#ALSO IF JR IS ACTUALLY DEAD ILL HAVE A CRY
Text
What the heck is going on in Batman/Gotham War?
I know a lot of people in fandom are confused and/or upset about what's been going on in Gotham War - why is Bruce acting like this, what is Selina doing, why are the Batkids taking sides. So I figured I would fill you all in on what's been happening in Batman and Catwoman since Chip Zdarsky took over with Batman #125, because it has been BONKERS and I have been enjoying the hell out of it.
Below, the quickest summary I can manage while still being comprehensive:
[Content warning: mental illness, abuse, suicide (...ish), LOTS of violence.]
The first arc, "Failsafe," starts with Batman and Robin (Tim, in this case) in pursuit of the Penguin, who is on a killing spree. In the very first issue, Tim gets shot in the neck. Bruce has to take him to the hospital, but first he has to strip him out of his costume and put him in civilian clothes to preserve their secret identities, triggering memories of when he had to do the same to Jason's dead body. There is LITERALLY NO PURPOSE TO ANY OF THIS EXCEPT WHUMP (Tim is back in action with a fucking BAND-AID on his neck very quickly), which is how I knew this was going to be good. Beat Tim up! Make Bruce cry about Jason! I want these men to suffer! (There is also SO much to be said about Tim's own Poor Mental Health Decisions throughout the entirety of Zdarsky's run so far, but that's for a separate meta post.)
Anyway. Bruce leaves Tim in the hospital and goes to confront Penguin, who turns out to be dying of mercury poisoning. He kills himself and makes it look like Batman did it, forcing Bruce to flee. (Penguin actually faked his death and is alive elsewhere under an alias, but that's not important right now.)
In the Batcave, a massive robot called Failsafe emerges. Failsafe attacks Bruce, who usually eats killer robots for breakfast, but he can't seem to get the upper hand on this one. Duke, Cass, Steph, and Dick show up to help, but Failsafe beats them all too, while Tim gets an injured Bruce away and to the Batcave.
In the Batcave, Bruce puts on a weird purple and red Batman costume and a new personality takes over: the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh. Now, Zur has a very complicated history going back to 1958, but for the purposes of this story, all you need to know is that when he was younger, Bruce decided it would be good to hang out in a sensory deprivation chamber until his mind created a secondary personality, Zur, who is essentially Batman without Bruce. Zur is pure efficiency who does not care about anything but the mission. He created Failsafe, for one purpose: to kill Bruce if Bruce ever crossed the line and killed someone. And right now, Failsafe believes that Bruce killed Penguin.
Failsafe nearly kills Tim, which Zur is okay with writing off as an expendable soldier's death, but this causes Bruce to take control of the body back because "Tim isn't my soldier...HE'S MY SON!" (Tim Nation, why are you not ALL OVER this story? It's catnip.)
Babs calls in the JLA (SuperBat fans, you will also want to read Bruce's adoring description of Clark when he shows up), but of course Failsafe has kryptonite, which it stabs Clark with. The League dumps Clark and Bruce into the JLA jet and distracts Failsafe while Tim flies Clark and Bruce to the Fortress of Solitude. Bruce tells Tim he's a good boy and jumps out of the jet and into the ocean so that Tim and Clark will be safe from Failsafe. He's rescued by Arthur, who takes him to Atlantis to heal. THIS HAS ALL ONLY BEEN FOUR ISSUES SO FAR.
Two weeks later, Bruce wakes up to discover that Failsafe has taken over Gotham. He teleports up to the JLA Watchtower on the moon to lure Failsafe there, then blows the Watchtower up, hoping to catch a ride on one of the Javelins. But Failsafe has already destroyed them, so Bruce RIDES A BOOSTER ROCKET BACK TO EARTH, OXYGEN MASK CLAPPED OVER HIS FACE. The whole thing has some powerful Scooty-Puff Jr energy.
The only tricky part is reentry, when Bruce starts to burn up - his costume is fireproof, of course, but his chin is exposed. SO HE TAKES OFF HIS LITTLE BAT-PANTIES AND PUTS THEM OVER HIS HEAD. I swear to god this happened in a real comic book and the entire "Bruce falls off the moon and survives" sequence is utterly delectable goofy nonsense and I truly cannot recall a time I've had more fun reading a comic book.
Anyway, Bruce lands directly outside of the Fortress, BECAUSE OF COURSE HE DOES, and runs inside to find Clark and Tim. While Clark keeps Failsafe distracted, Bruce and Tim program nanobots to inject compassion into Failsafe. I SWEAR TO GOD. They zap him with the nanobots, but Failsafe pulls a high tech space gun out of the Fortress and shoots Bruce with it anyway, apparently disintegrating him. Tim falls to his knees in the snow, weeping. TIM NATION, WAKE UP, THIS RUN IS CANDY FOR YOU.
But of course Bruce isn't dead! That wasn't a killing gun, it was a "zap you into another dimension" gun!!! THAT was the compassion!
So Bruce finds himself in a dystopian alternate Gotham, and I'll be honest, I didn't love this arc ("The Bat-Man of Gotham") as much as I loved "Failsafe," but it has its moments. In this Gotham, Bruce Wayne is dead, so Regular Bruce is like "Oh boy, time to Batman this place up." Also he's plagued by hallucinations of a skeleton version of Jim Gordon who is still wearing a trench coat AND A MUSTACHE. Like I said, it has its moments.
This Gotham is controlled by Arkham, and anyone who is diagnosed as "crazy" is locked up. A new villain, Red Mask, is in charge, and Selina and a Venomed-up Harvey Dent work for him. Bruce teams up with an orphan kid (of course) named Jewel and goes after Red Mask, who turns out to be some guy named Darwin Halliday and ALSO...the Joker. Well, he's the Joker who hasn't been Jokerized yet. But one time he breathed in some chemicals that let him see into the main reality of the DCU (???) and glimpsed Regular Joker and now he wants to build an interdimensional machine to mentally connect with Regular Joker across universes which he assumes will make him insane, NATURALLY.
Bruce attacks Red Mask, who sics a Venomed-up Ghost Maker on him. Ghost Maker cuts off Bruce's right hand. Bruce cauterizes it with an electroshock machine and ties some spikes on it (SERIOUSLY) and goes after Red Mask again. Meanwhile Red Mask mentally connects with an alternate dimensional Joker...but instead of it driving Red Mask insane, he's what drives the Joker insane. Desperate to become the Joker somehow, anyhow, he jumps into the interdimensional portal, and Morally Dubious Alternate Universe Selina kicks Bruce in after him.
Meanwhile, Tim is in full "I KNOW I SAW HIM DIE BUT HE'S NOT DEAD" mode, which: bless. So he teams up with Jon Kent, which...gosh, what an astonishingly boring duo. I love Jon, I love Tim, they're perfectly nice and normal around each other, I'm falling asleep. Anyway Tim fights Toyman for a while and then makes a VERY stupid costume where the entire torso is a giant light-up R, because "I want him to see that Robin is coming to save him." GET A THERAPY, TIM.
Bruce finds himself first in the Michael Keaton Batman universe, then the Red Rain universe, BTAS, Batman Beyond (yes I know they're the same universe but I guess he goes there twice), Silver Age, Kingdom Come, Gotham by Gaslight, and more. Adam West gives him a utility belt. The Dark Knight Returns Bruce builds him a robot hand.
Finally Bruce and Red Mask reach the end of the multiverse, which is a Gotham asteroid floating in space, surrounded by giant Jokerized sharks. LUCKILY BRUCE HAS BAT-SHARK REPELLANT IN HIS ADAM WEST UTILITY BELT!!! Honestly this whole arc was worth it for that moment.
Bruce knocks Red Mask out, but now he's stuck. He has a device from Batman Beyond Bruce to get home, but it's only good for one person, and he can't leave Red Mask there to die. Of course, that's when Tim shows up in his stupid giant glowing R costume and they hug it out, thereby fulfilling but also compounding all of Tim's issues since 1989.
Anyway things are fine now, right? Sure, Bruce is hallucinating that his family is on fire, and the Zur personality is not going neatly back into the box where it's been all these years, and he still has a robot hand (Damian, hilariously, immediately announces that he wants one too), but he's FINE. He is a little bit mad at Selina, because she broke out of jail (she was in jail because she killed her fuckbuddy because he was trying to kill Bruce), and also because she didn't tell him Penguin was alive and that would have stopped Failsafe, and also because Other Selina kicked into another universe. Selina, very fairly, is like "Well I'm not responsible for Other Selinas and also maybe don't build robots to kill yourself with and not tell anyone about them???"
THEN we got Knight Terrors, the summer event in which a villain called Nightmare caused everyone to fall asleep and, uh, have nightmares. Bruce, specifically, had a nightmare that he met an eight-year-old version of himself that vomited up a man-sized bat with a gun for a head. I laughed SO HARD. Bruce also had his body borrowed by Deadman for the duration of the event, so while he endured the psychological toll of nightmares like everyone else, he also endured the physical toll of everything Deadman was doing PLUS the mental toll of being aware of what was happening in the waking world even though he couldn't control his body. As soon as the event was over, he lapsed into a coma so that his body could get some damn rest.
Okay. Now we're up to Gotham War.
(I know, I know. But for all of you who are like "How could Bruce do this???" about Gotham War...*points up* THAT'S HOW. HE IS NOT WELL.)
Bruce awakens from his coma and IMMEDIATELY decides to Fight A Crime even though Babs is like "Maybe don't?" But he can't find any crime, which is...weird. His kids confirm that Gotham's been super quiet since he's been out.
Selina hears that Bruce is awake and is like okay, time to pay the piper. She calls all of the Bats to a meeting and explains that she's the reason crime has been down. See, villains like Joker and Two-Face always have goons, right? But what if the goon supply dried up because the goons have better jobs? So Selina has trained All The Goons In Gotham to be...cat burglars. No violence, no stealing from anyone who can't afford it. More importantly, no helping Scarecrow or whoever commit mass murder.
All of the Batkids are like "Hmm...I feel uncertain about this, but it's working...I don't know what to think..." except for Jason, who thinks it's hilarious and is instantly Team Selina, and Damian, who is staunchly Team Bruce. Bruce, meanwhile, is like "No! NO! THIS IS CRIMES, AND CRIMES IS BAD!" and Selina's like "I mean, robbing from the rich is basically a victimless crime" and Bruce screams, I swear to god, "MY PARENTS WERE 'RICH'!" Inexplicable scare quotes and all. I laughed so hard.
Anyway this is the basis for Gotham War and it is endlessly hilarious to me because everyone in the Batfamily is supposed to be a genius and yet not one single character has pointed out that:
There are jobs the goons could be doing that AREN'T illegal. It's not just violent crime vs. nonviolent crime. There are in fact many other jobs! I am POSITIVE Gotham needs construction workers and hospital orderlies. (Yes, I know it's hard for people with records to get jobs. That isn't addressed.)
Being Batman is SUPER ILLEGAL.
They are all so stupid.
Selina's plan doesn't even work, because one of her thieves gets killed by a rich person defending their home, and Bruce is like "See? This is why crime is bad!" and like...pretty much snaps. He's particularly fixated on Jason, even (rhetorically) threatening to kill him, which is when the other kids jump into the fray on Jason's side, all except for Damian, who like I said is firmly Team Bruce. (This makes complete sense to me, Damian has been dealing with severe trauma and isolation pretty much nonstop since 2018 and he and Bruce have finally made a tenuous peace, so I can understand why he wouldn't want to lose that.)
Also, Vandal Savage buys Wayne Manor. It's so random and SO funny.
OKAY BATMAN #138. Bruce has kidnapped Jason and injected him with a variation on fear toxin which will be triggered whenever Jason's adrenaline spikes, the idea being that Jason is no longer capable of killing - but in practice, Jason is no longer capable of even getting up off the floor, he's so terrified. I want to be really, really clear here: Bruce is like 90% Zur here, and the only reason he goes this route and doesn't kill Jason is because the remaining 10% that's still Bruce loves Jason and is trying to help him. He's just incapable of good or humane help because Zur literally can't do feelings.
Dick knows something is up and is sneaking around Bruce's Secret Other House We've Never Heard Of to figure out what it is. Damian attacks him to protect Bruce. Tim attacks Damian so that Dick can do what he needs to do, and handcuffs Damian to a parking meter:
THERE IS SO MUCH TO UNPACK HERE!!! TIM GO TO THERAPY! DAMIAN GO TO THERAPY! EVERYONE GO TO THERAPY!!!!!
Dick figures out what Bruce did to Jason (it's on the computer, for...some reason?) and absolutely loses his shit on Bruce, beating the crap out of him, which tbh is the only thing that felt off to me in this run because frankly I don't think Dick likes Jason that much. BUT WHATEVER.
Tim pulls Dick off of Bruce. Bruce leaves them both tangled in a net and flees as the cops approach. Zur's like "Good, fuck 'em" in Bruce's head, because the cops will expose Dick, Tim, and Damian's secret identities and Bruce will be free of the dead weight of a family, but the little bit of Bruce still in there throws Dick a batarang so he can free them all in time.
Then Bruce leaves. Damian is devastated.
I WILL NEVER RECOVER FROM THIS PAGE. Damian really thought he could have Bruce's love and loyalty if he turned on everyone else! Tim is going to be a therapy dog to a Wayne even if he has to settle for the one he doesn't like! That unresisting, blank hug made me SCREAM when I turned the page. Incredible. (Also the art fucking S L A P S, god bless you Jorge Jimenez.)
ALSO it turns out that Selina's second in command has been Vandal Savage's daughter Scandal Savage the whole time and they are turning Selina's cat burglar army into their own personal army WHOOPS. (This also feels very OOC for Scandal but at this point I trust Zdarsky with my life so let's see where things go.)
SO THAT'S WHAT'S GOING ON IN GOTHAM WAR. TL;DR:
Bruce is unhinged because he nearly died like 19 times in a week and it unlocked the smaller, meaner purple Batman that lives inside him.
Selina is unaware that you can get money legally.
Tim is going to have a nervous breakdown if he can't fix someone, ANYONE.
Damian needs a hug but ideally from someone he actually likes this time.
Jason is so scared.
THE END.
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
terror rewatch time!!! i'll be using this post to comment on ep. 10 "we are gone" block the tag terrorwatch2 if you'd like :-)
"you and I once shared a drink, on a wednesday" goddddd. you are so obsessed.
crozier was thrust into leadership at what was at the time their absolute lowest moment and little eventually was also thrust into leadership at what was at the time their absolute lowest moment.
and like. what little says makes absolute sense. none of them have ever been in the arctic and none of them speak netsilik. crozier is indeed their best chance. also the breakdown of all hierarchy!!! "there has been a vote, edward". that's so cool. i mean honestly they were fucked either way. i don't think retrieving crozier at that point would have changed their fate. and I suppose on some level they knew it too. so why bother coming into conflict with hickey's camp?
le vesconte still tries to keep a semblance of rank by saying "no, I mean, you're totally in command of this camp- buuuut" when that is absolutely not true. the fact that it is a fellow lieutenant who makes this empty nod towards hierarchy is telling.
and crozier then saying "I know lieutenant little's nature, he'll be here with a dozen armed men"....... and like that is true. by his nature he would but. you know. outvoted!!!!! and to be clear I absolutely don't blame the guys who staged the coup against him. obviously leaving the ill behind is a shitty thing but I understand it; "well these guys are practically dead but we- WE still have a chance to live" except of course they don't. and then one day one of those guys who voted to leave will become one of the sick and then HE will be the one left behind until there's a lone man fruitlessly marching south and then. there will be none.
it's been so long. there have been so many deaths. goodsir can't even remember david young's name.
jopson's death scene :-((((
hickey actually has a pretty good read on crozier TO SOME EXTENT however he is just. soooo blinded by his own narcissism it becomes his undoing. "then why have me brought here at all?" because of his obsessive need to be seen!!!!
"i didn't have anywhere near an equal in this expedition except for you" babygirl there is something soooo wrong with you
"you must be a surpassingly lonely man, Mr. Hickey" even after everything. after all he's done. crozier still manages to muster some compassion for the man who ruined him.
"private armitage"
if he couldn't- and under the normal naval hierarchy he indeed could never- rise up to crozier's level, then he would bring him down to his
hickey just. knocking out tozer in cold blood. tommy reaching towards him.
oh my goddddd the jcr + barrow jr scene..... "then you're sure to find it" the way this immediately rings an alarm in jcr's head. horror dawning on his face as he realizes barrow jr. is NOT referring to the men he's referring to the passage.
HODGE JUST BUSTING OUT THE FRENCH OH I LOVE THIS MAN.
"you think you're going back?" GODDDDD
"you could've just joined up" ICONIIIIIIC
the way some of the men ACTUALLY JOIN HIM IN SINGING WHAT.
robert golding desperately crying out "captain!". hickey's look of disbelief and betrayal as tuunbaq rejects his offering.
GET FUCKED DES VOEUX AHSHSJSHSHS
the look on silna's face as she sees goodsir's body.
the scene where he's just reciting the names of the crew.....
"close". but it was nothing. it was worse than nothing.
just. francis. his best friend right there, he hears his voice- but his back is turned. as another person has said here- eurydice refusing to be saved.
he was right in a way- aglooka may live, but francis crozier is dead. dead and gone.
oooooh I hadn't realized before that the song in the end credits is a distorted version of the silver swan. that's a nice touch.
1 note
·
View note
Text
I am here to follow up the sweet headcanon and backstory post with... THE SADNESS MWUAHAHAAHA-
I thank @sin-sidejob for letting me use Delaney we love a good MVP mom✨
Warnings: Inside job spoilers? For the ending and such? Mentions of mental illness (depression and anxiety), and some very sad dad stuff.
Ok so, I did mention last time that I was giving you another reason to hate Rand Ridley. Here’s the explanation for that mess!
Okay so like, Finn? Already not doing too hot. JR is their only real father figure and he is being accepted into the shadow council and they won’t get to see him much at all anymore.
But they don’t want to ruin his dream and life goal so those feelings? Immediately bottled up. Only showing JR the happiness they feel for him getting “Promoted.”
Finn would absolutely go to Delaney about it, they work for the shadow council directly? That sounds like a good plan!
They do not get very far before the entire day goes to crap- So it’s announced that the building is on lockdown, people are freaking the fuck out and something was stolen. Finn may be sugar crazy but they aren’t an idiot.
They do feel bad for not being at the cameras though, they still don’t say anything.
So Finn is probably with a bunch of randoms but I would also like to think that MVP mom Delaney grabbed Finn’s arm when the sharks were emerging and pulled them to safety. MVP mom Delaney is on the case.
So Finn is working on trying to hack the cams they have no clue what is going on and eventually Delaney is talking them down from a panic attack in whatever room they happen to have rushed into during the panic.
The day ends and they are ready for everything to go back to normal, I mean everything was fixed, Regan seemed to be even more ready for her promotion and if that didn’t say something?
Today was going to be better! Dad got his promotion! Friends are ok! Cognito is still up and running! What could go wrong?
Spoiler alert. Many things, so many things can go wrong. And they do.
So Finn is watching the cameras, they totally aren’t 100% more focused on doing their job because of what happened yesterday, what are you talking about.
But then they see their dad’s office. Reagan’s walking in and... There’s Rand. Sitting in JR’s chair, where Reagan should be.
Finn is running, they spent a second getting out of their room before breaking into a full on sprint down the hall. They don’t blink when they see Robotus passing by them, Not when Andre calls out when he see’s them running by with tears in their eyes. They don’t have time.
They rush into the hallway. They make it to the door just in time, But then they see it.
Their dad being sucked into the tube. He’s gone.
Finn’s breathing was heavy, panting from the run trying to catch their breath. They want to lunge forward to grab Rand and throw him out of the window behind him three stories in the air.
Neither Reagan or Finn acknowledge each other. Both panicking and reacting to their news.
It would be the next day? Week?? It’s been a while-
Finn hadn’t shown up to work again. They haven’t been answering many calls and they don’t really know what they are going to do.
The fear of what happened and what is going to keep happening is setting in. someone calls to tell them that they are going to have a funeral and that they should be the one to plan and speak at it, Delaney had asked them as well. They had to have known by now, Finn knew they did. They were sobbing and screaming into what felt like the void that was Rand Ridley.
“YOU TOOK HIM FROM ME! YOU TOOK MY DAD AND GOT HIM KILLED! YOU MONSTER-”
They weren’t ever good at subtlety but, this was much different. And the calls from staff all around Cognito coming into their phone proves it. But they won’t answer, they haven’t so far. They listen to the voicemails but they can’t bring themselves to call back.
Andre calls them worried, telling them he’s there if they need it, they can come over whenever, and that he loves them.
They think even Kate from the clone department tried
Gigi making sure they were okay in her own way, Finn suspects is to get them out of the house and to try and feel better.
Finn knew they would have to leave eventually, they weren’t even sure if they owned the house anymore. Besides, it felt much less like their home when JR wasn’t here. Less lively, not inviting or warm.
Finn hadn’t been in their own room since it happened either, they had been waiting and trying to sleep in JR’s bed. Hoping that they would wake up and it would all be a dream, dad would just walk through the doors and give them a hug! It would have just been a misunderstanding! Nothing was wrong it was all just-
But then the door opens. And Delaney comes in, she waves the key JR gave her to signal her entrance. JR had given her those keys, and the small keychain attached to it was from the nearby aquarium from the first trip she joined JR and Finn on. Finn felt weak, they couldn’t even bring themselves to smile at the memory.
JR had let both of them feed the sharks together. It felt like a family trip, it was one of their favorite memories if they were honest with themselves. They were just starting to feel like they finally had a family.
They were gonna miss those small visits with dad.
She doesn’t look great either. But that makes sense, they were both going through it.
Not a word is exchanged. Finn and Delaney share a glance.
Finn’s eyes start to water and Delaney meets them for a hug. It’s bone-crushing, filled with sobs of devastation and as much care as they could pack into a single one. But it’s enough. They know they are there for each other.
And that’s enough.
#RIP IN PIECES#I MADE MY WORLD SAD#AND I REGRET NOTHING#IM HAVING WAY TOO MUCH FUN#WRITING IS MY JAM RN#HAVE FUN BEING SAD :D#LOVES YOU#inside job oc#inside job sona#inside jobsona#ALSO IF JR IS ACTUALLY DEAD ILL HAVE A CRY#I WILL IN FACT SOB#AND YOU#YEAH YOU#GO FOLLOW LANEY#THEY ENCOURAGED THIS POST AND THEY ARE NICE AND COOL#The Scheimpough House🍦☕️
10 notes
·
View notes
Note
Glimmadora
ill do the first two form the kids one for this since i havent gotten kid questions
13. what is their name(s)? is there any significance to it? any nicknames they go by? or cute pet names their parents give them?
Their names are Harper, Mira, and Micah. Harper got her name after the Lyra constellation and to math with the 'er' like Glimmer (and it matches with her powers). Since she takes after Adora a lot and when little, would follow her mom around like a little shadow, Glimmer dubbed her 'Adora Jr' or just 'AJ' for short and almost always calls her that. Of course she also goes by Harp.
Mira was named after an actual shooting star (and originally she was gonna have healing powers so she was short for Miracles but that idea was cut). It also was to match both the 'ra' with Adora and 'Mi' with her twin brother, Micah. She gets called 'Mimi' a lot.
Micah is named after his grandpa.In this au, Micah is dead. I made the kids long before he came back so I didn't want to change it (so Angella is still alive). He matches up with his twin. He sometimes gets called Micah Jr, or MJ, and Mic, but he gets called 'Mikey' the most
14. how were they like as small children? did their personality change drastically as they grew older?
Harper always would want to join her mothers in on meetings, wanting to learn everything she can since she will one day be queen. She still very much is curious and tries to take her role seriously.
Mira and Micah could not be separated when they spelt as kid. Mira yeah always was a night owl and might sometimes keep Micah up but if Micah was removed so he could sleep, he would cry until he was put back with Mira (who also wasn't happy). They did grow out of it eventually.
Micah is pretty much the same. More quiet and reserved but as he grows older he does grow confidences. Mira...there is a lot to Mira. She always was a trouble maker but as she grows older, she gets like a darkness? she doesnt talk about it a lot but she HATES she doesn't have powers and will never get wings so there is resentment there that grows and grows until it finally breaks.
#batcassed#she ra#spop#she ra fankids#spop fankids#future of etheria#harper#mira#micah#glimmadora#kaestions
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
Michael In the Mainstream - Avengers: Endgame
Endgame is a film that is really more than a film. This is a cultural milestone. This is the culmination of a decade’s worth of stories told by all sorts of different creative minds, a set of stories that all managed to have consistent character growth and development, a grand finale to ten years with all sorts of beloved and iconic characters. This film is the twilight of the age of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, and the dawn of a new era of fresh heroes, heroes whose stories we’ve only begun to experience. This is something that has never been done before, a massive storyline told throughout twenty plus films coming together in a big shared universe to deliver an awesome, climactic final confrontation between characters we know and love and a villain we love to hate. There’s never really been a film of this magnitude before.
I have loved the MCU since it began when I was a teenager. I had just started high school when Iron Man first came out, and it just amazed me how good it was. Unlike the year’s other superhero film, which was based on one of the Big Three of Marvel’s Distinguished Competition, I didn’t really have any sort of huge expectations for Iron Man. Like sure, I was aware of who he was, I knew he was a classic Marvel comic character, but he wasn’t Spider-Man or the X-Men, the characters I grew up watching in cartoons and who I was intimately familiar with. Hell, I even knew the Hulk better than Iron Man. But boy, did that change fast; Robert Downey Jr.’s incredible performance, the fun writing, the gripping character study, and the solid action all got me interested in this washed up B-list hero who had spent the most recent arc of his comics becoming the superhero version of Hitler.
And that was a running theme for the MCU. I ever cared too much about characters like Captain America, Thor, Ant-Man, or Black Panther when I was younger, and I didn’t even know characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy were a thing. All of this was just beyond my knowledge. And yet, these films made me care about these characters, got me invested in them. It’s something that with a few rare exceptions the X-Men films completely failed to do. I honestly can say after all is said and done I love Iron Man, Captain America, and the Guardians way more than I do Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Storm, which is not something I would have ever guessed I’d say a decade ago. And growing up with all these characters and seeing them go through these films, going into this one I knew there had to be some big dramatic payoff, some sense of finality. You can pull of stuff like massive retcons and everyone coming back from the dead in comics, but in movies? That’s how you lose viewers. I knew they’d really have to blow our minds with this, especially after the brutal gut punch that was Infinity War.
And for the most part, they truly delivered.
Endgame is a satisfying conclusion to the epic first decade of the MCU, closing the doors on some stories but opening up a world of possibilities on others. And while there are some problems here and there, the overall product is just so good that it’s easy to forgive the flaws, though it is easy to see why some would be a bit less forgiving. Still, even more critical folk than me admit that regardless of problems this is still a good movie.
This movie has three acts, and I will be going over each individually. There are going to be SPOILERS here, because there is just so much to unpack with this film, so consider this your warning. Again, SPOILERS BELOW.
The first act picks up where the Avengers were left at the end of Infinity War: broken, defeated, and desperate. Despite Carol saving Tony and Nebula from deep space, things seem pretty hopeless, until an energy signature is picked up revealing the whereabouts of Thanos. The Avengers rush to confront him, eager to steal back the Stones and right what went wrong… but upon arriving, they find Thanos broken, scarred, and worst of all, utterly without the Stones. He destroyed them all so his work could not be undone. He has completely, irreversibly won. And so when Thor brings Stormbreaker down and cuts off his head only a short while into the film, it does not feel triumphant or thrilling. It feel sad, miserable, and bitter.
I think this is probably one of the better twists in the first act. The pace at the beginning is rather slow until they confront Thanos, and it ultimately works in the movie’s favor as it makes the horrific revelation hurt all the more, and then following it up with a time skip of five years later is just rubbing salt in the wound. It also helps cement the original Thanos as a truly unique villain. He not only won, but he died knowing he won. He was victorious in death for five years, and there was nothing any of the heroes could do about it. It seems a bit anti-climactic when you first think about it, but really this end to the original Thanos is a rather fitting conclusion of his character arc from Infinity War. He won, he watched the sun rise on the universe… what more could this Thanos really do?
The time skip shows what all the heroes have been up to in the interim: Steve is running support groups for survivors, Tony has married Pepper and has a daughter, Natasha has been in contact with the remaining heroes, Clint has been out brutally murdering criminals as Ronin, Banner has managed to keep his intellect as Hulk and become a relatively famous figure, and Thor has basically become an obese drunkard wallowing in his failure. Our heroes are at their absolute lowest point… until one little rat walks over a control panel on a van in a storage unit and frees Scott “Ant-Man” Lang from the Quantum Realm.
I will say that a lot of the latter half of the first act, the part that sets up the “Time Heist” of the second act, drags on a bit, and this is really the portion of the film that will make or break it for you. You need to really be invested in these characters, you need to be ready to handle the ways they’ve dealt with the knowledge that they have lost. Thor’s fate especially has been contentious, with people crying foul that throughout the movie the Russos did nothing but “undo” all the development Taika Waititi gave him, which is quite frankly such a stupid argument it’s not worth addressing. What IS worth addressing is how Thor’s trauma, unlike most of the other Avengers, is played for laughs. For some, seeing Thor as a fat, slovenly drunkard is going to be a bit upsetting and tasteless; for others, the black comedy will cross the line twice and make it rather funny. That aspect is definitely going to help or hinder your enjoyment of this segment.
Even that aside, it does really feel like it takes a while to get to the real fun part of the movie, though it’s not as if anything in the first act is truly bad, per se; it’s just very character-driven as opposed to exciting and thrilling. If you’re into character-driven drama, then you’ll really dig this, since all of the performances here are excellent, with Paul Rudd in particular really showing off some impressive range and Scarlett Johansson actually managing to impress me with her emotional performance. Seeing Hawkeye become a complete and total badass who slaughters his way through thugs is also a refreshing change from the absolute joke he has been in previous films, and his winning streak in act one is happily carried throughout the film, completely redeeming Hawkeye. There’s also a lot of good comedy here as it builds up into the time heist, particularly Rhodey’s suggestion of what to do with baby Thanos or the ill-fated test run of the time machine.
I think it is important to note that unlike most films that deal with the subject, the movie actually gives clear, definitive rules on time travel: you can’t go back to the past and alter your present, any changes you make only succeed in creating a split timeline resulting in an alternate universe. This does not allow them to go back and kill Thanos before the Snap, but it DOES allow them to go back to times when they could reasonably steal the Infinity Stones and use them to undo the damage done. This is actually a pretty solid take on time travel and an easy take to grasp at that, though as I will mention later, this simple and clearly explained version of time travel has somehow left people confused. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Act two is where the movie really picks up steam, as the remaining heroes split into groups and head back to points in time where they get to experience moments from beloved Marvel films (and Thor: The Dark World) as they retrieve the Stones. Cap, Tony, and Ant-Man go after Loki’s scepter and the Tesserect following the battle of New York as seen in The Avengers, which leads to a lot of hilarity including Cap fighting his past self and an elevator scene that not only calls back to the one from The Winter Soldier but also features the redemption of one of the most awful moments in modern comics with one of the single funniest lines in the entire film; Hulk wanders over to the Sanctum Sanctorum and argues with the Ancient One for the Stone in the Eye of Agamotto; Rocket and Thor go back to the period of time where Jane Foster was at Asgard to steal the Reality Stone from inside her, which leads to Thor getting a touching reunion with his mother as well as an opportunity to snag Mjolnir; Nebula and Rhodey get to go to the opening of Guardians of the Galaxy and witness Peter Quill dancing and singing to himself like a moron before knocking him out and stealing the Stone; and Black Widow and Hawkeye go to Vormir to confront the Red Skull for the Soul Stone. I’m sure you can imagine how that one goes.
This part of the movie is a lot more fun with how varied it gets. There’s plenty of comedy, action, and character moments, and it just feels a lot more fun than the first act. Seeing how characters that rarely interacted or even never interacted in the past bounce off each other is really delightful, particularly Rhodey and Nebula. Of course, there is also great moments of development, such as when Steve and Tony botch their initial Stone theft and have to go back even further in time, which leads to Tony getting a heartwarming moment with his father while Steve is reminded of Peggy. And then, of course, there is Black Widow and her character arc coming to a close, as she heroically mirrors Gamora’s tragic fate.
There has, of course, been a lot of argument over Black Widow’s fate here. Here’s my take on it: Black Widow’s character arc throughtout the films has always been a desire to scrub the red from her ledger and find some meaning to her life. Age of Ultron, for all its flaws, shows she thinks of herself as a monster, and truly just wants to make a connection, find a group she has something in common with. With the Avengers, she found just that, she found the family she never had, she found something worth living for, fighting for, and ultimately dying for. Her sacrifice wasn’t some sad attempt at shock, it wasn’t her being stuffed in the fridge to further the character arcs of her male costars, it was her character arc becoming fully realized, it was her understanding that to save those she loved she had to make a choice, and it is the most utterly selfless and heroic act in the entire movie, and maybe even the entire franchise. Everyone would have lost if not for Natasha. She is probably the most heroic character in the movie… well, with one exception, but we’ll get to him shortly. The point is, her sacrifice carried more dramatic and thematic weight than if Clint had sacrificed himself; Clint is very much an underrealized and underutilized character, and while this movie improved him, it was still not enough to make his sacrifice as painful as Black Widow’s.
Act two comes to a close with heroes grieving Black Widow and preparing the Stones for a Snap to bring everyone back… unfortunately, they don’t realize there is a traitor in their midst: Nebula. Not out Nebula, but Nebula from 2014, prior to her character development. You see, Thanos could still access the future Nebula’s video recording eye since her software is still on the same server even in the future (it’s a bit weird but it still makes a bit of sense). 2014 Thanos finds out about his future self’s victory and becomes furious that any would try and undo his “mercy.” And so he enacts a plan to get him to this future and kill the Avengers once and for all. The evil Nebula bringing her father and his fleet to the future right after the second snap kicks off the third act, as Thanos obliterates the Avenger’s mansion with his ship.
The third act, the entire third act, is just peak MCU. The entire act from start to finish is the absolute best the franchise has to offer. It all begins with the heroes struggling to regroup and find each other in the wreckage, with Hawkeye having to run from aliens in a dark basement, Hulk having to hold up rubble to help save Rhodey and Rocket, Nebula helping sway 2014 Gamora to her side and then in the ultimate act of “God I really hate how I used to be” shooting her past self to death, Ant-Man rushing to save his friends after escaping the blast, and Cap, Thor, and Iron Man going to fight Thanos. This is the beginning of the end.
It is interesting to note that here, Thanos is a lot closer to the megalomaniac tyrant he was in the comics while still staying in line with his movie version from the previous film. It does go to show how fragile his ego is and how his talk of his work being merciful and good is just a delusion he has bought into; he freely admits here that he should not have been so kind, he blames everyone else for his failure, and he promises to remake the universe in his image, perfectly balanced and unaware of all they lost. Despite being almost an entire reversal of his previous characterization, it actually functions quite while as a weird way of continuing his arc while at the same time addressing the criticisms many leveled at the anti-villainous Thanos of Infinity War. It definitely looks like the Russos were well aware of how Thanos would be perceived, and did a really great job at having the best of both worlds in regards to his characterization. And even here, where he is fully embracing his villainy and saying how he will enjoy crushing his foes, one still gets the sense that he still sees himself as the hero in his mind and is absolutely furious that anyone would wish to undo what he considers a kindness.
Of course, the battle with these three fighting Thanos is quite enjoyable, and showcases even without his Gauntlet Thanos is a force to be reckoned with, as he trounces the three Avengers, though not without great effort… especially after Steve Rogers does something we’ve all been waiting a long time to see him do: pick up Mjolnir and wield it in battle. I think it’s safe to say that Thor’s jubilant shout of “I KNEW IT!” is one that was echoed in the minds of every single viewer of the scene. And just when you think the movie couldn’t get even more epic, just when it seems that Thanos will win as a bruised and bettered Steve stands alone against Thanos and his entire army… Steve gets a call.
“On your left.”
Hundreds of magic portals open, and the resurrected heroes all come through, along with any sort of crew they could bring. For the record, this is: Black Panther, Shuri, Okoye, M’Baku, the armies of Wakanda, Doctor Strange, Wong, all of the wizards, Spider-Man, Star-Lord, Drax, Mantis, Groot, Falcon, Bucky, Scarlet Witch, Valkyrie, Korg, Miek, the remaining Asgardians, Wasp, Pepper Potts in her Rescue armor, Kraglin, his Ravager crew, and even Howard the Duck. And if that’s not enough for you, the Avengers who were still alive before the attack all come in for the battle. And they said Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was the most ambitious crossover of all time. Was Howard the Duck in Smash? I think not.
And as the heroes gather for the inevitable charge, do you know what Steve says? He says two little words that fans have been waiting for such a long time to hear him say, something a less talented writer and director teased us with several films ago:
“AVENGERS… ASSEMBLE!”
Hurry quick and wipe those tears from your eyes so you don’t miss the awesome final battle, which is just filled to the brim with moments where every single hero gets to shine. Highlights include Spidey and Tony reuniting, Spidey activating the “Instant Kill” function of his suit, Gamora kicking Star-Lord in the balls, Tony and Pepper fighting back to back, Scarlet Witch confronting Thanos, and the awesomely cheesy “GIRL POWER” moment that is far more empowering than the entirety of Captain Marvel. Everything about this battle is fantastic, everything about it is peak MCU, everything is the epitome of why people love superhero movies… and it all culminates with the conclusion of Tony Stark’s decade-long character arc, as he steals the Stones from Thanos and snaps his fingers, erasing Thanos and his army at the cost of his life.
This moment is depressing on two fronts. On one, there is Tony. He is the hero we have spent the most time with, the one we know the best. And after all these films, he finally proved Steve Rogers wrong: he was able to lay his life on the line for the greater good, sacrificing himself fully for his wife, his daughter, his friends, and the entire universe. Tony went from a self-absorbed egomaniac arms dealer to a truly great, heroic figure who did what he had to do to protect everyone he cared about.
But on the other is Thanos. Most villains, upon seeing their plans come to ruin and their armies laid to waste, would break down, rant, offer some sort of last taunt… but not Thanos. Thanos accepts his death, however much it pains him to. The look of exhaustion, anguish, and utter hopelessness on his face as he sits down in a dark mirror of the ending of Infinity War truly cements him as a great and worthy foe. For all his faults, for all his insanity, Thanos was still a man utterly deluded by his pain and past tragedies into believing his cause was noble and just, and here he sits in his final moments perhaps wondering as his future self did if it was really all worth it. His crumbling to dust as he so cruelly did to so many others I well-deserved and a fitting end for one such as him, but there’s no denying that there is an element of tragedy to it too. It’s the exact sort of emotional ending I would have hoped for from Marvel’s greatest villain.
The finale wraps things up with Tony’s funeral, as well as Cap going back in time to return the Stones and Mjolnir to the moments they were stolen so that the alternate timelines can handle themselves. But Steve decides to create his own alternate timeline before coming home, and lives out an entire lifetime with an alternate Peggy Carter before returning to his own time and passing his shield and title on to Falcon. Many were confused as to if this meant Steve changed the canon of the MCU, but… they explain what happens in the movie. Quite a few times in fact. If you paid attention at all, you would know it is not possible for him to alter the canon. He created an alternate timeline where he presumably lived a full, happy life and ensured things would go well for everyone. No Hydra infiltration of SHIELD, no Winter Soldier, no Stark assassination, none of that. Just a long, happy life with the woman he loved, his best friend, and a well-deserved retirement from the fields of battle in the end. While the conclusion to Cap’s arc is not quite as good as Tony’s, it’s still heartfelt and touching, and it’s hard to say he didn’t deserve a happy life after everything he went through.
And so ends the Infinity Saga, and the first ten years of the MCU. This movie changed a hell of a lot, to the point where even though only two main heroes died over the course of the film, things still will never be the same going forward, and I like that a lot. Unlike every other cinematic universe that has sprung up in the wake of the MCU, I fully feel like any stories told after this one will continue to build off the foundations that this film and its predecessors laid out. There won’t be the need for soft rebooting like with the DCEU, or with actual rebooting like Dark Universe, or just constant messy and confusing timelines like with the X-Men Series. The MCU has managed to remain remarkably consistent throughout, and there’s no reason to doubt they’d continue that into the future. There’s no stinger here, but the moments after the final battle with the Guardians and Thor certainly set up interesting possibilities, as does the now teenaged Cassie Lang, who may well take up the superhero role she has in the comics. It’s hard to predict where the future of the MCU will be going right now, but all things considered it certainly looks bright.
Ultimately, this movie is a love letter. It’s a slow build that starts by examining the characters we know and love at their lowest, builds into a nostalgic and hilarious trip down memory lane, and culminates in the most beautiful sort of fanservice imaginable that then brings a touching conclusion to two of the greatest heroes in all of cinema. Of course, as I’ve mentioned, that first act is going to be what makes or breaks this for some people, and the part does drag a bit, but ultimately this movie is more what it ends up as than what it starts out as. That finale is the single greatest work of art the MCU has produced thus far, and I’m not sure that even with another ten years they’ll ever be able to top it.
The amazing thing is, this movie is pretty accessible even if you aren’t a hardcore fan, though it’s definitely only going to have full emotional impact if you’ve been watching these characters for years. This is a movie for the fans first and foremost, and that’s really not a bad thing; why wouldn’t you make an epic finale to so many arcs that appeals to the people who invested so much time in it? As someone who grew up with the MCU, who has watched it grow and blossom into everything I ever dreamed of seeing as a kid, I only have this to say to all of the directors, writers, actors, stunt people, just everyone who made this and all the other films possible, and to the dearly departed Stan Lee who created so many of these people I’ve spent the past decade watching come to life on screen:
I love you three thousand.
Here’s to another ten years of cinematic superhero excellence.
#Michael in the Mainstream#MitM#Review#Movie review#Avengers: Endgame#Endgame#Avengers#Marvel#MCU#Marvel Cinematic Universe#Infinity Saga#Iron Man#Captain America#Thanos#Superhero#superhero movie#spoilers#Endgame spoilers
18 notes
·
View notes
Text
THOS2: A weekend to never forget
So I promised I would give a coverage of my weekend at THOS2 as soon as I would get my HD pictures in. I just got them today so I’ve decided to share my story with you guys finally! It’ll be quite a long post so if you’re interested in hearing about me meeting the best cast there is on this planet feel free to continue reading! :)
So this was my first convention ever so I was very curious to see how things would turn out. I was also very, very nervous to finally meet the amazing people who bring these characters to live so amazingly. So Saturday, our first day, started with an opening panel where the casts greets us and everything and shortly after the OPS were beginning. So the first block was Matt, Harry, Jade and Will. I had Matt and Harry first (and to be honest I was the most nervous to meet those two so that didn’t really ease my nerves. xD).
Meeting Harry Shum Jr
So I was told to go to Harry first and boy, I was shaking in my shoes about how nervous I was meeting him. Photo ops go very quick so in no time it was my turn to take a picture with him and my heart was just beating out of my chest but when I saw him, he just smiled at me and greeted me with a hug and immediately asked me “Hi! How are you doing?’’ and I could talk with him without even stuttering. Like, one hug and all my previous worries about being nervous just flew out the window. He was so sweet and patient with me and I am forever thankful I got the opportunity to meet this man. They day after I met him at the autographe and I had bought him an omamori and I’ll never forget our little conversation we had when I walked up to the table for the autograph session. He asked me how I was doing, if I still had some energy after these tiring two days and even danced with me a little! (Well he danced a bit in his chair but still, AHH) His reaction when he saw the omamori was the cutest thing ever. “An omoari! Oeeh, thank you so much!’’ (Also when he saw our picture he casually said, “Oh yeah I remember you!’’ and I was screaming on the inside.)
Meeting Matthew Daddario
So, after my photoshoot with Harry on the saturday, I immediately queued for Matt’s line in the room where the photo’s were taken. At this point I was a little nervous again because... hello it’s Matt. When I was behind the curtain where Matt took his pictures I could hear him go; “Guys I look ridiculous! I am gonna look ridiculous in these pictures!’’ And at first I thought maybe it were some girls wanting to do some cosplay with hum but NOPE, he was worried about his hat hair! (He wore a cap when he came in during the opening panel and clearly was asked by the crew at the beginning of his photo session to take it off. He later but it back on. xD) So, it was my turn and I walk up to him, give him a hug (which holy shit they all give amazing hugs) and the usual “how are you doing chat’’. So we take out picture and as I’m about to leave (you’re not allowed to hang around for very long) he turns to me and goes “Does my hair look ridiculous to you?’’ and I blink at first and then am like; “What? No! No you look fine, Matt!’’ And he continues to be like “I should’ve done something with it.’’ and I literally stare him dead in the eyes and say: “Matt, you look beautiful.’’ and he FUCKING SMILED AND SAID “Aw, thanks!’’ Yeah no, I was an emotional dead mess after that. Later on this day I had an autographe session with him where I gave him a self made omamori. He was very clearly tired and had a long day behind him so I didn’t want to take up much of his time. I gave him the omamori (which he loved by the way) but forgot to tell him I actually had made it myself. So the next day I had another autographe session and op with him. Because the queue for his op was so long this time there was not much time for small talk, I gave him a hug again and we did the parabatai op which I loved because OH DAMN HE STARES STRAIGHT INTO YOUR SOUL AND THEN HAS THE AUDICITY TO SMIRK AT YOU. ANyways so later on that sunday I had my last autogrpahe session which was him and got my friend an autographe from him. So he asked me about my friend and I told him about her where after I gave him the letter I asked him if he remembered me giving him the omamori. “Yeah! The tiny one right?’’ and so I explained that I made it myself and he was very surprised about that and when I gave him the letter I said that everything was written in there and he went like “Wait, lemme write omamori on it. That way I know it’s from you!’’ after that I said my goodbyes to him and a friend of mine who was stillin line offered a shoulder to cry upon because I was so emtionally overwhelmed :’) But yeah, Matthew Daddario is an angel and I feel so blessed I have met him.
Meeting Alberto Rosende
OKAY THIS HAS GOT TO BE ONE OF MY FAVORITE MOMENTS OF THE ENTIRE EFFING WEEKEND.
Let me start off with the fact that Alberto is a Gryffindor and I am a Gryffindor. Last Christmas my friend had gifted me a Gryffindor scarf so... I took that with me to the con. So when I had my op with him (I had two in one row) I wrapped the scarf around his neck and told him “You can borrow it for today.’’ And his eyes just... widened in surprise and he was like “Oh, thank you. This is so cool.’’ So we did a pose with the scarf and then a regular hug pose afterwards. Later that saturday I also had an autographe with him so naturally, I decided I wanted him to sign the gryffindor op! This entire exchange owns my heart. Alberto Rosende is the kindest soul I have ever met and I only love him more after this convention. So when it was my turn for his autographe he was eating some sweets and I playfully asked him if they were good. He was like “Yeah! Do you want some?’’ They were lemon napoleons AND I DO NOT SAY NO TO SOUR CANDY. So I gave him the picture of us and at first he wrote my name; “Anja. That’s a really pretty name. I love that name.’’ I think I blushed bright red at that lol. Then he saw the op and he gasped and before he even started writing I was like; “Gryffindor’s for life!’’ he stops all movements and was like: “I WAS GONNA WRITE THAT!’’ And we high fived and aahhh my heart was screaming with happiness. So when he had signed my photo I gave him an envelope with a letter and a tiny gift. He looked at me and was like; “Can I open it now?’’ And I was like, yes of course! So he opened it and he smiled so big when he saw the bas guitar keychain I got him. It reminded me of him as well as of Simon so I figured it would be a perfect gift for him. He told me he loved it and honestly, he made my entire day with this exchange. :’’)
Meeting Emeraude, Kat and Dom + the autographes with Jade and Will
So these three ops and autographes went quite fast so I’ve decided to put them under one headline lol. With Jade and Will I only had an autographe.
I had two autographes with Kat on the saturday, one for me and one for a friend. Her throat was very sore from when she was in Australia so I talked and laughed about that bit with her and then she was asking me how I liked the convention and such. Her op was super rushed, it was in and out in the snap of a fingers but she was an angel.
Emeraude was an absolute sweetheart. I talked a bit at the autographe with her about the con as well and then sunday we had our photo op. So I wanted to do the parabatai pose with her and Eme being Eme she was a bit confused which one it was but I showed her and she was like “Oh right! Well as you know I don’t have a parabatai but now you are my first one!’’ “Well I’m very honored to be!’’ She was gorgeous in real life and such a joy to talk with and see at panels.
Dom’s ops were a bit rushed as well but I had the chance to talk to him a bit and gah, his accent in real life. fuck man. Will’s accent too by the way. Shit. I’ve had my doubts about meeting Dom after everything that happened and had been struggling with this decision for the remaining eight months but decided to just do it since I already spend money on the photo op. During his autographe we talked baout my name and The Netherlands and how our J’s sound different, I found it funny he picked up on that xD.
Will was such a fucking pleasure to talk with and he was adorable. Hours before the autographe session he had a panel with Harry that I witnessed and so I had something to talk about with him. That panel was seriously everything.
Jade was a real sweetheart. He was talking in French at first but when he noticed I spoke English he did that (which I think is amazing, speaking French with the local fans) this was on the sunday and at the end of the event so we just talked about the weekend we had and that he was such a sweetheart.
For the rest I have an op with the Lightwood family and the Shumdario duo with one of my best friends and parabatai!
And basically that was my weekend! i ha the most amazing time with this incredible cast and met the best firends and mutuals in real life that I could’ve ever asked for.
And no matter how much I miss them at this point, I know I’ll see some of them back again at THOS3! (Whihc I got a pass for again and I can’t wait!)
If you read this far I applaud you! xD Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoyed this story!
#Shadowhunters#Shadowhunters Season 3#Matthew Daddario#Harry Shum jr#Katherine McNamara#Emeraude Toubia#Dominic Sherwood#Will Tudor#Jade Hassouné#Alberto Rosende#Shadowhunters cast#THOS2#The Hunters of Shadow#THOS2 con#THOS3#Story time
29 notes
·
View notes
Text
#11: Season 3, Episode 11 - “Hardly Famous”
An off-brand Harry Connick Jr. comes to town and holds auditions at LJH for a new performing arts school! Seeking change in her life, Tawny decides to audition and kills it! Louis’ world crumbles around him at the thought of her transferring -- to the point where he’d do anything to get into that school. ANYTHING...
This one opens with a handsome and famous guy by the name of Barry Hudson Jr. (who’s definitely supposed to be a “Great Value” Harry Connick Jr.), arriving at LJH in a freaking chopper lol. Of course, Ren is right there alongside Principal Wexler to welcome him! We learn that he’s there in search of talented recruits for a new performing arts school dubbed the Sacramento Arts Conservatory for Creative Youth a.k.a. “SACCY” (pronounced “sassy,” of course.) This is a very important moment because Barry asks Ren if she’ll be auditioning and she says “Um, no. I wish I could, but auditions are only for 7th and 8th graders,” yet Ren is still a student at Lawrence. This is subtly confirming once again that LJH does, in fact, include grades 7th-9th! Meaning Louis and his friends have moved up to 8th grade. I wonder why they never made a big deal about that or acknowledged it clearly? I feel like it would’ve been a good plot point for an episode or at least a passing comment like “We’re EIGHTH GRADERS NOW, guys! We’re no longer the Scrubs of the school. We’ve got the fancy bathroom with assorted toiletries!” I could totally see Louis saying something like that as a callback to Easy Crier, lol. Oh well. The common misconception that they stay in 7th grade for the whole series lives on...
Hello, Not Harry Connick Jr. Nice to meet you!
Ren is scheduled to be Barry’s “coordinator” for the duration of his stay, I mean... who else?! Actually, I’ll tell ya who else... State Senator Eileen Stevens shows up outta nowhere and gushes over Barry, claiming to be his biggest fan. Ren claims to be a big fan too, which is kinda weird? If he is based on Harry, he would’ve been around 36 at this point in his career and Ren is like... 15. But then again, Wexler mentioned that Barry is a Broadway star and we know that Ren is into opera and theater. So, maybe that makes sense. Anyway, Eileen mentions that she sponsored the bill that funded SACCY which is pretty cool imo, but she ends up fangirling and offers to give Barry a tour of the school as an excuse to spend time with him because she’s State Senator Eileen Stevens and can do whatever she wants.
It cuts to Tawny and Tom in the hallway chatting about SACCY. Tom’s planning on auditioning with a tap dance routine, but Tawny says he should sing instead because that’s really his “strength.” We’ll get to THAT later, lol. Tom is excited about the idea of going to school with ~sophistated artistic~ kids. Tawny tries to argue that there are kids like that at Lawrence, but right about then is when Louis and Twitty come walking over holding a “gum blob” made up of used gum they’ve collected from every nook and cranny around the school. Very sophisticated, indeed. Needless to say, Tawny and Tom are disgusted.
Tawny and Tom both tossed the blob into the air after realizing how many diseases it might be carrying and Louis is about to have a heart attack. Also this screenshot makes it look like Shia doesn’t have legs below the knee? I’m perplexed.
At lunch that day, Louis is taunting Tom about wanting to go to SACCY and how embarrassing it would be. Twitty agrees and says “Everyone in that school is gonna be walking around in tights and feathered caps! Does that sound like fun?!” Tom slowly replies “Well..... What color’s the feather?” which cracks me up. There’s an immediate collective groan from Louis and Twitty which is great. Tawny defends Tom’s desire to attend a school where people “appreciate the beautiful things in life,” which... being talented and going to an arts school isn’t a prerequisite to appreciating the beautiful things in life but ok. Louis says that he finds used gum beautiful and Tawny has had enough.
It cuts to the audition room where everyone is setting up. Eileen returns with Barry after giving him that school tour which ran overtime because she didn’t know where anything was. Wow! Eileen also took this opportunity to invite Barry to dinner. Yikes!
The auditions start up and we get a montage. Louis and Twitty are sitting in to support Tom, but spend their time making fun of the other auditioners while they wait. You might’ve seen these gifs floating around the interwebz:
As you can see in the first one, Tawny is so over their antics. I love how they’re not even discreet about it tho?! Like, what the heck that’s so obnoxious to do while someone’s auditioning -- especially in a small classroom. I would’a kicked them outta there so fast!
It’s finally Tom’s turn to audition and Doris (who is played by Fred Meyers’ real-life mom, btw!!) is there to accompany him on piano lol. He performs “Dear Old Dad” which is about wanting to marry a girl who is just like your mom. Oh, my lord. Tom’s relationship with Doris is such a strange one. I can’t tell if it’s innocent or a ridiculously inappropriate obvious in-joke like Miranda Sings and Uncle Jim. Either way, he completely butchers the song and it’s fantastic. Part of me always assumed it was a song written for the show and the other part of me always hoped it was a real song. I never bothered to google it until today and I’m oddly happy to discover that it’s legit. After the audition, Tom casually says “So long, suckers!” as he walks off arrogant as all heck arm n’ arm with Doris. He thinks he’s got it in the bag. I can’t. Remember how Tawny said that singing is what Tom is best at? Imagine being so untalented that singing horribly is your strong suit.
It had to be gif’d because Tom is always quality content.
Louis and Twitty are about to peace out now that Tom’s audition is over, when suddenly... Tawny’s name is called as the next auditioner. AWWWWW, SNAP!!!! The slopski’s hit the fanski now, guys. The juicy drama has arrived. Tawny’s auditioning for the theater department and explains that her reasoning for doing so is because she’s “ready for a change.” Twitty is all “Dude, I think she’s serious,” and Louis retorts “OH, YA THINK SO?!” I love sarcastic Louis, man.
Tawny proceeds to perform the most melodramatic monologue from fictional production “Fried Green Magnolias” HAHA. (An obvious humorous combination of the films Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias.) I have no idea how Margo Harshman kept a straight face when she hits the reveal “...he wasn’t just a turtle. He was my best friend” line. To be honest though, this scene is a great example of the stark contrast between the talent Disney Channel was churning out back then in comparison to now. Margo is playing a character within a character who’s also playing a character in this scene and she is selling the hell out of it. Whereas newer Disney actors can’t even pull off a regular ‘ol crying scene without looking like they’re laughing. So, yeah. Tawny kills the audition and everyone’s raving about her performance. Louis is immediately torn up about Tawny wanting to leave LJH and the fact that she’s pretty much a lock to get into the school.
My heart.
Louis approaches Tawny later that day and congratulates her on a great audition, but he’s clearly itching to know why the heck she wants to leave when Louis ~the love of her life~ Stevens is right in front of her, damn it! But of course, he’s not gonna come right out and ask that. Tawny is pretty dead set on transferring if she gets in. Louis beats around the bush saying things like “You realize what you’ll be leaving behind, right....? Like... Pizza Stick Thursday! And, ya know that water fountain on the 2nd floor? The water isn’t even brown anymore, IT’S JUST TAN!” Tawny is unimpressed and says that it’s gonna take a little more than “almost clear water” to make her stay. I always got a kick outta this, lol. She explains that she wants to be around people who care about things. So, basically, her decision was motivated by being fed up with Louis’ immaturity. You can tell that Louis is crushed about this. I love it. We’ve seen time and time again that Tawny’s opinion means the world to him.
It cuts to dinner that night at the Stevens house where Barry Hudson Jr. makes his grand appearance. Eileen and Ren are dressed to the nines and continuing to fawn over Barry. The best part of this bit is when Steve finishes preparing cheese and crackers and announces “I just cut some cheese in the kitchen. Why don’t we all go in there!” I love Tom Virtue. The tables eventually turn though when Barry recognizes Steve as Steve “Stiffy” Stevens (which is definitely another innuendo) from his football days when he played for Michigan State. Apparently, that’s Barry’s alma mater and now he’s the one totally fanboying.
The dinner turns into a nostalgic football sesh between Barry and Steve, leaving Ren and Eileen totally ostracized lol. Louis interrupts and pulls Ren aside to talk. This is really where the episode starts tugging at the heartstrings. Louis pretty much begs for her to help him get an audition for SACCY. Ren immediately knows that the real reason he wants to audition is because of Tawny, she thinks it’s sweet of him -- but all of the slots are already taken. Louis will not take no for an answer and we get one of the greatest moments that foreshadowed Shia LaBeouf’s future. He shouts “JUST DO IT, REN! If ya say ya can, ya can!!!” I made a Vine about this and it was my Vine claim to fame with nearly 1M loops. *takes a bow.*
Ren ends up working some magic and gets Louis an audition the next day. Oh, man. This is so great. Louis drags Twitty into it and the two do a totally improvised interpretive dance narrated by Tom. Tom also has an incredible line before they start the audition: “I’d just like to take this opportunity to say that although I was not selected to attend SACCY, I bear no ill will towards Barry Hudson Jr. or any member of his family.” He says it in the most menacing and creepy voice. TOM IS THE BEST. Louis and Twitty begin their audition and, well... It’s one for the books...
youtube
I’ve flip-flopped over how I feel about this scene. I used to be in absolute stitches, then I thought it was cringy for a while, but now I’m back to dying laughing. This is definitely one of the best moments ever, lol. Doris rocked that banjo solo.
Tawny is me when she witnesses the audition and accepts the fact that she’s unconditionally in love with Louis and the great lengths he’ll go to in order to stay close to her. She kinda melts there for a sec. Same.
Later that day, Louis comes to terms with Tawny possibly leaving and decides to be mature about it and wish her good luck. But Tawny lies and says she didn’t get in. “It’s okay. I don’t mind staying here with.... my friends. :)” she coos, and the emotional piano kicks in as Tawny heads outside to catch her ride home. I’d like to point out that Tawny has a goofy picture of Louis in her locker here. Precious. She also has a photo of her and Popular Mute Tad Taylor from the Sadie Hawkins Dance too! As well as a photo of the first show The Twitty-Stevens Connection played together. Ahh. I love these tiny details. Again, it makes the show’s universe feel more authentic.
Just then, Louis runs into Ren and rants to her about Barry Hudson Jr. not knowing what talent is! (“Uhhh... You really stunk up there,” / “No, no, no. Not me! Tawny!”) hahahahaha. He’s so confused as to why she didn’t get in because “her audition was awesome.” Ren agrees and discloses “yeah, that’s why she got accepted. But she told me she wasn’t going...” Louis puts two and two together and runs after Tawny in true rom-com fashion. I’m a sucker for this. He catches her right as she’s getting into her mom’s car and the lil lovebirds share an ~emotional~ glance across the parking lot.
THE MOST UNDERRATED DISNEY CHANNEL PAIRING OF ALL TIME RIGHT HERE!!!! What a love story, tbh.
And that’s it!
The final minute bit is Louis deciding to give up the gum blob and pass it down to Beans. Undoubtedly because owning a gum blob is immature and Tawny makes Louis wanna be a better man basically. Gotta love dat development.
Note the sad clown painting on Louis’ wall! He painted that back in Season 2′s “Ren-Gate.” Such a small detail I never noticed before. Love it!
This was always one of my favorites. I love this episode. Mainly because of the Louis/Tawny storyline, of course. I thoroughly enjoy seeing hopeless and confused Louis here doing everything in his power to stay close to Tawny and ultimately grow up a bit in the end. The dinner with Barry is probably the lowest point, but it doesn’t go on for too long so I’m not bothered by it. This is just a solid episode all around. It’s got character development, ace comedy, emotional weight, and a few great quotes!
Thanks for reading! We’re officially hitting the Top 10 now and I cannot believe it. Wow.
Don’t forget about the Disqus comment section below ;)
Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Redbubble
#rank#even stevens#shia labeouf#tom gribalski#tawny dean#louis x tawny#louis and tawny#season 3#comedy#disney channel#old disney#zoog disney#throwback#tv shows#steve stevens#eileen stevens#donna pescow#christy carlson romano#tv review#tv#retro review#nostalgia#early 2000s#2000s tv
9 notes
·
View notes
Note
Hey hey here's a promt miss Mayra. Imagine Sonic is a little older, he has fought countless battles against Eggman and then one day the thought that he may go into battle and never come back comes into his head. He starts pushing people away because of that thought not wanting people close to him to suffer if that were to happen. Amy notices his off behavior and helps him through this.
Warning: Some minor adult themes mentioned, but still innocently safe.
That being said- It’s a MAJOR AU concept… I took somewhat of your idea and expanded on another idea I had. If this prompt isn’t what you wanted, I will be more than happy to write a different one strictly on what you wrote. But I do hope you enjoy this one too!
Prompt:
“You are coming back… I know you will!”
Sonic simply stares… he’s already made this fact very clear…
He wasn’t coming back.
“You say it’s…” Amy’s voice cracks, tears flooding her face like April showers, but in the dead of the night… she knows that if she leaves his side now… he’ll never return.
“You’re not gonna die… you’re not gonna leave us all behind because you would never do such a thing! You wouldn’t do something you knew you couldn’t come back to unless-!” She stopped herself, coming up with a way to break his fib.
She glared him down, determined to prove him wrong.
But his will was unbreakable. His heart passed caring about formalities with Amy…
She had found him after he had decided to go off into the dimension Eggman had accidentally cast himself into. He vowed that in that dimension, he would terrorize and take over, plot for all eternity how to get back and destroy Sonic and this world.
Sonic knew that Eggman was trapped, and the thought of letting another world defend for itself…
Plagued him.
“You wouldn’t leave this world…” Amy bit her lower lip, realizing then that he would for the sake of innocent lives. “You wouldn’t leave and say goodbye… you couldn’t! You can’t just keep sacrificing like this! You fought for fun and won for the world’s sake! You’re a hero! But you don’t have to refuse everything now!” She gripped her hands to her face, her knees giving way but she forced them to jut into each other, keeping herself upward.
Sobbing harshly, she knew nothing she could say would make him stay unless she gave him a terrible ultimatum.
“You’ll return. I know you will. Because you can’t convince me you’re not!” She shot her head up, stepping slightly back as she realized Sonic’s cold stare never left her, looking at her from an angle.
“You…” she held back all her emotions now. He wouldn’t take her seriously if she didn’t get a hold of herself.
She gripped her fist.
“What I’m saying is… you wouldn’t leave without doing something that would ultimately mean you couldn’t come back.” She forced her tongue to form the words. “You would have to do something so unredeemable. So, against all you stand for… You wouldn’t leave me without saying goodbye.”
It broke her. Something she wasn’t expecting.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, before turning away and shaking her head to snap out of it.
This was her way of releasing him in a sense… She knew he would go even without blinking an eye to her.
But at least a kind word…
Or something that would convince her to let him go…
She then heard his voice as she wiped her red eyes from all the crying and held herself, trying to be still but feeling the cold of the wind on her sides…
“…Then I’ll do the unthinkable.”
Amy held her breath, but the stifling of sniffles of her sobbing couldn’t be repressed, causing her head to bounce up and down in subtle signs of still crying…
She heard the grass crush under advancing footfalls…
“If you won’t even spare me my pride… and if you refuse to let me die… then I have no choice but to convince you… this is it.”
Her eyes,… once held down in sorrow now looked forward in horror.
What was he doing?
He stopped right before her back.
“…You’re really going through with this?” Amy breathed out, almost the sound of a whisper, but more frantic and panicky.
Sonic frowned and gripped his fist.
“…Will you honestly let me go… if I don’t?”
She closed her eyes, shaking her head.
“…Then… Before I physically go away…” he bent his head down. “….I’ll have to force you to let me leave… in the one place you’ve refused to let me go from…”
She felt his arms slowly moving to ensnare her into a trap she willingly forced herself into.
They creeped at the corner of her vision… ready to pounce at any sudden movement and entangle her into her heartbreaking trap…
For both of them…
“Amy…”
She started to believe him, and it frightened her, as her eyes darted and her feet began to grow flighty, tapping to look for a way out on any which side.
“…I won’t be coming back…”
“NO!” Amy bolted, but the arms encircled her and threw her down.
“NOOO!!” Amy felt him pull her down, felt the unforgivable reality that he was going to do everything in his power to convince her he wasn’t coming back.
“Stop! You wouldn’t-! You couldn’t-!” She was pleading for him to be lying, but as he continued in his death-sentence, it became more and more real.
Amy pushed and struggled, but he overtook her and when everything was prepared he hesitated.
They panted and looked deep into each other’s eyes… the night consuming their dread.
“…Please…” Amy shook her head, not letting her eyes leave his. “Don’t go…”
He closed his mouth.
She knew this was his last declaration of goodbye, the last thing he could give her.
“Don’t-“
He pressed his lips against hers…and slowly… he got her to lay down.
-years later-
“…That’s terrible.” A blue hedgehog got up and shook his head from his bed, looking out a window and placing his hands on his hips. “Did he even know?” The boy looked back to his mother.
“…No.” Amy admitted, looking down and holding her hands together tightly, before draping them over the other in a rubbing motion. She was desperately trying to remain calm, but he had demanded to know who his father was…
It was hard to admit the truth.
“He really was an amazing hero… but I wouldn’t have believed he would never come back if he didn’t do something to leave me with… That act… was a mercy in the end.” Amy’s eyebrows bent and she looked to the wall of photos…
“I don’t think he imagined… No, I’m sure he had no idea that the consequence would be more than me letting him go and moving on with my life… but that act of love also gave me a final gift… You.” She smiled to her son.
He looked back over his shoulder.
“You’re the spitting image of him, Sonic… I loved your father, and it broke my heart to see him give into a selfish ultimatum… but I could tell he meant it with all of his heart… I would have waited for him, Sonic!” she gripped the edges of her chair, desperately trying to make it sound better than what he believed…
He shook his head, moving to the door and running his hands frustratedly through his upper quills.
“Your father gave up this life for that other dimension… he gave up everyone… everything..” she looked away, “I would have withered away waiting for his return… that would have never happened…”
The son of Sonic once again swung his quills around in a silent protest to his creation… and then his shoulders relaxed.
“…So, I’m a lovechild…” His voice cracked, unable to look back at his mother.
“…Yes.”
“You’re saying he loved you to prove he wasn’t coming back.”
“…Yes.” Her mouth could barely form the right way, her throat squeezing on her as she refused to see shame by it. She closed her eyes.
“Why can’t you understand… this is a difficult topic for me.”
“You’re not the one hearing you were born out of wedlock…”
“SONIC!” she stood up, “I will always be married to your father in my heart!” she pounded her chest, which snapped her son out of his open thoughts and flinch back to her, looking worried.
“Hey! Calm down, you’ll hurt yourself!”
“He sacrificed so much! He left me- no, the world with his only son to guard the joy and happiness of this world! Don’t you think ill of him! And don’t you dare judge me, either!”
“Calm down! Calm down, mom… Heh, Sonic Jr. I should of known.” He first addressed his mother, placing hands on her own arms to keep her from that powerful hitting she did before, and then looked up at the ceiling to think about his lineage…
“Alright mom, fine.” He sighed, “He was a good man.” He looked back down at her sweetly.
“…Do I also act like him? Not just all looks?” He tried to lighten the topic.
She nodded, blinking her glossy eyes in love for him. “Yes.” She felt her voice strain, “Yes, you’re like him reincarnated into this world.”
“…Then… I’ll do what I can… to serve this world he left behind.”
Amy kissed his cheek as he zoomed off…
Unknown to the actual Sonic… in that other dimension, there was a Tails, a Knuckles… and to his great astonishment and everlasting devotion… An Amy Rose.
Sonic swore that in this world, he would defend and protect her, to make up for any sin and pain he caused his Amy in his world…
But he wasn’t sure if he could love her like his Amy….
But he might as well try, for her sake.
But never let another ultimatum come between them again!
(I was thinking about how universes were created… An interesting AU concept of where Sonic was ‘figuratively to die’ by never coming back to his original universe, but going into another. This could lead to many different universes, and I thought your prompt was perfect for writing about this idea. I’m not sure what universe this Sonic took over in, but probably in a universe where Sonic didn’t exist at first. Still, an interesting idea, some sonamy, and the (read more) is for the somewhat adult themes mentioned in this prompt ^^; I hope that’s alright!)
60 notes
·
View notes
Text
"When Rev. Traci Blackmon took the stage in mid-October at the Prophetic Resistance Summit in Indianapolis, Indiana, she was technically slated to give a “keynote address,” a phrase that brings to mind Powerpoint presentations and break-out sessions. But what she actually delivered to 350-odd clergy was, well, a sermon.
The Missouri native, well known for her skills as a preacher, did not disappoint. Over the course of 25 minutes, her voice cracked with passion as she invoked the biblical story of Moses, using the instance of God speaking through a burning bush as a metaphor to explain the world’s many ills. But Blackmon, a pivotal spiritual voice in the Black Lives Matter movement, did not speak in generalities. She listed the tragedies impacting communities of color by name.
“Bushes were burning in Ferguson long before Michael Brown was killed!” Blackmon shouted. “Bushes were burning in Baltimore before Freddie Gray died! Bushes were burning in Florida before Trayvon Martin! Bushes were burning in New York before Eric Garner was killed on the street corner! Bushes were burning…in Flint before the water was contaminated, in Charlottesville before the white supremacists marched, in Palestine before the wall! Bushes were burning in the U.S. before Donald Trump became president!”
Sitting in an empty conference room down the hall a few minutes later, the rising star in the faith-based “resistance” movement gave off a noticeably different vibe. Some preachers are exhausted by fiery sermons, but Blackmon looked hardly fazed. She was calm, but not tired; serious, but quick to laugh.
Yet her intensity remained, albeit in a more distilled form. And when asked why she came to speak at the conference, she once again rooted her answer in a specific person.
“In 2014, when Michael Brown Jr. was killed…” she began, repeating the name of the Ferguson, Missouri teenager killed by police in 2014.
The use of his full name—including the “Jr.”—is common for Blackmon, who often insists on recounting vivid personal details. This is especially true when she speaks about Black Lives Matter or Ferguson, the incident that thrust her into the national spotlight. Although national-level faith leaders often stick to the broad strokes of policy or high-minded platitudes, the small-town pastor has a habit of highlighting individual people in specific places impacted by particular events or policies.
It’s a glimpse inside the often hyper-local, people-first approach Blackmon brings to advocacy—one that she’s increasingly bringing to the national stage.
A lifelong dedication to justice
For Blackmon, encounters with inequality and difference came early. While growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, she said reflection on her race wasn’t so much a choice as a fact of life.
“I integrated many classrooms,” she said, explaining that much of her early education was spent in private schools. “I transferred from all-black classrooms to all-white classrooms in fourth grade—not by my own volition, as my parents made that choice. I often reflect back on the fact that I didn’t even have another black classmate until I got to college. I never had another black teacher until I got to seminary.”
She added: “Justice work has always had to be a part of my being, [such as] earning to speak for myself and speak up in such environments. Although they weren’t necessarily overtly hostile environments…there was certainly an awareness of my blackness, and my otherness in those places.”
“There was certainly an awareness of my blackness, and my otherness in those places.”
Blackmon carried these experiences into adulthood, where awareness of those on the margins became a constant of her multifaceted career. She wasn’t always a minister, for instance: Blackmon racked up more than 25 years of health care experience working as a registered nurse focusing on cardiac care. But even as she aided the sick on the hospital floors, she looked for ways to expand the circle of those she served. Blackmon said she sat on the diversity team of the largest health care system in St. Louis, and launched ambitious projects designed to provide services to those who need it most.
“I began, developed, and utilized a mobile health care van for the hospital that targeted neighborhoods that were under-insured and uninsured,” she said. “Unfortunately, in our cities and communities, that always intersects with race—class always intersects with race.”
This work eventually took on an overtly spiritual flair. Blackmon, who is ordained in both the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the United Church of Christ (UCC), served the AME for several years before becoming pastor of Christ the King Church in Florissant, Missouri, a UCC church. She was the first female pastor in the congregation’s more than 150-year history, and preached a broad vision of “church.”
“My commitment to that neighborhood as a pastor of a church is, and in leading my people, was: if we’re going to be in a neighborhood, we’re going to be a neighbor,” she said. “So a part of that commitment was we began offering space in our church for start-up businesses.”
Christ the King was soon home to robotics groups and girls’ mentoring programs. But Blackmon said her most impactful community outreach initiative was her congregation’s response to a local surge in gun violence. Unlike other worship communities that would only perform funerals for church members, Blackmon offered up her sanctuary to anyone who needed space for a service to honor their dead—regardless of whether they were member of her church. Or any church.
“You could bring in your preacher,” she said. “They just [often] didn’t have a place. If they didn’t have a pastor, then I would do it.”
From healing bodies in hospitals to healing souls in the streets
Blackmon’s funeral policy proved to be a powerful witness to the surrounding community, and ultimately connected her to a pivotal moment in her life and ministry: The killing of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri.
In August 2013, Blackmon said she performed a funeral for a 21-year-old woman killed in a drive-by shooting in St. Louis when a bullet intended for her fiancé struck her skull as she held her nine-month-old child. A friend of the woman named Sierra attended the funeral, and—despite swearing off organized religion when she was 14, following an alleged incident of sexual abuse within a church—was moved by Blackmon’s ministry. She never made a habit of attending services at Christ the King, but asked for the pastor’s card after the service just in case.
“We came with a Bible in one hand, and a protest sign in the other.”
The two reconnected almost exactly a year later, when Sierra returned to her home in Canfield Green Apartments after a breakfast outing with her children. As she approached her door, she and her children walked past the bloodied, uncovered body of Michael Brown, still lying in the streets after he was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson.
“Her 7-year-old son Jordan saw Michael laying there and began to cry, and scream, and ask ‘Who hurt Mike Mike?’” Blackmon said. “She didn’t have answers for him. So she went into her house and found my card that she had kept for a year…and she said to me: ‘You don’t know it, but since that day you’ve been my pastor. And I need my pastor to come to Canfield.’”
‘We’re not the “nice” faith people!’: Faith leaders are battling white supremacy, Trump
Blackmon did, in fact, come to Canfield, saying she was “responding as a pastor to someone who was calling and asking for my services.” She quickly emerged as one of the few visible faith leaders in what became the Ferguson Uprising protest movement, which helped nationalize the growing Black Lives Matter movement.
Her role was unusual. Many faith leaders have acknowledged that unlike other campaigns for racial equality, the Black Lives Matter movement is often spearheaded by young activists instead of black clergy. Yet Blackmon stood out as an early exception, speaking at rallies and hosting forums with other faith leaders at her church to discuss Brown’s death with local police officials.
“We came with a Bible in one hand, and a protest sign in the other,” Blackmon told marchers who joined her at the time.
A national presence, but a local heart
Blackmon’s advocacy in Ferguson magnified her profile in faith circles and beyond. Within months, she was named a member of the Ferguson Commission, a group appointed by Missouri Governor to conduct a “thorough, wide-ranging and unflinching study of the social and economic conditions that impede progress, equality and safety in the St. Louis region.” The next year Ebony listed her as one of their Power 100, and she was selected as part of a 14-person delegation to the Vatican to meet with Pope Francis’ staff.
The fame also enhanced her political clout. When then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton rolled through Missouri in 2016, she spoke at a public forum on race at Blackmon’s church, where panelists invited by the pastor presented their work to Clinton. The “public” part was key: Blackmon turned down a request by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for a private meeting.
“I’m not going to partake in closed-door meetings with political candidates,” Blackmon said of her decision. “I do not speak for all black people; I do not speak for the black community collectively. Whatever kind of influence I have, I want to use it to open the door so that everyone can be at the table.”
Her advocacy-oriented stance came in handy following the election of Donald Trump, which set in motion a series of events that thrust Blackmon into the center of the “resistance” movement.
When torch-wielding white supremacists first arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, to chant racist slogans as they surrounded a statue of Thomas Jefferson, Blackmon was across the street with faith leaders preaching a sermon that condemned racism. She remained in the embattled city through the next day as white nationalists continued to descend on the town, live-streaming her counter-protest against bigotry that sometimes put her in harms way: in one dramatic incident, she was whisked away in the middle of an MSNBC interview when the situation around her suddenly became too dangerous.
Traci Blackmon speaks alongside William Barber and others while protesting the GOP-led effort to repeal the ACA in 2017.
She was also a highlight of several faith-led protests in Washington, D.C. decrying Trump’s various policy proposals. She and seven other clergy were taken into custody in April while staging a pray-in protest at the Senate building to condemn the president’s budget proposal. Undaunted, she returned three months later to stand against GOP-led efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and was one of several other faith leaders arrested for protesting outside Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office.
“I get a little annoyed when people say ‘She came up in Ferguson!’ No, you just listened in Ferguson!”
In many ways, Blackmon appreciates her newfound status as a national voice, especially after years of advocacy that sometimes felt like it fell on deaf ears.
“I get a little annoyed when people say ‘She came up in Ferguson!’ No, you just listened in Ferguson!” she told ThinkProgress.
But for all the attention she garners, Blackmon said she struggles with the increasing distance between her work and her congregation. She pointed to the recent surge in activism back in Ferguson, bemoaning that she often wasn’t there to march with her people.
“To be honest with you, I’m still wrestling with that,” she told ThinkProgress. “I have some grief over that, because it comes at great cost. I am still a local pastor … But I’m not involved in the same way, because I’m not present in the same way.”
An uncertain future
The role of “church” is paramount for Blackmon, who insisted she is “always in the streets as a representative of the church.” She acknowledged her role as faith advocate isn’t necessarily surprising given her theological background, saying of her famously liberal denomination, “If you go any further left than the United Church of Christ, you’re gonna fall of the edge.”
But her tone became serious when she spoke of her enhanced role in the UCC, which elected her this summer to be executive minister of their national-level Justice and Witness Ministries.
“I believe that the church, the institutionalized church, has to undergo a complete deconstruction, and a re-imagining of what God is intending,” she said. “The streets are a side-effect of my call.”
“I’m not preaching a progressive gospel, I’m not preaching a Social Gospel—I’m preaching the Gospel.”
And while she agrees her work implicitly rebukes the words and actions of the Religious Right, she stopped short of describing herself as the “Religious Left.”
“We have to reclaim the language of faith,” she said. “We have to stop defining ourselves by those who are misappropriating faith. We have to be more vocal about who we are, and what we stand for … So I am not ‘Religious Left,’ I’m not ‘Religious Right’—I’m a disciple of Jesus Christ. I’m not preaching a progressive gospel, I’m not preaching a Social Gospel—I’m preaching the Gospel.”
Her life’s ambition and struggle, it seems, is discerning where that Gospel should be preached the loudest: at the local level, the national level, or all of the above.
In a world with so many burning bushes, it can be hard to choose.
“I just really want to make sure I’m where God wants me to be,” she said.
0 notes
Text
WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND September 6, 2019 - LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE, SUPER SIZE ME 2: HOLY CHICKEN! and IT: CHAPTER TWO
Lots of COLONS -- there, you happy Edward Havens? :) -- in this week’s featured movies, huh?
Although summer still has a couple weeks left according to a couple of my co-workers, the fall movie season officially starts this weekend, but before we get to the wide releases, I want to talk about the fantastic doc LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE (Greenwich Entertainment), which opens at New York’s Film Forum on Friday. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, this movie really surprised me, because I never considered myself a fan of Ronstandt, despite listening to a lot of AM Top 40 radio in the ‘70s – yes, I was alive back then. I know I don’t look it, but I’m old.
This movie gave me goosebumps hearing Ronstadt at the beginning of her career, the archival footage of her performances making it blatantly obvious how talented she was and why she became so popular, something that wasn’t nearly as evident hearing songs like “Blue Bayou” on the radio. What’s even more amazing about Ronstadt is that I didn’t hear about much of her work in the ‘80s, as she started doing more unconventional things like honoring the traditional Mexican music of her father. I mean, she was just an amazing artist but she started drifting away as MTV made major stars out of much less-talented singers. And then of course, there’s the Parkinson’s Disease that made it impossible for her to sing and kudos to the filmmakers for actually catching a rare singing moment with her family. This movie honestly got me quite teary-eyed as it went along, because you watch this amazing talent having her greatest asset taken away from her by this horrible illness.
Anyway, this is another music doc that I highly recommend checking out if it plays at a theater near you as it continues a long run of solid music docs we’ve been getting so far this year. (Oddly, David Crosby was supposed to be in this movie, too, but I don’t remember seeing him in it, but saw his credit at the end. Weird.)
Another doc opening in New York, L.A. and Chicago before expanding further on Sept. 13 is Morgan Spurlock’s SUPER SIZE ME 2: HOLY CHICKEN!... and yes, the irony of Spurlock still calling his movie something that includes the words “Me, too” in it is a little more than ironic, since it was the movement that took him down just a few weeks after the movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival (which is where I first saw it). But honestly, Spurlock took himself out, as he came forward and admitted a few things from his own past, which basically got the movie dropped by YouTube Red, who had just bought it. Two years later and I’m not sure how I feel about the movie, but when I saw it back then, I thought it was a worthy successor to Spurlock’s Oscar-nominated film. This time around, Spurlock wants to set up a healthier fast food option, choosing a chicken sandwich place but also wanting to stick to some of the guidelines by making the chickens organic and free-range, something that he finds is more difficult than he initially thinks.
I generally like Morgan Spurlock’s docs, which generally includes himself as a personality, similar to the work of his peer Michael Moore, but Spurlock doesn’t always make super-serious docs and always keeps him mind on the entertainment aspect of going to the movies, and in that sense Super Size Me 2 is as entertaining as some of his past films.
Super Size Me 2 is opening at the Cinema Village in New York and Laemmle Music Hall in L.A. on Friday.
The only new wide release this weekend is New Line/Warner Bros’ IT: CHAPTER TWO, which I’m sure I’ll be writing about a lot over at The Beat, so go click on those links so that they’ll continue hiring me to write more stuff! You can read my review here and an interview with actor James Ransone over at The Beat.
LIMITED RELEASES
Because it’s early September and there is a big wide release, there isn’t as much to talk about as far as limited releases.
Apparently, Janice Engel’s doc Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins (Magnolia) was released in Texas last weekend, which makes sense since that’s where journalist Molly Ivins is from, but it will open in New York and L.A. this weekend as well. I wasn’t as big a fan of this doc as the ones above just because Molly Ivins just felt like she was trying to do a stand-up comedy routine. In other words, the film lacked the depth I would have hoped from a political figure.
Chelsea Stardust’s Satanic Panic (RLJE Films), written by my good friends Grady Hendrix and Ted Geoghegan, that follows Hayley Griffith’s Sam, a pizza delivery driver whose last stop of the day is to a group of Satanists looking for someone to sacrifice. Yup, that sounds like something Grady and Ted (who wrote Ted’s second movie Mohawk) might come up with. So Sam must fend off witches and demonic creatures before she can end her shift. The film also stars Ruby Modine, Rebecca Romijn, Arden Myrin and Jerry O’Connell. It will be released in select theaters and On Demand Friday after premiering at the Overlook Film Festival and playing Fantasia in Montreal in July.
Two more movies opening at the Cinema Village(and other theaters) is Rowan Athale’s Strange but True (Lionsgate Premiere), a star-studded thriller based on John Searles’ novel, starring Margaret Qualley from Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood as the ex-girlfriend of a dead high schooler who shows up at his family’s house claiming that she’s pregnant with his child (five years after her boyfriend Ronnie’s death). Ronnie’s mother is played by the great Amy Ryan and brother by Nick Robinson, and the movie also stars Greg Kinnear, Brian Cox and Blythe Danner, which makes you wonder why this is being four-walled and most likely getting a typical Lionsgate Premiere VOD release.
Paul Taublieb’s doc Blink of an Eye (1091) is an inside look at the Daytona 500 in 2001, featuring Michael Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt Jr, and that’s about all I know about it. Waltrip is a perennial underdog who broke his 462-race losing streak just before the 2001 racing season, but when his best friend the older Dale Earnhardt crashes in the last lap of the Daytona 500, he steps up to race against Dale’s son, Dale Jr.
Opening at the Roxy Cinema in New York this week is Michael Oblowitz’s surfing doc Heavy Water, which follows surfer Nathan Fletcher, whose brother is credited for introducing punk rock skateboarding techniques to the sport. That’s about all I know about that one.
Since actor/filmmaker Justin Chon (The Twilight Sagaand Gook) will be in Toronto this weekend with Wayne Wang’s new movie (which is premiering there), he probably won’t be doing many opening weekend QnAs for his new movie Ms. Purple (Oscilloscope), which opens in L.A. at the Landmark Nuarton Friday and at the Quad in New York on Sept. 13. This one is a drama about a brother and sister (Teddy Lee and Tiffany Chu) who seemingly are stuck in Koreatown after being abandoned by their mother and raised by their father, who is dying. It sounds like a real hoot.
Opening in New York and L.A. is Simnon Hunter’s Edie (Music Box Films), starring 86-year-old legend Sheila Hancock as a widow about to be forced into retirement home for her last days but wanting to do one last climbing trip before she dies.
The Bollywood film Chhichhore(FIP), directed by Nitesh Tiwari (Dangal), will also open on Friday in top markets, taking place in a hostel filled with interesting and unique characters who go on a journey together.
Coming to theaters for one night only (i.e. Thursday) is Melanie Martinez’s musical K-12 (Abramorama/Atlantic) about a girl named Cry Baby who is sent to a disturbing sleepaway school where she is bullied until she finds a friend who helps her fight against the Principal and his “wicked staff.” I haven’t seen this but having suffered through Slaughterhouse Rulez I’m slightly dubious.
LOCAL FESTIVALS
Not local, but the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) starts this week. It’s my favorite film festival on the world (after maybe Oxford) but I can’t afford to go for a second year in a row, so instead of writing about it, I’m just gonna spend the next week and a half sulking and writing about other things. L
REPERTORY
Since it’s September, a new month and a movie season, I’m welcoming a new addition to this section…
ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE BROOKLYN (NYC)
I went to see Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 70mm over the past and saw that they’re starting to do a lot more rep. programs tying to upcoming new releases by directors like Pedro Almodovar and Bong Joon-ho, so I’m going to start including some of their screenings and hoping they won’t disappoint me like the New Bev has the last few months. (And hopefully I can include the brand-new L.A. Drafthouse soon, as well.) The problem is that very often, the rep screenings might sell out before I have a chance to write about them, similar to the New Bev, actually.
Much of the Alamo’s rep programming happens on weekdays at 9:30 PM, but as I mentioned, they have some interesting fall series planned.
This week’s “Weird Wednesday” is Drop Dead Fred (1991), starring Rik Mayall of “Young Ones” fame. Monday’s “Video Vortex” is the 1943 Bollywood horror film Son of Dracula, and next Tuesday’s “Terror Tuesday” is the original found footage horror film The Blair Witch Project from 1999. (There’s a free screening of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of CherbourgWeds night for Alamo Victory members but it’s already sold out.)
METROGRAPH (NYC):
I never thought the Metrograph would bring back its initial charter “A to Z” program with more offerings but sure enough, this week begins Welcome To Metrograph: Redux! On Thursday, it begins with John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 from 1976 and continues Saturday with Ján Kadár’s The Angel Levinefrom 1970. I have never heard of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra but clearly, the programmers at the Metrograph have as they’re playing two shorts programs as well as his 2019 movie Testimony on Sunday and Monday. Also, the Metrograph will continue showing off its love for Anime with a regular engagement for the late Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001) after showing Paprika and Perfect Blue the last couple weeks. (You can still see Perfect Blue and Paprika on Thursday, as well as Roehmer’s Le Rayon Vert and Goddard’s Pierrot Le Fou.) This week’s Late Nites at Metrograph is René Laloux’s animated Fantastic Planet (1973). Kinda esoteric, no? Playtime: Family Matinees is Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001), so a little more mainstream for the kiddies. Also, some of the Shaw Sisters movies continues through the weekend, and I can recommend both Puppy Love and Starry is the Night, two of my favorites from the series.
FILM FORUM (NYC):
“Marty and Jay’s Double Features” ends on Thursday, so your last options are William Holden’s The Counterfeit Traitor (1962) and Slightly Scarlet (1956) on Wednesday and Sanjit Ray’s The Music Room (1958) /Il Post (1961) or Voyage to Italy (1954) and Vincento Minnelli’s The Long, Long Trailer (1954), starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz on Thursday. Joseph Losey’s 1976 Holocaust drama Mr. Klein, the filmmaker’s first French film after being blacklisted in Hollywood, will be screened on DCP starting Friday. Also, “Film Forum Jr.” is BACK this weekend with Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality (1923)on Saturday and Sunday morning with live piano accompaniment.
EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):
Egyptian going a bit esoteric this week with “A Short Series about Krzysztof Kieslowski” (which I won’t even try to pronounce), dedicated to the filmmaker behind the famed “Three Colors” trilogy, which will screen (all three chapters!) on Sunday evening. On Thursday, there’s a double feature of A Short Film about Loveand A Short Film about Killing, both from 1988, and they’re both under 90 minutes so no lie in the title. Friday is a double feature of The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and 1981’s Blind Chance.
AERO (LA):
This week begins the French Noir series “The French Had a Name for it 5” with a number of double features. On Thursday, there’s Quai es Orfèvres (1947) and The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), Friday is Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (1959) and Port du Desire (1955) and Saturday is René Clement’s Purple Noon from 1960 and a double feature of Melodie en Sous-Sol (1962) and The Sicilian Clan (1969). If it isn’t obvious, I haven’t seen any of them, but I have seen John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, which is the Aero’s Friday night midnight movie. Sunday’s French noir double feature is 1946’s Paniqueand 1947’s Non Coupable. “Heptember Matinees” continues on Tuesday with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam’s Rib from 1949.
FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER (NYC):
Friday begins a new series called “Sci-Fi Visionary: Piotr Szulkin” showing six of the Polish filmmakers films beginning with 1980’s Golemand 1981’s War of the Worlds: Next Century. They’ll also be showing a new 4k restoration of George Nierenberg’s 1982 music documentary Say Amen, Somebody (Milestone Films) about American gospel music starting Friday with QnAs and choir performances following screenings on Friday and Saturday.
IFC CENTER (NYC)
Beginning Weds, the IFC Center will screen the new 4k restoration of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), a movie that I feel it’s been showing as part of its midnight series for months… but if I get to this week’s offerings, and there’s the same bullshit I’ve seen every single week, I’m moving this down to the bottom of the rep section. This weekend’s Weekend Classics: Staff Picks Summer 2019 is John Singleton’s 1995 dramas Higher Learning starring Laurence Fishburne, chosen by “Kashif” and “Marilyn,” while Waverly Midnights: Staff Picks Summer 2019 is Scorsese’s 1999 film Bringing out the Dead (chosen by “Luke”), starring Nicolas Cage.Okay, at least this week’s Late Night Favorites: Summer 2019 is Satoshi Kon’s 2006 movie Paprika (2006), which the Metrograph has been playing for weeks, so I’ll spare the IFC Center from punishment … for now.
MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):
On Friday night, the museum is showing Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 sci-fi thriller Brainstorm in 70mm, and then on Saturday and Sunday, its showing It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Spielberg’s Ready Player One, also in 70mm.
ROXY CINEMA (NYC)
On Thursday, the Roxy is showing Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, and then on Saturday and Sunday, it’s showing the Apocalypse Now 40thAnniversary Final Cut.
LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):
This week’s Friday midnight is Tommy Wiseau’s The Room… again. YAWN.
THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):
Here I was going to give Tarantino the benefit of the doubt that he’d be back to rep programming in Sept. but why do your job as a programmer when you can just play your latest film and make just as much or more money? Sure, it’s playing The Postman Always Rings Twice from 1946 as the Wednesday matinee the original Disney The Parent Trap (1961), starring Hayley Mills, as the weekend KIDDEE MATINEE. And I do love P.T. Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, which is playing as the Monday matinee. But otherwise, it’s all Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood all the time. (I guess the Saturday midnight movie is Reservoir Dogs at least?) For this infraction, the New Beverly is being moved to the VERY BOTTOM of this section as punishment, yes, even below the Nuart’s midnight screening.
(NOTE: As of now, it doesn’t seem like the Quad Cinema or BAM in Brooklyn have any new repertory screenings this weekend.)
Next week, the wide releases are STX’s Hustlers and Warners’ The Goldfinch, plus I hear Jillian Bell’s Brittany Runs a Marathon will be expanding even wider. I’ll cover most of those over at The Beat, but I’m sure I’ll have stuff to write about here as well.
0 notes
Text
Passive-Aggressive Partnership
Parts 1-9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 @coveofmemories @bleedreid @my-xomatosis-s
Part 13
-----
Spencer swallowed hard as he stepped onto the plane. Why did they have to be fighting right now? Why was he such an idiot when it came to women? As he turned the corner, he noticed that pretty much everyone was on board already with the exception of Morgan and Garcia. Y/N was there and “asleep” at the back - at least, she was feigning sleep. He could tell she was still awake. This was probably her ill-conceived way of avoiding conversation and awkward silences for now.
“Ready to go, my pretties,” Garcia exclaimed as she walked onto the jet with Morgan following closely behind - her bags in tow.
“Babygirl, what in the world do you pack in these things?” he asked, stumbling aboard and dropping her two duffel bags. “If I didn’t know you angel, I’d say it was a dead body.”
“Women have to prepare for every possible situation when they travel,” she said matter-of-factly. “Isn’t that right, ladies?”
All but Y/N answered absolutely yes. Although Spencer could see her eyebrows raise as she “slept.” Hotch decided to let everyone rest a bit while the jet took off; cases had been non-stop as of late, which meant that everyone on the team was getting sporadic sleep at best.
“Alright, everyone,” Hotch said after about 45 minutes in the air. “Let’s go over victimology.” Although she wasn’t a profiler, Y/N magically “woke up” and joined the group. “We have one boy, Deacon Fullerton, found dead in the woods from apparent strangulation, with minor cuts, and barely covered in leaves and hay from nearby.”
Spencer looked through the pictures of the crime scene and saw Y/N flinch. Granted, she worked with dead bodies directly, even more so than he did, but actually seeing them at the scene of the crime apparently knocked her for a loop. “There seems to be no sign of sexual assault,” he said, motioning back toward his girlfriend (Was she still his girlfriend? Not now, he thought to himself). ”Although you’ll figure that out for sure when we get there. If that’s the case though, it’s rare for a child victim. There’s normally some type of sexual motivation.”
“If there’s no sexual motivation, then what is the significance of targeting young boys?” Y/N asked the group.
“Could be a stand-in for someone that tortured him in his youth,” JJ said.
Emily spun around from where she was sitting to interject and caught sight of Y/N, taut with frustration. Something was definitely going on there. “We’re not even sure about that yet. What if this is truly a one-time offender?”
“Then we need to look close to home,” Morgan said sadly, knowing all too well that these kinds of cases were central to the family. The papers fell to his lap as they thought about what this boy went through. Y/N had been standing behind and between Morgan and Spencer, so when Morgan let the crime scene photos fall into his lap, she noticed something.
“Can I see those?” she asked Morgan.
“What do you see?” Rossi asked, noting her look of consternation. “Something wrong?”
She scoffed. “Well besides the inherent wrongness of this entire thing, I had a theory based on what I can see of the strangulation marks.”
“What’s significant about them?” Spencer asked.
Putting whatever difference they had to the side, Y/N reached over Spencer and pointed toward the brushing on the boy’s neck. “I can’t be 100 percent positive until I take measurements, but based on what I see, Deacon was killed by a child.”
“What?” Garcia asked, stunned out of her technical reverie and into the present moment. “You think this boy was killed by another child?”
The strangulation marks were pretty indicative of that. “They are very small. Don’t even reach fully across the neck. On top of that, they move around, as though the killer couldn’t get a good enough grasp and had to go back to try more than once.”
“Oh my god,” JJ replied. As a mother herself, it must’ve been difficult to imagine one child killing another; they were supposed to be pure. When they weren’t? That didn’t sit well.
For a few moments, everyone sat in silence, trying to digest what Y/N had just said - and that she was probably right even without having autopsied the victim yet. “When we touch down, Y/N, you’re going to head to the local family doctor.”
“What?” she laughed. “The town is so small they do autopsies there?”
Hotch shrugged, a smile creeping into the corner of his mouth. “Apparently yes. They have a downstairs area that the doctor uses whenever an autopsy is needed.”
“Oh dear lord,” she replied with a sigh. This was going to be really interesting.
Hotch continued as Y/N tried to deal with the fact that she was supposed to conduct on autopsy on a murder victim in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. “Garcia, you and Rossi are going to head to the station and hook up your system. After your done Dave, you can meet me behind the Hensley’s house where the body was found. We’ll go over the crime scene, while Morgan and Emily, you interview Cash and Annabelle and their kids if they’ll allow it, and Reid, you and JJ can interview Deacon’s parents, Austin and Charlotte.” As he closed the file, he sat back, an unsettling feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. “I have a feeling this case is going to be more complicated than meets the eye.”
-----
When they touched down, Y/N had one of the local officers drive her to the doctor’s office where she would conduct the autopsy. Upon looking at little Deacon, she could tell her assumptions were right. Deacon was killed by another child, and the cuts had pooled next to no blood, meaning they were inflicted after death. She would look through the debris and conduct the autopsy as she was supposed to and hopefully she’d find something else useful. But it wasn’t looking good. Picking up the phone, she called Spencer, to let him know about the cuts on Deacon’s body. “Hello,” he said, “hello.” He was having a hard time hearing. The wifi in this area sucked.
“It’s me, Spence. Without even autopsying him yet, I can tell you that your killer is definitely a child and the cuts were made after death. Now, I’m no profiler,” she said snarkily, “but given that it’s definitely a kid, the cuts being made after death would most likely mean that your killer is more prone to things like this in the future, right?”
“Yea,” he said, noting the sarcasm in her voice. He really hoped they could get through this. “Look, Y/N...”
“Later, Spence, okay?” She didn’t want to do this right now. Not over the phone. Considering how small the town was, they’d undoubtedly be rooming together tonight. They could talk then.
As he said goodbye and hung up the phone, he relayed the information to the rest of the team. “She’s right,” Hotch said. “This may have been the first time, but if we don’t stop them, it probably won’t be the last.”
-----
“Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton?” Reid asked as he and JJ knocked on the door. “My name is Doctor Spencer Reid, this is Agent Jennifer Jareau. We’re here to talk to you about your son.”
Charlotte’s face was reddened, her eyes puffy from crying. Spencer couldn’t count the amount of victims families that had that same look in their eyes. Like the world was over. That’s how she looked. Charlotte was completely devoid of hope and Austin seemed to be in a state of pure shock, looking back and forth unable to focus on anything in particular. “Come in,” he said softly. “Take a seat.”
When they entered the home, JJ first took notice of a picture that used to be on the wall, now shattered on the floor. There were also quite a few vases and dishes that were broken. The other thing she noticed was a picture frame above the fireplace - on one side was a picture of Deacon and the other was nothing, nothing but a small pink baby sock with the name Savannah written underneath it; they’d experience a miscarriage, pretty far along from what it seemed, and now their other baby had been taken away.
“Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton,” JJ said softly. “Tell us about your son. His daily life. What did he like to do? Who did he like to hang out with?”
“He was just like any other boy,” Austin cracked, grabbing his wife’s hand as she sobbed into his shoulder. “Every morning, we’d make him breakfast...”
“He always wanted pancakes,” his mother interjected, a quiver beginning in her lips. “After pancakes, or cereal if I didn’t have the time, one of us would drive him to school.”
“Once school was over,” Austin said, “We’d pick him up and after dinner and homework, normally around five or six o’clock depending on the day, he would get together with friends. A boy named Joseph. Joseph Parker, and occasionally Cash Jr. next door.”
“Then he’d go to sleep and do it all over again,” his mother sobbed, clutching her chest as she cried. “It was just like any other day. What happened to my baby?”
Neither agent could imagine what these parents were going through. They didn’t want to reveal just yet that their baby was taken away by someone else. They needed an answer of some kind before telling them that. “Just one more question,” Spencer said, “Was there anything Deacon said or did lately that was out of the normal? Was he pulling away from anyone?”
“He just seemed more withdrawn in general,” his father said, standing up and pulling a picture off the shelf. “He’s only 10, but he is...was growing up faster than his friends.” As he continued, his voice croaked, unable to comprehend that his little boy was gone from this world. “We just attributed it to growing up, puberty, you know? But he was pulling away from Joseph and Cash. Said they were both being mean.”
Both JJ and Spencer stood up from the couch and shook the parents’ hands. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch,” Spencer said.
“We’re going to find out who did this,” JJ declared. “I promise.”
Spencer gave JJ a side eye as they left the house. “You sure you should have promised something like that?”
“Spence, they lost their child. Their second one - the first before she was even born,” she said with tears in her eyes. “We have to find out who did this and why.”
“I’m afraid we may not have the answer to why even if we do find who did it,” he responded. He felt in his pocket for the phone, having felt it buzz while they were inside the house. It was a text from Y/N.
“What is it?” JJ asked, turning toward him as he stared down at the text in shock and disgust.
“She said she found a piece of tan material stuffed down Deacon’s throat. Placed there after he died.”
They both took a deep breath and closed their eyes, attempting to process the information. Whoever did this was deeply disturbed.
-----
As he looked out the window, he wondered if Deacon’s body was still there. Maybe he’d check tomorrow. See if any of the animals had gotten to it. He could bring his pocketknife again. He thought about how Deacon’s skin had opened under the knife. It looked cool. He wondered if it would look any different now that it had been a couple days, but he was pulled out of his daydream when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Same as they did every night. He was hear again. Hiding under the covers, he stilled himself. It’ll all be over soon.
#spencer reid#spencer reid x reader#spencer reid fanfiction#spencer reid fic#dontshootmespence#passive aggressive partnership
118 notes
·
View notes
Text
Pop Picks – April 1, 2020
What I’m listening to:
Out of nowhere and 8 years since his last recording, Bob Dylan last Thursday dropped a new single, the 17-minute (the longest Dylan song ever) “Murder Most Foul.” It’s ostensibly about the murder of President John F. Kennedy, but it’s bigger, more incisive, and elegiac than that alone. The music is gorgeous, his singing is lovely (a phrase rarely used for Dylan even in his prime), and he shows why he was deserving of his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s worth listening to again and again. The man is a cultural treasure and as relevant as ever.
What I’m reading:
The Milkman by Anna Burns, the 2018 Booker Prize winner, felt like slow going for the first bit, a leisurely stream of consciousness (not my favorite thing) first person tale of an adolescent girl during “the troubles” in 1970’s Northern Ireland. And then enough plot emerges to pull the reader along and tie the frequent and increasingly delightful digressions into the psychology of terror, sexual threat, adolescence, and a community (and world) that will create your narrative and your identity no matter what you know and believe about yourself. It’s layered, full of black humor, and powerful. It also somehow resonates for our times, where we navigate a newfound dread. It’s way more enjoyable than I just made it sound. One of my favorite reads of this young year.
What I’m watching:
I escaped back in time and started re-watching the first season of The West Wing. It is a vision – nostalgic, romantic, perhaps never true – of political leadership driven by higher purpose, American ideals, and moral intelligence. It does not pretend that politics can’t be craven, self-serving, and transactional, but the good guys mostly win in The West Wing, the acting is delightful, and Sorkin’s dialogue zings back and forth in the way of classic Hollywood movies of the 50s – smart, quick, funny. It reminds me – as has often happened during our current crisis – that most people are good and want their community to be a better place. When we appeal to our ideals instead of our fears, we are capable of great things. It’s a nice escape.
Archive
February 3, 2020
What I’m listening to:
Spending 21 hours on airplanes (Singapore to Tokyo to Boston) provides lots of time for listening and in an airport shop I picked up a Rolling Stones magazine that listed the top ten albums of the last ten years. I’ve been systematically working through them, starting with Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I just don’t know enough about hip hop and rap to offer any intelligent analysis of the music, and I have always thought of Kanye as kind of crazy (that may still be true), but the music is layered and extravagant and genre-bending. The lyrics seem fascinating and self-reflective, especially around fame and excess and Kanye’s specialty, self-promoting aggrandizement. Too many people I know remain stuck in the music of their youth and while I love those songs too, it feels important to listen to today’s music and what it has to tell us about life and lives far different than our own. And in a case like Twisted Fantasy, it’s just great music and that’s its own justification.
What I’m reading:
I went back to an old favorite, Richard Russo’s Straight Man. If you work in academia, this is a must-read and while written 22 years ago, it still rings true and current. The “hero” of the novel is William Henry Devereaux Jr., the chair of the English Department in a second-tier public university in small-town Pennsylvania. The book is laugh aloud funny (the opening chapter and story about old Red puts me in hysterics every time I read it) and like the best comedy, it taps into the complexity and pains of life in very substantial ways. Devereaux is insufferable in most ways and yet we root for him, mostly because A) he is so damn funny and B) is self-deprecating. But there is also a big heartedness in Russo’s writing and a recognition that everyone is the protagonist of their own story, and life’s essential dramas play out fully in the most modest of places and for the most ordinary of people.
What I’m watching:
I can’t pretend to have an abiding interest in cheerleading, but I devoured the six-episode Netflix series Cheer, about the cheerleading squad at Navarro College, a small two-year college in rural Texas that is a cheerleading powerhouse, winning the National Championship 14 times under the direction of Coach Monica Aldama, the Bill Belichick of cheering. I have a new respect and admiration for the athleticism and demands of cheering (and wonder about the cavalier handling of injuries), but the series is about so much more. It’s about team, about love, about grit and perseverance, bravery, trust, about kids and growing up and loss, and…well, it’s about almost everything and it will make you laugh and cry and exult. It is just terrific.
January 2, 2020
What I’m listening to:
I was never really an Amy Winehouse fan and I don’t listen to much jazz or blue-eyed soul. Recently, eight years after she died at only 27, I heard her single Tears Dry On Their Own and I was hooked (the song was on someone’s “ten things I’d want on a deserted island” list). Since then, I’ve been playing her almost every day. I started the documentary about her, Amy, and stopped. I didn’t much like her. Or, more accurately, I didn’t much like the signals of her own eventual destruction that were evident early on. I think it was D. H. Lawrence that once said “Trust the art, not the artist.” Sometimes it is better not to know too much and just relish the sheer artistry of the work. Winehouse’s Back to Black, which was named one of the best albums of 2007, is as fresh and painful and amazing 13 years later.
What I’m reading:
Alan Bennett’s lovely novella An Uncommon Reader is a what-if tale, wondering what it would mean if Queen Elizabeth II suddenly became a reader. Because of a lucked upon book mobile on palace grounds, she becomes just that, much to the consternation of her staff and with all kinds of delicious consequences, including curiosity, imagination, self-awareness, and growing disregard for pomp. With an ill-framed suggestion, reading becomes writing and provides a surprise ending. For all of us who love books, this is a finely wrought and delightful love poem to the power of books for readers and writers alike. Imagine if all our leaders were readers (sigh).
What I’m watching:
I’m a huge fan of many things – The National, Boston sports teams, BMW motorcycles, Pho – but there is a stage of life, typically adolescence, when fandom changes the universe, provides a lens to finally understand the world and, more importantly, yourself, in profound ways. My wife Pat would say Joni Mitchell did that for her. Gurinder Chadha’s wonderful film Blinded By The Light captures the power of discovery when Javed, the son of struggling Pakistani immigrants in a dead end place during a dead end time (the Thatcher period, from which Britain has never recovered: see Brexit), hears Springsteen and is forever changed. The movie, sometimes musical, sometimes comedy, and often bubbling with energy, has more heft than it might seem at first. There is pain in a father struggling to retain his dignity while he fails to provide, the father and son tension in so many immigrant families (I lived some of that), and what it means to be an outsider in the only culture you actually have ever known.
November 25, 2019
My pop picks are usually a combination of three things: what I am listening to, reading, and watching. But last week I happily combined all three. That is, I went to NYC last week and saw two shows. The first was Cyrano, starring Game of Thrones superstar Peter Dinklage in the title role, with Jasmine Cephas Jones as Roxanne. She was Peggy in the original Hamilton cast and has an amazing voice. The music was written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner, two members of my favorite band, The National, with lyrics by lead singer Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser. Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife, directs. Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play is light, dated, and melodramatic, but this production was delightful. Dinklage owns the stage, a master, and his deep bass voice, not all that great for singing, but commanding in the delivery of every line, was somehow a plaintive and resonant counterpoint to Cephas Jones’ soaring voice. In the original Cyrano, the title character’s large nose marks him as outsider and ”other,” but Dinklage was born with achondroplasia, the cause of his dwarfism, and there is a kind of resonance in his performance that feels like pain not acted, but known. Deeply. It takes this rather lightweight play and gives it depth. Even if it didn’t, not everything has to be deep and profound – there is joy in seeing something executed so darn well. Cyrano was delightfully satisfying.
The other show was the much lauded Aaron Sorkin rendition of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring another actor at the very top of his game, Ed Harris. This is a Mockingbird for our times, one in which iconic Atticus Finch’s idealistic “you have to live in someone else’s skin” feels naive in the face of hateful racism and anti-Semitism. The Black characters in the play get more voice, if not agency, in the stage play than they do in the book, especially housekeeper Calpurnia, who voices incredulity at Finch’s faith in his neighbors and reminds us that he does not pay the price of his patience. She does. And Tom Robinson, the Black man falsely accused of rape – “convicted at the moment he was accused,” Whatever West Wing was for Sorkin – and I dearly loved that show – this is a play for a broken United States, where racism abounds and does so with sanction by those in power. As our daughter said, “I think Trump broke Aaron Sorkin.” It was as powerful a thing I’ve seen on stage in years.
With both plays, I was reminded of the magic that is live theater.
October 31, 2019
What I’m listening to:
It drove his critics crazy that Obama was the coolest president we ever had and his summer 2019 playlist on Spotify simply confirms that reality. It has been on repeat for me. From Drake to Lizzo (God I love her) to Steely Dan to Raphael Saadiq to Sinatra (who I skip every time – I’m not buying the nostalgia), his carefully curated list reflects not only his infinite coolness, but the breadth of his interests and generosity of taste. I love the music, but I love even more the image of Michelle and him rocking out somewhere far from Washington’s madness, as much as I miss them both.
What I’m reading:
I struggled with Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo for the first 50 pages, worried that she’d drag out every tired trope of Mid-Eastern society, but I fell for her main characters and their journey as refugees from Syria to England. Parts of this book were hard to read and very dark, because that is the plight of so many refugees and she doesn’t shy away from those realities and the enormous toll they take on displaced people. It’s a hard read, but there is light too – in resilience, in love, in friendships, the small tender gestures of people tossed together in a heartless world. Lefteri volunteered in Greek refugee programs, spent a lot of interviewing people, and the book feels true, and importantly, heartfelt.
What I’m watching:
Soap opera meets Shakespeare, deliciously malevolent and operatic, Succession has been our favorite series this season. Loosely based on the Murdochs and their media empire (don’t believe the denials), this was our must watch television on Sunday nights, filling the void left by Game of Thrones. The acting is over-the-top good, the frequent comedy dark, the writing brilliant, and the music superb. We found ourselves quoting lines after every episode. Like the hilarious; “You don’t hear much about syphilis these days. Very much the Myspace of STDs.” Watch it so we can talk about that season 2 finale.
August 30, 2019
What I’m listening to:
I usually go to music here, but the New York Times new 1619 podcast is just terrific, as is the whole project, which observes the sale of the first enslaved human beings on our shores 400 years ago. The first episode, “The Fight for a True Democracy” is a remarkable overview (in a mere 44 minutes) of the centrality of racism and slavery in the American story over those 400 years. It should be mandatory listening in every high school in the country. I’m eager for the next episodes. Side note: I am addicted to The Daily podcast, which gives more color and detail to the NY Times stories I read in print (yes, print), and reminds me of how smart and thoughtful are those journalists who give us real news. We need them now more than ever.
What I’m reading:
Colson Whitehead has done it again. The Nickel Boys, his new novel, is a worthy successor to his masterpiece The Underground Railroad, and because it is closer to our time, based on the real-life horrors of a Florida reform school, and written a time of resurgent White Supremacy, it hits even harder and with more urgency than its predecessor. Maybe because we can read Underground Railroad with a sense of “that was history,” but one can’t read Nickel Boys without the lurking feeling that such horrors persist today and the monsters that perpetrate such horrors walk among us. They often hold press conferences.
What I’m watching:
Queer Eye, the Netflix remake of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy some ten years later, is wondrously entertaining, but it also feels adroitly aligned with our dysfunctional times. Episode three has a conversation with Karamo Brown, one of the fab five, and a Georgia small town cop (and Trump supporter) that feels unscripted and unexpected and reminds us of how little actual conversation seems to be taking place in our divided country. Oh, for more car rides such as the one they take in that moment, when a chasm is bridged, if only for a few minutes. Set in the South, it is often a refreshing and affirming response to what it means to be male at a time of toxic masculinity and the overdue catharsis and pain of the #MeToo movement. Did I mention? It’s really fun.
July 1, 2019
What I’m listening to:
The National remains my favorite band and probably 50% of my listening time is a National album or playlist. Their new album I Am Easy To Find feels like a turning point record for the band, going from the moody, outsider introspection and doubt of lead singer Matt Berninger to something that feels more adult, sophisticated, and wiser. I might have titled it Women Help The Band Grow Up. Matt is no longer the center of The National’s universe and he frequently cedes the mic to the many women who accompany and often lead on the long, their longest, album. They include Gail Ann Dorsey (who sang with Bowie for a long time), who is amazing, and a number of the songs were written by Carin Besser, Berninger’s wife. I especially love the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the arrangements, and the sheer complexity and coherence of the work. It still amazes me when I meet someone who does not know The National. My heart breaks for them just a little.
What I’m reading:
Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad through the lens of a captive Trojan queen, Briseis. As a reviewer in The Atlantic writes, it answers the question “What does war mean to women?” We know the answer and it has always been true, whether it is the casual and assumed rape of captive women in this ancient war story or the use of rape in modern day Congo, Syria, or any other conflict zone. Yet literature almost never gives voice to the women – almost always minor characters at best — and their unspeakable suffering. Barker does it here for Briseis, for Hector’s wife Andromache, and for the other women who understand that the death of their men is tragedy, but what they then endure is worse. Think of it ancient literature having its own #MeToo moment. The NY Times’ Geraldine Brooks did not much like the novel. I did. Very much.
What I’m watching:
The BBC-HBO limited series Years and Years is breathtaking, scary, and absolutely familiar. It’s as if Black Mirrorand Children of Men had a baby and it precisely captures the zeitgeist, the current sense that the world is spinning out of control and things are coming at us too fast. It is a near future (Trump has been re-elected and Brexit has occurred finally)…not dystopia exactly, but damn close. The closing scene of last week’s first episode (there are 6 episodes and it’s on every Monday) shows nuclear war breaking out between China and the U.S. Yikes! The scope of this show is wide and there is a big, baggy feel to it – but I love the ambition even if I’m not looking forward to the nightmares.
May 19, 2019
What I’m listening to:
I usually go to music here, but I was really moved by this podcast of a Davis Brooks talk at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/david-brooks-quest-moral-life. While I have long found myself distant from his political stance, he has come through a dark night of the soul and emerged with a wonderful clarity about calling, community, and not happiness (that most superficial of goals), but fulfillment and meaning, found in community and human kinship of many kinds. I immediately sent it to my kids.
What I’m reading:
Susan Orlean’s wonderful The Library Book, a love song to libraries told through the story of the LA Central Library. It brought back cherished memories of my many hours in beloved libraries — as a kid in the Waltham Public Library, a high schooler in the Farber Library at Brandeis (Lil Farber years later became a mentor of mine), and the cathedral-like Bapst Library at BC when I was a graduate student. Yes, I was a nerd. This is a love song to books certainly, but a reminder that libraries are so, so much more. It is a reminder that libraries are less about a place or being a repository of information and, like America at its best, an idea and ideal. By the way, oh to write like her.
What I’m watching:
What else? Game of Thrones, like any sensible human being. This last season is disappointing in many ways and the drop off in the writing post George R.R. Martin is as clear as was the drop off in the post-Sorkin West Wing. I would be willing to bet that if Martin has been writing the last season, Sansa and Tyrion would have committed suicide in the crypt. That said, we fans are deeply invested and even the flaws are giving us so much to discuss and debate. In that sense, the real gift of this last season is the enjoyment between episodes, like the old pre-streaming days when we all arrived at work after the latest episode of the Sopranos to discuss what we had all seen the night before. I will say this, the last two episodes — full of battle and gore – have been visually stunning. Whether the torches of the Dothraki being extinguished in the distance or Arya riding through rubble and flame on a white horse, rarely has the series ascended to such visual grandeur.
March 28, 2019
What I’m listening to:
There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.
What I’m reading:
Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous.
What I’m watching:
A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.
February 11, 2019
What I’m listening to:
Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.
What I’m reading:
Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.
What I’m watching:
Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.
January 3, 2019
What I’m listening to:
My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.
What I’m reading:
Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.
What I’m watching:
Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.
December 4, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.
What I’m reading:
I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.
What I’m watching:
Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star. The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.
October 15, 2018
What I’m listening to:
We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.
What I’m reading:
Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.
What I’m watching:
Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.
September 7, 2018
What I’m listening to:
With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.
What I’m reading:
Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.
What I’m watching:
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.
August 16, 2018
What I’m listening to:
In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.
What I’m reading:
John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.
What I’m watching:
I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching. And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.
July 23, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.
What I’m reading:
Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.
What I’m watching:
Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.
June 11, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.
What I’m reading:
The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.
What I’m watching:
The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.
May 24, 2018
What I’m listening to:
I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.
What I’m reading:
Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia. It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.
What I’m watching:
I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.
April 27, 2018
What I’m listening to:
I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan. Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.
What I’m reading:
I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.
What I’m watching:
I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.
March 18, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.
What I’m reading:
Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.
What I’m watching:
Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news.
March 8, 2018
What I’m listening to:
We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.
What I’m reading:
Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.
What I’m watching:
The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.
February 12, 2018
What I’m listening to:
So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.
What I’m reading:
I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.
What I’m watching:
We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.
January 15, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.
What I’m reading:
A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.
What I’m watching:
David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.
December 22, 2017
What I’m reading:
Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.
What I’m watching:
Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.
What I’m listening to:
A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.
November 14, 2017
What I’m watching:
Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?
What I’m reading:
Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.
What I’m listening to:
Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.
November 3, 2017
What I’m reading:
Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.
What I’m watching:
We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.
What I’m listening to:
I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.
September 26, 2017
What I’m reading:
Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.
What I’m watching:
HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.
What I’m listening to:
The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J from President's Corner https://ift.tt/2w619QF
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
Pop Picks – February 3, 2020
What I’m listening to:
Spending 21 hours on airplanes (Singapore to Tokyo to Boston) provides lots of time for listening and in an airport shop I picked up a Rolling Stones magazine that listed the top ten albums of the last ten years. I’ve been systematically working through them, starting with Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I just don’t know enough about hip hop and rap to offer any intelligent analysis of the music, and I have always thought of Kanye as kind of crazy (that may still be true), but the music is layered and extravagant and genre-bending. The lyrics seem fascinating and self-reflective, especially around fame and excess and Kanye’s specialty, self-promoting aggrandizement. Too many people I know remain stuck in the music of their youth and while I love those songs too, it feels important to listen to today’s music and what it has to tell us about life and lives far different than our own. And in a case like Twisted Fantasy, it’s just great music and that’s its own justification.
What I’m reading:
I went back to an old favorite, Richard Russo’s Straight Man. If you work in academia, this is a must-read and while written 22 years ago, it still rings true and current. The “hero” of the novel is William Henry Devereaux Jr., the chair of the English Department in a second-tier public university in small-town Pennsylvania. The book is laugh aloud funny (the opening chapter and story about old Red puts me in hysterics every time I read it) and like the best comedy, it taps into the complexity and pains of life in very substantial ways. Devereaux is insufferable in most ways and yet we root for him, mostly because A) he is so damn funny and B) is self-deprecating. But there is also a big heartedness in Russo’s writing and a recognition that everyone is the protagonist of their own story, and life’s essential dramas play out fully in the most modest of places and for the most ordinary of people.
What I’m watching:
I can’t pretend to have an abiding interest in cheerleading, but I devoured the six-episode Netflix series Cheer, about the cheerleading squad at Navarro College, a small two-year college in rural Texas that is a cheerleading powerhouse, winning the National Championship 14 times under the direction of Coach Monica Aldama, the Bill Belichick of cheering. I have a new respect and admiration for the athleticism and demands of cheering (and wonder about the cavalier handling of injuries), but the series is about so much more. It’s about team, about love, about grit and perseverance, bravery, trust, about kids and growing up and loss, and…well, it’s about almost everything and it will make you laugh and cry and exult. It is just terrific.
Archive
January 2, 2020
What I’m listening to:
I was never really an Amy Winehouse fan and I don’t listen to much jazz or blue-eyed soul. Recently, eight years after she died at only 27, I heard her single Tears Dry On Their Own and I was hooked (the song was on someone’s “ten things I’d want on a deserted island” list). Since then, I’ve been playing her almost every day. I started the documentary about her, Amy, and stopped. I didn’t much like her. Or, more accurately, I didn’t much like the signals of her own eventual destruction that were evident early on. I think it was D. H. Lawrence that once said “Trust the art, not the artist.” Sometimes it is better not to know too much and just relish the sheer artistry of the work. Winehouse’s Back to Black, which was named one of the best albums of 2007, is as fresh and painful and amazing 13 years later.
What I’m reading:
Alan Bennett’s lovely novella An Uncommon Reader is a what-if tale, wondering what it would mean if Queen Elizabeth II suddenly became a reader. Because of a lucked upon book mobile on palace grounds, she becomes just that, much to the consternation of her staff and with all kinds of delicious consequences, including curiosity, imagination, self-awareness, and growing disregard for pomp. With an ill-framed suggestion, reading becomes writing and provides a surprise ending. For all of us who love books, this is a finely wrought and delightful love poem to the power of books for readers and writers alike. Imagine if all our leaders were readers (sigh).
What I’m watching:
I’m a huge fan of many things – The National, Boston sports teams, BMW motorcycles, Pho – but there is a stage of life, typically adolescence, when fandom changes the universe, provides a lens to finally understand the world and, more importantly, yourself, in profound ways. My wife Pat would say Joni Mitchell did that for her. Gurinder Chadha’s wonderful film Blinded By The Light captures the power of discovery when Javed, the son of struggling Pakistani immigrants in a dead end place during a dead end time (the Thatcher period, from which Britain has never recovered: see Brexit), hears Springsteen and is forever changed. The movie, sometimes musical, sometimes comedy, and often bubbling with energy, has more heft than it might seem at first. There is pain in a father struggling to retain his dignity while he fails to provide, the father and son tension in so many immigrant families (I lived some of that), and what it means to be an outsider in the only culture you actually have ever known.
November 25, 2019
My pop picks are usually a combination of three things: what I am listening to, reading, and watching. But last week I happily combined all three. That is, I went to NYC last week and saw two shows. The first was Cyrano, starring Game of Thrones superstar Peter Dinklage in the title role, with Jasmine Cephas Jones as Roxanne. She was Peggy in the original Hamilton cast and has an amazing voice. The music was written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner, two members of my favorite band, The National, with lyrics by lead singer Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser. Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife, directs. Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play is light, dated, and melodramatic, but this production was delightful. Dinklage owns the stage, a master, and his deep bass voice, not all that great for singing, but commanding in the delivery of every line, was somehow a plaintive and resonant counterpoint to Cephas Jones’ soaring voice. In the original Cyrano, the title character’s large nose marks him as outsider and ”other,” but Dinklage was born with achondroplasia, the cause of his dwarfism, and there is a kind of resonance in his performance that feels like pain not acted, but known. Deeply. It takes this rather lightweight play and gives it depth. Even if it didn’t, not everything has to be deep and profound – there is joy in seeing something executed so darn well. Cyrano was delightfully satisfying.
The other show was the much lauded Aaron Sorkin rendition of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring another actor at the very top of his game, Ed Harris. This is a Mockingbird for our times, one in which iconic Atticus Finch’s idealistic “you have to live in someone else’s skin” feels naive in the face of hateful racism and anti-Semitism. The Black characters in the play get more voice, if not agency, in the stage play than they do in the book, especially housekeeper Calpurnia, who voices incredulity at Finch’s faith in his neighbors and reminds us that he does not pay the price of his patience. She does. And Tom Robinson, the Black man falsely accused of rape – “convicted at the moment he was accused,” Whatever West Wing was for Sorkin – and I dearly loved that show – this is a play for a broken United States, where racism abounds and does so with sanction by those in power. As our daughter said, “I think Trump broke Aaron Sorkin.” It was as powerful a thing I’ve seen on stage in years.
With both plays, I was reminded of the magic that is live theater.
October 31, 2019
What I’m listening to:
It drove his critics crazy that Obama was the coolest president we ever had and his summer 2019 playlist on Spotify simply confirms that reality. It has been on repeat for me. From Drake to Lizzo (God I love her) to Steely Dan to Raphael Saadiq to Sinatra (who I skip every time – I’m not buying the nostalgia), his carefully curated list reflects not only his infinite coolness, but the breadth of his interests and generosity of taste. I love the music, but I love even more the image of Michelle and him rocking out somewhere far from Washington’s madness, as much as I miss them both.
What I’m reading:
I struggled with Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo for the first 50 pages, worried that she’d drag out every tired trope of Mid-Eastern society, but I fell for her main characters and their journey as refugees from Syria to England. Parts of this book were hard to read and very dark, because that is the plight of so many refugees and she doesn’t shy away from those realities and the enormous toll they take on displaced people. It’s a hard read, but there is light too – in resilience, in love, in friendships, the small tender gestures of people tossed together in a heartless world. Lefteri volunteered in Greek refugee programs, spent a lot of interviewing people, and the book feels true, and importantly, heartfelt.
What I’m watching:
Soap opera meets Shakespeare, deliciously malevolent and operatic, Succession has been our favorite series this season. Loosely based on the Murdochs and their media empire (don’t believe the denials), this was our must watch television on Sunday nights, filling the void left by Game of Thrones. The acting is over-the-top good, the frequent comedy dark, the writing brilliant, and the music superb. We found ourselves quoting lines after every episode. Like the hilarious; “You don’t hear much about syphilis these days. Very much the Myspace of STDs.” Watch it so we can talk about that season 2 finale.
August 30, 2019
What I’m listening to:
I usually go to music here, but the New York Times new 1619 podcast is just terrific, as is the whole project, which observes the sale of the first enslaved human beings on our shores 400 years ago. The first episode, “The Fight for a True Democracy” is a remarkable overview (in a mere 44 minutes) of the centrality of racism and slavery in the American story over those 400 years. It should be mandatory listening in every high school in the country. I’m eager for the next episodes. Side note: I am addicted to The Daily podcast, which gives more color and detail to the NY Times stories I read in print (yes, print), and reminds me of how smart and thoughtful are those journalists who give us real news. We need them now more than ever.
What I’m reading:
Colson Whitehead has done it again. The Nickel Boys, his new novel, is a worthy successor to his masterpiece The Underground Railroad, and because it is closer to our time, based on the real-life horrors of a Florida reform school, and written a time of resurgent White Supremacy, it hits even harder and with more urgency than its predecessor. Maybe because we can read Underground Railroad with a sense of “that was history,” but one can’t read Nickel Boys without the lurking feeling that such horrors persist today and the monsters that perpetrate such horrors walk among us. They often hold press conferences.
What I’m watching:
Queer Eye, the Netflix remake of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy some ten years later, is wondrously entertaining, but it also feels adroitly aligned with our dysfunctional times. Episode three has a conversation with Karamo Brown, one of the fab five, and a Georgia small town cop (and Trump supporter) that feels unscripted and unexpected and reminds us of how little actual conversation seems to be taking place in our divided country. Oh, for more car rides such as the one they take in that moment, when a chasm is bridged, if only for a few minutes. Set in the South, it is often a refreshing and affirming response to what it means to be male at a time of toxic masculinity and the overdue catharsis and pain of the #MeToo movement. Did I mention? It’s really fun.
July 1, 2019
What I’m listening to:
The National remains my favorite band and probably 50% of my listening time is a National album or playlist. Their new album I Am Easy To Find feels like a turning point record for the band, going from the moody, outsider introspection and doubt of lead singer Matt Berninger to something that feels more adult, sophisticated, and wiser. I might have titled it Women Help The Band Grow Up. Matt is no longer the center of The National’s universe and he frequently cedes the mic to the many women who accompany and often lead on the long, their longest, album. They include Gail Ann Dorsey (who sang with Bowie for a long time), who is amazing, and a number of the songs were written by Carin Besser, Berninger’s wife. I especially love the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the arrangements, and the sheer complexity and coherence of the work. It still amazes me when I meet someone who does not know The National. My heart breaks for them just a little.
What I’m reading:
Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad through the lens of a captive Trojan queen, Briseis. As a reviewer in The Atlantic writes, it answers the question “What does war mean to women?” We know the answer and it has always been true, whether it is the casual and assumed rape of captive women in this ancient war story or the use of rape in modern day Congo, Syria, or any other conflict zone. Yet literature almost never gives voice to the women – almost always minor characters at best — and their unspeakable suffering. Barker does it here for Briseis, for Hector’s wife Andromache, and for the other women who understand that the death of their men is tragedy, but what they then endure is worse. Think of it ancient literature having its own #MeToo moment. The NY Times’ Geraldine Brooks did not much like the novel. I did. Very much.
What I’m watching:
The BBC-HBO limited series Years and Years is breathtaking, scary, and absolutely familiar. It’s as if Black Mirrorand Children of Men had a baby and it precisely captures the zeitgeist, the current sense that the world is spinning out of control and things are coming at us too fast. It is a near future (Trump has been re-elected and Brexit has occurred finally)…not dystopia exactly, but damn close. The closing scene of last week’s first episode (there are 6 episodes and it’s on every Monday) shows nuclear war breaking out between China and the U.S. Yikes! The scope of this show is wide and there is a big, baggy feel to it – but I love the ambition even if I’m not looking forward to the nightmares.
May 19, 2019
What I’m listening to:
I usually go to music here, but I was really moved by this podcast of a Davis Brooks talk at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/david-brooks-quest-moral-life. While I have long found myself distant from his political stance, he has come through a dark night of the soul and emerged with a wonderful clarity about calling, community, and not happiness (that most superficial of goals), but fulfillment and meaning, found in community and human kinship of many kinds. I immediately sent it to my kids.
What I’m reading:
Susan Orlean’s wonderful The Library Book, a love song to libraries told through the story of the LA Central Library. It brought back cherished memories of my many hours in beloved libraries — as a kid in the Waltham Public Library, a high schooler in the Farber Library at Brandeis (Lil Farber years later became a mentor of mine), and the cathedral-like Bapst Library at BC when I was a graduate student. Yes, I was a nerd. This is a love song to books certainly, but a reminder that libraries are so, so much more. It is a reminder that libraries are less about a place or being a repository of information and, like America at its best, an idea and ideal. By the way, oh to write like her.
What I’m watching:
What else? Game of Thrones, like any sensible human being. This last season is disappointing in many ways and the drop off in the writing post George R.R. Martin is as clear as was the drop off in the post-Sorkin West Wing. I would be willing to bet that if Martin has been writing the last season, Sansa and Tyrion would have committed suicide in the crypt. That said, we fans are deeply invested and even the flaws are giving us so much to discuss and debate. In that sense, the real gift of this last season is the enjoyment between episodes, like the old pre-streaming days when we all arrived at work after the latest episode of the Sopranos to discuss what we had all seen the night before. I will say this, the last two episodes — full of battle and gore – have been visually stunning. Whether the torches of the Dothraki being extinguished in the distance or Arya riding through rubble and flame on a white horse, rarely has the series ascended to such visual grandeur.
March 28, 2019
What I’m listening to:
There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.
What I’m reading:
Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous.
What I’m watching:
A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.
February 11, 2019
What I’m listening to:
Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.
What I’m reading:
Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.
What I’m watching:
Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.
January 3, 2019
What I’m listening to:
My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.
What I’m reading:
Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.
What I’m watching:
Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.
December 4, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.
What I’m reading:
I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.
What I’m watching:
Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star. The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.
October 15, 2018
What I’m listening to:
We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.
What I’m reading:
Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.
What I’m watching:
Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.
September 7, 2018
What I’m listening to:
With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.
What I’m reading:
Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.
What I’m watching:
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.
August 16, 2018
What I’m listening to:
In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.
What I’m reading:
John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.
What I’m watching:
I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching. And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.
July 23, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.
What I’m reading:
Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.
What I’m watching:
Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.
June 11, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.
What I’m reading:
The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.
What I’m watching:
The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.
May 24, 2018
What I’m listening to:
I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.
What I’m reading:
Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia. It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.
What I’m watching:
I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.
April 27, 2018
What I’m listening to:
I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan. Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.
What I’m reading:
I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.
What I’m watching:
I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.
March 18, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.
What I’m reading:
Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.
What I’m watching:
Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news.
March 8, 2018
What I’m listening to:
We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.
What I’m reading:
Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.
What I’m watching:
The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.
February 12, 2018
What I’m listening to:
So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.
What I’m reading:
I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.
What I’m watching:
We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.
January 15, 2018
What I’m listening to:
Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.
What I’m reading:
A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.
What I’m watching:
David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.
December 22, 2017
What I’m reading:
Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.
What I’m watching:
Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.
What I’m listening to:
A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.
November 14, 2017
What I’m watching:
Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?
What I’m reading:
Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.
What I’m listening to:
Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.
November 3, 2017
What I’m reading:
Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.
What I’m watching:
We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.
What I’m listening to:
I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.
September 26, 2017
What I’m reading:
Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.
What I’m watching:
HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.
What I’m listening to:
The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J from President's Corner https://ift.tt/2UlsRCQ
via IFTTT
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
