#watched Fives go unlistened to

[tragedy-for-sale]

The cool part about watching episodes you haven't seen in years is that you forget what happens in length, the bad part is now you're crying

[itwoodbeprefect]

shuffle your favorite playlist and post the first five songs that come up. then copy/paste this ask to your favorite mutuals

hello friend. ❤ i think you sent this to me in april of 2024 so surely finding it in my drafts and actually responding to it in january 2025 is, like, normal. and stuff.

to make things better and/or worse, i'm going to be incapable of keeping this short. this is from my playlist just called "thai", which i need to start splitting up in some way that makes sense, rather than throwing everything in a pile, but i haven't done that yet, so it has 219 songs in it, nearly all of which are there due to some sense of emotional attachment:

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สะมะกึ๊กสะมะกั๊ก (stuckling) - earth & mix ft. jennie panhan

fjdkfd okay, look. we're starting off strong with a song i skip half the time it comes on, but it stays on the list because it does also make me go <3 when i'm reminded of it. this is the OST for ossan's love thailand and it's very nearly unlistenable to me and i deeply love it. the MV is very loud chaos in its purest form (i thought that was true about the peaceful property MV and in hindsight that was SO wrong. the peaceful property MV is goofy in its own way but it's almost demure next to this). bonus points for featuring jennie panhan! i don't know how this series will turn out yet (it's a remake of a japanese property, a type of history on which gmmtv (the company behind this) has a mixed record so far) but GOD am i happy to see that they're finally letting earth (the one in front of the pool table) play a role that lets him be the useless immature babygirl object of everyone's affections, instead of a stoic forest ranger (a tale of 1000 stars) or "almost 40" at 29 (moonlight chicken (i am. still not over that. i may never be.)), because he's GOOD at goofy comedy! jojo tichakorn did not make mama gogo (yet another series) to prove this but he did, inadvertently, prove this! also, there's literally never a bad time to watch mix sahaphap on screen because he's always great. also also. a gmmtv series with an actor who is (actually!) 46 as third billed and an official part of the central love triangle shenanigans? yes, please, thank you. most of this paragraph is not directly relevant to this song but to me it is, because these are the thoughts i have when i hit skip. (actually, one thought that's truly about the song: this has an E rating on spotify, which is incredibly funny to me, because the english subtitles on youtube don't have a single thing even close to a curse word in them, but apparently the thai original may be more rude? or spotify is being weird, which is also possible.)

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เพื่อชีวิตกู / peua chiwit koo - TaitosmitH

taitosmith!!! one of the first times i listened to them i put on a random album and most new thai song lyrics are way too much for me at once to catch more than a sentence fragment here and there, but then at some point i snapped to attention when it was, like, wait. are they singing that someone doesn't want to be a man? and they were. i love their songs, and i love the music videos they make for them, i love how often those MVs actually add layers or tell their own stories. they have a huge number of songs about class struggle, poverty, getting painted as a criminal, problems endemic to thai society (and many societies, but they're very clear about their roots). the MV for กี่ฤดู (kii reudoo, "how many seasons") tells a much smaller story but caught me at the exact right time to have me sobbing for a bit. and then there's one song that had me squinting at the title going ? is this called "helmet"? that can't be right. but it was! that's what it's called! so i was like, okay, this is a song about. wearing a helmet, i guess. but then the lyrics go something like, wearing a helmet isn't cool, i want to go really fast and smash my head into the pavement, it's my business if i want to take this risk. but then the MV was released (fairly recently, this is one of their newest songs) and in it a guy goes on a sort of vigilante spree to force people into wearing helmets and avenge his family member(? or friend?) who was killed by reckless drivers, and also there's a chance that at the end he's a ghost? which, just. i do enjoy a poppy catchy love song, but goddamn, the journey that one single song can take you on.

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เจ็บก็สิอดเอา (stay strong) - MANG bamm

love this one, it's great! in the MV mang (from bamm. mang is her name, bamm is the group she's usually in) stands in the middle of a field in a giant hat and a beautiful dress and high heeled boots and it's honestly pretty impressive she doesn't fall over. it also stars daou and offroad (actors, singers (though not here), etc.; currently stuck on my radar because they're the leads in century of love, which is stuck in my head) playing characters seemingly called daou and offroad (it's on daou's namecard at the start, and near the end he's crying over offroad's actual instagram handle. choices.) who meet and start dating and break up because they have to follow their dreams (that's those few lines of on screen dialogue in thai in the second half somewhere. offroad saying that) and so during the entire video the village is performing a traditional healing method on daou (they're not preparing to burn the man! they're helping him with his broken heart), except then they keep piling more and more improbable things on the fire, and it's a very understated kind of comedy and i'm incredibly here for it. it took me a second watch to realize that at 2:30 daou is absolutely about to burn down the whole music building because it reminds him of meeting offroad, and it's only mang's wise guidance (she shakes her head) that keeps him from going to prison i guess. i unironically love every single thing about this.

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แพ้คำว่ารัก / pae kam waa rak - calories blah blah

the title means something like "losing to the word love". we're staying daou pittaya adjacent somehow, because this song is here because he did a cover of it. i'm in love with the band name but i don't really know them. i'm pretty sure daou sang this on an episode of a tv show that seems to be about singers covering other people's songs (i'm right. it's here), and another one he did was รอพี่ก่อน / roh pi korn, which has one of my favorite (of many, by now) moments where i misunderstood what the lyrics of a thai song were doing, because the song is called, essentially, "wait for me", and it's about how he doesn't have money right now but he'll hurry up to get it and then he will, or so i blindly assumed, hurry to his lover. because at some point he sings something about a car, and a train, and a plane. except then it clicked that in between the car and the train he sings about a refrigerator, and for a while there i was having lovely whimsical visions of paddling down a river using a fridge as a boat (?? how else are you going to use a fridge as transport?), but actually. he's singing that once he's rich he'll pay for the car, and the fridge, and the train, and the plane. some of which seem like more realistic goals than others, but hey, go for it.

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แม่เกี่ยว / mae kiauw - palmy

you know what. i actually genuinely don't have a long story about this one, not even something that's vaguely related around two corners. i have zero memory of how this even ended up on my list (spotify recommendation? maybe??? i don't really know palmy beyond this one song, though i keep meaning to more seriously explore), i just know i really really like the sound of it! i've been listening to this one a lot.

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and finally! i don't think i'll be sending asks but i will tag some people: @redgoldblue (you may have forgotten by now that you ever did this, so that could be the perfect time to do it again, if you want), @theartichokesarepurple, @littlestarsailor, @spaceradars, @batvreason, and anyone else who wants. all of this with no pressure of course, only if you feel like it!

[ne0sgotmyback]

i was an art student who mastered in producing, i agree with your anon, hendery sound so spiceless and bad in wayv songs, normally it's so easy for a deep baritone voice and and tenor voice blend in songs but it doesn't work on hendery, his voice is just so annoying. i recommend to you go listen try my luck in phantom mini, ten and winwin sound so good together, this is how you blend tour voice with an tenor main vocal. weishennies here will hate to admit this. also hendery was fine in their previous songs he suddenly make the slow talking his entire brand and it ruins his voice. i watch wayv recording behinds, wayv really not doing good vocal layering anymore, you cant see the good production in their songs anymore, their voices just sound so naked without any adlibs. but not only hendery, kun also not doing his things anymore, why he singing every wayv songs like he is singing gospel, his versatility is so bad at singing, ten does vocal fry, rap, deep voice, high notes show every side of his sweet vocals others just get so lazy at singing, songs are also bad so it makes them double unlistenable. sorry but i prefer 1 wayv comeback per year with solid album instead of 3 back to back forgettable albums, people are talking about poppin love even the day frequency released, they just pretend to like this album because members worked so hard but every hard work is not giving good result, they should stop fake hyping, these fandoms are worst for me i love honest fandoms. it's getting so hard for me to keep up with wayv 😭

Such a late reply on my side. But I love the honest WayV reviews I have been getting. Like again, don't get me wrong. I still love the boys and admire their hardwork.

Poppin love is amazing and totally deserves all the love! But it has been harder to keep listening to their songs, so I agree, rather one amazing and good album a year, than three with many songs that are not WayV coded at all.

Furthermore it is hard to see them as five, I miss the little family they always were. I know somethings can't be changed, but I will always feel sad about it whenever I see them doing group stuff. It just feels so empty now.

[mayra-quijotescx]

and now it’s catty bullshit time in a separate post bc I don’t want to tarnish the sharing of amazing music with snark about what got chosen to represent Spain instead of it!

Don’t reblog this; if you want to reblog something, reblog the post with the good song video.

(If you like Sl*mo by Ch*n*l, the TL;DR here is that I don’t. We’re not going to convince each other and that’s not what I’m looking for.)

That band was ROBBED; honestly, that feels like an understatement. Imagine being so offended that a song is being performed in Galician and sending a message against borders that you opt instead for something borderline unlistenable in a 2012 Hetalia fanfic writer’s idea of Spanglish. That kind of self-hatred has layers, in the way a wedding cake would if the baker made it while impatiently envisioning the couple’s impending divorce.

And I enthusiastically support the expression of sexual desire in music, but what the blistering sideways fuck are those lyrics supposed to be? It’s an absolute dispassionate heterosexual mess that sounds like the songwriter was ticking boxes off some generic influencer checklist. And she completely lost me at “zoom zoom on my yummy.” Yeah, that’s an actual quote. Are you five?! Disgusting. And for anyone insisting it’s reggaeton, that’s a dire insult to reggaeton. Reggaeton is a lyrically rich and musically creative genre, probably because it’s Dominicanxs and Boricuas doing Dominican and Puerto Rican music, and not a white Cubana who grew up in Spain. 

Now my hopes for Eurovision are that Spain gets nul points, watches France win with a Breton-language dance anthem, and that jury never stops kicking themselves.

[maticide666]

my eurovision top 39 songs (finally)

anyway i finally got my top 39 completed. under a read more because it can get kinda long with the commentary i added klfdja;sflk (and by that i mean VERY long, maybe a wall of text if i have a lot to say about the song.)

none of this takes rehearsals into account.

basically, 39-37 i don't like, 36-35 are meh, 34-25 are decent, 24-18 are good, 17-12 i enjoy listening to a lot, 11-4 i love, and I would pay for votes for top 3 if i could.

39. Azerbaijan - Efendi - Mata Hari - Honestly, I kinda want to like this song. The instrumentation is nice, especially with the Azeri instruments. Efendi's vocals are ok during the verses. However, her vocals during the MA-MA-MA-MATA HARI part makes this song utterly unlistenable for me. It is just so distracting and ear-grating. Not great for my sensitive ears. And that is without taking anything else into account.

38. Estonia - Uku Suviste - The Lucky One - For some reason reminds me of a boring modern country song. Bland af. At least the melody of the chorus is nice.

37. Cyprus - Elena Tsagrinou - El Diablo - Discount Lady Gaga at the best points of this song. Feels like three songs at once. Also, the lyrics seem like they just went all "What Spanish-sounding words sound spicy? Taco? Tamale? Mamacita?" As a Spanish speaker and as someone of Mexican descent who enjoys those foods, this annoys the living shit out of me. At least I can make El Diablo/Fallen Angel memes out of this. (Honestly, I don't mind the gratuitous Spanish with the words El Diablo.) Also, this song got real old real quick.

36. Slovenia - Ana Soklič - Amen - The gospel vibe is nice, but there is just too much Christianity in it for me to enjoy this song. Sorry, Ana.

35. Moldova - Natalia Gordienko - Sugar - Sounds like a sugary version of Siren Song by MARUV. Kinda boring, but enjoyable in the right circumstances.

34. Georgia - Tornike Kipiani - You - Good to listen to when mind feels blank. At first I kinda liked this song, but nowadays this song has lost its charm. This won't sound out of place alongside boring 70s slow classic rock songs.

33. Austria - Vincent Bueno - Amen - Not something I would listen to regularly, but still nice. For me, easily the biggest downgrade from 2020.

32. Greece - Stefania - Last Dance - Pleasant to listen to, not much else.

31. Portugal - The Black Mamba - Love Is On My Side - Good song, but not my cup of tea. Unfortunately, some great songs have to be near the bottom of my ranking.

30. Germany - Jendrik - I Don't Feel Hate - A fun song to listen to. The novelty wears off after a while. The feel good vibes and ukulele are nice.

29. Israel - Eden Alene - Set Me Free - the song release version was bland and boring, but the revamp. Now THAT is good stuff. The song doesn't seem so empty anymore. I miss the key change from the original, though.

28. Spain - Blas Cantó - Voy A Quedarme - A very emotional and beautiful song from Spain. Again, not usually my cup of tea. However, the melody somehow gives me a nostalgic vibe.

27. North Macedonia - Vasil - Here I Stand - DAMN Vasil has a lovely voice. Nice that he's showing it off here. Too slow of a song for me to enjoy regularly, though.

26. Albania - Anxhela Peristeri - Karma - I don't have much to say other than this song is nice.

25. Bulgaria - VICTORIA - Growing Up Is Getting Old - Pleasant to listen to, but depending on my mood I think this is a beautiful song but not my cup of tea or a complete snoozefest.

24. Serbia - Hurricane - Loco Loco - Fun song, but it feels like something is lacking, and I can't quite put my finger on it.

23. San Marino - Senhit - Adrenalina - Once the initial hype from Flo Rida being on the song died down, this became another typical Eurovision bop.

22. Sweden - Tusse - Voices - At first I thought the song was completely unremarkable and couldn't understand how this won Melodifestivalen. Nowadays it's a nice song to chill to. I gotta respect a perfect televote score from the national final.

21. Ireland - Lesley Roy - MAPS - nice.

20. Croatia - Albina - Tick Tock - Grew on me slightly. Shoutout for including a verse in Croatian.

19. Switzerland - Gjon's Tears - Tout l'Univers - Another grower for me. Doesn't hit as hard as his song from last year, but I dig it.

18. France - Barbara Pravi - Voilà - Lovely chanson right here. I wish it didn't take forever to pick up, though. I was about to completely give up on this song in the middle of my first listen. I'm glad I didn't.

17. Belgium - Hooverphonic - The Wrong Place - Classy. Not much else to say.

16. Ukraine - Go-A - Shum - I'd definitely go rave to this song. I kept finding this song hard to rank due to the white voice. I couldn't decide if I absolutely adored it or if I found it grating. Maybe I just wasn't feeling well when I first thought about it.

15. Lithuania - The Roop - Discoteque - Lots of fun, doesn't have the charm that On Fire had last year. I would dance to this song.

14. Poland - RAFAŁ - The Ride - I actually kinda like this song???? Even with Rafal's vocals??? I know he has political controversies, but I can't help but think this song is nice. A better, less controversial singer would benefit this song, though. I'm not counting the revamp just yet since it was released too recently.

13. Latvia - Samanta Tīna - The Moon Is Rising - This song gives me nostalgic mid to late 2000s hip hop vibes. The guitars in this song are lovely.

12. Romania - ROXEN - Amnesia - Definitely something that can put me in a trance if I'm in the right mood.

11. Czechia - Benny Cristo - omaga - Nice, catchy, I would dance to this.

10. Malta - Destiny - Je Me Casse - Damn, Destiny has a lovely voice! And the song itself is wonderful. I'm not a fan of the amount of Swedish talent being used instead of Maltese talent, but I really do enjoy listening to this.

9. Denmark - Fyr og Flamme - Øve Os På Hinanden - another really fun song! This really grew on me. Nowadays if I want to listen to a Eurovision song, this is one of the first songs I think of.

8. The Netherlands - Jeangu Macrooy - Birth of a New Age - I can vibe with this. You can hear the passion in this song. I wish I could let my body do the talking right now, but y'all can't see that with just a tumblr text post.

7. Russia - Manizha - Russian Woman - I was NOT expecting this to come out of Russia when it won the national final. I wasn't expecting to like this either. The message is great, the instrumental is great, everything about this is brilliant.

6. United Kingdom - James Newman - Embers - A funky song. I LOVE James's voice. Massive upgrade from last year in my opinion. I'm a sucker for brass in an upbeat song. Unfortunately, I have had the staging kinda spoiled and I am VERY skeptical about this coming out of bottom five. I'm done with the BBC.

5. Australia - Montaigne - Technicolour - There is a Lot happening in this song and I am all in for it. I'm kinda terrible at parsing lyrics, but it's a non-issue when I can follow Montaigne's voice and forget about the lyrics. Ironically enough, it's Montaigne's voice that also worries me this Eurovision season - mostly whether she was able to pull off her live on tape performance off.

4. Iceland - Daði og Gagnamagnið - 10 Years - I didn't think Daði could pull it off against this year, but he did it. I like this just a little more than Think About Things, which was my favorite song last year. I'm still a little gutted that this pandemic robbed him of a probable victory, but I've made peace with it. I still need to learn the dance moves, though.

3. Italy - Måneskin - Zitti E Buoni - FUCK YEAH A KICKASS ROCK SONG IN EUROVISION! This song gave me massive rock en español vibes on my fist listen, and honestly this is something I would bang my head to if I had the same body I did when I was 15.

2. Norway - TIX - Fallen Angel - I was not expecting to like this song much, let alone becoming THIS obsessed with TIX. In fact, he wasn't even on my radar for winning MGP. I listened to Ut Av Mørket for the first time and thought something like 'this is boring af, but at least it's in Norwegian'. And then he changed it to English, which I wasn't a fan of at first. And then one day the lyrics clicked - especially with my own struggles with mental illness. To this day this is one of only two Eurovision songs to actually make me cry. Even now he still isn't my MGP winner (that honor goes to JORN), but he has definitely won my heart.

1. Finland - Blind Channel - Dark Side - To say that this song kicks ass would be an understatement for me. This song has just the right mix of rock, pop, and even metal. Ever since I found out that this song would be in the national final, I knew that it would be my favorite this whole Eurovision season regardless of who won UMK. Yes, my jaw dropped when I saw the lead Blind Channel had in UMK. I literally cancelled my plans to watch the MGP final live because of these guys. I am not disappointed. Even Måneskin couldn't bring these guys down in my ranking. And while the lyrics might be a bit iffy, they did get me through rough times. I hope these guys are able to bring rock music back like they want to. But for now, I will give them my (useless tbh) douze points.

[m00nlitknight]

Hello. I really like your previous works. Can I make request, please? Reader's been in relationship with whole gang for a couple of months. Everything was ok but Henry got jealous and started to ruin her relationship with rest of the gang distancing her from them.

ofc!! ✨  i don’t know if im really happy where i left off with this, so if you’re interested i could potentially make a part two?  i’m pretty happy with some parts of it ngl, but that might be my 4am brain talking lol;;

warnings:  usages of slurs / degrading terms ( light, but still present ).  mentions of frick fracking.  possessive behavior.  none else to really talk about. pairing:  poly!bowers gang x reader / henry bowers x reader extra ( edit ):  feel free to look through my masterlist for other bower’s gang/reader works, and have a fantastic day!

vindictive.

The relationship with the infamous Bowers’ Gang began in what you could only describe as a fictional scenario.  You’d always been known as one of the kindest individuals in your classes, a large soul and absolutely heart-warming and dazzling smile.  The reputation, though humbling on the darkest of evenings, felt strenuous to keep up.  It was suffocating, sometimes, when you wanted nothing more than to fade in the scenery, or to say no to a request from someone.  Being the school doormat gave you an easy pass to adoration, but a hard road to doing whatever anyone wanted.

That’s what confused you about the sudden interest of the gang.  Sure, you had been paired up once or twice with them for class projects, shouldered the entirety of the workload; but everytime they hardly batted an eye your way.  Except for Vic, but he always seemed to be a bit more socially adept then the other three.  So it was only fitting that the initial interest came from him, one day after your shared class he approached you, and asked if you’d ever want to hang out.

Obviously, you said yes, and reaped the immediate consequences.  Practically the next day after his query, people began to look at and treat you differently.  No longer was there an affectionate warmth in their gaze, reserved exclusively for you, instead replaced with a brief flash of fear before morphing into a bout of confusion for how to tread the situation.  You didn’t mind it, or at least on the surface you didn’t.  The validation found in your peers suddenly being ripped from your grasp was a bit whiplash inducing, not that you could really do anything about it.

The initial hangout, which you look back at fondly as your first actual date, was a casually dressed affair.  He took you to get milkshakes, which you indulged in the city’s center and poked fun at the Paul Bunyan statue, then took you to go thrift shopping.  It was that day you’d found your new favorite sweater, called ‘hideous’ on many occasions by the likes of your mother and peers, and a cute denim skirt.

It didn’t take long for Henry himself to nearly shoehorn himself into your relationship with Vic, apparently prompting Belch to ambush the two of you on your second date.  The Trans-Am’s engine was unbearably loud, coming up behind the two of you holding hands as Henry hollered something you couldn’t quite make out.

Five months down the line, and half-way through Junior year, a heartfelt outpour from the entire gang; and suddenly you’d become the apple of all of their eyes, so to speak.  Most of the time, your interactions were soft with all the boys, cuddled up with them all -- your personal favorite being Belch, he knew just the position for you to be putty in your hands; Patrick on the other hand did everything in his power to make you squirm while in his grasp.  He’d simply cackle at your protests of his wandering hands, then proceed to mock the tone of your voice.

Though, from the sidelines, you were mostly able to ignore the fiery glares thrown by Henry.  No matter how much attention you gave him, how many times you’d let him leave unsolicited hickies on your neck in plain sight to be hidden from your mother, or held him after a rough night.

He’d never said thank you or praised you for anything, which left you devoid of where you stood with him.  If he hated you, would you even be around the other three?  Wouldn’t he have been completely blunt and outright with it?  The creeping worry manifesting itself in your gut grew with time, and with time you began to give him more of your attention to try and sedate it.

Inside the labyrinth of his mind, Henry’s opinion of you began as negative -- the ambushing of your and Vic’s date was a stunt to try and drive you away from the gang in entirety.  But you just came the fuck back.  Loyalty was written all over your features, as was inexperience.  With time, the faint flame of interest that licked the recesses of his mind fanned themselves into a stronger blaze, and suddenly the shared attention you had been giving the gang was like gasoline.

He played himself off as distant, instead replying to the work you put in with brief hand holds or an arm thrown around your shoulders to show possessiveness around school.  Being calculating obviously wasn’t his thing, nor was being patient.

He took your first kiss, and one of his first, one night while alone with you, the second month into the relationship.  Pussyfooting around the more carnal aspects of a relationship wasn’t something he typically found himself doing, but he knew that Vic or Belch would have his head if he rushed things too fast.  In the end, though, it drove him to wanting more.

Physical affection was kept behind closed doors, and he couldn’t be sure that your intimacy was only reserved for him, considering you never sported any other markings or called out the name of any of the other members while you were with him.  It inflated his ego to astronomical levels, and it killed him that he couldn’t flaunt it in his friend’s faces.

Regardless, he wanted you to himself and himself alone.

-----------

“Good morning!” your voice cut through the mid-morning drowsiness of the boys sitting in the parked Trans-Am on the curb in front of your home with steely sharpness, but a welcome smile finds its way onto Belch’s face.

“Morning, gorgeous,” he says from the driver’s seat.  “Hop in.”

“Can do!”  your morning pep leads to a foot on the tire and hauling yourself into the car by means of the roof, and plopping directly in Patrick’s lap - eliciting a hearty grunt and smirk from the boy.

“You’re awfully full of life this morning, feels shameful to waste this energy on something so innocent as breakfast,” he all but purrs as he tugs you further into his grasp while the car lurches forward and en route to the typical Saturday-morning hangout spot.

“Ew, Pat,” Vic cringes over to his friend and you, true malicious intent absent.  “It’s fucking brunch time, let ‘em wake up first, will you?”

His question is answered by a cheeky nip to your neck, causing you to squeal.

In the front seat, Henry broods silently.  On the radio plays one of Belch’s cassettes which goes unlistened, and a favorite of his; ...And Justice for All by Metallica.  The playful tone of your voice and Patrick’s advancements manage to leave a sour taste in his mouth, even though he made the extra effort to brush his teeth this morning.

The meal goes relatively uneventful, though your wandering eyes, half-lidded and vixen-esque, irritate him further.  Vic has an arm around your waist, and Belch holding an unoccupied hand under the table.  If he’d thought any better, Patrick was all but devouring you from across the table.  It was an affection-filled scene, which made the poor diner waitress visibly uncomfortable.

After breakfast, Belch drops both you and Henry off at your home, currently unoccupied by your mother who has work.  “Bye, we’ll be seeing you guys later!”

“Henry, be nice to ‘em, will ya?”  Belch booms from the window, around Patrick climbing into the front seat like an animal.

His request is met with a smirk from Henry, who pulls you into a passionate but short kiss in front of the trio.  “As nice as I can be.”

It leaves you immediately flustered and giggling as you’re pulled into your own home and leaving the other three in a vague state of confusion.  The engine faded away in the distance as you moved toward your house, a mess of giggles, flushed cheeks, and a downcasted gaze.  Henry’s smirk is short-lived as his expression shifts back to neutrality.  He watches you walk through the door and shift to the side to take off your shoes, opting to keep his own on.  The brief and blissful silence is broken by his voice, laced with the undeniable edge of his ire.  “Who’s your favorite?”

The question hangs in the air, souring the atmosphere directly as it leaves his mouth.  You freeze at the words, mid finangling your shoe off as you turn to look at him with a confused, and slightly hurt, expression.  “Huh?”

“Don’t play fuckin’ stupid.  Who’s your favorite?”  He takes a step towards you, which you subconsciously shrink back from.

“I-I don’t have one?”

“God, maybe y’are fuckin’ stupid.  There’s four of us and y’mean t’tell me not ‘a one of us sticks out more than the others?”

A blush spreads across your features, an involuntary testament to your unease and outright lie.  Your eyes dart to look anywhere but him as your body betrays you, petrified in intimidation.  “You,” murmur with a gentle voice and laced with a lack of thinking.

He leans down to your mouth, quickly overtaking your personal space and invading your nostrils with his scent -- cheap body spray and masculinity.  It’s nearly intoxicating.  “What was that?”

“You,” an utterance with little more force, the action of taking a lungful of air simply too strenuous.

“Mind tellin’ me why I feel the least love then?”

You almost want to deflate at it, even if the hands wrapping around your shoulder feel like nothing short of a tender moment.  All the time you’d spent with him, all that you’d given to him, and he still felt overshadowed?

“I…”

“Or, is it jus’ that you’re an attention-seeking slut?”  The words cut deeper then he’s capable of understanding, and the sick smile curling onto his lips and the whispered tone feel vastly different then what he’s actually saying.

You’re rendered speechless as he takes you closer to the couch, dragging you into a straddling position on him.  “Show me what I was missin’ at brunchfast then, huh?”

Wide-eyed and bashful you stare.  What are you even supposed to do?  He leans into you, peppering your throat with kisses while his hands wander up and down your sides.  Instinctively, your hands move to run through his hair and he nearly purrs at the contact and looks up at you with an intense, baby-blue gaze.

“Who’s your favorite?”

“You,” sighed out as he starts sucking on your neck and rubbing at your hips.

“Say it,”  a rough voice reverbs through him from his chest, and he relishes in the affection of your gentle hands.  You’re his.  His.

“You’re my favorite, Henry,” your voice tightens when he starts to suck on your collarbone.

---------

He’d managed to cut your afterglow short in the early evening, badgering you to call Belch and tell him not to drive you to school for the next week.  You did it, albeit with a bit of confusion, and feeling vague sadness when Belch’s tone took a nose-dive into disappointment when the subject of the call was revealed. For the next week, you couldn’t look any of the gang in the eye, instead taking to marinate in your own shame and blatantly avoid them.

[reblogthiscrapkay]

Review Of My 2020 New Year’s Resolutions/2021 Resolutions

I had said last year that my resolutions seemed like softball challenges, which is kind of wild when you think about it now. On the one hand, the pandemic made some things really easy and other things really hard. 

* Read 20 more of my own books. Soft Pass. Very soft pass. I only manage to pass this if I include books I purchased this year in addition to ones I already had (I bought like eight and have read six of those). I read a LOT though, particularly because of quarantine. The problem with how I’ve been judging my reading became really apparent this year when I had all the time to actually accomplish this task. In addition to this ongoing resolution, I also have a tendency to set a very high number of books to read each year on Goodreads (often 60) and it has become clear that this is leading to me prioritizing short books, whether mine or not. As such, I’ve decided this year that I will need to revise this to reducing my book read list to 75 from its current 100 with my Goodreads goal at  no more than 30. * Watch all the important movies of 2019 and keep that movie list under control. Pass. This resolution is definitely here to stay.  * Watch a new television show. Pass. Early on in quarantine I watched “The Ancient Magus Bride” and I loved it. I read the manga series too. And although they don’t totally count as much, I also watched a bunch of miniseries (”When They See Us,” “Cults & Extreme Beliefs,” “Tiger King,” “Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult,” “Alias Grace,” and “The Queen’s Gambit”). * Purge that list of music I need to look into by either deleting it or looking into it. Reduce unlistened to music list down to a page. Pass + Soft Pass. This resolution would have probably never happened so successfully had it not been for quarantine. I purged the list completely and found a ton of great new music from it. When it comes to reducing down my music list to a page, I came as close as I think I was ever going to reasonably get. In addition to the TONS of new albums I got, for the first time I listened to 45 albums I already owned. Now I have a better idea of my actual capabilities with this one and can revise my resolution accordingly. * Run at least four times a week. Preferably five. Neutral. I started this year excellently and was even losing weight at the beginning of quarantine, but like last year school starting and the weather getting colder has lead to me really falling off the wagon. I have a plan though. * Go to a new country I haven’t been to. Preferably two. Also, somewhere new in America. Pass. The fact that I managed to do this is honestly lucky as all hell. I went to Savannah in January and South Africa in February. Then the world ended and we can’t go anywhere. Over the summer I went to Lake George and Acadia National Park for the first time so I even managed to get in some new travel in spite of the pandemic. Again, I was very lucky. * Make another step forward with my book. Fail. I haven’t even been able to think about this. Artistically, I have written a lot of poems and I did do a painting in April, but I’ve been pretty creatively stunted.  * Get okay.  Fail. But I think everyone else is right there with me. I am definitely ending this year even worse than last year. 2021 RESOLUTIONS * Reduce “Want To Read” list down to 75. * Watch all the important movies of 2020 and keep that movie list under control. * Watch “Peaky Blinders.” * Listen to 50 albums I already own. * Run at least four times a week. Preferably five. * Go to at least two new places within pandemic restrictions. * Do that ocean painting for the dining room. * Make another step forward with my book. * Get okay. 

[grimelords]

There is no limit to how many good songs exist! There are just so many!

My June playlist is finished, and on time too! Please enjoy all manner of bangers from Dave Brubeck, Nelly Furtado and everyone in between.

listen here

Night And Day - Hot Chip: I’ve started a band with some friends and my friend Tiana (who has requested a special shoutout in this playlist and is currently receiving it!) suggested this as a song for us to learn and she was extremely right to do it! It’s extremely funky and probably the most i’ve ever liked Hot Chip because they’ve finally allowed themselves to be emotional and feel the most important emotion of all: horniness.

Infinity Guitars - Sleigh Bells: The other day a friend of mine said ‘hey whatever happened to Sleigh Bells?’ and guess what: they have five albums and continue to release new music as recently as last year. They seem to steadfastly refuse to advance their sound and you’ve got to give them props for that. When nobody else sounds anything like you the smartest thing you can do is double down on your own weird thing. I’ve always loved this song and am totally enamoured by whatever mixing trick it is that enables this song to start loud as fuck and somehow finish even louder no matter what volume you play it at.

Hurricane - Bob Dylan: I haven’t watched the Rolling Thunder Revue thing on Netflix yet but I’m excited to because this is a good Dylan era and I’m always down for more footage of the world’s freak Bobby D acting like a maniac. This song is a good example of how have no control over how music is consumed once you release it because this is ostensibly a serious and angry protest song about a great injustice but my greatest memory of it is for at least a month when I was in boarding school a guy in my dorm would play it every morning super loud and we would all yell the words along as we were getting dressed. Having a great time being fifteen and yelling happily about a miscarriage of justice.

Grindin' - Clipse: I started putting together a playlist of songs with super minimal or no pitched instrumentation that almost totally rely on the percussion and the vocals to carry it. Basically the Pharrell special because he did it on this and Drop It Like It’s Hot and I’m sure more songs of his I haven’t heard yet. But also songs like Lipgloss by Lil Mama, Fix Up Look Sharp by Dizzee Rascal, Tipsy By J-Kwon (almost if it didn’t have the baseline) and The Whisper Song by The Ying Yang Twins. There’s heaps more I’m sure. It was a real minimal style for a little while in the mid 2000s and I think it’s great. It gives you so much space in the mix and it’s a great lesson: if the beat is hot enough and you’ve got enough charisma to carry the vocal you don’t need anything else at all.

Rock Lobster - The B-52's: Did you know the guitar in this is tuned CFFFFF? Did you know this song is nearly 7 minutes long? Did you know The B-52s had a hit with this and then didn’t have another hit until Love Shack fully ten years later? Truly everything about this song is insane.

Johnny Irony - Bad//Dreems: I think ‘are you bleeding?’ is my favourite bit of pre-song hot mic dialogue i’ve ever heard. I love the energy of this song, and what a fun throwback it is to I guess reference Lead Belly’s ancient song about doing cocaine Take A Whiff On Me for a new modern twist on a song about doing cocaine.

Girls On Film - Duran Duran: Have you ever noticed how the bass in this song is absolutely popping off? It rocks. I listened to just the isolated bass track on youtube the other day and it’s my new favourite song. I’m having a big moment with this early eighties art-funk thing where someone figured out you could put huge funky basslines into rock music and completely changed the game.  

Love - Lana Del Rey: I figured out this month that my vocal range seems to be just Lana Del Rey but an octave lower which is absolutely great news for anyone that wants to hear me sing this song in a cowboy voice in my car.

Want You In My Room - Carly Rae Jepsen: I am absolutely in love with this song and also absolutely furious at it. Absolutely in love with the way it’s written like a duet with herself, trading lines and overlapping and harmonising. The big ascending guitar line that leads into the chorus. I love how horny the lyrics are, I love the very 80s robot voice in the chorus who also wants to fuck. It’s just phenomenal, which brings me to the the think that makes me so furious: this song just fades out? After the second chorus just as the saxophone comes in? Just as it’s getting good???

Genevieve (Unfinished) - Jai Paul: It's just unbelievable how good this sounds. The bass sound. The way the whole mix seems to float around. The cuts to silence that feel like someone took a razor randomly to the master. It all culminates in this frenetic nervous energy that feels like the song could just fall apart and stop at any point. And it does! It just fades to silence and then comes back in as a totally different song near the end before fading away again.

Elephant Talk - King Crimson: King Crimson is on Spotify now and I’m comically striking them off my list of Bands I Have A Grudge Against For Not Being On Spotify. It’s always kind of surprised me that for someone who loved The Mars Volta as much as I did I never really had a big King Crimson phase. I always liked them fine, and I love this song, but I never really sat down and gave them a proper listen. Maybe now they’re on streaming that’s all about to change and my girlfriend will have to suffer accordingly.

Kids In The Dark - Bat For Lashes: Very excited for Bat For Lashes next album if this is an indication of the direction. She's always had a very hazy 80s feeling, so purposefully leaning into it is only going to be great.

CHORDS For Organ - Ellen Arkbro: My favourite lady is back with 15 minutes of rock solid chords. Something I've been thinking recently in regards to Ellen Arkbro and Holly Herndon is people who make pretentious art unpretentiously, truly believing in their process and outcomes but very aware  of and fine with the fact that it's silly, useless or unlistenable to anyone who's not interested. Ellen Arkbro posted a photo of an organ on instagram the other day and wrote "turned out this was one of the biggest instruments in berlin and it was also connected up to two other organs in the same space. Despite that I ended up playing an extremely quiet version of my music. I don't really know how that happened. I will play a louder version in st giles cripple gate in london this saturday if you're around" She posts like Courtney Barnett about her experimental organ drone music, I just love it. As for the music itself I don't really know how to explain this other than if you let it it can be extremely overwhelming. It's also the closest I've come musically to Malevich's Black Square and how I feel about that, which is hard to explain properly other that to say I love it.

SWIM - Holly Herndon: I'm obsessed with this Holly Herndon album. It's just amazing though I think the marketing and a lot of the writing about it is sort of.. misleading? There's a lot of emphasis being put on the machine learning and AI aspects of it, which as undoubtedly good and cool as they are, are sort of overshadowing what's so good about this in a simple way which is that it's just choral music for the future. It feels like it reaches so far back and so far forward at the same time it's incredible.

Too Real/Television Screens - Fontaines D.C.: I really had to stop myself from putting the whole Fontaines DC album on here because quite literally every single song on this is amazing. Just when you think guitar music is well and truly dead it pulls you back in!! Also the way he says 'aaa' at the start of Too Real just absolutely kills me.

Dangerous Match Ten - Scientist: I forget where I read it but some bass player was saying she learned to play by listening to Scientist albums, and so that made me listen to Scientist for the first time and go on a long dub trail and have a very good and dangerous day where I thought “..what if I become a dub guy?”. It’s very good. I don’t know anything about dub really, we don’t really have the jamaican population here for it to have any cultural currency like it does in america and the UK so my biggest exposure is the Dub radio station from GTA III and San Andreas which I’m now learning was mostly made up of Scientist songs anyway. Anyway dub is good, please keep an eye one me and watch as this playlist evolves into me becoming an evangelical dub guy over the next few months and start calling everyone m’brethren in a racist way.

Lipitor - Longmont Potion Castle: Lipitor. This is unfortunately unavailable on Australian spotify which is a crime but if you're from anywhere else please enjoy.

A Lot’s Gonna Change/ Andromeda - Weyes Blood: I am having such a time with this Weyes Blood album. Yesterday I spent all day playing A Lot’s Gonna Change over and over and over and today I spent all day listening to Andromeda over and over and learning how to play it. I suspect this will happen to me with the entire album, it has a complete hold over me.

I’ve listened to Weyes Blood before and she’s never really grabbed me and so it took a lot of people rhapsodising about this one to get me to give it a go and I’m so glad I finally did. This album really took me by surprise, and looking back now I love the development of her sound: from her original spacy noisy thing to the bonafide soft rock of Front Row Seat To Earth to this - an expensive sounding 70s singer songwriter pop album of absolutely devastating beauty and inventiveness.

Wasting My Young Years - London Grammar: I think what's so interesting about this song is that it sounds like an acoustic cover of a trance song. I don't really know how to explain it better than that. The way the deceptively fast four on the floor drums come in, the sort of adult-contemporary The XX instrumentation, the whole structure of it, it feels like a BBC Live Lounge cover of some forgotten rave classic. I love it regardless but it's an odd song as well.

Left Hand - Beast Coast: Beast Coast is lames and I didn't make it more that halfway through the album. On the fourth song there's a verse where one of these guys is doing that rap thing of talking way to graphically about eating pussy. He says lick lick lick it's gross. Anyway this song rocks though. The beat is that perfect mix of hard as hell and a little bit spooky and I love any song where one million guys do like four lines each.

Hung Up - Madonna: In the wake of not listening to Madame X I've been reflecting on how it's been 15 years since Madonna's last true banger, Hung Up, and in my opinion she's a legend forever for this song alone. Do you remember the Madonna x Gorillaz performance at the 2006 Grammys? Where she walked BEHIND the hologram? She still has so much to teach us. 

Never Fight A Man With A Perm - IDLES: I love just how purely sweaty man muscle this song is. 'concrete to leather' are you kidding me?? That's the coolest shit I've ever heard. 'You look like you're from Love Island' also quite good.

Speakers Going Hammer - Soulja Boy: I was listening to this the other day and had to keep stopping and rewinding because of how advanced the flow is when he says 'Style swift hot like it's July 10th/Fly chick in my whip with nice tits/Her boyfriend paid for it, I didn't" he's like five minutes in front of the beat and combined with the internal assonance it just sounds sick as hell.

African Woman - Ebo Taylor: Man goes ham on toy piano must see

(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone - The Monkees: My friend Tiana (who I've mentioned twice now!) came to band practice and said she saw The Monkees last night. I thought no, that's impossible. The Monkees are all long dead, forgotten legends from a forgotten age. BUT I was wrong! Michael Nesmith and Micky Dolenz, the surviving Monkees tour to this day! And she introduced me to this great song which we learned for the band! Monkees forever!

Whoo! Alright! Yeah! .. Uh Huh - The Rapture: Somehow as time goes on this song becomes more and more important to me and more and more groovy.I used to think life’s a bitter pill but it’s a grand old time. Now that’s wisdom.

World Of Stone/Loinclothing - Hunters And Collectors: I've been getting very heavily into early Hunters And Collectors over the last couple of months.  I think I put Loinclothing on last months playlist as well but fuck it, it's great. It's so primal and raw it feels like the first caveman who learned to talk fronting a band of cavemen who sing songs about caveman issues and passion. I love the incredibly wide open sound the drums and bass have and the fidgety guitar combined with the unhinged vocals creates this really unique ambience of menace and power without ever getting particularly busy and losing the spaciousness. Feels like yelling about monkeys on a wide open desert plain.

Coisa No. 10 - Marcello Gonçalves and Anat Cohen: I found this song ages ago on ABC Jazz I think, and I absolutely love the intricacies of it. It twists and folds in on itself over and over and over without ever losing the groove or relaxing into anything easy. There's so much tension in it even though the melody and groove are so fun, it's a great mix. I also found out it's from an album that's a tribute to someone I'd never heard of before named Moacir Santos, so I got the great joy of discovering his music via this song as well.

Monologue/Nana - Moacir Santos: Moacis Santos, as I understand it, was one of Henry Mancini's film composition assistants and also the guy that taught all the Boss Nova geniuses like Sergio Mendes. I love this Monologue where he tells the story of a mystical vision that inspired this song, which you assume being inspired by a vision would be of mythical importance and weight and but instead sounds like the theme to a cartoon about a grandma who has superpowers.

Weird People - Little Mix: I need more info about the identity of the robot voice in this song. What is his relationship to the singer. He starts off antagonistic: “get off the wall” then commenting on what happened to her: “fell off the wall” then just echoing her: “on the other side” then becoming her “i’m living my life”. It’s complicated and hard to explain but I believe the robot voice in this song is god. Anyway this song is a masterpiece. It’s an incredibly goofy and great piece of 80s revival that imagines a glorious alternate future where Oh Yeah by Yello is the template for all pop music.

3 Legged Dog - Marisa Anderson: Marisa Anderson used to write songs with words here and there among her instrumentals but it seems that over the last couple of albums she’s decided to stick to instrumentals only which I think is a shame. She’s obviously brilliant at it but I’d hate to be missing out on beautiful little slices like this. I love how small time this song is, it feels like a song you’d sing to yourself more than a song for anyone else.

Nighttime Suite - Adam Gnade & Demetrius Francisco Antuña: Adam Gnade is a guy I’ve been following for about ten years now who seems determined to stay obscure. He self-releases all his stuff in limited editions or on cassettes, some of my favourite things he’s ever done don’t seem to be available anywhere digitally any more (if they ever were). I remember years ago he seemed hard up for cash and he ran a deal on his website called a ‘lifetime subscription’ where if you sent him I think $100 he would send you everything he’s ever done AND would continue to send you everything he made in the future for the rest of his life. It was absolutely great, I would get CD-Rs and tapes and zines and things delivered randomly to my mailbox every so often for a couple of years and they were all fantastic. I guess at some point my lifetime subscription lapsed because he’s released a bunch of stuff I haven’t heard or read but that’s ok, you shouldn’t be able to buy someone’s eternal soul for $100.

Adam Gnade has developed his own style of folk music where he just recites a sort of prose poetry over music and it’s incredible. In the hands of anyone else it could feel overly pretentious, and he pretty often rides that line. He’s reaching for a sort of poet laureate of Americana ideal but very often he actually grabs it. His writing is great and magnifies the minor details of normal life into larger symptoms of the American mindset, like depression-era songs of marginalised and exploited people individualised and updated for the modern era. Most of the time he backs himself on a lazily strummed guitar or banjo and his music sounds like sitting on the front step or laying down in the tall grass, but for this song he’s teamed up with Demetrius Francisco Antuña for some real Godspeed feeling dark soundscapes and it’s really something.

We Are The Same - Lurch And Chief: I think it's a damn shame that Lurch And Chief broke up before they even put an album out because this song is a damn classic and I have begun praying every day for the return of Lurch and/or Chief. I love a big voice and there's two distinctly huge voices in this song fighting for position.

983/Near DT, MI - Black Midi: Fucking hell I love this Black Midi album. I'm so, so glad it exists. It feels like the next generation of the Slint Hella, Tera Melos etc lineage of math rock and I simply can't get enough of it. Pump it directly into my veins I'm obsessed with it.

Take Control - Amerie: I just screamed out loud in my car hearing this song for the first time because it samples Jimmy, Renda Se by Tom Zé one of my absolute favourite songs ever. And samples it amazingly, totally transforms it into something new while keeping the spirit of the original. Do you ever feel like a song was just made for you personally? It’s a very kind thing of my vlogger wife Amerie to do for me but I guess that’s just how she is. Also, thanks to Spotify’s new feature where you can see the actual credits for songs I got to find out that Hall And Oates are credited on this because it basically interpolates the the whole verse melody from You Make My Dreams Come True which I didn’t even realise until I looked up why they were credited.

Unsquare Dance - Dave Brubeck: Dave Brubeck's brain is huge. I can't belive it's possible to make 7/4 this funky. How come nobody else ever ripped off this rhythm? It deserves to be a whole genre. I also totally love the piano solo near the end where it turns into like a funky 7/4 stride and then abruply ends with a shave and haircut like it's 1925.

Suddenly - French Vanilla: Get a load of this fucking slice of dance punk that Discover Weekly served me up. I haven't even listened ot the album yet because I just love this song so much I'm stuck on it. Singing "I like the nightlife! I'm in the spotlight!" like you're being hunted with a knife? Incredible. The impromptue glossolalia about halfway through? Incredible. Everything about the saxophone? Incredible

Maneater - Nelly Furtado: There's nothing deft or subtle about Timbaland. Everything he does is just so heavy handed and thick. The drums in this are so straightforward and they sound like garbage cans.. Nothing ever plays at he same time as anything else . It's like a gorilla learned to play and it's absolutely fucking sick. And then the whole rest of the song! His insanely thick buzzy synth lines against the big beautifully stack clean harmonies

I, The Witchfinder - Electric Wizard: I've been getting back into Skyrim because I have a little worm living in my brain and I've discovered a good trick is to turn off the game music and turn on Electric Wizard instead. It increases the ambience because it feels like if you did an x-ray of the Dragonborn's head this is all that would be in there. It's just stoner metal in there and no other thoughts.

Music Sounds Better With You - Stardust: Can you believe how lucky we are to live in a world where the greatest song ever written is finally available on spotify? You can just listen to this any time of the night or day and immediately improve your life.

Don’t Chew - Spilled Oats: Here’s a very good and underexplored idea: what if guitar music but it sounds like chopped and screwed? Absolutely dynamite.

 As an extra bonus treat here the absolute best ever chopped and screwed channel I’ve found on youtube, please explore Scobed & Robed: https://www.youtube.com/user/scottalexanderburton

listen here

[nightcoremoon]

i only like pop music when I can choose to hear it.

if rock's on, I'm on board. even if nickelback or creed is playing and I fucking hate them both.

if metal's on, I'm on board, as long as it's metal and not grindcore or deathblast or djentfuck or whatever the fuck else 4chan is concocting in their parents' basements.

if r&b's on, and I mean real r&b and not just "cishet male literal sex predators are sad", I'm on board.

if jazz is on, I'm on board, and I'm not even the biggest fan of jazz.

if classical music is on, I'm on board- I'm just so goddamn sick of vivaldi's spring, beethoven's symphony number five, bach's toccatta and fugue, pachelbel's canon in D, and liszt's hungarian rhapsody. THEY HAVE OTHER SONGS, GUYS.

if opera is on, I'm on board, just as long as it's not just fucking one of three ave marias by andrea bocelli. there's more opera artists than bocelli and there's mores songs besides ave maria.

I think you can see where this is going.

if rap is on, I'm on board, as long as it's not just fucking Drake Drake Drake Drake Tyga Drake. they're not even good rappers ASIDE from being two steps from pedophiles. give me wu tang, tribe, roots, nwa, public enemy, kid cudi, wiz, biggie, tupac, outkast, kurupt, beasties, jay, bone thugs, busta, eminem, nas, nate, luda, cypress hill, childish gambino, tech 9, snoop, give me real rap with meaning, feeling, flow, cultural impact, bass, clever lyrics, RHYTHM.

if country is on, well, if it's pre-9/11 i'm on board but if it's post-9/11 then fucking kill me. because post-9/11 country music is glorified pop with subliminal fascist ultranationalism and commercializations for alcoholism and cars. except for lil nas x and probably a small handful of others I don't know or care to know because I don't give a fuck about country music.

if punk's on and it's real punk I'm on board but not if it's just nasally white boys crying over an ex girlfriend or ugly british men with bad hair because THATS NOT WHAT PUNK IS. black flag, bad religion, bad brains, jack off jill, ice t, cromags, poison idea, rancid, misfits, against me, nofx, even sum 41, green day, offspring, and four year strong have redeeming qualities. but plain white tees, all american rejects, all time low, mayday parade, ramones, sex pistols, simple plan those are just pop groups who play four chords kinda fast, maybe yell sometimes. and while I do like songs by these bands, they are essentially pop, not punk.

if grunge is on and I mean like alice in chains (not rooster) or soundgarden (not black hole sun) or nirvana (not literally half of nevermind) or stone temple pilots or mudhoney or mother love bone (oh yeah and pearl jam is there too but honestly pearl jam is overrated, mike and eddie were way better in mad season, temple, and all the other configurations) then I'm on board. even if it's A- tier grunge like pumpkins, bush, live, spacehog, screaming trees, melvins, silverchair, veruca salt, l7, meat puppets, blind melon, local h, which isn't AS good but it still quality music made outside of commercialized bullshit which is what grunge was created to ESCAPE FROM after england fucking ruined metal in the 80s with hairspray and leather taking precedence over the actual music itself.

wait look commercialization ruined metal and grunge and punk and r&b and rap and country. I wonder why that is-

The Fucking Pop Music Industrial Complex.

so, look. there's a lot of music I don't know. I couldn't tell you billy eyelash from lil rubber ducky. maybe they're amazing and maybe they're not. I'm not gonna talk shit about modern music or pop music or anything. my problem is I can't go anywhere without hearing katy perry or taylor swift or miley cyrus or any number of dumbass inbred white trash idiots, and they all have like 80 songs each on replay. drake and cardi b are the same way, without the inbred and white parts. but they're all still horrible people made worse by $$$. it's a huge circlejerk of millionaires sonically engineering the airwaves to brainwash the masses into the sweet sweet ad revenue from youtube spotify itunes etc. it's made as a product to recycle. "Your style's like garbage cans meant to be taken out on a weekly basis, ever since your first record you've been in a state of suspended animation." There's no artistic integrity in the same song made over and over again except oh this one's about someone breaking up with you over booze and this one's about someone you broke up with because they cheated. 😑

Now I like some music that was made to sell for a product. Backstreet Boys, Nsync, New Kids on the Block, Britney, etc. I like it now 30 years later. Because I can choose to listen to it on my own terms. But I have no control over the shit they play now that's constantly pumped into my ears. It's all the same goddamn drivel and come a decade we're not gonna remember any of it. You know how much terrible music there was in the 50s? The 60s? The 70s 80s 90s and 00s were so full of the worst garbage anyone could ever churn out. Billboard was stocked to the brim with terrible music that nobody recalls and we only remember a tiny portion of it. The top 500 of 1982 is horrible. Even good bands like The Cars had boring unlistenable shit. There was good stuff too like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull and The Who and other bands THAT DIDNT SELL WELL AND WERE PERCEIVED AS FAILURES BY CRITICS IN 1982. It's always been that way. The popular shit is always bad and the good stuff subsists through the popularity to be remembered fondly. Why do you think the 80s are making a huge resurgence right now in meme culture? Because we know that Toto and Men At Work and A-Ha and Depeche Mode and Tears For Fears are actually good no matter how poorly they may have sold back then. But now, post-9/11 with American culture becoming what it is today, it got worse. So much worse. I watched it happen. There's no nostalgia filter here, music just sounds different at its core. The notes themselves affect my ears differently and actually cause pain nowadays. I use the same pair of earbuds and I can listen to stuff from earlier time periods just fine, even if I've never heard it before. But new music now? Either something's different with production and mixing or I just have auditory hallucination issues. Which I don't. I don't even have chronic tinnitus. Something is wrong. And looking at the fossil fuels industry, the software industry, the cinema industry, the automotive industry, the prison industry, politics, social media, and the economy, there's no possible way that everything is just a coincidence.

The things that make money benefit the ones getting that money and hurt everyone else. That includes music.

...

...

...

or maybe pop music just sucks.

[lowplainlowinthemorning]

Omg your tags... Can you talk more about your songwriting pls? I'm at that point now where I'm just trying to finish as many songs as I can, not caring so much abt the quality bc otherwise I will never finish one. I still only have a few, I'm trying to learn the process and what works for me. But it's so encouraging to hear someone else talk abt this like I keep comparing myself to famous ppl I listen to and it feels like they just have a gift and I don't

dude, I have been comparing myself to artists I look up to constantly, ever since I got into music at fourteen, wondering why I’m not good enough. I think it’s normal. The truth is, when you stop listening so much to beginner’s self doubt, perfectionism, and in my case, chronic anxiety, everybody is the same. The people who are really good are really good because they sat down and fucked around with instruments long enough to understand them, the people who are really good are really good because they love what they do, and all of them wrote shitty songs in their late teens/early 20s/whenever they started out. I have(and still do) beat myself up for everything from writing too fast to writing too slow, for taking months long breaks because of mental health issues, for lyrics that my band laughed at, for only knowing how to play one instrument, the list goes on...But I comfort myself with facts like these:

PJ Harvey was asked about her first ever song in an interview from 1995 and that’s the closest I’ve seen her come to blushing; She said it was about a girl going on an adventure and that it was awful. She reiterated in a magazine that most of her earliest work was ‘terrible’ and heavily influenced by Irish folk music, meaning, apparently, that it was full of tin whistles. It took her years before she was comfortable playing her orginal music in front of other people(and if you watch her early Dry performances, she’s not even all that comfortable in the first place.) The important thing is, PJ Harvey hated her early songs.

Nick Cave said that he was ashamed of the Birthday Party’s discography up until Junkyard and that he didn’t like to think about those albums. Nick Cave hated his early songs- And Nick Cave is partially famous DUE to these early songs, go figure.

Courtney Love bashes Hole’s first album Pretty On The Inside nearly constantly, calling it ‘unlistenable’ and saying it was more about her persona being established than making good music. Courtney Love hated her early songs- and, once again, her band was given its name and image because of them.

I BEG you to listen to five seconds of David Bowie’s first album, which he doesn’t discuss.

If these people, who mean the world to me and have saved hoards of others from personal destruction, had given up bc they were Bad at a young and inexperienced age we wouldn’t have their music and it’s not an exaggeration to say that that would have ended in suicide for a big number of people. If you can get your ego in place, you can believe the same about your music, and the thing that’s going to keep you motivated more than anything else is Ego.

We live in a world right now where popular music lacks human hands and clumsiness and rawness and so the fact that both of us are, against the odds, composing music that still reflects those things is a rebellion. It’s important that we keep writing, not just because we deserve to be good songwriters because we care about it, but because for music to evolve there needs to be a constant underground of young people with limited skills trying their best. Plus, if we’re both lucky, we’ll end up saving people the same way we were saved and if it takes a few notebooks of three note trauma songs to get there then fine(besides, who doesn’t love a good three-note trauma song?).

But beyond the ‘glory’ of it(and I think to do anything artistic you have to romanticize it to a certain degree), I started songwriting seriously at the end of a bad relationship when I was sixteen, nearly seventeen. When that relationship ended, I wrote constantly. I wrote about everything. My main influences were Bikini Kill and The Runaways and I hadn’t developed my seriousness towards lyrics yet so anything went. I’d write three songs in a week, realize that two were bad and play the third one for my band only to get laughed at for writing something like “I swallow Clorox” which was a confessional thing about suicidal thoughts that hurt my feelings, but wasn’t articulated well.

I wrote Nirvana knock-off songs and I wrote Hole knock-off songs and I half finished at least one hundred different things and I have three notebooks filled with them, the latter half being the worst fake-Nick Cave writing I have ever read. From all of 2018, during which I probably wrote 30-35 songs, I have two that I would actually put on an album and three that I can remember/still like. Once I got my mental health under control, I did the same thing for the bulk of 2019. This stage you’re at is NOTHING TO FEEL BAD ABOUT. It’s like making stuff out of Play-Doh or fingerpainting. It’s FUN and you’re learning, Extremely Quickly, a million different skills that you’re going to need over the course of your life. Lyric writing, the classic verse/chorus/verse, how to invert that, experimental tactics, particular playing styles that you like, playing styles that you HATE, etc.

And the best part about it is that some of your songs are good! Some of them have good parts that you’ll take out later to put into better songs! You’re probably sitting on two or three good songs at the moment, maybe even more, maybe you’ve got a whole album of brilliant material and you just don’t know it. In thirty years your demos could work like Vashti Bunyan’s and be the proto-whatever of a new genre. I really don’t want to make you think that all your material right now is bad, because that idea has actually been super detrimental to me and is a shitty narrative pushed to push beginners. I’m saying that it’s OKAY for you to be bad, that even experienced people write bad shit, but that if you think you’ve written some bangers they deserve to be recognized as such.

To close, new phase that I was talking about, the quality over quantity phase, is definitely something I had to work up to. 90% of it is taking in enough new music to understand what you really want from yourself, and the rest of it is gaining enough confidence to willingly let other people hear what you do. I only started taking my shit this seriously in late December of last year because I knew people would be hearing it, and that has its set backs too: My perfectionism is crazy right now and I have to kick back against it all the time. The perks of getting to the point where you can hone yourself are that you build real relationships with your songs, and that you have some idea of what you want. But I also think that it’s healthy to go through the quantity over quality phase over and over again throughout the course of your career, because there’s no way to really write in a new style unless you keep going back to frenzied experimentation. If we both end up pursuing this long term, we’ll probably have to work on Finishing over Perfecting a million times over, and its best to make peace with it now.

I am so sorry that this is like. A million paragraphs but another important aspect of songwriting is procrastinating by being on tumblr so!!! You’re doing just fine. Keep up the good work, and feel free to talk to me or share music with me anytime. I hope this helps, or at least isn’t a boring read.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z 138

Last time on Dragon Ball Z, Krillin was alone before the overwhelming might of the artificial humans.  

Piccolo’s sick of the androids beating everyone up and killing Goku and making out with Krillin, and whatever other damn thing they’ve been up to, so he heads to Kami’s Lookout to merge with him.   They used to be one Namekian long ago, until that Namekian purged himself of his latent evil to become Kami.   Said latent evil became King Piccolo, who fathered Piccolo Junior, blah blah blah everyone knows this by now.

Piccolo is pretty blunt about this.    This isn’t a union of equals.  Kami is just going to provide a power-up for Piccolo.  

And it won’t matter much that Kami will be gone, since the only thing he does anymore is sustain the Dragon Balls.  

That’s harsh, but Kami gets it.    The irony is that Kami was once the strongest being on the planet until Goku and Piccolo surpassed him in the final arc of Dragon Ball.   In Dragon Ball Z, he’s been an afterthought.   The other characters have trained and become more and more powerful, but Kami’s probably about the same as he was when he first appeared. 

Meanwhile, even Super Saiyans are helpless against the current crop of androids, so it’s pretty clear that losing Kami to boost Piccolo’s strength would be a bargain.

However, Kami wants to observe the situation more before consenting to the fusion.   This decision will be permanent, and he’s not yet convinced that the androids represent a sufficient threat.    Piccolo finds that insane, because he’s seen how powerful the androids are, and Trunks has told of the devastation they’ve caused in his future.   But Kami reminds Piccolo that his group picked a fight with the androids, and the androids spared their lives anyway.   Trunks himself has admitted that they’re not the same as the ones he fought in the future, so the situation bears watching.

Piccolo is disgusted with Kami’s reluctance to act, so he plops his butt down and waits right there for Kami to make up his mind.   

Meanwhile, Tien heads off to pick up Chiaotzu from Master Roshi’s, while Krillin and Trunks go to relocate Goku to... Master Roshi’s.  I feel like Tien could have just accompanied them.

Meanwhile, at Goku’s house, Yamcha reads one of Goku’s books.   At least, I assume it’s Goku’s, since it’s about punching and kicking.  

Meanwhile, the androids steal a van right in front of the guys who drive it.

Meanwhile, Vegeta’s still mega ultra pissed about losing his fight with 18.  

Meanwhile, a biker gang harasses the androids, who decide to play with them for a bit.   17 hits them with their van, and he drives like a maniac, basically daring the gang to follow them.  

I don’t know what these guys are supposed to be called.    Their leader refers to them as the “Lords of the Highway”, so maybe that’s the name of their gang.   

This whole scene is pretty fun.   There’s like a dozen guys in this gang, and they all look pretty cool.  One of them is a dead ringer for Fangs the Vampire Man from the Fortuneteller Baba Saga.  

This dude looks like Van Zant, the guy who shoots Majin Buu’s dog about a hundred episodes from now.    For all I know he might be Van Zant.  

The main thing about all of this is that the androids do not sweat these guys at all.   At one point 17 drives on railroad tracks towards an oncoming train, then swerves away at the last minute.  

Eventually they get the androids to face them directly, but they can’t hurt them, of course.   Just when it looks like 18 might really get serious, the cops show up, and the gang use that as a handy excuse to withdraw.

Oh, cool they have a girl in the gang.    I didn’t notice her back there.   She kinda looks like Teen Bulma with purple hair.  

Anyway, the police are even more baffled than the gang was.    18 picks up their car and chucks it into a mountain.  

So I’d like to take a moment to talk about the music for this show.    One of the problems people have with the Funimation dub is the fact that they used a different score.    The Ocean dub episodes (1-67), had a truly awful music, composed by Shuki Levy.   The Levy score suuuuuuucked.    I won’t deny that.    Every track sounded the same, and it all kind of sounded like someone was just sort of slapping stuff together to get the episodes ready for broadcast.   This may be the case, since I’m pretty sure the reason Funimation didn’t use the original score was because they didn’t have the rights to use it.   If that’s the case, they were probably in a hurry to get some music laid down as quickly as they could.  When Funimation re-dubbed Episodes 1-66 for the Orange Brick box sets, they used music by Nathan Johnson for the score.   This music is also unlistenable.   

But, from Episodes 68 to 291, Funimation used music composed by Bruce Faulconer, and most of it kicks a lot of ass.    Purists hate it because it’s not the original Japanese score, but Faulconer composed a lot of memorable themes for several characters and situations.   When I watched all of  Dragon Ball from start to finish for the first time in 2009, I watched the English dub with the Japanese score, right up to Episode 67 of Z, and then I immediately switched over to the Faulconer score.    This time, I’m watching it in Japanese, so I don’t really have a choice.   The Orange Brick sets let you chose which score you want when it’s in English, but you can only listen to the Japanese voices with the Japanese score.  

So this is really the first time I’ve watch the show with the Japanese score for the post Ginyu Force episodes.    I’ve heard all this music before, though, because a long time ago I bought a copy of “Dragon Ball Z: BGM Collection,” which is a three-disc album of the original score by Shunsuke Kikuchi.   Disc One has all the stuff used in the first 117 episodes and the first five movies.   Disc Two covers Episodes 118-199 and Movies 6-9.   Disc Three covers the Buu Era and the last four movies.  

Here’s the thing about the original Japanese score for Dragon Ball Z: It’s not that great.    The music itself is fine, on the same quality as the music from the original Dragon Ball.     The problem is that there just isn’t very much of it, and it’s spread very thin.    The three disc set I mentioned isn’t a best-of collection.   It’s the entire score (minus insert songs) for all 291 episodes and 13 movies.   It’s only about three and a half hours’ worth of music.  

To make matters worse, the music isn’t even distributed very evenly across the series.   The movie scrores are fairly long, and these eventually got incorporated into the TV soundtracks, but only after each movie was released.   In other words, the music on the Movie 5 score didn’t start creeping into the anime until well after episode 99.    And for the first 117 episodes, all they use is the music from Disc 1, which is only 70 minutes long.    About half of that is movie scores, the opening and closing themes, and the music they would play during the recap.    That leaves maybe 40 minutes of music that got used across over a hundred episodes.   You want to know what that sounds like?

The video above is Track 14 from Disc One of the BGM Collection.   The title is “ Kyôfu no Ginyū Tokusentai” or “The Fearsome Ginyu Special Corps”.   It’s actually two songs.   The first one is about thirty seconds long, and then at 0:35 the second one starts.   You might assume that one of these songs is used when the Ginyu Force first appears in the show, and you would be correct.    The second, longer portion is played when the Ginyus first arrive on Namek and do their poses for Frieza in Episode 62.  

However, the music was first used in Episode 31, when Goku attacks Vegeta while using the Kaio-ken Times Three.    After that, Toei used it for various tense or exciting moments, or important battles, including:

Vegeta vs. Cui.

Vegeta vs. Dodoria.

Vegeta vs. Tsuno’s village.

Vegeta vs. Zarbon.  

Krillin vs. Dodoria.  

Anybody vs. Anybody.  

Pretty much anything even remotely exciting

No, they basicaly used this music in almost every episode.

The Namek Saga gets pretty dry, music-wise, because by that point, it doesn’t really fit to use a lot of the early tracks that were composed around Gohan training under Piccolo.  At the same time, they didn’t have a lot of movie scores to draw upon either.    So for a long stretch of episodes, the Ginyu Force song was pretty much the go-to music for almost any situation.   I got kind of tired of it, is my point.    It’s a good song, but it wore out its welcome.   

The nice thing about the Androids/Cell phase of DBZ is that now Toei is finally utilizing music from the second disc of the BGM collection, and they have disc one to draw upon as well.    The reason I say all of this here and now is because this episode used the Ginyu Force song once again (for the part where 17 and 18 face the biker gang), but it’s been about twenty or thirty episodes since I hear it last, so it’s not nearly as irritating.   

The point I want to make about the Faulconer score is that Bruce Faulconer actually tailor made some music for this episode.   There’s a song specifically for the androids messing with the biker gang.

Now, it might not make for great listening in your car, because the song keeps switching back and forth between leitmotifs.   The hard, metal sound is the bikers, and the easy-going kettle drums are the androids chillaxing in their pink van.     Then at the end, you get this kind of old timey western saloon music that accompanies the hapless small-town cops who try to handcuff the androids.

But it made for good TV, because the music actually reflected the action happening on the screen.  To be sure, Faulconer would use bits and pieces of tracks like this to score other moments in the show, but they still worked, because he wasn’t just making a one-size-fits-all action song and applying it to every single situation.  

I think it’s telling that Bruce Faulconer’s collection of DBZ music is something like nine discs, and there’s a lot of his score that was never released, and he only did the music for about three-quarters of the show.    I’m not saying you have to prefer his score or even like it, but I think he deserves some respect for the greater variety and depth.    He clearly put more work into making the music work with the footage.  

Moving on, Krillin and Trunks arrive at Goku’s place, and Krillin asks if the androids really are pure evil like Trunks has said.    Trunks assures him that they were terrible in his world.

Of course, Krillin is only asking because the girl android kissed him and he kinda liked it, but he doesn’t want to go and just say that, so he plays down the question.

From there, the boys fill Yamcha and Chi-Chi in on the situation, and then Gohan shows up and they fill him in too, and everyone piles into the air-bus-vehicle thingy to head for Master Roshi’s place.

Now, maybe this is dumb how their big idea is to move Goku to Kame House, since that’s the next place the enemy would think to search.   The thing is, the androids aren’t exactly in a hurry to get to Goku’s house, so it probably doesn’t matter where they hide him as long as they can stay one step ahead until Goku’s well enough to hide himself.    One thing I like about the androids is that 18 thinks it’s stupid to drive the whole way, and yet she insists on stopping somewhere to get herself new clothes.    And 17 is basically the other way around.   16 is fixated on killing Goku, and yet he seems to be in no hurry either.    They all seem happier to have the company than they would be to save time. 

Of course this whole saga is kind of circling the drain at this point.    Once the Androids beat the Z-Fighters and declined to kill them, it just sort of sucked all the tension out of things.    Everyone’s just sort of casually moving around from one place to the next, with no particular urgency.   The bad guys aren’t very bad, especially when the good guys include Vegeta.   

As much as I enjoy this leg of DBZ, I can’t help but feel that something’s missing.    The arc really could use a stronger villain.   Someone more motivated.   Someone more dangerous.   But where are you gonna find one of those at this late hour?  

As it is, this episode ends with Bulma getting a phone call, like that’s going to lead anywhere.   It’s probably just a robocall trying to tell her she won a free scam cruise to the scam Bahamas. 

[kalluun-patangaroa]

An Audience With… Brett Anderson

UNCUT Magazine

December 2010

Interview: John Lewis

Brett Anderson has some fans in odd places. This month, Uncut’s email boxes are positively heaving with questions from adoring fans in Peru, Serbia, Japan, New Zealand, Belgium, South Africa, Slovenia and Russia. “I’m quite popular in odd places,” he says. “Suede had No 1s in Chile and Finland. We were massive in Denmark. If asked why Denmark, my stock answer was that, well, I’m a depressed sex maniac and so are most Scandinavians. We toured China long before most Western pop groups. I remember playing Beijing, to a crowd divided by armed soldiers facing the audience. That was pretty scary.” Anderson is currently back in the Far East, speaking to Uncut as he overlooks Kowloon Harbour, preparing for solo dates. Later in the year he’ll be in London for a big O2 show with Suede (sans original guitarist Bernard Butler, although the two remain good friends). “I wanted to check out what the stage was like at the O2 Arena,” he says. “So I went to see The Moody Blues with my father-in-law. Come on, you can’t argue with ‘Nights In White Satin’. What a tune!”

I presume you’re aware of the ‘reallybanderson’ Twitter account purporting to be by you. Amused or offended? Helen, Birmingham

Twitter is one of those strange things, like Facebook, that I don’t have anything to do with. But I have to grudgingly admit that the reallybanderson Twitter updates are rather funny [starts giggling]. And the guy doing it is obviously a bit of a Suede fan, because there are some very detailed references to b-sides and bla-di-blah. I can’t exactly complain about it without coming across as a real tit. It’s just fun and no-one really thinks it’s me, it’s a cartoon version of me reflected through some fairground mirror. I don’t think anyone reads it and thinks, ‘Oh, Brett Anderson has Jas Mann from Babylon Zoo doing his washing up, or Brett punched Damon in the street.’ It is, ha ha ha, quite witty. Having shown them the picture inside the Best Of Suede CD, my kids would like to know why you refused to feed me for five years? Also – can my mum have her top back? And are you around for a trip to the Imperial War Museum? Bernard Butler

Yes, what most fans don’t realise is that we kept Bernard in a cage for five years, and fed him edamame beans and tap water. Regarding his mum’s top – he should know that it’s long been ripped up and destroyed by the front row of the Southampton Joiners, or somesuch venue. Now, the Imperial War Museum – me and Bernard were talking about getting older the other day and he said: “Are you finding yourself increasingly interested in British military history?” And I have become oddly fascinated with watching WWI docs on YouTube. It’s not just the personal tragedies, but the sense of it being a shocking transition point between the Victorian world and modernity. The idea that they were going into war on horseback, and by the end of it they were in tanks. Blimey. So tell Bernard I will be going to the museum, soon… What’s your favourite Duffy song? Kris Smith, Wembley

I thought “Rockferry” was a very beautiful, stirring track. So that’s the only one I know well, but I’m really pleased for Bernard that that was a big success [Butler co-wrote and produced much of the album]. He’s an incredibly talented person and works incredibly hard, and he’s one of those people who is just obsessed with music. People like that deserve success. Did I ask him to join the Suede show at the O2? No. I told him about it, but he’s moved on so far from Suede that it would have been odd, and we’ve had a completely different lineup since he left. I don’t think he’d want to be jumping around a stage again! He’s much happier doing what he does now, I think he’s really found his calling. Do you still have your cat, Fluffington? Claire Vanderhoven, Holland

Unfortunately, he’s ascended to cat heaven. He had 15 long years of adoration. Am I getting another cat? Well, I recently got married, and my wife brought two Italian greyhounds with her. I don’t know if anyone is aware of them, but Italian greyhounds are like little cats. Ours are eight years old but look like miniature foxes, bonsai greyhounds. But incredibly fast, like little bullets. When they’re not running they spend their whole life under the duvet. Someone once told me they were bred by the Pharaohs as bedwarmers! Brett, do you have a copy of the single I recorded with Suede: “Art” b/w “Be My God”? If so, could I have one? Mike Joyce

Mike, I think I destroyed my copy years ago. I’m not one to keep memorabilia. They’re about 100 quid on eBay. Mike was an early member of Suede. We were advertising for a drummer and listed The Smiths as an influence. Then at an audition, their drummer pokes his head through the door and says, “Hello, lads!” Ha! It was a bit Jim’ll Fix It. I don’t think anyone thought it was going to last, Mike was far too big a name for us. But he just took us under his wing, guided us through the industry, and was so charming. I still keep in contact with him. What’s the weirdest story you’ve heard about yourself? Badabingbadaboom

Someone once told me that they’d heard a story about me wanting to shit in someone’s mouth. But I also heard the same story about David Byrne, so I think it’s one of those urban myths that gets transferred from one slightly kooky pop star to another. That’s probably the most unsavoury thing I’ve heard about myself. Maybe I should give it a go. Which actors would you like to play the lead members of Suede in a biopic? James Kumar, Manchester

This is the kind of thing we talk about on tour. Matt Osman is convinced I should be played by Peter Egan, who was in Ever Decreasing Circles. I think Nic Cage should play Matt. Arsène Wenger reminds me of Bernard. That’s what Bernard will look like when he’s 60. Billy Idol could play Simon Gilbert, couldn’t he? Would you ever consider working in musical theatre? Neil Tennant

It’s funny he should ask that, because only the other day, I was listening to the album Neil and Chris did with Liza Minnelli in the late ’80s. Results, I think it’s called, with “Losing My Mind”. That sounded great, so emotive, and real. I’m a big fan of the Pet Shop Boys, they’re one of those amazing bands that almost created their own genre. But anyway, musical theatre. Yeah, I think I would. Sondheim? Rodgers and Hart? Definitely. I’m always open to new ideas. Musical theatre sounds like it’s going to have camp undertones, but I’d love to do it in an interesting way. What’s the worst song you’ve ever written? Mark Catley, Christchurch, NZ

That’s a good question. I wrote lots of terrible songs that were never recorded in the early days. But there’s a song called “Duchess” – a B-side to something from the Head Music era [actually to 1997 single “Filmstar”] – which is pretty rubbish. I’ve often regretted the production on certain songs, like “Trash” and “Animal Nitrate”, even though they’ve been pretty good songs. But you can’t go messing around with things like that. You start to interfere with what people originally liked about it. I also think people like your mistakes, as they give your work humanity. I quite like that about Prince. He seems to throw stuff out – some of it genius, some unlistenable – but all quite honest. I respect that. Do you enjoy art? Excited about Gauguin at the Tate? Katarina Janoskova, London

Absolutely. I’m a big fan of Gauguin and the post-impressionists. My favourite visual artist, if I had to narrow it down to one, would be Manet, the pre-impressionist. Not Monet, who doesn’t do it for me. But Manet had this revolutionary technique of painting on black, which gives his pictures a real depth, there’s something very sumptuous about his paintings. And further back, the kind of medieval-style stuff like Holbein and Brueghel – they’re so well observed and so real. You look at these pictures of people who lived 500, 600 years ago, you can imagine them walking down Tottenham Court Road now, the same face, they’re so real. It’s a little window into the past. I’ve quite got into art recently. It’s all part of expanding yourself and your education, appreciation of beauty in life, innit? Now that you’re no longer coming to work in Bow, how are you coping without the salad pitta? Leo Abrahams, musician and producer

Ha ha! I’ve been working on an album with Leo, in his studio, and I have an unhealthy obsession with East London’s kebab shops. You don’t get many good kebab shops in west London. It reminds me of being a student. I’m surprised Leo’s got the time to email you questions! He’s far too busy producing Eno or Grace Jones or Florence & The Machine. He also does these bizarre things where he plays entirely improvised gigs, no rehearsals. And that inspired the latest solo LP I’ve done with him. It was based on improvs. Me, Leo, Seb Rochford on drums, and Leopold Ross on bass just jammed for days, cut up them up and improvised, and did overdubs. It’s a full-on rock record. I love Leo, he’s great. He never takes the easy option. He pushes you a bit, which can be terrifying. Can you give us not-so-slim-in-2010 Suede fans some health tips? Simon Quinton, Oxford

My wife is a naturopath – she’s conscious of what she eats, so we eat a lot of sushi and seeds. I’ve got into cycling recently, particularly living in London, through the parks and the backstreets. It makes you fall back in love with the city. I cycled to Bow the other day from my house in Notting Hill. So that’s staving off the fortysomething belly. I’m sure I’ll get it when I’m fiftysomething. I’m looking forward to that. What do you think of Gorillaz? Ruiz, São Paulo, Brazil

To be honest, I don’t know much about them. I like the drawings. I guess that’s a veiled question about my relationship with Damon? Well, we don’t have a relationship to talk about. We all have things that happened years ago, rivalries and so on, and people assume that they’re still on your radar and part of your life. It’s like some musical soap opera, often one that’s been fabricated, without much substance. I have different issues in my life now. Is the art of songwriting dead? If it isn’t, who is flying the torch? Paloma Faith

Oh, it’s not dead at all. I’m constantly inspired by new music. If you look on YouTube, there’s a clip of me singing Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful”. When you’re covering stuff it’s interesting to try things that are out of your genre, which gives it a frisson. So I always try songs that aren’t, you know, British indie, stuff like Blondie, or The Pretenders. That Christina Aguilera song is amazing. I try not to look at songs as the finished product, I look at it as the chords and the melody and the words, like sheet music to be interpreted. You’ve got to keep moving with your musical appreciation. I loved the last Horrors record, I liked The National, The Drums, These New Puritans, lots of stuff. I never listen to the records I grew up with. Why bother? It’s all in my head! Brett, you’re from Haywards Heath. What’s the deal with the swimming pool there? It’s deep in the middle, not at one end. What’s your take on that? And were you ever caught out by it? P Newman, Brighton

I don’t know what they’re referring to at all, but funnily enough my dad used to work there as a swimming pool attendant. And I don’t really know how he got the job because he couldn’t swim. It’s lucky there weren’t any accidents. Every Tuesday, we had to troop down to the local pool, and everybody would be pointing at my dad saying, “Oh look there’s your dad, he’s working as a pool attendant.” And I was hoping none of them would start drowning, ’cos my dad wouldn’t be much use. Still, this was the early ’80s, and I guess we all thought the world was going to end any second with a nuclear bomb. Ha ha.

[imagine-me-here]

The Gingerbread Man (Brooklyn Nine-Nine)

Summary: "Christmas, like everything else in Florida, was going to suck..." Jake is stuck in Coral Palms for Christmas, and he wants nothing more than to buy a one-way to ticket to New York and spend it with Amy. But he's a good police officer and an even better boyfriend, so he will have to make do with a gift. Media: Brooklyn Nine Nine Genre: Angst, little bit of fluff Warnings: Mentions of Figgis and accompanying canon-typical violence Word count: 1055 Notes: So in 405 "Halloween IV" when Amy is showing Rosa her virtual binder, I thought I noticed a little plush gingerbread man on her keychain. I couldn't help but wonder how it got there...

Christmas, like everything else in Florida, was going to suck.

Jake didn’t know what he expected--that all the trailer homes would magically transform into cute little brownstones and people would suddenly decide to trade their cargo shirts and muscle tops for tailored suits and tartan dresses? But there were only gaudy lights, plastic flamingos adorned with reindeer antlers, and a cardboard cutout of Santa-on-an-ATV that Todd had put in the shop window.

He missed all the stupid hokey tourist things in New York that he hated and Amy loved: carriage rides through Central Park, FAO Schwarz, the Rockefeller tree, and most of all the snow. Jake felt like a little kid for saying that, and most of the time the Brooklyn snow was more like slush. He complained about it every year, but now there was nothing more that he wanted than to cuddle up with Amy and watch the snow fall.

Instead, Jake spent Christmas Eve driving aimlessly through Coral Palms. After hours of gas stations and trailer parks, he found himself at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood, physically itching to leave. FLL was perhaps the happiest place in Florida, not because it was a nice place--there were rats in customs and gators in the toilets, presumably--but because everyone there knew how close they were to leaving Florida. One ticket, Jake thought. One ticket and I'd be out of here. His feet carried him into Terminal 2 - Domestic Flights. He walked to the counter like he was having an out-of-body experience and nothing was on his control, because nothing was. A 12:50 a.m. to LaGuardia, and he could hold Amy in his arms and tell her everything was going to be okay. “I love you, Ames. To hell with Figgis. To hell with the NYPD. I need to be with you. Not through letters, not over the phone, not in a few years. Now.” And she’d break down sobbing, and she could barely get out a word, and he'd say “Also, Florida is a hell-hole where even the Twinkies are swamp-flavoured, and a man can’t live with humid Twinkies.” Oh God, and now she’s laugh-crying, and she’s happy and smiling and in some ways it's even worse because he knows how likely it is that Figgis could kick down the door any minute and shoot her in the head.

“Sir? Are you alright? Do you want some help? Sir?” He was standing in front of the heavily-lipsticked ticket lady, comatose, unlistening, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“I'm sorry, what? No, I...”

“Do you still want the ticket? One economy ticket to LaGuardia?”

“No, sorry...I...sorry, I have to go. Sorry.”

On his brisk walk from the counter to the sliding doors--this was torture being here, being so close--Jake stopped at the dimly-lit gift shop. Head pillow, corn nuts, earbuds. Jake picked up a pack of Twinkies and a bottle of blue--he was in Florida now (and likely forever), so he might as well lean into it.

“Just these, please.”

On the counter was a faded Christmas display filled with sad little plushie keychains. Anywhere else, they would’ve been cute. But these little guys had been in this godforsaken airport for too long. Every day they watched people come and go--but mostly go--while they were condemned to this sad little shelf on the sad little counter of a sad little gift shop in the saddest place on earth.

“Actually, I’ll take this as well.”

“Good morning, Sarge.”

“Morning, Amy. Hey, were you expecting a package today?”

“No, why?”

“This was addressed to you,” Sarge said, handing Amy a tiny cardboard box. “No return address, no mailing address. Just showed up on the doorstep this morning. I was almost about to put the precinct in lockdown, but look at this.” On the bottom corner of the package, so small she could barely see it, was a symbol drawn in black Sharpie.

“Nakatomi Plaza,” she said. “It’s Jake.”

Amy grabbed the package out of Sarge’s hands and brought it over to her desk. Slicing the tape with her letter opener, she found a note carefully placed on top:

Dear Ames - I love you and I miss you. I miss New York and I miss Christmas. I miss us buying a tree and decorating the house. I miss baking gingerbread cookies and eating them while insisting Die Hard is the best Christmas movie ever made. This is a pretty small post-it note, so I don’t have much room left, but I just needed you to know.

I love you and I miss you.

-- JP

Underneath, wrapped in tissue paper, was a plush keychain, a little gingerbread man.

“I love you and I miss you.”

A year before.

“Jake, how much cookie dough did you eat? This is only our fifth batch and we’re running out. Five batches, triple yield, six cookies per person, plus extra for Captain Holt...we’re 36 cookies below schedule, Jake. 36 cookies!”

“Oh, no, what? This is a disaster!”

“Thank you! This is a disaster!”

“You just got betrayed, son!”

Amy glanced at the phone in his hand.

“Lemme guess, Die Hard? Again? Stupid of me to think you were actually listening.” Overwhelmed, Amy crumpled to the kitchen floor.

“Whoah, Ames,” Jake said. He sat down beside her and tucked his phone back in his pocket. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how upset you were.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Amy said, wiping tears from her face. “It’s just some stupid cookies. I overreacted. You can go back to watching your movie now.”

“No way, babe. I’m staying here with you.”

“Thanks. It’s not just cookies, you know. It’s just--with the hostage situation and everything, I was really worried about you. I thought you were dead. I just wanted one perfect, normal Christmas. Tree, lights, gingerbread men...”

“Hey, come here.” Jake pulled Amy into his arms. “It’s okay. Being a cop, dating a cop. We know it’d be stressful from the beginning. And yeah, sometimes I hate it. But you know what? I love you. And we’re gonna get through everything, good and bad, yeah?”

“Yeah. I love you.”

“I love you too. And hey,” Jake said, reaching up onto the counter and handing her a cookie. “No matter what happens, we still have gingerbread, right?”

[polyamorouspixie]

I just kind of want to post about V&A and also M because... I like them and I want to blog about why and it's my blog and I can't give aggressive advice all the time. And even when some people live in another country you can still admire them from afar.

V is so beautiful. She's got this smile that just makes you happy and this amazing mad black curly hair and when you run your hands through it your fingers get lost, and she has just a few grey streaks in it that are incredible. She's got this tiny waist that feels so good to put your arms around. Her face is usually lit up with excitement while she explains how the expansion of the universe works or about some special type of glue she's ordered (she's an art conservation person) or telling a story about a really weird stranger she once met. She's genuinely quirky, in a way few people are but most people would like to be, she just says and does things that are weird and ridiculous and funny and adorable. I would happily just follow her around helping her with her life and never ask for anything in return.

A is so pleasing to be around. He smells like contentment and he has the biggest smile you could ever imagine, and his hair is so soft I just want to pet him whenever I look at him, and his eyes are just magical. Sometimes when he talks he makes me speechless. He taught me a lot of things about rocks (he's a geologist) and he also knows lots about history and politics. Sometimes he makes sure I have dinner and other times he lets me have biscuits for lunch. When he holds me I feel like everything is safe and good in the world. A few times he just stroked me until I fell asleep. He teases me sometimes in a way that most people wouldn't get away with but he has this cheeky look on his face that just makes me like him more.

And they both say "going to the store" and "pasta" in that weird American way but they say rubbish bin and takeaway. And they talk about things together and even when I'm not included I could just watch them all day long.

And M is just... The best thing that ever happened to me. Sometimes I watch him when he's making cuppas and I can't stop myself from smiling. He's got this little light streak in his hair that grows naturally when his hair needs cut and he wears shirts with the sleeves rolled up. He gets so into talking about politics or history or coins or unlistenable music and I could just nod and listen to him for hours. He reads Famous Five books to me and has a different voice for every character and he never gets cross when I interrupt every few minutes. He picks up the dogs and sings to them like they're babies. He brings me snacks even when I didn't know I was hungry. He listens to all my daft stories about pointless work gossip and remembers it all. And he's so adorable about V that it just makes me want to smush them together and make them kiss, and when he gets into debates with A about politics I just sit back and admire the two of them.

[analogscum]

DON’S PLUM (2001, d. R.D. Robb)

Why is it, my dear Scumbags, that forbidden fruit is the sweetest fruit of all? Why is it that, when we know that we can’t have something, it only makes us want it that much more? This applies to any number of life’s pleasures, but especially to movies. Just think of the number of films that are out there, just waiting to be viewed, but because they’ve either been lost to time, or the powers that be have locked them away somewhere, we may never get to experience. London After Midnight. The Day the Clown Cried. Until recently, anyway, The Other Side of the Wind. Well, tonight, thanks to the magic of illegal YouTube uploads, I’m here to tell you about some of that forbidden fruit. We’re going to talk about a film that its stars do not want you to see (if you live in America or Canada, that is), a film that to this day they continue to try and bury via any legal shenanigans they can. So get ready, because it’s time to take a big juicy bite out of Don’s Plum.

To start, we must talk about the nineties. In the nineties, two big things happened that allowed Don’s Plum to come into existence: the advent of low-budget Indies with cool kids talking in verbose, provocative lingo (see: Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Reality Bites, Kids, etc.), and the teen heartthrob coronation of Leonardo DiCaprio. As an infamous New York magazine profile from 1998 established, young Leo ran with a gang of fellow young thespians who would be immortalized as “the Pussy Posse.” The modus operandi of the Pussy Posse was…well, you can probably guess what it was. These guys were all about scoring chicks and getting loaded and not tipping waitresses, and they lived like goddamn boy kings. Leo was the leader, with his two best friends Tobey Maguire and Kevin Connolly on either side of the pussy throne. Other members of the Pussy Posse included David Blaine, Lucas Haas, and R.D. Robb, who you undoubtedly remember as the kid who played Schwartz in A Christmas Story. Anyway, around 1995, Robb had a boffo idea: if I could get my hands on a camera and some black and white film, I could shoot my friends doing what we do every night, just hanging out acting like douchebags, and somehow this will magically congeal into a smash indie hit. So Leo and Tobey, who were allegedly under the impression that this was just going to be a short film, gave Robb a bunch of money to make this thing, which he did, casting Leo, Tobey, Kevin Connolly, and a bunch of their other friends, shooting on and off for a two year period, with the young actors improvising almost all of their dialogue. And with that, let’s get into the finished film itself, shall we?

Los Angeles. The mid to late nineties. Everything is in black and white and super fuckin’ suave, because, again, it’s Los Angeles in the mid to late nineties. Jeremy Sisto is driving a pickup truck with leopard print seats. He kicks a hippie chick out of the passenger seat, mumbling something about “I need…pleasure. And…I need…to know that with…BRUTE FORCE, I got you out of my life, mmkay?” So, uh, right off the bat, um, that dialogue. Yikes, right? The hippie chick, for her part, gets very angry and yells, “You were supposed to take me to Vegas!” Don’t worry, we never find out why she was going to Vegas in the first place, or who Jeremy Sisto’s character is, because he then promptly drives out of the movie. Bye, Jeremy Sisto! Beep beep!

Cut to Tobey Maguire, who looks like he just finished going through puberty roughly five minutes before Robb called “action!” He’s got a dopey look on his face, and an unfortunate bowl cut/chin scruff combo that makes him look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. He’s sitting in a moody mid to late nineties café, drinking a comically large cappuccino, and half paying attention to the absolute worst goddamn music I have ever heard in my life. The end credits describe this band as “acid jazz,” but I think a more accurate description would be “music to try and swallow your own tongue to.” It’s like a fiendishly unlistenable combination of free jazz, ska, Tom Waits hobo wailing, and beat poetry, and it should’ve been left back in the nineties where it belongs, alongside Olestra and the Kosovo war. Tobey is trying to pick up some ladies to bring to hang out with his friends later, but oddly enough none of these women want to hang out with an arrogant sad sack who has all the charisma and sex appeal of Uncle Joey from Full House. Meanwhile, there’s like a full-on burlesque dance number happening to accompany this zoot suit cacophony, and the director only occasionally cuts to it for a few seconds at a time. I guess, who needs to see a big splashy musical number when you can watch a comic relief wet blanket who just got his first pubes strike out with every woman he talks to, right? Luckily, the café waitress takes pity on him and agrees to accompany him to meet up with his friends, and then does basically nothing else for the rest of the movie. Occasionally the scene will cut to her to remind us that she’s there, but, like, is she really there, though?

Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley is sitting facing a dude who is showing his bare ass to the camera, because that’s how real fuckin’ life just is, maaaaan, not everyone always wears pants, dude! They apparently just had sex, even though she’s fully clothed, and they get into a philosophical argument about nothing and everything, as if they’re in the worst deleted scene from Slacker. Even though they clearly hate each other, the dude, Brad, invites Jenny Lewis to come meet up with his friends, and she makes some overly hostile joke about how he didn’t make her cum earlier, because low-budget indie movie. Next we see Kevin Connolly driving down the street in his Jeep, when he encounters the hippie girl from the beginning of the movie, like a couple of star-crossed blabbedy blahs. Finally, FINALLY, we’re introduced to Leo, when he borrows a comically large mid to late nineties cell phone from this little hood rat kid who insists on telling him some boring story about a brawl at the Viper Room even though Leo is CLEARLY trying to use said comically large mid to late nineties cell phone to call up every fine young female he knows to meet up with him and his friends. This makes the little hood rat kid very very angry, and its supposed to be funny, I guess? Anyway, like they were all fated since time immemorial to do, all of our leads finally converge down at the titular greasy spoon eatery, Don’s Plum.

Now, have you ever been at a restaurant, and you find yourself sitting near a table of people who are so obnoxious, so vapid, so relentlessly annoying and unpleasant, that you can no longer enjoy your food, and just find yourself eavesdropping on every improbably stupid thing that these goddamn condom leaks are rattling on about, slowly being pulled further and further into their vortex of suck? You have? Well, then, congratulations, because that experience is the rest of this fuckin’ movie. Jenny Lewis and Brad are the first to arrive, and what do they do? They start playing a goddamn harmonica. Um, no. Hell no. I’m trying to enjoy my meal in relative peace and quiet, you know what I don’t need? Your shitty ass John Popper impressions, ok? Get that shit all the way outta here. Then, just to really up the insufferability factor, Jenny Lewis starts opining about Bob Dylan, but she only calls him Bob, which, you can take that one away from here right away, and then launches into the following diatribe...

“You know what I’m so sick of though? All that fucking commercial grunge crap. It all sounds alike. It’s like the record companies that are promoting sterile music. I mean, I love Nirvana, don’t get me wrong, but they weren’t the Beatles.”

WOOF. Mercifully, Brad interrupts her to tell her that he loves her, even though it’s their like, first or second date. She’s reasonably creeped out by this, and just by how earnest and dark and brooding Brad is in general, until thankfully Tobey and the waitress show up, soon followed by Kevin and the hippie hitchhiker. Leo gets his own grand entrance, checking himself out in the reflection of an aquarium while some mid to late nineties boom bap hip hop blares on the soundtrack, natch. For the next hour or so, the group basically just chain smoke countless cigarettes (remember when restaurants had smoking sections?), harasses their waitress, Flo (hey, it’s a mid to late nineties indie movie, were they supposed to NOT name the waitress Flo?) and talk shit endlessly. They also say the word “bro” a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Like, way too much. The world’s most date rapey frat dude would tell them to relax with how much they say the word “bro.”

Suddenly, in between all of the cigarettes and “bros,” a morbidly obese lady walks past the table, and Leo mocks her for daring to be morbidly obese. The hippie hitchhiker takes umbrage with this, and Leo, charming guy that he is, calls her a “squatty piece of hippie shit cunt.” This escalates to the point where the hippie hitchhiker storms off, throwing her Birkenstocks at Leo, and then smashes Kevin’s windshield with a bat that she found…somewhere? Anyway, she’s out of the movie now, and replacing her is Jenny Lewis’s friend Constance, who they just happen to run into. So more bullshitting and chain smoking unfolds. Female masturbation is discussed, because mid to late nineties indie movie. They play Never Have I Ever, and Kevin doesn’t understand the rules, which is kinda endearing. They almost get into a fight with some creep in a mechanics outfit and Buddy Holly glasses. A horrible ska cover of the “Menomena” song from The Muppet Show pops up for a minute of your life that you’ll never get back. Leo sends the group into more turmoil when he outs Brad as bisexual and gives Tobey shit for being vegan. He also gropes Jenny Lewis’s breasts countless times, but no one seems to mind. They all fight about this for awhile, but eventually apologies are offered and they’re bros once again. However, upon learning that Brad is into both girls and guys, Jenny Lewis begins freaking out about AIDS, because ugggh. Then she and Constance start making out for absolutely no reason other than mid to late nineties indie movie. At one point, the film fades out for no reason, and then fades up again on the exact same scene just in time to hear one of the ladies ask the table, “do you guys bathe every day and, like, wash yourself with soap?” Meanwhile, the film will occasionally cut to short vignettes of the characters each saying non-sequiturs into the restroom mirror. Why? Again, because mid to late nineties indie movie. DUH.

The absolute weirdest scene occurs when Kevin Connolly notices a lady producer whom he auditioned for the previous week. He calls her “Spielberg with a pussy,” because of course he does, what else would he call her? The rest of the table convinces him to go talk to her. To both our surprise and his, when he tentatively approaches her at the bar, she’s like, Oh my god, Kevin Connolly! It’s so good to see you! I’m sorry you didn’t get that part you auditioned for, but get this, I was just watching your tape again the other day, and I want to cast you in the lead in this other movie that I’m doing! Not only that, I have to admit, I find you and your Cub Scout haircut and thrift store bowling shirt to be super fucking sexy, and later on tonight I wanna fuck your brains out so hard, so take my number and call me, hot stuff.

WHAT?!?! Like, is this supposed to be a fantasy sequence? Is it? If it is, you have to tell me, movie! Shellshocked and erect, Kevin returns to the table and recounts the whole thing, including the line “bro, it was crazy, bro! She was on my dick so hard!” Leo, meanwhile, is wearing some fake redneck dentures, talking in an exaggerated Southern accent, and eating his own boogers. This is all real, you guys, I promise.

Anyway, some more shit happens, and everyone is yapping about some stupid, possibly offensive nonsense when suddenly a lady at the next table over slaps the guy that she’s with. Hard. Slaps him really hard. Our heroes get quiet for less than a second, before remarking on the slap that just took place. Holy shit bro, that bitch slapped that guy so hard bro, bro bro bro bro, etc. When things get back to normal, Leo is suddenly quiet and sullen. Kevin notices, and tries to coax it out of him the best way he knows how, which is by asking, “you fuckin’ thinkin’ about something, bro?” Leo starts giving all of these cagey, mysterious non-answers, and before long everyone at the table wants to know if he’s fuckin’ thinkin’ about something, bro. Leo takes a deep drag off of his cigarette, and tells everyone, “my dad committed suicide bro.”

WHAAAT?!?! I’ve gotta say, I honestly did not see this coming. In a mood, Leo storms off for the back bar. Jenny Lewis follows him, and tries to make him feel better by relating her OWN familial sob story: “My dad is gone. And my mom is a junkie. She sells her ass on the corner.”

WHAAAAAAT?!?! All of these sudden dollops of soap opera drama, man! Good gravy. For whatever reason, this turns Leo on, and he tries to bang her. She rebuffs his advances, and they get into an overwrought screaming match that plays out like a Level One improv exercise at the world’s shittiest acting school. Meanwhile, back at the table, Tobey gets mad at Kevin for pushing Leo to reveal the truth about his dead dad, and this escalates into a full on fist fight! BRO!

Now, holy shit, you guys, the last five minutes of this movie. Jenny Lewis runs into the bathroom, and begins lamenting into the mirror about how she let a “perfectly good fuck” get away. As she’s saying all this, she pulls some tinfoil, a straw and a lighter out of her purse and just straight up starts FREEBASING CRACK COCAINE.

WHAAAAAAAAAT?!?! Kinda makes all that AIDS talk seem kinda hollow, huh? Then, oh my god, she starts crying and launches into this fucking after school special monologue, screaming into the mirror about how “I was the one that came on to Uncle Jerry! I was the one that was curious!”

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?! Excuse me, waitress, but it seems you got drug abuse and child molestation in my mid to late nineties indie movie! What is ANY OF THAT doing in here?! And in the last five goddamn minutes of the movie, no less! So now Tobey and Kevin’s bro fight has spilled out onto the street, so Leo goes and breaks it up, he and Kevin do a very intricate secret bro handshake, everyone has a good laugh, Brad lights Kevin’s bowling shirt on fire, everyone goes prancing down the street, and the movie ends.

Now, imagine that you’re Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. It’s late 1997, or possibly early 1998. One of you is now the biggest movie star on the planet, thanks to a movie about a big-ass boat. You’ve just seen this Don’s Plum movie that your little buddy R.D. Robb made. First of all, it’s a full-length fucking movie, not a short like you both thought it would be. Second of all, both of you are in there saying terrible things about women, doing terrible things to women, and oh shit, the majority of your fans…wait for it…are women! Bro! But worst of all, our little buddy R.D. Robb, who we thought was our friend, our fellow Pussy Posse member, our BRO, is shopping this fucking movie around to distributors? This fucking movie that could possibly end our careers if anyone ever sees it? Tell me, if you were Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire in late 1997 or early 1998, would you do everything in your power to make sure that Don’s Plum never saw the light of day?

Well, according to a lawsuit filed in 1998 by one of the film’s producers, David Stutman, that’s exactly what Leo and Tobey did. Interestingly enough, according to court documents, apparently it was Tobey who was more concerned with how his performance in the film would negatively affect his nascent stardom, and therefore enlisted his much more famous best friend to help him carry out “a fraudulent and coercive campaign to prevent the release of the film.” I mean, Leo comes off as WAY more of an asshole than Tobey, who mainly just mopes around and eventually bro fights with Kevin Connolly, but in any case, both parties eventually reached a settlement in which Stutman agreed that Don’s Plum would not be released in the U.S. or Canada. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 10, 2001, and quickly faded into Hollywood lore.

Every few years, talk of this wild, black and white, mostly improvised movie with some big celebrities before they got famous will pop up again. Most recently, back in early 2016, another of the film’s producers, Dale Wheatley, uploaded the film to Vimeo and posted it to his website, freedonsplum.com, where anyone could watch it for free. Within days, Leo and Tobey’s respective legal teams had the video removed. You would think that after more than twenty years, with Leo now a respected Oscar winner, and Tobey having brought Spider-Man to life on the big screen, they’d be willing to let bygones be bygones. But it seems that they’re still legitimately concerned that they would stand to lose their vaunted place amongst the Hollywood elite if North American audiences ever got to see Don’s Plum. They still fear it. They still think it’s dangerous. In reality, it’s just embarrassing, which isn’t the same thing.

Truth is, there are a million movies out there just like Don’s Plum. There are a million other overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing indie movies made by overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing young people about the lives of overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing young people out there. I mean, I went to film school, fer chrissakes, I can say with some level of authority that Don’s Plum is the sort of project that my classmates and I poured our hearts and souls Into, only to be embarrassed by its messy, guileless sincerity later. The only thing that distinguishes Don’s Plum from the horde of other cringeworthy embryonic efforts like it is, as I said before, its status as cinematic forbidden fruit. Will its two stars ever allow the audience that it was made for to have a taste? Somehow I doubt it, bro.

[aoibhs]

Jump

Chapter One

Chapter Three

She didn't spend all that long with Vic when they fled the scene of the party. They walked together down a few different avenues. Together, but in total silence. It was quite awkward but neither of them were going to change that. Nora counted, and she was pretty sure they circled the Derry suburbs three times. It was now nine o'clock. Nora felt that was an acceptable time to start making her way back home.

"I... I'm gonna..," She jerked her thumb in the direction of  her avenue. It was a bit weird, seeing as they had walked past it a few times already. But surely they had gone by Vic's house too several times, so maybe it wasn't so bad.

"..Yeah, I mean, sure," He nodded after a moment of trying to comprehend what she meant.

"See ya," Nora gave him a pathetic wave and a shy smile, then turned to leave. He said nothing, just watched her leave. He stood there, staring after her until he was sure she was gone. After that, he just went home, half expecting an annoyed and concerned phonecall from Belch who'd be wondering why he ran off without telling him, especially since Patrick had gone missing.

Nora watched tv with her parents for two hours, enduring plenty of nosy questions from them about her Keene-party-experience. Most of her answers were true. She left most of the night out, including the fact that Gretta's invitation was a dud and the fact that herself and Victor Criss, a boy, had been wandering around Derry for a hour and a half. They didn't need to know that. She only told one lie, and that was that Beverly Marsh was there and they walked home together. It was two lies if she counted the one where she said they had only left Gretta's at quarter to nine. If her parents knew anything about teenagers' opinions and gossip, there'd be no way in Hell the Sheridans would believe that Beverly was invited.

At eleven Nora said goodnight to her parents and retired to her room, not that she was going to sleep straight away. Not that she was going to sleep at all. She lay on the bed for an hour with her headphones over her ears, listening to a cassette. And for some reason, for some reason, her mind was cast back to that morning, to Patrick and Henry and Henry eyeing her hungrily, and then to Patrick mysteriously vanishing. And as she thought about this, her mind was overcome with a tide of unease. She felt all clammy, that a cold fever was slowly washing over her skin. She tore her headphones off, switching her walkman off. And she just lay there, unable to shut her eyes. What if she had a nightmare? What if she couldn't wake up? Her skin crawled, so much so that she was basically twitching. Something catch her eye then, in the mirror of her wardrobe, something out of place, something red.

A balloon?

Nora propped herself up with her elbows to get a better look. Yep, it was definitely a balloon. She turned her head to see the source of the balloon's reflection, but there was none. The only red balloon was the one in her mirror. She went to get up to inspect the mirror, in a stressed fashion. Hopefully, she had actually fallen asleep. Or hopefully, she wasn't. Just as her body had lifted itself off the bed, two arms burst out of the mattress, grabbing onto her torso and pulling her back down again. They scrapped at her body, holding her down as she struggled and all that before she even screamed.

"Need help sleeping, Nora?" As she shook violently against the white arms laced with dirt and blood, Nora looked over to the closed door. In the darkness, a tall, tall figure loomed. She couldn't see its features but something was in her room and her mattress was trying to kill her so Nora, naturally, felt like she was having a heart attack. She could she a red smile, sharp teeth with a mad mop of ginger hair and glowing yellow eyes, "When you sleep, you can float too! Don't you want to float?" Then it laughed, their deranged chuckles warping and becoming distorted and unlistenable to the human ear.

Nora screamed.

She didn't sleep that night. She wasn't sure if she was even awake, but her mounting tiredness said otherwise. She had to just label it as a nightmare and move on.  She sat on the bathroom floor all night, after locking herself in, just sat there shaking. The following morning, she told her mother she didn't sleep well and needed to just walk about town for a while, that she needed fresh air. She didn't eat anything, and brought nothing with her but the clothes on her back and her walkman. Her main objective was getting out of that house, away from her room. She could still feel the arms imprinted on her body, like a weight.

"Oh! Gosh, I am sorry," In her haste, she had walked right into someone. In fairness, they were totally fine, almost unphased. Nora was the one who was nearly falling over.

"Don't worry about it, it's fine," Once Nora had focused herself, she realized that she had walked into Beverly Marsh, "Are you okay? It's Nora, right?"

"Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm fine- I mean, I'm Nora," Beverly giggled at how flustered she was, "And you're Beverly,"

"I am," She nodded, "Were you going somewhere when you barged into me?"

"Not really actually," Nora snorted at her remark.

Beverly stayed quiet for a moment, thinking.

"..I was going to the quarry, if you wanted to come?" She suggested. Nora seemed like a nice girl, from what she'd gathered at school. What was the harm?

"I don't want to impose on anything," Nora shook her head, smiling at the girl's intentions. Part of her was inwardly laughing because she had supposedly hung out with Beverly the night before.

"You won't, I swear," Beverly laughed, "The others won't mind," Nora felt herself bite her lip. Was this another practical joke? Something told her to be wary. But something else said that Beverly had no reason at all to pull pranks on her. Beverly was a victim of rumors too, if anything she would be looking to bond with Nora, "Come on, it'll be fun," The girl with copper hair grinned at her and she knew how much she actually wanted to go with her. She nodded and Beverly's smile grew even wider, offering the girl the space on the back of her bike. Nora accepted even if she was a little skittish regarding the unsteadiness at times. She knew they'd get to the quarry far quicker if they took they bike there. Regardless, she held onto Beverly for dear life, making the ginger laugh.

"By the way," Nora said, "I love the new look. It's very you," It took Beverly a second but then remembered her new haircut, still not entirely used to it.

"Thanks," She smiled. It didn't take long for them to get to the quarry but once they got there, there were five boys, stripped to their underwear lined up at the cliff's edge. Nora stifled a laugh at the sight of them but then realized that's what Beverly was planning on doing too and felt herself blushing furiously.

"Alright, who's first?" She recognized that as Bill Denbrough's voice. His friends exchanged glances. Were they all afraid of heights or something?

Having just gotten off the contraption, Beverly dropped her bike and began to unbutton her pretty dress. Although she was an embarrassed mess, Nora found herself automatically following suit and untied her blue wrap-over top, stepped out of her gray skirt and kicked off her shoes and socks, not to forget leaving her walkman and headphones carefully on the ground.

"We'll go," Beverly announced, taking her newfound friend by the hand and starting to run to the edge, "Sissies," She smirked.

They jumped, and in that moment, Nora forgot that five boys were looking at her in nothing but her underwear.

"What the fuck?!" Richie Tozier exclaimed as they went hurdling through the air and plummeting down into the water, "Holy shit! We just got shown up by some girls!"

"Was that Nora Sheridan?" Stan looked down at the water in bewilderment.

"She's not gonna think we're cool now," Eddie Kaspbrak whined as Ben Hanscom attempted to send a wave in the direction of Beverly.

"Do we have to do that now?" Stan made a disgruntled expression.

"Yes," Bill almost sounded as if he was scolding him.

"Come on!" Beverly yelled up in hopes of coaxing the boys to follow them. Nora was still reeling from the leap as the boys began to jump down to join them. When Richie started splashing water in her direction, she found that she couldn't stop laughing. That led to a full on play fight amongst she, Richie, Stanley and a terrified Eddie. And that led to games such as Chicken Fight, which included Nora on top of Stan Uris' shoulders trying to knock Richie off of Bill's shoulders while the bespectacled boy pretended to flirt with her. It really wasn't as coy and distracting as he thought and wound up falling back into the greenish water.

"She cheated!" He yelled upon resurfacing. Nobody listened to his profound accusations. It wasn't long after that when they all made their way out and headed back up to the rocks where some of the boys had left their stuff.  Nora ran back to Beverly's bike to get her cassette as soon as she seen the radio.

"Mind if I put this on?" She asked meekly, holding it up.

"Sure yeah, go ahead," Richie nodded, suddenly a bit shy. The lack of water around them made it evidently clear that Nora and Beverly were still in their bras and underwear.

"Really?" Eddie made a slightly disgusted face once her tape began to play, "Duran Duran?"

"I like Duran Duran, E-e-eddie," Bill shot his friend a defensive look.

Beverly giggled as she and Nora laid down on the stone ground to bask in the sun. Nora subconsciously began miming the words to the song to distract herself from the idea of inevitable sunburn. The girl was so damn pale, it was bound to happen.

Chapter Five