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obiternihili · 5 years ago

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Something about property rights

I felt like I needed to rant yesterday and decided to adapt the discord messages into a tumblr post.

I spent most of a class this morning thinking about the Anglo interpretations and notions of property rights, trying to actually contrast it with workable alternative notions of property rights and feeling kind of hopeless about it and finding it hard to actually come up with anything that isn't literally communism.

And in retrospect it made the whole “philosophically questioning the whole notion of property rights” feel more, idk, respectable than it had before, when it just sounded like the USSR and China opposed its inclusion in the UDHR for technical reasons or pure self interest in covering their own atrocities.

The whole thing started with thinking about the Zapatist slogan “la tierra es de quién la trabaja”. “The land belongs to those who work it.” To me, the Zapatistas were pretty cool guys, who sided with the little guy and the indigenous peoples of México. But I thought immediately about how a colonial American might react to it, and I couldn’t escape the idea that they’d hear the slogan and go, “ah, yes, we should kill the savages and steward the land correctly”.

As much as the magna carta is held up as this great precursor to democratic rights in this country, its origins are far more dismal and petty. It wasn’t really a democratic impulse, it was more like a bunch of petty-kings coordinated to overwhelm a high king. But it doubtlessly had a strong effect on feudalism and came to be a part of English identity before that even really made sense from a modern perspective. In short it came off almost as a promise that “every man is a king of his own home” and that helped to make property itself sacrosanct.

So when capitalism changed the people’s relationship with the land, the serfs were “liberated” as the commons were siezed by their de jure owners. The collapse of the commons fundamentally changed people’s relationships with property, exacerbating the whole “every man is a king of his own house” issue, and making property the be-all-end-all of basic needs like shelter. To the degree that the Magna Carta made property sacrosanct, in a literal “this is a divinely appointed right” sort of sense, the collapse of the commons codified exactly what that meant, making that sacrosanctity intrinsic to thriving.

So because of tying these issues together so deeply, it made sense to steal the lands of people “not working it” according to how you might work it. So that it made sense to go to war because the yankees were stealing your chattel, and horror of horrors not even repurposing them! So that telling South Africa “hey, no, black people are people too” was unholy, violating their sacred authority to clean their own house. So it makes sense that Australia continues to break promises to its Aboriginal communities, if, say, their homes have a potentially profitable mine to work. So it makes sense that Canada breaks promises to its indigenous population, if there’s an oil pipeline they can lay. So that it made sense, paradoxically, for the US to strong arm México into changing articles of its constitution about indigenous land rights in order to pass NAFTA and be able to threaten to go United Fruit Company on the people for not being profitable to the corporations. And the EZLN, which formed directly because of the anxieties of these moves as the Maya genocide was still very fresh on everyone’s minds, are neo-Zapatistas; the land belongs to the one who works it! The Maya who always has, or the companies that want to (exploit it)?

I remember once as a teen confronting the attitudes this bears on a small chan.

Before the BLM stuff, actually regarding OWS and those "rich punks arguing for socialism with their iphones" and shit; I'd made an off hand comment about things not being worth more than lives at some point and someone replied "I'd totally kill someone if they stole my phone".

I made a comment in utter exasperation (this was on a board that was like /pol/ before that was really what it is now and there was no reason to believe they weren't serious), saying something like "Is, what, a month's pay really worth a human life to you?" ($800 really was more money than my mom was making at the time, let alone taking out rent and shit first, and I gave them benefit of the doubt that they weren't rich first world fucks who could afford to take a hit. At that point I’d learned that most people in India, even dirt poor people who couldn’t afford water, generally had smart phones in order to help with work and things; conscientious of this, the fact that I know and knew dirt poor almost homeless people in the US who needed phones for work, I was trying to allow for “if I lose this phone, I lose my job, my home, my health, and my life” which is a reality a lot of people live with, and at least somewhere to come at this issue with).

(But) the commentators, both the user I was arguing against and several people using trips, proceeded to mock me for apparently living in a 3rd world country for thinking a phone cost more than one paycheck.

To these people a phone wasn’t even worth a week’s pay, let alone two. And yet, to them, another person’s life, no matter how desperate they were, no matter how hungry or sick or anything they were, they were worth less than that.

This exchange was about the time I started nurturing (or giving in, depending on your perspective) the idea that "maybe some people aren't just, mistaken, or seeing something I don't, or have some complex network of beliefs making them bite a bullet, but like, actually goddamn legitimately evil in terms of their fundamental values". I gather absolutely that there’s a lot going on with this; that you could understand the guy to mean “I think thieves should be killed” as opposed to ““humans”“ or whatever. But, like, still.

Traumatizing is an overly dramatic word for what that conversation all those years did to me, but maybe it was. And it’s not like a phone’s *nothing*. But the way the users undercut me, and revealed not only how worthless the phone was to them, but how little human lives were worth to them in relation to the phone just kind of knocked the wind out of me

This made the rounds recently. This is the legacy of that property is sacrosanct bullshit.

And, like, fuck, this is the whole cultural underpinning of what’s been going on with the gun shit here. It’s why guns are so important to us. Why we feel it’s absolutely justified to shoot a kid in the back for lifting a $2 bottle of beer from a convenience store and leaving him to bleed to death without so much as calling the police. The entire fucked up thing we got going on w/r/t race here in the land of the free? It’s because of our relationship to property rights.

At the same time, you get climate change from people who feel it’s their right to do whatever to their property. Oil’s money. Dairy farms, meat, cash crops like almonds. You don’t like your water dirtied? But I’m only fracking over ma plotte!

What’s going on in Brazil? Some natives won the right to their lands against farmers who wanted to clear the forest, and mysteriously within a few weeks everything’s lit on fire. 𝅘𝅥 Dark torrents shake the airs, as black clouds blind [São Paulo] ♫

You even get the nimby zoning shit out of this. How dare you let colored people into my neighborhood! That’s stealing from my property values! A tall building? That’s stealing my sunlight!

In a more mixed sort of way, you got homeless shelters, oil wells, chemical plants, industrial parks, military bases, fracking, wind turbines, desalination plants, landfill sites, incinerators, power plants, quarries, prisons, pubs, adult entertainment clubs, concert venues, firearms dealers, mobile phone masts, electricity pylons, abortion clinics, children's homes, nursing homes, youth hostels, sports stadiums, shopping malls, retail parks, railways, roads, airports, seaports, nuclear waste repositories, storage for weapons of mass destruction, cannabis dispensaries, recreational cannabis shops and the accommodation of persons applying for asylum, refugees, and displaced persons - a list i just lifted from wikipedia’s articles on nimbies. Looking at that, there’s some clearly sympathetic issues too. I mean do you really want a train cutting through your farm, no matter how well you’re recompensated, no matter how much it will objectively improve the lives of the people in the cities, no matter much better it is for the environment to commute together?

But, like, what exactly are the alternatives?

We could look at other cultures. What did Belgian property notions look like? Leopold of the Congo? What do French notions look like? Forcing Algieria to pay back the “investment” France made by colonizing them? Well, the English and the French go back a long, long ways, maybe we could look at Germany?

The first genocide of the 20th century is often recognized to be that of the Herero, in Namibia’s, Germany’s biggest steal in the struggle to carve up Africa like the Black Dahlia.

I already mentioned Brasil.

What about China? Surely they aren’t western!

By some notions they were the first feudal nation in the world, and yet only left the system really in the 20th century. That’s a lot of cultural baggage that underlays the reality the Chinese live under today.

The early republican period saw the rise of warlords and other petty bastards effectively continuing the feudal reality in much the way sharecropping and jim crow continued chattel slavery in the US. The successor states aren’t pretty either; Taiwan, continuing republican ideals, cleared out much of its indigenous population for the Han in ways analogous to what European powers did to the natives of their countries; the PRC, which was born to challenge the ideals of the old republic for its own, took back “what was theirs” with Tibet.

The PRC, explicitly rejecting property rights as the west understands it, doesn’t even have a legal analog to eminent domain, and in effect can seize property on a whim without compensation, forcibly engaging in actions like people moving, which I feel it should be known when done to a community often results in genocide.

Something else illustrative of the conflicts of interest in the problem lies with the 3 Gorges Dam project. Ostensibly to control flooding to villages downstream, over a million residents of the Chongqing area were forcibly relocated, with rumors of people who resisted the project being explicitly drowned and because everything’s just hopelessly corrupt the money actually provided for recompensation never made it to the hands of farmers now stuck in a big city without the education for work.

Similar stories to Taiwan’s play out in other capitalist countries; similar stories to the PRC’s play out in countries that reject those notions.

Generally you just reinvent the same concepts drawing from the lord and serf mentalities of old. There’s shit like this going down in the Muslim world, in East Africa, South America, South Asia, whereever. It’s not just an Anglo thing, even though I’ve let myself believe it were, because of how I was taught about history, from my culture’s perspective.

Then you have to ask yourself, when there’s no net, when you have to provide for yourself first, do the commons necessarily make sense?

Is it even viable, economically or politically, to abolish private property and return to the commons like people have advanced? Would, to enjoy the benefits of something evidentally only stable under feudalism, we have to return to some kind of practice of feudalism? Is that even worth considering?

There are more people alive today than ever before. And that didn’t happen just by accident. We really, actually, seriously have made incredible improvements to agricultural yield and safety, ensuring that the only places on the planet that starve are those that are being starved, by monsters like the Saudis. But the scale we need, the scale we want, the scale we have - is much more than just what one farmer can provide for himself. And the fact that we do have other farmers do the mass farming with their bulk fertilizers, machinery, pesticides, and such, means that most of us don’t have to spend time every week tending to our gardens making sure we have enough staple foods to survive, so we can pursue our own hopes and hobbies and dreams and undertakings and services and so on.

All of it sort of leads to the question, Who deserves the land?

The worker whose blood sweat and tears are wrought into the soil? That could lead to the issue of killing my Yokuts friends' gatherer ancestors for stewarding their lands, husbanding their ecosystem and managing burns and wild populations, instead of raping the lands, burning everything to ash to farm foreign crops that aren’t even adapted to the water issues here. And it doesn't proclude the workers from choking us with smoke, if they feel they need to. The guy on the oil rig isn’t doing it because he endorses what the oil companies do or because he thinks it’s necessarily a good thing, he does it because it makes him bread. Why would worker’s self management solve that? Shareholders and workers alike would only care about taking home what they can.

The "owners” in the English sense? Taking subsidy after subsidy, fighting actively to drain our rivers, collapse the formerly self-renewing resources entirely, bringing us droughts, feeding even the lactose intolerant among us the lie that we need fatty heart clogging cheeses to be healthy? Illegally hiring, exploiting, and deporting the vulnerable? Big farms are just any other business, their owners are the same venture capitalist vultures preying on anything else in that world. South of me used to one of the biggest lakes in North America, virtually the entire south valley was lake Tulare. It’s a bunch of cities now.

So, the people who need it?

Maybe but who decides that? War for territory is a fundamental struggle built deep into us; war is even practiced by chimps. Military ration planning like we saw in the USSR and PRC cause Holodomors. United Fruit and their entire coalition caused the Silent Genocide. Abolishing private property entirely would, what, return us to the times when the lands were unclaimed? That would just lead to petty struggle after petty struggle, like a chimp disemboweling another.

And now, having written this a second time, I’ll end with what I wrote earlier

#effort post #property rights

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anactualcaseofthetruth · 7 years ago

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Call Me A Safe Bet, I’m Betting I’m Not - Chapter 7

(AO3 Link- Chapter Seven)

Even though scientists are still quite baffled after multiple millennia of medical and technological advances of exactly how the soulmarks work, there has been enough research and study that we now know when and how to expect them… There has yet to be one soulmate coupling occur before the female has experienced a menstrual cycle and the male to begin producing sperm. In short, soulmarks have never appeared before entering puberty…

There are many, many more cases in which two people have insisted they are soulmates only to not mark with one another. All in all, only about 3% of couplings are correct in predicting they are soulmates before marks form.”

***

Betty Cooper is four years old when she meets Jughead Jones. She knows he is her soulmate, he’s not so sure.

Chapter Seven

“There is no written record of a society without soulmarks. For as long as humans have been on Earth and able to communicate, there has been evidence of soulmarkings and, subsequently, soulmates.

Perhaps the most commonly researched ancient culture regarding soulmarks are the Ancient Egyptians. Their hieroglyphs and recorded history tell of soulmarks that are markedly different from the kind we know of today… They left stories of soulmates who could feel each other’s pain, knew when something happened to the other, and even those who died when their soulmate did despite appearing relatively healthy.

Many researchers chalk this phenomenon up to intuition or tall-tales, but others believe in its existence, however speculate that as we evolve, so do soulmarks… but perhaps a better explanation may be that as humans become more and more desensitized and interested in only the physical, soulmarks have changed too.”

From Soulmarks Through History, 2013

The coolness of the window against her skin is calming until the train comes to a halt and jerks her forward against the expanse of glass.

It should be unsettling, but Betty just grits her teeth and stands, trying to focus on the fact that she’s home, even if it is a day late, even if her parents insisted they pick her up from the train station instead of (and without) Jughead, even if there are crescent shaped scars on her palms that are irritated because they are so fresh, even if it is her birthday and she’s spent it on a train with broken air conditioning.

Finally, she’s home in Riverdale, she’s in same zip code as her soulmate, breathing the same air, surrounded by familiarity.

Betty lugs her extra-large suitcase down the tiny train aisle and ignores the stares since she’s the only one getting off in her small town. They look at her like she’s a burden, because they have to spend ten minutes in Riverdale rather than speed past to get to somewhere more fun and exciting.

Well, fuck them, Betty thinks as she exits the train. She just had the most challenging summer of her life, and while it was unique, informative, and there are parts she will never forget, it was also long, hard, and unforgiving.

They can wait ten damn minutes so she can finally put this summer behind her and be a step closer to seeing her soulmate again.

She stops and sighs in the train station, surprised her mother hasn’t spotted her and pounced already. Something happened at home between her parents and Polly, she knows it, but isn’t very clued in just yet. All she does know is that her sister’s phone number is no longer in service, and her parents aren’t answering questions about it at all. Archie and Jug haven’t seen Polly around the house in weeks—a part of her is scared to go home and find that her sister has become a weird smell in the basement.

Who knows what went down when the two strong-willed Cooper girls finally blew up at one another?

Betty’s looking around when her eyes instantly find a figure leaning against a pillar across the mostly empty station—Riverdale isn’t exactly a travel hub, despite Pop’s being recently featured on the Food Network—something Jughead was very against as he saw it as the media exploiting something he savored as pure and the soul of his hometown. Her boyfriend complained about it for weeks, but Betty loved hearing him drone on about it on the phone, sometimes it was all that got her through the day without him there.

She blinks and thinks her mind is playing tricks on her.

Her mouth drops open as she takes in the sight, the beanie wearing boy she left home is not the person in front of her.

Instead, she sees a man, or almost a man, now officially a whole head taller than her, with lean muscles, broad shoulders, and a cut on his chin, probably from attempting to shave because he has actual hair on his face (instead of just insisting he does), and she manages to stand still for a whole minute before jumping into action.

He’s already halfway to her when she forgets about the suitcase, takes off in a run, and catapults herself into his arms, legs wound tight around his waist.

“Oh, my God, this better be you or else I’m wrapped around some guy who is now terrified or about to kidnap me,” she says into his neck and hears his laugh in her ear, and it’s like coming home.

Riverdale is just a place, a word to describe the dirt and structures around her. In reality, Jughead is her home, he’s where she belongs.

“Happy birthday, baby,” he says and her insides quiver—his voice is lower too.

“Keep—keep talking, I want to hear your voice. Fuck! I missed you so much,” she murmurs, clinging to him so hard her palms ache, but she doesn’t care.

“Language! What did the big city do to you?” he laughs and she does too and then pulls away just enough to press her lips against his.

It’s innocent, for all the naughty texts and phone calls they’d shared near the end of her internship program, but Betty’s just so happy to be near him, touching him, actually being held by him, that having a full-on make out session with roaming hands isn’t what is on the forefront of her mind.

They share a series of intimate kisses before Betty rests her forehead on his and runs a thumb over his bottom lip.

“I missed you so much, baby,” she whispers. “We’re never going to spend that much time apart again, okay?”

“Agreed,” he murmurs before kissing her again, this time a little deeper, a little longer, and makes her squeeze her legs tighter around his waist. Jughead smiles as their kiss ends and purposefully lets her slowly slip through his fingers until she’s back on her feet safely.

Betty refuses to let go and keeps her fingers locked around his neck. “How are you here? I mean, my mom said she wanted time as a family first and—ugh, is she dangling you in front of me just to be waiting in the car or something?”

“No, but I do love being treated like a piece of meat, and that’s not sarcasm,” Jughead answers easily. “She decided to honor the original plan of us getting to be together for the majority of your birthday. When we got word you train was delayed she called to let me know. I think I’m a present? So again, the piece of meat thing is working for me.”

“Best present ever,” Betty whispers with a soft kiss. “Can we get out of here? I mean, do you have a plan, or,” she stops and bites her lip.

“The original plan was to crawl through your bedroom window at midnight, give you your present, and then do some of those things we talked about,” he says with a devilish grin that makes Betty turn pink. “So, whatever you want, I’m down for. Food, family time, alone time—”

“Option three please,” she interrupts with bright eyes and Jughead chuckles, dropping his hands from her waist to grab the handle of her abandoned suitcase.

“I’d like to say your chariot awaits, but we’re walking, sorry,” he says as she wraps her arms around his free one, leaning into his body as they make their way out of the station.

“Hm, that’s fine, I don’t think my suitcase would fit on the motorcycle you’re fixing up, or so you told me,” Betty teases.

“Alright, so I might just be helping my dad by handing him tools, but it’s keeping us both out of trouble, which is something I thought you’d approve of,” he mentions pointedly.

“I do, you just don’t know the difference between a socket wrench and a torque wrench, so it’s hard to believe—”

“Well unlike you, my dad is nice about it and explains what they are and—”

“I do that! You just don’t listen—”

“I do too listen, but let’s not do this on your birthday, okay? But at midnight, it’s on,” Jughead states and Betty giggles into his arm.

“Hmm, you smell different,” she murmurs into the sleeve of his t-shirt. “But it’s not your shirt, it’s…” she trails off while sniffing up his neck.

“After shave,” Jughead fills in as their stride slows.

“After—are you shaving now, Jughead Jones? And you didn’t tell me?” she questions, a twinkle in her eye that makes Jughead grin without even realizing it.

“I’m sorry, I also stubbed my toe the other day, it hurt really fuckin’ bad, I swore and everything,” he jokes in return, to which she rolls her eyes as she hangs off his arm.

“Who doesn’t swear when they stub their toe?”

“Jesus, probably,” he answers and she smiles up at him because his own is so unapologetic, like he wouldn’t be able to stop if asked.

“You’re a doof, I don’t know why I even missed you,” Betty sighs dramatically.

“It’s about three inches soft, maybe six when it’s hard,” he fills her in.

“Jughead!” Betty squeaks, her cheeks flushing pink as she buries her face in his shoulder. “Wait, did you actually measure?”

“Using the finger method,” he answers, to which Betty raises one eyebrow. “Like, when you bend your index finger the middle part is about an inch, so you count how many you can make until you’re out of, well, room,” he explains.

“Hmm,” Betty hums.

“What, no comment?”

“Uh-uh,” she replies as they enter the trailer park. “I’m just gonna have to measure it myself later to settle this dispute,” she says with the most innocent of faces.

“Oh, are you now?” Jughead just about chokes and Betty shrugs nonchalantly. “The door’s unlocked, go ahead first,” he instructs when they reach his trailer, and Betty does as she’s told so Jughead can lug up the too-big suitcase she’s lived out of for two months now.

Jughead himself looks different, smells different, talks different, but the trailer is the same. A messy-clean, one where both boys know where the necessities are, but an outsider would be totally clueless. There are a couple dishes in the sink, some clothes scattered about, all FP’s it seems, but the surfaces are clean, the vacuums been used recently, and some air freshener is sitting out, probably for her sake.

Betty lets her overly large purse, practically a carry-on of sorts, fall from her shoulder to the floor.

“Hm, you still with me, baby?” Jughead questions, his arms wrapping around her waist from behind, his fingers slipping underneath her flowy white t-shirt that’s knotted in the front, but was bought that way.

It covers her mark, of course—probably her favorite part about being away was that she was able to show their mark, a sign that she was taken and happy. She’s in love, and it didn’t matter who saw it because no one in Boston knew her or ever heard of Riverdale.

“I think your hands got bigger too,” Betty murmurs as she leans back against him, an arm reaching up to settle around his neck as she angles her face to look at him.

“Too?”

Betty turns, her eyes locked on his, and she shivers as his hands roam and massage at the small of her back. “Mhm, your shoulders are wider, you’re taller, your voice is lower, you’re shaving now. So much changed in two months, Jug.”

“Maybe, but a lot has stayed the same,” he tells her.

“Like what, because to me, even your neck is thicker, and I like it! What is up with that?”

Jughead grins and reaches a finger up to hook her neckline. “This,” he murmurs as he tugs to show their crown. “This is the same, baby, and it will never change. And yeah, we’re different physically, but that’s it.”

“’We’re’ different?” Betty questions.

“You think it’s just me that went through a growth spurt, Cooper?” he demands to know. “The only part of me that I thought changed was my height, well, that and I’m aware I shave now,” he mentions in an afterthought.

“I like how low your voice is now,” Betty whispers. “I hope it gets even lower.”

“I like how many cannoli’s you ate,” Jughead offers in return.

“What?” she laughs, her eyes scrunched together.

“All summer I got at least one specific text every day, how you insisted you weren’t going to buy any cannoli that day, but later I got a picture of you eating one because you couldn’t resist,” he informs her. “That, and Boston Crème pie, but that wasn’t every day. You’re a real big dessert eater, you know?”

“Are you insinuating something, Jughead Jones?”

“I like my woman with a hearty appetite,” he answers easily. “And I like how because you were out from under your mother’s thumb you could do what you wanted. You didn’t have to worry about the look you’d get for having seconds, or answer questions about why you didn’t work out in the morning, or if you did what exactly did you do and for how long. You didn’t get compared to Polly or explain anything you did.”

“So you’re saying…?” she asks.

He grins down at her. “You grew too, Betts,” he says and reaches down to grope her ass. “In all the best ways.”

“My boobs got bigger,” she admits.

“Trust me, I noticed,” he agrees.

“Well, I had to buy new bras. In Boston, by myself. Usually I have Polly or Kevin.”

“Not your mother?” he asks with that shit-eating grin of his.

“Definitely not my mother,” she insists.

“It’s not just your boobs and ass, Betts, you’re different. More confident, more comfortable in your own skin because you didn’t have your mom’s voice in your ear. You carry yourself differently, but yes, Betty, eating those Boston delicacies definitely worked for you.”

“You think so?”

“I know so, you’re beautiful, Betty, but do you know the best part?”

“Hm?”

With a grin, Jughead quickly reaches down to wrap his hands under her bum and lifts her up. “We get to rediscover each other all over again.”

Betty shrieks, then laughs into his hair as he hastily makes his way down the hall to his bedroom—again, something else that has stayed the same. It’s still covered in movie posters, black and white classics, Star Wars, even a John Hughes one, but next to his bed is a corkboard covered in pictures of him and their friends, Jellybean, even a few from when they were kids, but mostly her, to be honest.

Surprisingly, his bed is made, the plaid comforter splayed across the mattress perfectly. It had been a joke she’d bought him one Christmas, but it was warm and soft, and Jughead loved it. The floor is clear, another air freshener adorns the bedside table and it smells clean, but not like Jughead per se.

Betty bites her lip and sighs as he kisses down the column of her throat. “You planned this?” she questions, but it sounds more like a statement.

“Not exactly this, but I hoped you’d want time alone eventually,” Jughead answers and lets out a long breath as he rests his forehead on hers and breathes her in. “Even if to just touch marks. We don’t have to do anything besides that. Whatever you want, baby.”

Betty nuzzles their noses together in a nod.

After how far they went on Valentine’s Day she’d suggested they calm down with the physical part of their relationship, at least in taking layers off their bottom halves. How much she wants to be with him physically scares her, something he knows, and so he quickly agreed, saying she was the boss of how fast, or slow, they went.

Betty doesn’t think having sex with Jughead would ever be a mistake, but she doesn’t want it to be impromptu either. She wants it to be a step they take together being fully aware of what they are about to do, to be responsible with the very big action they will be taking when they do. Maybe that’s her mom’s doing, always telling her how big of a deal sex is, but Betty doesn’t think it’s a bad thing, even if her mother is the reason she gets so nervous every time they go further physically.

“Jug, I wanna do what we talked about,” Betty says after a silent moment, her voice earnest and heart pounding in her ears. “On the phone, when I called you in the middle of the night after that dream I had—”

“I remember,” Jughead interrupts with hands cupping her cheeks.

“Is your dad coming home soon or—” she stops as he shakes his head.

“Not until the bars close,” he tells her. “What happened in that dream again? Remind me.”

Her eyes close as he strokes her cheeks and a thumb runs over her bottom lip. “Jug, I—you know,” she murmurs, her tone pleading.

“I want you to tell me what you want, Betts.”

“What we talked about, I want you to,” she stops and gives him a look while slipping her fingers under his shirt to feel his bare abdomen.

“Want me to what?”

“Jug, you know, I,” she lets out a breath and stares up at him with yearning eyes.

“Betty, when have I ever made you feel like you can’t talk to me about anything?”

“Never, but I—you know what I want, Juggie.”

“And I want to hear you say it,” he responds easily. “I love when you’re vocal, baby,” he admits and bites his lip while pulling her hips to meet his. “I love when you tell me what you want, how you want it, when you say my name, fuck, just the noises you make. So I want you to tell me what you want, then I want you to instruct me as I do it so you get exactly what you want.”

Betty takes in a deep breath and lets it out shakily, her pupils now blown, and nods ever so slightly. “Okay.”

Jughead presses their foreheads together and licks his lips. “Say it, Betty.”

“I want—I want,” she starts, then clears her throat. “I want you to go down on me,” she whispers and brings him in for a kiss. It’s all heat and open mouths and tongue.

Jughead pulls away just enough to tug her shirt off, then his own, and smiles down at her heaving chest, or their mark, she isn’t quite sure.

He licks his bottom lip as he brings a hand up to touch her bralette, it’s white and lacy and tight, holding in her breasts just so.

Betty shivers, but says nothing as his eyes take in the sight.

“Take your pants off,” he orders, his tone firm but soft, and she does as she is told, revealing the matching white bikini cut panties. They are practically sheer, with a few white lace flowers being the only real coverage. “And let your hair down,” he says once her jeans are kicked off.

Her hair, previously in a messy bun because it is longer now than ever before, falls around her shoulders in waves, full and heavy. The smell of her shampoo fills her nostrils and she shivers again as the tendrils tickle the top of her breasts, which are now sensitive and causes her whole body to break out in goosebumps.

Jughead threads his fingers into her hair and tugs her close, breathing her in and to Betty he almost looks high, like she’s a drug, one he hasn’t had in eight weeks and had been dying for.

Betty runs her hands up and down his bare sides and leans in to his hold.

“You’re so fucking beautiful, Betty,” he murmurs, his lips brushing against hers as he speaks, “and I’m going to make you feel so fucking good, but you have to tell me what you need ‘cause we’ve never done this before, okay?”

Betty swallows visibly, but nods. “I love you,” Betty whispers and lightly scratches down his chest to his happy trail.

“I love you more,” Jughead states before capturing her mouth in a kiss and slowly starts backing her towards the bed. “Is this one of the new bras?” he asks when the back of her knees hit his extra-long twin causing her to fall back.

Betty smiles while situating herself on the mattress and relaxes into the comfort of it, into the smell of Jughead that erupts when it’s rustled. The cotton of the comforter is so different than the delicate and too-expensive pink one on her bed that is itchy and heavy, and sometimes feels like it’s suffocating her.

She waits until Jughead is on his knees between her legs to answer. “Mhm, the mall was one of the places approved for us to go during our free time, and since no one knew me or would be able to tattle to my mother I may have gone a little overboard. I might have a lingerie kink, if that’s a thing?”

“I definitely approve of it if you do,” he tells her while simply looking down at her. “Remember, be vocal, baby,” he whispers before descending upon her.

He goes straight for their mark and attends to it thoroughly using his teeth and tongue, every lick and nibble causing Betty to moan and arch her chest closer to him. She grabs onto a hunk of his hair to do her best to keep him there.

“Hm, this is so pretty,” Jughead says against the lace of her bralette.

“Do you have a lingerie kink too?” Betty asks in a breath, a smile on her lips.

“On you? Definitely,” he states and pays attention to the mounds of her breasts, his lips gliding over them, teasing. “But I bet you look better without it.”

“What a line,” she says in a laugh as he slips his fingers behind her back, quickly setting her chest free. Jughead guides the undergarment down her arms then tosses it aside.

“Look at that, I was right,” he says and grins before continuing his journey down her body.

He licks and sucks and kisses, making her writhe and moan under his touch. By the time he reaches her panties Betty feels like a livewire, like electricity is coming from her fingertips and snapping in the air surrounding them.

“Juggie, take off my underwear,” Betty pleads as his mouth kisses around the edging.

“That’s what I like to hear,” he says against her hipbone before tugging the lace down.

Once it’s gone, Betty tries to ignore the feeling of being so exposed and bites her lip under his intense gaze. It’s the first time she’s ever been completely naked in front of Jughead, and she lets out a shaky breath to get rid of the nerves.

“I wish you could see you the way I see you,” Jughead murmurs.

“Back at you, babe,” she counters, making him smile.

He slides his hands down her legs, pulling them further apart. “You still want this?”

“God, yes,” Betty practically moans.

Jughead situates himself between her legs and before Betty can even start to get nervous (again) his fingers separate her bottom lips so he can lick up her slit.

“Holy—fuck!” Betty cries against the pillow and she’s sure there are literally sparks of electricity crackling in the air.

He likes the encouragement and repeats the action, this time flicking his tongue, making Betty grip the sheets and mewl for more.

Jughead takes his time with her, learning what she likes and what makes her tug on his hair or swear. He discovers what and where her clitoris is, making sure to pay special attention to it and Betty’s eyes just about roll back inside of her head. He does as he’s told until her hips are bucking and she’s begging for more.

“J—Jug,” she stutters, pulling on his hair until he realizes she wants something from him.

“What, is everything okay?” he asks and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, a sight that makes her stomach coil tighter.

“Jug, I want you to,” she stops and tries to catch her breath. “Finger me.”

Jughead nods. “Let me know if anything hurts or—”

“It won’t, but I will. It feels so amazing, Jug,” she assures him and while looking her in the eye Jughead takes his middle finger and gets it wet between her folds, his knuckle hitting her clit just right. “Jesus,” she moans, her head dropping back to the pillow.

“Actually, it’s Jughead,” he says and she can’t even find it in her to roll her eyes or make a snide comment in return. He sucks hard on her sensitive nub before his finger enters her.

It does feel weird at first, Betty thinks, but then he crooks his digit and hits a spot that makes her practically yelp. “There, Jug,” she says in a loud moan, “right there.”

He does as he’s told, flicking and sucking while rubbing the spot inside her. It feels so good Betty isn’t in control of her body, she can’t stop herself from begging for more or even trying to wiggle away because it feels too good. Jughead clamps an arm over her hips, keeping her still, and every time she manages to peer down at him he either looks like he’s devouring his favorite meal (and with his appetite that’s an honorable title) or his eyes are on hers, and it’s an extremely intimate feeling.

It’s their marks touching times a million, and then some.

“Jug, Jughead, I think I’m almost,” she says in pants and he speeds up his miniature thrusts inside her and in a matter of moments she’s screaming and trying to muffle it in his pillow.

Waves of pleasure wash through her, they are large and powerful, like a tsunami, destroying everything in its wake. And that’s how Betty feels, utterly wrecked. She knows she’s breathing heavy and that her throat is producing a hum she hasn’t consented it to do. It’s almost like she’s not in her own body, but floating above it.

No, flying.

Betty feels a light blanket come over her and Jughead cuddle up next to her.

“Thank you,” she sighs, and it’s the first action she has control of, but doesn’t think she’d be very useful doing much more just yet.

“For what, baby?” he asks and she shivers as his breath hits her sticky skin.

“For making me fly,” she answers with eyes still closed.

When Betty comes-to Jughead is rubbing her back and periodically kissing behind her ear.

“You are a very fast learner,” is the first thing out of her mouth and it makes Jughead chuckle. The rumble is welcome against her chest. “Jug, that was… wow, thank you.”

“And to think I’m just starting out,” he jokes and Betty nuzzles her face into his shoulder. “It sounds dumb, but I did research, sort of. I wanted to make sure it was good for you. You hear how so many girls fake it or whatever. I never want us to be like that.”

“It never will be,” Betty assures him. “You’ve never made me feel less than amazing, Jug. We’re learning together,” she tells him and kisses the corner of his mouth. “And, research? You mean you watched porn and called it research?”

“I read, actually. Surprisingly there are quite a few articles written on the art of eating out a woman. There were flow charts, diagrams, pictures of a clitoris, how to find the g-spot, and the best way to stimulate it. It’s the size of a nickel and three inches inside the vagina,” he informs her, his voice professional and matter-of-fact. “And, yes, I did watch some porn, merely for scientific purposes, not at all for personal reasons.”

“You’re so selfless,” Betty coos as she sits up on an elbow. “I bet you rewarded yourself for being so practical and making sure I’m taken care of.”

“I try very hard to be a good boyfriend,” he agrees.

She swings her leg over his hips and takes hold of his still hard erection. “I think you should be rewarded by me too. I mean, your research worked out so well.”

Jughead gasps and strokes the base. “Fuck, I—” he stops and bites his lip so hard she’s surprised there isn’t blood.

“You have lube, boyfriend? I’ve been doing research too,” she mentions with a wicked grin.

“Top drawer,” he grunts.

She puts a little in her hand and starts rubbing him up and down slowly. “This goes both ways, Jug, tell me what you like or want, okay?”

“I don’t think you understand just how much you merely being naked does to me,” he grits out as she starts twisting with her hands.

“If you’re still using big words I don’t think I’m doing so well,” she comments while stretching her body out with her head at his waist.

Betty takes her time exploring him too, kissing down the V at his hip bones, scratching at his happy trail, letting her breasts skim over his penis, her hair tickle his tip. Finally, when he’s gasping for more and she licks her lips and takes his cock into her mouth.

A string of curses slips from his lips as Betty’s head bobs. “Jesus Christ, Betty, holy shit!” he grunts, her cheeks hollowing out as she sucks. “Betty, I’m—you might want to,” he warns and Betty reaches for the box of napkins just in time.

“Fuck, did you do research too?” he gasps after Betty’s cleaned up his mess and tossed the napkins in the nearby trashcan, then settled back in against his side.

“Remember how I complained about my roommate for the internship because she never stopped talking? Well, she was very boy crazy, so I listened when I felt the information was useful.”

Jughead lets out a heavy breath and wraps his arms around her. “We make quite the pair the way we research and selectively hear, huh?”

Betty rubs her fingers over their mark and hums in agreement.

“Before I forget due to teenage hormones, I do have an actual present for your birthday,” he says as he’s already reaching into his nightstand, this time the bottom drawer.

“You didn’t have to get me anything, Jug, just seeing you is enough, and especially with what we just did—”

“I hope you don’t plan to only do this on special occasions, because I was hoping for some regularity,” he comments and Betty shakes her head at him. “You know how that new vintage store-slash-pawn shop that opened on the Southside?”

“Mhm, you couldn’t stop talking about the old camera you got there and how excited you are to develop the pictures in the dark room when school starts back up.”

“I found something else there, and I probably shouldn’t be spouting off about how I found it at a pawn shop like—”

“Jughead, shut up, I would love anything you got me because you got it for me,” she assures him. “And I hate when you spend money on me, so if it was expensive I’m going to kill you.”

“I’m not telling you how much I spent. Besides, with my working off and on for Fred all summer, along with the Drive-In, I have plenty of money saved up. Plus, I don’t have to worry about Jellybean financially anymore so it’s mine to do what I want with it.”

“All right, all right.”

“Well, I saw this and—honestly, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and how it was perfect, even though you hate the word,” he mumbles while handing her the little black box.

Betty sits up as she opens it. “Oh, my God, Jug,” she breathes, taking the ring out of the box. It’s silver and is made up of Celtic knots and comes together at the top with hands, a heart in the middle, and of course, a crown on top. “It’s beautiful, and yes, perfect.”

“It’s called a Claddagh,” he answers. “It’s Irish, it represents love, loyalty, and friendship. I thought it was perfect because even though you’re my girlfriend, you’re also my best friend, and you’re also so much more than both of those titles, you’re my soulmate. I’ve never known anyone so persistent, so stubborn, you’re always telling me how much I’m worth and how you’ll always be there for me. My parents never bothered to truly stick around, and even though I pushed you away time and time again before we marked you never budged. I know no matter what happens you’ll be there, by my side, and the same goes for you.”

Betty smiles and looks up at him. “And it has a crown on it,” she states.

“That helped,” he agrees, taking the ring from her and slips it up her left ring finger. “The story goes that when the heart is facing out it means your heart is free. But when it’s facing up, it means you’re taken, that you’re in love.”

Her eyes water as she stares at it. “It’s beautiful, I love it,” Betty whispers while wrapping her arms tight around his neck.

“Mm, I love you,” he says into her neck.

“I love you more,” she murmurs their mantra and tugs him back down to the mattress. “Do you want to take a nap then grab some Pop’s?”

“Mmm, if I didn’t already love you that would have done it,” he says with a light kiss to her forehead before closing his eyes.

“Jug,” Betty warns hours later without much heat to it. “Jughead.”

“Don’t threaten if you’re not willing to follow through,” he replies with a shrug that jostles her head.

“Juggie, it’s my birthday,” she reminds him softly in a timid voice that makes him crumble.

“Ugh, I like it better when you actually fight me, not when you have a legitimate excuse for me to give you what you want,” he sighs as he slides the plate of fries within her reach.

Betty smiles in victory before popping a small fry into her mouth. “Don’t worry, there’s always tomorrow,” she says cheerily, a stark contrast to her tone just a moment ago.

Jughead settles back against the booth and wraps his arm tighter around his girlfriend, shaking his head as she empties his never-ending fry plate. “I love that my appetite is rubbing off on you,” he comments. “That, or our actions earlier just left you positively famished.”

“Hm, Juggie, I love you, but you can read some books from our century, I promise you not all of them are like Twilight,” Betty responds with a hand over her mouth as she speaks because it’s still full of potato. “You’ll find that words like ‘famished’ are outdated.”

“So is chivalry, but you don’t seem to mind when I practice that.”

“That’s not outdated, it’s dead,” she corrects.

“Or is outdated? Progressive feminism is serious and we shouldn’t joke about it,” he says matter-of-factly and makes Betty giggle into his neck.

“Well, I got myself a chivalrous feminist, so who is the winner here?”

“Have you seen what you look like naked? I’m the winner in this relationship, always,” he responds without missing a beat. “Thanks, Pop,” he adds on as the old man drops off a new plate of fries and takes the old one.

“And I wouldn’t forget one of my favorite’s birthday,” the old man tells her as a waitress walks up with a tray holding two milkshakes, one for her and one for Jug, in their favorite flavors, of course.

“Pop, you didn’t have to!” Betty insists, but takes the milkshake happily, because no one ever turns down one of Pop’s milkshakes.

“I wouldn’t forgive myself if I forgot. Happy birthday, Betty,” he says and leaves them with a wink.

Betty takes a long sip from her vanilla milkshake and hums without realizing it. “There’s nothing like Pop’s milkshakes,” she sighs and slumps against Jughead’s side.

He nods in agreement, his on lips wrapped around the red and white straw.

“Mm, I don’t want to go home,” Betty whispers as she adjusts her head so Jughead’s chewing isn’t bothering her. “This has been the best birthday ever.”

“I don’t know, remember when your parents rented that bounce house thing? That was pretty awesome,” Jughead comments.

“You just liked that birthday because I insisted on wearing a crown and then made my mom buy you one, because if I was going to have a crown, then you needed one too,” she states.

“I remember Archie got jealous, so you made him one before the party and it was so bad,” her boyfriend says in a laugh.

“It was not bad! It was unique.”

“It was like the paper boat from It but on his head,” Jughead insists.

“Well, I felt bad. I didn’t want him to feel like he wasn’t my best friend too. He’s my best friend, but if I happened to pull a Princess Diaries somehow and become queen one day it’s you that would be king, not Archie, sorry.”

Jughead laughs before stopping abruptly. “Speaking of,” he says and Betty looks up to see their red-haired friend entering the diner with the football team. “You go say hi, I’m going to go to the bathroom,” he suggests and is gone before she can even answer.

Archie had spotted her almost immediately and is already at the booth when she stands up. “You’re back!” he exclaims before engulfing her in a hug.

“I am, since this afternoon,” she responds, but it’s muffled into his shoulder. “Wow, you grew too, and you’re… harder,” she says and playfully punches his pecs.

“Hey, all I did was load one pile of rocks into a wheelbarrow and then drop it off in another pile, and this is what happened,” he answers. “And, happy birthday. I have a present for you, but didn’t think I would be seeing you, so it’s at my house, sorry.”

“No worries, Arch, it’s not a big deal. I know where you live.”

He laughs at her lame joke. “I want to hear all about your internship, and I have so much to tell you too, but I gotta get back to the team.”

“You can sit with us for a bit, if the guys don’t mind. We’re aren’t staying much longer, my mom wants me home in time for cake or something,” Betty tells him.

He scratches the back of his neck and she sees red start to bloom on his skin. “Uh, nah, I don’t want to be rude. You guys have a good rest of your night, all right? I’m so glad you’re home, I missed you,” he says with another hug before jogging off to sit with the football team.

Just as he disappears, Jughead returns. “Hey, you ready to go? I don’t want to piss your mom off on your birthday.”

Betty turns with her eyes narrowed. “What’s going on?”

“Well, I was about to pay, but—”

“Don’t play stupid with me, Jughead Jones. Why are you and Archie not talking?”

“Who says we aren’t talking?” he questions while dropping some ruffled green bills on the table. “Here, you should take my flannel, the temperature dropped a little bit,” he suggests and is already holding it up for her to put on.

“Okay, if my observation was uncalled for before, it’s definitely not now. What’s going on?” she demands.

“Nothing, can we go? Your mom has cake waiting.”

Betty puts her arms through the black and white flannel and lets Jughead drag her out of the diner. When they hit the street Betty tugs on his hand to pull them to a halt.

“Betts—”

“No, I can do this now that we’re not in public: Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Third, what is going on with you and Archibald Andrews?” she demands.

“Hey, you didn’t say his full name! How come I get the full name treatment?”

“Because, I have a lot more power over you, and he’s not here.”

“Betty, it’s nothing. Really, we just—it’s nothing, okay?”

“Is this about how the trip during the fourth of July got cancelled? I mean, I was pissed too, but our parents wouldn’t let you come alone, but he got sick, it’s not like it was his fault,” she insists.

“It’s your birthday, can we do this tomorrow?”

“No, it’s my birthday, so I say you tell me now. What’s going on, Forsythe—”

“Stop with the full name, will you? Jeez,” he mumbles with a shudder. “And it’s—it’s between Archie and I, and you have to respect that. It’s our issue, you’re my soulmate, his best friend, we don’t want you in the middle.”

“I am in the middle, I’m your soulmate, and he’s our best friend. So maybe I’ll be objective and can tell you both you’re stupid so you’ll get over it before school starts.”

“Or, you can let us handle it as big boys and the adults we’re growing up to be?” he suggests.

“You’re really not going to tell me?”

“Betty, it’s not a big deal. He’s been busy with work, I’ve been busy with work and my dad, we’ll resolve it on our own time, in our own way. Okay?”

“No, not okay, tell me what happened and I’ll have it resolved by tomorrow. School starts in a week, I don’t want this still going on and—”

“Betty, please, just—I love you, but stay out of it, please, okay?” he pleads.

Betty considers his tired face and sighs. “I hate this. We’re the three musketeers.”

“I promise I’ll do my best to keep things as normal as possible, okay? You have my word.”

She nods before getting up on her tiptoes to kiss him quickly. “You know in a couple days I’ll be driven mad by the unknown and start to annoy you again, right?” she asks as they begin walking again, her suitcase rolling along behind them.

“Yeah, but I’m free of that for now, so,” he stops and shrugs. “Do you think your mom made the cake or bought it? She’s a damn good cook, but you’re definitely the baker in the family.”

Betty lets his change of subject slide and drops whatever is going on between him and Archie.

For now.

It’s not until over an hour later when Jughead is out the front door (with a promise to climb through her window later) that Betty can ask about her sister.

Upon coming home and seeing no Polly, Betty opened her mouth to ask what happened, but Alice Cooper gave her an infamous head shake that meant ‘not now’ and Betty knew not to poke the bear right then, even if it was her birthday.

“Well, he’s gone, even if he is family and should have been privy to the following conversation, because I’m going to tell him anyways, so I’m asking. Where’s Polly? You disconnected her phone more than three weeks ago, I haven’t talked to her in a month. Did you give her the letters I sent? She hasn’t been active on the internet or—”

“What Polly does is no longer up to us,” Alice interrupts.

“We haven’t had control over what Polly does in a long time,” her dad adds on.

“Can we stop being so cryptic? Is she okay? Where is she? Is the most intense quiet game going on or—”

“Polly isn’t here,” her mom cuts in again.

“Okay, where is she? Did you send her to Grandma’s or—”

“We gave her a choice, Betty, and she made one,” Hal tells her.

Betty feels her fists close, but manages to resist the urge to dig her nails in. “Can you just tell me where she is? What’s going on?”

“What do you think happened, Elizabeth? That damn Blossom boy, he—he,” her mom stops and turns away because showing negative emotion like this is not the Cooper way, in private or not.

“What did he do to her?” Betty demands, stepping forward with a hand over her heart. If Jason Blossom hurt her—Betty would gladly rip the redhead’s heart out.

“He took her away from us,” her dad says softly as he wraps his arms around her mom and the action is something so small, so simple, but so gentle and unusual for her parents that Betty is taken aback. They don’t usually show any kind of PDA, minimal or not.

“She left us for the Blossom’s,” Alice tells her, now turning back, her moment apparently over.

“You said she made a choice. So what, you just—you told a seventeen year old girl to pick between her boyfriend and her strict parents and expected the outcome to go in your favor? She’s�� she’s Polly. She’s stubborn and leads with her heart and you just let her go? She’s not even an adult, she’s not thinking clearly, I mean,” Betty stops and sits on a dining room chair to collect herself.

“Betty, it’s not that simple. There are other factors—”

“Yeah, me! I’m the key factor here, and you sent me away!”

“No, you made a choice—!”

“Like Polly did? A choice that felt like mine, but was really orchestrated by you? Like everything in this family always is?” Betty questioned.

“Watch what you’re saying Betty,” her dad insists, his voice low and firm, a tone he only uses when her mother is under fire. “We are your parents and so deserve respect.”

“But you can’t—” Betty stops and stands again. “You can’t raise us to be strong and independent like you, then be angry when we want to assert that independence. I learned so much this summer, Mom, so much and parts of it were overwhelming in the best way, but most of the time I just wanted to be here. I wanted to be home with Jughead, painting my nails crazy colors with Polly, drawing on Archie’s face when he falls asleep first, and trying to get a byline at the Register. But I was gone because I felt like I had to do this internship to please you, to have an opportunity you never did, to never let you down. I was gone and I wasn’t here to keep the peace, to keep Polly in this family—”

“Polly made herself a new family,” her mom confesses, her eyes full of tears. “Polly got pregnant and we told her,” she stops to attempt to collect herself. “We told her to be smart, to not let this ruin her life, but she chose the Blossom’s, Betty. She chose that horrid family over her own flesh and blood.”

“Polly’s pregnant?” Betty whispers more to herself than her parents. “And, you told her—what did you want her to do?”

“Betty,” Hal murmurs with a ‘tsk’ in his voice, like she asked a stupid question.

“I can’t believe this—Polly’s in love with Jason and she got pregnant, and you expected her to just want to, what? Give it up for adoption, have an abortion? It’s her body, her baby, that makes it her decision,” Betty states forcefully.

“You think Polly’s responsible enough to raise a baby? She wasn’t responsible enough to not get knocked up! And you are going on the pill!” Alice tells her with a finger point.

“So that was it, huh?” Betty asks with a shrug. “You told her to get an abortion or get out?”

“We approved of adoption as well,” her father informs her, like that makes it okay.

“You just,” Betty stops and almost wants to laugh at the audacity of her parents. “You don’t get it. Polly’s your daughter! She’s your child, you’re supposed to be there for her, take care of her, and you tossed her aside for not doing what you wanted?”

“It’s not that simple,” Hal insists.

“It is though,” Betty tells him. “She’s your daughter, my sister, and you gave her up. You disconnected her phone, probably took all her electronics, did you even let her pack a bag, or did you just throw her out on the porch?”

“That’s enough, get upstairs, now,” Alice orders. “I won’t have you acting like this isn’t hard for you father and me as well.”

“Was it? Or did Polly break the image of the perfect Cooper family and it was a necessary evil to save face?”

“I said upstairs,” Alice roars and Betty flinches at the ferocity.

She shakes her head before ascending the steps two at a time, her hands in fists. In the throes of executing a full-on teenage tantrum she slams the door behind her, and squeezes her eyes shut.

How could they just turn their backs on her like that? Polly’s their firstborn, their daughter, and they let her go? Disowned her just like that?

Having one door between them didn’t feel like enough and so Betty goes into the bathroom and slams that one for good measure. She slides down to the floor and tries to keep her composure, but it’s impossible. Tears stream down her face as she muffles the sobs into her knees.

Polly’s gone? Moved out? Into that horrible castle they call Thornhill? That is a place ghost stories are made of. There were multiple urban legends in Riverdale about Thornhill—kids went in and never came out, the family members buried there haunted the grounds, the statues and gargoyles were real people that the Blossom’s hated and cured into stone, the list goes on and on, and Polly was living there?

Polly used to hold a flashlight to her chin under a blanket and tell Betty stories that made her almost wet the bed.

They were supposed to have one more year.

One more year before Polly left home for college. One more year together doing makeovers and giggling about their boyfriends. One more year of eating junk food during their periods and crying over stupid Lifetime movies. One more year of having someone in each other’s corner, knowing no matter what their parents did or said, they had someone on their side.

Polly said she would be okay, that Betty shouldn’t be worrying about her, that it should be the other way around.

“I’m the big sister,” she had said after Betty climbed into her bed the day before she left for Boston. “I’m supposed to worry about you, tell you to be safe, to hold a key between your fingers when you walk alone at night and to be smart,” she told her and smiled at her in a way that always made Betty feel calm. “I’m going to be fine with Mom and Dad, Betty. You go and experience everything you can. This is chance for you to get out from under their thumb like I always wanted. Don’t you pass it up because of me, don’t you dare.”

Polly said they would talk every day, and for about a month they did. They spoke once a day and sometimes even Facetimed, even if just for a few minutes. Then Betty had a busy day and realized she’d texted Jughead all day, but hadn’t heard from her sister. She called and there was no answer. She called again and again still with no answer.

Then, the next morning her phone was disconnected. Her Facebook deactivated. Her Instagram and Twitter silent.

Betty asked her parents what was going on, but was stonewalled every time. She wrote letters, asked Jug and Archie to look for her, to pass along messages, but they never saw her. Her letters went unanswered. Another phone number never supplied. Her parents deflected every question, gave her vague no-nonsense answers, and it was enough that Betty gave up.

She was to be home in a month, they would figure it out then.

But now they couldn’t. Her parents kicked her out, told her to choose between them and her child, and she chose the baby growing inside her. It’s a choice Betty supports, but did Polly think she wouldn’t? Is that why she hasn’t reached out?

Betty doesn’t realize that her hands are bleeding until she opens her eyes and sees the smudges on her jeans.

Quickly, she pulls out her cell phone and with shaking hands she presses her boyfriend’s smooshed face in the ‘favorites’ section of her contacts. It was a picture Kevin took of him, her hands squishing his cheeks together. He hated the picture, but she adored it.

He answers after one ring. “That was fast.”

“Juggie, I need you,” she manages and swallows the knot in her throat and it makes her ache.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” he says instantly. “I’ll be there in a—fuck,” he stops and there’s a crash. “A minute, okay?”

“Can we stay on the phone?” Betty whispers, it comes out more of a squeak.

“I only went to the treehouse, I’m literally almost there, just hold on for me.”

“My window should be unlocked. I’m—I’m in the bathroom,” she tells him. Betty scoots away from the door and leans against the sink so he can get in.

“I’m about to climb up and I need two hands, but I’ll be with you in less than sixty seconds, okay?” he promises and Betty nods even though he can’t see her and lets her phone drop when the line goes dead.

It’s only a moment before the door bursts open and Jughead’s panting in front of her. “Shit, I’m out of shape,” he dramatically wheezes, probably for her benefit.

Betty attempts to laugh, but it comes out a sob and quickly the door is shut behind him and he’s on her knees in front of her.

“C’mere,” he murmurs as he drops to his butt and lifts her into his lap so her legs are crisscrossed behind his back. “I’m here, and I have you, alright?”

Betty melts into his chest and lets herself finally really cry. Her body is wracked with sobs and she can’t hold them in, but she doesn’t have to. She knows she can unravel with Jughead and he’ll take care of her, that’s something she never has to worry about.

How could they just let Polly go?

Jughead rocks her back and forth, one of his hands rubbing up and down her back, the other holding her hands between them, making sure they aren’t digging in anymore.

She’s completely limp in his lap, her hands included. He has that effect on her, to make her pain feel shared, more manageable, like it will never fully consume her because he won’t allow it.

“It’s Polly, isn’t it?”

Betty nods against his collarbone, her cries now lessened to sniffles.

Jughead gives her temple a series of kisses and uses both arms to hold her tight, apparently now sure she won’t hurt herself. “Is she okay? Polly?”

“She’s pregnant. They told her to get rid of it or get out,” she supplies. “She moved in with the Blossom’s.”

“Fuck, baby, I’m so sorry,” he murmurs against her skin. “That’s… not right.”

“I’m proud of her,” Betty admits while pulling away and wiping her face. “She did what was best for her and the baby. She did the right thing, the same thing I would have done in that position.”

“I know.”

“How could they just give her up like that? And why hasn’t she tried to contact me? Doesn’t she know I’m always on her side? She’s my sister—” Betty chokes out and wills herself to stop crying, to stop feeling so weak.

“Maybe she didn’t want to put you in the middle,” Jughead offers, his forehead resting on hers. “I never wanted Jellybean in the middle.”

“But I’ve always been in the middle, what makes this different?”

“I don’t—I don’t know,” he sighs. “But, I promise I’ll help you figure it out. We’ll ask around for her new number, try to get Cheryl to notice we exist, but honestly what help will she really be? She likes to play with people’s emotions rather than help. Hell! We can get straight to the point and sneak into Thornhill, I’m down for a little breaking and entering.”

Betty can’t help but chuckle as she attempts to clean herself up. Makeup is probably streaking down her face, and after crying so hard she has a headache, plus feels gross from traveling.

“You’d really storm Thornhill’s gates for me?” she asks, her voice light and eyes blinking.

“How many times do I have to tell you I’d do anything for you? Just like you’d do anything for me,” Jughead murmurs while bumping their noses together. Betty opens her mouth, but he cuts her off before she even begins. “Except tell you what’s going on with me and Archie. Boundaries, babe,” he adds on as an afterthought.

Betty shakes her head at him. “I wasn’t going to even mention that,” she insists. “I was going to ask if you would shower with me, since you said you’d do anything,” she informs him. “I feel gross and… I want to be close to you.”

“Baby, this is one of those things where if I ever say no something is wrong with me,” he tells her.

She smiles weakly, then just holds her arms up like a little kid. Jughead takes the hint and slips her shirt off.

They undress each other innocently and Betty gets the shower ready before stepping in and holding a hand out to Jughead for him to join her, that she’s sure this is what she wants to happen, because she knows he worries.

He closes the shower door behind him and Betty pulls him under the warm spray, their hair becoming matted to both their heads, and goosebumps breaking out over their skin.

“What do we do now?” Betty asks softly with her lips grazing over his heart, and she lightly kisses their golden crown splashed across his heart.

“What we always do,” he responds as he cups her jawline with his now large, strong hands. “Figure it out. Together.”

So many things had changed when Betty was gone. It made her wish she never went to Boston, never left when things at home were so fragile, apparently in more ways than one.

Polly was unreachable, for now. Thornhill was serious business, it even had security, and just showing up was last on the list of her ideas for how to get in contact with Polly. Her and Jug were likely to be strip searched or just thrown out on their asses, hopefully the latter in all honesty.

Betty wasn’t even sure the situation with Polly was fixable, but all she really wanted was her sister back, in some shape or form.

But the situation with Archie and Jug? That was tangible, that was something she could fix, because boys are stupid and Archie is so much more easily crackable than Jughead. However, it does take almost a week to get Archie to hang out with her because it’s like he knows she’s going to try and do something about it.

“I can’t believe our sophomore year starts tomorrow, can you believe it?” he asks as soon as they sit down and after they nodded to Pop for their usual’s.

“I can’t believe it took a week for you to finally hang out with me,” Betty counters and gets that signature Archie eye-roll and wide smile combo in return. “I was gone for two months and you treat me like some old, tossed aside… I don’t know, football or something.”

He reaches across the table and squeezes her hand. “I missed you, Betty, I did, you know I did,” he assures her. “Not in the same way as Jughead, and probably not as much, to be honest, but I did. I was busier than him though, so,” he stops and shrugs as he slouches in the booth. “Tell me all about it. I can’t believe you met Toni Morrison! You must have freaked.”

“I did, I really did, you would have laughed at me,” she agrees.

Of course, things changed with Archie too, because why wouldn’t they? Everything changed when she was gone and she wasn’t around to see any of it, or prevent any of it.

But Archie’s change is good, at least Betty thinks so. He has a great voice, which she is aware of since she has continued the joy of overhearing him belt out boyband songs when their windows are open. Plus, he’s putting his guitar lessons to good use, and it’s another thing to help keep him out of trouble and hopefully it means he won’t fall in love every other month like he usually does.

She waits until dessert to make her move, because it’s only polite to make small talk and catch up first.

“I can’t take it anymore, what’s going on with you and Jug?” she demands, and must have been louder than she thought because Archie jumps in surprise.

“Betty…”

“No, don’t you ‘Betty’ me, Archibald, it took me a week to get you to hang out with me because we can’t all hang out together—”

“Hey now, that’s not true. I’ve been busy with football practice, and I just told you I’m working on music. It takes a lot of dedication, especially since I’m getting into it late in the game,” he insists.

“No, no don’t do that. We’ve always been busy, Arch. I have a million extra-curriculars, you have sports and girls, and Jughead has me and his isolation stuff, but we always managed to get together. Even if it meant we were all just sitting in the same room quietly because we have stuff going on. I’m keeping us together throughout high school and beyond, okay? And I won’t have you and Jug ruin it over some stupid boy fight, I won’t!” she told him, getting more forceful as she went.

“Betty, it’s not on you to—”

“But it is!” she cuts him off and realizes she’s getting worked up and her nails are resting on her scabs ready to sink in.

No, she wasn’t going to do that. She was going to be vocal and use her words and learn to cope better like her and Jug talked about. Or, started talking about at least. It’s a process.

“Betty—”

“We’re best friends, Archie, not just the two of us, not just him and me and not just you and him. All three of us are best friends, the three musketeers, and I don’t want it ruined. You two are,” she stops and sighs. “You two are my family and I don’t… sometimes I feel like you guys are all I have and,” she looks down to stare at her angry yellow scabs. “I can’t lose you.”

“Betty, hey,” he murmurs and she looks up, not realizing tears welled up in her eyes. “Jughead and I aren’t going anywhere, I promise.”

She wipes her nose and nods. “I don’t want you to think I’m being selfish,” she admits.

“Betty, you are the least selfish person I know,” he assures her. “Don’t worry, just give us some time and we’ll figure it out. I’ll be better, I’ll make sure we spend more time together and nothing changes too much, alright? Our friendship is a priority; believe me when I say that.”

“I do,” she whispers and sniffles. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot,” she apologizes, and he gives her a look. “Okay, I did, but I didn’t mean to cry as I did.”

“No worries, one of my best friends being a girl has made me very in touch with my emotions,” he teases.

“Arch, sometimes I think you’re too in touch with emotions,” Betty responds and he laughs, but stops abruptly after the bell above Pop’s door rings. Archie seems like he’s enchanted, or under some spell.

Betty turns and sees a brunette around their age entering the diner. She’s wearing all black and even from far away Betty can tell the pearls around her neck are expensive.

“I’m here to pick up an order for Lodge,” she announces as Pop walks by her.

“Two burgers, be ready in one sec,” the old man assures her.

The girl looks over at the two of them and, of course, Archie is still mesmerized. “How are the onion rings here, if you don’t mind my asking?” she asks.

Archie’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out.

“They’re great,” Betty speaks up. “Everything here is amazing.”

The girl smiles. “Thanks, some onion rings too, please!” she calls over to Pop, who nods. “I’m Veronica Lodge,” she introduces herself.

Betty’s eyes fill with know. She should have known, or at least guessed. The school called her two days ago. “Oh, I’m Betty Cooper, I’ll be your peer mentor this year, I guess,” she tells her.

“I prefer the term ‘friend,’” Veronica insists with a kind smile.

“Friend, okay,” Betty agrees and they both look to Archie who is still staring. “This is Archie Andrews.”

“Archie… Andrews,” he echoes and licks his lips. He holds his hand out and Veronica takes it to shake, and that’s when Betty notices delicate white gloves on the raven-haired girl’s hands.

“Well, Betty Cooper and Archie Andrews, I guess I’ll be seeing you,” she says and is gone as fast as she came.

As Betty literally watches Archie drool at her silhouette, she can’t help but think that she better get used to change, because this year is going to bring a lot of it.

To be continued….

Notes: The timeline is going to slow for the time being because I have a good bit planned for them at these ages and it's when we see them on the show, so, yeah. Welcome to the fun, Veronica Lodge ;) ALRIGHT - don't be mad at me because technically it's the 13th (maybe the 12th for some of you depending on timezones) so it didn't take me a whole month to update because the last one was on the 14th so HA. JK - I went through a pretty bad depression spell where all I did was work, eat, and sleep and it was rough there for a minute. I was struggling, but I'm coming out of it and I'm trying to continue to do so. Thanks for hanging in there with me and sending asks on my tumblr about my progress or motivating me. You have no idea how much it helps just to know someone is thinking about my writing and telling me its worth pursuing. ALSO - my brother had a baby on the 10th! So I had two days of babylovin' meaning I wouldn't leave him alone. He's the CUTEST (kind of, I mean he's my third nephew and they're all cute so) and he was a BIG boy, 10lbs! Jandy got pics, ask her how cute he is because he's so CUTE. & - as always, shout out to @jandjsalmon for beta-ing and making the aesthetic and for dealing with me when I was a low mope and on a baby high - she's the best and deserves praise, applause, and possibly alcohol or whatever she enjoys immensely. Lemme know your thoughts!!

#riverdale #bughead #betty cooper #jughead jones #fanfiction #call me a safe bet

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poshfather · 8 years ago

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some thoughts about stan

i love stan so heres kind of an analysis/headcanon sort of thing ok here we go

i feel like a lot of stan’s character derives from a place of insecurity. and this insecurity probably stems from the amount of rejection he’s faced in his life, both from his friends and his family.

his parents have gotten divorced twice, both times sort of blaming it on him, his sister bullies him, jimbo replaced him as his nephew with kenny, wendy repeatedly shows interest in other guys, and when he was diagnosed with depression his best friends abandoned him.

so to counter all of this hes devloped this complex where he needs people to like him and look up to him to survive. and a good place to start with this would be randy, who plants this idea in his head that to be a “normal” kid you have to be...well kind of an asshole. like when stan innocently calls cartman a “silly goose” randy throws a fit and demands stan calls him an “asshole” like a normal kid. and this, mixed with a ton of other bullshit randy spews, stan has this warped view on what being “normal” means, which is why he can so easily pick on other kids, deeming them dorky or “melvins”.

and in situations with wendy, he finds himself competing with other guys, often changing his personality to be more like or better than them. “for wendy ill be an activist, too” or, caving in and organizing an entire high school musical dance number just to win back her attention. even in raisins he adopts a whole new goth persona, and while it wasn’t to impress her, it was because of her that he felt like he needed to fit in with a new crowd to feel accepted.

but he sometimes takes this way too far, as in scause for applause/butterballs/gluten free ebola where he takes a good cause and exploits it to become popular or accepted. in the first two, it becomes less about the cause and more about him, letting his ego overtake him and, in the end, driving everyone away again (or at least, them feeling neutral towards him, which to stan, isnt the desired adoration he thrives on.)

a lot of stan’s actions aren’t exactly...calculated. he doesn’t really think before he acts when it comes to winning people over. consequently, he has no self awareness. he thinks he can do what he wants with no repercussions. ex, breaking up with wendy because he’ll be “dripping in bitches”, and then expecting they’d be fine again once his startup company failed. and a lot of the other things he does is on the whim, too. whale whores, fun with veal, - he sees something he deems unjust and lets his emotions overtake him, choosing to go headfirst into some ridiculous scheme to stop it.

and a lot of the he even gets sucked into things on accident, but then gets really into it, because suddenly he feels important. (asspen, scause for applause, trapped in the closet)

stan actually can be pretty selfish or hypocritical, especially if it will protect his image. in we should’ve never gone ziplining, he puts himself and his friends at risk just for an ipod nano.the whole guitar queer-o escapade, where he abandons kyle because he thinks he’d be better off without him. and then in the mystery of the urinal deuce, he pulls out a fucking gun on kyle to keep him quiet, so that know one will know that he was the culprit. and in two days before the day after tomorrow, he refuses to confess that he broke the dam because he didn’t want to get in trouble. he’d rather go solve the issue himself then admitting he did something wrong and accept outside help.“this way i can do the right thing, but still lie about it”

and those are only a few examples.

and as ive stated before, stan often lets his emotions get the best of him. i think the symptoms of his depression extend beyond youre getting old/ass burgers. while those two episodes did a great job of depicting his struggles, and showed that he uses alcohol to get by, he also copes in other ways, in my opinion. similar to these two episodes, in raisins we find him almost mute, and unmoving. he lays in bed in his dark room, blinds closed, dirty clothes and trash covering the floor. in freemium isnt free, he claims he stayed home from school because he “wasnt feeling the best” and instead layed in bed for 8 hours playing a game on his phone. i think anyone with depression could relate to that one LOL (at least i do) but with that, he also excessively spends money on that game, which is another reckless coping mechanism. and then finally even his habit of hoarding in insheeption could be considered yet another way he deals with his depression.

despite all of this though, stan can be logical. he can be a mediator, and a peacekeeper, and a voice of reason, especially between cartman and kyle, or the adults. he has the ability to see through bullshit and look at the bigger picture. usually he gets this way though on issues that don’t directly involve him, however.

he’s also pretty passive, and has a calming presence from time to time. he’s openminded and tends to at least hear people out before deciding if its totally stupid or not.

and all in all, no matter how stan acts, he has this way about making people like him no matter what. hes just really likable, even if he himself doesnt think so at times. probably because he has no self awareness and everyone (mainly wendy) gives in and forgives him because he really is trying his best but... he doesn’t exactly know what hes doing.

i just wanted to write this because i feel like people either overlook stan and call him boring, or only pick two or three of stans traits and mold that into his entire character, when there’s actually so much more to him, and how he’s not as, well...”pure” as some people claim him to be.

so i guess in summary stan is an insecure, egoistic, selfish, hypocritical, reckless, and emotional bully, as well as being a logical, good natured, passive, openminded, peacekeeping, and frustratingly lovable kid whos just trying to get by with all the shit he has to face

i could write about stan all day but those are the main things i wanted to talk about so thank you for reading this

#south park #stan marsh

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preservationandruin · 8 years ago

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Part Four: Storm’s Illumination

Update! I downloaded the nook app, killed my phone’s storage, and have accepted that reading too much on this will fry my already-bad eyes.

But, on the plus side, I can read more WoK.

Point of views back out to be Dalinar, Kaladin, Adolin, and Navani for this section. Featuring Dalinar deciding not to do a stupid thing but to keep trusting Sadeas, the fact that Dalinar isn’t hallucinating, Kaladin learning about his powers, and Dalinar and Navani finally smooching. Also, this is really fucking long, my apologies.

We start seeing the epigraphs be death rattles again. Meanwhile, Adolin has realized that trying to get his father to see that he’s going mad has resulted in Dalinar deciding to abdicate in favor of Adolin--which is not what Adolin wanted at all. You done fucked up, Adolin.

Dalinar has another vision, where he sees the Recreance--the Shardbearers giving up their swords. Interestingly, he also feels the hurt and betrayal of the spren: “A terrible feeling struck him. A sense of immense tragedy, of pain and betrayal. [...] What was happening? What was that dreadful feeling, that screaming he swore he could almost hear?” Also, the blades were glowing, but they dimmed and dimmed over time--the spren dying. Yikes.

So there’s a big hint as to what the Shards actually are. And one of the Radiants--probably Tanavast taking their shape, although it’s hard to tell and it could be a former Bondsmith or something--tells Dalinar that the Night of Sorrows, True Desolation, and Everstorm are coming, and to read the book and “unite them.”

Ren’s also having either a panic attack or an epileptic moment--all Dalinar classes it as is “an episode of weakness” but he’s pale, his legs are shaking, and he immediately sits down and rests his head in his hands.

...I wonder when Renarin started awakening his powers, as a note. Also Renarin accepts the Old Magic as existing easily, while Adolin claims it’s a myth (Dalinar shuts that down).

Adolin and Dalinar start fighting about whether or not Dalinar should step down and Renarin interrupts with “uh...guys...we could, like test to see if the visions are legitimate or not??” and both of them are like “?????”

So they decide to have Navani write down the visions as Dalinar sees them, because they know they can trust her and their first choice--Jasnah--isn’t there.

“The visions had told him to trust Sadeas” DALINAR NO

Navani is going out of her way to help Adolin with his flirting attempts she’s such a good aunt I love her. Also it gets him out of the room so Navani and Dalinar can talk privately.

Navani tries yet again to convince Dalinar they can be together but Dalinar is a bit too tired and confused and uncertain to be able to do this right now, which she recognizes and does leave.

Back to Bridge Four!!! They’re on another bridge run, and Dunny dies--hit by two arrows and trampled by horses. Moash has to pin Kaladin down to stop him from running out after the kid which, thank god Kaladin has some people who are willing to act as his self-preservation. And so instead of helping Dunny, he goes around and tries to heal Bridgemen from other crews.

Kaladin is too good and pure. He’s just furious that nobody cares about the dead Bridgemen.

Kaladin runs off of righteous anger and like, coffee, probably.

Anyway he fucking tears the Bridge Four gang a new one when they refuse to help someone from another bridge because people from other bridges were mean to them--and in the process states that his father was the only man with honor that he ever knew.

Listen, this is why Kaladin is dangerous--he cares about everyone, that makes them surprised and grateful, especially on the bridge teams where nobody gives a shit about anybody, and then they become slightly more loyal to him. And then suddenly he has like, an army of loyal people.

He’s such a hufflepuff.

Also Teft is dropping the world’s least subtle clues here like “wooow its so weird we keep not getting hit....funny that that happens when you run point...just keep carrying lit spheres with you......they’re good luck....oh they went dun again wow that’s so strange kaladin”

Meanwhile, Kaladin’s own grazed arrow wound is completely gone, and he’s getting a little freaked out.

Another death rattle: “the burdens of nine become mine. Why must I carry the madness of them all? Oh, Almighty, release me.” This is absolutely Taln (or, uh, whichever of them is the one who was left behind).

Dalinar’s at a feast again, and Wit isn’t there--Dalinar notes it’s probably because he doesn’t want to become predictable. Also Dalinar notes that noblewomen competing to draw the same person has the same social function as duels between noblemen, although they don’t use the same word. Wit does show up, just casually sitting next to Dalinar--and Dalinar notes that Adolin’s judgement of Wit was more accurate than his was.

I gotta say, Adolin is hella perceptive. I’ve said it before, I know, but he’s a smart kid.

Wit quietly--and accurately--depicts the relation between Dalinar and Sadeas: “The foolishness of men who care, Dalinar, and the brilliance of those who do not. The second depend on the first--but also exploit the first--while the first misunderstand the second, hoping that the second are more like the first.”

Also Wit ponders if you can pull a person apart and put him back together into something else “Like a Dysian Aimian” (but also, unsaid, like a Radiant.) This whole conversation is Wit trying to gauge exactly how much Dalinar knows--possibly because Wit doesn’t know exactly what Tanavast is telling Dalinar. Interesting.

Sadeas is going to pull Some Bullshit (as always) and Elhokar is getting more and more paranoid, so all of that is interesting.

Dalinar voice: Sadeas is going to cause Bullshit re: the investigation so I’m just going to go up and ask him about it.

I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad idea but regardless it’s going to possibly throw Sadeas off. Unfortunately, Sadeas’ plan is to lull Dalinar into a false sense of security--claiming the most likely suspect is someone who dislikes Dalinar.

Adolin cannot fucking believe that Sadeas is exonerating Dalinar (which, again, Adolin should stick to his intuition that Sadeas is a sneaky bastard). So Dalinar and Sadeas start plans to ally, which of course GOES HORRIBLY WRONG DALINAR DON’T TRUST SADEAS.

Skar, about Amaram: Were you with him when he won his shards? Kaladin, quietly, but with great internal salt: No. Nobody was.

BECAUSE AMARAM DIDN’T FUCKING WIN ANY SHARDS HE STOLE THEM LIKE A FUCKING ASSHOLE I HATE AMARAM SO MUCH

Rock: You can’t fucking swallow a broam Moash: I bet I can Kaladin: Don’t do that, because if you do that, you will die

Kaladin as Bridge Four’s tired Team Mom is very real

Also Moash is still showing signs of wanting to go too far--a la “we could just take everything” until Kaladin shuts that down for being stupid and likely to get them caught. Moash isn’t a tactical thinker.

Also Kal baits Rock into revealing that he can use a bow and arrow.

Rock: that shot is nearly impossible

Rock: effortlessly makes the shot

Dalinar is trying to figure out Parshendi gender. “The clean-shaven ones didn’t have much in the way of breasts” weLL IM PRETTY SURE THEYRE NOT MAMMALS so THANK GOD. But Dalinar has noticed that the fighting pairs are usually a man and a woman, and also wonders why in six years of fighting nobody thought to investigate what gender their opponents were.

I mean, honestly, given how much we depersonalize our enemies, I can believe that.

And Dalinar’s having problems with the Thrill again. Notably, it doesn’t make him a less effective fighter--it just cuts off the bloodlust and glee.

Dalinar literally saves Sadeas’ fucking life and later in the book Sadeas repays him by leaving him and Adolin to die.

To quote a D&D show I watch, SOME PEOPLE HAVE NO SENSE OF FUCKING HONOR.

Descriptions of the thrill remain disturbingly...sexual, almost. At least in the sense that the vocabulary we have to describe a visceral glee and desire tends to be reminiscent of sexual language. (”He nearly choked on it, the joy, the pleasure, the desire. The danger.”)

Sadeas: tonight, all of my soldiers will feast as if they were lighteyes Me, full of salt: BET THAT DOESN’T INCLUDE THE BRIDGEMEN YOU COLOSSAL ASSHOLE

Another bridgeman has died and Kaladin is not taking it well. Gaz didn’t come to the bridge run--he might have deserted by this point. Kaladin also notices that the Parshendi revere their dead. Kal also still doesn’t believe that Dalinar is as good as people say he is.

And Teft just got Kaladin to inhale stormlight and use it instinctively, leading to him glowing. Kaladin is lowkey freaking out about having the powers of the Radiants.

Kaladin and Hoid are interacting for the first time and it’s great. We also get the story of a group of people who would kill any who did something wrong because the emperor wouldn’t tolerate it, and then discovered the emperor was dead all along and had to live with the guilt of knowing that those murders were on their hands, not the emperor’s.

...which could be a metaphor for all of Vorinism learning that Honor is dead. Or not. As with most things with Hoid, it’s very ambiguous. Also, Syl doesn’t like Hoid, which is understandable. I can see an Honorspren thinking he was strange and wrong.

Kaladin, thinking, also realizes that his “Emperor” is the apathy--the belief that he can’t change anything. He holds onto that instead of looking for other reasons things could be happening, or acknowledging that he can change things.

And so he decides to actually start working with and using his powers.

Honestly from the point of anyone else this story is lowkey ridiculous like “yeah a slave turned out to be a new radiant and so his team of bridgerunners helped him train in the chasms and literally nobody noticed, really” in-universe it makes sense because nobody pays attention to the bridgemen but still you have someone who CAN FLY

A death rattle mentions “Re-Shephir, the Midnight Mother, giving birth to abominations with her essence, so dark, so terrible, so consuming.” Another of the unmade? Hard to tell.

Adolin is talking to Jakamav, who I unfortunately can only ever see as a fratbro. On the other hand, that’s not an inaccurate interpretation. Adolin is also casually Judging other people’s fashion choices someone let this boy dress in the pretty clothes he wants to dress in instead of his uniform

Also Adolin is grumbling about how other people always want dark hair, which he thinks is stupid. He also claims he forgot that Humility existed, which is probably true.

Also Jakamav’s girlfriend insulted Dalinar and Adolin is just. ready to FIGHT.

“Adolin liked to be familiar with a large number of people, but not terribly close with any of them.” That’s just interesting. He’s only really close with his family, especially Renarin, at this point.

Also, Adolin starts to see the purpose behind the Codes--he starts to see that it’s not just about pure practicality, but also about treating war and the death that comes with it with a measure of seriousness, and also giving people commanders they can trust. It’s about the importance of symbols.

Dalinar is reciting the Way of Kings to Sadeas and Elhokar, who don’t really get it. We also get “all save the Heralds themselves must dine with the Nightwatcher,” implying that she’s seen as some sort of death entity.

Also, Dalinar is me: “And you have this entire passage memorized?” “I likely got a few of the words wrong” “Knowing you, that means you might have forgotten a singled “an’ or ‘the.” Also Sadeas does give Dalinar the honest advice that literally nobody else naturally talks like him, so other people assume he’s putting it on as a self-righteous act (...again, Dalinar, I feel you on that one.)

Dalinar is staring at Navani again. And Sadeas is judging people’s fashion sense now.

Time for Adolin to crush it in the duelling ring. Also the line “And so Adolin--in a moderately subtle move” is killing me like. Welp. It was moderately subtle which is the best we can expect from him. Anyway, Adolin obviously just annihilates his opponent, because Adolin is incredible.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Elhokar said softly, huddling down in his armor. “They’ll see me dead, like my father.” Highprinces: Look we made a strong king Me: Look at what you did to him! he has anxiety!!!

I retain a soft spot for Elhokar. And he mentions seeing “Symbols, twisted, inhuman” in mirrors--sounds a lot like Cryptics. I almost wrote Cryptids. Wonderful. And Elhokar and Sadeas bully Dalinar into using Sadeas’ fast and costly bridges--which Kaladin later takes as a sign of Dalinar not having as much honor as people say, if I remember right.

Also, Dalinar’s opinion on fights: “When you won, it was always better to win quickly and with extreme advantage.” Amen to that.

Kal’s trying to intentionally inhale stormlight now. And we get Teft’s explanation of the Words, which i like, although one of them is pretty much word-for-word “Dying is easy, young man, living is harder” from Hamilton.

And now, Bridge Four is being put on Bridge duty every single day, which is just the brightlords flat-up wanting them killed. “Consider it an...honor” they say, and Kaladin has to stop himself from swearing. He also learns that he has to inhale the Stormlight in, he can’t just...will it inside of him.

And Kaladin forms the “parshendi carapace” idea to protect them. We also get some examination of Kaladin’s agnosticism.

Also he tried to walk on a wall and fell on his ass, nice going Kaladin.

But he’s getting the hang of having a lot of power and exploiting that to smuggle things out of the chasms. Including surviving a 40-foot fall.

Back to Dalinar and Adolin, Dalinar has decided not to abdicate. Navani is also the one most aware of Elhokar’s weakness, while Dalinar still denies it. Also, Renarin is fascinated by Navani’s fabrials. So am I--fabrials are really cool.

And Dalinar is talking with Nohadon in his vision. Also, Navani realizes he’s speaking, instead of gibberish, an ancient dialect of the Dawnchant. Which Dalinar doesn’t know, and thus can’t have hallucinated--the visions are genuine.

Navani is realizing she might have just figured out how to translate the Dawnchant, which is also incredible.

Navani and Dalinar are, yet again, alone, and Dalinar is even like “Navani you’re doing it again” and Navani is just like. yep. you caught me. Also she explains that being the old queen basically means she’s placeless in the world and everyone only sees her as the wife of a dead man, and she’s furious seeing it from Dalinar as well, who knew her even before Gavilar did.

And so Dalinar kisses her because of course he does. There are even passionspren. And then she starts talking business and important things but Dal is also like, distracted because holy shit she’s so pretty aaaaa which, is, relateable, i too cannot function around pretty people.

Also, multiple notes that the marriage between Gavilar and Navani might not have been the best--Navani notes she had reason to be unfaithful even though she wasn’t, and starts saying something that Dalinar cuts off.

Also Navani is very smug about the fact that Dalinar kissed her first. Dalinar tries to claim that he was seduced. “What? Seduced?” She glanced back at him. “ Dalinar, I’ve never been more open and honest in my life.” “I know,” Dalinar said, smiling. “That was the seductive part.”

This is such a Good Ship

Anyway back with the bridgemen Moash just wants to flat-up attack Sadeas’ army and Kaladin is like. Nope. No. If we do that we will die.

Yep, Dal is using the bridges again. I can’t remember if this is the time with the Tower or not. I’m on around the 900th page, so maybe?

“a one-armed herdazian is still twice as useful as a nobrained Alethi. Plus, so long as I’ve got one hand, I can still do this” and then Lopen just flips off the army i love him.

Also a soldier tries to take their water and Kal is ready to fight them. The soldier is like I don’t want to wait for our water crews and Kaladins like wow that’s too bad for you, and the soldier looks like he’s going to hit him and the entire fucking Bridge 4 gang forms up like buddy, if you punch Kaladin we’re going to have a Problem.

The soldiers who aren’t assholes are even like, nice.

Kaladin voice: oh god i hope they don’t notice that was a spear fighting formation WHOOPS And its time for operation Parshendi Armor.

So everyone targets Kaladin, who can fucking dodge shit and surgebind, and not the bridges. Booyeah. All of bridge four is now yelling at him because of course they are. Matal, who is in charge of the bridges, threatens to have Kaladin strung up and Kaladin’s like yeah bc that worked so well for you guys last time.

And Dalinar noticed that Parshendi archers were targeting Kaladin’s group and went in to save them. Dalinar is Good. And he even raised his Blade to salute Kaladin. So this time wasn’t the Tower, but that’s got to be the next full Bridge run we get. We’re close, now.

Although Shen took this badly. Of course--these are the bodies of his people. But at the same time, Kaladin literally needs to do this to keep them all alive. All the choices here are bad, but this was the least bad. Kaladin also is trying to work out the logistics of leaving, realizing that staying is untenable, but leaving is impossible. Somehow they discount the possibility “Dalinar Kholin recruits you as a personal guard after you save his life.”

Anyway Dalinar and Navani are now a thing. Their guards and clerks are starting to get a bit confused at how much time they spend together. And more discussion of Shshsh, who I hope we get the story of next book. God, I hope she’s not just one more fridged woman for male pain.

Dalinar: how will we explain this to Elhokar??? Dalinar at the end of the book: yes i am fucking your mother goodbye

...I still blame/thank Jazz for making me incapable of taking that scene seriously.

Oh man, horns just sounded for a chasmfiend on the Tower HERE IT IS. Kaladin, Dalinar, and Adolin are all getting ready for it, and the rate of my habitual leg-jiggle stim has like, doubled. Wonderful.

And we also see Sadeas planning--trying to get Dalinar to commit most of his forces and leave behind his bridge crews. That sneaky bastard. Also Sadeas claims credit for the armored bridgemen idea. That dick.

I’m gonna cut it here. I have a feeling I’ll scream a hell of a lot about the Tower.

#stormlight archive liveblog #roshar #dalinar voice: unite them #FUCK YEAH BRIDGE FOUR #cultivation is that you #holy foreshadowing batman #dalinavani is a Good Ship

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iandeleonwrites · 4 years ago

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“Why did I come to Brooklyn to see this?”

It’s a Saturday night in Greenpoint. The brisk autumn air is moist with traces of the East River only a block or two away. I’m famished. There isn’t anything like a bodega or deli anywhere in sight. This is barely Brooklyn.

Nevertheless, here we were, discerning horror fans of the Greater New York area, all assembled in celebration of the Brooklyn International Horror Film Festival’s inaugural year.

Proudly local, this small festival has made great use of alternative spaces throughout the Brooklyn area for their screenings. Bushwick haunt Catland, an occult book store and performance space, in particular, has served as a hub of sorts for the fest, hosting a variety of spooky events throughout October.

But tonight we’re sitting inside a small theater at Triskelion Arts, a performance venue on what might be called the outskirts of Manhattan––just over the bridge from Bowery and Lower Manhattan.

A maximum of 40 people are in attendance to catch the premiere screening of We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne), a 2016 Mexican film that the BIHFF’s programmer describes in his opening remarks as being “like a Jodorowsky film, only angrier and more sexually perverted.” I tremble with anticipation.

The eager audience chuckles at the allusion to the Chilean midnight master––more, perhaps, out of a general sense of name recognition than a real understanding of what cinematic sensibilities such a comparison might yield. From the crowd’s subsequent reaction to the feature, I could almost guarantee these same folks would have booed films like El Topo and Holy Mountain as well.

The scene which really got everyone going tonight came about halfway through We Are the Flesh. It was a moment in which the adult brother and sister duo that make up two thirds of the film’s cast are compelled (with little persuasion, really) into an act of sexual intercourse with each other, their supposed latent desires laid bare and physically manifested.

The film’s other lead, a charismatic and manipulative older man (coming off like some kind of south of the border Charles Manson) berates the young brother for not being able to get a hard-on at the sight of his naked sister and proceeds to force her into fellating him until he does indeed get it up––again, not much force is required for any of these things to take place.

The film works more on the level of an allegorical exploration of sexuality and the unconscious than a realistic portrayal of incest and abuse. The brother and sister are also in their late teens or early twenties, so they’re not kids, and the sex scenes, as a result, are especially graphic.

As the scene progresses, there’s a jarring but delightful surprise in the use of multiple POV to depict the sex act from both of the sibling’s unique perspectives. Looking out from the brother’s eyes, we gaze downwards at his sister’s searching, hopeful eyes as her lips slide up and down his cock, willing her brother to forget their familial relationship.

Soon fully erect, a reverse shot gives us the low-angle POV of his sister, who stares past the brother’s cock, losing herself in a face that alternates between the wide, toothy grin of the lecherous older man and that of her brother. All three characters appear to be in the midst of surrendering to the pure ecstasy of taboos.

By this climactic point, the Greenpoint audience is in an uproar. Some presumed out-of-towner blurts out: “Why did I come to BROOKLYN to see THIS,” and turns the screening into a heckling session. A young couple walks out, never to return and someone takes out their phone, probably snapping a picture of the screen to share with their friends.

Others either laugh, smack their lips dismissively, or crinkle something loudly in their hands, shifting in their seats uncomfortably—anything to create some distracting noise to avoid sinking into the disquieting depths of the movie in front of them. They’ve lost all respect for the filmic experience, found the material too alien, too disturbing. But isn’t that what a horror audience is supposed to thrive on? And what did that guy mean about coming out to Brooklyn…what kind of associations did he carry inside about NYC’s second-largest borough?

We Are the Flesh is a sensuous film that celebrates the complexity of the human experience through visceral imagery that challenges conventional notions of family, impropriety, and the afterlife. But it wasn’t the ruminations on death or the gratuitous shattering of the incest taboo that sent this crowd of supposed horror hounds over the rails.

This was to be a group of people hardened by countless hours of gore and exploitation cinema, veterans of pornography and brutality in all its forms. Indeed, the audience seemed most at ease during scenes when a woman was either crying (performing femininity) or someone was screaming in anguished pain. Such actions are par for the course in the horror genre. Horror they could handle. But this was something else.

Why did we have to come to Brooklyn to see this?

The statement says it all. Considering Brooklyn’s infamous notoriety as a haven for queer, creative, and rebellious youth, it becomes clearer that what was most upsetting to this largely white male (presumably non-Brooklyn) audience tonight was the frank, public portrayal of a brown man’s rather large penis, just a stone’s throw away from the rarified and gentrified air around the Williamsburg Whole Foods and the city’s financial district.

Horror has always been mainstream, box office fare, romanticized in the American collective consciousness as a vehicle with which men may prove their emotional superiority over women in times of fictional distress and channel that supposed weakness into a chemically-charged sexual conquest of power dynamics and gender roles.

Yet these horror jocks were quaking in their boots at the mere sight of a rival penis rendered so gorgeously and prominently on the big screen. Their attitude toward the film, and by extension the festival’s selection committee, was disheartening. I wanted to turn around and reassure them, like Michael Jackson in the Thriller video: “It’s only a movie,” but there was no turning back. No amount of bloodletting or cannibalism would put this crowd back on the path toward enjoying this well-made, deserving movie we’d all paid to see.

I felt embarrassed to be there, though what began as an exaggerated case of locker room insecurities soon broadened to encompass much more, a very real over-arching fear of the animal body and its mechanisms. Without the need for Cronenberg-level depictions of anatomical monstrosity, this jumpy crowd was brought to an almost sophomoric level of vehement discomfort at the suggestion of even the body’s humblest functions.

Intimate views of male and female genitalia continued throughout the film, but it was really the following examples which opened up a whole new world of displeasure for the remaining members of the audience: 1) a shot of the sister squatting and vigorously peeing after sex, and 2) a scene in which the sister crouches over her brother’s mouth and dribbles a few drops of menstrual blood onto his lips while proclaiming the unattainability of real love. All common enough occurrences raised to the level of horrific by this hypersqueamish audience.

Now it was the women’s turn. The three ladies sitting in front of me are simply not having it, I literally hear them say: “I can’t even.” Everyone seems to be whispering to each other, talking over the subtitled dialogue. Not a single person ventured to shush the others. It was like we had all collectively given up on this movie, treating it with the kind of casual familiarity reserved for timeless communal favorites like Rocky Horror Picture Show. This was a shame, because it really was a beautiful film.

Later, when it had ended, the most overheard phrase in the lobby was: “I’m sorry,”—as in, “I am sorry I brought you here.” It didn’t seem like anybody had been a fan of the film, although it seemed to me we’d gotten exactly what we were after, we’d gotten scared, profoundly unsettled at the revelation of our basest selves, not long gone, but lying right there, dormant within all of us.

In thinking about this audience’s cool reception of the film, it became clearer to me how much the film’s narrative structure mirrors that of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Having reveled in the construction of their cardboard, womb-like cave, the film’s characters lose themselves in an orgy of sex and violence that culminates in a blinding act of consensual cannibalism. This is all they have come to know as real.

The next scene is a kind of morning after in which everything we thought we knew about the film suddenly changes as a queer boy rises from the floor of this mad party and stumbles out the door into the light, taking us out of the squatter’s flat we have been in for the entire film and onto the real streets of a large Mexican city.

The abruptness of this shift from dark to light / fantasy world to real, as with Plato’s escaped prisoner, is blinding. We know from Plato’s thought exercise that the escaped prisoner upon adjusting their eyes will perceive the new world as more genuine than the old. In attempting to return to the cave to impart this new found wisdom on their fellow prisoners, they would again be blinded, now by darkness, and may even be killed by the others for what they perceive as the disastrous effects of leaving the cave.

The idea of this liberated cave party in a squatter’s building seeming safer than the world outside resonates with the film’s overarching theme of acceptance of life at the margins. In this way, the story of incest and cannibalism appears largely allegorical, a place where fantasies are cultivated, rather than repressed.

Guess what these horror fans hated even more than a night out in Brooklyn, or giant dicks, or girls pissing?…ALLEGORIES, they can’t stand them. When the film takes viewers outside of the cave for the first time and the possibility that the events we had just witnessed were not meant to be taken literally, it hit these people in the audience like a flaming bag of dog shit to the face.

The teeth sucking began again in earnest then, and it was like Plato had freed all of those prisoners at once and they all got dragged out into the light only to beg to be put back in their chains. This audience was not ready to have the wool pulled from their eyes. They would have been much more comfortable with the standard slasher fare, women being mutilated, castration anxieties, all the usual stuff.

Programming We Are the Flesh was a brilliant move by BIHFF organizers as it pushed the envelope away from escapist fantasy and into a new, disquieting realm of social terror, one which forced these bourgeois modern viewers desensitized to violent acts of aggression to confront their complicity in the mundane horrors of globalization, poverty, and isolation. If you wanted to strike fear into the hearts of this Brooklyn borderland crowd, all you had to show them was a little honesty.

We all are the flesh. Grow up horror fans.

- Ian Deleón 2016

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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Inside ‘The Circle,’ Reality TV Gets a Social Media Filter

LONDON — “Message: ‘Hey girls, hey. I want to start this chat just to get to know all of you. Girls who stick together are pretty girls.’ Emoji heart. …”

Alana Duval, 25, from Brownsville, Tex., begins a group chat with three of her seven fellow contestants. They are sitting in separate apartments, never meet in person, and they bond and back-stab only through online profiles and a voice-activated social media platform.

It may not immediately strike you as a killer television format. But the drama had already begun.

“How old is Alana again?” wondered another contestant, Samantha Cimarelli. “Because she’s acting like she’s in high school.”

When “The Circle” debuted in Britain in 2018, cultural commentators were skeptical, to say the least. The Guardian predicted “fame-hungry nitwits sitting alone in their pants spewing small talk online,” and asked if the concept heralded “the coming of the apocalypse.”

But the series, a reality competition show in which “anyone can be anyone,” soon became a cult hit. Within a month, that same newspaper was hailing it as “one of the standout TV shows this year,” and Netflix snapped up the global rights. A 12-episode American version debuts on Netflix Jan. 1, and Brazilian and French versions are in the pipeline.

Contestants craft their online profiles with the focus and precision of a brain surgeon. While some opt for full-frontal honesty, others exploit the artifice of social media to experiment with their identities — or purely to help win the $100,000 prize. Past impostors, known as catfish in social media parlance, have switched gender or sexual orientation, pretended to be their sons or girlfriends, and even invented babies and dead pets.

But how did producers turn this flurry of emojis and hashtags into binge-worthy entertainment? (Ultimately, the show is mostly scenes of solitary people talking to themselves and their screens.) Is it an ennobling social experiment, as its producers — and many of its contestants — suggest? Or is it a descent into the worst inanities of contemporary online discourse? In 2020, does it matter?

“We’re in a social media era — that’s how we’re going to be defined 1,000 years from now,” said Shubham Goel, a virtual-reality designer from Danville, Calif., who is a contestant on the American version. “I think the show really encapsulates the world more than any other thing at this time.”

Producers clearly hope they have distilled the essence of our times. Ratings for the British “Circle” have been modest (1.2 million viewers on average), but the series has been catnip among 16-to-34-year-olds: The first season was Channel 4’s “youngest profiling” show in six years, according to the British TV industry magazine Broadcast, drawing half its viewers from that sought-after demographic.

“The starting point I’d had is: What would a reality show look like where people never met face to face?” said Tim Harcourt, the creative director of Studio Lambert, which produces the original British series and the international versions for Netflix. “At the same time, I had also been toying with a ‘Rear Window’-style documentary where you could visually see all these people in their apartments, living out their lives, but they were atomized.”

The two strands came together when Harcourt heard that Channel 4 was searching for a reality-show format centered on social media.

“Quite quickly I realized I had a much more simple game of communication and of masks,” he said.

Sometimes those masks can help a contestant’s efforts; other times, not so much. In the British version, James Doran, a 26-year-old recruitment consultant, morphed into Sammie, a single mother with an angelic baby — the guise he felt would be most likely to prevent his competitors from voting him out. He reached the final.

Busayo Twins, meanwhile, a 24-year-old black woman, became Josh, a trust-fund kid “with a white savior complex” pictured on his snowboarding holidays. She said she had wanted to subvert “the stereotypes attached to black confident women that they may be angry or aggressive.” After a cake she decorated appeared to show the imprint of long fingernails, she was suspected of being a catfish and “blocked.”

Other players’ experiences complicate the very idea of authenticity. Duval, a white, blonde model with more than 80,000 Instagram followers, used her real identity in her profile, which featured a professional-looking portrait and declared, “Tacos all day every day.” Her status was immediately in jeopardy.

One of the series’s hallmarks is its diversity, and not only in demographic terms — not every player is as practiced as Duval in social media. Goel, 23, described by Harcourt as “probably one of my favorite all-time reality characters in any show,” is an earnest Indian-American techie who described social media as “our modern-day bubonic plague.” But “The Circle” eventually won him over.

“I brought a Shakespeare book, and I was playing a lot of Ping-Pong against the wall,” he said in a phone interview. “As the game went along, I kept losing my hobbies because I was so enrapt in my connections with these people.” He said he still communicates with his fellow contestants on a private Instagram group. (Their season completed filming earlier this year in Manchester, England, where every version is filmed.)

Amid the naked gamesmanship engendered by “The Circle,” beautiful human stories emerge. In the second British season, Georgina Elliott, 22, uploaded a photo of herself wearing a bikini and an ileostomy bag — to raise awareness of Crohn’s disease. It helped cement a friendship with Paddy Smyth, 31, who had started by uploading only pictures of himself without his crutches. (He calls them “glam sticks.”) He had wanted to hide his cerebral palsy.

“It’s not that I’m ashamed or scared,” he later told Elliott by dictating to his TV screen. “It’s that I wanted to feel what it would be like for once to just be me and not be that disabled guy.”

Elliott responded with the hashtag #ProudOfYouProudGayDisabledMan. Both ended the virtual conversation in real tears, and Smyth soon opened up about his disability to the rest of the group.

Not everyone is quite so smitten. Helen Piper, a professor of television and film studies at the University of Bristol, believes that the “obligation to perform,” which has been at the heart of reality TV for decades, has been “turbocharged” by the pretense encouraged by social media.

“I think the whole moral, touchy-feely thing that they’re talking about is a bit of a facade,” she said. “It’s substituting for a kind of more robust moral framework, in which people could really be themselves. They can’t just be a single parent, they have to be a single parent who’s ‘struggled’, who has to narrativize that process.”

The fact that a catfish won the first British season, she added, shows how hollow all the talk of “authenticity” is.

“But we’re all spinning narratives of ourselves now, that’s the world we’re in,” she said. “The personality is everything. The performance is all.”

Few have been as central to TV’s transformation in that regard as Peter Bazalgette, who as a British TV executive at the turn of the millennium helped take the Dutch reality series “Big Brother” global. At the time, he received no shortage of easy criticism, but he believes reality TV has played a part in fostering open-mindedness, citing winners of “Big Brother” who were gay, transgender, or had Tourette’s syndrome.

At its best, he argued, reality TV showed the “humanity behind the stereotype.”

“It’s a very clever format,” he said of “The Circle,” “and it touches a very contemporary nerve — the uncertainty we feel in what I like to think of as the digital dystopia. Are people what they seem online?”

Eventually, that format ensures that all players, regardless of strategy, must confront such tricky questions unfiltered: When a contestant is voted out, he or she is allowed to meet one other player in person. Those exits can be complicated, but the five contestants interviewed for this article expressed overwhelmingly positive feelings about their time on the show.

Karyn Blanco was one of them. After a straight male contestant is eliminated from the American version early, Blanco must reveal her true identity to him. She had posed as a willowy 27-year-old named Mercedeze, who is intentionally vague about her sexuality, using photos donated by a stranger. In reality, she is a 37-year-old lesbian from the Bronx.

In an unguarded moment, she confessed: “I did a catfish because all my life I’ve been judged. I’m not ugly, but I’m not feminine. So it’s really the fact of just showing the world you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Still, the acceptance she received after unveiling her true self “pretty much revived my faith in humanity,” she said in a phone interview.

“I feel as though it made me just look a little bit differently towards men as far as why they’re so protective of their ego when it comes to me being around,” she said. “I just learned a little bit more about myself and the power of perception.”

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Over the past 50 years, lots of things have changed in the United States. Here are a few examples.

1) A child’s chance of earning more than his or her parents has plummeted from 90 to 50 percent.

2) Earnings by the top 1 percent of Americans nearly tripled, while middle-class wages have been basically frozen for four decades, adjusting for inflation.

3.) Self-inflicted deaths — from opioid use and other drug addictions — are at record highs.

4) Nearly one in five children in the US are now at risk of going hungry.

5) Among the 35 richest countries in the world, the US now has the highest infant mortality rate and the lowest life expectancy.

These facts, and many others, are cataloged in a new book by Steven Brill about America’s gradual decline over the last half-century. Brill has been writing about class warfare in the US since 2011, and the picture he paints is as depressing as it is persuasive.

The book argues the people with the most advantages in the American economy have used that privilege to catapult themselves ahead of everyone else, and then rigged the system — to cement their position at the top, and leave the less fortunate behind.

I spoke to Brill about how this came to pass, why the American dream has vanished, and what it will take to undo the damage that’s been done. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

I read this book as an autopsy of the “American dream.” What happened? Who or what broke the country?

Steven Brill

There isn’t one villain or one pivotal moment, but there really were several different things that started happening at the same time, and they fed off each other.

One example is the movement towards corporate free speech — that supplied the money and the power for all the lawyers who are being hired in Washington to be lobbyists, and to fight regulations, to fight labor laws.

That, in turn, gave companies much more power, and it weakened labor unions, which consequently undermined support for a real program for job retraining in the face of automation, and in the face of global trade.

There were several things like this that made sense at the time, but in retrospect, they kickstarted a chain of events that led to disaster.

The real answer to your question is it takes a fairly complicated, ambitious book to tell the whole story. It’s not a matter of pointing the finger at someone.

For example, the guy who invented mortgage-backed securities didn’t wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to get rich by really tanking the economy.” What he probably thought was “I’m going to get rich by creating something that’s going to make mortgages available for a lot more people,” and he was right at the time. But we all know how that turned out.

Sean Illing

The key distinction you make in the book is between the protected and the unprotected classes. Why is this so important in American society?

Steven Brill

I think it’s a much more relevant distinction than saying people are Democrats or Republicans, or that they’re conservatives or liberals.

The unprotected are all the people in this country who rely on the government in some way to provide for the common good. They actually need public education to be good because that provides opportunity to their children. They need mass transit. They need a fair tax code. They need someone to answer the phone at the Social Security Administration when they get their Social Security check.

And what’s happened over the last three or four years is that big swaths of the unprotected people in this country have gotten very frustrated and angry that basically nothing is working for them — whether it’s the economy, or the highways, or the power grid, or the tax code, or job training programs, or public education, or health care. They basically have the sense that the government’s responsibility to provide for the common good is gone. It’s evaporated.

This is why they reacted, or at least 46 percent of them reacted, the way they did in the 2016 election, which was really an effect of severe frustration — “Let’s just elect this guy who’s promising all this stuff. He seems really unconventional, but at least he says exactly what’s on his mind. Let’s try this.”

Sean Illing

And the protected class?

Steven Brill

Well, they’re the “winners” in our system who don’t need a good system of public education because their kids go to private school, who don’t care about mass transit because they can afford to drive anywhere, and they don’t need public health care because they can pay for private coverage.

In short, they’re not invested in the common good because they’re protected, and the system is rigged to keep them that way.

Sean Illing

The story of decline you tell really begins about 50 years ago, so is this basically a story of how a subset of the baby boomer generation drove the country off a cliff?

Steven Brill

That may be too much of a generalization, but I wouldn’t knock it because it’s basically right.

The particular baby boomers that I have in mind are the high achievers in the knowledge economy — the corporate lawyers who helped take companies over, the bankers who created derivatives and stock buybacks, and so forth. We became an economy that basically moved assets around instead of creating new assets.

Sean Illing

You seem hesitant to say that the country is broken, and yet when you look at all the relevant measures — public engagement, income inequality, wage levels, satisfaction, knowledge of public policy, faith that the next generation will do better than the current one — we’re at or near historic lows.

Steven Brill

Oh, I haven’t said that we’re not broken, only that I don’t think we’re irretrievably broken. I think we can still fix things.

The core promise of the American dream has always been that you can do better than your parents. “If you work hard and you play by the rules,” as Bill Clinton used to say, “you can make it in this country.”

For a large swath of the country, the majority of the country, that’s just not true anymore.

Sean Illing

You make an interesting argument that America hasn’t abandoned its core values but instead has become a victim of those values. Can you explain?

Steven Brill

I say that they’ve been hijacked. It’s possible to have too much of a good thing, right? We decided that we needed more democracy in our politics. What better way to do that than to allow people to go to the polls and vote in primary elections, to choose their nominees? That has not worked out so well. What the founding fathers wanted was a representative democracy, not a pure democracy.

We have much more of a pure democracy today, and it has its virtues, but it also has its problems. When you combine that notion of pure democracy with the total monetization of that democracy by having no limits on what people can spend and no limits on what rich people or rich corporations can contribute, you have a democracy that just doesn’t work.

Sean Illing

Has America been victimized by its own meritocracy? Have the people who worked or innovated their way to the top used their advantages to engineer what amounts to an aristocracy?

Steven Brill

It’s been victimized by its own failures. The way it was victimized is that the smartest, most driven, most talented people were able to take those values and use them to their own advantage at the expense of the common good.

For a country to work, you have to have balance between personal ambition and personal achievements and the common good.

The way you do that is to have all kinds of guardrails on the system. In finance, you have regulatory guardrails. You have labor laws that produce something like a level playing field between employer and employee. You have consumer protection laws. You do all kinds of things to create these guardrails so that the winners can’t win in a way that hurts everybody else. That’s what we’ve lost.

Sean Illing

You used the phrase “common good” a couple times there, and I think that gets to the core problem. We don’t have a common good anymore — if we ever did have one. We live in country with almost no social capital, no real civic bonds. A generation of Americans have exploited the rules of our system, hoarded all the gains for themselves, and then rigged the game in their favor. And they did it because they feel no obligation whatsoever to the country that provided the opportunities or to their fellow citizens.

Steven Brill

No question. In many cases, the people doing the most damage aren’t breaking any laws or consciously trying to hurt anyone else. They’re simply doing what they were told to do — go to prestigious law schools, get a job at a prestigious law firm, and make lots of money.

But the end result of what they’ve done is increase the gap between the protected and the unprotected, and to create a country that is more unequal and less fair.

Sean Illing

If the protected class, as you call them, was wise enough to see beyond their own immediate self-interest, they’d be playing the long game here. They’d see that if things get bad enough, there will no one left to exploit, no system to rig, no game to win.

Steven Brill

That’s exactly right. A big theme in the book is short-term thinking. One example is ignoring the decline of infrastructure, because infrastructure is a really slow-moving crisis until a bridge collapses, as it did in Minneapolis.

That bridge was inspected and deemed to have been dangerously defective 15 years before it collapsed, but politicians don’t win headlines for saying, “I’m going to repair that bridge.”

That’s the sort of short-term thinking that is ruining us.

It happens on Wall Street all the time. If you do stock buybacks instead of investing in your company, you get a quick hit to the stock price. Your quarterly bonus goes up, but the long-term interests of not only the country but actually the corporation that you’re supposed to be serving is not served.

Short-term thinking like this drives everything now, in business and in politics, and it’s making it impossible to invest in the country’s long-term health. Can you imagine Congress or the president today coming up with a 20-year plan to build an interstate highway system, as Eisenhower did in 1958? Nobody does that anymore. And that’s our problem.

Sean Illing

Where, then, does that leave us? If the values and institutions that made America great have been corrupted, is there any point in trying to salvage them? Or do we need new values, new institutions, new ways of doing politics?

Steven Brill

I think we need to redirect our old values. The values that were hijacked — the First Amendment, due process, meritocracy, the financial and legal engineering — they need to be redirected to undo some of the damage that’s been done.

We have to demand leaders in Washington and state capitals who unite us, who will tell the frustrated middle class that they have more in common with the poor than with the protected class. If we can’t do these things, we’re in trouble.

I conceived the book as an autopsy of the “American dream” when I started, but I also realized that there was another part of the story.

In the course of trying to collect all the facts for the autopsy, I started talking to the people who were tackling campaign finance or infrastructure or income inequality, and I realized that there were a lot of people out there doing really important work, really good work.

So yes, things are very bad, but the patient isn’t quite dead yet — there are some cures that are still possible.

Original Source -> An autopsy of the American dream

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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chaoscrystals · 7 years ago

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Every note in my phone 19

Maybe I can speed up the present. All I can think about is how I'm going to dominate the art world. I guess that's kind of fucked up? I feel dizzy and like my blood sugar is low. My body must look so disgusting I'm always burping. I must be disgusting that's why Ariel never hits me up All I can think about is how I want an art empire that is accessible to people of all races and social classes And how I want this sandwich I'm about to go eat. I'm so much fatter than I was when I was 18 that's why Ariel never hits me up anymore!!! :(__(_((((( It's really not worth beating myself up over. Pretty sure I got a yeast infection from fucking him anyway. * Why does my back hurt so much why does everything hurt why is life pain. when have I gotten to the point where I can hold all my pain and all my ecstasy at the same time, for one moment and then the moment ends and I'm back on the train again trying to make time go faster. If I was decaying I would look like black and pus and torn flesh, strips of flesh covering what once was my body. She killed me and left me in the woods to die. Put me in the back of her trunk. Headlights were right blue. Righteous and it was..she thought it was good. I wasn't either dissatisfied, but isn't dying to hurt and be sad? I could spit black tar right here and people would probably just turn away in disgust, I could vomit up maggots, yeah girl its the same as it is for you too. I don't want you anymore he always wanted me. I'm taking you with me. Now we are dead. It came to me in a flash I had a divine vision. Of music. And being alone. * The boy means everything to me I got him in the corner of my sleeve, oh the bend of my elbow i lean on the table looking over at you I see the empty glass it magnifies you I'm ready I'm ready we're starting again, you're starting to break my heart again * Male exclusivity needs to die. Some men really can't be around women if they aren't fucking someone it seems. Ugh. Get away from me. Wake the fuck up. Sorry that everyone made us think that our bodies alone are sexual and need to be covered. I do so many non sexual things with my body. Americans can tend to being lethargic. I'm so angry * Im all caught in vines . sleeping time leaks the day its dripping in green and surrounding me. Phonetically speaking I think your words have more meaning than you realize Pick it up again inspired by my friends and I'm feeling feeling so good. Pack up your bags and take a vacation take yourself to rockaway * There's nothing special about me I bet you could compare me to any other girl in the world and id seem just the same, got a pretty face and her head isn't too bad either. And if you asked me today id say I don't think nothing special about me neither but id tell you what I know, that I'm the girl who would love you the most. * The praise on the water sought after colorful lights and pure tones Praise phoning in for a second chance in glasses cracked in the pavement red warring the light and wearing it as a disguise, praise be had, our Lord has grown old * Y stomach is too full its so full but I'm hungry and I don't have the energy to digest. I never needed to eat that much * So excited to be your own boss until the app doesn't give you work!! I'm gonna stop acting like I'm not doing things for a reaction or to make people think something of me. I am. Including playing music I am almost to the point where I dont have near anxiety attacks from eating around people. Proud of myself Taking kindness at surface level only is probably not going to cause any progress. Take all of me, baby. Even if I'm mean from time to time. I'm not okay with people's boundaries being broken in a monogamous relationship. But I don't really believe in monogamous relationships. Maybe I'm just cynical but it seems like there are too many rules. Or maybe it's all a ploy to lure guys in because they'll think I'm easygoing but I'm not I want to tell everyone every single one of my thoughts that sounds like a fun game * Jonathan is on my mind I've always had a craving for a good hearted musician and someone who will counter my unbalance, prince charming rides in on a horse, who brought the horse into the street who's mans is that? Are they getting with the plan do they understand or do you only like me because i have connections to new dimensions * I'm in love with nothing This haunting feeling Like I know what comes next I'm in love with nothing There's a hole in my heart when its growing apart it gets darker and smaller and I'm falling in love with you again * It isn't fair he will never hear me. He will never see me or understand me, when the mere sight of him sends me spinning away from anything easy to feel, I'm feeling so dreary one second and the next I got jets on my feet, flying over the moon cause I'm so in love with you * I just enjoy Jonathan is my whole heart!! One day he will know * Songs to write out Gracias a la vida Stormy weather Good morning heartache Lover man where can you be April in Paris * I want to tell people how hard my life is! * My song for you This is my song for you I like everything you do When I see you its like a cool breeze graced me with unending presently waiting pleasant and unchanging you seem stable to me, and I even like you when you're rocky. I like the lyrics I like the melody, you're like music, lets make a baby And live together In the city and very far. We can have two houses and even a car This is my song for you I like everything you do When I realized it was you Wrap it in red and a bow, kiss my head, after your show I know I can be a hard one to break, I've heard all these stories of heart break, what do I choose, what to listen, use or lose. But I know when I'm with you my dreams start coming true * Deep desires Understand the universe. Have someone accompany me in my sadness and despair. I want to come back together I want to feel enlightened I want everyone to feel goddamned enlightened I'm definitely willing to open up portals make everyone realize we are collectively manifesting our reality I want everyone in new York city to know my name nova luz, the body inhabited by us. She needs a companion. Lets get her a partner or two. * How do i really feel about the boys that I think I love? My Spanish tongue isn't too sharp....I wish...shit man, you just have to try harder to get it right. Laser mind. Not tonight. Michael is the name of an angel and no matter how hard I try or how much I'm thinking about Jonathan I still wonder about Michael and we spent more time together than Jonathan and I ever have. Fuck me. What are either of them up to? Why do neither of them talk to me. Haven't seen either one in weeks. I think I feel like I'm attached or in love. No matter how hard I try to forget...not trying hard enough you stupid fucking cunt! You're so fucking weak nova!. I wish someone knew how much I fucking hate myself sometimes I don't get why I just internalize this and nobody can ever know and its always a dead end fall off a cliff and snap your spine on the rocks before you drown and are pummeled by the waterfall FUCK. I think about them every day I wish I had a boyfriend, but malificence red lipped and hooded with festering infections on her skin, she's standing in the way, she's guarding the little red dog in my heart, the little puppy with forgetful parents, crying and underfed in an alley way alone, you only care about the way it looks. The loving puppy. Loving little dog I love you so much I love you no matter what even if you took a knife to my throat severed my veins and rendered my body a corpse I would still love you. Shit man that's fucking intense. That's a part of me that needs some help. The unconditionally loving part.....have I been deceived? I feel as though she has been deceived, and people always want to exploit her loving nature. This is the world I live in today. What if I wake up tomorrow on another planet? Is my boyfriend going to be there? If it was a planet with fruit orchards brightly colored things little houses and healthy atmosphere I would be down. Since I'm making it up, my boyfriend is there too. He loves me and we only need each other. I love him so much it fills me with fullness and vibrancy. He loves me so much. We spend most of our time together enjoying the planet, and sometimes we cook a big feast together for our friends and they come over and we all play music and drink wine * I guess now is an appropriate time to work on my issues with jealousy right? Actually...maybe ill wait What if it was a giant poetic metaphor? Green goop spilling from my heart and getting stuck in my pelvis..melting out of my pelvis out onto the floor. My physical my non physical. Non psychic but spiritual. Elephants from India are a shymbol for wealthy. And poor. Bread. Winning. Happy family. Sad family. Bread. Okay Maybe now I can work on my massive jealousy issues. Okay I'm going to start by listing scenarios that make me jealous Any female speaks to a boy that I like (level 10 code red situation) Someone's life looks shinier than mine Julia's in middle eastern vogue My friends have things that I want Other people have things that I want Other peoples bands are playing at cooler venues I am literally not a musician my name is Harriet and I never leave my apartment. Yo these sensory hallucinations are too much sometimes. That was a side note. I think my biggest issue is that when I am into someone in a romantic way, I get really upset when I see them talking to like, anyone of the opposite sex. Or of the same sex with Ursula. Or when someone is skinnier than me. Sometimes I get jealous cause of that which is not allowed because I am not allowed to have an eating disorder. Why is Julia getting so much attention while simultaneously being underweight and anorexic??? Noooo oh my god is she okay? Is everyone else okay?? Why is that allowed are you people fucking retarded? I can't do these things without having a million other thoughts. But I'm breaking the surface which is something. This is a deep fear for me I don't intend to leave unchecked. * I want somebody to love. I think writing all this sad lonely poetry can't be helping kts hard not to hate yourself sometimes. I wish someone was reading this. I really want a boyfriend so badly but I'm resisting it because in want it to be Jonathan so I'm waiting for him and ignoring everyone else.that's scary I don't know where he's at. He never talks to me. I want to smash glass bottles over his head for being so detached Fuck you!!! He never talks to him I mean me but I think about him pretty much every day.this hurts Why am I being like this? Lately everything I do is to get his attention. I want to cry. I hardly get any attention from him this is ripping me up inside.I just keep these fantasies in my head and I fall in love with them but it's an illusion I'm in love with an illusion. This hurts my chest. All I want is his attention and he isn't giving me any!!! I should turn around and walk the other way but I know I wont because I'm still in my fantasies that we are the same and that he gets weird crazy visions as well and that I was a part of his. I think I'm going to be wrong. My heart.. * I'm hitting the resin in my pipe again. And writing semi cohesive notes about my feelings. Am I using boys as a distraction from my problems? Why do I always want someone to hear the most insecure parts of me....I always always share my deep insecurities, like, first before we even get to know each other. What a weird kind of flirting style that's so weirded out by myself. Like, why? Do I not realize that most people are too in denial to accept insecurities in someone else? Especially in a package as cute as a nova. I have some pretty great ideas in my head..heart..butt..whatever...all of me......... Dot dot dot * Feeling A poem by nova luz palaquibay brener Written in September of 2017 I can feel everything. Mannequin pussy is famous they were in new York Times and rolling stone and a bunch of other big name publications. In happy for them. Not like when Julia's thing got famous. Even though I didn't spend a ton of time with any of these people, they changed my life. I still feel a little intimidated by that world, by the professional world and its cutthroat attitude. I don't really like it or want to participate. I just wanna have a nice apartment with a nice boy and wake up at 7 am every day. I still want to play rock music Its fun Mannequin pussy has that song where Marissa goes "I'm feeling it all I gotta get home I gotta get up" I'm feeling it all I'm feeling it all I just want to share a room with a nice boy and Rowan can come too And we can have small shows where we support each other for the things we love about each other and we still love each other when the other one is being an asshole. I don't like thinking of myself in a negative way. It feels bad. I'm very childish. I'm insecure that the things I do aren't big enough. That's stupid. I'm mad at my mom for always acting like everything was a huge deal. Like, nothing was ever just chill and normal everything was something. I'm childish inside * September 7 2017 Dear j boxer, There are actually several thousand things I would like to be saying to you, but I don't want to overwhelm you and lose you. Oh my god. You make me so nervous. Did you realize?at flowers for all occasions. I have never been more stressed out at a show in my life. I was hyper focused on what you might be thinking of me. I want to pour out all the imbalance I feel and you can watch it run down into the drains Yes I still think about that. And don't think that the only side of me is erratic and unbalanced and bad, everyone has so many sides. I know you think the way i play is interesting. I know I can play well. I feel like I am everything when I think about you. I think about you every day. Would you still love me when I am nervous and insecure? Love me like this or you'll never love me at all, you can only leave me if you don't love me like this, my all. My heart. Sometimes I get chest pains What do you think about me? My dream partner is someone I can put together shows with. but not ordinary shows. I don't know. But it would be something. I can envision my dream partner: active, healthy, compassionate, loving, open, creative, enjoys sex, kisses my neck. Is it fair to tell you this? Am I asking too many questions? Is it fair that I want to tell you all this but we haven't exchanged a single word in weeks? I can't explain it, its a feeling in my body, it feels so electrifying I don't ever want to stop. I'm sorry I have to test you so much. I can't help it. I think I'm like that with everyone. I wonder what you are doing now? If I said I wasn't feeling good would you sit with me in the park and put your arm on my shoulders? Even when my eyes are puffy and dry? * I don't know there's a vacuum in my heart and silver worms that live inside the vacuum, ever present resilient love the lasting energy in my blood, that they feed off of. Freed some space for their babies I know it couldn't be any other way, but sometimes I resent my mother for leading me to believe this. Because my religion is based in pain, my suffering will cleanse my sins and if you don't know then you must be unclean, I got to tell you how I see it. Everyone is looking at me Cause there's maggots in my heart, I can feel them squirming around, I can feel the top shell of muscle straining to get ahead of them to get on top of them, maggots squirming around in my heart, eating my muscles. My mind is unfocused. All I can see is misery. But its okay. The lord wants me to be this way. With a red-skinned entity hanging onto my shoulders and telling me "no, don't go there, you dog". Maggots in my heart. Maggots eating my heart * September 8 2017 Dear Jonathan Hi, how are you? Its been a couple of weeks since we last met. I am pretty much still the same. Hopefully I'm going to get a job teaching kids! Maybe one day you will fall in love with me. What have you been thinking of since I last saw you?do you want to tell me? Do you think about me? Do you want to hold hands? Can I kiss you in the dark on the street? Can I kiss you in front of people? I'm trying really hard not to take things too fast. Part of me really believes you and I are the same person. I really like how you make me feel..I always think about what it would be like to fuck you again. I really want to. I think I will. But there's one thing I'm wondering. Like what kind of relationship do you want? Do you like the idea of having me around or is this like "ill see you when I see you" No it can't just be fine I have insane feelings about you I need to know. I can be fine with what you want..I just want to know I'm not gonna hurt myself falling for you when I don't need to. If I'm just living on the promise of what I think you and I could be, I need to know if I'm right, right? Oh shit this doesn't sound good I'm spiraling into a panic. Oh god. Just tell me if you want to be with me!! Sorry I kind of get these intense insecurities. Then I like to wallow in them. Love me? Hah. To not end this letter on a sad desperate note, I will say the following: I like how you look I think you are very handsome, I like how you sing and play even when you lose your focus you sound amazing to me, I want to kiss you all over be naked with you and have my chest against yours, and feel your arms. I hope you don't mind me saying I love you and that I have a lot of love for you in my heart because I am insatiably attracted to you, and I also think you are kind but distant, and I think you are very loving and radical in your ideology, but you aren't annoying and liberal and show-offy about it. I like how much you know about music and music history, I think you are really smart. I want to kiss you all over. I feel so passionate when I think about you. It feels like you live in my heart and that's why I love you. I really really want to tell you. I don't know what could happen I just need to fuck you. I want you so badly, body and soul and mind. * August 9 Honey I want to marry you I love your sweet and bitter tastes Even on your sour days You make me believe That all my desires can be mine And I know my heart is true When I'm near you Yes I may have immense pools of jealousy, but honey, its nothing to me, when you bring me back home In a sentimental way, I say, oooooohhh you're too good for me The way we play together Like in our youth I feel like our life is a union, oh know honey I want to be true to only you We spend our days rushing around But I dream of a night where, without a sound I can slip into bed next to you, and you will hold me close, you're then the only other person I need to know, you're my everything Oh my honey I love you, you know I do, I would spend my days working for you, because I do love all the things you do And at night when the moods right, ill look into your eyes and say my sweetie, you know I love you.

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claudecat17 · 8 years ago

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New York Pop Music, Buildings, and How the Mob Changed Everything

I've been reading a lot of books about the late 1950's through the late 1960's era of American music lately. Phil Spector, Bert Berns, bubblegum music, the girl groups, etc. It's fascinating stuff, especially early on. The whole story of how these little tiny independent record labels, sold out of the trunks of cars by mobbed-up goons and related characters, changed the whole paradigm is bizarre. A little scary too.

I love learning new things, having preconceived notions shattered. I knew in broad strokes about how important the independents were in the change to rock and roll, that particular paradigm shift. What I didn't know was the extent to which it went even deeper, displacing decades-old established avenues of songwriters and publishers and management and all the other crap that goes into making hit music. One year Frank Sinatra and all those guys are still relevant and profitable, the next? It's a whole new ball game.

There are two buildings in NY that were for a long long time, since the 1930's, the hubs of American music. The Brill Building, and just down the street, 1650 Broadway, where the rockier stuff was done, and the biggest studio was housed in the basement. Don Kirshner’s (the ultimate weasel with no talent aside from a golden ear and greed) web of intrigue was based here. These were almost-skyscrapers, honeycombed with the offices and studios of the country's most prestigious (and not, especially as time went on) music publishing houses, record labels, and all the other related facets of the industry.

It was an almost unbelievable concentration of talent in one little area, and wasn't limited to the innards of the entire music biz. Lots of other tendrils of showbiz extended from these buildings too. Comedians, lounge acts, performers of almost any description derived their life's blood from the cash that flowed from the businesses holed up on these offices. The delis and drug stores in and around these buildings were where the great and wannabe-great went to schmooze and hold court. Stars were spooned up and spat out over corned beef and Nehi.

The first rumblings of the big change happened as rock and roll was taking off, in the early to mid-50's. All of a sudden these little records on nothing labels were selling like crazy, and not just to the black audiences that had been catered to by the first of these indies in the 40's. Then you had Elvis, who, surprisingly (for me), was as much a creature of the old school publishers and songwriting houses as anyone else, after RCA snapped him up. His publisher, Hill & Range (a relatively young but decidedly traditional country music concern), had the penthouse of the Brill building. No song reached the King without fully half its publishing grabbed by their weasels.

Once Elvis happened, it was really on. There was gold in them thar teenagers (now white ones!), and all kinds of sharpies, goons and ne'er-do-wells sprang into action, leaving their racing forms aside as they scoured the street-corners for young exploitable talent. They'd bring 'em right to one of the buildings, taking the elevator up to the top floor and working their way down until a deal had been made, a song perhaps found or co-opted then sold to a publisher. As more and more of these amateurish freaks started hitting the top ten, the old guard stood firm, jaws agape as they watched the times a-change.

For a while it was business as sorta usual though, as the new labels and their teenage-exploiting henchmen set up shop among the old guys. They even used a lot of the tried and true tactics of old, paying off DJ's, working the phones, grabbing songwriting credits, not paying royalties unless forced to. It was the old normal, only easier to make money now because the kids (and blacks) being used were more clueless than the older stars and would be stars.

It was a bit different though. Gone were the days of a star being dependent on his songwriters and groomers and managers doing most of the work. There was a new breed of performer. Guys and gals that could (some of ‘em, more as time went on) write for themselves. Most importantly though, the song became less important than the record itself. The finished product. The production.

That's an important distinction. Long long ago, music consumers didn't buy records. They bought songs. If the Bing Crosby version wasn't available, they'd grab the one by Vaughn Monroe or whomever. Seriously! Bing certainly was a star, and people did seek out his records specifically, but the Hit Parade was a parade of songs, not records.

The change to the record being the thing predated even the paradigm shift from old to young, but it was still a factor in the mid-50's. Within a few short years there would be no more Pat Boone versions of "Tutti Frutti". It just became ridiculous. People started to know what they wanted and accept only the real thing. Georgia Gibbs just wasn't gonna do "The Watusi".

As the 50's came to a close and the 60's began, things began to regress a bit. Or did they? Sure, there was a glut of old guard attempts to dip their toes into the teenage waters. Fabian, Frankie Avalon, the plane crash with Buddy Holly and all, etc. The empty years?

What rock historians tend to ignore though is that things had not fully changed by this point. Rock and roll hadn't fully taken over, and wouldn't for years to come. The charts were still full of show tunes, “folk” music, calypso and other exotica, and the same pop drek as had been around since the late 1940's (Perry Como, Patti Page, etc.). Plus, there was still plenty of great music between the Fabians and Funicellos.

But what was happening in the buildings was beginning to solidify into something that would change everything for good. The sharpies and independents and their cronies and goons were infesting more and more offices, insinuating themselves into even the more schmaltzy musical flavors. The great songwriting teams (Goffin/King Barry/Greenwich, Mann/Weil, the older Lieber/Stoller, etc.) were beginning to come together. The assembly line was being prepped for years of consistently youthful, if occasionally outrageously opportunist, musical product to begin rolling out.

Phil Spector. Love him or hate him, he was a wacko genius. But he was not alone. By the very early 1960's, maybe earlier, all the pieces were in place for this new breed of record "producers", using these new breed songwriters, to make gigantic dents in the firmament of pop music.

Was it rock and roll? Maybe, maybe not. It was popular though, and not at all the pop music of old. As the Phil Spector/girl group era began, few recognized how permanently the ground was being eroded from underneath their Hush Puppy-clad feet.

It's amazing how powerful these buildings in NY were during this time. With the exception of Capitol records on the west coast and the small timers out there making surf and hot rod records, a staggering proportion of the pop charts was the domain of the buildings. Some of it was still by the older cats, but the new breed were making inroads year by year.

By the time the British Invasion hit in 1964, almost everything that wasn't a soundtrack song was something from the increasingly powerful and interwoven hordes of mobbed-up sharps and their victims. The Twist craze, the girl groups, dozens and dozens of disposable one-off artists, anyone that hit the R&B charts hard, all making records of new breed songs on new breed labels using new breed producers. The assembly line rolled.

Producers. A concept that was unknown before this era. Actually it had its roots back in the late 1940's with Mitch Miller making records (as opposed to songs) by artists like Frankie Lane and Patti Page, little pieces of fluff that were products of the studio rather than purely live performances. But now it was rock and roll and its poppy relations, making records that were abhorrent to Miller and his old guard ilk. Music made by and for juvenile delinquents, now growing up and becoming more refined and complex, with Spector's best works perhaps the pinnacle of achievement during this period.

The artists were now disposable. It was all about the producers and songwriters, aided by their labels' armies of promotion men and their goons. The labels and producers made all the money, and the only way to keep a decent share of it for the rest was to get “connected” or otherwise find a way to make an enforceable deal with these keepers of the cash.

The artist? They'd get a car if they were lucky, more often a one-time payment. Maybe as much as a grand for a huge record that would earn the label hundreds or thousands of times more. Plus they had to pay for all the studio time and musicians and anything else the bosses could dream up. Recoupables, still the bane of today’s struggling musician that thinks he or she’s made it big with a record deal.

The songwriters? They did better, but not by much. Every label owner and producer put their own (or a family member's) names on songs they'd had no part in writing. You wanna challenge that? Meet Vinny...

And this wasn't all that different than it always had been. The music biz has been a morass of corruption for time immemorial. It was just ramped and gooned up a few notches now, with artists younger and more exploitable and disposable than ever before.

Then came the Beatles, and all that changed, right? Well, no. Not really. Not for a while anyway, and even by the time the album had become king and the summer of love had made rock music a thing for adults as well as just kids there was still a lot of nefariousness. Still is. It's done by corporations now, so it's legal!

But even as the Fab Four took America by storm, the new breed and the buildings were still raking in cash. There were acts like the Monkees and the Archies and the Banana Splits for whom to write, not to mention all the serious artists that still used the new breed songwriters and many of their cronies to break (in the promotional sense) records. The goons simply found other ways to take their cut. Management and promotion were still wide open even if the labels were big corporations and the artists wrote for themselves.

But still, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke and dozens of lesser "soul" and R&B acts were often reliant on outside songs, as were the hundreds of now-you-see-'em-now-they're-gone acts like the McCoys or the Strangeloves or ? Mark and the Mysterians. Maybe a few of the one-offs wrote their own song(s), but they still needed help, and that help would be happy to watch their accounting with the aid of some dude with an iron pipe wrapped up inside a rolled up newspaper.

It wasn't really until the 1970's that this wound down to a great extent, and even then there were little one-offs here and there that kept an ever-dwindling number of these building denizens in racing forms and cash for the track. The Tokens, Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds, the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, etc., etc., all heavily mobbed up, all broke or playing Vegas within a year. Then there was disco, itself a product of the remnants of the less talented, more promotionally savvy tendrils of the dying new breed.

But we're straying off topic. How did the buildings and the new breed years change everything? Well, they displaced the old guard, didn't they? They really did. By the 70's, despite the decline in power of the building denizens' methods and production line techniques, the pop tune as known by the Mitch Miller and Irving Berlin old guard guys was completely dead, only to be revived occasionally by rock artists making records of the Great American Songbook to revive their own fading careers. The old guard was now novelty act material, just as the new breed had been seen originally.

The mainstream had changed forever. The buildings were done as the nexus of American music, their offices moved to corporate cubicles and board rooms and into cyberspace. The dream is over, and, sadly, the music was much much better back when the goons got their taste.

One last little nugget, just to illustrate just how ingrained the mob was during the building years.

Atlantic Records. Started in the late 40's and with a reputation for being less unscrupulously shady than most of their competitors. The label of Ray Charles, the Drifters, Aretha, Lieber and Stoller. Classy. Owned by the debonair and diplomatic Turk Ahmet Ertegun and his irascible Jewish partner Jerry Wexler (the guy that invented the term R&B back when he wrote for Billboard). Such a reputable company, and an independent well into the 60's.

Well, turns out they weren't immune from mob shadiness themselves. In reading Bert Berns' biography, the story is told of how Berns and Wexler (both Atlantic guys at the time, though it's complicated) had a dispute over money owed to Berns. Wexler gets one faction of mob guys to scare Berns. Berns gets a higher level of mob guy to fight back. It gets ugly. Berns, who had been mentored by Wexler, saw him as a father figure, a best friend, wins the battle.

Game over. Wexler still doesn't pay, and they never talk to one another again. They just go on making more and more cash, with more bodyguards. Wexler sells Atlantic to a big corporation in 1968 (for waaay less than it was worth) and the days of the independent label are over. Can't wait to read what Wexler's autobiography will have to say about that!

Sorry for the boring and probably uninteresting reading for most of you folks. Just wanted to get this down while it was fresh in my alleged mind. Thanks for reading if you've made it this far!

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Howzabout a tune to alleviate the boredom, possibly preclude the need to read? Here’s a classic of the era, a great example of the kinds of highly produced miniature symphonies for teenagers that the buildings did best:

youtube

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