#this took a much more autobiographical turn than i was intending it to

[those70scomics]

Hi hi hi!

So, since you watched the show as it was airing I wanted to ask if Hyde and Jackie were always intended to become a ship and if they were, how do you know? Also, how do you know the original intention was for them to get engaged at the end of season 7, before it was renewed? (Outside from the obvious) I'm so curious

Hi! 😊

I'll start with how I know what I know. The T7S message board at Fan Forum was created very shortly after T7S began airing. When I became co-moderator of the board (less than ten years ago? Around ten?), I read every single post. Including those that were lost in what was called "the purge" by using the Internet Wayback Machine when Fan Forum was called Forum 4 Fans. These are the earliest posts one can find about the show.

This effort took me weeks. I read tens upon tens of thousands of posts and T7S / T7S fandom history. Followed links to defunct T7S fansites (again, the Internet Wayback Machine). This includes reading articles and transcripts of interviews with the cast, producers, writers, and showrunners. Press releases. News about cast negotiations.

Within these posts and fansites are people who went to tapings and wrote thorough reports. People who spoke to producers at tapings. People who (were) connected to people who worked on the show. Wilmer Valderrama posted himself in the board and interacted with fans. Remember, this forum existed before Twitter/X, before Facebook, before Tumblr. These forums were where social media started.

This was also the time of Myspace, and some of the cast posted there, too, which was reported on the message board.

As I found all the info through my research, I posted it in fresh threads on the message board. I also inherited my grandfather's eiditic memory and have partial highly superior autobiographical memory -- which is, thankfully, nowhere near Marilu Henner's complete HSAM. Of course, if I place a pen down and I'm distracted, I'll forget where I put the pen a second later 😂.

Facts stick in my head. Once I know it, I remember it. For example, I used to recite one of my college classes from start to finish to my friends (those who were interested). I've forgotten half the class by now. I learned how to let go of certain info so it wouldn't drive me 🤪. But not autobiographical memories. Those I re-experience like I'm watching a movie but with all thoughts and feelings attached. It's a visceral trip. A blessing and sometimes not so much. 😅

Anyway, there's the how.

Jackie and Hyde weren't always intended to endgame. The Filgos were writers on the show a few years before they were chosen as showrunners. During Jackie and Hyde's season 2-3 arc, the Filgos became enamored of the chemistry between the characters.

When the Filgos were chosen sometimes during season 4 to be the showrunners moving ahead (season 5 through the original end of the show, season 7), they asked the current showrunners to break up Jackie and Kelso by the end of season 4 because they wanted to pair Jackie and Hyde in season 5.

In the second half of season 4, one can see the change in Jackie and Kelso's relationship. It grows more and more toxic, a turn from their previous growth away from their original toxicity. It's written in stages rather than a sudden shift, so it's grounded in story and character.

From season 5, Jackie and Hyde were intended to be endgame. During the press for season 7 before it aired, the cast made clear this was the final season.

The Filgos were contracted through season 7. They got their next job since T7S was ending. Topher was moving into his movie career fully. The scripts, including the series finale, were written. Shows were filmed and began to air

Then Fox decides to renew the show (safer to continue a popular series than to risk $$$ on a new show). But the Filgos already had a new job lined up. They couldn't break that contract. They hoped whoever was hired after them would follow through on their vision for the show and reasonably expected the new showrunners to respect the past seven years of character a d relationship development.

But the showrunners hired were a) probably cheaper to pay because this was their first showrunning gig and b) presented their vision for season 8, which was to "bring it back to the humor and feel of season 1" -- the only season they liked, clearly, but didn't watch very carefully or with any depth of understanding.

W.V. also had in his contract changes for his character, including him ending up with one of the principal female characters. It wasn't going to be Donna, obviously, so that left Jackie. Not a problem for the S8 showrunners who hated J/H and, very evidently, Jackie as a character.

So instead of following through on the storyline the Filgos left them (i.e. reconcile fan-favorite couple Jackie and Hyde for good) to ease them into the role, they destroyed Jackie and Hyde's relationship because [partially direct quotation, partially close paraphrase from a magazine interview published before season 8 aired], "We never understood it. We never liked it. We think it was a mistake for the show to pair them romantically, so we're returning them to their season 1 dynamic. They were originally antagonists, and they should have stayed that way. That's where the humor is."

Fortunately, frustratingly, and sadly, someone connected to the show revealed Jackie's endgame from the original series finale, the original season 7 finale: Hyde proposes to Jackie, and they get engaged. Their season 7 arc is built around this endgame. Despite the script revisions and rewrites made when season 8 was greenlit, their original endgame remains evident throughout the second half of season 7.

Hyde tells Eric peacefully and happily (for Hyde) that he's decided [to marry Jackie]. Jackie would have actually left for Chicago, leaving Hyde the note he reads shortly after his decision. Kelso was not involved. But the rewrite, I believe, changed Jackie to having pretended to leave. It's messy writing, but it sets up that Kelso must now drive Jackie to Chicago. He's in her motel room, etc.

The original scripts likely have Jackie go to Chicago before the deadline she set for the ultimatum. Hyde is naturally upset and angry because he'd decided within her deadline to propose, but she deprived him of the chance after forcing the choice.

Hyde's conversation with Eric and Donna about his feelings (in Hyde's way) was probably in the original script. Donna calls out Hyde, realizing he was going to propose. Later, Eric tells Hyde he recognizes that Hyde became happy once he and Jackie got together.

All of the above is easily discernable. The following is conjecture based on the facts, foreshadowing, the Filgos' intended endgame for Jackie and Hyde, and my education and experience as a writer.

These conversations lead Hyde to break out of his misery and go to Chicago (with a ring) and follow-through with the proposal -- a huge character moment for him. He's going to fight for Jackie even if she ultimately rejects him (a parallel to "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" in season 5, where Jackie professes her love and doesn't care if Hyde says it back).

Hyde would have knocked on Jackie's motel door. She would've been shocked and asked Hyde what he's doing there. He would have entered and gotten on one knee. The audience would have squealed. Hyde would have proposed in a way true to himself -- not sentimentally but touching nonetheless.

She'd be in shock. "I can't believe you came to Chicago ... "

Hyde says his knee is starting to hurt, so she better make up her mind before he's forced to stand up.

Jackie: "Yes! Steven, yes, I'll marry you!"

Hyde blows out a heavy breath in all kinds of relief, stands up, and puts the ring on Jackie's finger. Jackie and Hyde kiss and embrace. Then Jackie examines the ring and is surprised he didn't go on the cheap like Eric.

Hyde: "Yeah, well, I asked W.B. for help."

Jackie: "But you hate hand-outs!"

Hyde: "It's not a hand-out! It's a loan. I'm gonna pay him back."

Jackie stares at Hyde lovingly.

Hyde: "What?"

Jackie: "This is our first fight as fiancés!"

Hyde laughs quietly then kisses Jackie again.

Fade out.

Other scenes to finish off the series, including the reveal to Jackie and Hyde's friends and family about their engagement.

[studydreamrepeat]

I’m a very goal driven person.  Without a clear goal in mind I begin to flounder and struggle, uncertain of where I should redirect my efforts.  So, as I reconsider my career goals and relationship with academic research, I thought some reflection might be useful. 

I entered college with a very specific career goal in mind.  I wanted to be a pharmaceutical researcher, working for a (large, well-paying) corporation on developing drugs for clinical trials and/or consumer use.  Chemistry and biology were my favorite subjects in high school; lab experiments were my favorite part.  I had an amazing experience during HS where I spent a year doing community outreach for a grassroots air quality organization.  The experience had been so amazing because they were actually measuring the levels of air pollutants in the air with the help of graduate students at a local university, and I got to help them measure the levels of nitrous oxides in the air.  I reported my results to city officials and even presented at a youth conference in DC, where I spoke to my local and state representatives as well as EPA officials.  Doing real-world lab techniques, learning about the chemistry and the biological effects, and seeing my results be used in real life outreach and legislation had enraptured me.  I was sold.  I wanted to do something similar with my life, but in pharmaceutical research I saw a better connection to my interest in disease, better pay/job security, and more real-life influence by developing medications.  It seemed perfect.   Three years later, I have no idea where that enthusiasm went–but it’s totally gone.  I’m now changing my major.  Again.  A B.S. in Biology is what I’m switching to, making it my third chance.  I entered college pursuing a B.S. in Biochemistry & Biophysics, as there was no plain biochemistry degree (which seemed ideal, with biology and chemistry being my favorite subjects)–but switched out within the year.  Following a poor first term (C’s across the board, with the exception of a history course), my adviser scared me out of the program by convincing me that I would never survive the rigor of the remaining calculus and advanced chemistry classes I would have to take.  If I couldn’t excel in general chemistry right out the gate, how would I survive the school’s advanced physical chemistry series where straight-A students were known to struggle for passing grades?  That seemed like a fair criticism.  I switched majors that spring.   I aced the rest of my self-written gen chem labs and went on to ace organic chemistry as well, driven by pettiness to deliver a subtle “fuck you” to that particular adviser.  

There were other, more valid reasons for my leaving the department, but the success I forced myself towards out of sheer bitterness has always entertained me.  I switched to a unique degree after biochemistry, pursuing a B.S. in Biological Research.  I loved the department, adviser, and coursework.  I got to customize the classes I was taking and elected to focus on toxicology.  The other great thing about the degree was that it required nearly 20 credits of thesis research experience.  I tacked on a chemistry minor and a certificate in medical humanities, thinking I was set for the next three years.

Within two weeks of joining the department, my adviser had been contacted by a doctoral candidate looking for an undergraduate to work with him.  He was a program alumni needing extra hands for his natural resource isolation research in a pharmaceutical sciences lab.  On paper it seemed like a great fit.  I jumped on board even though natural resource isolation wasn’t my real interest.  I was willing to learn about anything, and for the first few weeks natural curiosity carried me.  I’d heard horror stories of how difficult it was to get a proper thesis project, and was relieved to have it seemingly handed to me. In person, it was more of a disaster.

Of the four other undergraduates already affiliated with the lab, three of which were also women, I was the only one who regularly came in.  It didn’t take long to find out why.  A majority of the researchers (not that there were many) came from cultures that are known for poor treatment of women.  I was, after a few months when I finally thought to ask, told it had been quite some time since there had been a post-doctoral or other faculty researcher in the lab, and that the last one had not stayed particularly long.  I consider myself a friendly person–I make eye contact, smile, and exchange pleasantries when it seems opportune.  I was now in a setting where I was actively ignored.  I was largely expected to learn by just doing what I was told.  Questions were rarely answered, and trust me–when you’re holding a bottle with a giant label declaring CARCINOGEN for the first time, you’re going to have questions about how to proceed. 

I was isolated from everyone but the other undergrads and my mentor–when he was gone, I could occasionally convince one of our post-docs to help me find the right compounds, before he would return to his bench where he would scroll through FB for a majority of the day.  My PI rarely spoke to me, and he was often gone from the country for weeks at a time.  With only general chemistry under my belt, I didn’t know enough to really appreciate what I was doing.  I struggled.  Things got better and I started to understand, only to get lost again when our project shifted in another direction, then back, then back again.  My mentor was surprisingly patient through all of my confusion–far and away, he is the only reason I even survived a year in that lab.

Paperwork caught up with me.  My depression returned, worse than ever.  This time I struggled with anxiety symptoms that I had somehow evaded in all my previous experiences with mental illness.  My grades started looking like the long end of a bell curve. I gave up part of my Christmas break to stay in town to work in the lab, only to spend those days working on an unrelated project.  

Halfway through the school year, I was casually told my thesis project would be changed to something involving gene operons.  I would be working with a lot of bacteria, rather than the genetically modified yeast cultures I had been working on in my resource isolation.  I hadn’t taken general microbiology yet, much less bacterial genetics or any other relevant class.  I was just starting a class in cellular biology and barely knew what a gene operon was.  My opinion had never once been asked through this process.  It was never once suggested that my mentor and PI had been thinking of switching my project.  They decided without me or any input from me, and when I was told it hadn’t been a proposition or question–they were very honest in telling me the decision had, somehow, already been made.  Had they asked me, I would have been happy to go along with it.  That my opinion on what I would be spending the next two years working on was regarded as unimportant was very frustrating.

I was starting from square one again.  To this day, I still don’t understand a lot of the techniques I used or data I generated.  The only thing I understood was that I was getting damn good at electrophoresis.  I had no funding, so I continued to put in my hours without pay.  For most of the year my efforts were considered null even though I was in the lab logging more hours and generating more data than many of the paid researchers.  It seemed I had gotten my acknowledgement when funding finally came that June, nine months after I had started.  It turned out that the grant had actually been secured for me by my adviser who knew I was staying in town for the summer to continue my research.  Now four months into this new project, I still didn’t understand the basis for most of my experiments, didn’t understand how to analyze whatever data I was continuously generating, and generally didn’t know what was happening.  The lab was becoming emptier. On occasions I would arrive and find the lab was just closed for the day, lights off and doors locked.  My mentor was busy with his prelims.  There was no support or acknowledgement of my frustrations.  I remember one day where I repeatedly asked for clarification, followed the directions I was given, and was then told I had done it incorrectly and had to redo it.  I messed it up again because the numbers I had been given was wrong.  I remember tearing up in the lab and managed to excuse myself for the evening, then crying out of sheer frustration in the women’s bathroom.

I wasn’t the only one frustrated.  One of the other undergrads left the lab, citing the lack of support and poor treatment, including some degree of sexism, from the professional researchers. The lab was falling apart at the seams.  Water occasionally dripped from pipelines running above our workbenches.  The equipment was all older than I was, and the bigger equipment was twice my age.  Our fridges wouldn’t maintain their temperatures.  Experiments would frequently be delayed for a day or two while my mentor tinkered with equipment, trying to fix things that someone else had broken. Someone had broken a rubber ring on the fermenter and tried to replace it with a ring of parafilm. We had two HPLCs, and one of them was broken the entire year I was there.  When questioned, I was told fixing it would be pointless because if we had a second working one then someone would break it knowing there was still the second. When we started having weekly lab group presentations, sharing our data and progress, it devolved immediately.  One person would present, and the rest would sit around the table finding the most useless and particular questions to ask in an attempt to one-up the presentation.  We stopped having meetings again as our PI flew in and out of the US.  The problem with the lab wasn’t that we were complacent or poked fun at each other and each other’s research, or asked legitimate questions to encourage growth.  It was openly hostile.  Asking for help accomplished nothing. Undergraduates were not encouraged to ask questions in the lab or ask for help. We also weren’t allowed to work without someone else  in the lab, because it was well understood that we didn’t know what we were doing and were a danger to ourselves.  

There’s no way of explaining how exhausted or ill working in that specific setting had made me.  It was a collection of small things.  The inherent frustration of research–constant failure and constant redesign–barely registered through the entire experience.  The frustration of not being able to express myself, being isolated, lacking financial/intellectual/mental support, and not having working equipment built up to become hair-pulling.  I stopped wanting to come to lab.  Then I stopped wanting to go to school.  For a while I entertained just dropping out completely and fulfilling my life’s dream of becoming a subsistence potato farmer in rural Idaho. My partner patiently reminded me my life goals were bigger than potatoes.  My friends reminded me my life goals were more than potatoes. My family wanted me to have more than potatoes.  Everyone severely underestimates potatoes. All the meanwhile my family life devolved in the background.  There were three months where at any given point I had a family member in a hospital.  I was constantly on the edge of a mental breakdown. 

I left at the end of August for a week’s vacation, which extended into a month because of a medical emergency.  Away from the lab–even with other major stresses–my anxiety receded.  I was coping better with my depression.  I resolved not to go back and I didn’t.  I withdrew from the lab, citing family responsibilities and health problems.  I was, and am, completely disenchanted with lab-based research.  My career goals had been decimated because I don’t believe I have the discipline or willpower to pursue a PhD.  I am skeptical of the quality of any letter of recommendation or reference I could get from that lab because of how my PI rarely interacted with me and the way I suddenly made my exit, abandoning a lot of responsibilities. Exhausted by research, never mind a full thesis, I am switching majors to a good and simple Biology degree and taking my minor and certificate with me.  I’m not sure what my new career goal will be.  MD, PharmD, JD focusing in health law, or maybe a MS or PhD in a different field. 

Despite the frustrations and discrimination my peers and I dealt with in that lab, I learned so so so much and am very grateful to have gotten the opportunity.  I learned a lot of lab techniques and shortcuts. I learned how to present and communicate my research, how to interact with vendors, how to get funding (alternatively: how not to get grants), and saw a lot about graduate school and what it really took to get a lab-based research degree at the doctoral level.  I saw my mentor’s frustrations, even with his decade of experience, and how it was shaping his career and effecting his family life.  My scientific writing improved.  I pushed myself to new limits and, optimistically, I’d like to say I grew as a person. I also learned some things that I’m glad I haven’t taken for granted, which is what I don’t want to do with my life.  I learned how to put myself and my health first, even if it means giving up on amazing opportunities.  I learned how to tell when something was becoming too much for me to handle or deal with.  I learned where my breaking point was, which is at an 18 credit term with 20 hours a week of research (orgo chem, physics, cell bio, and tech writing made for a pretty brutal term). 

Even with the disastrous experience I went through with academic pharma research, I still want to have more research experience–just in a completely different field.  I’m going to pick research that I am interested in and because it’s what I want to learn more about, not because I need research experience to fill a requirement or to bolster my resume (although that’s a bonus).  I’m looking at PIs who are focused in health literacy, or quantifying legislative effects, or nanotoxicology. 

If you want to do research, it ought to be something you genuinely care about or are interested in.  Sure, you can do it if you’re indifferent or if you’ve scrounged up some everyday curiosity for it, but after a couple hundred hours you’ll be pretty goddamn miserable. No matter what it is you’re doing, if you’re going to put hundreds of hours into something, make sure you care about it.  Those are hours you will never get back.  Even in labs where there is support and people act like decent human beings, research is still not an easy task.  I’d like to think we call it research because you have to constantly be searching for reasons to continue. 

There are reasons worth continuing.  There are reasons to keep pushing forward and hunting down the answers to your questions.  Your discoveries may be small at first.  History is made by small discoveries and a random spattering of luck.  But your discoveries, no matter how revolutionary or mundane, are still discoveries.  Your work can lead to a cure.  To a difference in the way we interact with other species. To a difference in the way we interact with each other.  You can change the way we use certain materials, or the way we use the world. You can change the world.

[topweeklyupdate]

TØP Weekly Update #142: A Formidable Album (5/21/21)

So... how 'bout that album release week?

There's so much to cover; the release of nine new songs, the hype that's building for the World's Best Band to return to the stage, and (if we're able to come up for air) the massive speculation of what the future brings for our band.

I'm gonna get right into it, laying out my thoughts regarding this bold new album and covering all the most notable news from the week. I'll be sharing my (mostly) positive opinions about Scaled and Icy under the Read More line; I hope they're the start of a fun conversation with all of y'all who have stuck around through this last year.

Scaled and Icy Review

First, my general thoughts on the album: It's good! Really good. Do I think it's a no-skip like Vessel or a cohesive piece of art like Trench? Absolutely not! But it's also not the potential misfire that I worried that we might be getting when I first heard "Saturday" (more on that later); I think all of the songs are at least good, and some of them are downright great tracks that hold up with anything else that our band has ever released. It is also indisputably very different, but I think that generally works pretty well. Many of the songs evoke '60s rock or Britpop sounds and structures that you can tell Tyler is still trying to navigate, but I think he does a very solid job at adapting them to suit his strengths- namely his lyricism and knack for melody- rather than change to suit them. Unfortunately, this does result in a bit of square-peg-in-round-hole syndrome at times; most of the rap verses on the album feel like they're here just to fulfill an obligation to fans who would be mad if they weren't here, and most of the songs that use them are the weakest ones in the project.

"Good Day" plays a major role in getting the rest of the album to work as well as it does. Its gradual ramp-up, introducing the sound that will be used throughout the rest of the album. Its playfulness belies its message about how one can project a somewhat false optimism for oneself in the midst of tragedy: the type of dark stuff in a bright package that Tyler is so so good at. It's perhaps not an instant classic, but I am excited to see how it comes across when it's eventually used as a show-opener. 9/10

I've of course already discussed "Shy Away"; an anthemic, inimitably catchy track that I just wish had a bit more going on under the hood. Still going to be so good to hear thousands of voices scream "An 'I LOVE YOU' that isn't words!" someday. 9.5/10

"Choker" definitely took a little bit to grow on me. I think part of that was a bit of disappointment from over-inflated expectations and the environment I was in when I first heard it. With further listens, I fall more and more in love with the melody of the song... well, most of it. Like the rest of this album, the biggest weakness in the song is when Tyler tries to tick the box of having a rap verse; it just feels really out of place, unfinished, and almost amateurish, and it doesn't end the song on the note that it really should. Without it, it'd be one of my favorites on the album; with it, "Choker" is a solid 8.5/10.

Speaking of unfinished-sounding songs really hurt by their rap verse: "The Outside". There's a definite something to the vibe of the song, but that seemingly nonsensical verse is one of the two weakest parts of the entire project for me. The way the song meanders only adds to the feeling that there wasn't as much energy and attention paid to it compared to other parts of the project. It's pretty easily my least favorite track on Scaled and Icy, and the only one I might regularly skip. I've also seen plenty of people saying it's the best song on the album, so please tell me why I'm wrong! 6.5/10

"Saturday", as mentioned above, had me really nervous about this album. Like "Choker", it's grown on me a bit since I first heard it, in part because it fits better with the context of the rest of the album. However, this one really does feel undercooked lyrically and overreliant on the novelty of using a disco-inspired sound that seems to chase trends more than almost any other TØP track. The inclusion of that very sweet audio clip from Jenna boosts the song in some ways, but also adds to the disappointment in others; there are many other songs on this project that would be more worth surrendering time watching Friends. Thankfully, those come next. 7/10

"Never Take It" is fascinating. I never thought I'd hear a Rolling Stones-style song from Tyler Joseph featuring a gd guitar solo of all things, and it actually sounds pretty great. However, I also predict that this song will see some of the greatest critical scrutiny out of all the songs on the album. The lyrics seem to be Tyler's criticism of the media for playing up division in our society, but he's extremely vague when discussing which entities are spreading said division and ultimately recommends that people "educate yourself, but never too much". I'll be honest: maybe it's the fact that it sounds like something my dad would listen to, but it feels like this would get tons of play on Fox News. Since it makes specific reference to the events of last summer, it's hard not to feel like song is at least partially inspired by Tyler's brush with cancellation last year. Maybe I'm reading too deeply into it, but those reservations come from the song's lack of specificity, which is an issue of songwriting more than politics. They hold me back from truly loving a song that still manages to be one of the most exciting the band has ever put out. 8.5/10

"Mulberry Street" seems like the perfect realization of the entire album's intended tone. It is so pleasant, so lush while also simply produced, full of great lyrics, metaphors, and imagery. It really brings the whole project together, even if it's missing That One Line to really move this up to the top tier of the canon. 9.5/10

"Formidable" is the best song on the album and one of two songs I would truly rank in the top tier of the band's canon. Extremely pleasant and brimming with well-crafted lines to make your heart swoon. Jenna (and Rosie) is (are) a lucky gal(s). Or is it about Josh? Who's to say? 10/10

"Bounce Man" is just plain wild. I think Tyler's smuggling someone to Mexico to escape the feds? The playfulness of it all really covers up any frustration I might have with the clarity; it makes it clear that there's not really stakes here, just vibes. 8.5/10

"No Chances" sees the album take a turn that I'm sure the Reddit Clique is going to have an absolute field day with; it and "Redecorate" both sound quite different from the rest of the album and evoke enough elements of Trench to make me think that's it's actually possible that all this 'SAI is Propaganda' stuff might actually have something to it... until I actually pick apart the lyrics, then I'm even more confused. The song has some of the best rapping on the album, though that's not saying much (the feng shui line is a groaner right out the gate) and the gentle pre-chorus is really pleasant. I still haven't made up my mind on whether the chorus is effective or just plain goofy. This one might get worse or better on repeat listens, impossible to say for now. 7.5/10

"Redecorate" rounds out the album by opening with a Clancy quote (Tyler, you bastard), firmly setting this as a coda to Trench more than the album we just listened to. The rest of the song is really storytelling, with Tyler describing a bunch of people who are struggling deeply. The idea of "redecorating" here stands for how they are faced with the option to clean and resort their own spaces and lives or leave that to their loved ones to do after they're gone. By the time it gets to the album's name drop, you begin to wonder how much of this is potential autobiographical of the last year. It's moving stuff, a callback to some of the great strengths of the band's discography. 10/10

If I average those scores all up, this project ranks below almost every album among the Pilots discography on my rating scale, very narrowly edging out Self-Titled. That's still a very solid 8.6. Scaled and Icy is a very good album on first listen. We'll see how I feel about it after having a little more time to sit with it, but I've rambled enough: let's move through the rest of the week's news.

Other News

Of course, there was a lot else going on this week! To accompany the release of "Saturday", Zane Lowe over at Apple Music dropped an interview with Tyler. As usual, Zane did a pretty solid job of getting to the heart of the craft and the creation process. However, Tyler also wound up skirting a lot of the questions to just talk more about how much he loves being a dad, which makes me happy; if the cost of getting a little less attention and mental energy devoted to the music is that little girl getting all of his attention, that's honestly preferable for me.

The album rollout is not even close to over. Later today, the concert will be streamed live. It's our first real performance that we've gotten from the band since 2019, but the previews that we've seen have completely exceeded any of my expectations, and really anything that we've seen from the band. It appears that they've transformed the entire arena (which I think is the ol' Schott at Ohio State) into a whole TØP world, with different sets laden with Easter eggs and a cast of backup dancers. If the website can hold up to the traffic (and I acknowledge that might be a big ask), this could really live up to Tyler's promise of this being the best livestreamed concert ever.

Oh, and this guy dyed his hair pink.

What a time to be a fan. Catch you all tomorrow.

Power to the local dreamer.

|-/

[howaminotinthestrokesyet]

Behind The Album: The Downward Spiral

The band’s second studio album was released in March 1994 from Nothing Records and Interscope Records respectively. The release represented a concept album from Trent Reznor detailing a person’s descent into depression and ending in suicide. He would combine the record with qualities of industrial rock, techno, and metal. Much like Broken, this stood in stark contrast to Nine Inch Nails debut Pretty Hate Machine. He first thought of the idea for the record while staying in a European hotel just after the touring Lollapalooza Festival in 1992. Along with the rest of the touring band, the singer had felt this very negative vibe towards their live performances. His original vision for the project was to explore a fictional character with major psychological issues. This fictional character in the end turned out to be Reznor himself as he used this concept to speak on his particular issues at the time in the lyrics. At this time, the Nine Inch Nails front man was at war within the group with Richard Patrick, while at the same time gradually becoming a much harder drinker. Reznor made a conscious decision to distance the sound on this album from the harshness and loudness of Broken. For that reason, he tried to minimize completely any use of guitars and synthesizers, but instead sought an atmosphere on the album of “ texture and space.”

Nine Inch Nails recorded The Downward Spiral at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, which stood as the house in which Sharon Tate had been murdered by members of the Manson family. Reznor had first bought the house in 1992 during the recording of Broken. He named the studio that was built there Le Pig After what was scrawled on the wall in blood after the murder. He would later produce Marilyn Manson’s debut album there, Portrait of an American Family. Both the Nine Inch Nails front man and manager John Malm stayed at the house for 18 months while recording Broken and The Downward Spiral. Later in 1993, the sister of Sharon Tate, Patty Tate confronted Reznor about exploiting her sister’s death by recording at her sister’s former home. The encounter did affect him profoundly causing the singer to change his perspective. “For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, 'What if it was my sister?' I thought, 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I went home and cried that night. It made me see there's another side to things, you know?” Once again, Reznor would collaborate with producer Flood for this record, but it would be their last. They would both have major creative differences moving forward that could not be resolved. One example of these differences came in the song entitled “Just Do It” that did not appear on the finished album. The producer believed Trent had gone too far with that particular track based on the entire concept of the album.

Over the years, the album has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways that make it difficult to pin down. Some of these themes include nihilism, self control, self abuse, depression, and madness. The one interpretation that people did agree on unanimously represented the idea that the entire record is semi autobiographical meaning the fictional protagonist is Trent Reznor. That same person has gradually been going insane through the effects of drugs, alcohol, religion, society, and finally decides to end it all. Some accused Reznor of copying a well traveled theme of angst within grunge music only a few years earlier. The music on The Downward Spiral represented something new, unique, and very unconventional. As noted before, Trent incorporated several seemingly different genres into the record including technical, metal, rock, and electronic. He would regularly utilize distortion and other noises In unstructured ways that listeners were not used to at the time. This meant that the formula of following verse and chorus went out the window with Nine Inch Nails. Another unique trend on the album came with Reznor’s use of new time signatures that were off the standard beat. Another quality found within the music emerged with his singing as it alternated between whispers and screams. He did not rely on too many samples either for The Downward Spiral with the primary ones being one from the George Lucas film THX1138 and an Iggy Pop drumming sample. The singer has noted that the two primary inspirations for the album emerged in David Bowie‘s experimental Low and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Nine Inch Nails released the tracks “March of the Pigs” and “Closer” as singles, while “Hurt” and “Piggy” did make it on the radio, but not as singles. He was frustrated by the fact that “Closer’s” lyrics were widely misinterpreted as a song about lust, but Reznor intended the lyrics as a theme of self-hatred. The song “Hurt” subsequently released in 1995 made reference to hurting yourself and an addiction to heroin. The track would get worldwide fame a few years later when Johnny Cash covered the song. Reznor would say this about it in interviews. “I wasn’t prepared for what I saw, and it really then, wasn’t my song anymore. Then I got a CD in the post. I listened to it and it was very strange. It was this other person inhabiting my most personal song. Hearing it was like someone kissing your girlfriend. It felt invasive.” As time passed, the singer would make the statement that Johnny Cash covering one of his songs probably meant more to him than winning a Grammy.

The Downward Spiral did suffer from numerous delays from Reznor. He had hoped to finish the album in 1993, but setting up the studio to his liking took longer than expected. At the same time, he was trying to educate himself on how to write songs vastly different from anything he had ever recorded. Another reason for a further delay came in the fact that halfway through the album he suffered a massive attack of writer's block. The record became a massive hit for the band as it debuted at number two on the Billboard charts eventually being certified quadruple platinum by 1998. In the first week alone, The Downward Spiral sold 119,000 copies. Some very early listeners of the record predicted that Reznor had affectively killed the profitability of the band with the release. The singer did not disagree with this assessment as he saw the commercial value of it as quite limited, so the huge sales surprised him quite a bit. Critics almost universally praised the album commenting on its brutal honesty, darkness, and offbeat sound. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice gave it an honorable mention, while the New York Times review found the music to be quite abrasive, but meant as a compliment. Jonathan Gold of Rolling Stone likened the album to cyberpunk fiction popular at the time. Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly had this to say about it. “Reznor's pet topics (sex, power, S&M, hatred, transcendence) are all here, wrapped in hooks that hit your psyche with the force of a blowtorch." In the end, the record would make many best of lists ranked very highly. Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums Ever saw the release as number 122 in 2020. Spin Magazine’s Top 20 albums of the past 25 years gave it the 10 spot. The legacy of The Downward Spiral was felt by both Reznor, his touring band mates, and the rest of the music world. Its success would lead to fame and notoriety that the singer had not envisioned, nor was he prepared for it in a mental health way either. The group had to deal with rumors left and right referencing Reznor‘s depression, possible death, and even a crazy story that he had been friends with Jeffrey Dahmer. The record also led to countless imitators including Motley Crue. Reznor would later say that The Downward Spiral was an album, where the actual truth self-fulfilled itself, meaning all the darkness, depression, and other negative themes came true in his own life.

[blessed-but-distressed]

#FindEmmaSwanAFriend

Feeling left behind by her more successful, settled friends, Emma Swan moves to Scotland on a whim. Sure, she’s winning at Instagram, but something is still missing from her new life. Fortunately, her friends back home are on it. #FindEmmaSwanAFriend goes viral. Enter Killian Jones, reluctant columnist, who is on the hunt for his newest subject, and may just have found her. CS AU

***

also on ff.net and ao3

***

Tagging: @katie-dub , @wholockgal , @kat2609 , @whovianlunatic, @optomisticgirl, @ladyciaramiggles, @the-lady-of-misthaven, @emmaswanchoosesyou, @ilovemesomekillianjones, @biancaros3, @cigarettes-and-scotch-whisky, @ms-babs-gordon  @ab-normality, @andiirivera, @fangirl-till-it-hurts, @onceuponaprincessworld , @natascha-remi-ronin, @kiwistreetswan and whoever else asks me.

***

A/N: Part 1 of 2. We’ll get there when we get there.

***

Emma

 It had been building for weeks. Months, really. 

It began with a series of fences up on the Castle Esplanade, robbing the selfie-stick set of their outlook towards Arthur’s Seat. Before long it became a full-blown construction site, scaffolds looming up on either side of the tarmac like a bad omen. 

Then came the anti-terrorist bollards on the Mile, at once ugly and terrifying in their design. By the time the placards went up at the tail end of July, you could feel it in the air, like an encroaching thunderstorm.

August.

For as long as she’d lived in Edinburgh, Emma had heard the war stories. 

A bloody nightmare, was how Killian had once phrased it. Imagine, if you will,  if every insufferable wanker in London with even the slightest dramatic inclination took it upon himself-

Or herself, Tink had interrupted.

Or herself, he’d amended, with a roll of his eyes, to decamp 400 miles up the East Coast line, en masse. And not just for a weekend, either. An entire month. And then imagine they proceed to spend that time putting on dodgy comedy shows, getting pissed as newts, and trying to get off with each other.

Don’t forget the inflated prices, Will had cut in.

The traffic, Tink lamented.

Hipsters with posh accents taking up all the seats in your local, Will added mournfully.

The flyers, Killian sighed. At that, the other two groaned.

So it’s busy? Emma had asked.

Aye, Swan, Killian had replied, a weary glint in his eye. It’s busy.

 ***

It wasn’t that she didn’t believe them, exactly. She’d seen the crowds at Christmastime, swelling up around the markets in Princes Street Gardens. She’d stared the drunken aftermath of Hogmanay in the face, and lived to tell the tale. She knew busy.

The Festival was, well… most days it wasn’t unlike navigating the Battle of Thermopylae. Every major thoroughfare, every centrally located eatery turned into a desperate crush of bodies, all attempting to coexist in too little available space. And there on the periphery the thespians lay in wait, ready to exploit any signs of weakness.

The first few days, she took every flyer on offer. It was the polite thing to do. But as her bag, and the crowds swelled, she was forced to reassess. By week’s end Emma learned to do as the locals did, keeping her head down, headphones in, and her hands stuffed in her pockets at all times.

So when August, the man, promised Emma he could sneak her into the green room at the Book Festival, she took her chance to escape the rabble.

Compared with the madness up on the Mile, the Book Festival in Charlotte’s Square was an oasis of calm. The crowd skewed older, and it showed. They sat drinking up the sun in plastic lawn chairs, whiling away the hours until the next panel or signing with the unhurried air of the newly retired. Yet even as she sipped her overpriced plastic cup of gin, Emma felt content.

It was summer. She was on vacation. And she was one Q & A session away from having her apartment all to herself again.

“Emma!” Her houseguest fell onto the grass beside her, spilling half of his gin in the process.

“You got them?” Emma asked, leaning over to top up his drink with some of hers.

Taking a few surreptitious glances in either direction, August unzipped his jacket, and tossed something into Emma’s lap. “I’m a man of my word.”

Emma wouldn’t go quite that far, but she snatched it up anyway. It was a sweater, pale blue with a prominent STAFF designation across the back. Her ticket into the green room. “And where did you get that? Did you slip some poor underpaid usher a tenner, or something?”

August just tapped the side of his nose, and smiled his usual mysterious smile. 

Tamping down her urge to kick him, Emma sighed and pulled the sweater over her head. It was a little big on her, but not comically so. She rolled up the sleeves, and waved a little to get August’s attention.

“What do you think? Do I look like I’d volunteer at a Book Festival?”

“No,” he replied, without looking at her. “And I think your columnist just came out of the Zadie Smith signing. Kevin?”

She squinted against the sun, to where the crowd was pouring out from the Signing Tent. Sure enough, there was a familiar monochromatic figure loping his way across the square. It’d been more than a month since she’d seen him, but if the signature walk hadn’t given him away, the outfit would’ve. Who else would insist on black leather in the middle of summer? 

“Killian,” Emma corrected automatically, already regretting rising to the bait.

August knew full well who Killian was. He’d Facebook stalked him the same as Ruby had. He read his columns religiously, picking them apart in their group chat with the zeal of a literature major on Adderall. He just liked being a dick.

 As they emerged from the throng, Emma saw the petite woman at Killian’s side, matching his stride in impressively tall heels. 

How does she walk in those things? Emma wondered to herself. But before she could voice this aloud, August was already on his feet.

“I’m going to go say ‘hi’.” There was a twinkle in his eye, one she didn’t much like the look of. 

“August...” Emma gave a low warning, but it was too late. He’d already passed her the last of his drink, and disappeared across the square.

Lord help her.

Downing the last of the gin, Emma straightened her sweater one last time and went after him.

***

August wasn’t famous, exactly. His debut, a semi-autobiographical account of his early twenties backpacking through South East Asia, had made some waves when it first came out. There’d been movie interest. A profile in the New Yorker. Everyone was a sucker for that foster-kid-made-good fairytale.

But when he switched focus to fantasy fiction, his agent jumped ship. Likewise, most of his readership. These days, he was what Emma might charitably call a “midlist author.” Consistent, but not exactly setting the world on fire. Mostly, he survived under the radar, letting the royalties from his successful debut prop up his middling career. But every once in a while, he’d run into a fan in the wild, and things would get... strange.

When Emma finally caught up to August, she came to two sudden realizations;

On closer inspection, the woman with the impressive ability to navigate across grass with spike heels was none other than Belle. Librarian Belle. As in, I-really-like-sad-songs-and-married-a-complete-douchebag Belle. 

Belle was staring at August with the kind of gobsmacked, I-just-swallowed-a-goldfish expression that could only mean one thing: She was a fan.

“You know August Booth?” Belle shout-whispered to Killian. The hand clinging tightly to Killian’s bicep might’ve stirred Emma’s interest, if she didn’t think it was all that was keeping the girl upright.

Killian seemed entirely puzzled. “Err… in passing?” He looked from August to Emma, searching for a lifeline. 

“You’re a Swords of Storybrooke fan, I take it?” Emma asked, helpfully.

Belle seemed to shake herself a little. “Emma! Hi!” She reached across to give her a one-armed hug, the best she could do with the books still cradled against her chest with her other hand. 

“Are you kidding? I’m in love with those books! I have the last line from Good Form tattooed on my-” She trailed off abruptly, cheeks flushing red. “Sorry,” she said, turning again to August. “You must get that all the time.”

“Not as often as I’d like,” he said with a flash of teeth.  “Always nice to meet a fan. It was Belle, wasn’t it?” Emma saw the flash of recognition cross his face, as he matched the name with the story. “You’re a friend of Ruby’s, right?”

“Ruby? Ruby Lucas? Uh, yeah. We dated. Sort of. You know her?”

“We go back a ways. Do you like gin, Belle?” he asked, coaxing her closer to the bar. “I heard they’ve got some here that tastes like Earl Grey…”

It took Emma a moment to realize she’d been abandoned. Alone. With Killian Jones. Exactly as August, that slimy son of a bitch, had intended.

To his credit, Killian looked similarly startled, trying and failing to cover it with a casual scratch behind his ear. It was just a small thing, but it killed her.

“Sooo…” he began, never one to leave a silence unfilled, “Been a while…”

5 weeks, not that she was counting.

“Not that I blame you for avoiding me, mind...” he added.

“I wasn’t-” Her first instinct was denial, but she swallowed it back down. He knew her better than that. “Yeah, okay, I was, a bit. Sorry. I just needed…”

“Space,” Killian finished for her.

“Yeah. Space.” 

The smile they shared was fragile. Precious. She wanted to tell him she’d meant to call. That she’d had to fight off tears the whole time she’d read through his latest column. She wanted to tell him what it had meant to her.

Instead, she just said the first stupid thing to pop into her head. 

“Sorry,  I think August just stole your date.”

“Date?” Killian looked back to where Belle and August had disappeared, and it dawned on him. “Belle?” His laugh was incredulous, if Emma was any judge.  “Err… no. We just kind of met in the line.” 

“To Zadie Smith, right?”

“Aye.” He held up the autographed copy of her latest, before tucking it back under his arm. “Elsa’s a big fan. Her birthday’s coming up, so-”

She felt a prickle of attraction and hated herself for it. Just because he was a good brother-in-law, it didn’t mean she had to let her guard down again. Ted Bundy had probably been a great brother-in-law too.

“She’s coming home soon?” Even as strained as things had been, he’d been unable to keep the implosion of his home life entirely to himself.

“Next week. Let the boys settle back into things before school goes back.”

“And things with her and Liam are…?” She let her words trail off, not wanting to overstep.

“They’re… I don’t know.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “They’re talking now, at least. These long, overwrought transatlantic Skype conversations that I pretend very hard not to overhear.  It’s a start, I suppose.”

Emma shrugged in agreement. As thoughtful responses went, it fell short of the mark. But what did she know about fixing a broken marriage? She’d had one functional adult relationship in her entire life, and she hadn’t even made it through the entire proposal before she’d cut and run.

“So you’re working here?” he asked suddenly.

“Huh?” She looked down, confused, only to realize she was still wearing her baby blue STAFF sweater. “Oh, this? No, this is stolen. Or borrowed? You know what? I’m not really sure on the specifics.”

“Oh..kay?” Amusement was definitely winning out over his confusion.

Emma shrugged. “August said he’d sneak me into the Green Room. This is part of my cunning disguise. Pretty convincing, huh?”

“You know they check lanyards at the door, right?”

She didn’t. Fucking August.

“There is, of course, another way in…” He tried for his usual irrepressible swagger, and it rang a bit hollow to Emma’s ears. But he was trying. 

“Oh, is there?” she asked , crossing her arms sullenly over her chest.

He nodded, eyes growing brighter as they fell into a more familiar rhythm. “A secret way. Only known to the chosen few…”

Emma shot him a flat look.

With a grin and a flourish, he pulled a lanyard from his pocket, and held it out for her inspection.

It was identical to his in every way, right down to the Saorsa logo stamped on the back.

“Our photographer never made it, so I had a spare. What do you say, Swan? Want to ditch that awful jumper and join the big leagues?”

Emma cocked her head, considering this proposal. ”Would I actually have to take photographs?”

“If you like. But you’d definitely have to hold the camera. Authenticity and all that.” 

“And we’d breathe the same air as actual famous authors?” She was kidding, but only a little.

“Breathe the same air, eat the same Chocolate Digestives. We could even talk to a few, if you like.” He shrugged. “That’s kind of why I’m here.”

Somehow, that trumped her original plan of playing the wallflower while August caught up with his cadre of fellow fantasy authors.

She didn’t say anything, but Killian must’ve already intuited her answer, because he gently pulled the lanyard from her grasp, and slipped it over her head with a smirk. 

“Congratulations, Dr Swan. You’re now a proud member of the fourth estate.” He held out a hand. “Shall we?”

Emma looked down at the proffered hand and hesitated. 

It was just a hand, and it wasn’t. Because here was the truth: Emma had started to trust Killian Jones. Started to lean on him. Confide in him.  And even now, after he’d kicked the metaphorical chair out from under her and shown he was capable of being a complete ass when the mood struck, she still wanted to. 

It was a hand, but it was also a second chance. 

And maybe it made her weak, but Emma reached out and took it.

***

I can’t believe I met a Pulitzer Prize winner! ES

I can. You only made me take twenty pictures of the two of you together. KJ

Funny. ES

Not a hardship, I can assure you. I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. It was good to see you, even if only for a wee bit. KJ

Huh. Sincerity. Not sure what to do with that. ES

I’m trying a new thing, where I occasionally let the people in my life know that I actually appreciate their company. KJ

And how’s that working out for you? ES

Will is now convinced I harbour a dreadful crush on him, and Liam asked me if I had a concussion. Soo… I’d call it a work in progress ;-) KJ

Good to see you too. ES

***

August’s Q & A went better than expected, if you didn’t count the guy at the front whose question was more of a diatribe, really, about all the things he would’ve done differently.

There was always one.

But on the whole, the genuine fans outnumbered the assholes, and it took a good two hours to finally extricate August from his adoring masses, after the fact.

He was already flushed, drunk on ego and free booze when he finally emerged from behind a tent flap, and pulled Emma into a lazy hug. 

“Where to next, oh tour guide extraordinaire?” he asked with hot gin breath.

Emma grimaced, and held him at arm’s length. “There’s no next. You have a train to catch, remember?”

“Last train for London isn’t for another three hours,” August shrugged. “Still time for a last bit of revelry. Didn’t you promise you’d actually take me to a Fringe show?”

She had, but she’d also counted on August being distracted by his own brilliance long enough for her to welch out of that particular contract. The last thing she felt like doing was wading back into the madness of the Old Town.

“It’s kind of last minute…”

But August already had his phone out, scrolling through the app and Emma knew a lost cause when she saw one.

He looked up suddenly, eyes lit with a tantalizing prospect. “How far’s the Tron?” 

***

During the semester, The Tron was a studenty kind of hang out. Plenty of drink specials, and always a free table downstairs. She usually avoided the place, none too eager to bump into her students during their messy nights out. Least of all during hers.

During the Festival, however, it was a very different beast.

Gone were the baby faced clientele, and reasonable prices. It was standing room only, and foreign accents were more common than not. In this crowd, she might’ve been just another festival-goer, at a loose end between shows.

Even with having the push through the late afternoon crowds on the Mound, they still made it with ten minutes to spare before August’s chosen comedian started his set downstairs. She sent him down to save them some seats, and after a lot of pushing, shoving and gratuitous cleavage displays, managed to attract the attention of the nearest bartender.

“Alright, love?” he asked, with little better than a leer.

She ordered a pint for herself, and a tap water for August.

“That’s £10.”

Emma nearly swallowed her tongue. “For a pint? That’s extortion!”

The bartender shrugged, snatching the bill from her hand. “That’s August.”

She turned around, drinks in hand and the crowd surged around her, gunning for her vacated space by the bar. Some of her lager slopped onto the shoes of the guy in front of her, and she was halfway through her apology before she took a look at his face, and froze.

Graham.

Her Graham. Standing in The Tron. And decidedly not somewhere in Northern Ireland, studying the possible ramifications of Brexit on the Irish Border. Contrary to the text he’d sent her two hours ago.

“Emma, hey!” the words were friendly, but there was no disguising the tension in his jaw.

He was not pleased to see her. 

And when Emma looked behind him, and saw the dark haired young woman whose hand was clutched tightly in his, she realized why. It wasn’t just the white knuckled hold they had on each other, so they wouldn’t lose each other in the crush. 

It was the matching silver wedding bands.

Mother. Fucker.

Emma barely had time to process before she was tipping her overpriced pint down his shirt. All £10 of it.

The crowd of people around them suddenly went deathly quiet, so quiet Emma could hear the rush of her own blood inside her ears. She saw at least one person raise a camera phone.

Graham, himself said nothing. Even as his companion, his wife, stared between the two of them, dumbfounded. 

“Sorry,” Emma said, with the least amount of sincerity she could muster. “Really crowded in here, huh?”

The crowd parted for her as she left. Someone even slow clapped. It was all she could do to keep her face level until she was outside on the Mile, already dialing August’s number.

***

August never did end up catching his train that night. Instead they went back to Emma’s flat, and tore through Emma’s entire cache of American candy while bingeing episodes of Bake Off. 

It was only around 3am that she finally let him lead her into her bedroom, tucking her in like she was still a kid. Like nothing had changed in the last twenty years.

“You don’t need to say it,” she said, as he settled on top of the covers beside her, both of them staring at the ceiling.

“Say what?” he asked, leaning over to turn off her lamp.

“That my taste in men sucks.”

August snorted, settling back down beside her. “Well, you said it.”

“You’re right,” Emma admitted to the dark. “And you were right about Walsh. I didn’t love him. I just kind of… got used to him. And it’s not the same thing.”

“No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

She turned over then, so she could see the vague outline of his face in the near darkness. “Have you told Jefferson how you feel, yet?”

They’d never discussed it. Not explicitly. But from the moment August had introduced his editor into their little group, Emma had known. And it didn’t seem to matter that Jefferson was a widower. Or a single father. There was something there, something between them as they traded insults and bickered over line edits. Something more than colleagues, or even friends. Something rare.

The silence was telling, as August regrouped.

“I wrote him a letter, once,” he confessed. “I was going to submit it with my finished manuscript. Right on the last page. But I ripped it up before I could give it to him.”

Now it was Emma’s turn to snort. “We never stood a chance, did we?”

“Some kids get trophies. Foster kids get abandonment issues.” It was a recitation. A line she’d heard before. 

They knew the truth of it better than anyone.

[stainedglassgardens]

Watched in April

Queen of Earth Black Christmas Dogs of Chernobyl Firecrackers Les Misérables The Evil Dead The Daughters of Fire (Las hijas del fuego) The Fallen Idol The Wailing (곡성, Gokseong) Inherent Vice Sorrowful Shadow Mistery Lonely The Grand Bizarre Zombieland: Double Tap Waves '98 Uncut Gems The Last Séance Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven) Room Queen & Slim The Holy Mountain (La montaña sagrada) The Chaser ( 추격자, Chugyeokja) Made in Dagenham The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը, Nřan guynə) Lost Girls Ghost Town Anthology (Répertoire des villes disparues) And Then There Were None Doctor Sleep Meshes of the Afternoon Circus of Books Catfish Wildling Delphine The Strange Love of Martha Ivers The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge) Nona. If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them (Nona. Si me mojan, yo los quemo) The Lodge Invisible Man Sans Soleil

Did not finish

Horsehead (Romain Basset, 2014) Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012)

Did not like

Sorrowful Shadow (Guy Maddin, 2004) Mistery Lonely (Harmony Korine, 2007) Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2019) The Last Séance (Laura Kulik, 2018) The Holy Mountain (La montaña sagrada, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973) Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

Okay

Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015): The way it was filmed reminded me of The Midnight Swim and Always Shine. I watched it because Elisabeth Moss is in it but was rather disappointed in the end -- it was beautifully shot but went nowhere

Black Christmas (Sophia Takal, 2019): Like Assassination Nation, this is a film I'm glad young people today have -- and it was fine, and if there’s anything I’ve got to say about so-called raging feminists it’s that we need more of them, but yeah the ending was disappointing and I felt that I had aged out of the target audience a good number of years ago

The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981): Finally saw this! Love me a a good campy horror story once in a while

The Wailing (곡성, Gokseong) and The Chaser ( 추격자, Chugyeokja) (Na Hong-jin, 2016 and 2008): A healthy dose of wtf in both of those, I’m still not sure I “correctly” grasped the intended tone. I also just lost all interest in The Chaser when (spoiler) the girl died. What’s the point of that? Are we in Game of Thrones now? I may still be angry about that, actually

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014): I know it’s a good film but it bored me to death. I don’t like stories about men or drugs

Zombieland: Double Tap (Ruben Fleischer, 2019): A sympathetic, slightly disappointing sequel

Waves '98 (Ely Dagher, 2015): I don’t remember much about this short but I did think it was good

Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015): I couldn’t watch this as separate from the book, it felt more like a companion film to me than anything else. It was good I think, but I’m definitely not the best judge on this one, because the book was so amazing and I’m still not over it, apparently

And Then There Were None (René Clair, 1945): Was it good? Who knows. They changed the ending and added in a crap love story, so who cares, really

Wildling (Fritz Böhm, 2018): I liked it? I didn’t really see the “feminist themes” in this but it was good

Delphine (Chloé Robichaud, 2019): This is one of those short films that are a little too “slice of life” for me to really enjoy. I can tell it’s good, tho

The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge, Albert Lamorisse, 1956): This is apparently a classic short film, and I think I would have enjoyed it a lot had I seen it in 1956. Seeing it today, when everything in it has been used in a hundred thousand other films, made it fall flat a little

Nona. If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them (Nona. Si me mojan, yo los quemo, Camila José Donoso, 2019): Watched this because it was directed by a woman! Did not know what to expect at all. The non-linear narration kept me trying to remember if there was something I could possibly have skipped that would have made more sense of it. I think the premise (old woman throws Molotov cocktail at former lover’s car) is better than the finished product, although it is very well-shot and the acting is amazing

Good

Dogs of Chernobyl (Léa Camilleri & Hugo Chesnel, 2020): Short documentary that had me on the verge of tears several times (you can watch it for free on YouTube!)

Les Misérables (Ladj Ly, 2019): It’s hard to talk about films like these. It is very good, very important, I think everyone should watch it. Think a new La Haine

The Daughters of Fire (Las hijas del fuego, Albertina Carri, 2018): Loved the reflection on pornography. The pornography itself was a little more... boring... but I appreciate the intention, and the guts it took to shoot something like this

The Fallen Idol (Carol Reed, 1948): An amazing British classic (adapted from Graham Greene!) that I had somehow never heard of. Great acting, especially considering the main character is a small child

Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven, Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, 2018): There will be people in this world to say that "uhh nothing happens in this film", a statement to which my reply will be twofold: first, it's beautiful so who cares, and second, how many other films have you seen that take place in a commune in the 1990s in Chile? That's what I thought. Shut up

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010): Films like this and Suffragette, that is, mainstream films about the working classes and political activism, are almost bound to be flawed, but I'm grateful they exist all the same. And how many of those have we seen that are about workers’ unions, with an all-female main cast, and nuanced dialogue about communism and the place of women in the home and of men in feminism? I’m glad that male directors have finally figured out that one of the best ways to avoid showing a one-dimensional idea of women is to have lots of them in one film. And Sally Hawkins! I love her

The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը, Nřan guynə, Sergei Parajanov, 1969): Another one of those classics I had never heard of (until I got Mubi!). Indescribable, beautiful

Lost Girls (Liz Garbus, 2020): Really liked the speech at the end about the police failing the victims and their families, really liked that the old inspector guy wasn't made to be someone who was on the side of the victims instead of on his own side. Bleak, sobering. When I watched this I didn't know Garbus was the person who directed that Nina Simone documentary, which I also love.Will definitely seek out more Liz Garbus in future

Ghost Town Anthology (Répertoire des villes disparues, Denis Côté, 2019): I watched this not knowing anything about Denis Côté or the film, and I loved the atmosphere even before the supernatural element really kicked in. Films like this and The One I Love or Everything Beautiful is Far Away are my kind of low-key science fiction

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943): Aaaand another classic I finally saw! It just warms my heart to see that stuff like this was being made (by a woman!!) in the 1940s

Circus of Books (Rachel Mason, 2019): I saw a headline calling this “the queer Stories We Tell” and I loved Sarah Polley’s documentary and wouldn’t go quite that far but I can see where it’s coming from. A good autobiographical documentary about the complexity of families

Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010): I think everyone going into this today knows what this is going to be about, but let me tell you, it does not reduce the impact

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946): Barbara Stanwyck and Lizabeth Scott! Murder! Intrigue! Love and sleaze!

The Lodge (Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala, 2019): This was so efficient. It is so well-done, and Riley Keough is amazing as usual. More subtle than Franz and Fiala’s last effort, Goodnight Mommy, and at least as good

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983): It’s hard not to be disappointed by this after hearing every film bro I’ve ever met describe this as his fave ever. It is... pretty racist and sexist... but yes, very pretty, very nice if you can get past that

Faves

Firecrackers (Jasmin Mozaffari, 2018): Is this a coming-of-age story? Anyway it’s about two working-class teenage girls in small town Canada who are this close to making their dream of leaving for New York, and one of them is fuuuuucked up...

The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack, 2018): I think this is what I want from a non-narrative documentary. I’m tired of seeing pretentious Godfrey Reggio knockoffs. This quite simply blew my mind and is one of those very rare films I can see myself rewatching ten times

Queen & Slim (Melina Matsoukas, 2019): I can’t not compare this to Natural Born Killers and Thelma and Louise, both of which I used to love and haven’t seen in a number  of years -- but Queen & Slim is quite possibly better than both of those. The tone, the breadth, the acting -- even the soundtrack. It’s a masterpiece

Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020): This is about a man who creates an invisibility suit. This is also about a woman who is being stalked and abused by a controlling man who just won’t rest until he has completely destroyed her -- but of course, since this is cinema and the woman in question is Elisabeth Moss, she ultimately beats the shit out of him. This was very difficult to watch for me but I’m glad I stuck through

*

I got Mubi this month! So glad I did. It’s so much better than both Filmstruck (RIP) and Amazon Prime. I like that choices are made for me up to a certain extent -- and those choices often turn out very good, and always interesting. And yes, we’re still in lockdown, I’m still unemployed, hence the number of films watched this month. Hopefully we can get out in May and I’ll end up watching less!

[morrisondauthor]

Demi’s Way, The Summer Daze & Quentin’s Way Q&A

This is the Q&A post for Demi’s Way, The Summer Daze and Quentin’s Way. Hope I answer most of your questions with this!

Warning: May contain possible spoilers

Q: Will there be a continuation to any of these stories?

A: I’ve gotten this question the most, so I’ll go ahead and answer it first. No, there will not be any continuations to these stories. Originally, Demi’s Way was going to be the only one but after seeing how well-received it was and realizing the large number of readers who wanted a sequel, I decided to do Quentin’s Way. As a bridge between the two, I created The Summer Daze which introduced new characters but also included the Malcolm character (the only character to appear in all three stories). I understand why some of you would want to read a Malcolm’s Way or The Summer Daze 2, but I just don’t have the time to devote to those potential stories since I have other things planned. Quentin’s Way is the end of the line for now and I’m satisfied with that decision.

Q: What inspired you to write all three stories?

A: I was somewhat inspired by my very first story Darren’s Way (posted to the now defunct blackmen4now.com) to write Demi’s Way, even though the stories have little in common. Darren’s Way was a semi-autobiographical story I’d written about my life at that time. I’d been involved with a boy on my high school’s football team and the story was almost like a fictionalized journal for me since I couldn’t tell anyone in my life at that time what was going on. Demi’s Way is a complete fictional story that I wrote based around the premise of Darren’s Way but without any relevance to my personal life. 

Of course, Quentin’s Way is the counterpart to Demi’s Way so that goes without explanation. The Summer Daze was supposed to be a standalone story, but I decided to set it in the “Demi universe” so it could bridge the other two stories and show the summer of that year.

Q: Which one was your favorite to write?

A: I honestly can’t choose because I enjoyed writing all three and I still go back and reread chapters from all three. Demi, Dorian and Quentin all had interesting points of view and were unique when it came to how they handled very different situations. One thing all three protagonists had in common was their willingness to embrace the men they’d become by the end of their respective journeys. Neither character had a single regret by the end of his story.

Q: Why did you put Demi with Malcolm by the end of Demi’s Way only to put him with Quentin by the end of Quentin’s Way?

A: For Demi, Malcolm was basically everything from his first crush to his first kiss to his first love. They lost their virginity to one another and that’s a deep bond. By the end of Demi’s Way, Demi genuinely feels like his heart belongs with Malcolm. Remember, the only reason why he broke up with Malcolm was because his mother blackmailed him. He later realizes it was a mistake to let her do that, but he fell into it in the moment. While he was with Quentin in high school, their connection was mostly sex-based due to the attraction they felt to one another. In other words, Demi didn’t spend years crushing on Quentin as he’d done with Malcolm. To him, Malcolm had this halo above his head and he was the good guy. I originally intended for the story to end with Demi and Malcolm reuniting.

Fast-forward to Quentin’s Way and we learn that Malcolm’s halo is gone LOL. He wasn’t the perfect boyfriend and he definitely wasn’t a good guy anymore. Cheating turns out to be a red line for Demi and once Malcolm crosses that line, it was literally like turning off a light switch. Having Demi go back to Quentin was harder to write than it seems because I didn’t want it to come off as Quentin being the second choice. Demi always cared about Quentin, but he hadn’t fallen in love with him during their time together in high school. Quentin, on the other hand, had never been in love before so he when he fell for Demi he fell hard. I had to strike a balance in writing it so that Demi and Quentin reformed their own relationship without Malcolm being a major part of the equation. This is why it took some time for Demi to get to the point of trusting his heart not to lead him into another bad situation. Since it was Quentin’s story, we didn’t get to fully experience Demi’s process of realizing he was in love with Quentin but his love for Quentin is real and it’s separate from any feelings or lack thereof he had for Malcolm.

Q: In The Summer Daze, why did you make Dorian so different than his brother Tavian and their father?

A: Dorian is different than Tavian and their father because he simply wasn’t raised in the household of their father like Tavian was. There’s a part in the story where right after Dorian comes out to his dad, his dad makes the claim that Dorian’s gay because he wasn’t around much while Dorian was growing up. The ironic thing about that claim is that in many ways, he did Dorian a favor by not being around as much. Dorian and Tavian’s dad is a serial cheater and just a lowdown man all around when it comes to how he treats his wife. And what effect does his behavior have on Tavian? Tavian is a serial cheater, a mini misogynist and Dorian has to put him in his place a few times in the story. I wouldn’t say that Dorian being gay is the reason why he’s able to call out his brother and father on their behavior; it’s more about the way his mother raised him. Had Terri raised Tavian without his dad being around, Tavian would have been more like Dorian when it comes to being monogamous with someone.

Q: Why is Malcolm the only character to appear in all three stories?

A: Throughout Demi’s Way, we see that Malcolm frequently hangs out with his own friends that Demi doesn’t hang out with. He plays basketball with them and video games, etc. I decided to have Malcolm appear in The Summer Daze as Tavian’s friend because I wanted to show that Tavian wasn’t homophobic and I also wanted someone to know that Dorian was gay prior to Dorian coming out. As a result, Malcolm gives Dorian good advice on how to deal with his situation with Noah. Basically, Tavian is present in Demi’s Way as one of Malcolm’s friends but he’s just not mentioned. Needless to say, Malcolm appears in Quentin’s Way because he’s still with Demi when the story begins. I could have put more characters in all three but I actually liked the idea of Malcolm being the only character to appear in all three because it feels unique to me in some way.

Q: What made you broaden Quentin’s sexuality in Quentin’s Way?

A: This was actually a tough decision for me. For a long time, Demi was the only guy that Quentin had been attracted to. I didn’t want it to come off as a “once you go gay...” type of scenario nor did I want it to look like Demi “transformed” him. Quentin simply never allowed himself to consider being curious about anything. He spent most of his life post-puberty liking only girls, only to develop an attraction to another guy at age 17. After his situation with Demi, he knew there was some form of tension between him and his roommate Reggie, but he never allowed himself to consider the tension was sexual until he was unavoidably faced with that possibility. Once he explored with Reggie it was like opening a Pandora’s box. He went even further with Jacen. He was turned on by things he’d never been turned on before in his life and that made him want to explore more. Also, I broadened Quentin’s sexuality to emphasize the lengths he were willing to go to just to ease the pain of having his heart broken. He tried to run from his love for Demi by using sex and was willing to bend his norms to accomplish that feat.

Q: Why were there mothers in both Demi’s Way and The Summer Daze but not in Quentin’s Way?

A: There’s two main reasons for why I placed mothers in Demi’s Way and The Summer Daze but didn’t place Quentin’s mother in Quentin’s Way. One is because I wanted to show the various effects having a mother could have on a young man. Demi’s mother, Dorian’s mother and Dorian’s stepmother are three universally different mothers and their respective form of motherhood has extremely different effects on their sons. Demi’s mom had a conservative attitude for most of his story and her effect on him is present throughout the story. Dorian’s mom is supportive and caring, but she refuses to hold herself accountable to the fact that she played a role in hurting Dorian’s relationship with his dad. Terri, Dorian’s stepmother, causes the biggest change in Dorian because her support comes without bias or an ulterior motive. By not having his mother present for most of his life, Quentin had to rely on his grandmother for a mother-son bond and she still had an effect on him. The other reason is because I wanted to emphasize Quentin’s fear of inheriting his mother’s mental condition without explicitly pointing out that fear constantly.

Q: There’s foreshadowing at the end of The Summer Daze, but what happens next with Demi and Quentin?

A: Well, we know that Demi and Quentin are pretty much engaged by the end of Quentin’s Way, but I decided not to do a foreshadow like I did for Dorian and Noah at the end of The Summer Daze. I want the readers to imagine what happens for Demi and Quentin. Most likely, they stay together and after graduating they get married that summer. If the story were real, they’d be in the middle of their sophomore year for the 2017-2018 current school year. Well, they’d be on winter break right now LOL.

Q: Will you be posting pics of the characters from all three stories?

A: I’ve given this considerable thought and I understand why so many of you have asked this question, but I would rather have you all imagine what the characters exactly look like. I gave detailed descriptions of main characters and somewhat decent descriptions of secondary characters, so it shouldn’t be too hard to guess what a character looks like. It would literally take me forever and a day to search for and find pics that even look a fraction of how I described some of the characters, and I simply don’t have time to conduct that kind of search. For Demi and Quentin, the cover art for their respective stories closely matches how I see them in my head. However, that doesn’t mean you all should see them that way; it’s just how I see them.

Q: Can you compare Dorian and Noah to Demi and Quentin? What are their similarities and differences?

A: Before I answer this, I’d just like to point out the part in Quentin’s Way where Quentin admits to having a little crush on Noah, who is his freaking neighbor! Of course, there are comparisons that can be made between Dorian and Noah and Demi and Quentin. Both Quentin and Dorian are athletes, masculine and prefer to top in their respective relationships. They also come from working class backgrounds, although Quentin’s finances change dramatically due to the money he later inherits from his grandma’s untimely passing. Both Demi and Noah are petite, are varying degrees of feminine, and prefer to bottom. There are also many differences. While Dorian identifies as gay from the beginning of his story, Quentin was more confused and at times either referred to himself as bisexual or gay later in his story. While Noah comes from a somewhat blended working class family consisting of himself, his separated parents, little half-sister and older half-brother; Demi comes from an upper class family consisting of himself, his married parents and older sister. Relationship wise, the couples have some differences but they are also totally interchangeable. I can definitely see Demi falling for Dorian over the course of a summer and Quentin falling for Noah since Noah has lived next door to him for years.

Q: Will you be writing more Wattpad stories with teen characters or are these three the only ones?

A: Following my next Wattpad story, Not My Brother’s Keeper, I will be taking a somewhat long hiatus from Wattpad to begin the process of writing my first novel. However, I probably will be writing more teen/high school stories on there once I return. I’ve always believed that showing how complex life can be for black LGBT youth during those high school years is very important.

[epacer]

Classmates

10 Questions with Author Melissa Abramovitz

Today I’m happy to welcome author Melissa Abramovitz to my blog and to answer “10 Questions.”

Melissa is a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction for children and teens. She’s also published a “How To” book for writers.

Melissa Abramovitz, Class of 1972

Linda Covella: Hello, Melissa. So glad you could join us today.

When and why did you decide to become a writer?

Melissa Abramovitz: I decided to start writing professionally in 1985, when my children were little and I was a stay-at-home mom and homemaker. Much as I loved being a full-time mom, I wanted to do something just for me, and I had always loved to write. I even had some poetry published when I was in high school, and I liked to write so much that I loved writing term papers in high school and college! Weird, and so nerdy, huh! And maybe a foreshadowing of my later enjoyment of professionally writing nonfiction.

Back to 1985… I had never thought about making a career as a writer – my college degree is in psychology, and I thought I would do something related to that – but when I saw an advertisement for a correspondence course offered by the Institute of Children’s Literature on how to write for children, I decided to sign up. I loved the class, and it was perfect for me because I could fit working on my classwork around my other responsibilities. My instructor recommended that I submit a nonfiction article I wrote as a course assignment to a children’s magazine, and I did and was amazed when the magazine accepted it for publication. I had heard that many aspiring authors spent years piling up rejections before selling anything, and I thought – wow! This won’t be as difficult as I thought. Well, I was so wrong. After that initial success, I accumulated (and still do receive) more rejections than I thought possible. But I persisted, and gradually started selling more and more nonfiction articles and short stories to magazines for children, teenagers, and adults. Then I got into writing educational books, and to this day, that is still the type of work I do most often. My writing was very part-time until my kids grew up, but it is now my full-time job. And I still love it as much as ever.

Linda Covella: Congratulations on your success and hard work. Writing for publication does take persistence, doesn’t it!

What is your writing process: where do you write, how often do you write, are you a full-time or part-time writer, do you outline or do you plot as you go, etc.?

Melissa Abramovitz:  I write almost every day, usually in my home office, and as I previously mentioned, writing is my full-time job. Some days I work for 6 to 8 hours; other days 10 to 14 hours, depending on how many projects and deadlines I’ve got going. I mostly write nonfiction books on assignment for educational publishers and nonfiction magazine articles (for all age groups) on assignment or independently to submit to specific magazines, with occasional fiction thrown into the mix. In addition, when I have time I write children’s picture books (fiction and nonfiction) and market them to trade publishers. Unfortunately, I have not sold three of these manuscripts, and with so many publishers no longer accepting unagented submissions, I have been trying to find an agent to represent me. But so far, this has not happened. I also recently completed my first novel (after working on it off and on for more than 20 years), and hopefully an agent will be able to help me market it as well.

I usually make a detailed outline before I start writing a manuscript; the only exception is when I write very short stories for young children. In fact, an outline is even more important for nonfiction than for fiction, and I find that having an outline helps me stay on track as far as where and when to introduce certain concepts and facts in my manuscripts. I know that some writers shudder when they hear the word outline, and some do excellent work writing “by the seat of the pants.” But I benefit from outlines, so I use them.

Linda Covella:  With all your publications, I imagine you’ll find the right agent. Best of luck on that!

Where do you find your inspiration for your stories? Do you draw from your own experiences?

Melissa Abramovitz:   Most of the educational publishers with whom I work regularly develop their series and individual title ideas in-house and then ask me which titles I would like to write. So in those cases, I am not responsible for generating ideas. For other types of stories, books etc. I find inspiration everywhere, by simply keeping what I call my writers’ antennae alert. In fact, when writers tell me they have trouble coming up with story ideas, I tell them that story ideas are all around them, and they just need to train themselves to notice and build on those ideas. For example, I’ve gotten many ideas and have been inspired to write many stories/articles based on something my children or grandchildren said. One such question that spurred me to write a fun poem came from my then-three-year-old son, who asked, “Mommy, where does the sun go at night?” I also derive inspiration for stories from news reports, from watching TV, from reading books and magazines, and from noticing interesting things when I travel. But I don’t have to be doing something different or exciting to find story ideas, since I’ve trained myself to be on the lookout for these ideas wherever I am, whether it’s taking a walk in my neighborhood, shopping for groceries, or spending time with family and friends. For instance, one day while I was walking my Labrador retriever, his ears perked up and his body snapped to attention as he stared at something that turned out to be a squirrel crossing the street a couple of blocks away. That got me thinking about what I had learned about animal vision in my neuroscience classes in college, and I realized that writing a children’s nonfiction article about how different animals see the same thing would be fun and interesting (for me and for readers). The article was published in Sierra Magazine (this was years ago when the magazine contained a monthly section for children). Another time, I was doing something really mundane – I was looking through my desk calendar. I noticed that it contained no pre-printed mention of holidays in August. Every other month had at least one listed holiday, and I wondered if other calendars listed any August holidays. I began my “research” by hurrying to a store and perusing a variety of desk, wall, and other types of calendars. None mentioned any holidays in August. By that time, my writer’s antennae were on full alert, and I decided to do other types of research, such as consulting books about celebrations in various cultures, so I could write a children’s article on the topic. It turns out that even though there are no major American holidays in August, there are plenty of August holidays in other countries, and there are even some “commemorative” or “honorary” days like National Ice Cream Day and Women’s Equality Day in the US. In my article, which I titled “Are There Any Holidays In August?”, I took readers on my journey to answer the question raised in the title and shared information about some of the international August holidays and commemorative days. It sold to the first magazine to which I submitted it; most probably, I believe, because most writers do not turn mundane pastimes like looking at a desk calendar into fun and interesting articles.

Linda Covella: LOL You certainly do know how to find inspiration in unusual places.

Who is one of your favorite characters from your story(ies), one that you enjoyed creating and writing about, and why?

Melissa Abramovitz:   That would be Herbie Hedgehog, the clueless anthropomorphized hedgehog who stars in my interactive picture book, Helping Herbie Hedgehog (Guardian Angel Publishing, 2015). I love using humor to help kids learn about various concepts, and I created Herbie to be a lovable but clueless guy who needs the reader’s help making everyday decisions. Such as, should he ride a bicycle or embark on a boat when he decides to visit his cousin who lives across an ocean? Should he visit a policeman or a doctor when he feels sick? Kids love it because they’re laughing while yelling out the correct answers and learning at the same time.

Linda Covella: Do you incorporate (or inadvertently find) any of your own personality traits into your characters?

Melissa Abramovitz:   In the novel I recently finished, I noticed that the main character had some of my personality traits and even spoke the way I speak in several instances, even though she is a “Southern belle” and I am not. I changed these aspects of the story, mostly because I don’t want people who know me to think that the (fictional) story is in any way autobiographical. That’s because the main character is a psychopath who is obsessed with achieving revenge by harming a particular individual. I did not consciously intend for this character to be anything like me, but somehow the similar traits/dialogue snuck into her personality and behavior. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have a field day analyzing how and why I subconsciously allowed this to happen, but I think the important thing is that I found and changed these things.

Another character I created, in this case for a short story I wrote titled “A Hannukah Miracle,” (published in Girls’ World magazine, 2018) has a couple of my traits because the story is based on a question about miracles I asked many years ago when I was a child. The main character, Jenny, asks a similar question about what miracles are and who creates them. However, even though Jenny’s question and concerns were similar to mine, I never came up with a plan to nudge a miracle to transpire like she did, nor did I answer the question by putting this plan into action like she did. Jenny therefore became a unique character who was loosely based on my personal concerns and experience at one point in time. Indeed, this is how many fictional stories and characters are inspired by true events, but are then given a life of their own that builds on this spark.

Linda Covella: Do you find your stories are more plot driven or character driven? Please explain.

Melissa Abramovitz:   I’d say more plot-driven, mostly because I tend to think of a plot first and then create characters to fit into the plot. Even though I do not write a lot of fiction, I would like to make the stories I do write more character driven because I find that I usually enjoy reading these types of stories more than those which are plot driven. As with any other aspect of writing, this takes lots of practice, so I continue to work on it.

Linda Covella: Did you read much as a child?

Melissa Abramovitz:   Yes! My favorite book was Heidi. I read it hundreds of times. I also loved reading Dr. Seuss and mysteries. Until I read a couple of the really scary Sherlock Holmes mysteries (like The Hound of the Baskervilles). After that, I was too petrified to read another mystery written for adults for many years, and I stuck to reading children’s mystery series like the Nancy Drew books (fun and well-written, but not scary)!

Linda Covella: I loved Heidi and Nancy Drew. But Edgar Allan Poe was also one of my favorites.

How important do you think reading is for writers?

Melissa Abramovitz:   I think it’s essential. It’s important to read books by other authors because it really helps writers analyze what these authors do, and don’t do, to make these books interesting, readable, and desirable (or not). This helps writers pinpoint what they want and do not want in their own books. Plus, it’s important for writers who want to publish their stories to know what else is available in different genres and for different age groups. So people who want to write and publish picture books should read dozens, if not hundreds, of picture books.

Linda Covella:  Good advice for aspiring writers.

Who are some of your favorite authors and/or books? What draws you to them?

Melissa Abramovitz:   I’ve always loved Dr. Seuss because of his fun characters and because of the fact that his books carry important messages as well as being fun. As far as novels I read, I love books by Mary Higgins Clark, Belva Plain, Robin Cook, Nicolas Sparks, and sometimes David Baldacci. Many people who know me notice that I stay away from trendy stuff like 50 Shades of Gray because I despise pornography and books that contain a lot of profanity. One thing I admire about Mary Higgins Clark, Nicolas Sparks, and Belva Plain, in particular, is that their books are exciting, interesting, emotionally compelling, and very well-written, without profanity or explicit, gratuitous sexual content that many authors include, presumably because they are either obsessed with these matters or simply think including them is necessary to sell books. I am certainly not averse to story characters (in adult material) using somewhat profane language and/or thinking/acting in ways that are sexually provocative, but these behaviors should arise from situations and personality traits that are integral to the plot, rather than being there because the author likes using bad language and sharing sexual fantasies with the public.

Linda Covella:  Anything new in the works?

Melissa Abramovitz:   I am always working on assignments for educational books for children/teenagers, and after I finish writing the books I’ve committed to writing this year, I plan to work on a fun picture book I started a few months ago. I also have several magazine article ideas about which I want to query some editors. And I keep promising myself I will work harder to find an agent to market my novel and the picture books I mentioned earlier, but this gets pushed to the side when I must meet deadlines on other material. Adding about ten more hours to each day would be helpful…

Linda Covella:  Bonus question! Do you have anything you’d like to add?

Melissa Abramovitz:   I just want to thank you for featuring me in this interview and for doing author interviews on your blog. I love reading about other authors, so I look forward to seeing the other interviews you post.

Linda Covella: Thanks so much for sharing your writing life with us, Melissa! *Reposted  Word blog interview from 10 Questions with Author Wendy Dunn of January 23, 2019

[comicteaparty]

January 10th, 2019 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party chat that occurred on January 10th, 2019, from 5PM - 7PM PST.  The chat focused on Chasing Little Lights by Evelyn Shi.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- THURSDAY BOOK CLUB START!

Good evening, everyone~! This week’s Thursday Book Club is officially beginning! Today we are discussing Chasing Little Lights by Evelyn Shi~! (http://www.cllcomic.com/)

Remember that Thursday discussions are completely freeform! However, every 30 minutes I will drop in OPTIONAL discussion questions in case you’d like a bit of a prompt. If you miss out on one of these prompts, you can find them pinned for the chat’s duration. Additionally, remember that while constructive criticism is allowed, our focus is fun and respectfully appreciating the comic. All that said, let’s begin!

QUESTION 1. What is your favorite scene in the comic so far and why?

my favorite scene so far is probably...well okay its not really a scene so much as a moment in a scene. but when soren is walking around with valentin and noticing that valentin already has like 1 billion friends. i can just severely relate to soren in that moment. it has some fantastic facial expression and i just love the panel framing too. theres kind of this sense of isolation whenever you see valentin interact. and even though soren is there, you get this sense he is the one out of place. and i just really think the visual aspects alone express that kind of loner thing he has going on

eleviken

haha hi! i'm the creator of Chasing Little Lights and i'll stick around here for a bit!

RebelVampire

glad to have you, @eleviken ~!

eleviken

i'm really glad you took note of that scene! i wanted to capture their different personalities - they are friends and get closer as the comic progresses, but soren is quite shy and valentin is a classic extrovert! i think valentin doesn't intend to single out people sometimes but he can give off that vibe

RebelVampire

actually honestly i really love valentin and soren's interactions. theyre very different people, and usually when you have an extrovert and an introvert they kind of butt heads. but nah, in this case valentin is like "hey buddy lets get bubble tea" and to me thats just super refreshing to see.

another scene i really like was the fencing scene. it played out exactly how i imagined it would: elena got her arrogant butt beaten by someone with infinite more years experience. but what i like more is that she doesnt expect this. instead to retreats further into her belief that she just wasnt on her a-game. cause i feel this is a moment that is true to how a real person would act.

and i also like how it preps for future drama

eleviken

that's great!! yeah i wanted valentin to be a good hearted person inside, even if he gives off an absentmindedly popular vibe! but of course there will be fights between the characters>:)

mhm! for me the fencing scene got quite tedious actually, as i wanted to have the action play out in maybe a few weeks, rather than dragging on for over a month. but i can only make a page per week with school and all, so i'm glad you enjoyed that!

all the characters are good people despite their flaws- elena's is arrogance obviously. we'll see how her character growth plays out in the future!

RebelVampire

yeah theres no doubt in my mind theyre good people. but i love all their flaws because theyre poignant and feel super realistic. not to mention i really enjoy a lot of the elements that stress them out cause to a degree it helps to make them feel their age.

eleviken

mhm, in future chapters - especially chapter 4, which is coming up soon, there will be more dramatic/challenging obstacles in the plot that will test their innocence as kids

i wanted to emphasize the coming of age aspect in the story because some challenges force you to grow up

RebelVampire

exactly what im hoping for. cause these kids are def in a situation where their innocence is gonna be tested. what with all the air pollution.

this is not s etting of happiness

K.E. Karlsen

yeah thats a theme i like seeing in stories and i can definitely see it happening in yours, whatever may happen

can i ask where you got the idea of a setting with air pollution sickness?

mathtans

The little one is in bed for the moment, but I might have to leave unexpectedly. ^.^

Rebel - I kind of liked that scene with Valentin having all the friends, but I think what I liked more was kind of the follow-up, when Kasen sees Soren with Valentin and thinks, geez, that guy's already got a friend. Kind of a perspective shift.

eleviken

i live in Shanghai, China, and air pollution has been a pretty big issue here! it has gotten better over the past few years but it's still very polluted. air pollution is also quite bad in areas like mongolia and india and other parts of asia

mathtans

Nice closer to Chapter 2 also.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 2. The comic’s setting is one where air pollution can be rampant enough to cause a fatal sickness called contamina. Given Valentin’s blood-filled coughing, do you believe he has contracted contamina? Why do you believe he is so intent on hiding his symptoms, especially from Elena? If Valentin does have contamina, do you believe he’d come to accept it or continue to live in denial? Whether he has contamina or not, how do you believe the others will react to finding out about the coughing? Overall, do you think Valentin’s health problems will change the group’s opinions on how normalized the air pollution is? How might this change their future goals?

mathtans

Characters need flaws, or it's boring.

eleviken

mathtans - to add on i think soren and kasen are more similar in personality than elena and val, defnitely! but they face very different challenges, so i think it makes them different in that way too:))

i am also a high school student! so i think CLL is at least semi-autobiographical in many ways

mathtans

Truth, probably makes sense that the siblings are a bit alike too.

eleviken

on question 2 - i won't give away too much

mathtans

I've been reading most of your little author notes btw eleviken. I think it's very cool that you're using your location as a setting. (Also, your field trip to Mongolia sounds really interesting, possibly more interesting than it was, I dunno.)

eleviken

but of course val will eventually be forced to face the issue

mathtans

I think Valentin is hiding the symptoms for a couple reasons. One, if people start talking about it, that makes it "real" and harder to deny to himself. Second, since his parents died due to pollution, he doesn't want his sister to have to go through the same kind of thing again.

eleviken

what really!!! i love leaving the author notes as a record to what i'm up to that week, but i didn't expect too many people to take note! my trip was a culture/service trip and it was definitely interesting, as it was quite different from the big city life in Shanghai

RebelVampire

you mean val doesnt just gain immortality and thus is rewarded for his denial?

XD

eleviken

Maybe val /is/ an immortal!

RebelVampire

see

confirmed

no problems here

O_O;;;;;

mathtans

I wonder if on some level, like subconsciously, Valentin is hoping for a breakthrough that helps out his own health. And Elena's dismissal of his attempts at research may not be helping with that (though I get why she does it).

Valentin - There can be only one.

eleviken: Yup, I'm one of those readers who tends to check out Q&As and Author Notes and stuff. In particular I was interested because I've never been to China or anywhere in the far East. Cool!

(I'm also a high school teacher, so there's that side of me, pleased to see students doing creative things. )

RebelVampire

i honestly feel the denial is more for valentin's sake than elena's sake. because hes what, 14? 14 is not the age where youre ready to accept mortality. 14 is the age where you believe youre super invincible and nothing ever bad will happen to you ever. can do whatever you want for you are the immortal one. and to accept he has contamina is to accept that whatever he had planned in his future is now kaput. and i just dont think hes ready for that, thus the hiding.

not to mention denial is the first stage of the 5 stages of grief

eleviken

valentin is definitely an optimist, and as the creator it even makes /me/ sad to see (or make lol) him suffer. he's definitely holding out hope for a miracle about his health, whether it turns out to be contamina or not. he is definitely at a point of denial, by filling his life with fun and his new friends to forget about the problem!

mathtans

Oh, the denial is probably more for his sake, you're right. The not telling might be for Elena's sake a bit though.

eleviken

mathtans - no way, that's amazing! Thank you for teaching, it's definitely hard work!

mathtans

Valentin is kind of the type to throw caution to the wind too, like I don't know the specifics of the disease, but he wanders around without a mask like that won't make the problem get worse faster or something.

Oh, thank you eleviken.

RebelVampire

eh i feel that the hiding it from others goes along with hiding it from himself. cause i get more the impression hes hiding it from the others to protect himself more than to protect the others. cause if he told elena, shes going to make a fuss and treat him like hes dying. and he cant very well live in denial about dying if everyone treats him like hes dying.

mathtans

That's a good point too, Rebel. (Who knows what's going on in his head!)

RebelVampire

although im sure there isnt no element about protecting elena cause of what happened to their parents. i just think self preservation is the overriding factor

eleviken

val and elena definitely have the petty sibling dynamic, but with their parents gone they are also looking out for each other. elena isn't good at expressing her emotions, though, so it's not directly stated that she's protective! i think part of his not-wearing-a-mask-stupidity is denial as well. as someone who's inclined to be happy, Val really wants to hold on to that happiness!

mathtans

Maybe Soren will come up with the cure. Can't kick him out of school if he does that.

eleviken

Ah soren's grade issue is quite important too! i think the pressure to achieve perfect grades is a reality for many students, and i especially see it at my school.

RebelVampire

although tbh i get the hint of a stigma? like at least that guy in the bathroom was kind of...apprehensive when he thought valentin might have contamina. even tho its established contamina is not contagious, its kind of got the cancer affect it seems. where everyone is like eww gross stay away from me sick person. and for an extrovert like valentin, that would probably be devastating. to be avoided because of something like being sick.

mathtans

Speaking as a teacher, I feel like society (well, North American society at least) is starting to put way too much emphasis on grades, and not enough emphasis on, y'know, actually learning stuff. Students tend to ask me "how can I get an 80%" not "how can I understand this unit better".

Rebel: Good point. It's said to not be contagious, but if people think that only poorer types who can't afford to replace their masks get the disease, that might be part of it.

eleviken

that's definitely very true at my school - as an asian school with an american system, the pressure to get 4.0s, have extracurriculars, and get into ivies is supersupersuper high. i'm under that pressure myself!

RebelVampire

haha that emphasis on grades over learning has been in the us for a looooong time. but now you have helicopter parents so a good portion of teachers in the us are just giving the grades anyway. because administration wont back the teachers up in the face of angry parents.

but i digress.

eleviken

mathtans - i'm going to admit i never thought about the "poorer people" part, that's very smart!

mathtans

You never know what will be read into things, feel free to run with it.

Yeah, it's not as bad here in Canada, but we still have some standardized testing. Anyway.

Hope you're able to weather the pressure, eleviken. The fact that you can keep up with a comic shows pretty good time management skills.

RebelVampire

i definitely feel that valentin's dilemma will make all the kids confront the air pollution. especially elena cause seeing another person she loves get contamina has to make her confront the idea that air pollution is bad and they shouldnt just go "nah its fine and normal were kids"

eleviken

thanks mathtans! i'm managing to keep up :))

i think high school can definitely be a bubble from real-world issues, and val's problem is forcing him to face the real world. that's a big coming of age part!

RebelVampire

yeah and i definitely love that about this story. that theres this whole conflict and theme of the child bubble world vs the actual world with all its huge problems that are overwhelming to deal with

mathtans

It's one of those things too where, if you see it every day, it just becomes normal. Why confront something that's normal? Whereas for the transfer students, it's not a normal thing, so maybe they can help with that.

Superjustinbros

peeks in

eleviken

hi!

mathtans

Good point, eleviken.

Superjustinbros

Hello there~

Just thought I'd drop in till the end

and this comic of yours is pretty interesting, @eleviken

eleviken

speaking of that, i am heading to class! i will still be here for the most part, though. :))

thanks!

Superjustinbros

You're welcome! Kudos too for representing all these different countries

(And shoutouts to Soren's hair)

RebelVampire

hey super~!

Superjustinbros

Hi Rebel!

RebelVampire

good luck in class, eleviken!

Superjustinbros

Secodned!

RebelVampire

and thats also true math. i definitely get that impression from val and elena

mathtans

All the best with classes!

RebelVampire

that theyre just so used to it they cant even fathom what clean air is like even

too normal

just everyday life

mathtans

Yeah, the choice to have a bunch of countries was cool. I like the little flags in the dialogue bubbles.

RebelVampire

although speaking of normalization though, i really loved that dialogue piece where kasen was saying "did you hear about that celebrity who died of contamina" to elena and elena just said what a shame i liked their music.

like man

mathtans

I'm also impressed that Valentin can already speak 5 languages.

RebelVampire

thats great characterization on how they view the world

yeah

valentin dying is a tragedy

dawgofdawgness

Is this still going? For CLL

mathtans

Rebel - Great point there.

RebelVampire

cause he seems super smart

yes it is~!

we still have another hour left

eleviken

DAWG!!! HEY!!!

dawgofdawgness

HALLO

RebelVampire

QUESTION 3. Kasen and Soren are both characters who have to deal with academic and parental pressure for various reasons. Do you believe Soren will be able to maintain a 3.5 grade average? Or, do you think even with the help of the others he’ll continue to struggle and fall behind? Whether he fails or succeeds, do you believe the school will continue to honor their scholarship agreement? In the long run, do you believe Soren will be able to help pull his family out of poverty with his potential academic success? Kasen, being the headmaster’s daughter, has to deal with similar pressures. Do you believe that Kasen will be able to convince her father to let her go to art school? How might she accomplish this? Alternatively, do you believe she’ll give into her father’s reasoning? Lastly, how might these similar struggles help or hurt the groups’ relationships with each other?

dawgofdawgness

I saw your wall post lmao

eleviken

rebel - ngl i added that dialogue in later, probably about a year into the comic. i really wanted to emphasize the air pollution part!

dawgofdawgness

I thiiiiink that Soren is gonna have to make some sort of sacrifice to maintain his GPA

eleviken

ok i love these questions! i won't spoil but it's great to see this discussion

dawgofdawgness

I think what's keeping Sore n back is his self confidence lol, that's one of the things about his character - he's always putting himself down and getting really anxious about everything

Superjustinbros

That's pretty much what happens at all these CTP's

dawgofdawgness

and Kasen , she's a bright student but needs to be pushed - what's holding her back, I think, is inexperience

mathtans

Just want to add, I think all the characters have parental issues, even the other two mains because of how their parents passed on. It's an interesting theme.

Superjustinbros

That's sad.

eleviken

yeah! kasen is quite smart, but she doesn't want to ~try~ at school because she wants to do art. as a creator i think she still should to an extent, but the pressure from her father is quite high

Superjustinbros

I can relate to that so much

dawgofdawgness

oooh that's relatable

mathtans

Dawg: Yeah, I'm reminded of the "reading difficulties" thing that was alluded to, and how the book he was reading at one point said "you're going to fail" or words to that effect. So definite self confidence issues. I wonder if Soren does have some kind of learning disability though, like dyslexia or something? Or maybe just has trouble with English, is better with German.

eleviken

me too! i don't have plans to go to art school, but the pressure to do well is quite high

dawgofdawgness

ohhh right yeah

Superjustinbros

I was good in school but lots of times I would just zone out and think of making art/games because it gets really tedious.

RebelVampire

i definitely think soren has self confidence issues, but i dont think thats the only thing holding him back persay. i think hes probably suffering a bit from actually being educationally behind. because private schools have way more intense curriculum and generally better educational programs than public schools. so its like someone whose only taken algebra that now they have to do calculus.

dawgofdawgness

Soren maybe has a language barrier as well? Since he's going to a prestigious college out of the country

eleviken

mathtans - nope! english is just not soren's native language

yeah, and ASI is a very competitive school

Superjustinbros

But yeah just saying I can relate to that feeling of wanting freedom

mathtans

I also don't feel like Soren will be able to pull off the 3.5, but that maybe there will be extenuating circumstances (from his friends advocating for him to Soren discovering a cure for the disease) that might prevent him from being kicked out.

Superjustinbros

Perhaps

dawgofdawgness

wait what's soren's gpa at right now?

or is it unknown

mathtans

Rebel: That's also a good point, about private schooling.

RebelVampire

he mentioned it

its under 3.5

close but under

eleviken

under!

dawgofdawgness

oh ok

he'll be fine pfpfttt

RebelVampire

3.2

dawgofdawgness

I have a feeling that he's going to reach that GPA through hard academic studies, and then get kicked out for smoking weed or something

RebelVampire

http://www.cllcomic.com/comic/83/

Superjustinbros

These feels

eleviken

HAHAHA SOREN SMOKING WEED!!

it seems like the most unlikely thing he'd do but at the same time i can see him doing it

RebelVampire

i think he can do it cause hes super close to a 3.5. so he only has to do a smidgen better in a few classes and just not do worse in others

Superjustinbros

Meanwhile I'm looking at these pages and just feeling sorry for Soren

RebelVampire

this is what soren will do in college when he find out high school was worthless and basically a cruise ship

Superjustinbros

I second that

RebelVampire

buuuuuut

i also feel if he hits 3.5 theyre gonna raise the bar on him

and say "good job soren. now get a 4.0 or we kick you out"

cause i feel like that counselor would not care at all about the struggles and triumphs he went through to even get a 3.5

Superjustinbros

D:

That's harsh.

RebelVampire

i mean not that im hoping thats the direction

but that counselor gives me bad vibes man

like theyre just waiting and hoping to kick soren out

Superjustinbros

Yeah.

RebelVampire

i feel bad for soren that its being put on him to pull his family out of poverty

especially cause his academic success doesnt even gurantee that

getting a job is a whole other ballpark

dawgofdawgness

With Kasen, wasn't it also implied that she has social problems on top of academic problems?

I remember there beeing a scene where she looks out the window and is sad i think

RebelVampire

idk if she has social problems? she seems better adjusted than soren socially speaking. although shes definitely less outgoing than elena and val

although i do get the impression shes maybe not the best at expressing herself?

like i kind of feel she holds back some

dawgofdawgness

oh right

ShaRose49

Hi!! I really wanted to make it to this chat cause I read all of the comic. I think poor Valentin is misguidedly thinking he’s being selfless in that he doesn’t tell anyone. And he probably doesn’t think it’s contamina

Superjustinbros

Oh hello there. ^^

ShaRose49

Hullo!

mathtans

Back. Little one was fussing in her crib.

Superjustinbros

Welcoem back!

dawgofdawgness

Yupp, Val's gonna have to accept his sickness or else he will have consequencesss

Superjustinbros

Hope the little one's doing alright @mathtans

RebelVampire

tbf val's acceptance is irrelevant to the consequences

dawgofdawgness

I gotta go, I have to do AP bio (which is a course that Soren takes) no wonder he has a 3.2 GPA the homework is ass

mathtans

I was wondering about that counselor, if she had hearing problems or something. Because the first time we meet her, we see Soren knock at the door, he comes in, and then she says "knock next time". I was thinking, like... he did? Where were you?

dawgofdawgness

goodluck @eleviken !! goodbyee

mathtans

SJB: Oh yeah, she's fine, just not much of a sleeper.

Superjustinbros

Bye!

mathtans

Dawg: Best with it!

(I was never into bio.)

RebelVampire

good luck dawg!

i dont think the counselor has a hearing problem

she was probably just focused

which i get

when im focused i legit cancel out all sound

Superjustinbros

aah I see, Math.

mathtans

ShaRose: Interesting point, about the being selfless thing.

RebelVampire

i think the counselor has a being a bitch problem cough cough

ShaRose49

@mathtans yeah I guess

mathtans

Prejudiced against Germans.

ShaRose49

Yeah that counsellor sucked

RebelVampire

but im sure she has reasons and stuff

Superjustinbros

I'd believe it if she did have a bitch problem

RebelVampire

but admittedly as someone who was as socially anxious as soren at that age

i wouldve been in tears if i had knocked and someone's reply to me was "knock first"

so that moment specifically angered me to no end

in the good way

mathtans

Yeah, character feels.

ShaRose49

Yeah I felt sorry for Soren. My Dad is German so I guess that makes me half

Superjustinbros

Soren is nothing but feels

ShaRose49

And nice hair

Superjustinbros

yes the hair too

I just want to hug him.

mathtans

I want to see Soren do some of his music stuff.

ShaRose49

Same

Superjustinbros

Secodning the music stuff

ShaRose49

Also the hug

eleviken

i love drawing soren's hair!

it's my favorite

RebelVampire

im personally more interested in seeing kasen and art stuff. cause just cause she wants to go to art school doesnt necessarily mean shes good enough to get in.

which actually would be an ironic twist

Superjustinbros

That would be interesting

Also great to hear Eleviken!

I love drawing characters with fun/wild hair myself, it can be pretty fun sometimes, is a biiiit hard.(edited)

mathtans

That's true. Kasen's possibly my fave character, just because she's in a tight spot by virtue of her father, which she can't do anything about.

ShaRose49

But the pollution aspect was really intriguing to me. It’s a real problem in China. But I can relate a little because here in Canada there have been so many fires in the summer especially BC that the air is all smoky all the time and some people have respiratory issues. I could be wrong but I think some people died because of it or at least got sick. I wasn’t bothered by the air when I visited bc

mathtans

Oooh, I should be shipping Kasen and Elena.

ShaRose49

@eleviken Hi there, author!! I was hoping you’d be here

Superjustinbros

That sounds scary, ShaRose

ShaRose49

But I was surprised that the air in BC didn’t really bother me at all

It was a little. I hope next summer isn’t bad. I’m sure it was very scary and awful for the people in BC @Superjustinbros

Superjustinbros

yeah...

Hopefully it's not so bad next year

mathtans

Roommate ships are best ships. ^.^

ShaRose49

Yeah. The news said the pollution because of the smoke was as bad as the air quality in China this summer

Superjustinbros

...Jesus christ.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 4. Despite her generally good nature, Elena has her own sorts of troubles to deal with. Do you think Elena should have been captain of the fencing team as she believes she should have? Why or why not? Do you think Fenya views Elena with the same disdain Elena has for her, or might Fenya feel differently? Regardless, how might their rivalry affect their teamwork? Overall, do you think that Fenya and Elena might be able to patch things up and become friends? As shown recently, Elena also has to deal with her parents having died from contamina. Assuming she finds out, how might Valentin’s situation change her opinion about her parents’ work (if at all)? In general, how might Elena’s experiences at school change her as a person?

ShaRose49

I think Fenya might be just ignorant but I could be reme,Bering her wrong

RebelVampire

i really love kasen and the dad's dynamics as far as the future goes. cause as a child i def was kasen, wanting to pursue that creative dream. but as an older adult i actually get a lot more with the dad is coming from cause creative pursuits are a hard path. which is why im curious how talented kasen is in the first place. cause she might come to realize that even if she wants to art, she may just not have the talent for it

K.E. Karlsen

no i dont think she should have been captain of the fencing team.

ShaRose49

I liked fenya she was big and strong and had green hair

Superjustinbros

Green Hair is always good

K.E. Karlsen

the girl who won (apologies its been awhile since i read, i have been reading since its updates and havent had time for a reread and forgot her name ;;;) i think it was best she won, she clearly knew more what she was doing

mathtans

Oh yeah! I wanted to mention that was real clever, having Fenya and Elena meet early on, then have them become rivals later. Though I don't think Fenya really sees Elena as a rival or with disdain or anything, like just, there's this other girl who fences decently but doesn't watch where she's going, whatever.

ShaRose49

@K.E. Karlsen @Superjustinbros yup yup

K.E. Karlsen

oh is her name fenya?

RebelVampire

yeah i agree. elena did not deserve to be captain. especially cause she was a sore loser.

yes her name is fenya

ShaRose49

Yup

K.E. Karlsen

ok thats who im talking about sorry!! im bad at remembering names

RebelVampire

thats okay

no shame in getting help with names

mathtans

I'm also bad. It's why I have the cast page up in another window. (For a teacher, I'm soooo bad at names.)

Superjustinbros

I'm bad at names in general

ShaRose49

I forgot too the question helped me remember

RebelVampire

fenya is a passable offense anyway cause shes more a side chara than main cast. so her name isnt mentioned a whole ton compared to others

i kind of agree that i actually dont think fenya views elena as a rival at all. i kind of feel fenya is just like "oh yeah its that teammate i wonder why shes glaring at me how weird."

Superjustinbros

Perhaps

RebelVampire

and that any rivalry elena has just created in her own mind

cause the world revolves around her

Superjustinbros

Plot twist: it does

ShaRose49

Just what I was thinking

mathtans

She's also an immortal.

ShaRose49

I really want the story to show more of the streets on China, like I’d love for them to have a downtown scene, and I want to see more of the relationship between the brother and sister characters

I want to visit China someday

mathtans

Actually it's funny, when I first went to the comic I saw the latest update, with Elena talking about how they were going to get Soren's grades up, and I thought, huh, is she their mother or TA or something but why are they all laughing. Made more sense in context. All that to say, Elena does have leadership skills in terms of motivating people, but I'm not sure about delegation and such.

eleviken

hey yeah!

mathtans

It would be interesting to see more China.

eleviken

rebel - kasen's artsy side has yet to eb elaborated on

Superjustinbros

Yeah, do some more worldbuilding and more excuses for epic landscape shots (edited)

RebelVampire

id be interested in seeing more of china as well. though more to see how the world in general deals with the pollution. like i feel thered be other world things goes on besides the masks.

math- i do feel like elena has potential as a leader, but i also think she lacks the humility to do so. i think as she is right now shed be a self absorbed leader. so concerned with her own skills and showing off than helping anyone else on the team to get better

ShaRose49

Like Leonardo ughhh

Superjustinbros

And I just realized that's why everyone wears the masks on the main visual(edited)

ShaRose49

But she’s not all bad

Hooboy ya just noticed now?! Lol it’s alright

mathtans

Good point, humility's a problem.

RebelVampire

nah i dont think elena is all bad at all

i just dont think shes ready to be captain

mathtans

SJB: It's because it's Halloween.

RebelVampire

cause arrogance is a big thing to work through and elena isnt confronting her own flaw as of yet

ShaRose49

@RebelVampire wow you seem wise

I’m not being sarcastic sorry if that’s weird

Superjustinbros

lol

Guess I'll wear a "sick" mask on Halloween

ShaRose49

XD

RebelVampire

thank you i think XD idk if id label myself as wise, but i appreciate the sentiment

Superjustinbros

That'll scare the trick-or-treaters real good

RebelVampire

ya know the comic did give me halloween vibes from teh banner. so before i read it i thought it was gonna be some spooky halloween thing

ShaRose49

Yeah me too!

Superjustinbros

I did not think that at all, I jsut thought "why is everyone wearing masks"

ShaRose49

But I was pleasantly surprised. No offence but the other comics I tried were all too dark for me

mathtans

Huh. I didn't think about it at all tbh.

Just figured there'd be an explanation and there was.

RebelVampire

i was also guessing post apocalyptic so i was pleasantly surprised it wasnt that either

did not expect a coming of age story

ShaRose49

We got another wise person here

Haha I was kidding mostly I meant that @mathtans knew and we didn’t

Or well he guessed better

mathtans

Incidentally, any thoughts on the title? "Chasing Little Lights"? Like, I wonder if it's sort of metaphorical, like you need to chase after the people or subjects who bring light into your life... or if it's more about the idea of chasing grades and things, thinking they'll bring enlightenment or something.

ShaRose49

I think it’s a compelling drama I just hope it doesn’t get so sad it’s depressing

Maybe there are actually little lights that help stop pollution or something and that’s why they’re chasing them! CRAZY THEORY TIME

RebelVampire

i assumed it was metaphorical about chasing dreams or something

thats what val was talking about that elena didnt want to listen to

they separated the lights form the pollution

ShaRose49

I can’t remember that very well. What Lights?

Superjustinbros

All these wise people

mathtans

Oooh, didn't think of the pollution analogy.

ShaRose49

@Superjustinbros We a buncha sages we are

Superjustinbros

\o/

ShaRose49

I’m too into science fiction so my theory is probably too fun for this kind of story

Superjustinbros

Nothing like a tea party for all the Sages to gather

ShaRose49

Not that it sin’t fun

Superjustinbros

also Science Fiction is good

mathtans

Oh yeah, we haven't had enough crazy theories yet. So, Kasen is going to practice her art by drawing nude models of Elena, which is how the two of them end up dating.

ShaRose49

@Superjustinbros amen

mathtans

The modelling also helps with the fencing, in terms of seeing how Elena's weight is balanced.

ShaRose49

@mathtans I was thinking more about crazy theories about the pollution aspect I guess

RebelVampire

tbh i ship elena and fenya more

gotta have that slow burn rivalry turned to romance

Superjustinbros

we setting ships on sail already?

mathtans

Rebel: I am okay with that.

I still find Kasen precious though. Hope there's more of her. That was a cool image of her to start off Chapter 3.

Superjustinbros

Also before the comic tea party ends, I'd like to wish you luck with developing the story further, @eleviken. It's really developing well so far.

RebelVampire

they can bond when elena needs fencing help and asks for some private lessons

mathtans

Agreed.

About the developing that is, not the fencing. Though that'd be fun too.

RebelVampire

kasen is adorable though. i really like her hair in particular for some reason. its so fluffy and bouncy seeming

mathtans

"Don't fence me in."

ShaRose49

I don’t think this story is super romantic I’m not a huge romance person

@mathtans great pun

RebelVampire

oh its not. i will be surprised if theres romance at all. but shipping can be part of fun theory time

mathtans

True, I don't see the comic veering heavy into romance. (I just like adding yuri romance wherever I can.)

I also wonder if we'll see Soren's sister again. Like maybe one of the others will end up talking to her.

ShaRose49

I guess I like adding cartoony scifi wherever I can

Superjustinbros

No probs with that

ShaRose49

I loooove stories about siblings

mathtans

In fact maybe Soren and his sister is a parellel to the relationships between the Lins? Hmm.

ShaRose49

@Superjustinbros thanks I think you and I would get along fine XD scifi in me bloood

@mathtans oooh, I like this theory

eleviken

i am currently in class but i want to say thanks you all for coming!

Superjustinbros

You're welcome!

Glad to be here. ^^

ShaRose49

@eleviken thank you for coming and giving us something to talk about!

RebelVampire

i would like to see soren's sister again. cause theres gotta be a degree of tension there since soren can come off as the favorite since hes the one who gets to go to the prestigious academy

mathtans

Thanks for putting it out there, eleviken! (Also, maybe you shouldn't be messaging in class while the teacher is talking, the way Valentin got called out. )

I tease.

RebelVampire

thank you as well, eleviken~!

eleviken

i wil catch up later, sorry i couldnt participate!

mathtans

Rebel: Good point about that.

Superjustinbros

Have a good rest of the day/evening, Eleviken!

mathtans

I also wonder a bit why the headmaster's from Sweden, if they're in China. I wonder if that will be addressed.

Anyway, best with the comic!

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- THURSDAY BOOK CLUB END!

Sadly, this wraps up this week’s Thursday Book Club chat for now. Thank you so much to everyone for reading and joining us! We want to give a special thank you to Evelyn Shi, as well, for making Chasing Little Lights. If you liked the comic, make sure to support Evelyn Shi’s efforts however you’re able to~!

Read the Comic: http://www.cllcomic.com/

[kinetic-elaboration]

October 25: Conference 2

I definitely had a let-down feeling after the conference but I think I am feeling better now. Except that it doesn’t seem real, now, like something that really happened. I had a good time overall and I’m glad I went, and even though I was worried about making it through today, it was a lot easier than yesterday.

We had to drive all the way back, which was kind of weird--it’s that weird amount of distance that, and I realize I am not being very American right now, is I guess short enough to warrant not paying several hundred dollars for a hotel room, but is too big to really feel like it’s right to be commuting back and forth, especially since the conference atmosphere is so unusual. I suspect none of this is making sense. It’s just a strange thing to be going back and forth from is what I’m trying to say.

Anyway, we got there later than intended and so I was about two minutes late for the first session. Also my co-worker was going to a different first session, and hers was in a library that is, weirdly, like, off the hotel, and so she found the door right away and was like ‘peace out, bye,’ and I was like WAIT WHERE’S THE HOTEL? because like I don’t have a smart phone or a map so ???? Lol but it was fine. I just walked into a circle until I found it, and I was still almost on time. The session was on a public library turning themselves around from press disaster to model system, which actually was more relevant to me than perhaps you might guess because their advice re: not being a disaster was very general and adaptable. Also it made me feel good that there are still good faith people out there tbh because all of their advice really just boils down to don’t be a dick, behave reasonably with the people around you.

The next session I wanted to go to was in the same room, but I also needed caffeine, so I went across the way to the main ballroom and got some chai tea (not really my thing but I couldn’t find anything else caffeinated so it had to do) and also a really stale bagel. Then back for the next session, which was on diverse Virginia. It was mostly public library focused--what isn’t???--and I had to do some very quick translating of my own to figure out how I might apply some of this stuff to my library’s foreign born population, which is actually quite sizable, but not quite the same as the public library immigrant population. Still, I enjoyed it.

After that I had a very long lunch period, about two hours. My co-worker had met some people at the workshop she’d done in the morning and they invited me to lunch with them. I had a wonderful breakfast-type-dish (was it a sandwich? was it just a collection of random stuff in a box? not sure but it tasted good) from this soup-and-sandwich-type place; we ate in the weird little mall that connects to both the hotel and the library. The women were very nice and we got to share some of our experiences in our respective libraries and also in the earlier sessions we’d attended. (Later conversation turned to husbands and children and dogs, all of which are ??? topics for me but that’s okay.)

The other women were from quite far away in the state, so they left after lunch, while J and I wandered the mall a little; we picked up baked goods and I grabbed a fucking delicious pumpkin latte from a fancy coffee place. Then we went back to the hotel and looked at the gift baskets being raffled off. There were a couple that would have been perfect for our supervisor but unfortunately the drawing was after our planned departure time and in order to claim a prize you had to either be there yourself or use a proxy so that kind of killed the plan to win one for her. Which is a shame because I would have liked to see the look on her face if we’d shown up with one but oh well.

We separated after that, J to a session on creating a crafting program on a shoestring budget, and me to a session on research using newspapers. Mine was...okay. The first presenter wasn’t great. I feel bad saying that because I got what he was trying to do, but I felt like it could have been shorter and livelier. Like the idea was there but I could tell it wasn’t quite shaking out as intended. The second presenter was better, both in the sense that he was a somewhat more engaging speaker and also in the sense that he was actually showing us how to use the resources they were discussing, but by then there wasn’t that much time left. I will say that the Library of Virginia is doing some super nifty digitizing, including digitization that the Library of Congress isn’t doing (”we’re not really supposed to be prioritizing this but what are they going to do, throw me in library jail?” = one of the funniest sentences I heard over the course of the two days) (right up there with “I have a tattoo of Peter Rabbit, I promise you I am not intimidating?). They have Civilian Conservation Corps newspapers, which is apparently a thing, and also some old papers run by African-Americans, and now they’re trying to find and digitize antebellum newspapers as well, which are apparently pretty rare online. And they’re collecting old fugitive slave ads, which excites me as someone who’s tried, however briefly, to research specific slaves and found it very difficult--like for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating to find oneself in this research desert. And it was just an academic project for me, not a personal thing, or a genealogy thing, where I’m sure the frustration must be more acute and more painful.

There was only one more session after that. J and I met up by accident in the restrooms and then realized we were both going to it. It was on making one’s library affirming for trans and non-binary people. The presentation was really good, really well done; basically the presenters explained what they’d done in their library, following the recommendations of committee on inclusivity on which they’d all served, and then we did short little conversations with our neighbors on how these issues might play out in our libraries. My situation is, again, weird in that my library is not autonomous, and a lot of policies really have to come from the law school or even university level, but I had a few things to share, and it was interesting hearing about my partner’s experiences trying to do what she could in a library where the people at the top of the hierarchy were somewhere between neutral and cool on even having inclusivity as a goal.

It was still pretty early at this point but the conference was basically wrapping up. We went across the street to check out a nifty little bookstore. I picked up a book for my mom that she hopefully does not already have and a book for my dad that he will hopefully like. Because this town is a port, it has a lot of boat-related stuff and it just seemed a shame not to get something for my dad at such a place. But it was also had to tell what books would most interest him. For example, there was one big one that looked like it was full of nice pictures--but it was also super expensive and shrink wrapped and I’m not dropping that kind of money on something that I can’t look inside, sorry. Another one was an autobiographical tale of a man building a wooden boat himself, which I was very close to getting, but I couldn’t tell if it was mostly about the building or mostly about, idk, a spiritual journey, so I chickened out on it and got one one the history of seafaring instead.

The drive back was much easier than yesterday in part because we didn’t miss an exit or get lost and in part because I wasn’t struggling to stay awake. We ended up talking pretty much the whole way back, and I got home at about 4:30. I wasn’t really that tired physically but my brain was like Nope to the possibility of doing anything, so I took a nap to try to reset.

I woke up feeling kind of bummed and lost, but dinner and catching up on The Good Place helped. I’ve also been working more on my Halloween fics. The third one is officially done in draft form and I have a tentative moodboard for the second.

I want to go the farmer’s market tomorrow and get apples for this apple crisp I have some weird idea I’m going to make. And then... idk... might walk around, might try to call R. Gonna try to write in the afternoon/evening. Just--Halloween!!!!! Yeah! Time to get spooky!!

[nemolian]

Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote film finally hits the big screen after 25 years

Enlarge /

Jonathan Pryce stars as an aging Spanish cobbler who becomes convinced he is Don Quixote in Terry Gilliam's film,

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

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It's been 25 years in the making, but The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, director Terry Gilliam's tribute to the classic Spanish novel, has finally hit the silver screen. The project has foundered and been revived so many times, it became a poster child for Hollywood's notorious development hell, with a reputation of being cursed. But Gilliam persevered, and while the finished product isn't exactly a masterpiece, it definitely reflects the singular vision of one of our most original filmmakers.

(Mild spoilers for the film and Miguel de Cervantes' 17th-century novel below.)

Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote is inarguably one of the most influential works of Spanish literature. The book is written in the picaresque tradition, which means it's more a series of loosely connected episodes than a plot. It follows the adventures of a nobleman (hidalgo) named Alonso Quixano who has read far too many chivalric romances and becomes convinced he is a knight errant. With his trusty peasant sidekick, Sancho Panza, he embarks on a series of random tragicomic adventures, with the Don's hot temper frequently getting them into scraps. (Sancho usually gets the worst of the beatings and humiliations.) Don Quixote is the archetype of the delusional dreamer, tilting at windmills and believing them to be giants, preferring his fantasy to mundane reality.

Everything went almost comically wrong from the start.

Gilliam came up with the idea for his Don Quixote film back in 1989 when he read Cervantes' novel, but he didn't secure funding until 1998. Johnny Depp signed on to play the role of Toby Grisoni, while his then-partner Vanessa Paradis would be the female lead. Shooting commenced in 2000 in Navarre, Spain. But everything went almost comically wrong from the start. There were conflicts with the various actors' schedules, making it difficult to get everyone on set at the same time. The production site was near a NATO military base, and F-16 fighter jets flew overhead the entire first day of shooting, making it necessary to dub those scenes in post-production. A flash flood ruined the second day of filming by damaging equipment that was not covered by the insurance policy. The flood also caused continuity problems, since the colors of the terrain had noticeably changed.

Finally, on the fifth day, the film's star, the late Jean Rochefort, was clearly in pain during the scenes on horseback, despite being an experienced horseman. He turned out to have prostate problems and a double herniated disc, and while Gilliam tried to shoot around Rochefort's scenes, it soon became clear the ailing actor could not return to the set. The production was officially cancelled in November 2000.

The shoot did produce a critically acclaimed documentary film, Lost in La Mancha (2002), detailing the production's various woes. (It was originally intended to be an accompanying "making-of" special feature. A second follow-up documentary is in the works, titled He Dreamed of Giants.) In it, cinematographer Nicola Pecorini claims that "never in 22 years of being in this business have I seen such a sum of bad luck."

In the years since, Gilliam kept trying to revive the project with a constantly shifting cast and multiple rewrites of the script. Finally, he succeeded in getting funding and completing The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, only to have its release delayed by legal disputes involving one of the earlier producers. The film ultimately debuted at Cannes last year, although it was ineligible for the top prize because of its ongoing legal woes.

They might be giants

Don Quixote tilting at a windmill.

YouTube/ONE Media

It gets the better of him.

YouTube/ONE Media

"Cut!" Adam Driver plays Toby Grisoni, an auteur advertising executive who comes to Spain to shoot a commercial.

YouTube/ONE Media

"I am Don Quixote!" The beginning of a years-long delusion.

YouTube/ONE Media

A delusional Javier mistakes Toby for Sancho Panza.

YouTube/ONE Media

Javier/the Don ridicules the notion that his lowly Sancho can read.

YouTube/ONE Media

A joust! Why not?

YouTube/ONE Media

Toby and Javier/the Don run into Angelica (Joana Ribeiro), whom Toby first met while making his student film.

YouTube/ONE Media

Thou shalt not covet thy boss's wife, Toby: Olga Kurylenko plays the alluring Jacqui.

YouTube/ONE Media

An elaborate gala designed to humiliate the delusional Javier.

YouTube/ONE Media

Oligarch Alexei Miiskin (Jordi Molla) uses and abuses Angelica.

YouTube/ONE Media

A steamy tango as Toby and Angelica rekindle their spark.

YouTube/ONE Media

You see windmills, but Don Quixote sees giants.

YouTube/ONE Media

Don Quixote cannot die; he will ride forever with his trusty companion, Sancho Panza.

YouTube/ONE Media

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote features Jonathan Pryce as Javier, an old cobbler in a small Spanish village. He becomes convinced he really is Don Quixote after a visiting college student named Toby Grisoni (Adam Driver) casts him in a student film about the legendary hidalgo. Ten years later, Toby is a hotshot advertising executive who returns to Spain to shoot a Quixote-themed commercial. He finds Javier still so caught up in his delusion that Javier mistakes Toby for his loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza. Together, they set off on a series of increasingly wild and incoherent misadventures. And like Cervantes' Sancho, Toby often bears the brunt of the consequences.

The cast is fantastic, especially Pryce and Driver. The dialogue is sharp and witty, and Gilliam remains a master at skirting the fine line between comedy and tragedy—much like Cervantes himself. The first half of the film works really well, driving home the unintended consequences that a naive Toby's student film wrought on the people of that small Spanish village. ("I'm incorporating the idea of the damage that films do to people, so it's become a bit more autobiographical," Gilliam told the BBC last year.)

This may be one of those visionary films that will play better with age.

Unfortunately, the plot, such as it is, unravels into delirious chaos during the second half. Toby even breaks the fourth wall at one point to wonder aloud, "There's a plot?" Certainly the sumptuous visuals and dazzling dream-like sequences, blurring the line between what's really happening and what's just in Toby's head, reflect Gilliam's unique sensibility. It's the same sensibility that produced Gilliam's incomparable dystopian satire, Brazil (1985), which kept the director's wilder instincts well-constrained and was all the better for it. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote might have benefited from a few more constraints. But given the sheer effort of will it took just to make the film, I'm inclined to forgive its chaotic excesses. It helps to be familiar with the source material, since the film shares the same meandering episodic structure and weaves in plenty of nods to Cervantes' novel.

"The problem is that people have very high expectations," Gilliam told the BBC in May 2017. "And a lot of people say I'm a fool to make the film, and that it would have been better to let people imagine how great it would have been rather than making it a reality and disappointing them. People love Roman ruins because they're not complete and you can imagine them. So I may be making a great mistake. Maybe the film would be better as a fantasy."

He has a point. Personally, I'm glad Gilliam finally finished his film, the way he always wanted, with all its messy imperfections. Whether it connects with audiences remains to be seen. This may be one of those visionary films that will play better with age. Its spirit is true to the picaresque tradition, and the Man of La Mancha would approve, I think. Gilliam has been tilting at this particular windmill for 25 years, and it's gratifying to see him finally conquer the giant.

Trailer for Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

via:Ars Technica, April 14, 2019 at 09:01AM

[blogcompetnetall]

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? http://www.nature-business.com/nature-where-in-the-world-is-denmarks-2-billion/

Nature

Image

CreditCreditQuickhoney

As large as it is, the building would be easy to miss. Plain, gray and near a McDonald’s, it’s part of a generic office complex surrounded by a vast parking lot in a suburb of Copenhagen. “Danish Tax Agency” is stenciled in both English and Danish on a glass front door.

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history. For three years, starting in 2012, so much money gushed from an office here that it was as though the state had sprung a gigantic leak.

Prosecutors in Copenhagen say it was an elaborate ruse, one that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion — a spectacular sum for Denmark, the equivalent of a $110 billion loss in the far larger American economy.

The country had fallen victim to a dubious financial maneuver at the intersection of the tax system and capital markets, a dizzyingly complex transaction known as a “cum-ex” trade.

The trade is focused on one of the dullest, most overlooked acts in any financial system — the request for refunds on taxes withheld on dividends. Under Danish law, the government automatically collects taxes on dividends paid out by companies to their shareholders. If the shareholders live in the United States, they are eligible for a refund on some or all of those taxes.

A tiny department in SKAT, run by one man, approved thousands of applications for refunds. Most of the applications were filed by self-directed pension plans in the United States, a type of retirement account for individuals.

But experts and lawyers familiar with the scheme say those people were fronts for cum-ex trades. Deploying a kind of financial sleight of hand, the trades made it appear as if the pension plans had purchased shares of Danish companies and paid taxes on the dividends. Neither was true.

To the Danes, it was a fraud, one executed and conceived by Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier. With an assist from employees, he found the Americans, helped facilitate the applications and ended up with much of the money.

Mr. Shah denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole. He now lives in Dubai, where he owns a $1.3 million yacht and a 10,000-square-foot villa with access to the beach. He has become Denmark’s national villain.

“You have this guy, living off fraud, it’s infuriating,” said Joachim B. Olsen, a member of the Danish Parliament and chairman of its Finance Committee. “The expectation of the Danish people is that we will go after him, no matter the cost.”

Since May, the cost has included hiring an American law firm to sue 277 of the self-directed pension plans and their owners who applied for all those tax refunds. But the true toll of this scandal can’t be measured in kroner. It has undermined trust in Danish politics and it has severely dented the country’s self-image as a bastion of honest, efficient government. An unfolding $230 billion money-laundering fiasco at Danske Bank, the country’s largest lender, has only deepened the gloom.

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Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier, who Danish authorities say conceived and executed the scheme in Denmark. He denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole.CreditStuart Williamson

What has made the dividend debacle even more painful is that many here believe it was an inside job. The lone employee approving those tax refunds was a lifelong civil servant named Sven Nielsen. After a lengthy investigation, the police learned that Mr. Nielsen had spent a few boozy and convivial evenings with an employee of Mr. Shah’s, although they found no evidence that he had colluded or profited in any way.

Instead, they discovered evidence that years ago, Mr. Nielsen had helped an old friend bilk SKAT in a relatively small scam. Through his lawyer, Mr. Nielsen declined to comment — from prison, where he is now serving a six-year sentence for criminal fraud in that case.

So, Danes are left with a mystery that belongs in a Nordic noir, one with elements of farce and filled with enraging twists. Is Mr. Nielsen a co-conspirator, or a dupe? Is he a criminal or a man so flattered by attention that his critical faculties abandoned him?

The other mystery concerns Mr. Shah, who is now rebranding himself as a philanthropist, raising money for autism research by promoting concerts in Dubai with performers like Flo Rida and Lenny Kravitz. He has been formally termed a suspect by Danish authorities, but to the collective amazement of the Danes no criminal charges have been filed against him.

A spokesman for the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime would not say why. Instead, with impeccable Scandinavian restraint he said only that the case involves people “who seem to have used a very crafty setup.”

Finding His Calling

Mr. Shah declined to be interviewed for this article. To offer his version of events, he provided through his publicist a 14-page handwritten letter that outlined his career. And for added personal details, there is a series of autobiographical videos that he posted two years ago on YouTube, titled “I Am Sanjay Shah.”

In each, he sits in a spacious living room in a house in Dubai and muses about his life and business philosophy, omitting any hint of controversy. He comes across as an upbeat, middle-aged expat with an abiding fondness for music. After a midlife crisis, he founded Autism Rocks and became a part-time concert promoter, at one point booking his personal favorite, Prince. Mr. Shah also has a taste for the extravagant. In one video, he said that sports cars parked outside the office at Merrill Lynch, where he worked early on, inspired him to consider a new career.

“I said to my boss, ‘Who drives these cars?’” he recalled in the video. “And he said the traders do on the fifth floor. So then I decided that I wanted to be one of those people.”

Mr. Shah was raised in London by parents of Indian ancestry who had immigrated from Kenya. He dropped out of college in 1992, citing a lack of motivation, and worked at a number of large financial firms. In 2007, he landed a job at the London office of Rabobank, a Dutch company, on the dividend arbitrage desk.

There he learned about cum-ex trades. The term is Latin for “with-without” and refers to the status of shares before and after a dividend is issued. Cum-ex trades would quickly become the focus of Mr. Shah’s professional life.

Around the time of the global financial crisis, Rabobank closed its dividend arbitrage desk. While former colleagues scrambled to look for careers in other fields, Mr. Shah boldly opened his own firm, Solo Capital, with an office of eight employees. At the same time, he did something unusual for a man starting a business in London. He and his family moved to Dubai, “mainly for the weather and the lifestyle,” he explained in a video.

As economies around the globe reeled, Mr. Shah found himself in one of the few growth segments in banking. Cum-ex trades are made possible by tax treaties between countries, agreements that are intended to prevent double taxation. Denmark has such a treaty with the United States.

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This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What government regulators throughout Europe failed to foresee was that foreign dividend tax refunds could yield immense and dubious profits. After the financial meltdown, dozens of German banks desperate for a new source of profits eagerly facilitated cum-ex trades, fueled by capital from all over the world.

Traders made off with more than $11 billion, according to officials there. Cum-ex would reap fortunes from the governments in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, too.

It took years for the German authorities, who banned the practice in 2012, to figure out what had hit them. The first cum-ex indictments in the country were filed in May.

“It turned out to be one of the biggest financial scandals that Europe has ever seen,” said Bastian Finkel, a tax lawyer at BLD, a law firm in Cologne, “and all the more painful because it’s public money.”

In the wake of their losses, the authorities in Germany didn’t bother to alert other countries, and speculators moved elsewhere. The biggest target, it turned out, was Denmark.

Under the terms of an American-Danish tax agreement, Americans who own shares in, for instance, Carlsberg can get a full or partial refund on the 27 percent withheld for tax on dividends. Retirement accounts get the best deal of all. They get all 27 percent of the tax back.

To scale up his cum-ex trade, Mr. Shah needed individuals in the United States with self-directed pension plans, a type of retirement account that allows owners to invest in a wide range of financial instruments. By 2012, he had found more than a dozen of them — which turned out to be plenty.

A Man With 44 Pension Plans

The names of these Americans who owned the self-directed pension plans became public this summer, when Danish authorities sued them, hoping to recover lost funds. Exactly how these people linked up with Solo Capital is unknown. Mr. Shah’s publicist would say only that they came via wealth management advisory firms.

There are demographic patterns. Most live on the East Coast, with clusters in New York, New Jersey and Florida. At least five different plans used the same mailing address, 425 West 23rd Street, Apartment 7B, New York, N.Y. The current tenant there had never heard of the Danish lawsuits, but said he had received mail for one of the defendants, Gavin Crescenzo, a previous occupant.

Nearly all the defendants have jobs in finance, though one, Michael Ben-Jacob, is a partner at a prestigious law firm, Arnold & Porter. He declined to discuss the case and a spokeswoman at the firm said it did not comment on litigation in progress.

Many people have their names attached to dozens of pension plans, which is why there are 277 suits and roughly 17 defendants. A 30-year-old named Roger Lehman, for instance, opened 44 plans in a handful of states, with names such as the Ludlow Holdings 401K Plan and the Hotel Fromance Pension Plan.

Mr. Shah said through his spokesman that Solo Capital worked with 200 of these pension plans. He declined to identify which ones.

Image

John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases — then suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

None of the defendants responded to requests for comment. In July, though, an email response came instead, unbidden, from a law firm in Luxembourg called Schaffelhuber Müller & Kollegen. A partner there named Helene Schwiering stated that her clients, whom she did not name, would appreciate it “if you henceforth refrain from attempting to contact them.”

On paper, the owners of the plans pocketed most of SKAT’s $2 billion. In reality, these people probably wound up with little or none of the money.

That, at least, is the impression of John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases, then he suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.

The withdrawal filings were revealing. They stated that Mr. Hanamirian was not paid by defendants named in the lawsuits. Rather, his bills were paid by what he described only as a “Luxembourg law firm.” And that law firm would not provide needed files about his defendants, “despite repeated requests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Hanamirian elaborated. The firm was the one in Luxembourg that sent that out-of-the-blue email asking that defendants in the cases be left alone.

“I needed documents surrounding their involvement, whatever that is — bank statements, investment statements, communications,” Mr. Hanamirian said. “The firm wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We’ll meet you in advance, the day of the proceedings.’ I said that’s unacceptable.”

Before exiting the cases, Mr. Hanamirian spoke to a handful of clients who told him that money went in and then was immediately moved out of their accounts. Whether the defendants earned a fee of some kind is unknown to Mr. Hanamirian, as is the ultimate destination of the funds.

“I don’t want any of this to reflect on my former clients,” he said. “But the whole thing was definitely odd.”

$3 Million, Every Hour

In 2013, all that stood between Solo Capital and Denmark’s treasury was the bespectacled, gray-haired veteran of SKAT, Sven Nielsen. After two colleagues retired, he was the last person in the Dividend Department. Complicating matters, he lacked the tools to perform the most basic due diligence when reviewing refund applications.

The agency was in the midst of a yearslong and often disastrous overhaul, meant to digitize the system and reduce head count. The priority was helping Danish taxpayers, not foreign shareholders. Mr. Nielsen didn’t even have a database to check whether an individual pension plan actually owned the shares it claimed, said Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013.

“Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”

There was another problem that nobody knew about then: Mr. Nielsen could be persuaded to break the law. When the Danish police searched his home after the Solo Capital revelations, they found a letter showing that in 2007, he helped an old friend illegally secure $5.7 million from SKAT. (The two men knew each other from the days when Mr. Nielsen moonlighted with a job delivering newspapers.) Last December, prosecutors convicted Mr. Nielsen of fraud for taking a kickback, the equivalent of $315,000, for his efforts.

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A restaurant in downtown Copenhagen where Mr. Nielsen was said to have been taken.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

Defenders of Mr. Nielsen maintain that he is a fundamentally decent guy who made a serious mistake under the suasion of a pal. True or not, Mr. Nielsen had a new pal in 2014, just as the SKAT payouts soared.

His name was Camilo Vargas. He worked in London at one of a small number of “payment agents,” niche companies that handle the array of paperwork submitted to foreign tax authorities for refunds. Mr. Vargas had just founded his own payment agent firm, which he called Syntax GIS. Soon after Syntax began operations, it started working with Sanjay Shah, who eventually bought the company.

During the first of several trips to Copenhagen, Mr. Vargas sought out Mr. Nielsen, asking for guidance on how to fill out Danish tax refund applications. What is known about those meetings comes from the one interview Mr. Nielsen has ever given, in a 2016 documentary that ran on DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC. Mr. Nielsen appeared to be flattered by the attention and happy to provide advice.

He just as gladly accepted invitations to dinner. Mr. Nielsen described in the interview a lively evening drinking beer with Mr. Vargas in a popular downtown area in Copenhagen.

“We walked down Stroget,” he said, referring to a famous pedestrian street, “and made several pit stops.”

The friendship was fantastically lucrative. In 2014, more than $590 million was paid on 1,500 refund applications. Danish authorities believe most of them came from Solo Capital clients. In the first seven months of 2015, the figures soared to roughly $1.2 billion, paid to more than 2,500 applications — about 16 applications every working day.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Nielsen that Camilo Vargas was playing him.

“At no point did I get the impression that he wanted to trick me or cheat in any way,” Mr. Nielsen said in the documentary, sounding bereft. “But that’s what it could appear like today.”

Mr. Vargas could not be located for comment. The producers at DR hired a researcher to find him, to no avail.

In the summer of 2015, the pace of applications made one final surge. In July alone, $500 million in refunds was disbursed — about $25 million per working day, $3 million every hour.

Mr. Shah may have had a hunch that the Danish tax refund machine was about to stop working. In May 2015, he met in London with his then-new compliance officer at Solo Capital, Navin Khokhrai. As Mr. Shah put it in the handwritten letter provided by his publicist, Mr. Khokhrai expressed profound reservations about Solo Capital’s business, telling his boss that he was unsure “whether the company was processing the trades correctly.” Mr. Shah assured him that he’d obtained all necessary legal clearances.

Mr. Khokhrai was apparently not convinced. He resigned soon after and Mr. Shah stated in the same handwritten letter that his former employee “submitted a whistle-blower letter to HMRC” — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — “alleging that Solo had created fictitious client accounts and trading records in order to defraud the tax authorities in Denmark and Belgium.”

In August 2015, the dividends stopped flowing out of SKAT, though not because of sirens set off by anyone inside the agency. Rather, it took a tip from the British government to end the scheme, several Danish politicians said. The London offices of Solo Capital were later raided by Britain’s National Crime Agency and by July 2016 Solo Capital closed.

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Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013. “Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

At the time, Mr. Shah said he had done nothing improper. “Had they accused a large bank like Goldman Sachs the bank would have kicked back with a large team of lawyers,” he told Borsen, a Danish newspaper. “It’s easier to target a single individual.”

‘This Was Fraud’

Danish authorities have been trying to unravel Mr. Shah’s handiwork for over three years. Much of his modus operandi was revealed, experts believe, in 2017 when police in Germany, who were acting at the behest of the Danes, used a search warrant to sift through the records of North Channel Bank, a small bank in Mainz, a city outside Frankfurt. A team of 60 investigators found that the bank was used by 27 of the American pension plans, which were ultimately paid a total of about $168 million by SKAT.

What investigators found is that the accounts didn’t actually own any shares of Danish companies, said Prof. Christoph Spengel, who served as an adviser to Germany’s Parliament during an inquiry into the questionable trades. He studied the results of the North Channel investigation, issued in a report by a German district attorney. He said that the 27 plans primarily traded with one another. One would place an order to short a chunk of shares of Danish stock — essentially, a promise to buy the shares once they dipped below a certain price.

Soon after, an order was placed by another of the 27 plans to buy the order for the shorted shares. That open buy order — essentially, a promise to purchase shares that the other plan still didn’t own — was proof enough for SKAT to approve a refund. Once the refund was issued, the buy order was canceled.

“This wasn’t a transaction, this wasn’t tax planning,” Professor Spengel said. “This was fraud.”

A spokeswoman for North Channel said the bank was cooperating with the authorities and had no comment.

After funds were wired to North Bank, Professor Spengel said, they were shunted to two banks, first in London, then another in Germany. Finally, he said, they were sent to accounts controlled by Mr. Shah and his wife, Usha.

Jack Irvine, Mr. Shah’s spokesman, said none of this was true.

“Neither Solo nor Sanjay have had anything to do with North Channel Bank,” he wrote in an email, “so there appears to be confusion, which is not unusual in this case.”

There has been outrage in Denmark over the SKAT scandal but so far the repercussions have been surprisingly limited. No ministers have been fired. The director of SKAT was laid off in August 2016, though Mr. Shah’s machinations were among several causes. A new investigation into the cum-ex disaster was ordered by the justice minister in February, which could last years. For now, politicians here seem to emphasize pragmatism over finger-pointing.

“In the past, governments have fallen because of investigations like this,” said Jesper Petersen, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party. “But we have yet to find any minister who saw evidence of this problem and ignored it.”

Sanjay Shah is preoccupied with his own troubles. In mid-September, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against Solo Capital and a company it owned, Elysium Global, in a case filed by SKAT alleging fraud. Mr. Shah’s spokesman said his client didn’t respond to the lawsuit because both companies are now controlled by liquidators.

He also said that at the prodding of Danish officials, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates have all frozen, though not confiscated, $660 million in assets belonging to Mr. Shah. The financial pinch is enough that Mr. Shah has been forced to put his house up for sale, the publicist added. Out of caution, the publicist said, Mr. Shah does not travel.

Fears of arrest and extradition are justified, said Henning Sorensen, an associate law professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

“Shah is free as long as he stays in Dubai,” he said. “He is like a bird living in a golden cage.”

Alain Delaquérière and Martin Selsoe Sorensen contributed reporting.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/business/denmark-skat-tax-scandal.html |

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?, in 2018-10-05 17:45:18

[blogwonderwebsites]

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? http://www.nature-business.com/nature-where-in-the-world-is-denmarks-2-billion/

Nature

Image

CreditCreditQuickhoney

As large as it is, the building would be easy to miss. Plain, gray and near a McDonald’s, it’s part of a generic office complex surrounded by a vast parking lot in a suburb of Copenhagen. “Danish Tax Agency” is stenciled in both English and Danish on a glass front door.

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history. For three years, starting in 2012, so much money gushed from an office here that it was as though the state had sprung a gigantic leak.

Prosecutors in Copenhagen say it was an elaborate ruse, one that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion — a spectacular sum for Denmark, the equivalent of a $110 billion loss in the far larger American economy.

The country had fallen victim to a dubious financial maneuver at the intersection of the tax system and capital markets, a dizzyingly complex transaction known as a “cum-ex” trade.

The trade is focused on one of the dullest, most overlooked acts in any financial system — the request for refunds on taxes withheld on dividends. Under Danish law, the government automatically collects taxes on dividends paid out by companies to their shareholders. If the shareholders live in the United States, they are eligible for a refund on some or all of those taxes.

A tiny department in SKAT, run by one man, approved thousands of applications for refunds. Most of the applications were filed by self-directed pension plans in the United States, a type of retirement account for individuals.

But experts and lawyers familiar with the scheme say those people were fronts for cum-ex trades. Deploying a kind of financial sleight of hand, the trades made it appear as if the pension plans had purchased shares of Danish companies and paid taxes on the dividends. Neither was true.

To the Danes, it was a fraud, one executed and conceived by Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier. With an assist from employees, he found the Americans, helped facilitate the applications and ended up with much of the money.

Mr. Shah denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole. He now lives in Dubai, where he owns a $1.3 million yacht and a 10,000-square-foot villa with access to the beach. He has become Denmark’s national villain.

“You have this guy, living off fraud, it’s infuriating,” said Joachim B. Olsen, a member of the Danish Parliament and chairman of its Finance Committee. “The expectation of the Danish people is that we will go after him, no matter the cost.”

Since May, the cost has included hiring an American law firm to sue 277 of the self-directed pension plans and their owners who applied for all those tax refunds. But the true toll of this scandal can’t be measured in kroner. It has undermined trust in Danish politics and it has severely dented the country’s self-image as a bastion of honest, efficient government. An unfolding $230 billion money-laundering fiasco at Danske Bank, the country’s largest lender, has only deepened the gloom.

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Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier, who Danish authorities say conceived and executed the scheme in Denmark. He denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole.CreditStuart Williamson

What has made the dividend debacle even more painful is that many here believe it was an inside job. The lone employee approving those tax refunds was a lifelong civil servant named Sven Nielsen. After a lengthy investigation, the police learned that Mr. Nielsen had spent a few boozy and convivial evenings with an employee of Mr. Shah’s, although they found no evidence that he had colluded or profited in any way.

Instead, they discovered evidence that years ago, Mr. Nielsen had helped an old friend bilk SKAT in a relatively small scam. Through his lawyer, Mr. Nielsen declined to comment — from prison, where he is now serving a six-year sentence for criminal fraud in that case.

So, Danes are left with a mystery that belongs in a Nordic noir, one with elements of farce and filled with enraging twists. Is Mr. Nielsen a co-conspirator, or a dupe? Is he a criminal or a man so flattered by attention that his critical faculties abandoned him?

The other mystery concerns Mr. Shah, who is now rebranding himself as a philanthropist, raising money for autism research by promoting concerts in Dubai with performers like Flo Rida and Lenny Kravitz. He has been formally termed a suspect by Danish authorities, but to the collective amazement of the Danes no criminal charges have been filed against him.

A spokesman for the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime would not say why. Instead, with impeccable Scandinavian restraint he said only that the case involves people “who seem to have used a very crafty setup.”

Finding His Calling

Mr. Shah declined to be interviewed for this article. To offer his version of events, he provided through his publicist a 14-page handwritten letter that outlined his career. And for added personal details, there is a series of autobiographical videos that he posted two years ago on YouTube, titled “I Am Sanjay Shah.”

In each, he sits in a spacious living room in a house in Dubai and muses about his life and business philosophy, omitting any hint of controversy. He comes across as an upbeat, middle-aged expat with an abiding fondness for music. After a midlife crisis, he founded Autism Rocks and became a part-time concert promoter, at one point booking his personal favorite, Prince. Mr. Shah also has a taste for the extravagant. In one video, he said that sports cars parked outside the office at Merrill Lynch, where he worked early on, inspired him to consider a new career.

“I said to my boss, ‘Who drives these cars?’” he recalled in the video. “And he said the traders do on the fifth floor. So then I decided that I wanted to be one of those people.”

Mr. Shah was raised in London by parents of Indian ancestry who had immigrated from Kenya. He dropped out of college in 1992, citing a lack of motivation, and worked at a number of large financial firms. In 2007, he landed a job at the London office of Rabobank, a Dutch company, on the dividend arbitrage desk.

There he learned about cum-ex trades. The term is Latin for “with-without” and refers to the status of shares before and after a dividend is issued. Cum-ex trades would quickly become the focus of Mr. Shah’s professional life.

Around the time of the global financial crisis, Rabobank closed its dividend arbitrage desk. While former colleagues scrambled to look for careers in other fields, Mr. Shah boldly opened his own firm, Solo Capital, with an office of eight employees. At the same time, he did something unusual for a man starting a business in London. He and his family moved to Dubai, “mainly for the weather and the lifestyle,” he explained in a video.

As economies around the globe reeled, Mr. Shah found himself in one of the few growth segments in banking. Cum-ex trades are made possible by tax treaties between countries, agreements that are intended to prevent double taxation. Denmark has such a treaty with the United States.

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This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What government regulators throughout Europe failed to foresee was that foreign dividend tax refunds could yield immense and dubious profits. After the financial meltdown, dozens of German banks desperate for a new source of profits eagerly facilitated cum-ex trades, fueled by capital from all over the world.

Traders made off with more than $11 billion, according to officials there. Cum-ex would reap fortunes from the governments in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, too.

It took years for the German authorities, who banned the practice in 2012, to figure out what had hit them. The first cum-ex indictments in the country were filed in May.

“It turned out to be one of the biggest financial scandals that Europe has ever seen,” said Bastian Finkel, a tax lawyer at BLD, a law firm in Cologne, “and all the more painful because it’s public money.”

In the wake of their losses, the authorities in Germany didn’t bother to alert other countries, and speculators moved elsewhere. The biggest target, it turned out, was Denmark.

Under the terms of an American-Danish tax agreement, Americans who own shares in, for instance, Carlsberg can get a full or partial refund on the 27 percent withheld for tax on dividends. Retirement accounts get the best deal of all. They get all 27 percent of the tax back.

To scale up his cum-ex trade, Mr. Shah needed individuals in the United States with self-directed pension plans, a type of retirement account that allows owners to invest in a wide range of financial instruments. By 2012, he had found more than a dozen of them — which turned out to be plenty.

A Man With 44 Pension Plans

The names of these Americans who owned the self-directed pension plans became public this summer, when Danish authorities sued them, hoping to recover lost funds. Exactly how these people linked up with Solo Capital is unknown. Mr. Shah’s publicist would say only that they came via wealth management advisory firms.

There are demographic patterns. Most live on the East Coast, with clusters in New York, New Jersey and Florida. At least five different plans used the same mailing address, 425 West 23rd Street, Apartment 7B, New York, N.Y. The current tenant there had never heard of the Danish lawsuits, but said he had received mail for one of the defendants, Gavin Crescenzo, a previous occupant.

Nearly all the defendants have jobs in finance, though one, Michael Ben-Jacob, is a partner at a prestigious law firm, Arnold & Porter. He declined to discuss the case and a spokeswoman at the firm said it did not comment on litigation in progress.

Many people have their names attached to dozens of pension plans, which is why there are 277 suits and roughly 17 defendants. A 30-year-old named Roger Lehman, for instance, opened 44 plans in a handful of states, with names such as the Ludlow Holdings 401K Plan and the Hotel Fromance Pension Plan.

Mr. Shah said through his spokesman that Solo Capital worked with 200 of these pension plans. He declined to identify which ones.

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John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases — then suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

None of the defendants responded to requests for comment. In July, though, an email response came instead, unbidden, from a law firm in Luxembourg called Schaffelhuber Müller & Kollegen. A partner there named Helene Schwiering stated that her clients, whom she did not name, would appreciate it “if you henceforth refrain from attempting to contact them.”

On paper, the owners of the plans pocketed most of SKAT’s $2 billion. In reality, these people probably wound up with little or none of the money.

That, at least, is the impression of John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases, then he suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.

The withdrawal filings were revealing. They stated that Mr. Hanamirian was not paid by defendants named in the lawsuits. Rather, his bills were paid by what he described only as a “Luxembourg law firm.” And that law firm would not provide needed files about his defendants, “despite repeated requests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Hanamirian elaborated. The firm was the one in Luxembourg that sent that out-of-the-blue email asking that defendants in the cases be left alone.

“I needed documents surrounding their involvement, whatever that is — bank statements, investment statements, communications,” Mr. Hanamirian said. “The firm wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We’ll meet you in advance, the day of the proceedings.’ I said that’s unacceptable.”

Before exiting the cases, Mr. Hanamirian spoke to a handful of clients who told him that money went in and then was immediately moved out of their accounts. Whether the defendants earned a fee of some kind is unknown to Mr. Hanamirian, as is the ultimate destination of the funds.

“I don’t want any of this to reflect on my former clients,” he said. “But the whole thing was definitely odd.”

$3 Million, Every Hour

In 2013, all that stood between Solo Capital and Denmark’s treasury was the bespectacled, gray-haired veteran of SKAT, Sven Nielsen. After two colleagues retired, he was the last person in the Dividend Department. Complicating matters, he lacked the tools to perform the most basic due diligence when reviewing refund applications.

The agency was in the midst of a yearslong and often disastrous overhaul, meant to digitize the system and reduce head count. The priority was helping Danish taxpayers, not foreign shareholders. Mr. Nielsen didn’t even have a database to check whether an individual pension plan actually owned the shares it claimed, said Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013.

“Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”

There was another problem that nobody knew about then: Mr. Nielsen could be persuaded to break the law. When the Danish police searched his home after the Solo Capital revelations, they found a letter showing that in 2007, he helped an old friend illegally secure $5.7 million from SKAT. (The two men knew each other from the days when Mr. Nielsen moonlighted with a job delivering newspapers.) Last December, prosecutors convicted Mr. Nielsen of fraud for taking a kickback, the equivalent of $315,000, for his efforts.

Image

A restaurant in downtown Copenhagen where Mr. Nielsen was said to have been taken.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

Defenders of Mr. Nielsen maintain that he is a fundamentally decent guy who made a serious mistake under the suasion of a pal. True or not, Mr. Nielsen had a new pal in 2014, just as the SKAT payouts soared.

His name was Camilo Vargas. He worked in London at one of a small number of “payment agents,” niche companies that handle the array of paperwork submitted to foreign tax authorities for refunds. Mr. Vargas had just founded his own payment agent firm, which he called Syntax GIS. Soon after Syntax began operations, it started working with Sanjay Shah, who eventually bought the company.

During the first of several trips to Copenhagen, Mr. Vargas sought out Mr. Nielsen, asking for guidance on how to fill out Danish tax refund applications. What is known about those meetings comes from the one interview Mr. Nielsen has ever given, in a 2016 documentary that ran on DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC. Mr. Nielsen appeared to be flattered by the attention and happy to provide advice.

He just as gladly accepted invitations to dinner. Mr. Nielsen described in the interview a lively evening drinking beer with Mr. Vargas in a popular downtown area in Copenhagen.

“We walked down Stroget,” he said, referring to a famous pedestrian street, “and made several pit stops.”

The friendship was fantastically lucrative. In 2014, more than $590 million was paid on 1,500 refund applications. Danish authorities believe most of them came from Solo Capital clients. In the first seven months of 2015, the figures soared to roughly $1.2 billion, paid to more than 2,500 applications — about 16 applications every working day.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Nielsen that Camilo Vargas was playing him.

“At no point did I get the impression that he wanted to trick me or cheat in any way,” Mr. Nielsen said in the documentary, sounding bereft. “But that’s what it could appear like today.”

Mr. Vargas could not be located for comment. The producers at DR hired a researcher to find him, to no avail.

In the summer of 2015, the pace of applications made one final surge. In July alone, $500 million in refunds was disbursed — about $25 million per working day, $3 million every hour.

Mr. Shah may have had a hunch that the Danish tax refund machine was about to stop working. In May 2015, he met in London with his then-new compliance officer at Solo Capital, Navin Khokhrai. As Mr. Shah put it in the handwritten letter provided by his publicist, Mr. Khokhrai expressed profound reservations about Solo Capital’s business, telling his boss that he was unsure “whether the company was processing the trades correctly.” Mr. Shah assured him that he’d obtained all necessary legal clearances.

Mr. Khokhrai was apparently not convinced. He resigned soon after and Mr. Shah stated in the same handwritten letter that his former employee “submitted a whistle-blower letter to HMRC” — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — “alleging that Solo had created fictitious client accounts and trading records in order to defraud the tax authorities in Denmark and Belgium.”

In August 2015, the dividends stopped flowing out of SKAT, though not because of sirens set off by anyone inside the agency. Rather, it took a tip from the British government to end the scheme, several Danish politicians said. The London offices of Solo Capital were later raided by Britain’s National Crime Agency and by July 2016 Solo Capital closed.

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Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013. “Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

At the time, Mr. Shah said he had done nothing improper. “Had they accused a large bank like Goldman Sachs the bank would have kicked back with a large team of lawyers,” he told Borsen, a Danish newspaper. “It’s easier to target a single individual.”

‘This Was Fraud’

Danish authorities have been trying to unravel Mr. Shah’s handiwork for over three years. Much of his modus operandi was revealed, experts believe, in 2017 when police in Germany, who were acting at the behest of the Danes, used a search warrant to sift through the records of North Channel Bank, a small bank in Mainz, a city outside Frankfurt. A team of 60 investigators found that the bank was used by 27 of the American pension plans, which were ultimately paid a total of about $168 million by SKAT.

What investigators found is that the accounts didn’t actually own any shares of Danish companies, said Prof. Christoph Spengel, who served as an adviser to Germany’s Parliament during an inquiry into the questionable trades. He studied the results of the North Channel investigation, issued in a report by a German district attorney. He said that the 27 plans primarily traded with one another. One would place an order to short a chunk of shares of Danish stock — essentially, a promise to buy the shares once they dipped below a certain price.

Soon after, an order was placed by another of the 27 plans to buy the order for the shorted shares. That open buy order — essentially, a promise to purchase shares that the other plan still didn’t own — was proof enough for SKAT to approve a refund. Once the refund was issued, the buy order was canceled.

“This wasn’t a transaction, this wasn’t tax planning,” Professor Spengel said. “This was fraud.”

A spokeswoman for North Channel said the bank was cooperating with the authorities and had no comment.

After funds were wired to North Bank, Professor Spengel said, they were shunted to two banks, first in London, then another in Germany. Finally, he said, they were sent to accounts controlled by Mr. Shah and his wife, Usha.

Jack Irvine, Mr. Shah’s spokesman, said none of this was true.

“Neither Solo nor Sanjay have had anything to do with North Channel Bank,” he wrote in an email, “so there appears to be confusion, which is not unusual in this case.”

There has been outrage in Denmark over the SKAT scandal but so far the repercussions have been surprisingly limited. No ministers have been fired. The director of SKAT was laid off in August 2016, though Mr. Shah’s machinations were among several causes. A new investigation into the cum-ex disaster was ordered by the justice minister in February, which could last years. For now, politicians here seem to emphasize pragmatism over finger-pointing.

“In the past, governments have fallen because of investigations like this,” said Jesper Petersen, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party. “But we have yet to find any minister who saw evidence of this problem and ignored it.”

Sanjay Shah is preoccupied with his own troubles. In mid-September, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against Solo Capital and a company it owned, Elysium Global, in a case filed by SKAT alleging fraud. Mr. Shah’s spokesman said his client didn’t respond to the lawsuit because both companies are now controlled by liquidators.

He also said that at the prodding of Danish officials, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates have all frozen, though not confiscated, $660 million in assets belonging to Mr. Shah. The financial pinch is enough that Mr. Shah has been forced to put his house up for sale, the publicist added. Out of caution, the publicist said, Mr. Shah does not travel.

Fears of arrest and extradition are justified, said Henning Sorensen, an associate law professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

“Shah is free as long as he stays in Dubai,” he said. “He is like a bird living in a golden cage.”

Alain Delaquérière and Martin Selsoe Sorensen contributed reporting.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/business/denmark-skat-tax-scandal.html |

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?, in 2018-10-05 17:45:18

[captainblogger100posts]

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? http://www.nature-business.com/nature-where-in-the-world-is-denmarks-2-billion/

Nature

Image

CreditCreditQuickhoney

As large as it is, the building would be easy to miss. Plain, gray and near a McDonald’s, it’s part of a generic office complex surrounded by a vast parking lot in a suburb of Copenhagen. “Danish Tax Agency” is stenciled in both English and Danish on a glass front door.

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history. For three years, starting in 2012, so much money gushed from an office here that it was as though the state had sprung a gigantic leak.

Prosecutors in Copenhagen say it was an elaborate ruse, one that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion — a spectacular sum for Denmark, the equivalent of a $110 billion loss in the far larger American economy.

The country had fallen victim to a dubious financial maneuver at the intersection of the tax system and capital markets, a dizzyingly complex transaction known as a “cum-ex” trade.

The trade is focused on one of the dullest, most overlooked acts in any financial system — the request for refunds on taxes withheld on dividends. Under Danish law, the government automatically collects taxes on dividends paid out by companies to their shareholders. If the shareholders live in the United States, they are eligible for a refund on some or all of those taxes.

A tiny department in SKAT, run by one man, approved thousands of applications for refunds. Most of the applications were filed by self-directed pension plans in the United States, a type of retirement account for individuals.

But experts and lawyers familiar with the scheme say those people were fronts for cum-ex trades. Deploying a kind of financial sleight of hand, the trades made it appear as if the pension plans had purchased shares of Danish companies and paid taxes on the dividends. Neither was true.

To the Danes, it was a fraud, one executed and conceived by Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier. With an assist from employees, he found the Americans, helped facilitate the applications and ended up with much of the money.

Mr. Shah denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole. He now lives in Dubai, where he owns a $1.3 million yacht and a 10,000-square-foot villa with access to the beach. He has become Denmark’s national villain.

“You have this guy, living off fraud, it’s infuriating,” said Joachim B. Olsen, a member of the Danish Parliament and chairman of its Finance Committee. “The expectation of the Danish people is that we will go after him, no matter the cost.”

Since May, the cost has included hiring an American law firm to sue 277 of the self-directed pension plans and their owners who applied for all those tax refunds. But the true toll of this scandal can’t be measured in kroner. It has undermined trust in Danish politics and it has severely dented the country’s self-image as a bastion of honest, efficient government. An unfolding $230 billion money-laundering fiasco at Danske Bank, the country’s largest lender, has only deepened the gloom.

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Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier, who Danish authorities say conceived and executed the scheme in Denmark. He denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole.CreditStuart Williamson

What has made the dividend debacle even more painful is that many here believe it was an inside job. The lone employee approving those tax refunds was a lifelong civil servant named Sven Nielsen. After a lengthy investigation, the police learned that Mr. Nielsen had spent a few boozy and convivial evenings with an employee of Mr. Shah’s, although they found no evidence that he had colluded or profited in any way.

Instead, they discovered evidence that years ago, Mr. Nielsen had helped an old friend bilk SKAT in a relatively small scam. Through his lawyer, Mr. Nielsen declined to comment — from prison, where he is now serving a six-year sentence for criminal fraud in that case.

So, Danes are left with a mystery that belongs in a Nordic noir, one with elements of farce and filled with enraging twists. Is Mr. Nielsen a co-conspirator, or a dupe? Is he a criminal or a man so flattered by attention that his critical faculties abandoned him?

The other mystery concerns Mr. Shah, who is now rebranding himself as a philanthropist, raising money for autism research by promoting concerts in Dubai with performers like Flo Rida and Lenny Kravitz. He has been formally termed a suspect by Danish authorities, but to the collective amazement of the Danes no criminal charges have been filed against him.

A spokesman for the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime would not say why. Instead, with impeccable Scandinavian restraint he said only that the case involves people “who seem to have used a very crafty setup.”

Finding His Calling

Mr. Shah declined to be interviewed for this article. To offer his version of events, he provided through his publicist a 14-page handwritten letter that outlined his career. And for added personal details, there is a series of autobiographical videos that he posted two years ago on YouTube, titled “I Am Sanjay Shah.”

In each, he sits in a spacious living room in a house in Dubai and muses about his life and business philosophy, omitting any hint of controversy. He comes across as an upbeat, middle-aged expat with an abiding fondness for music. After a midlife crisis, he founded Autism Rocks and became a part-time concert promoter, at one point booking his personal favorite, Prince. Mr. Shah also has a taste for the extravagant. In one video, he said that sports cars parked outside the office at Merrill Lynch, where he worked early on, inspired him to consider a new career.

“I said to my boss, ‘Who drives these cars?’” he recalled in the video. “And he said the traders do on the fifth floor. So then I decided that I wanted to be one of those people.”

Mr. Shah was raised in London by parents of Indian ancestry who had immigrated from Kenya. He dropped out of college in 1992, citing a lack of motivation, and worked at a number of large financial firms. In 2007, he landed a job at the London office of Rabobank, a Dutch company, on the dividend arbitrage desk.

There he learned about cum-ex trades. The term is Latin for “with-without” and refers to the status of shares before and after a dividend is issued. Cum-ex trades would quickly become the focus of Mr. Shah’s professional life.

Around the time of the global financial crisis, Rabobank closed its dividend arbitrage desk. While former colleagues scrambled to look for careers in other fields, Mr. Shah boldly opened his own firm, Solo Capital, with an office of eight employees. At the same time, he did something unusual for a man starting a business in London. He and his family moved to Dubai, “mainly for the weather and the lifestyle,” he explained in a video.

As economies around the globe reeled, Mr. Shah found himself in one of the few growth segments in banking. Cum-ex trades are made possible by tax treaties between countries, agreements that are intended to prevent double taxation. Denmark has such a treaty with the United States.

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This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What government regulators throughout Europe failed to foresee was that foreign dividend tax refunds could yield immense and dubious profits. After the financial meltdown, dozens of German banks desperate for a new source of profits eagerly facilitated cum-ex trades, fueled by capital from all over the world.

Traders made off with more than $11 billion, according to officials there. Cum-ex would reap fortunes from the governments in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, too.

It took years for the German authorities, who banned the practice in 2012, to figure out what had hit them. The first cum-ex indictments in the country were filed in May.

“It turned out to be one of the biggest financial scandals that Europe has ever seen,” said Bastian Finkel, a tax lawyer at BLD, a law firm in Cologne, “and all the more painful because it’s public money.”

In the wake of their losses, the authorities in Germany didn’t bother to alert other countries, and speculators moved elsewhere. The biggest target, it turned out, was Denmark.

Under the terms of an American-Danish tax agreement, Americans who own shares in, for instance, Carlsberg can get a full or partial refund on the 27 percent withheld for tax on dividends. Retirement accounts get the best deal of all. They get all 27 percent of the tax back.

To scale up his cum-ex trade, Mr. Shah needed individuals in the United States with self-directed pension plans, a type of retirement account that allows owners to invest in a wide range of financial instruments. By 2012, he had found more than a dozen of them — which turned out to be plenty.

A Man With 44 Pension Plans

The names of these Americans who owned the self-directed pension plans became public this summer, when Danish authorities sued them, hoping to recover lost funds. Exactly how these people linked up with Solo Capital is unknown. Mr. Shah’s publicist would say only that they came via wealth management advisory firms.

There are demographic patterns. Most live on the East Coast, with clusters in New York, New Jersey and Florida. At least five different plans used the same mailing address, 425 West 23rd Street, Apartment 7B, New York, N.Y. The current tenant there had never heard of the Danish lawsuits, but said he had received mail for one of the defendants, Gavin Crescenzo, a previous occupant.

Nearly all the defendants have jobs in finance, though one, Michael Ben-Jacob, is a partner at a prestigious law firm, Arnold & Porter. He declined to discuss the case and a spokeswoman at the firm said it did not comment on litigation in progress.

Many people have their names attached to dozens of pension plans, which is why there are 277 suits and roughly 17 defendants. A 30-year-old named Roger Lehman, for instance, opened 44 plans in a handful of states, with names such as the Ludlow Holdings 401K Plan and the Hotel Fromance Pension Plan.

Mr. Shah said through his spokesman that Solo Capital worked with 200 of these pension plans. He declined to identify which ones.

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John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases — then suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

None of the defendants responded to requests for comment. In July, though, an email response came instead, unbidden, from a law firm in Luxembourg called Schaffelhuber Müller & Kollegen. A partner there named Helene Schwiering stated that her clients, whom she did not name, would appreciate it “if you henceforth refrain from attempting to contact them.”

On paper, the owners of the plans pocketed most of SKAT’s $2 billion. In reality, these people probably wound up with little or none of the money.

That, at least, is the impression of John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases, then he suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.

The withdrawal filings were revealing. They stated that Mr. Hanamirian was not paid by defendants named in the lawsuits. Rather, his bills were paid by what he described only as a “Luxembourg law firm.” And that law firm would not provide needed files about his defendants, “despite repeated requests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Hanamirian elaborated. The firm was the one in Luxembourg that sent that out-of-the-blue email asking that defendants in the cases be left alone.

“I needed documents surrounding their involvement, whatever that is — bank statements, investment statements, communications,” Mr. Hanamirian said. “The firm wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We’ll meet you in advance, the day of the proceedings.’ I said that’s unacceptable.”

Before exiting the cases, Mr. Hanamirian spoke to a handful of clients who told him that money went in and then was immediately moved out of their accounts. Whether the defendants earned a fee of some kind is unknown to Mr. Hanamirian, as is the ultimate destination of the funds.

“I don’t want any of this to reflect on my former clients,” he said. “But the whole thing was definitely odd.”

$3 Million, Every Hour

In 2013, all that stood between Solo Capital and Denmark’s treasury was the bespectacled, gray-haired veteran of SKAT, Sven Nielsen. After two colleagues retired, he was the last person in the Dividend Department. Complicating matters, he lacked the tools to perform the most basic due diligence when reviewing refund applications.

The agency was in the midst of a yearslong and often disastrous overhaul, meant to digitize the system and reduce head count. The priority was helping Danish taxpayers, not foreign shareholders. Mr. Nielsen didn’t even have a database to check whether an individual pension plan actually owned the shares it claimed, said Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013.

“Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”

There was another problem that nobody knew about then: Mr. Nielsen could be persuaded to break the law. When the Danish police searched his home after the Solo Capital revelations, they found a letter showing that in 2007, he helped an old friend illegally secure $5.7 million from SKAT. (The two men knew each other from the days when Mr. Nielsen moonlighted with a job delivering newspapers.) Last December, prosecutors convicted Mr. Nielsen of fraud for taking a kickback, the equivalent of $315,000, for his efforts.

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A restaurant in downtown Copenhagen where Mr. Nielsen was said to have been taken.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

Defenders of Mr. Nielsen maintain that he is a fundamentally decent guy who made a serious mistake under the suasion of a pal. True or not, Mr. Nielsen had a new pal in 2014, just as the SKAT payouts soared.

His name was Camilo Vargas. He worked in London at one of a small number of “payment agents,” niche companies that handle the array of paperwork submitted to foreign tax authorities for refunds. Mr. Vargas had just founded his own payment agent firm, which he called Syntax GIS. Soon after Syntax began operations, it started working with Sanjay Shah, who eventually bought the company.

During the first of several trips to Copenhagen, Mr. Vargas sought out Mr. Nielsen, asking for guidance on how to fill out Danish tax refund applications. What is known about those meetings comes from the one interview Mr. Nielsen has ever given, in a 2016 documentary that ran on DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC. Mr. Nielsen appeared to be flattered by the attention and happy to provide advice.

He just as gladly accepted invitations to dinner. Mr. Nielsen described in the interview a lively evening drinking beer with Mr. Vargas in a popular downtown area in Copenhagen.

“We walked down Stroget,” he said, referring to a famous pedestrian street, “and made several pit stops.”

The friendship was fantastically lucrative. In 2014, more than $590 million was paid on 1,500 refund applications. Danish authorities believe most of them came from Solo Capital clients. In the first seven months of 2015, the figures soared to roughly $1.2 billion, paid to more than 2,500 applications — about 16 applications every working day.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Nielsen that Camilo Vargas was playing him.

“At no point did I get the impression that he wanted to trick me or cheat in any way,” Mr. Nielsen said in the documentary, sounding bereft. “But that’s what it could appear like today.”

Mr. Vargas could not be located for comment. The producers at DR hired a researcher to find him, to no avail.

In the summer of 2015, the pace of applications made one final surge. In July alone, $500 million in refunds was disbursed — about $25 million per working day, $3 million every hour.

Mr. Shah may have had a hunch that the Danish tax refund machine was about to stop working. In May 2015, he met in London with his then-new compliance officer at Solo Capital, Navin Khokhrai. As Mr. Shah put it in the handwritten letter provided by his publicist, Mr. Khokhrai expressed profound reservations about Solo Capital’s business, telling his boss that he was unsure “whether the company was processing the trades correctly.” Mr. Shah assured him that he’d obtained all necessary legal clearances.

Mr. Khokhrai was apparently not convinced. He resigned soon after and Mr. Shah stated in the same handwritten letter that his former employee “submitted a whistle-blower letter to HMRC” — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — “alleging that Solo had created fictitious client accounts and trading records in order to defraud the tax authorities in Denmark and Belgium.”

In August 2015, the dividends stopped flowing out of SKAT, though not because of sirens set off by anyone inside the agency. Rather, it took a tip from the British government to end the scheme, several Danish politicians said. The London offices of Solo Capital were later raided by Britain’s National Crime Agency and by July 2016 Solo Capital closed.

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Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013. “Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

At the time, Mr. Shah said he had done nothing improper. “Had they accused a large bank like Goldman Sachs the bank would have kicked back with a large team of lawyers,” he told Borsen, a Danish newspaper. “It’s easier to target a single individual.”

‘This Was Fraud’

Danish authorities have been trying to unravel Mr. Shah’s handiwork for over three years. Much of his modus operandi was revealed, experts believe, in 2017 when police in Germany, who were acting at the behest of the Danes, used a search warrant to sift through the records of North Channel Bank, a small bank in Mainz, a city outside Frankfurt. A team of 60 investigators found that the bank was used by 27 of the American pension plans, which were ultimately paid a total of about $168 million by SKAT.

What investigators found is that the accounts didn’t actually own any shares of Danish companies, said Prof. Christoph Spengel, who served as an adviser to Germany’s Parliament during an inquiry into the questionable trades. He studied the results of the North Channel investigation, issued in a report by a German district attorney. He said that the 27 plans primarily traded with one another. One would place an order to short a chunk of shares of Danish stock — essentially, a promise to buy the shares once they dipped below a certain price.

Soon after, an order was placed by another of the 27 plans to buy the order for the shorted shares. That open buy order — essentially, a promise to purchase shares that the other plan still didn’t own — was proof enough for SKAT to approve a refund. Once the refund was issued, the buy order was canceled.

“This wasn’t a transaction, this wasn’t tax planning,” Professor Spengel said. “This was fraud.”

A spokeswoman for North Channel said the bank was cooperating with the authorities and had no comment.

After funds were wired to North Bank, Professor Spengel said, they were shunted to two banks, first in London, then another in Germany. Finally, he said, they were sent to accounts controlled by Mr. Shah and his wife, Usha.

Jack Irvine, Mr. Shah’s spokesman, said none of this was true.

“Neither Solo nor Sanjay have had anything to do with North Channel Bank,” he wrote in an email, “so there appears to be confusion, which is not unusual in this case.”

There has been outrage in Denmark over the SKAT scandal but so far the repercussions have been surprisingly limited. No ministers have been fired. The director of SKAT was laid off in August 2016, though Mr. Shah’s machinations were among several causes. A new investigation into the cum-ex disaster was ordered by the justice minister in February, which could last years. For now, politicians here seem to emphasize pragmatism over finger-pointing.

“In the past, governments have fallen because of investigations like this,” said Jesper Petersen, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party. “But we have yet to find any minister who saw evidence of this problem and ignored it.”

Sanjay Shah is preoccupied with his own troubles. In mid-September, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against Solo Capital and a company it owned, Elysium Global, in a case filed by SKAT alleging fraud. Mr. Shah’s spokesman said his client didn’t respond to the lawsuit because both companies are now controlled by liquidators.

He also said that at the prodding of Danish officials, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates have all frozen, though not confiscated, $660 million in assets belonging to Mr. Shah. The financial pinch is enough that Mr. Shah has been forced to put his house up for sale, the publicist added. Out of caution, the publicist said, Mr. Shah does not travel.

Fears of arrest and extradition are justified, said Henning Sorensen, an associate law professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

“Shah is free as long as he stays in Dubai,” he said. “He is like a bird living in a golden cage.”

Alain Delaquérière and Martin Selsoe Sorensen contributed reporting.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/business/denmark-skat-tax-scandal.html |

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?, in 2018-10-05 17:45:18

[computacionalblog]

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? http://www.nature-business.com/nature-where-in-the-world-is-denmarks-2-billion/

Nature

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CreditCreditQuickhoney

As large as it is, the building would be easy to miss. Plain, gray and near a McDonald’s, it’s part of a generic office complex surrounded by a vast parking lot in a suburb of Copenhagen. “Danish Tax Agency” is stenciled in both English and Danish on a glass front door.

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history. For three years, starting in 2012, so much money gushed from an office here that it was as though the state had sprung a gigantic leak.

Prosecutors in Copenhagen say it was an elaborate ruse, one that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion — a spectacular sum for Denmark, the equivalent of a $110 billion loss in the far larger American economy.

The country had fallen victim to a dubious financial maneuver at the intersection of the tax system and capital markets, a dizzyingly complex transaction known as a “cum-ex” trade.

The trade is focused on one of the dullest, most overlooked acts in any financial system — the request for refunds on taxes withheld on dividends. Under Danish law, the government automatically collects taxes on dividends paid out by companies to their shareholders. If the shareholders live in the United States, they are eligible for a refund on some or all of those taxes.

A tiny department in SKAT, run by one man, approved thousands of applications for refunds. Most of the applications were filed by self-directed pension plans in the United States, a type of retirement account for individuals.

But experts and lawyers familiar with the scheme say those people were fronts for cum-ex trades. Deploying a kind of financial sleight of hand, the trades made it appear as if the pension plans had purchased shares of Danish companies and paid taxes on the dividends. Neither was true.

To the Danes, it was a fraud, one executed and conceived by Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier. With an assist from employees, he found the Americans, helped facilitate the applications and ended up with much of the money.

Mr. Shah denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole. He now lives in Dubai, where he owns a $1.3 million yacht and a 10,000-square-foot villa with access to the beach. He has become Denmark’s national villain.

“You have this guy, living off fraud, it’s infuriating,” said Joachim B. Olsen, a member of the Danish Parliament and chairman of its Finance Committee. “The expectation of the Danish people is that we will go after him, no matter the cost.”

Since May, the cost has included hiring an American law firm to sue 277 of the self-directed pension plans and their owners who applied for all those tax refunds. But the true toll of this scandal can’t be measured in kroner. It has undermined trust in Danish politics and it has severely dented the country’s self-image as a bastion of honest, efficient government. An unfolding $230 billion money-laundering fiasco at Danske Bank, the country’s largest lender, has only deepened the gloom.

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Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier, who Danish authorities say conceived and executed the scheme in Denmark. He denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole.CreditStuart Williamson

What has made the dividend debacle even more painful is that many here believe it was an inside job. The lone employee approving those tax refunds was a lifelong civil servant named Sven Nielsen. After a lengthy investigation, the police learned that Mr. Nielsen had spent a few boozy and convivial evenings with an employee of Mr. Shah’s, although they found no evidence that he had colluded or profited in any way.

Instead, they discovered evidence that years ago, Mr. Nielsen had helped an old friend bilk SKAT in a relatively small scam. Through his lawyer, Mr. Nielsen declined to comment — from prison, where he is now serving a six-year sentence for criminal fraud in that case.

So, Danes are left with a mystery that belongs in a Nordic noir, one with elements of farce and filled with enraging twists. Is Mr. Nielsen a co-conspirator, or a dupe? Is he a criminal or a man so flattered by attention that his critical faculties abandoned him?

The other mystery concerns Mr. Shah, who is now rebranding himself as a philanthropist, raising money for autism research by promoting concerts in Dubai with performers like Flo Rida and Lenny Kravitz. He has been formally termed a suspect by Danish authorities, but to the collective amazement of the Danes no criminal charges have been filed against him.

A spokesman for the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime would not say why. Instead, with impeccable Scandinavian restraint he said only that the case involves people “who seem to have used a very crafty setup.”

Finding His Calling

Mr. Shah declined to be interviewed for this article. To offer his version of events, he provided through his publicist a 14-page handwritten letter that outlined his career. And for added personal details, there is a series of autobiographical videos that he posted two years ago on YouTube, titled “I Am Sanjay Shah.”

In each, he sits in a spacious living room in a house in Dubai and muses about his life and business philosophy, omitting any hint of controversy. He comes across as an upbeat, middle-aged expat with an abiding fondness for music. After a midlife crisis, he founded Autism Rocks and became a part-time concert promoter, at one point booking his personal favorite, Prince. Mr. Shah also has a taste for the extravagant. In one video, he said that sports cars parked outside the office at Merrill Lynch, where he worked early on, inspired him to consider a new career.

“I said to my boss, ‘Who drives these cars?’” he recalled in the video. “And he said the traders do on the fifth floor. So then I decided that I wanted to be one of those people.”

Mr. Shah was raised in London by parents of Indian ancestry who had immigrated from Kenya. He dropped out of college in 1992, citing a lack of motivation, and worked at a number of large financial firms. In 2007, he landed a job at the London office of Rabobank, a Dutch company, on the dividend arbitrage desk.

There he learned about cum-ex trades. The term is Latin for “with-without” and refers to the status of shares before and after a dividend is issued. Cum-ex trades would quickly become the focus of Mr. Shah’s professional life.

Around the time of the global financial crisis, Rabobank closed its dividend arbitrage desk. While former colleagues scrambled to look for careers in other fields, Mr. Shah boldly opened his own firm, Solo Capital, with an office of eight employees. At the same time, he did something unusual for a man starting a business in London. He and his family moved to Dubai, “mainly for the weather and the lifestyle,” he explained in a video.

As economies around the globe reeled, Mr. Shah found himself in one of the few growth segments in banking. Cum-ex trades are made possible by tax treaties between countries, agreements that are intended to prevent double taxation. Denmark has such a treaty with the United States.

Image

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What government regulators throughout Europe failed to foresee was that foreign dividend tax refunds could yield immense and dubious profits. After the financial meltdown, dozens of German banks desperate for a new source of profits eagerly facilitated cum-ex trades, fueled by capital from all over the world.

Traders made off with more than $11 billion, according to officials there. Cum-ex would reap fortunes from the governments in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, too.

It took years for the German authorities, who banned the practice in 2012, to figure out what had hit them. The first cum-ex indictments in the country were filed in May.

“It turned out to be one of the biggest financial scandals that Europe has ever seen,” said Bastian Finkel, a tax lawyer at BLD, a law firm in Cologne, “and all the more painful because it’s public money.”

In the wake of their losses, the authorities in Germany didn’t bother to alert other countries, and speculators moved elsewhere. The biggest target, it turned out, was Denmark.

Under the terms of an American-Danish tax agreement, Americans who own shares in, for instance, Carlsberg can get a full or partial refund on the 27 percent withheld for tax on dividends. Retirement accounts get the best deal of all. They get all 27 percent of the tax back.

To scale up his cum-ex trade, Mr. Shah needed individuals in the United States with self-directed pension plans, a type of retirement account that allows owners to invest in a wide range of financial instruments. By 2012, he had found more than a dozen of them — which turned out to be plenty.

A Man With 44 Pension Plans

The names of these Americans who owned the self-directed pension plans became public this summer, when Danish authorities sued them, hoping to recover lost funds. Exactly how these people linked up with Solo Capital is unknown. Mr. Shah’s publicist would say only that they came via wealth management advisory firms.

There are demographic patterns. Most live on the East Coast, with clusters in New York, New Jersey and Florida. At least five different plans used the same mailing address, 425 West 23rd Street, Apartment 7B, New York, N.Y. The current tenant there had never heard of the Danish lawsuits, but said he had received mail for one of the defendants, Gavin Crescenzo, a previous occupant.

Nearly all the defendants have jobs in finance, though one, Michael Ben-Jacob, is a partner at a prestigious law firm, Arnold & Porter. He declined to discuss the case and a spokeswoman at the firm said it did not comment on litigation in progress.

Many people have their names attached to dozens of pension plans, which is why there are 277 suits and roughly 17 defendants. A 30-year-old named Roger Lehman, for instance, opened 44 plans in a handful of states, with names such as the Ludlow Holdings 401K Plan and the Hotel Fromance Pension Plan.

Mr. Shah said through his spokesman that Solo Capital worked with 200 of these pension plans. He declined to identify which ones.

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John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases — then suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

None of the defendants responded to requests for comment. In July, though, an email response came instead, unbidden, from a law firm in Luxembourg called Schaffelhuber Müller & Kollegen. A partner there named Helene Schwiering stated that her clients, whom she did not name, would appreciate it “if you henceforth refrain from attempting to contact them.”

On paper, the owners of the plans pocketed most of SKAT’s $2 billion. In reality, these people probably wound up with little or none of the money.

That, at least, is the impression of John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases, then he suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.

The withdrawal filings were revealing. They stated that Mr. Hanamirian was not paid by defendants named in the lawsuits. Rather, his bills were paid by what he described only as a “Luxembourg law firm.” And that law firm would not provide needed files about his defendants, “despite repeated requests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Hanamirian elaborated. The firm was the one in Luxembourg that sent that out-of-the-blue email asking that defendants in the cases be left alone.

“I needed documents surrounding their involvement, whatever that is — bank statements, investment statements, communications,” Mr. Hanamirian said. “The firm wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We’ll meet you in advance, the day of the proceedings.’ I said that’s unacceptable.”

Before exiting the cases, Mr. Hanamirian spoke to a handful of clients who told him that money went in and then was immediately moved out of their accounts. Whether the defendants earned a fee of some kind is unknown to Mr. Hanamirian, as is the ultimate destination of the funds.

“I don’t want any of this to reflect on my former clients,” he said. “But the whole thing was definitely odd.”

$3 Million, Every Hour

In 2013, all that stood between Solo Capital and Denmark’s treasury was the bespectacled, gray-haired veteran of SKAT, Sven Nielsen. After two colleagues retired, he was the last person in the Dividend Department. Complicating matters, he lacked the tools to perform the most basic due diligence when reviewing refund applications.

The agency was in the midst of a yearslong and often disastrous overhaul, meant to digitize the system and reduce head count. The priority was helping Danish taxpayers, not foreign shareholders. Mr. Nielsen didn’t even have a database to check whether an individual pension plan actually owned the shares it claimed, said Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013.

“Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”

There was another problem that nobody knew about then: Mr. Nielsen could be persuaded to break the law. When the Danish police searched his home after the Solo Capital revelations, they found a letter showing that in 2007, he helped an old friend illegally secure $5.7 million from SKAT. (The two men knew each other from the days when Mr. Nielsen moonlighted with a job delivering newspapers.) Last December, prosecutors convicted Mr. Nielsen of fraud for taking a kickback, the equivalent of $315,000, for his efforts.

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A restaurant in downtown Copenhagen where Mr. Nielsen was said to have been taken.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

Defenders of Mr. Nielsen maintain that he is a fundamentally decent guy who made a serious mistake under the suasion of a pal. True or not, Mr. Nielsen had a new pal in 2014, just as the SKAT payouts soared.

His name was Camilo Vargas. He worked in London at one of a small number of “payment agents,” niche companies that handle the array of paperwork submitted to foreign tax authorities for refunds. Mr. Vargas had just founded his own payment agent firm, which he called Syntax GIS. Soon after Syntax began operations, it started working with Sanjay Shah, who eventually bought the company.

During the first of several trips to Copenhagen, Mr. Vargas sought out Mr. Nielsen, asking for guidance on how to fill out Danish tax refund applications. What is known about those meetings comes from the one interview Mr. Nielsen has ever given, in a 2016 documentary that ran on DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC. Mr. Nielsen appeared to be flattered by the attention and happy to provide advice.

He just as gladly accepted invitations to dinner. Mr. Nielsen described in the interview a lively evening drinking beer with Mr. Vargas in a popular downtown area in Copenhagen.

“We walked down Stroget,” he said, referring to a famous pedestrian street, “and made several pit stops.”

The friendship was fantastically lucrative. In 2014, more than $590 million was paid on 1,500 refund applications. Danish authorities believe most of them came from Solo Capital clients. In the first seven months of 2015, the figures soared to roughly $1.2 billion, paid to more than 2,500 applications — about 16 applications every working day.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Nielsen that Camilo Vargas was playing him.

“At no point did I get the impression that he wanted to trick me or cheat in any way,” Mr. Nielsen said in the documentary, sounding bereft. “But that’s what it could appear like today.”

Mr. Vargas could not be located for comment. The producers at DR hired a researcher to find him, to no avail.

In the summer of 2015, the pace of applications made one final surge. In July alone, $500 million in refunds was disbursed — about $25 million per working day, $3 million every hour.

Mr. Shah may have had a hunch that the Danish tax refund machine was about to stop working. In May 2015, he met in London with his then-new compliance officer at Solo Capital, Navin Khokhrai. As Mr. Shah put it in the handwritten letter provided by his publicist, Mr. Khokhrai expressed profound reservations about Solo Capital’s business, telling his boss that he was unsure “whether the company was processing the trades correctly.” Mr. Shah assured him that he’d obtained all necessary legal clearances.

Mr. Khokhrai was apparently not convinced. He resigned soon after and Mr. Shah stated in the same handwritten letter that his former employee “submitted a whistle-blower letter to HMRC” — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — “alleging that Solo had created fictitious client accounts and trading records in order to defraud the tax authorities in Denmark and Belgium.”

In August 2015, the dividends stopped flowing out of SKAT, though not because of sirens set off by anyone inside the agency. Rather, it took a tip from the British government to end the scheme, several Danish politicians said. The London offices of Solo Capital were later raided by Britain’s National Crime Agency and by July 2016 Solo Capital closed.

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Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013. “Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

At the time, Mr. Shah said he had done nothing improper. “Had they accused a large bank like Goldman Sachs the bank would have kicked back with a large team of lawyers,” he told Borsen, a Danish newspaper. “It’s easier to target a single individual.”

‘This Was Fraud’

Danish authorities have been trying to unravel Mr. Shah’s handiwork for over three years. Much of his modus operandi was revealed, experts believe, in 2017 when police in Germany, who were acting at the behest of the Danes, used a search warrant to sift through the records of North Channel Bank, a small bank in Mainz, a city outside Frankfurt. A team of 60 investigators found that the bank was used by 27 of the American pension plans, which were ultimately paid a total of about $168 million by SKAT.

What investigators found is that the accounts didn’t actually own any shares of Danish companies, said Prof. Christoph Spengel, who served as an adviser to Germany’s Parliament during an inquiry into the questionable trades. He studied the results of the North Channel investigation, issued in a report by a German district attorney. He said that the 27 plans primarily traded with one another. One would place an order to short a chunk of shares of Danish stock — essentially, a promise to buy the shares once they dipped below a certain price.

Soon after, an order was placed by another of the 27 plans to buy the order for the shorted shares. That open buy order — essentially, a promise to purchase shares that the other plan still didn’t own — was proof enough for SKAT to approve a refund. Once the refund was issued, the buy order was canceled.

“This wasn’t a transaction, this wasn’t tax planning,” Professor Spengel said. “This was fraud.”

A spokeswoman for North Channel said the bank was cooperating with the authorities and had no comment.

After funds were wired to North Bank, Professor Spengel said, they were shunted to two banks, first in London, then another in Germany. Finally, he said, they were sent to accounts controlled by Mr. Shah and his wife, Usha.

Jack Irvine, Mr. Shah’s spokesman, said none of this was true.

“Neither Solo nor Sanjay have had anything to do with North Channel Bank,” he wrote in an email, “so there appears to be confusion, which is not unusual in this case.”

There has been outrage in Denmark over the SKAT scandal but so far the repercussions have been surprisingly limited. No ministers have been fired. The director of SKAT was laid off in August 2016, though Mr. Shah’s machinations were among several causes. A new investigation into the cum-ex disaster was ordered by the justice minister in February, which could last years. For now, politicians here seem to emphasize pragmatism over finger-pointing.

“In the past, governments have fallen because of investigations like this,” said Jesper Petersen, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party. “But we have yet to find any minister who saw evidence of this problem and ignored it.”

Sanjay Shah is preoccupied with his own troubles. In mid-September, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against Solo Capital and a company it owned, Elysium Global, in a case filed by SKAT alleging fraud. Mr. Shah’s spokesman said his client didn’t respond to the lawsuit because both companies are now controlled by liquidators.

He also said that at the prodding of Danish officials, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates have all frozen, though not confiscated, $660 million in assets belonging to Mr. Shah. The financial pinch is enough that Mr. Shah has been forced to put his house up for sale, the publicist added. Out of caution, the publicist said, Mr. Shah does not travel.

Fears of arrest and extradition are justified, said Henning Sorensen, an associate law professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

“Shah is free as long as he stays in Dubai,” he said. “He is like a bird living in a golden cage.”

Alain Delaquérière and Martin Selsoe Sorensen contributed reporting.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/business/denmark-skat-tax-scandal.html |

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?, in 2018-10-05 17:45:18

[memoirsofagenie]

The “Baby Taj” of India: A Time-Stopping Experience

Throughout the course of millennia, civilization has gradually become accustomed to inextricable historical binomials, such as the Pyramids-Egypt binomial in the African continent or the Colosseum-Italy pairing as regards Europe. In the case of Southeast Asia, the Taj Mahal and India are one of such combinations. However, if Egypt is more than “just” the Pyramids and Italy has more than the Colosseum to offer, the same can be said for India, where, precisely in the city of Agra, the aforecited white wonder is not the only monument on the banks of the Yamuna River. In fact, in order to fully understand the complexity and appreciate the elegance of Mughal architecture, of which the Taj Mahal (built between 1632 and 1653) marks the zenith, one need embark on a chronological, preparatory path like those trodden by the erstwhile caravans on the distant notes of a sitar. A lesser-known, but immensely breathtaking monument that can be said to be the smaller blueprint for the Taj Mahal, is the Mausoleum Complex of I'timād-ud-Daulah (built between 1622 and 1628), otherwise known as the “jewel box” or “Baby Taj”.

Although it may sound like a cliché, time is of the essence when visiting India, not necessarily because of the traffic or the hustle-and-bustle of the particular venues per se. In India, time is truly crucial, because different times of day may, on occasion, grant a totally different charm to a specific building. As such, entering the Mughal Riverfront Gardens of Agra during the early hours of any given winter day will slowly but surely deliver an awe-inspiring vision, as the morning mist framing the hazy contours of one of their best-kept secrets slowly dissipates, revealing the remote yet glittering, full fairy-tale picture that is the Mausoleum Complex of I'timād-ud-Daulah.

Aside from the Red Fort of Agra (built between 1565 and 1573), this particular architectural masterpiece too marks the transition from constructing in marble-coated red sandstone (a material heavily found in the area), to building directly in marble and subsequently decorating the surface with intricate motifs of inlaid semi-precious stones. This technique, known as pietra dura, is in itself an Italian expression literally signifying hard stones, in turn deriving from the Ancient Roman opus sectile stone engravings. If the Persians are credited with “borrowing” this decorative art and spreading it throughout Southeast Asia, in India it was the Mughals themselves who further reinterpreted and refined its intrinsic splendor according to their tastes.

The Mausoleum Complex of I'timād-ud-Daulah is a dynastic chef d’oeuvre; from the cornice to its four minarets, it is entirely studded with floral and vegetable stylized designs, as well as other geometric and arabesque patterns, all of which come to life through the harmonious, multi-colored burst of the onyx, topaz, lapis lazuli, jasper and cornelian that fill the rich intarsia. The flickering light cutting through the rigorous perforations of the lace-like jalis, or marble latticework of the windows, merely adds intensity to this otherworldly profusion of nuances and hues. A sophisticated sight definitely not intended for the faint of heart!

While the origins of the Mausoleum Complex of I'timād-ud-Daulah may appear seemingly less romantic than those of the Taj Mahal, they are by no means less epic. This enchanting structure was commissioned by Nur Jahan, the daughter of an exiled Persian Amir and wife of the Fourth Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, for her father Mirza Ghiyath Beg, whose nickname I'timād-ud-Daulah, specifically, meant “pillar of the state.” (On a side note, Mirza Ghiyath Beg was also the grandfather of Mumtaz Mahal, the second and most influential wife of Shah Jahan -son of Jahangir, thus Fifth Mughal Emperor,- for whom the Taj Mahal was erected as a testament of love, using the Tomb of I'timād-ud-Daulah as a “draft”.) Apart from other interred relatives, Nur Jahan’s mother and her father I'timād-ud-Daulah himself are the only ones to have visible cenotaphs inside his eponymous tomb. Male cenotaphs can usually be distinguished from the female cenotaphs because they have a pen-case engraved on top, whereas female ones depict a writing tablet. I'timād-ud-Daulah and his wife’s cenotaphs mark no exception to the rule, and are the only two elements within the building that, because of their simplicity, break away, so to say, from the overall ornamental style.

In his best-selling, autobiographical novel “Shantaram”, the Australian author Gregory David Roberts, wrote: “The Indians are the Italians of Asia. […] It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indians in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna - they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The Language of India and the Language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalité. They are nations where love - amore, pyaar - makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours.”

Food for thought indeed! However, whether these words ring true or not, would depend on how intimately one knows both cultures, something that could only come across with long sojourns in both states (if one were to rule out superficiality altogether!) This being said, any Italian -like myself- who visits India, even for just a few days, is undeniably bound to feel that immediate millenary connection spawned by the realization and acceptance of the countries’ common denominator, namely, a timeless and eternal grandeur. Needless to say, as I toured the country, countless were the moments when such grandiose realizations were encountered, and the Mausoleum Complex of I'timād-ud-Daulah within the Mughal Riverfront Gardens of Agra not only took me back in time, but it made time stop, as hopefully it will do for many, many more of its visitors in the centuries to come!

(Although I finalized this article on 9 March 2017, exactly one year ago from today -31 December 2016,- I started my day visiting the “Baby Taj”. I then went on to visit the Red Fort of Agra and naturally, the Taj Mahal itself. What a memorable way to end 2016! It was my first time in India, but I hope there will be (many) more, as one cannot possibly imbue of such beauty -and history- in just one trip! And with this...  Happy New Year! Genie)