#well. noir has harlem

[whaliiwatching]

finally my obsession with zoot suits becomes useful

[foolsocracy]

Hi, hello, I’m new to your blog. I’ve made myself at home. Lovely carpet.

Can I please know more about your spider Robbie pie? Can’t seem to find the silverware.

but of course, kind anon

Spider Robbie is an au in which Robbie Robertson takes up the spider mantle after the death of the one before him. He is the third, following Ben Urich and, most notably, Peter Parker.

This au is very much canon divergence from Eyes Without a Face, where Peter makes it in time to save Robbie from his original fate but dies in the process. Peter is shot while rushing Robbie and the others out. In his panic and elation at finding Robbie physically unharmed, Peter outs himself as the Spider Man to his best friend. Robbie stays with him as he bleeds out and resolves to continue to hide Peter's identity.

Peter is buried and remains that way for... an undetermined amount of time.

Robbie is left with a mask, a jacket, and the question of just who was this other half of his friend. As he learns more of who this... Spider Man was, he gets more and more involved in the spider's cases and conflicts. Robbie gets more sure of his own abilities and makes a bit of a name for the Spider Man within his own community, though the people of Harlem are largely unaware that the appearances of a masked vigilante match the interests of one Robbie Robertson.

It is to be noted that none of these aforementioned abilities are spider-god-induced powers like Peter's. Robbie, especially at the beginning of his spidering career, leans more into Urich's role than Parker's. To me, Robbie has been passionate about the press and journalism in a way that Peter never was. For Pete, his job as a photographer and reporter was a job he took until he could get into college and study science. Robbie has a way with words and communication that Peter frankly lacks. Of course, that isn't to say that Robbie won't be kicking ass, because he will. It will just take him a bit of time to get some of those skills as he's, well, a normal guy. Not everyone can get their biology scrambled like Pete.

And just because Robbie hasn't been scrambled doesn't mean he's completely separate from all things supernatural either!

I think the marvel noir universe is at its best when there's a magical, supernatural undercurrent. This concept isn't super prevalent in the actual comics, but HoplesslyLost on ao3 has done some really cool world building with it.

I think in Robbie's case, where he would be the narrator, "magical realism" would be an interesting avenue to take it. I use this term in particular because I most closely relate it to Toni Morrison in my head, when I first learned about it through her work in high school. For Morrison, the concept was inseparable to blackness and I think for Robbie, where his blackness is so central to his character and his motivations, drawing on that could be more of a service to his character. It feels better to do that than ignore how incredibly racialized his society and story is. It will make his relationship with the spider god, Peter (who I will get to very very shortly), his community, and his own mythos as The Spider Man really interesting and complex.

So it's been established that Robbie doesn't have spider powers. And we all know that Peter did-- or should I say does. One of the spider god's abilities is to bring Peter back to life. She does this in the comics, but not in any of the runs from 2008-2010 (the runs that make up this au). When Peter dies on Ellis Island, he does not think he is coming back from that. Waking up again is a surprise.

Here's where I think the au really takes a left turn. Do I think the Spider God is purely evil and spiteful and has it out for Pete? No, not really. Will I be ramping said traits up to 11 for the au? Yeah, I guess I might. This is because I love a little bit of horror and the came back wrong trope. I will hopefully be fleshing the spider god out in the near future, but I really haven't given her the many hours of thought I have the other characters. For that I'm sorry spider god </3

Peter digs himself out of his grave, more spider than he ever has been. For much of his new, waking life he is more animalistic than not. There is clearly something wrong with him; his joints are too flexible and loose, he's got some eye-shine going on, his skin is pale and his veins are starkly dark beneath it. He's possessed. Someone is puppeteering him, someone who knows a lot-- almost everything about him, but it's clear that the someone isn't him.

And Peter--- the body, it can't be Peter. At least, that's what Robbie thinks when the figure catches his eye the first time. Because Peter is dead and buried, and he has been dead and buried for weeks.

[didierleclair]

Gregory Porter has a deep and rich voice. He sings with great panache too. The first time I heard him sing was on the radio, “Be Good, lion’s song” in 2012. He started his career in New York and when his second album was released, he became an international sensation in Europe. His third album “Liquid Spirit” (2013) got him a Grammy for Best Jazz vocal album. This artist is making sure you don’t see his technique. The smoothness of his delivery is near perfect. However, Gregory Porter is more than a jazz singer. He is a composer too. Always well dressed, he is using his baritone voice masterfully.  I love the all “Liquid Spirit” album but he managed to baffle me with “Take me to the alley”, or “in Fashion”, songs from recent albums. His messages are always to the point like “On my way to Harlem”. He is a great defender of culture and African American culture in particular.

Gregory Porter a une grosse voix profonde. Il chante avec panache. La première fois que je l’ai entendu, c’était à la radio « Be good, Lion’s song » en 2012. Il a débuté sa carrière à New York et quand son second album est sorti, il est devenu une vedette internationale en Europe. Son troisième album « Liquid Spirit » (2013) lui a permis de gagner un Grammy pour Meilleur album à voix de jazz. Cet artiste s’assure que vous ne perceviez pas sa technique. Sa livraison est toujours presque parfaite. Cependant, Gregory Porter est plus qu’un chanteur de jazz. C’est aussi un compositeur. Toujours bien habillé, il use de sa voix de baryton avec assurance. J’aime tout l’album « Liquid Spirit » mais il est arrivé à me surprendre avec des chansons comme « Take me to the alley » ou « In Fashion » dans ses albums plus récents. Son message est toujours louable comme dans « On my way to Harlem ». C’est un grand défenseur de la culture et surtout de la culture noire américaine.

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

When Strangers Marry

William Castle opens his WHEN STRANGERS MARRY (1944, Criterion Channel), reissued as BETRAYED, with a lift from Alfred Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS (1934) as he cuts from a scream to a train whistle. In lesser hands that might seem like a cheap gimmick, but for Castle it’s the start of a film whose imagination more than compensates for its low budget.

The King Brothers, former bootleggers turned producers, were out to improve the quality of the films they were making for Monogram Pictures. So, they borrowed Castle and composer Dimitri Tiomkin from Columbia and Kim Hunter and Neil Hamilton from David O. Selznick. For their male leads, they turned to Robert Mitchum, who had already worked for them and was still a year away from stardom, and Dean Jagger, who’d worked at Monogram. The result was a surprisingly stylish piece that garnered praise from no less than Orson Welles and James Agee.

Hunter has come to New York to join the husband (Jagger) she met when he traveled through her small town in Ohio. Only she can’t find him. Old friend Mitchum tries to help her track him down, but as she learns of a murder and robbery in Philadelphia, she and we start to believe Jagger’s the killer. Will she turn him in to homicide detective Hamilton or try to save him?

There are atmospheric shots of Hunter gazing out windows at night as neon lights flash outside and a creepy scene in which she walks through a tunnel while haunted by her suspicions. In addition to Hitchcock, Castle borrows from Val Lewton’s 1940s horror films at RKO, with an obvious “bus” (a shock that turns out to be benign) when sirens herald not Jagger’s arrest but the arrival of a boxing champ in a Harlem nightclub. That scene, with some lively dancing and jazz, may go on longer than it needs to for plot purposes, yet it adds a moment of levity to the film as Castle just explores the life in that location for the sheer pleasure of it all. And there’s some crackerjack editing at the climax that can stand beside the car accident in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and the broken suitcase in THE KILLING as an example of the workings of fate in film noir. Keep an eye out for Minerva Urecal as a crabby landlady and Rhonda Fleming, in her film debut, as a young innocent.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[tcm]

Pioneering Black Actors of Hollywood By Susan King

Clarence Muse and Rex Ingram by Susan King Thirty years ago, the legendary Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier reflected on the Black performers who paved the way for him in the Los Angeles Times: “The guys who were forerunners to me, like Canada Lee, Rex Ingram, Clarence Muse and women like Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers and Juanita Moore, they were terribly boxed in. They were maids and stable people and butlers, principally. But they, in some way, prepared the ground for me.”

Poitier prepared the ground for such contemporary Black actors and directors currently in competition during the 2021 awards season such as Regina King and Leslie Odom Jr. (One Night in Miami), Delroy Lindo (Da 5 Bloods), the late Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Andra Day (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) and Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah).

But it is imperative to remember the veterans from the 1930s-1960s who tried to break out of stereotypes and maintain dignity at a time when Hollywood wanted to “box” them in.

Clarence Muse 

Muse appeared in countless Hollywood films often uncredited. And as Donald Bogle points out in his book Hollywood Black, Muse spoke his mind to directors if he felt he was being pushed around or when his characters were stereotypes. Bogle stated, “At another time when Muse questioned the actions of his character in director King Vidor’s 1935 Old South feature SO RED THE ROSE, Vidor recalled that Muse was quite vocal in expressing his concerns. A change was made. Vidor could not recall exactly what the issue was, but he never forgot Muse’s objection.”

The 1932 pre-Code crime drama Night World screened at the 2019 TCM Classic Film Festival to a standing-room only crowd. The film stars Lew Ayres, Boris Karloff and Muse as the doorman at a club owned by Karloff. The audience was surprised that such a stereotypical role was anything but thanks to Muse’s poignant performance. Instead of being forced to be the comic relief, Muse’s Washington is a man worried about his wife’s surgery at a local hospital. Though his boss doesn’t treat him as an equal—after all it is 1932—Karloff’s Happy shows general concern toward Washington.

Muse, said Bogle, “also worked in race movies, where he realized there was still a real chance for significant roles and narratives.” One such was BROKEN STRINGS (’40), which he also co-wrote. It’s certainly not a great film, but Muse gives a solid turn as a famed Black violinist who wants his young son to follow in his footsteps. But the son wants to play swing with his violin.

Muse, who was a graduate of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, also co-wrote the Louis Armstrong standard “Sleepy Time Down South.” In the 1920s, he worked at two Harlem theater companies, Lincoln Players and Lafayette Players, and 23 years later he became the first African American Broadway director with Run Little Chillun. He continued to act, appearing in Poitier’s directorial debut BUCK AND THE PREACHER (’72), CAR WASH (’76) and THE BLACK STALLION (’79) and was elected to the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1973. He died one day before his 90th birthday in 1979.

Rex Ingram 

Tall and imposing, Ingram had a great presence on the big screen and a rich melliferous voice. No wonder his best-known role was as the gigantic Genie in the bottle in Alexander Korda’s lavish production of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (’40). Born in 1895, he began his film career in movies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (’23). Ingram also has the distinction of playing God in THE GREEN PASTURES (’36) and Lucifer Jr. both on Broadway in 1940 and in the 1943 film adaptation of the musical CABIN IN THE SKY.

Ingram also brought a real humanity to his role as the slave Jim in MGM’s disappointing THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (’39), starring a miscast Mickey Rooney, who was way too old at 19 to play the part. Ingram, though, breaks your heart when he talks to Huck about how his dream is to earn enough money to buy his freedom so he could join his wife and child living in a free state. And when he runs away, Ingram explains to Huck why he had to flee the widow Douglas: “If one of them slave traders got me, I never would get to that free state. I would never see my wife, or little Joey.”

He also is superb in Frank Borzage’s noir MOONRISE (’48) as Mose Johnson, the friend of the murderer’s son Danny (Dane Clark), who lives in a shack in the wilderness with his coonhounds. Noble and thoughtful, Mose is the film’s conscience and helps guide Danny to do the right thing after he kills a bully (Lloyd Bridges) in self-defense.

Ingram was one of the busiest Black actors at the time and at one point even served on the Board of the Screen Actors Guild. But the same year MOONRISE was released, he was arrested and pleaded guilty for transporting an underage girl from Kansas to New York. He served a prison sentence and for a long time his career was derailed. He even lost his home. Though his film career was never the same upon his release, he worked in TV and on the Broadway stage, appearing in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and died in 1969 at 73 shortly after doing a guest shot on NBC’s The Bill Cosby Show.

Ernest Anderson 

Anderson never achieved the notoriety of Muse and Ingram, but the actor gave an extraordinary performance in the Bette Davis-Olivia de Havilland melodrama IN THIS OUR LIFE (’42) directed by John Huston. Born in 1915, Anderson earned his BA at Northwestern University in drama and speech. He was recommended for his role in the movie by Davis, who saw the young man working at the commissary on the Warner Bros.’ lot.

Anderson plays Parry, the son of the Davis-de Havilland family’s maid who aspires to be a lawyer. Davis’ spoiled rotten Stanley Timberlake gets drunk, and while driving she kills someone in a hit-and-run accident. Stanley throws Parry under the bus telling authorities he was the one driving the car.

Initially, the script depicted Parry in much more stereotypical terms, but Anderson went to Huston and discussed why he wanted to play the character with dignity and intelligence. Huston agreed. And for 1942, it’s rather shocking to see a studio film look at racism as in the scene where Parry tells de Havilland’s Roy why he wants to be an attorney:

“Well, you see, it’s like this, Miss Roy: a white boy, he can take most any kind of job and improve himself. Well, like in this store! Maybe he can get to be a clerk or a manager. But a colored boy, he can’t do that. He can keep a job, or he can lose a job. But he can’t get any higher up. So, he’s got a figure out something he can do that no one can take away. And that’s why I want to be a lawyer.”

Needless to say, such monologues were cut when the movie was shown in the South. Despite strong reviews for his performance, Anderson never got another role with so much substance. But he continued working through the 1970s and died in 2011 at the age of 95.

[demifiendrsa]

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales - Gameplay Demo. It's due out at launch for PlayStation 5.

Sony Interactive Entertainment and developer Insomniac Games have also announced that it will be available on PlayStation 4 in addition to PlayStation 5, and that the “Ultimate Edition” of the game on PlayStation 5 includes Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered.

Launch and Ultimate Edition Box art

Overview

Gameplay Demonstration

The demo opens with Miles and his best friend, Ganke Lee, walking through their East Harlem neighborhood to an election rally for Miles’s mother, Rio Morales. Here you’ll see some of the characters you’ll get to know during the game and a glimpse at the culture of the neighborhood. We hope you love the beautiful visuals of a wintertime Marvel’s New York, our neon-noir aesthetic for the game, and gorgeous ray-traced* reflections.

Miles is searching for a sense of belonging in his vibrant new neighborhood, but a war has broken out between a devious energy corporation, Roxxon, and a high-tech criminal army, the Underground. In the gameplay sequence you saw captured from PlayStation 5 hardware, the Underground interrupts the election rally. 

Meanwhile the Underground also attacks a Roxxon convoy on the Braithwaite Bridge in an attempt to steal NuForm energy canisters. NuForm is a highly violate energy source that Roxxon promises can power the entire city cleanly. Here we meet the leader of the Underground, the brilliant Tinkerer. Marvel fans will surely recognize the name of this villain from the comics, but we’re very excited to introduce you to our take on this classic Spider-Man villain.

Miles races to the bridge, and, using his explosive, new bio-electric venom and camouflage abilities, attempts to stop the Underground while protecting the citizens of Marvel’s New York City. But as Miles endeavors to rise to the challenge of becoming his own Spider-Man, he finds it’s not as easy as just having impressive new powers.

Beyond the thrilling gameplay, the gameplay video also shows off some of the amazing visuals that are available for the game on PS5. We are taking advantage of the next-generation in many more ways as well for the PS5. From the silky smooth targeted 60fps frame rate Performance Mode, to feeling the bio-electric venom energy course through your fingertips via the haptic feedback of the DualSense controller, to hearing Marvel’s New York surround you in lush 3D audio*, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be a showpiece for the PlayStation 5.

Also Coming to PlayStation 4

We’re also excited today to reveal that Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be arriving on both PS5 and PS4.

Yes, that’s right, we know that some of you may transition to PS5 at different times, which it was why it was important to us to release the latest title in the Marvel’s Spider-Man universe on both consoles.

The standard edition will be available digitally on the PlayStation Store or physically at your local retailer for $49.99.

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales also supports a next-gen upgrade path, so even if you aren’t ready to upgrade to PS5 just yet, there’s nothing stopping you from buying the PS4 version and enjoying the game alongside everyone else at launch. While it doesn’t have the enhancements made possible by the console in the PS5 version, the game still looks beautiful on PS4 and PS4 Pro, and you can rest easy that when you do make the jump to PS5, the game comes with you.

Ultimate Edition

But that’s not all; we have one more surprise for you today. On PS5, we are announcing an Ultimate Edition that includes a voucher code* for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered. You’ll be able to experience the complete storyline up to this point, which includes the remaster of the original game and all three installments of the Marvel’s Spider-Man: The City That Never Sleeps downloadable content so you can play the full narrative arc.

The remaster for the PS5 is no simple up-res, as many of the game’s art assets have been completely updated to take advantage of the PS5 console’s horsepower. You’ll see better-looking characters with improved skin, eyes, hair, and facial animation (including our new, next-generation Peter Parker). You’ll also see ray-traced reflections and ambient shadows, improved lighting, more pedestrians and vehicles stretching further into the distance, and the same optional performance mode offered on Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, allowing you to finally play the game at a targeted 60 frames per second frame rate. We’ll be supporting near-instant loading, 3D audio, and the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback. Lastly we’re adding three amazing new Spider-Man suits, new photo mode features, and even new trophies for those of you looking to Platinum the game all over again.

The Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition will launch both physically and digitally on the PlayStation Store for $69.99 on launch day.

We have been working hard all year to ensure that PS5 will launch with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales as well as Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered. We have big plans for the Marvel’s Spider-Man universe with our partners at PlayStation and Marvel, and we cannot wait for you to experience the next adventure with Miles.

[algernoninwonderland]

“Porter sur toi un nouveau regard”: basic outlines and preparatory notes

What better way to celebrate a fic being completed than me releasing some of the basic notes I took while planning it? Here they are, with a few additions.

 It all started as a prompt I got on Discord, the very simple “love at first sight” and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it at first, but the idea of sight stuck with me. Are your first impressions the right ones? Can you learn to see someone a certain way or another? It’s ultimately a story about learning to see other people and yourself, isn’t it?

Which meant I had to take a certain point of view, because an omniscient floating eye is emotionally detached. Character POV may have a limited scope, but that may help empathise with them. This is a story about Kagami, so it was only fair for Kagami to be the centre of it.

Chapter 1: 

“How does Kagami truly feel about Marinette before Ikari Gozen”? 

While Marinette sees the two of them as rivals, that rivalry is one-sided, and Kagami wouldn’t take that girl seriously. She’s simply annoying. 

Kagami is a lonely character, who genuinely wants to make friends, still, and she’s anything but cool or smooth. She doesn’t know the other characters the way the audience does, at all.

Tomoe Tsurugi sucks.

Switching from “Dupain-Cheng” to “Marinette Dupain-Cheng” to “Marinette” would be a nice way to keep the reader hooked. Lots of tiny details that’ll come back later on!

Comphet. 

Lots of comphet already. What you “should” like, a calculated, conscious choice.

A few jabs at the show because why not.

Chapter 2:

Filling gaps in characterisation and timeline to make sure that everything hurts later on! Including pre-Adrigami. People thought the paperwork between Tomoe and Gabriel was a marriage contract, not quite, but an arranged relationship? Definitely from Tomoe’s side.

Are Kagami and Marinette already going on dates when they visit the city together all on their own? Isn’t that the true sapphic experience.

Also, the promise of them going to the terrace rooftop on sunny days! It’ll come back later on.

The Bike Motive. Marinette driving her forward.

“Your hair is beautiful” but make it much gayer. 

I hate the André scene in the finale, it sucks and it’s awful for everyone. It should be awful for both Marinette and Kagami. Comphet. So much comphet. 

Kagami’s impression of brokenness is something we’ll come back to over and over again.

Adrien doesn’t notice because he’s Adrien. The kiss. Nothing.

“K-Kagami!” End with a cliffhanger for more suffering.

As a side note, I made myself cry writing this chapter.

Chapter 3:

Everything hurts. Everything. Hurts. 

Identity reveals don’t solve anything, they still fail, and Marinette still isn’t willing to show herself to Kagami, still hiding behind a facade.

Just because Marinette understands things a little better doesn’t mean it hurts any less

They are both lying to each other and themselves and they don’t even realise it.

“Fixing the brokenness” through comphet.

Nothing is solved at all.

Falling asleep on a chaise longue plus blanket

Chapter 4:

Life as a socialite in Paris, concerts and restaurants, wearing clothes she hasn’t chosen

The Adrien routine, pulling chairs and flowers

It’s all miserable still, lots of “shoulds”

Fencing competition, fencing competition ahead. Tomoe is a terrible parent and a terrible coach.

Text conversations with Marinette, overdoes joy with emojis

The Bike Motive Returns, with more feelings, Marinette’s almost desperate gestures

(Kagami as the only person she can fully confide in, but still won’t)

An early birthday present… But Kagami is born in November, Marinette is a mess and so is her room.

Hug and first hint of reciprocated Marigami? Just the happiness of having someone like Kagami who admires her work as Marinette.

Falling asleep on a chaise longue plus blanket, part deux.

KAGAMI IN A SUIT!!!

Kisses on the cheek are really common in France, not Japan. A heavy kiss.

Dress or suit?

Marinette is a mess, texts at night. Difference between Adrien and Marinette’s texts, Adrien’s more self-centred.

No sense of space in Tokyo, jet lag and closed house. Closed spaces. 

Chapter 5:

I’m going to write a full chapter about sabre fencing and people will love it

Lots of sneaky (or not so sneaky) GL and Yuri manga/anime references. Make Juri Arisugawa part of the Jury.

All the locations are real

Marinette overdoes it again, Kagami can’t tell.

Kagami’s technique dissecting her opponents. She is a champion already.

Teach the readers about fencing whilst describing it. Have opponents be challenging in specific, understandable ways.

She chooses the suit. What even is subtlety.

As a side note: it was a really fun one to write.

Chapter 6:

Marinette internship phone call, Nathalie’s plan. No way Gabriel would accept to work with a kid. Flirting, Kagami as a muse?

The Foucault chapter. Everything is a prison. Restaurant, vertical stripes on wall as prison bars, the relationship, the self-locking car. This is no Utena car.

Everything is wrong, including the food

Adrigami friendship, much better than Adrigami romance. Rose/Chair. She doesn’t hate him at all, she just doesn’t love him… It wouldn’t work, she’s gay and he’s a liar.

Self-imposed gestures of affection.

Do not describe the kisses, they’re just a thing she has to do

Marinette is a mess, Ladybug is a mess, hell imagery, falling down a hole, almost dying. We are in the car with Kagami and we want to do something, anything, and we can’t.

Chapter 7:

The first step to things being alright again is to admit that they aren’t alright now

Nighttime conversation, Kagami letting Ladybug in

Marinette finally showing herself bare to Kagami but still tries not to until the dam breaks. Being a hero is miserable. Being the Guardian when you are a child with no guidance or support is miserable. Kagami as the only person she can trust.

Botched Lukanette date?

“I’m just so tired.”

“You are not a failure, you are so courageous, a genius fashion designer and my best friend”

(Additional note: I cried writing that passage)

Sharing the burden: help in more than just words.

“I hate that you have to see me like that.”

But showing your vulnerability and still being accepted as true love

Kagami truly sees Marinette now.

“Tutorship” and Tomoe being awful but excuse works. Help is material, homework, tidying up the room together.

“Stop feeling guilty about letting other people help you.”

Flirting hidden behind jokes, Kagami lying to herself. Way to ruin the mood.

Marigami baking.

Harlem 88, postal workers, acab

Watching television on the same couch, or rather watching Marinette watch television.

Umbrella scene with polka dots.

Kagami fully aware of her feeling and afraid of them, afraid that Marinette might feel the same

Chapter 8:

more fencing, Kagami absolutely rules

Worrying about Marinette alone with Gabriel, rightfully so, but can’t say that out loud

Stereotypical outdated Japanese-ness, Kagami can’t conform, doesn’t know how to put on her houmongi on her own. Tomoe and paradoxes, her daughter is both weak and “too muscular” at the same time.

The Palais Royal. The Buren columns are very climbable.

Gabriel, “quite miraculous”. Testing the waters, Kagami doesn’t notice. 

Jealousy when Adrien speaks of Marinette?

Ratatouille reference! Tatou. 

Tomoe playing the role of the exotic Japanese to be accepted. 

Drunk parents, drunk on power and self-satisfaction. 

Adrien’s kiss, forced to return it. 

Fear that Adrien might become Marinette’s muse

The bike motive once more

Barkk’s power is tracking magical signatures, each is different from the other

Marinette taking control over her own life, making plans to stop Hawk Moth instead of passively waiting for each attack, 

“She was never broken. She is in love with another girl.”

Marinette is in love with her too, but is ready to wait.

Chapter 9:

Adrien IS Chat Noir, up to the entitlement and his way of being physically affectionate. Stay true to canon and canon implications.

Adrigami/DJWifi double date, Alya means well but doesn’t know everything

Wordbuilding: of course the Ladyblog isn’t the only website ever, bad rival, Daily Bugle pun.

Not hating someone doesn’t mean you should be with them.

Hints of Adrigami friendship again, relief at avoiding romance.

Food at Kagami’s, cooker, formally perfect but not personal

Marinette and Barkk, closer to their goal

The Turtle Pearl bracelet: a shield, a great way to show feeling of danger, symbol of love

Kagami is the one to kiss Marinette on the cheek this time

Chapter 10:

Tomoe is a bad instructor episode 100

In which Adrien proves himself to truly be also Chat Noir, i.e. unable to understand personal barriers and entitlement. Still Kagami’s POV. He doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong, insistence≠playfulness. certainly won’t apologise

The bike motive again. Scenic road and conversation

Going to Orsay, definitely a date!

Chat Noir was moody during akuma crisis because of course he was.

Chapter 11:

Adrigami “break”, Adrien sucks at admitting that he’s anything but perfect and being confronted with that.

Kagami bluntness.

Adrigami isn’t about Adrigami, it’s about the Tsurugi family’s status and Tomoe terrified of consequences. Attacking the room instead of Kagami herself.

The Turtle Pearl glows when wearer feels endangered or imminent danger

The museum pictures, the two of them together

Aquarium date?

“Voice of reason” isn’t the voice of reason at all.

Barkk is in the bag, smells everything

Chapter 12:

Kagami as Tomoe’s messenger

Agreste mansion as a mausoleum, setting up the geography, security cameras, cold. Painting of Émilie, goal is near

Nathalie being extremely good at pretending she didn’t just knock that kid unconscious months ago, she’s awful and it’s great.

Marinette internship, Gabriel wears a bowtie… Resembles a butterfly.

Barkk in the bag, smells everything.

Stressful phone call, feels feverish, it’s him and that’s undeniable.

Marinette the detective.

��Thanks for being there for me”

“Thank you for trusting me so much”

Having dinner with Hawk Moth, it’s awful and stressful

No more chair/rose

Adrien is miserable but not aggressive. Building up to final fight

Chapter 13:

Meet the Dupain-Chengs, short, awkward, sweet moment

Marinette’s room, perfectly clean

From creepy stalker to detective, without downplaying the former or overplaying the latter

The two are complementary, very concrete things, 

The plan: catch Hawk Moth red-handed, take it outside and expose him to the world

How the Kwami Pearls work: just like the Miraculouses themselves, feeding off the host, only more brutal. Marinette trying to reassure Kagami

Re-explain Turtle Pearl and other powers, illusion, thunder, time-rewind and portal

Gabriel owns original Degas painting since they are both assholes

Adrien/Chat still not great at all

Ice-cream but no biphobia/lesbophobia this time, just a regular shop suggested by Juleka.

The Pont des Arts, no more locks, just like in real life.

The confession, the kiss: consent and everything is right, but also desperate. Marinette really wants to do it well.

Longg is back, also, hype

Side note: I cried writing this one.

Chapters 14-15

Ryuko infiltrating the mansion, all in the details

I hate that Hawk Moth’s lair is an actual real physical space in the show, but if this needs to be material, then so be it. He was allowed to turn his house into that because he got help from the Mayor/Audrey.

Chat Noir can’t fight, near breakdown.

Nathalie knew. Remake of first fight, only Ryuko has clear upper hand.

Having missiles in your house isn’t a good idea.

The Turtle Pearl serves its purpose at last, 

Gabriel mostly defeats himself on his own, hubris, the whole extent of his power dynamic with Nathalie

Going back to the Champ de Mars, 

Teamwork, taking the butterfly down. Chat Noir rejects his father entirely, cataclysm-ed akuma.

The mansion again, entirely destroyed, paintings of Émilie burning. Spell book and tablet recovered.

Chapter 16:

Taking the big bad down is useless if you don’t take down the power structures that allowed him to strive in the first place. Killing Voldemort only solves that much.

Discovering it all on a phone screen, shut-in

ACAB no matter your gender

They are just following orders and happy to do so, and Gabriel still has some power over them

Tomoe plays by the rules, even though these rules are awful

Kagami’s anger

Chapter 17:

Aquarium date, aquarium date! Fish facts

Kagami’s anger still, doesn’t die out, render it through environment and senses

Water as a healing motive, fish facts

Hot outside - cold inside, ice-cream

Kagami nearly blows out because of kids after being slightly soothed

The power of love is strong but it can’t solve everything.

Additional note: someone in the comments asked me if Kagami had ASD, and the answer is, I don’t know, you tell me! If you think she is on the spectrum, then she is!

Addressing Kagami being closeted, because there’s simply no other way. This isn’t good. Having to live hidden out of fear isn’t good..

The bike motive, + ice cream

Kagami uses the word “lesbian” for the first time to describe her own experience.

Chapter 18:

Tomoe has feelings and these feelings suck. Under the guise of rules, abuse.

Kagami fighting back.

Power is material, through connections and money, nothing that can’t be bought

Kagami’s first demonstration, don’t make it too violent but still ACAB

Nino and Alya as reporters, Julerose and Luka seasoned protestors

The Palais de Justice’s gilded gates are closed vs the crowd

Marinette using her powers for something other than Hawk Moth, strong stance but also still a 15 yo kid’s understanding of the situation

Chapters 19-20:

No tanabata because Tomoe is terrible

The rooftop terrace at last, more Marigami wholesomeness

Dupain-Cheng house vs Tsurugi house, the furniture and dishes, the meal, more Tom and Sabine

Marinette has been cut from her Chinese heritage, exploring that (callback to Mandarin app, chapter 1) and bitterness of it

Adrien moving on in England, still Plagg with him, he’ll become a rich prep boy

Marinette as a Guardians, her own spell book

Duusuu is devouring Émilie’s soul and neither Marinette nor Kagami knows

Françoise Dupont at night, fencing classes, Marinette moves like Ladybug

The future: it is bright but bittersweet, let’s talk about it together

And there was only one bed

Oh, to cuddle with your girlfriend in her bed for the first time

Watching the sun rise together, calm breakfast

Side note: I also cried writing this one.

Chapter 21, epilogue

A new beginning

Kagami turning her back on her mother almost entirely

The bike motive, but Kagami no longer needs Marinette to show her the way now

New school, familiar faces but not only

An ordinary bracelet for Marinette, but proof of love despite everything

End on their hands.

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 6, Number 13

Trees

It’s four in the afternoon and already getting dark, a foot of snow on the way. One year is nearly over — and yes, we’ve got some essays on that coming up after the holiday break — and another one is taking shape in our inboxes, mail chutes and hard drives. But for right now, let’s take another look at 2020, doubling back on the records that caught our ears without exactly fitting our schedules, the ones that almost got away. Here are the usual free improvisations and long drones, hip hop upstarts and cowpunk also-rans, a harpist, a cellist, a tabletop guitarist and at least one stellar punk record that has us hoping for sweaty live music again in 2021. Contributors this time included Bill Meyer, Bryon Hayes, Andrew Forrell, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Arthur Krumins, Ian Mathers and Ray Garraty, heck let’s call it a quorum, and see you again in the New Year.

Mac Blackout — Love Profess (Trouble In Mind)

Love Profess by Mac Blackout

Mac Blackout owes his surname to his membership in the Functional Blackouts. That’s a garage combo that was once the subject of an article about how they’d been banned from various venues on account of the destructive chaos of their live performances. But you can’t do that forever, and nowadays Mac’s a painter and solo recording artist. His latest sounds are unlikely to make anyone want to put a chair into the mirror behind the bar, but they might send you flipping through your record collection, looking for the sounds that you and he have in common. Love Profess opens with a burst of piano-pounding, sax-overblowing free jazz, but that lasts for about nine seconds before it gets swallowed by some John Bender-worthy synth throb. Give “Wandering Spheres” a couple more minutes, and Mr. Blackout goes full La Dusseldorf on us. By turns spacy, spooky and seriously compelled to vent nocturnal loneliness, this half-hour long LP is both as familiar and as unknown as a well-shuffled deck of cards.

Bill Meyer

 Ross Birdwise — Perfect Failures (Never Anything)

Perfect Failures by Ross Birdwise

Vancouver-based electronic improviser Ross Birdwise rails against spatio-temporal norms. The concepts of tempo and rhythm are malleable in his universe. Architecturally, Birdwise is Antoni Gaudí, working in fluid lines to build incomprehensible structures. With Perfect Failures, he leaps even further away from the orthogonal grid of musical construction, dissolving beats into grains of sound. The warped rhythms found on Frame Drag are divested in favor of an approach that more resembles electroacoustic composition. As a matter of fact, the title track comes on like a digital recreation of a piece of classic musique concrète. Birdwise avoids venturing into purely ambient territory yet borrows some signifiers from the genre: keyboard melodies, elongated tones, washes of sound. He overlays these seemingly innocuous elements with crashes of noise, oblique jump cuts and hyperkinetic sequences, constantly forcing us to shift focus to make sense of his soundscapes. The febrile nature of the music is what intoxicates, but the discordant melodies are what enthrall.

Bryon Hayes

 C_G — C_G (edelfaul recordings)

C_G by C_G

Belgium-based French electronic artist Eduardo Ribuyo (C_C) and Israeli drummer Ilia Gorovitz (Stumpf) join forces on C_G, a one-take collaboration of molecular machine noise and improvised percussion. It opens as a slow creep, Gorovitz playing minimal rhythms that sound like someone walking through the pre-dawn streets of an awakening city. Ribuyo accretes whirrs, cracks and electrical pops to evoke the dread of a night not over. On “Normalising Cruelty,” for instance, the discomfort builds, the drums tumble in flight, the noise intensifies. The relative conventionality of the percussion tracks seems intentional and serves to focus attention on the granular details Ribuyo conjures from his machines. Think the experiments of similarly minded Mille Plateaux and Raster Norton artists. When played through headphones at volume, its full queasy Room 101 buzz and grind squirms most effectively into the brain. Easy listening this is not, but if and when home gatherings resume this would be an ideal way to clear the house.

Andrew Forell

  Che Noir — After 12 EP (TCF Music Group)

If you’ve been paying attention to hip-hop in the last few years, Buffalo’s Griselda camp has dominated the “old heads” conversation away from whatever the kids are vibing to on TikTok. But there’s life away from an Eminem partnership, and not just in the form of Benny the Butcher: Witness Che Noir, who has been on fire throughout 2020. After starting off the year with the 38 Spesh-produced Juno and following it up with the Apollo Brown-produced As God Intended, Che’s closing things out with this self-produced seven-song EP that covers a wide range of territory without dipping into tales of street hustling, just the age old struggle to get some respect. “Hunger Games” is an early highlight that shows her chemistry with Ransom and 38 Spesh, while she completely takes over in speaking to the times on “Moment in the Sun,” which is the clear emotional highlight of the EP. Amber Simone’s pleading chorus on closer “Grace” is another stylistic turn and closes things on a high note. The last words you hear are Simone’s as she sings, “Imma go get it”; the lingering effect is that you know Che Noir is already showing you as much. Miss this one at your own risk.

Patrick Masterson 

 Cong Josie — “Leather Whip” b/w “Maxine” (It Records)

Leather Whip / Maxine (AA single) by Cong Josie

Frankie Teardrop rides again in this smoking synth punk single from Australia’s Cong Josie. “Leather Whip” is about as menacing and minimal as synthesizer music gets, braced by the hard slap of gate-reverbed drums and a claw-picked bass sound (maybe electronic?) and Cong Josie’s whispery insinuations. “Maxine” is just as stripped, with blotchy bass sound and swishing drum machine rhythms framing a haunted rockabilly love song. It’s very Suicide, but isn’t that a good thing?

Jennifer Kelly

   Divine Horsemen — Live 1985-1987 (Feeding Tube)

Divine Horsemen “Live”1985-1987 by Divine Horsemen

With Divine Horsemen, Chris D of the Flesh Eaters had a brief but memorable run in vivid, gothic, country-tinged punk. This disc commemorates two red-hot live outings from 1985 and 1987, the first at Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach, California, the second at Boston’s The Rat. A sharply realized recording shows how this band’s sound fit into the cowpunk parameters set by X, with strident guitar clangor and hard knocking rock rhythms (the ax-heavy line-up featured in this recording included Wayne James, Marshall Rohner and Peter Andrus on guitars, the Flesh Eater’s Robyn Jameson on bass). The secret weapon, though, was the ongoing and volatile vocal duel between the front man and his then-wife Julie Christensen, a classically trained soprano with an unholy vibrato-laced belt. You can hear how she transformed his art by comparing the Flesh Eater’s version of “Poison Arrow” with the one here. It’s as aggressive as ever, musically, and Chris D. is in full florid, echoey, goth-punk mode. Christensen, however, is molten fire, letting loose cascades and flurries of wild vibrating song. There’s a scorching, stomping romp through the vamping “Hell’s Belle,” and a lurid rendering of mad, howling “Frankie Silver,” and, towards the end, a muscular take on the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Christensen later made a mark as one of Leonard Cohen’s favorite backup singers, and Chris D is still knocking around with a reunited, all-star Flesh Eaters, though there’s some talk of getting this band back together as well. I’d go.

Jennifer Kelly

 Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger — Force Majeure (International Anthem)

Force Majeure by Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger

Harlem harpist Brandee Younger and bassist Dezron Douglas faced down New York’s early months of quarantine with a series of live broadcasts recorded in their apartment on a single microphone. This document of intimate resilience collects highlights of the Friday ritual. Younger and Douglas perform covers of spiritual Jazz, soul and pop songs as well as the delightfully titled original “Toilet Paper Romance.” The music is so close you feel the fingers on the strings and frets. Younger’s harp playing is a revelation, pianistic on John Coltrane’s “Equinox”, pointillist yet robust on his “Wise One” which they dedicate to Ahmaud Arbery. Douglas provides vigorous and sympathetic accompaniment and his solo rendition of Sting’s “Inshallah” is a tender tough exploration of his instrument. Along the way there are lovely versions of pieces by, amongst others, Alice Coltrane, Kate Bush and Clifton Davis. Douglas closes with the words “Black music cannot be recreated it can only be expressed” and Force Majeure demonstrates that the same goes for humanity and creativity.

Andrew Forell

Avalon Emerson — 040 12” (AD 93)

040 by Avalon Emerson

It’s been a big year for Avalon Emerson, who started 2020 prepping a move from Berlin to East Los Angeles and ends it back home stateside with an almost universally acclaimed DJ-Kicks entry to her credit. This three-song 12” for the label fka Whities is a nice way to close out a triumphant year, illustrating her penchant for bright melodies and percussive detail. “One Long Day Till I See You Again” is a welcoming slice of beatless percolation to close; “Winter and Water” leans heavily on rhythmic tricks in the middle. That makes A1 “Rotting Hills” the ideal lead as a balance between them. There may not be so obvious a gimmick as a Magnetic Fields cover, but that makes it no less valuable for showing what Emerson can do. Call it one more fluorescent rush.

Patrick Masterson

 End Forest — Proroctwo (Self-released)

Proroctwo (The Prophecy) by End Forest

For some of us, the fusion of folk music forms with crust and metal mostly issues in obscenities like Finntroll (yep, a Finnish band that makes folk metal songs about…trolls) or in politically toxic, Völkisch nationalist fantasias. But some bands get it right; see Botanist’s remarkable work, and see also End Forest, an act just emerging from Poland’s punk underground. Singer Paula Pieczonka employs a traditional Slavic vocal technique that roughly translates to “white singing” — but before you get creeped out by any potential fascist vibes, please know that the “whiteness” at stake in the phrase is purely an aesthetic value. And her voice is really great, open and soaring. “Proroctwo (The Prophecy)” has the sweep and drama of a lot of contemporary crust, and all of the genre’s interest in symbolic violence. The lyrics envision a future wrought and wracked by social conflict, a coming conflagration of torn bodies and of piles of dislodged teeth housed in some horrific archive of viciousness (that’s quite an image). It’s harrowing stuff, big guitar chords accented by sitar and flute. The track is available on Bandcamp, along with several inventive remixes by Polish musicians and DJs, like Tomek Jedynak and Dawid Chrapla. End Forest indicates that a full record is forthcoming sometime in spring. Looking forward to it, y’all.

Jonathan Shaw

 Lori Goldson — On a Moonlit Hill in Slovenia (Eiderdown Records)

On A Moonlit Hill In Slovenia by Lori Goldston

Goldson creates movement and tension in an arresting way with a rough-hewn approach to the cello. This could be a good entry point to her solo work, which is varied and bridges the gap between DIY attitude and elevated levels of musicianship and considered approach. The flow of her playing here evokes the almost brutal scrape of the strings, which gives a welcome texture to the melodic squiggles.

Arthur Krumins

Hot Chip — LateNightTales (LateNightTales)

The LateNightTales series of artist-curated mixes has seen a fair bit of variation over the years since Fila Brazilia first took up the torch in 2001, which makes a certain amount of sense; how we spend our late nights can differ wildly, of course. Hot Chip’s instalment in the series hits some of the expected notes (at least one cover, in this case a deeply moving one of the Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” they’ve been playing since Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard were in high school together; a closing story track, in this case Taylor’s father reading a bit from Finnegan’s Wake) and otherwise depicts the kind of late night Dusted readers might be more familiar with than most; one where a clearly voracious and eclectic listener is keeping their own private party going just for another hour or so, but always keeping things just quiet and subtle enough to not wake up anyone upstairs. The three other, non-cover new Hot Chip tracks all make for standouts here but there’s plenty of room for accolades, whether it’s for the smoothly groovy (Pale Blue, Mike Saita, Beatrice Dillon), the more avant garde (Christina Vantzou, About Group, Nils Frahm) to just plain off-kilter pop (Fever Ray, PlanningToRock, Hot Chip themselves). The result works as both a wonderful playlist and a survey of the band’s sonic world; and it does work best when everyone else is in bed.  

Ian Mathers

Annette Krebs Jean-Luc Guionnet — Pointe Sèche (Inexhaustible Editions)

pointe sèche by Jean-Luc Guionnet, Annette Krebs

Annette Krebs and Jean-Luc Guionnet recorded the three long, numbered tracks on Pointe Sèche (translation: Dry Point) over the course of three days at St. Peter’s Parish church in Bistrica ob Sotli, Slovenia. Location matters because this music couldn’t happen just anywhere; Guionnet plays church organ. Krebs was once part of the post-Keith Rowe generation of tabletop guitarists, but since 2014 she has abandoned strings and fretboards in favor of a series of hybrid instruments called konstruktions. Konstruktion #4, which appears on this record, includes suspended pieces of metal, a handful of toy animals, a wooden sounding board, vocal and contact microphones and a couple touch screens that manage computer programs. While both musicians have extensive backgrounds in improvisation, this recording sounds more like an audio transcription of a multi-media collage. Guionnet plays his large instrument quite softly, extracting machine-like hums, brief burps and dopplering tones that flicker around the periphery of Krebs’ fragments of speech, distant clangs and unidentifiable events. The resulting sounds resolutely defy decoding, which is its own reward in a time when so much music can be reduced to easily identifiable antecedents.

Bill Meyer

 KMRU — ftpim (The Substation)

ftpim by KMRU

If you happened to catch Peel, Joseph Kamaru’s wonderful release on Editions Mego in late July, but haven’t paid attention before or since, early December’s half-hour two-tracker ftpim done for (and mastered by) Room40 leader Lawrence English is a Janus-faced example of the Nairobi-based ambient artist’s power. As Ian Forsythe put it in his BOGO review of both Peel and Opaquer, “Something that can define an effective ambient record is an ability to disintegrate the perimeter of the record itself and the outside world,” a line I think about every time I listen to KMRU now. “Figures Emerge” feels more immediately accessible to me as a relatable environment where the gentle, pulsing drone is occasionally greeted by sounds outside the studio, while “From the People I Met” is more difficult terrain, a distorted fog of post-shoegaze harmonic decay — no less interesting, but perhaps more metaphorical in its take on the outside world. (Or not, given how 2020 has gone.)

Patrick Masterson

  Paul Lovens / Florian Stoffner—Tetratne (Ezz-thetics)

Enough years separate drummer Paul Lovens and guitarist Florian Stoffner that they could be father and son, and Lovens membership in the Schlippenbach Trio, and Lovens role as drummer in the legendarily long-running Schlippenbach Trio establishes him as an august elder of free improvisation. But the partnership they exhibit on this CD is one of equals committed to making music that is of one mind. Whether matching sparse string-tugging to purposefully collapsing batterie or burrowing sprung-spring wobbles to an immense cymbal wash, the duo plays without regard for showing us one guy or the other’s stuff. The point, it seems, is to how they imagine as one, and their combined craniums generate plenty of imagination. They operate in a realm close to that occupied by Derek Bailey and John Stevens, or Roger Smith and Louis Moholo-Moholo, but their patch of turf is entirely their own.

Bill Meyer

  Mr. Teenage — Automatic Love (Self-Release)

Automatic Love by Mr. Teenage

Melbourne, Australia’s fertile garage punk scene has squeeze out another good one in Mr. Teenage, a Buzzcockian foursome prone to short, sharp riffs and sing-along choruses. A four-song EP starts with the title track, whose arch talk-sung verse erupts into rabid, rip-sawing guitar, like Devo meeting the Wipers. “Waste of Time” piles palm muted urgency with explosive release, with a good bit of the Clash in the crashing, clangor. “KIDS” struts and swaggers in a rough-edged way that’s close to the violence of early Reigning Sound or Texas’ Bad Sports. “Oh, the kids these days,” to borrow a phrase, they’re pretty good.

Jennifer Kelly

 Nekra — Royal Disruptor (La Vida Es Un Mus)

Royal Disruptor by Nekra

Remember punk shows? Remember half-lit, dusty basements and fully lit, dirty kids? Remember your sneaker soles sticking to scuffed, gummy linoleum? Remember greasy denim battle jackets and hand-drawn Sharpie slogans? Remember warm beer (watery domestic suds in cans and cups) and cold stares (angsty bravado and bad attitude for its own sake)? Remember anarchists arguing with nihilists, and riot grrrls arguing with rocker boys? Remember people laughing and people smoking and people shouting and people spitting, all without masks? Remember the anticipation that crisps the air when the amps switch on? Feedback from the cheap-ass mic stabbing your ears? Beefy dudes elbowing through the press of flesh? That volatile, stomachy mix of happiness and truculence? Those warm-up thumps of the bass drum and the initial strums of crackling guitar? Remember all that? For the time being, in the United States of Dysfunction, here’s the closest thing you’ll get: an EP of feral, fast punk songs that sound like they’re happening live, right in front of your face. Thanks, Nekra — I really needed that.

Jonathan Shaw

 Neuringer / Dulberger / Masri — Dromedaries II (Relative Pitch)

Dromedaries II by Keir Neuringer, Shayna Dulberger, Julius Masri

Yes, Dromedaries II is a sequel. It follows by three years a debut cassette which was sold in the sort of microquantities that 21st century cassettes are sold. So, it’s more likely that you have heard another of the bands that the trio’s alto saxophonist, Keir Neuringer, plays in — Irreversible Entanglements. While the two combos don’t sound that similar, they share a commitment to improvising propulsive, cohesive music that will put a boot up your butt if you get in the way. While IE focuses on supplying music that frames and exemplifies the stern proclamations of vocalist Camae Ayewa, the trio plays instrumental free jazz that balances individual expression with collective support. Neuringer, double bassist Shayna Dulberger and drummer Julius Masri play like their eyes are on the horizon, but each musician’s ears are tuned into what the other two are doing. The result is music that seems to move in concerted fashion, but usually has someone doing something that pulls against the prevailing thrust in ways that heighten tension, but never force the music off track.

Bill Meyer

Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song (Smalltown Supersound)

One of the distinctive things about Kelly Lee Owens’ marvellous debut LP a few years ago, as noted here, is that it felt so confident and distinct that it could have easily been the work of a much more seasoned producer. That impression, of a deftly skilled hand at the controls and a keen artistic sensibility and taste shaping it all, certainly doesn’t recede on Inner Song, whether it finds Owens homaging the grandmother who provided support and inspiration (“Jeanette”), gently but firmly rejecting unhealthy relationships (the utterly gorgeous “L.I.N.E.”) or teaming up with John Cale to make some bilingual, deep Welsh ambient dub (“Corner of My Sky”). And that’s one pretty randomly chosen three-song run! Owens continues to excel at both crafting gorgeous, lived-in productions and maybe especially with her handling of voices (her own and others), and she’s comfortable enough in her own skin that if she wants to open up the album with an instrumental Radiohead version (“Arpeggi”) she will, and she’ll make it feel natural, too.  

Ian Mathers

San Kazakgascar — Emotional Crevasse (Lather Records)

Emotional Crevasse by San Kazakgascar

You won’t find San Kazakgascar on any map, but give a listen and you’ll know where this combo is coming from. Geographically, they hail from Sacramento CA, where they share personnel with Swimming In Bengal. But sonically, they are the product of a journey through music libraries that likely started out in a Savage Republic and sweated in the shadow of Sun City Girls. They likely spent time in the teetering stacks of music collections compiled in a time when the problematic aspects of the term world music were outweighed by the lure of sounds you hadn’t heard before. More important than where they’ve been, though, is the impulse to go someplace other than where they’re currently standing. To accomplish this, twangy guitars, rhythms that straighten your spine whilst swiveling your hips, bottom-dredging saxophone and a cameo appearance by a throat singer who understands that part of a shaman’s job is to scare you each take their turn stepping up and pointing your mind elsewhere. Where it goes after that is up to you.

Bill Meyer

     John Sharkey III — “I Found Everyone This Way” (12XU)

Has Sharkey mellowed? This early peek at the upcoming solo album from the Clockcleaner legend and Dark Blue proprietor suggests a pensive mood, with liquid jangle and surprisingly subdued and lyrical delivery (albeit in the man’s inimitable hollowed out and wounded snarl). But give the artist a power ballad if that’s what he wants. The song has a graceful arc to it, a doomed romanticism and not an ounce of cloying sentiment.

Jennifer Kelly

 Sky Furrows — Sky Furrows (Tape Drift Records/Skell Records/Philthy Rex Records)

Sky Furrows by Sky Furrows

Sky Furrows don’t take long to match sound and message. As Karen Schoemer drops references to SST Records and Raymond Pettibone, bassist Eric Hardiman and drummer Philip Donnelly whip up a tense groove that could easily have been played by Mike Watt and George Hurley. Mike Griffin’s spidery, treble-rich guitar picking is a little less specifically referential, but does sound like it was fed through a signal chain of gear that would have been affordable back in the first Bush administration. The next track looks back a bit further; Schoemer’s voice aside, it sounds like Joy Division might have done if Tom Herman had turned up, pushed Martin Hannet out of the control room before he could ladle on the effects and instead laid down some space blues licks. Schoemer recites rather than sings in a cadence that recalls Lee Ranaldo’s; pre-internet underground rock is in this band’s DNA. The sounds themselves are persistently cool, but one drawback of having a poet instead of a singer up front is an apparent reluctance to vary the structure; it would not have hurt to break things up with some contrasting passages here or there.

Bill Meyer

  Soft on Crime — “You’ve Already Made Up Your Mind” b/w “Rubyanne” (EatsIt)

7'' by Soft on Crime

These Dublin fuzz-punks kick up a guitar-chiming clangor in A-Side, “You’ve Already Made Up Your Mind,” which might have you reaching for your old Sugar records. Sharp but sweet, the cut is an unruly gem buoyed by melody but bristling with attitude. “Rubyanne” is slower, softer and more ingratiating, embellished with baroque pop elements like flute, saxophone and choral counterpoints. “Little 8 Track” fills out this brief disc, with crunching, buzz-hopped bass and a bit of guitar jangle under whisper-y romantic vocals. It’s a bit hard to get a handle on the band, based on such disparate samples, but intriguing enough to make you want to settle the matter whenever more material becomes available.

Jennifer Kelly

Theoxinia — See the Lapith King Burn (Bandcamp)

See the Lapith King Burn by Theoxenia

Students of Greek mythology will grasp it right away, but in the internet age, it doesn’t take anyone long to figure out that when you name your record See the Lapith King Burn, you’re casting your lot for better or worse with the party animals. The Lapiths were one side of a lineage that also involved the considerably less sober-sided Centaurs, and the two sides of the family had a bloody showdown at a wedding that has been taken to symbolize the war between civilization and wildness. Theoxinia is Dave Shuford (No-Neck Blues Band, Rhyton, D. Charles Speer & the Helix) and his small circle of stringed instruments and low-cost repeating devices. If you were to dig through his past discography, it most closely resembles the LP Arghiledes (Thrill Jockey) in its explicitly Hellenic-psychedelic vibe. But, like so many folks in recent times, Shuford has decided to bypass the expanse and aggravation of physical publication in favor of marketing this LP-sized recording on Bandcamp. If that fact really bugs you, I guess you could start a label and make the man an offer. But if fuzz-tone bouzouki, sped-up loops and unerringly traced dance steps that will look most convincing when executed with a knife between your teeth and the sheriff’s wallet poking mockingly out of the top of your breast pocket sounds like your jam, See the Lapith King Burn awaits you in the realm of digital insubstantiality.

Bill Meyer

 Trees — 50th Anniversary Edition (Earth Recordings)

Trees (50th Anniversary Edition) by Trees

This boxed set presents the two original Trees albums from the early 1970s, The Garden of Jane Delawney and On the Shore, with the addition of demos and sundry recordings from the era. Here the band took the UK folk rock sound emergent at the time and drew it out into its jammy and somewhat arena rock guitar soloing conclusion. It’s good to have all of this in one place to document the myriad ways that Trees wrapped traditional material into new forms and with a bracing, druggy feel.

Arthur Krumins 

 Uncivilized — Garden (UNCIV MUSIC)

Garden by Uncivilized

Guitarist Tom Csatari presides over NYC-based large jazz ensemble known as Uncivilized, whose fusion-y discography stretches back a couple of years and prominently incorporates a cover of the Angelo Badalamenti theme from Twin Peaks. This 27-track album was recorded live at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works space in 2018 with a nine-piece band, who navigate drones and dances and the multi-part Meltedy Candy STOMP, a sinuous exploration of space age keyboards and surging big band instruments. Jaimie Branch, who lives next door to Csatari and was invited on a whim at the last minute, joins in for the second half including a smoldering rendition of the Lynch theme. It’s damn fine (though not coffee). Later on, Stevie Wonder gets the Uncivilized treatment in a pensive cover of “Evil,” led by warm guitar, blowsy sax and a little bit of jazz flute.

Jennifer Kelly

 Unwed Sailor — Look Alive (Old Bear Records)

Look Alive by Unwed Sailor

Johnathon Ford, who plays bass for Pedro the Lion, has been at the center of Unwed Sailor for two decades, gathering a changing cohort of players to realize his lucid instrumental compositions. Here, as on last year’s Heavy Age, Eric Swatzell adds guitars and Matthew Putnam drums to Ford’s essential bass and keyboard sounds. Yet while Heavy Age brooded, Look Alive grooves with bright clarity, riding insistent basslines through highly colored landscapes of synths and drums. The title track bounds with optimism, with big swirls of synth sound enveloping a rigorous cadence of bass and drums. “Camino Reel” is more guitar-centric but just as uplifting, opening out into squalling shoe-gaze-y walls of amplified sound. Ford, who usually leans on post-punk influences like New Order and the Cure, indulges an affinity for dance, here, especially audible on the trance-y “Gone Jungle” remix by GJ.

Jennifer Kelly

 Your Old Droog — Dump YOD Krutoy Edition (Self-released)

Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition by YOD

American rapper Your Old Droog has been releasing solid music for years. He never had ups for the same reason he never had downs: he never left his comfort zone. Dump YOD Krutoy Edition (where “krutoy” stands for “rude boy” or “badass”) may be his breakthrough album. He always kept his Soviet origins in check, and here for the first time he draws his imagery from three different sources: New York urban present, Ukrainian folk and Soviet and post-Soviet past (even Boris Yeltsin makes an appearance). In this boiling pot, a new Your Old Droog is rising, among balalaikas and mean streets of NYC, matryoshkas and producers with boring beats, babushkas and graffiti writers.

Ray Garraty

[bravadoseries]

hey ava!! can you tell me more about olivia? i’m a whore for sam ocs and i loved the gifset so much!!

oh my gosh yes of course! 

olivia’s fic is entitled symbiosis!  it takes place immediately after the winter soldier over the summer of 2014 after sam moves into avengers tower.  there’s another fic she stars in called ostranenie which takes place during the falcon and the winter soldier as well but that’s a story she shares w juliette fury (my bucky oc).  

olivia was born and raised in harlem, and joined the military after high school to help make enough money for her brother to afford college.  she served in the air force for two tours before coming back home and deciding to pursue a college degree 

when the fic picks up, she’s a re-entry student at empire state university who also works part-time at her family’s bakery in brooklyn.  it’s a modest hole in the wall that as of right now is not named but i think it’s started to suffer because of gentrification and the movement of new, luxury businesses into the neighborhood and the forcing out of residents that have kept it afloat.  audrey’s been obsessed with their red velvet cupcakes forever, though, so when it’s time for steve’s birthday party, she sends sam to make a giant order, on really short notice.  

because her family’s business has been suffering, olivia pays for college through a series of deals with the esposito crime family (currently headed by annie esposito, who is the step-daughter of the king who’s on his way out and also the protagonist of a jessica jones fic lol).  she tutors annie’s little brother at empire state (which is.  a pain because he’s a little like frat boy who’s convinced that if he does enough adderall, it’ll all work out), agrees to work as a runner from time to time for minor drug deals (like weed, not like. heroin), etc. the esposito crime family has a rival mafia family that is also unnamed rn but they catch onto olivia’s involvement and attempt to extort her to get dirt on the espositos.  for context, also, like the espositos are bad, but this rival family is a lot worse.  espositos sell arms, and they sell drugs, and whatever, but their rival family is involved with trafficking and murder.  way more intense and really trying to escalate things.  

unfortunately, these two threads come to a head at the same time.  sam is in the perales’ bakery on july 2, 2014, asking olivia if she’d be willing to make 300 cupcakes in two days, and someone from the rival family shoots out her windows.  they both immediately duck and have like ptsd flashbacks for a hot second, but olivia takes it way worse because she hasn’t had any sort of counseling or support since coming home.  so he covers her and helps her calm down and is like I Have to Call the Police and she’s like NO POLICE! because even though she just got shot at, she knows that going to them is more trouble than it’s worth.  olivia’s family is documented, but there are others in her community who aren’t, and she doesn’t want to risk it.  plus, if they find out she was voluntarily involved with the gang, she’s screwed.  

so sam decides that the gentlemanly thing to do is to help her get out of this mess.  cue the two of them involved in a 40s-esque noir crime drama that’s also somehow a romantic comedy.  it’s a very cute fic that i’m super excited for—all the chapter titles are really cheesy pickup lines, and olivia is a very sweet and wholesome character despite some of the people she’s involved with.  in a world that just keeps getting darker, she’s the sun, and her relationship with sam is one of the most consistently positive things in the whole stars & stripes universe.  

thank you so much for your interest!!! <3<3<3

[writemarcus]

Black LGBTQ+ playwrights and musical-theater artists you need to know

These artists are producing amazing, timely work.

By Marcus Scott Posted: Friday July 24 2020, 4:56pm

Marcus Scott is a New York City–based playwright, musical writer, opera librettist and journalist. He has contributed to Elle, Essence, Out, American Theatre, Uptown, Trace, Madame Noire and Playbill, among other publications. Follow Marcus: Instagram, Twitter

We’re in the chrysalis of a new age of theatrical storytelling, and Black queer voices have been at the center of this transformation. Stepping out of the margins of society to push against the status quo, Black LGBTQ+ artists  have been actively engaged in fighting anti-blackness, racial disparities, disenfranchisement, homophobia and transphobia.

The success of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, Donja R. Love’s one in two and Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’—not to mention Michael R. Jackson’s tour de force, the Pulitzer Prize–winning metamusical A Strange Loop—made that phenomenon especially visible last season. But these artists are far from alone. Because the intersection of queerness and Blackness is complex—with various gender expressions, sexual identifiers and communities taking shape in different spaces—Black LGBTQ+ artists are anything but a monolith. George C. Wolfe, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Harrison David Rivers, Staceyann Chin, Colman Domingo, Tracey Scott Wilson, Tanya Barfield, Marcus Gardley and Daniel Alexander Jones are just some of the many Black queer writers who have already made marks.

With New York stages dark for the foreseeable future, we can’t know when we will be able to see live works by these artists again. It is likely, however, that they will continue to play major roles in the direction American theater will take in the post-quarantine era—along with many creators who are still flying mostly under the radar. Here are just a few of the Black queer artists you may not have encountered yet: vital new voices that are speaking to the Zeitgeist and turning up the volume.

Christina Anderson A protégé of Paula Vogel’s, Christina Anderson has presented work at the Public Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Penumbra Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons and other theaters around the U.S. and Canada. She has degrees from the Yale School of Drama and Brown University, and  is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and Epic Theatre Ensemble; she has received the inaugural Harper Lee Award for Playwriting and three Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominations, among other honors. Works include: How To Catch Creation (2019), Blacktop Sky (2013), Inked Baby (2009) Follow Christina: Website

Aziza Barnes Award-winning poet Aziza Barnes moved into playwriting with one of the great sex comedies of the 2010s: BLKS, which premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2017 before it played at MCC Theatre in 2019 (where it earned a Lucille Lortel Award nomination). The NYU grad’s play about three twentysomethings probed the challenges and choices of Millennials with pathos and zest that hasn’t been seen since Kenneth Lonergan’s Gen X love/hate letter This Is Our Youth. Barnes is the author of the full-length collection of poems the blind pig and i be but i ain’t, which won a Pamet River Prize. Works include: BLKS (2017) Follow Aziza: Twitter

Troy Anthony Burton Fusing a mélange of quiet storm ‘90s-era Babyface R&B, ‘60s-style funk-soul and urban contemporary gospel, composer Troy Anthony has had a meteoric rise in musical theater in the past three years, receiving commissions and residencies from the Shed, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Atlantic Theater Company and the Civilians. When Anthony is not crafting ditties of his own, he is an active performer who has participated in the Public Theater’s Public Works and Shakespeare In the Park. Works include: The River Is Me (2017), The Dark Girl Chronicles (in progress) Follow Troy: Instagram

Timothy DuWhite Addressing controversial issues such as HIV, state-sanctioned violence and structural anti-blackness, poet and performance artist Timothy DuWhite unnerves audiences with a hip-hop driven gonzo style. DuWhite’s raison d’être is to shock and enrage, and his provocative Neptune was, along with Donja R. Love’s one in two, one of the first plays by an openly black queer writer to address HIV openly and frankly.  He has worked with the United Nations/UNICEF, the Apollo Theater, Dixon Place and La MaMa. Works include: Neptune (2018) Follow Timothy: Instagram

Jirèh Breon Holder Raised in Memphis and educated at Morehouse College, Jirèh Breon Holder solidified his voice at the Yale School of Drama under the direction of Sarah Ruhl. He has received the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award and the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, among other honors. His play Too Heavy for Your Pocket premiered at Roundabout Underground and has since been produced in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Des Moines and Houston; his next play, ...What The End Will Be, is slated to debut at the Roundabout Theatre Company. Works include: Too Heavy for Your Pocket (2017), What The End Will Be (2020) Follow Jirèh: Twitter

C.A. Johnson Born in Louisiana, rising star C.A. Johnson writes with a southern hospitality and homespun charm that washes over audiences like a breath of fresh air. Making a debut at MCC Theater with her coming of age romcom All the Natalie Portmans, she drew praise for empathic take on a black queer teenage womanchild with Hollywood dreams. A core writer at the Playwrights Center, she has had fellowships with the Dramatists Guild Fellow, Page 73, the Lark and the Sundance Theatre Lab. Works include: All the Natalie Portmans (2020) Follow C.A.: Twitter

Johnny G. Lloyd A New York-based playwright and producer, Johnny G. Lloyd has seen his work produced and developed at the Tank, 59E59, the Corkscrew Festival, the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and more. A member of the 2019-2020 Liberation Theatre Company’s Writing Residency, this Columbia University graduate is also a producing director of InVersion Theatre. Works include: The Problem With Magic, Is (2020), Or, An Astronaut Play (2019), Patience (2018) Follow Johnny: Instagram

Patricia Ione Lloyd In her luminous 2018 breakthrough Eve’s Song at the Public Theater, Patricia Ione Lloyd offered a meditation on the violence against black women in America that is often overlooked onstage. With a style saturated in both humor and melancholy and a poetic lyricism that evokes Ntozake Shange’s, the former Tow Playwright in Residence has earned fellowships at New Georges, the Dramatist Guild, Playwrights Realm, New York Theater Workshop and Sundance. Works include: Eve’s Song (2018) Follow Patricia: Instagram

Maia Matsushita The half-Black, half-Japanese educator and playwright Maia Matsushita has sounded a silent alarm in downtown theater with an array of slow-burn, naturalistic coming-of-age dramas. She was a member of The Fire This Time’s 2017-18 New Works Lab and part of its inaugural Writers Group, and her work has been seen at Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Playwright Playground and the National Black Theatre’s Keeping Soul Alive Reading Series. Works include: House of Sticks (2019), White Mountains (2018) Follow Maia: Instagram

Daaimah Mubashshir When Daaimah Mubashshir’s kitchen-sink dramedy Room Enough (For Us All) debuted at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in 2019, the prolific writer began a dialogue around the contemporary African-American Muslim experience and black queer expression that made her a significant storyteller to watch. She is a core writer at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis as well as a member of Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab, Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group, and a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her short-play collection The Immeasurable Want of Light was published in 2018. Works include: Room Enough (For Us All) (2019) Follow Daaimah: Twitter

Jonathan Norton Hailing from Dallas, Texas, Jonathan Norton is a delightfully zany playwright who subverts notions of post-blackness by underlining America’s obscure historical atrocities with bloody red slashes. The stories he tells carry a profound horror, often viewed through the eyes of black children and young adults. Norton’s work has been produced or developed by companies including the Actors Theatre of Louisville (at the 44th Humana Festival), PlayPenn and InterAct Theatre Company. He is the Playwright in Residence at Dallas Theater Center. Works include: Mississippi Goddamn (2015), My Tidy List of Terrors (2013), penny candy (2019) Follow Jonathan: Website

AriDy Nox Cooking up piping hot gumbos of speculative fiction, transhumanism and radical womanist expression, AriDy Nox is a rising star with a larger-than-life vision. The Spelman alum earned an MFA from NYU TIsch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program and has been a staple of various theaters such as Town Stages. A member of the inaugural 2019 cohort of the Musical Theatre Factory Makers residency, they recently joined the Public Theater’s 2020-2022 Emerging Writers Group cohort. Works include: Metropolis (in progress), Project Tiresias (2018) Follow AriDy: Instagram

Akin Salawu Akin Salawu’s nonlinear, hyperkinetic work combines heart-pounding suspense chills with Tarantino-esque thrills while excavating Black trauma and Pan-African history in America. With over two decades of experience as a writer, director and editor, the prize-winning playwright is a two-time Tribeca All Access Winner and a member of both the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group and Ars Nova’s Uncharted Musical Theater residency. A graduate of Stanford, he is a founder of the Tank’s LIT Council, a theater development center for male-identifying persons of color. Works include: bless your filthy lil’ heart (2019), The Real Whisperer (2017), I Stand Corrected (2008) Follow Akin: Twitter

Sheldon Shaw A playwright, screenwriter and actor, Sheldon Shaw studied writing at the Labyrinth Theater Company and was part of Playwrights Intensive at the Kennedy Center. Shaw has since developed into a sort of renaissance man, operating as playwright, screenwriter and actor. His plays have been developed by Emerging Artist Theaters New Works Festival, Classical Theater of Harlem and the Rooted Theater Company. Shaw's Glen was the winner of the Black Screenplays Matter competition and a finalist in the New York Screenplay Contest. Works include: Jailbait (2018), Clair (2017), Baby Starbucks (2015) Follow Johnny: Twitter

Nia O. Witherspoon Multidisciplinary artist Nia Ostrow Witherspoon’s metaphysical explorations of black liberation and desire have made her an in-demand presence in theater circles. The recipient of multiple honors—include New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, a Wurlitzer Foundation residency and the Lambda Literary’s Emerging Playwriting Fellowship—she is currently developing The Dark Girl Chronicles, a play cycle that, in her words, “explores the criminalization of black cis and trans women via African diaspora sacred stories.” Works include: The Dark Girl Chronicles (in progress) ​Follow Nia: Instagram

Brandon Webster A Brooklyn-based musical theatre writer and dramaturg, Brandon Webster has been a familiar figure in the NYC theater scene, both onstage and behind the scenes. With an aesthetic that fuses Afrofuturist and Afrosurrealist storytelling, with a focus on Black liberation past and present, the composer’s work fuses psychedelic soul flourishes with alt-R&B nuances to create a sonic smorgasbord of seething rage and remorse. He is an alumnus of the 2013 class of BMI Musical Theater Workshop and a 2017 MCC Theater Artistic Fellow. Works include: Metropolis (in progress), Headlines (2017), Boogie Nights (2015) Follow Brandon: Instagram

[shenanigans-and-imagines]

Gabriel Ramirez

Basics

Fandom: Marvel

Full Name: Gabriel Ramirez

Age: Born July 1, 1979

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Appearance

Ethnicity: Chilean

Skin Tone: Olive

Eye Color: Brown

Hair Color: Dark Brown

Hairstyle: Short and clean

Build: Not thick, but not about to be knocked over with a pail of water either

Height: 5’ 11’’

Weight: 190 lbs

Style: Anything that looks good with a leather jacket and sunglasses really

Personality

General Personality Traits: Charming, Impulsive, Capable

Strengths: Courage, Team player, Attentive

Flaws: Reckless, Arrogant at times, Stubborn

Habits And Mannerisms: Talks with his hands, messes with his hair when he’s thinking or nervous

Secrets: People assume he’s a killer ladies’ man, when in reality he’s only had three serious relationships in his life and basically nothing in between

Regrets: Not coming out to his mom sooner

Skills/Talents: Can and will make a pun out of anything

Likes: Home cooked meals, Film Noir, being a detective

Dislikes: Bullies, Defense Lawyers, Mayonnaise

Sense of Humor: Puns! All of the puns!!!

Savvy: Street smarts

Guilty Pleasure: Bad 80s action movies

Defining Moment: Keeping Juliet’s secret after he find out she’s Blackout

Relationships

Friends: Dave the Mortician (they’ve been friends for years and he still doesn’t know his last name), Clint Barton

Family: Florencia Ramirez (mom)

Enemies: Crime

Lovers: Juliet Holden

Relationship Status: Married to Juliet Holden (as of Age of Ultron)

Reputation: Definite flirt, but ultimately harmless

Miscellaneous

Current Residence: Manhattan, New York City, New York

Collections: VHS tapes of old movies (even if he has them on DVD and Blu-Ray)

Accent: Chilean

Voice: Deep, slightly accented and easy

Signature Quote: “Trust me.”

Song: Jumpstarted by Jukebox The Ghost

Backstory

Gabriel was born and raised in East Harlem.  It was basically just him and his mom since his dad left not long after he was born. Despite all that, his had a pretty happy childhood.  He was fairly popular at school, making friends easily and being the designated class joker. He was also the kid that would sit next to the new kid at lunch.  This got him into a few scrapes with bullies more than once.  While his mom was proud he stood up for people, she didn’t want to see him get hurt and Gabriel didn’t want to hurt his mom.  So, he learned how to talk his way out of confrontations should the need arise.

Being a detective was always the dream for him, combining his love of cheesy cop movies and film noir. Of course, once he got his degree in criminal justice combined with his experience in the police academy, he realized the lone wolf thing wasn’t going to fly.  But, unlike some, he always preferred the buddy cop movies anyway and adjusted quickly.  

It didn’t take him long to make detective with the combination of his talent as an officer and the fact most of his precinct actually really liked him.  The only down side was having to leave Harlem and settle in Manhattan since it was the only position open.  Thing were going pretty well for him, until he got a call about a paramedic, Juliet Holden, being injured after inspecting a seemly abandon building, only for his case to be snatched up by an agency called S.H.I.E.L.D.

[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Al and Linda Lerner on Movies and Shakers: Motherless Brooklyn

This throw-back of a film noir detective story with Edward Norton in charge, on and off the screen, is better than we expected. It’s clues and blues about power, corruption and race, and the detective office is right out of central casting, Norton is Writer, Producer, Director and stars as Lionel, a detective’s right hand man who has Tourettes Syndrome.

Co-producer, Gigi Pritzker (Drive, Hell or High Water, The Way Way Back, Rosewater), told us  at the Chicago International Film Festival that Norton studied hard to get Tourettes Syndrome right. Norton plays Lionel as smart and intuitive with an acute memory for details. He spews out what sound like random phrases as his head jerks sharply. It can be disturbing to watch, but pay attention to what he says. Lionel is the truth teller in this movie. 

Norton started working on this adaptation of a 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem shortly after it was published. But he decided to set it in the 1950’s which mirror some of the same problems big cities now face. Set in that era, It also gives it a grittier, more historical look with an appeal reminiscent of detective films like Chinatown.

Lionel is also the narrator of the film, filling in the blanks where necessary. He’s trying to solve the murder of his boss, and the mentor the head of a Detective agency in New York City in the 1950’s. Frank Minna (Bruce willis, plucked Lionel out of a Catholic orphanage and trained him to work with Frank’s buds in the agency, Danny, Gilbert and Tony, (Dallas Roberts, Ethan Suplee and Bobby Cannavale), who grew up together in the same orphanage. 

Minna leaves just enough clues that when he is bumped off, Lionel sets in motion the search for his killer. More clues about every character and what they’re up to, including what happened to Frank, are telegraphed throughout the film.

Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) is based on a real man named Moses who was New York City head of the Burrough Authority. He’s a powerful businessman who is manipulating the Mayor (Peter Gray Lewis) to enact urban removal of Blacks, Hispanics and low income families living in Brooklyn and Harlem. His goal is to build high-priced, highly-taxed property to build his own profit center. His wife, played by Leslie Mann, is a real piece of work, in the movie for about a minute. Moses’ henchmen are big, tough guys who don’t mess around, especially the biggest guy, (Radu Spinghel) who you would not want to meet in a dark alley. 

Moses Randolph’s brother (Willem Dafoe) enters the picture. He’s the frantic and frustrated architect Moses keeps using, abusing, then pushing aside. What’s up with that? On the trail to find out who killed Frank, Lionel meets Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a stunning, young, Black lawyer trying to fight the city’s corrupt plans to move Black families out. Her boss and champion activist, Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones) gives a rousing speech at City Hall to no avail. Talking to Laura, Lionel finds out there’s more going on here that’s connected to Moses. Interesting choice for Norton to show that when Lionel is with Rose, he seems calmer and doesn’t seem to have Tourettes.  

Rose’s father, Billy, (Robert Wisdom) owns The Rooster, a blues club in Harlem that may have another tie. Closeups of the musician in the band playing Miles Davis style soulful trumpet (Michael K. Williams) in the smoky dark club, sets the scene. Horn music throughout the film sets a melancholy mood for Lionel’s depression about losing Frank and his search for the truth. But those who might have information keep getting killed before he can get to them.  Norton makes Lionel pretty much a loner going to these gritty places alone and getting roughed up more than once. He makes you really feel for this guy.

Scenes in the club, at City Hall where protests are going on, Laura and Lionel walking through a neighborhood under construction, and with Moses Randolph at the Steam Bath with his cronies, back alleys and shadow on fire escapes all create what it was like in New York City during this period. And this film brings in more complicated issues for Lionel to deal with than just his mentor’s murder. 

Norton took on a huge project, obviously a labor of love, producing, writing and directing himself acting as well. It gets sappy towards the end and there are several places where it could have been judiciously edited so it didn’t last 2 and a half hours. Long running times seem to be trending these days. But Norton holds your attention creating a good tribute to film noir, loaded with colorful characters. 

Warner Bros.        2 hours 24 minutes         R

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[idaoftheburningmind]

Devotion

@blissfullybarnes has referred to her Grey Matter series as her greatest labor of love to date; and at over 10k words in the first chapter of a planned 30-part story, we feel both the herculean endeavor behind it and, yes, the abundant love poured into the writing.

Raen’s storytelling is a prime example of why writing is called a craft — the atmosphere of this first chapter is reminiscent of the lyrical David Mack run of the Daredevil comics (complete with the lush Joe Quesada watercolors ) before Brian Michael Bendis’ noir became the norm. Moreover, the careful planning that went into the narrative is obvious in the way that no detail is spared; rather than coming across as excess, there is instead a joyful generosity in depicting who these characters are and who they are to each other.

This labor of love is a passion project, the very passion mirrored in the devotion Matt and the reader have for each other.

It’s Matt then, not Billy, whom we meet in the opening chapter. He’s engaged to the reader and Raen’s writing has us so convinced of their love that to begrudge them happiness would be meanness of spirit.

Raen shares this from Matt’s point of view.

Suddenly, and then all at once, he can smell the fragrant notes of your perfume and hear the steady rhythm of your heart beating inside your chest. In an instant, he’s overwhelmed by awareness, struggling to catch his breath as he’s swept up into a violent hurricane of you- each of his senses drowning in the taste, scent, and sound of your own.

To which the reader responds with the equal fervor.

Close is never close enough. Not even when you’re sharing the same air, not even when you can feel the heat that radiates off of each other’s skin and hear the breathless groans and gasps that are barely audible because they’re so faint, could close be considered enough. He aims to drown himself in you, and you welcome it- for you share the same desire to be completely engrossed by him in every way possible.

The characterization of Matt clearly comes from a place of love; the “man without fear” carries the weight of the world upon his shoulders.

Matt was many things- smart, charming, devilishly handsome, selfless- but he was also too hard on himself, overconfident at times, and often willing to give away parts of himself that were already broken or splintering at the cracks just to make someone else whole.

The reader, on the other hand, might seem like the impossible ideal in Matt’s world, he certainly seems to think he cannot possibly deserve her.

…you found a way to love the very things he couldn’t stand about himself. You brushed off his recklessness as utter devotion, his tardiness as an unwavering commitment to both of his jobs, and his inability to not burden himself with blame every time something went sideways as virtuous.

Where the comics had Matt hopelessly entangled with Elektra who called to the darkness within him, Raen stands her ground and has an “angel” save the devil of Hell’s Kitchen from himself.

You knew, better than anyone else, that the heroes that were idolized all the way from Queens, to Harlem, to Hell’s Kitchen bled just the same as everyone else at the end of the day. The distinct shade of dark red was one you were familiar with.

…you were determined to coax him from the deepest, darkest parts of his mind by whatever means necessary.

The reader’s acceptance of Matt’s dual life, the risks he takes, the fact that he’ll come home to her battered and bruised, may as well be the stuff of miracles; but Raen writes her in such a way that we believe the consideration the reader shows for Matt’s professional integrity, we believe the respect she has for the principles that compel him to become a vigilante, we believe this kind of love is possible. For Raen’s Matt, it exists without question.

As childhood friends to lovers, distance did not diminish Matt and the reader’s affection. We get then the sense of their relationship being fated.

You learned a long time ago that you can’t pick and choose what you love about someone. There’s no place for hate when it comes to truly loving another soul….

The feeling of a covenant reaffirmed intensifies with how Raen portrayed their moment of intimacy.

He surges forward, eager to taste and feel the promise that lingers on your lips. ..

…The vow whispered against his lips is so much more than just a few meaningless words said in the heat of the moment. He can physically feel the truth behind them.

… His tongue darts across his bottom lip, savoring the taste your shared desperation has left in the air, and shudders when he realizes that he’ll be able to taste you in the air for days.

And when Matt thrills at the thought of her bearing his child, we know that in that instant at least he believes that the two of them can have a future.

We haven’t forgotten though that this is Raen’s ‘triangleverse’, and the future Dr. Murdock must soon cross paths with one William Russo.

Of all of the people who have betrayed him and his trust, all of the people who abandoned him and left him behind, you have been his only source of constant support throughout his entire life. At his most vulnerable, you’ve stood by his side. You’ve never judged him or tried to change who he was. The kind of love you had for him was effortless and abiding.

Those lines, beautifully written, haunt in the way that they could be echoed by another.

grey matter // chapter 1

Summary: when it becomes difficult to grasp a solid concept of morality, you begin to question everything you know, causing the fine line between right and wrong- good and evil- to ultimately become blurred. As you struggle to find a definitive answer, you find yourself torn between two very opposite ends of the spectrum and grapple with your own virtue- wondering if what you’re fighting for is right, or if you’ve been led astray

Pairing: matt murdock x fem!reader & billy russo x fem!reader

Requested: no

Chapter Warning: NSFW (minors dni), mature content, established relationship, mentions of self-doubt, unprotected sex, breeding kink, and mentions of canon villains

Word Count: 10,365

masterlist

Today, like many other days, has slipped away from you. The sun has already started to set- illuminating the walls of your office with a soft, orange glow, but you’re too engrossed in your work to notice the way the colors in the sky start to bleed together like a watercolor painting. Your eyes remain focused on the screen in front of you while your fingertips dance across the keyboard in fast strokes of precision and determination. The pain behind your eyes has intensified from a dull throb to a sharp ache, but you blink it away, eager to finish what you’re working on. Sure, whatever you didn’t finish tonight would be waiting for you tomorrow morning, but you’ve never been one to start a task you weren’t willing to complete.

It simply wasn’t in your nature to abandon something you’d started working on.

A glimpse at the notepad on your left causes your gaze to narrow. Anyone else wouldn’t have been able to decipher the messy scribbles and characters that littered the page. You were the one that wrote them and you’re still having trouble trying to figure out what you wrote down less than a few hours before. Intent on unscrambling what you haphazardly jotted down earlier, you reread the sentence over and over again, trying to make sense of it.

Across the hall, a door opens. The sound of two little feet padding across the carpeted floor might’ve distracted you if you weren’t solely engrossed in transcribing your notes from earlier that afternoon. If you’d been paying attention, you would’ve heard a little girl excitedly telling her mother all about her session. You might’ve even heard her mother remind her to use her inside voice, but you were too far gone, down a rabbit hole you unknowingly created for yourself.

Finally, you’re able to make out the incoherent mess and with a heavy sigh of relief, you begin typing once more. The first gentle knock against your doorframe isn’t loud enough to catch your attention, but the second one is a little firmer and followed by someone clearing their throat. It’s harder to miss, but still not enough to divert your focus.

“What are you still doing here?” When you steal a quick glance over the top of your monitor Nadine, your co-worker, is standing in the doorway with her arms folded over her chest and a small pout on her lips. “It’s already five-thirty.” She tells you and before you have the chance to react, she adds, “You’re going to be late.”

Keep reading

[tcm]

Trailblazing Black Actors Canada Lee and James Edwards By Raquel Stecher

Canada Lee and James Edwards may not be household names, but they deserve to be honored for being trailblazers. These Black actors defied stereotypes and fought for dignified roles on stage and the big screen. They refused to play servants, opting for better roles than their predecessors had been given. And, they both had significant roles in what film historian Donald Bogle calls the four “problem pictures” of 1949: Lee in LOST BOUNDARIES and Edwards in HOME OF THE BRAVE. Both men were ahead of their time yet tragically died far too soon. Let’s take a look at the lives of these two extraordinary individuals.

From a young age, Canada Lee rebelled against the concept of living a normal humdrum life. He wanted to be someone extraordinary. Lee studied violin and piano as a kid with hopes of becoming a musician. When that didn’t pan out, the restless Lee ran away from home at the tender age of 14 to become a jockey. He abandoned this career when he grew too tall for the sport. His next calling found him in the boxing ring, and by the age of 19, he was a professional fighter. He had a successful career as a lightweight and welterweight boxing champion until a blow to the head detached his retina causing him to lose vision in one eye. It was then that he found his calling at the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem during the late 1930s.

Lee proved to be an excellent actor, and with the guidance of Orson Welles, he was cast in a highly publicized all-Black production of Macbeth. He found success both on and off-Broadway in productions of Anna Lucasta, South Pacific and The Tempest. His breakout performance in Native Son put Lee on the map and Hollywood soon came calling. Lee only appeared in five films, including two films where he could put his boxing skills to good use: KEEP PUNCHING (’39) and BODY AND SOUL (’47). According to the website Black Past, “Canada Lee declared that he would only take roles that educated society about race and enhanced the image of African Americans.”

For Alfred Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT (’44), he tweaked the dialogue to make his character less of a stereotype. He had a minor role in LOST BOUNDARIES as the understanding cop who guides a young mixed-race man. The film broke ground for tackling the difficult subject of African Americans passing as white. For his last film role, Lee and co-star Sidney Poitier were smuggled into South Africa by director Zoltan Korda for the production of CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY (’51) during the early days of Apartheid. Always proud of his West Indian roots, Lee became an outspoken civil rights activist. This made him a target of the House of Un-American Activities Committee investigation. Many believe that his fatal heart attack at 45 years old was the result of his being persecuted for his political beliefs.

Much like Lee, James Edwards transcended stereotypical Black roles on screen. Edwards served as first lieutenant in the Army during WWII. After a particularly bad car accident that damaged his face and vocal cords, Edwards returned to the U.S. and started training in both public speaking and acting. He earned a master’s degree in drama from Northwestern University and became part of the same acting group, the Federal Theatre Project, as Lee. He made a name for himself on Broadway with the principal part in the play Deep Are the Roots.

Edwards then moved to Los Angeles where he started an acting school and got his start in the film industry. His silver screen debut was in Robert Wise’s film noir THE SET-UP (’49). That same year, Edwards landed one of the lead roles in HOME OF THE BRAVE, a WWII film about racism and psychological trauma. It proved to be his breakthrough performance but is also credited for paving the way for other Black actors, like Sidney Poitier, to take more substantial roles in future productions.

About his performance in HOME OF THE BRAVE, Bogle wrote, “his tension, restlessness, sensitivity and admirable attempt to connect to or at least understand a white world that has continually rejected him make this a fascinating movie.” Edwards often played Black soldiers in war films throughout his acting career. He also worked with top directors in big productions like Stanley Kubrick’s THE KILLING (’56), John Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (’62), Vincente Minnelli’s THE SANDPIPER (’65) and Franklin J. Schaffner’s PATTON (’70). When he wasn’t acting or helping fellow actors master their craft, Edwards worked as a freelance screenwriter for film and television and was a published novelist. He suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 51, just as he was preparing for a new role.

Both Lee and Edwards were able to rise above stereotypes to portray more authentic characters on screen. While Lee had a short film career and Edwards was often relegated to minor characters in his movies, they both proved to be pioneers that fought against the limitations Hollywood imposed on them. Their fight paved the way for Black actors to receive quality roles in film.

[sensei-aishitemasu]

2017 Black-Owned Gift Guide!

It’s that time again! This Black Friday, try and support a Black-owned business for all your gift-giving needs. For last years gift guide, click here. For the 2015 gift guide, click here.

Similar to 2016, I kept every individual item listed under $100! Click on the links to be taken to the websites in order to peruse more yourselves. 

[And as always, this guide has been split into categories to make it easier to get through, but feel free to mix and match for the person in your life that fits all of (or none of!) these categories!]

Gift Guide 2017 Items

For the Homebody:

Concept Forty-Seven ANNET WEELINK Placemat - Barbados (Set of 4), $30

Concept Forty-Seven Gray and Blue Woven Textile with Citrus Yellow Pillow, $28

Concept Forty-Seven Dauville Small Bowl - Gold, $20

Lettie Gooch JUNE'S - BOY SMELLS CANDLE, $29

Harlem Heirloom Grapefruit Candle, $32

The Jungalow 2X3 Kilim Orange & White Stripe Rug, $56

The Jungalow Botanicals On Blush Insulated Water Bottle, $45

The Jungalow Bohemian Vibes Art Print, $40

The Jungalow Berber Bowl, $32

The Jungalow Bedside Carafe with Cup, $30

The Jungalow Anika Bowls, $20

For the Foodie:

Gullah Girl Tea in Mint Lemongrass, $7

Bounty & Full ‘The Truth’ Habanero Hot Sauce, $5

Bounty & Full Cranberry Mandarin Jam, $5.99

Essie Spice Essential Sauce Collection, $38

For the Beauty Guru:

Harlem Soap in Spearmint & Orange, $6

Hunny Bunny Rose Clay Soap, $5

Hunny Bunny Rose Clay Facial Mask, $6

Hunny Bunny Rose Clay Lip Balm, $2

BeeLux Goods Bad Gal Bamboo Banger Bubble Bath, $14

Beelux Goods Lust Highlighter, $10

BeeLux Goods Mojito Shampoo Detox Bar, $10

BeeLux Goods Juicy Fruit Bath Bomb, $10

Natty Naturals Oral Mouth Rinse, $15

Natty Naturals Herbal Tooth Powder, $15

Plain Jane Beauty Sheer Translucent Powder, $26

Plain Jane Coconut Water Setting Mist, $25

Plain Jane Time To Prime Makeup Primer, $22

Plain Jane Micellar Water Eye Makeup Remover, $14

Elo Perfect Sugar Scrub for Lips, $17

Elo Watermelon Coconut Lip Balm, $13

Eden BodyWorks Peppermint Tea Tree Shampoo, $8.99

Eden BodyWorks Peppermint Tea Tree Conditioner, $8.99

Eden BodyWorks Peppermint Tea Tree Hair Oil, $8.99

Brown Butter Beauty Pumpkin Seed Hair & Body Oil, $16

Brown Butter Beauty Herbal Rich Hair Oil, $10

Foxie Cosmetics Caffeine + Vitamin C Eye Cream, $48

Foxie Cosmetics Moroccan Argan Serum, $25

Foxie Cosmetics Coconut + Vanilla Bath Soak, $20

Foxie Cosmetics Everything Zen Face Mist, $16

Foxie Cosmetics Konjac Facial Puff Sponge, $13.50

vee + co apothecary ‘wanderlust’ aromatherapy roller, $20

For the Fashionable:

Chris Cardi Roxy Unisex Carry-All Clutch (Camo), $45.03

Adorned By Chi ‘Alien From Outerspace’ Crop Top, $31

Adorned By Chi ‘Alien From Outerspace’ Hat, $30

Philadelphia Printworks James Baldwin Tote, $25

Orchids & Spice Berry 2-Pocket Pinafore, $40

Orchids & Spice Hayden Blush Fluffy Jacket, $55

Orchids & Spice Kemi Bralette, $29.50 

Orchids & Spice Isabel Drawstring Crossbody Taupe, $48

Tree Fairfax Cognac Half Moon Leather Waistbag, $86.25

Tree Fairfax Honey Half Moon Leather Hip Bag, $86.25

Joe Freshgoods ‘Don’t Be Mad In NY’ Tee, $30

PeaceImages Tawa Necklaces, $26

PeaceImages Camay Necklace, $37

PeaceImages Sterling Silver Knuckle Ring, $22

Deami Footwear ‘The Chisholm,’ $79

For the Bookworm:

The Jungalow Abstract Face Bookends, $95

The Jungalow Botanical Notebook Trio, $25

‘Nought & Crosses’ by Malorie Blackman, $16.76

‘The Tipping Point’ by Malcolm Gladwell, $9.24

‘Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist’ by Nancy Goldstein, $36.49

‘The Ebony Cookbook: Date With A Dish’ by Freda DeKnight, $32.99

‘Iola Leroy’ by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, $12.43

‘A Taste of Power’ by Elaine Brown, $14.36

‘Child of the Dark’ by Carolina Maria de Jesus, $7.69

And of course, my own book!

For the Kids:

Yummy Spoonfuls Chicken Broccoli Bites, pricing available in stores

Coolie Classic Knapsack in Green, $50

AFRO-BETS Book of Black Heroes From A-Z, $11.18

Beija Flor Naturals Cocoa Mango Buttercream, $18

Mielle Organics Children’s Hair & Health Vitamins, $9.99

Honey Child & Co ‘The Fun Tee,’ $10

Swimma Swimming Caps for Big Hair, $15.38

For Men:

Solo Noir All Natural Starter Kit, $34.99

A Life Well Dressed Gray Pocket Square, $20

Talley & Twine Red Canvas Chronograph Watch, $99

Chris Cardi H. St. Clubhouse Cap in Cranberry, $39.03

Chris Cardi LS No Crew Tee, $49.03

Chris Cardi H. St. Sweat Shorts, $65.03

Sole Rebels ‘The Surge TopUP’ in Blue, $95

BeeLux Beard Oil, $20

BeeLux True Grit Shower Gel, $16

Scotch Porter ‘Fresh Meat’ Masculine Wipes, $5

For The Technologically Savvy:

Khristian A. Howell FCL Chic Black Phone Case, $39.99

Khristian A. Howell Deuces Phone Case, $39.99

Adorned By Chi ‘I Hate Everything’ iPhone Case, $25.95

Joe Freshgoods ‘Happy Life’ Phone Case, $15

The Colour Polka Dot iPhone Case, $32.54

Dual Citizen iPad Case, $35

Puku Portable Charger, $49

Puku G8 Headphones, $25

For Cards, Invitations, and Gift Wrap:

‘Happy Holidays’ Card by Debra Cartwright, $8.95

‘Happy Holidays Babe’ Card by Debra Cartwright, $8.95

‘Make A Wish’ Card by Justina Blakeney

Khristian A. Howell Rosy Holiday Card Set, $20

Khristian A. Howell ‘Rosy’ Holiday Gift Wrap Sheets, $8.50

Khristian A. Howell Buffalo Plaid Gift Wrap Sheets in Evergreen, $8.50

Khristian A. Howell Blush Color Capsule Wrapping Sheets, $8.50

I Paint In Heels Holiday Card 2017 ‘Lovely Ladies,’ $25

I Paint In Heels Assorted Pack of Holiday Cards, $32