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leafs-lover · 1 year

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Too Far Gone - Part Fifty Two

A/N: I read/ edited it, made a fair bit of tweaks and didn't review it, so ignore any grammatical issues.

Warnings: brief mentions of swearing, drinking and drugs. smut, therapy, feeling worthless or unworthy

Series Masterlist

Word Count: 5400

It was a rough night. It took some time for Auston to venture down the hall and when he did he saw the spare bedroom door was shut and the lights were off. Auston knew she was awake, he could hear her crying.

As much as he wanted to try and talk to her, he knew he didn’t have the mental capacity for it. He had been keeping everything in for far too long, he couldn’t anymore. He hadn’t even finished brushing his teeth when he felt tears sting his eyes, and barely managed to climb under the duvet before they were rippling down his face.

He didn’t sleep well. Tossing and turning, waking up what felt like every hour. His heart ached, head throbbed, stomach churned, and his mind spun, replaying everything that happened. He spent so long wanting to hear her say that, how could that be his response?

Now at 6:14 in the morning, Auston spent the last hour creating a mile-long list of questions, arguments and counter-arguements. He contemplated walking in her room and just asking them – he knows she has been laying awake and drowning in the abyss - but he also knows the words wont come out the way he wants. Emotions are still too high.

Tia heard him get up at 6:28. She heard the footsteps down the hall and the coffee grinder whirl. Shortly after she could smell the freshly brewed coffee and heard cupboards and drawers open and shut. Around 7:19 she heard Taylour’s door creak open and him excitedly burst down the hall. She heard him squeal when he saw Auston in the kitchen, heard Auston laugh and some muffled words before the TV turned on. She lay staring up at the ceiling, doing everything to avoid him for as long as possible.

When she finally emerged her glasses were on which drew attention to the bright red that surrounded her eyes. The bags underneath are dark and heavy, holding onto a weight Auston didn’t know was possible. Her t-shirt was inside out and tucked into her leggings, mismatched socks were on her feet.

Auston wasn’t surprised that Tia remained in her room as long as she did. He wasn’t surprised by it, but he hated it. Hated how awkward it had become between them within a matter of minutes. What’s worse is he knows what comes next because they’ve been down this road before - tiptoeing around the other person, over-analyzing everything. It was hell. It took them far too long to break free of that and get to a point where they could tell the other anything but more importantly wanted to. And now neither one can say anything; instead, a bubble of silence builds around them, pushing all the air out.

He wished he could tell her it would all be okay, but he knew she’d put her walls up, her defense mechanism designed to block everyone and everything out. There was no way anyone could get through, except for one person.

“Mommy!” Taylour runs over the second he sees her. He has a wide smile on his face, and his curls that have returned bounce with every stride. “Daddy says I’m going to Fweddies house!”

“Really? That sounds fun.”

Auston can hear the panic in her voice. She thought Taylour would be a buffer all morning and during the ride to therapy, that they would not have to be alone.

“Mhm.” He nods.

“Come choose some toys to bring.”

Auston walks around the living room and picks up a firetruck and Paw Patrol figurines and shoves them into a backpack. He proceeds to scour the living room, looking for Rubble and Zuma – he knows Taylour will want to bring them all.

“MY TOWER!” He squeals with an enthusiastic jump. “Fweddie will love my tower!”

“That’s too big, they have to fit in this bag.”

“Oh.”

Auston moves to the couch and starts lifting cushions and pillows until he finds the remaining Paw Patrol characters wedged inside.

“Can I bring my crayons?”

“Yeah. I’ll go grab some colouring books.” Auston sets the bag down on the couch and starts down the hall to Taylour’s room. “Can you show Mommy where the crayons are?”

Taylour walks over to the pantry and points to the top for Tia. “There Mommy.”

Ever since Taylour decided the back of his door was a perfect spot for a mural, Auston decided crayons, paint, stickers, all arts and craft supplies, were going to be moved out of the reach of Taylour.

Tia walks over and opens the cupboard above the fridge. Standing on her tiptoes her hand swats around until she feels the shape of them through a plastic bag.

"Just killing the turtles,” she mumbles to herself.

Working in an industry that is a major contributor to waste and environmental impacts, Tia tries to do what she can to counteract that. Breathing new life into old clothes, donating what she can, and reusing leftover cuttings for something else. On top of that she has reusable water bottles, coffee tumblers, reusable straws, and every time she goes shopping she uses cloth bags (many of which she made herself). A plastic grocery bag is not something that would be found at Tia’s apartment.

“What’s killing the turtles Mommy?” Taylour gasps.

“Oh...um...well.” Tia fumbles over herself a little. Normally she loves his inquistive mind, questioning everything he sees and hears, but this is a topic she would have left for any other day. She bends down and picks him up and sets him on the counter. Each of her hands land on either side of his legs, and she softens her voice.

“When plastics bags get in the ocean, sometimes turtles eat them and then they get sick."

“Why do the turtles eat them?”

“They confuse the plastic bag for jellyfish, some turtles eat jellyfish.”

“What?” Taylour’s voice goes up in pitch and his eyes widen. “Why do they eat jellyfish?”

“Uh, well,” Tia laughs uncomfortably. “Just like you, animals need food to get energy. Elephants, beavers and horses only eat plants, and some animals, like turtles, eat both plants and other animals.”

Taylour takes a second to think over her answer. “But if they don’t have to eat the animals, why do they?” he finally asks. Apart from confusion blanketing his face, Tia can hear the hurt in his words. His voice quivers and a thin layer of tears coats his eyes.

Tia takes a deep breath. “Some animals just do bud.”

Auston walks back in carrying Geoffery, Marshall, a couple of colouring books and another shirt – three-year-olds tend to be messy – and sets them on the counter. Completely unaware of the impact this conversation is having on Taylour he says, “You eat animals.”

“What?!” His voice breaks. Tia purses her lips and lets her head fall. She has never hated Auston, but in that moment she thinks she might.

“Chicken comes from chicken, and beef,” Auston shuffles around the condo. He grabs the backpack and is on his way back to the kitchen when he sees Taylour’s face and realizes what he’s done. He stops dead in his tracks and sighs.

“I don’t want to eat chickens, I like them. I pet the chickens at the farm and -”

“Hey.” Tia brings a hand up and gently wipes away a few of his tears. Keeping her hand on his cheek she smiles at him. “You don’t have to eat chicken if you don’t want to.”

Taylour is quick to jump in her arms and bury his head against her neck. “I don’t want to eat animals Mommy.” He releases a soft sniffle and tangles his hands in her hair.

“Oh Taylour.” One hand slides around him to support his weight and the other gently soothes over his back, then places a soft kiss to his temple. She hears him sniffle a few more times and she bounces him in her arms, and sends a frightening glare toward Auston.

Taylour’s mood shifted after that. He was mopey and clingy; he didn’t even leave Tia when she had to brush her teeth. When the time came for him to take him to Fred’s, Taylour said he didn’t want to go and clung to Tia to a point Auston almost cancelled his plans.

When Fred opened the door, he crouched down to welcome what should be a fiery ball of energy to his arms. Instead, Taylour took a few steps forward and stopped once he hit Fred’s chest, making no attempt to give him a hug.

“Hi Fweddie.” He huffs against his shoulder.

“Hey Taylour.” Taylour may not return the hug, but Fred wraps his arms around his little body and holds him in tight. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.”

The second Fred’s arms fall, Taylour walks by him. He kicks his shoes off and slowly saunters in the apartment, collapsing face first on the couch. Auston always knew Taylour took some his mothers sass and flair for the dramatics, he didn’t realize just how much until this moment.

“What is going on with him?” Fred’s knees crack as he stands up, his eyes still trained on Taylour.

“I’m murdering turtles and he eats chickens.” Auston runs a hand down the side of his face.

“What?” Fred laughs, he turns toward Auston with a perplexed look on his face.

“I don’t know he’s three.” Auston dismisses his friend, setting Taylour’s backpack inside the door.

“You look worse than him.”

“Thanks for noticing.” Auston says a little pointedly.

“Are you going to tell me? I assume your problems are bigger than turtles and chickens.”

There is a hint of sarcasm in his tone, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Auston. His dark eyes narrow and he exhales, heavier than he needs to. “It’s been a wild 24 hours and I’m running late.”

“Yeah, no, it’s fine.” Fred awkwardly stammers out. As if it wasn’t weird to wake up to a message with a 5:07am timestamp asking him to watch Taylour (Fred didn’t even know Auston had Taylour and that’s the kind of thing that usually comes up) the one-lettered response he received later triggered an uneasy feeling. Add in the way Auston can’t even look him in the eye, is barely able to form a sentence and looks like he’s ready to vomit, and ever single bell and whistle is going off. “We’ll be fine.”

“K. Thanks. Bye Taylour.”

Auston didn’t wait for Taylour’s response, which is good because he didn’t have one. He didn’t even acknowledge Auston left. While Fred knows his three-year-old world is crashing around him, he knows it pales in comparison to whatever Auston is going through. The last time his friend acted like this was when he first found out about Taylour, and while he’s fairly certain it’s not another secret baby he doesn’t want to wait to find out. He’s hell-bent on getting the answer from Taylour even if it means ice cream at 10am.

Tia thought it was odd Auston left Taylour with Fred but she tried to remind herself Auston wasn’t expecting Taylour today. Maybe he had plans, grocery shopping, a hair cut, something he felt would be easier without a three-year-old, that’s why she didn’t question it (that and she didn’t care to speak to him). What really threw her off was when the arrived at Heidi’s. Auston didn’t just stop the car, he turned it off. He grabbed his phone from the centre console and slid it in his pocket and reached for the handle.

“Auston.” Heidi greets them when they step in. After hanging his coat on the rack he turns to Tia and takes hers and does the same. “I didn’t know you were coming today. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Tia kissed me.” Auston says bluntly.

“Well, I guess we have a lot to talk about.”

Auston and Tia each take a seat on the couch, only a foot separates them, but it feels like miles. She sits towards the end with her ankles crossed and clasps her hand in her lap. Her eyes drop to her feet, and she exhales, not exactly how she planned on telling Heidi.

Now that she knows, Tia starts at the beginning. Three days ago, when she knew she had to do something. Two days ago, when she borrowed Auston’s car and went to Ikea then to pick up Max to help her unload everything. She rambles her way through, Heidi occasionally looking down to scribble in a notepad. It almost feels rehearsed the way she gets through it all, only pausing when she gets to yesterday. That takes a bit more time, her voice breaks and she needs a few deep breaths, but eventually gets to the end leaving out no detail.

“Why did you think Auston felt the same way?” Heidi asks once Tia is done.

“Everyone seemed to think it – my dad, Fred…I guess when people are constantly suggesting it, its hard not to believe it.”

“Could it also be that a part of you wanted to believe it?” Heidi prompts from behind her thick framed lenses.

“Yeah,” Tia sniffles and nods. “Maybe.”

“What about you Auston?” Heidi directs her gaze to him. “You have had feelings for Tia over the past year?”

Auston is not a stranger to therapy. Five weeks after Zurich his parents took him to one in Scottsdale, by the time he left in August he hadn’t really noticed a change. He didn’t plan on continuing with it, but his dad joined him in Toronto for his rookie year to help him adjust to life in the NHL and helped Auston find someone. He doesn’t know when it happened, but eventually there was a change. Sessions went from once a week, to once every two, to once a month, to even more time between. Auston wasn’t back to himself, he doesn’t know if he ever made it there, he had processed it as best he could.

Then Tia came waltzing back into his life with their wild and joyful two-year-old and the next day Auston was back on his therapist’s couch.

“Yeah. More than once.”

“And why do you think it didn’t work any of those other times?”

Auston scoffs and rolls his eyes.

“Where do I even start? We were selfish and didn’t account for everything that had changed between us, within us. We were clinging to the past as if it was something we had to recreate regardless of the consequences.” He tries to hide the pain in his words, but it seeps out through every pore.

“Do you feel that way now? Like you’re trying to relive the past?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I did,” he admits truthfully.

Tia tries to keep her composure, but she’d given up on all hope 24-hours ago, and hearing him say the door isn’t completely closed sends her heart into an erratic rhythm.

“You seem surprised by that Tia,” Heidi drops her notepad on her denim clad thigh and shifts her gaze.

“Yes. After what happened I...” Tia trails off to gather her thoughts. “One of his first question was if I’m still taking my meds, I assumed he thought I had stopped and wasn’t thinking rationally.”

“Interesting, that was your first thought when she told you her feelings,” Heidi premises. But it wasn’t Auston’s first thought.

His first was that he must have misheard her, surely she didn’t tell him she had feelings. Second was how relieved he was to hear her say it and his third was how he wanted to hear it again. Her mental health wasn’t his first thought, but when he opened his mouth to talk that was what came out.

“Is her mental health a concern to you.

“After everything that’s happened how could it not be? Doesn’t matter what our relationship status is, she will always be important to me.”

“Are her mental health problems too much for you to overcome?”

“No, definitely not.” Auston answers quickly. He subconsciously seeks out her hand, at his touch her fingers release and she lets him intertwine his fingers with hers. “Everyone has stuff they are working on, things they want to change or improve, I’d never use that as a reason to not be with her.”

“But you do have reasons to not be with her?”

“Obviously.” Tia chortles. She meant to say it to herself, based on the eyes glaring her way she spoke a little too loud.

“Why do you say that?” Auston can feel her eye roll without even looking.

“Because I’ve hurt him way too many times to count in the past year. I tried to keep him from Taylour, because of my dad he missed out on two years –“

“That was not your fault.” Auston asserts. He feels her grip soften almost as if she’s pulling away and quickly shifts. The smooth fabric on the couch squeaks under his jeans, but he now sits with his knee touching hers. If he could touch her more, he would. “You never have to apologize for that.”

“It was because of my dad, how could you not blame me?”

She speaks softly and refuses to make eye contact. Auston can see a tear stuck to her cheek, the stream from another that fell earlier. It’s clear she is trying to mask her emotions, Auston just doesn’t understand why after all they’ve been through.

“You had nothing to do with Paul’s decision. If I thought you were even the slightest bit responsible I wouldn’t consider dating again.” Auston raises his voice, purely out of frustration. “I may have been his target, but I honestly think you were hurt the most by his actions.”

“Okay,” she brushes past the comment. “I still fought you instead of welcoming you. I never once made this easy for you, in fact I made it hell and yet your still here. Not just as my friend, but you’re here, listening to what I have to say.”

“I’ll always listen to what you have to say.”

Tia needs to understand the meaning of that statement - is he being polite or is he saying the door is never closed? She hopes that his expression will tell more than his words and brings her gaze to him only for her heart to break. He looks more hurt than ever before.

“Is there something you have to say Tia?” Heidi encourages her, not wanting to let them fall into a silence.

Tia blinks back the tears she has been fighting for the last ten minutes, “I guess…” she clears her throat, “I guess –“

“Tell him, not me,” Heidi interrupts her.

“I guess I just needed you to know.” Tia lets out another shaky breath, it’s harder than she thought to say these words. “I understand why you don’t want to do this…” she trails off thinking of all the reasons he has to walk away, because that list is a mile long. “But you need to know I am sorry; I know I haven’t always been the best person to you, that I don’t deserve you…regardless of what happens, you will always be important to me, and I am so grateful to have had you in my life, even if only briefly.”

“Why don’t you think you deserve him?” Heidi asks the question Auston had been thinking but was too scared to ask.

“The world tells me I don’t. I’m an ex-stripper and everyone has this preconceived notion about me, I’m a slut, a gold digger, I got pregnant on purpose.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” His face contorts and Tia can feel the steam erupting from his nostrils. “Why the hell would you think that?”

“Because everyone and their mother thinks it. This entire city worships the ground you walk on but shames me for just existing.”

“Well, they’re a bunch of idiots that couldn’t be further from the truth. You have one of the warmest hearts I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. My life would not be the same without you, I would not be the same without you.”

Auston doesn’t say anything else. His face doesn’t soften. Tears don’t brim in his eyes. His breathing doesn’t even shift. He doesn’t do anything, and Tia is once again confused by him.

“Knowing that, do you still feel unworthy of him?” Heidi glances to Tia, over to Auston then back to Tia again.

Tia chews on the inside of her cheek and runs a hand through her hair. She wants to not just believe everything he says but feel it in every part of her, but how can one sentence overwrite things she has been told for years?

“I mean,” she takes another second to consider her answer. “I don’t know.”

“And why is that?” Heidi continues to prompt her, ignoring the very exaggerated eyeroll.

“Because of him!” She stammers out then pauses for a second, taking that time to gather herself as best she can. “This last year wasn’t easy, the drugs, rumours, my mom, through it all, all he did was support me and encourage me to get better. I don’t think he stopped to think about himself, or if he’d get hurt, he just blindly and selflessly dove in to help me. I don’t think I could ever be worthy of that.”

Auston heard nothing after that. Heidi and Tia talked, maybe they asked him questions, maybe they didn’t and the three of them sat in complete silence. He felt nothing, no anger, no pain, no joy or confusion. He went completely numb to everything and anything around him until Tia tapped his shoulder.

The wind was loud when they stepped outside and the sharp winter air cut against his skin. Ice crunched under their feet as they walked down the driveway. He tucked his head into the collar of his jacket and shoved his hands into his pockets, silently walking beside Tia to the car.

Tia kept glancing up to him, hopeful she’d see a sign that he wasn’t trapped inside, but he moved like stone. She had no idea what he is thinking, how he was feeling, or if he got what he wanted from the session, assuming he had a goal. After ten minutes he completely shut down. He still held her hand but never again squeezed it. She didn’t notice his body stiffen or eyes roll, his breathing remained slow and steady. If she didn’t tell him it was time to leave he’d probably still be sitting on that couch, staring at the wall.

She stops at the passenger door to his blue Lamborghini and reaches for the handle when he forcefully slams it shut.

“If you ever think you aren’t worthy of anyone you need to check yourself.” The amount of anger in his voice shocks them both. “You are an amazing human being, and don’t ever let someone say otherwise. Promise?”

Pulling her lower lip between her teeth her eyes dart over his face and she nods. Auston takes his palm off the door and steps back, letting her climb inside.

The drive back to condo was like so much of their time together recently, silent. The radio was on but set to a decibel that could barely be heard over the faint hum of the heater. He isn’t white knuckling the steering wheel while mumbling under his breath. He isn’t fighting back tears and the curling of his lips as if he is struggling to not fall apart. He isn’t smiling and glancing to her from the side of his eye with a sweet but devious grin, as if he is excited to get home. It’s as if she isn’t even there.

The walk to the elevator was silent.

The elevator ride was silent.

The walk down the hall was silent.

Tia doesn’t even know why he brought her back here. Her apartment was on the way home. His silence spoke volumes.

“Auston what –“ she starts once she realizes they are at his apartment and not Fred’s.

Firmly gripping her wrist, he tugs her inside and swiftly cages her against the door. Her eyes dart from left to right and he watches every imaginable emotion blanket her face in under three seconds. Without a word he leans down and connects his lips to hers and they both relax. It’s not a fiery tongue filled kiss where he rips every article of clothing off in seconds, instead its soft and light, filled with everything they had been holding onto all those years.

“I like you T.”

“You do?” She breathes out, eyes welling with happy tears for a change.

“I never stopped.” He kisses her again. “But if something is bothering you, no matter how small, you have to tell me, okay?”

“Okay. I promise.” When the words come out so does all the stress she has been harbouring, and for the first time in weeks she is at ease.

“I need you to remember one thing,” he presses her coat off her shoulders and grins when it lands in a heap on the floor. “You’re way too good for me.”

They spent the next ten minutes slooooowly making their way down the hall. They kept stopping to take off her shirt, take off his, there was a trail of clothes littering the hall. Before they even made it to his room he reached down and grabbed the back of her thighs. And because being wrapped in his arms was always her spot, she instinctively jumped.

A slight giggle slips out which only made Auston smile more, and he presses her against the wall for added support to kiss her again. Her hands glide into his hair and her hips gently roll forward, making Auston grunt into her mouth.

He begins to walk and when he feels his knees crash against the bed he slowly lowers her onto the soft duvet. His hands begin to roam her body, along with his mouth, hitting every curve and crevice, relearning every swell. He can smell her lavender body wash, and it is euphoric, intoxicating; he could have spent the entire afternoon just kissing her.

He could have. But there is no way he was going to.

Her hand runs along his jaw and tangles into his chain to pull him closer. His knee slots between her thighs and she gets lost in the moment, lost in him. They continue to kiss but his hand works its way around her body. She shudders at the touch but arches her back. He pauses at the clasp before expertly ripping it open, and lets out a hefty breath when her breasts spring free.

Her hands slide down his broad shoulders and trail over his warm skin. Through her excitement, she fumbles with the elastic band of his boxer, but after a few seconds her nails slip under and she works to free his hardening cock. Every part of her is wrecked with anticipation and Auston can feel it against knee.

“Fuck T.” He sucks at her lower lip while dragging the thin satin fabric down her thighs. He groans when two of his fingers graze over her entrance. “I missed seeing you like this.”

“You’ll never have too again.”

Auston doesn’t want to, but he has to pull away. He never thought he’d see Tia like this again, naked and on his bed, but now that he has her, he needs this engrained to his memory. The freckles on her ribcage, the faint red marks on her sides – remnant of her pregnancy with their son - perky and round breasts and a glistening pussy.

Her entire body jolts when two of his fingers dip inside her, and he smiles against her lips. They slowly start moving in and out, and it doesn’t take long for him to find the spot he remembers so well. One leg wraps around his waist and she groans into his mouth as he pumps in and out. His free hand quickly finds her pebbling breast and tugs on her nipple.

He revels in the sounds – her breathy moans and the slurp coming from between her legs. She is quickly at the edge. Auston always knew what to do and how to do it, but this is so much more. This is her body finally welcoming back the piece it has been yearning for, and the thought alone has her teetering. All it takes is his thumb circling her clit a few times and she is a goner – releasing a string of curse words and moans as her walls tighten around his fingers. She drenches his fingers and he works her through it, mumbling in her ear to encourage her sweet collapse.

Auston removes his hand and begins kissing his way down her body. Hot, open-mouthed, sloppy kisses are everywhere, her jaw, shoulder, neck. He starts to make his way to what he’s been craving for so long.

“Aus,” she pleads, giving his hair a soft tug.

“Yeah baby,” her murmurs thickly against her ribcage.

“I need you.”

“You have me.”

“No.” She tugs a little harder this time. “I can’t wait, I need you, now.”

“Seriously?” He doesn’t even try to hide his disappointment. “I want to,” he nods and winks.

“Later. It’s been too long; I need to feel you.”

“I’m doing it tonight.” He swiftly informs her, beginning to climb back up her body. “And tomorrow morning.”

“Deal.” As much as she can’t wait any longer to be stretched by his dick, she knows she can’t wait too long to feel his tongue between her walls.

Auston shifts his weight and reaches into the side table for the condoms and Tia feels some of his excitement leak onto her thigh and smiles – she knew he wasn’t that upset.

He is quick to enter her, but he doesn’t move right away. He’s content to watch her eyes flutter and bask in the feeling as she becomes re-accustomed to his girth. He missed this, missed her and could easily take a moment to enjoy it, but when her nails scratch along his should blades, he starts to move.

Its slow, but deep and thorough, moaning loudly as he drags his cock through her heat. He pulls back and presses his hips back to hers, then leans down to kiss her, he never wants to stop kissing her.

“You thought about this didn’t you?” He huffs, finding a steady pace that constantly has her gasping in pleasure. “When you were alone in bed?”

“Yes,” she bites at her lower lip and nods. “All the time.”

“I did too,” he tells her between kisses. “Now that you’re my girlfriend we can do it all the time.”

Hearing him call her that made her pussy quiver. Auston reaches down and grabs her thigh and holds it over his hip. He thrusts in and out, groaning and moaning as his release began to build.

“You are my girlfriend, right?”

Up until this point Tia had only heard ferocity and hunger when he spoke. Every word was thick and warm, pulling her closer and closer to ecstasy. This is different, she hears worry and feels nothing but hopelessness as if he is scared of what’s to come. Not that she can blame him, in the past year they never made it past breakfast the following morning.

She brings her hand over and cradles his jaw, and sweetly looks up into his eyes. “Yeah, Auston, I am. I’m not going anywhere. I need you.”

All his life, everyone talked about three words, eight letters, and the weight they bear. I love you. They are supposed to hold all meaning, but they don’t. I need you, those are the eight letters, three words, that he needed to hear.

Auston’s lips crash against hers. No more words are said just the rhythmic squeak of his bed frame mixed with grunts and moans until finally her sweet whimpers feel the air. Auston pumps into her a few more times, but the feeling of Tia tightening around his cock sends him careening over the edge with her. He releases everything into the condom and collapses onto her body so they can both catch their breath.

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k9catastrophe · 1 month

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During my search for some games for the other list, i thought i'd share some cute [and free!] games i play when im regressed sometimes! Most are animal themed as usual. This isnt going to be a constantly updating list like the Therian Games list, but maybe there'll be another one of these someday :)

Bluey: Let's Play! : You've probably heard of this one if you're a Bluey watcher like i am, or have younger siblings, but i really like this one! Keeping the same cute artstyle and voices, made by Budge Studios in 2023 and still actively updating, there's plenty of fun to be had !! With tons of paint bucket coloring activities, and 9 Toca Boca-like scenes that you can fill and change around to your liking, i give it the BIGGEST 10/10 there is :) I love Bluey so much !! :3

Toca Life- Pets: Created by Toca Boca (That's really their name? I thought it was a series of games.) around early 2018, this game is one of my favorites to make silly stories with :) With TONS (100+?) of pets, plenty of different areas to go between, fun 'secret' places, and more, this one has a nice 10/10 aswell :) (honestly they're almost all gonna have a 10/10, i wouldnt recommend them if i hated them) I actually heard something about this game being unavailable since this year, but it works just fine for me? Most definitely reccomend it, along with most of the other toca boca games. They're all just really cute and fun :)

My Town - Pets: Honestly i have mixed feelings about this one, but i think it's just because of how i feel abt the style sob. Released in 2017 by My Town (Im not sure if that's the brand or what, my apologies), this one is just like Toca Boca, but with a different artstyle. I don't hate this one, but i do dislike the artstyle, sorry sob. With a few places to switch between, plenty of fun pets, and a highly interactive environment, i give it a 9/10.

Paw Patrol - Rescue World: (Sorry the icon is smaller? I didn't do that on purpose.) Another silly fun puppy game made by Budge Studios in 2020, you can go on fun adventures through Adventure Bay as your favorite pups! Herd chickens back into their pens, make giant banana strawberry smoothies, and collect bones for reward crates, there's always another adventure waiting for you on Adventure Bay ! My personal favorites are Rocky and Zuma, they're so silly :) ! nice 9/10 for this one too! the only point taken away because of how blurry the models look for me (but that could just be my tablet!! dont let that discourage you!!)

#Sorry this is a bit out of my usual posting stuff but #i am a #pet regressor #so this is something that will be brought up a few times sob #Toca boca #sfw agere #sfw age regressor #sfw petre #sfw pet regression #Bluey #paw patrol #sorry for getting off track haha i just got excited

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ourpickwickclub · 5 months

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Absolutely B, she is one lucky girl and deserves all that love from B. I’ve said before in here, I actually think that’s why I admire her so much more over the years. Knowing what she went through, how she kept her head held high, didn’t get pulled into his games after the divorce. Had to sit back and pick up all the pieces of damage he’s tried to do (and she could have easily come out and told her truth but didn’t) And actually found true love - the happiness you see in all that part of the family, is real.

It’s a fairy tale - She escaped the evil and found her Prince Charming and lived happily ever after 😂

Also to anon on A looking happy. Yeah, he didn’t look that happy tbh he was happy at something on his phone. Not at being there. Whilst being forced to wear his new Christmas present from his “loving” dad. A sea of sound tshirt.

Lola and Zuma looked as they wanted to be anywhere else in the world, other than in GR’s company 😂

Probably why I’m so invested in Blake and Gwen but less so in Taylor and Travis (although it is cute). Blake and Gwen built this beautiful life together with things they saved from the fire. They have these huge hearts and they were taken advantage of, but now, they face things as a true team. I started out rooting for them but didn’t realize what a truly wonderful life they would create.

- B

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shefanispeculator · 3 years

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I'm slightly disappointed to log onto Zoom and find Gwen Stefani in Los Angeles. I wanted to see the ranch. Stefani spent most of the pandemic in Oklahoma with her fiancé and fellow The Voice coach Blake Shelton, with whom she has recently collaborated on a string of country radio hits, alongside a kitsch Christmas song. For a ska-pop superstar, it's a pivot, but Stefani and Shelton are cute together — picture-perfect in their opposite attraction.

Country Gwen exists, her urban counterpart assures me, but on this particular MacBook she's nowhere to be seen. I'm not sure what crude regional stereotypes I was expecting (Stefani spitting sunflower seeds? Shelton line dancing in the background?) but I get Californian sunshine instead, illuminating a version of Stefani more familiar from my teenage years, when Love. Angel. Music. Baby and its follow-up The Sweet Escape spawned millions of fans, haters and imitators. She's platinum blonde, red lipsticked and wearing a black-and-white outfit that matches the decor. The checkerboard pattern can be traced back to an even earlier era, when Stefani and her No Doubt bandmates were '80s teenagers obsessed with two-tone acts like Madness and The Specials.

Cowboy boots wouldn't fit this picture, and nor would Stefani's glitzy showgirl outfits from The Voice, where she just wrapped another season as a celebrity coach. As she prepares to release her fourth solo record, and enters the fifth decade of an extraordinarily successful music career, Gwen Stefani is re-re-branding as... Gwen Stefani.

Top: Local Boogeyman, Pants: GCDS, Shoes: Valentino, Earrings, bracelets and rings: Dena Kemp (The Residency Experience), Necklaces: Gwen's own, Engagement ring: Gwen's own

"But what is that?" Stefani asks with seriousness, as we consider the possibility of some essential, inherent Gwen. "Everyone's interpretation of what I am and how I sing, I mean, that's what this era is about for me."

Said era kicked off late last year, with the music video for "Let Me Reintroduce Myself." It saw Stefani playfully revisit the wardrobes of album cycles past, from the ab-bearing tomboy tank tops of "Hollaback Girl" to the club kid blue hair mascara of '90s No Doubt. Her Harajuku Girls also make a return. The entire visual is a huge flex, not only for the sheer volume of iconic career moments recreated in dutiful detail, but the fact Stefani can still fit into the clothes originally worn during all of them. She looks eerily the same, frighteningly good, ageing in reverse at the same pace as her frequent collaborator Pharrell.

"It's really a blessing to be able to have such a long career, where there really is nothing to prove anymore."

Pop stars are expected to be young forever, in looks but also in their capacity to innovate new trends. Which makes the nostalgic music video a curious choice. Doesn't Stefani know by now that the cardinal rule of pop is to avoid repeating yourself? That even the hottest artists in the world are basically required by law to create completely new eras from scratch every six months in order to appease fans and maintain maximum TikTok-ready relevance?

Of course she does, but that doesn't mean she has to participate. Stefani isn't trying to chase down her contemporaries, despite clearly possessing the physical fitness required. "It's really a blessing to be able to have such a long career, where there really is nothing to prove anymore," she says. "It's a different energy. You know, it's really just about doing it to do it, as opposed to trying to make a statement or make a mark."

Corset: Ronald van der Kemp, Bracelets: Dena Kemp (The Residency Experience), Earrings: Lana Jewelry (The Residency Experience), Engagement ring: Gwen's own

Even the Saweetie remix of her latest single "Slow Clap" happened on a whim, after the younger artist happened to post a video of herself vibing to Stefani's 2004 single "Luxurious" on Instagram Stories. They knocked out the song and accompanying video in a day. Neither seems bothered by the Old Navy meme. "It was just this little video that we did on the fly," Stefani says. "It just happened. It just feels good to put new stuff out there."

Stefani completed a two-year Vegas greatest hits residency in 2019, which gave her a sense of perspective on her own legacy. "You make a new record because that's what is exciting for you," she says. "But people really just want to hear the records after a while that were the backdrop to their lives, a 'Don't Speak' or a 'Just a Girl' or a 'Hollaback Girl,' or whatever it was for them. So, you know, it's hard — you can only be new when you're new, and that's just the truth, and I know that."

She says she was pleasantly surprised that "Let Me Reintroduce Myself" charted at all, and that she only found out it did when Shelton walked into the kitchen to show her the iTunes numbers. "I burst out crying with joy, because it was like, 'Whoa, really?' I think I'd set myself up to be quite realistic about where I'm at."

Stefani, endlessly polite and self-deprecating in conversation, which on her end mostly consists of endearingly earnest run-on monologues, says she still has "tons" of insecurities. I get the impression she has been trying harder to give herself credit lately. She recalls recently hearing Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" on the car radio and finding herself in awe of the song's timeless catchiness.

Suit: Balmain, Earrings and choker: Lana Jewelry (The Residency Experience), Necklaces: Gwen's own

"But then I started thinking," she says, in a goofy Cher Horowitz tone. "Like, I have a few of those myself." She talks of this realization as a genuine breakthrough, which is a little worrying for a woman who has sold 40 million records. No shit, she has a "few of those." More of them than Lauper, actually.

More new music is coming along slowly, but I've caught Stefani on a day when the horizon looks closer than usual, and while things haven't quite fallen into place yet, she's feeling more confident that they eventually will. "I'm at the end," she declares. "The idea of going for a session and not being with my kids or the idea of taking time away from Blake doesn't fuel my fire like it did two months ago. I need to decide, wrap it up, put out the project."

Crucially, there's no rush. The album will simply arrive sometime this year, tracklist and title currently undecided.

"You're talking to me at a weird transitional time," Stefani says repeatedly throughout our conversation, which sometimes takes on the cathartic tone of therapy. But having time in the first place is a new feeling.

Bracelet and choker: Dana Kemp (The Residency Experience), Obsession necklace: Lidow Archive, Gold necklaces: Gwen's own, Clothing: Blumarine, Boots: Philipp Plein

NO DOUBT WERE A BAND for nine years before getting on the radio. Enough time for Stefani and bassist Tony Kanal to be in a long term relationship then break up and write a whole hit album about it. All of the Fleetwood Mac drama was resolved pre-fame, which enabled the group to capitalize on the surprise success of Tragic Kingdom singles like "Don't Speak" and "Just a Girl" with a world tour that lasted almost three years. Three more albums followed, and Stefani has reinforced her household name status in every decade since, launching a solo career and multiple fashion lines while never totally cutting the cord from her original musical project.

In other words, record executives have been dictating Stefani's schedule since the mid-'90s. She even sings about it on Love. Angel. Music. Baby opener "What You Waiting For," in which her biological clock ticks like a metronome. Interscope Co-Founder Jimmy Iovine, who discovered No Doubt and continued to work with Stefani on her solo output, was quick to point out that his client's prime childbearing years were also her last opportunity to cross over into pop stardom. And after her first record went number one, it only made sense to lay down some new tracks straight away.

"Whether or not I get the response that I would hope to get — because that's what I'm used to, because I'm so damn spoiled and I've tasted the blood of success — I still got to do the creative journey."

"I had the baby, the first one, and it was only like eight weeks after I had him, that Jimmy was calling me saying, you've got to go in the studio with Akon," Stefani recalls cheerfully. "Like, Akon wants to work with you. Like, no, I'm nursing my baby. But then I couldn't say no." And then? "We wrote 'Sweet Escape.'" And then? "I went on a world tour." And then? "In the month that I got home from that one hundred and whatever shows it was, I got pregnant with Zuma. So then that was that." (It wasn't. Admittedly: "Then it was like, No Doubt, let's do another record.")

Things are different now: "You can just drop singles and you don't have to put a record out. But if you want to put a record out, you can work on it slowly." But even as she talks of slowing down, speculating that she might not even go on tour after the pandemic ends, in the next sentence Stefani's back to admitting that there's more work to be done, that she wants to write a couple more songs for her new record, "just to make sure."

Earrings: Lana Jewelry (The Residency Experience) Choker: Chanel, Necklaces: Gwen's own, Gloves: Laurel DeWitt, Top: Local Boogeyman

"The creation is the thing that fuels me so much," she says. "Whether or not I get the response that I would hope to get — because that's what I'm used to, because I'm so damn spoiled and I've tasted the blood of success — I still got to do the creative journey."

Like any good lyricist, she reaches out to her listener, hoping to convey a more universal point. "It's just probably the same for you as a writer," she guesses. "You know, it's the anticipation. You're in it now. You're getting the information. This is what you live for. You're doing the interview and then you're going to write it. And that's going to be the challenge."

GWEN STEFANI WAS PUTTING out diary entry pop when Olivia Rodrigo was still in diapers and Taylor Swift was but a humble Pennsylvania Christmas tree heiress. She struggles to pen lyrics that aren't confessional ("I'm not a creative writer when it comes to like, 'Oh, let's just write a sad song about something that didn't happen to me'"), and occasionally re-traumatizes herself when performing old hits. Return of Saturn deep cut "Dark Blue" triggers "crazy, just horrible" recollections of a past relationship. Even "Don't Speak" felt emotional onstage in Vegas.

But after releasing an excruciating divorce album, This Is What the Truth Feels Like, in 2016, Stefani is back to writing happy songs only. She's getting married, after all. She won't be releasing any of her trademark breakup anthems anytime soon. "Girl," she laughs, "I think I've had my fair share."

Bow: Laurel DeWitt, Earrings: Lana Jewelry (The Residency Experience), Bracelets: Dena Kemp (The Residency Experience), Shirt: Vintage Archive, Dress: Erdem, Tights: Capezio, Shoes: Marc Jacobs (Lidow Archive)

Stefani and Shelton's relationship has puzzled some fans. Shelton, a country radio phenomenon, never endorsed Trump in the 2016 election, but he did come close. Earlier this year, he was criticized for releasing a song called "Minimum Wage," about finding small joys during periods of economic struggle, at the peak of a recession.

Is Gwen Stefani a Republican now? She's not offended by the question, or really anything I have to ask. She has been famous for so long that she expects and even embraces scrutiny. "If you're going to be a star, that's what you get," she says. "You know what I mean? You get what you get, and you don't get upset, at all."

As for her politics, it's read-between-the-lines."I can see how people would be curious, but I think it's pretty obvious who I am," she says. "I've been around forever. I started my band because we were really influenced by ska, which was a movement that happened in the late '70s, and it was really all about people coming together. The first song I ever wrote was a song called 'Different People,' which was on the Obama playlist, you know, a song about everyone being different and being the same and loving each other. The very first song I wrote."

One of very few multi-racial bands playing stadium shows for hoardes of American teenangers in the 1990s, No Doubt did very literally embody those second-wave ska principles of inclusion. Stefani even wore bindis and saris on stage as a symbol of cultural exchange with Kanal, who is Indian-American, briefly kickstarting a white girl facial jewelry trend that it's safe to say would not fly in 2021.

Rings (left): Dena Kemp (The Residency Experience)

"The Specials and The Selecter and all those groups, and what they were doing in the late '70s was this whole kind of anti-racism, we come together, Black and white ska movement," Stefani elaborates on the band's founding principles. "And we were sort of echoing that in the '80s when we did it, we were like the third generation of ska."

Ska she's always happy to discuss, but Stefani was brought up to keep her electoral preferences personal, and that rule has held for her entire career. "The whole point of voting, is you have this personal space to feel how you feel," she explains. "I use my platform to share my life story and to engage with people and to exchange whatever gift I was giving. I'm not a political science major. I am not that person. Everyone knows that. So why would I even talk about it?"

"I don't need to go on Instagram and say 'girl power.' I just need to live and be a good person and leave a trail of greatness behind me."

It never has been. Looking back, it's weird that "Just a Girl" is so integral to Gwen Stefani's brand. She's never written anything else with remotely the same message, and or publicly identified as a feminist. To Stefani, it's just a song about growing up, and "all of a sudden you realize your gender." It wasn't meant as a protest or anthem: in fact, being her breakout hit, she didn't think anyone other than her bandmates and some local fans would ever hear it.

"I don't even know if I knew what feminist at that time was," she says. "I was very sheltered growing up with my family. I wasn't political. I wasn't angry." Even now: "I don't need to go on Instagram and say 'girl power.' I just need to live and be a good person and leave a trail of greatness behind me. Stop talking about it and stop trying to bully everybody about it. Just do it. And that's how I feel like I've lived my life."

WHEN STEFANI WAS GROWING up in 1970s Anaheim, her father got a job doing market research for Yamaha, which required frequent business trips to Japan. He'd bring home Sanrio toys, as well as anecdotes about the Tokyo district of Harajuku, where teenagers were dressing like Elvis, and "taking all these American things and making them Japanese." His daughter was entranced. "He would be telling me these things my whole life, like my whole life. I had a deep fascination."

So when No Doubt played Japan in 1996, Stefani describes, "It was a pretty big deal for me." The tour was the first time she'd traveled outside of the United states, save one trip to Italy when she was 21. "I just was inspired," she recalls. "It's a world away. And at that time it was even further, because you couldn't see it on the internet. I don't think a younger generation can even imagine what it's like to not have access to the world."

From then on, Japan became one of Stefani's biggest career motivations, especially when it came to her solo albums. If she could just write more hits, she'd get to tour there again, see the street style, visit the vintage stores. "If you read the actual lyrics [in 'What You Waiting For?'], it talks about being a fan of Japan and how if I do good, I get to go back there," she says.

In the meantime, she decided she'd bring Japan to Los Angeles. "I never got to have dancers with No Doubt. I never got to change costumes. I never got to do all of those fun girl things that I always love to do. So I had this idea that I would have a posse of girls — because I never got to hang with girls — and they would be Japanese, Harajuku girls, because those are the girls that I love. Those are my homies. That's where I would be if I had my dream come true, I could go live there and I could go hang out in Harajuku."

Earrings, bracelets and rings: Dena Kemp (The Residency Experience, Gold Necklaces: Gwen's own, Top: Local Boogeyman, Pants: GCDS, Shoes: Valentino

Dancers Maya Chino ("Love"), Jennifer Kita ("Angel"), Rino Nakasone ("Music") and Mayuko Kitayama ("Baby") would go on to accompany Stefani for her next two album cycles, dancing on stage and in her videos while also making silent, but very well-dressed, awards show appearances. Kita, who'd grown up in LA, visited Japan for the first time on Stefani's tour.

In a 2006 interview with Blender magazine, comedian Margaret Cho compared the Harajuku Girls to a minstrel show. The backlash against them has been consistent ever since. Stefani, to this day, disagrees.

"If we didn't buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn't have so much beauty, you know?" she says. "We learn from each other, we share from each other, we grow from each other. And all these rules are just dividing us more and more."

Hello Kitty merch was harder to come by when she was a kid, but in other ways, life felt easier. "I think that we grew up in a time where we didn't have so many rules. We didn't have to follow a narrative that was being edited for us through social media, we just had so much more freedom."

Earrings, bracelets and rings: Dena Kemp (The Residency Experience), Necklaces: Gwen's own, Dress: GCDS, Shirt: Faith Connexion, Tights: Capezio, Shoes: Marc Jacobs (Lidow Archive)

Stefani's penchant for rule breaking has always been apparent in her music as much as her aesthetic. Genre-wise, she's a randomista. The chart success of No Doubt's bouncing ska beats felt like an accidental post-grunge-era glitch in the matrix, and it's insane to this day that one of Stefani's biggest solo hits samples "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof, by way of '90s British dancehall duo Louchie Lou & Michie One. That another, "Wind It Up," features earnest Sound of Music yodeling.

"I just make up whatever comes out," Stefani says of her songwriting process. "I don't even know where it comes from. I feel like it just comes from the source. It's not trained, and it's not perfect, it's just real."

She looks back on the Love.Angel.Music.Baby era as unusually experimental and artistically fulfilling. "It was just a really incredible time, and a very creative time. I feel like it was just a really creative project."

STEFANI VIEWS HER CAREER success as mostly a matter of luck. Pop stardom is God-given and mysterious."Because the fact I made it, it doesn't make any sense," she reflects. "It's written in the stars. You know what I'm saying? I'm not the most talented. I'm not the most pretty. I'm not the most smart. None of those things. But I made it, right?"

Clothing: Blumarine, Bracelet and choker: Dena Kemp (The Residency Experience), Obsession necklace: Lidow Archive, Gold necklaces: Gwen's Own

Every week on The Voice she watches objectively gifted musicians fail at becoming artists. "I watched people that went through that without seeing their faces, without knowing what color they are. And I chose the ones that pulled my heartstrings. And even though they were so talented, none of them have had careers. It's made me look at myself and even feel even more amazed by the fact that anyone cared or cares."

If all of this is actually so out of her control, then Stefani feels safe stepping back a little bit. "I don't have that fuel in me like I used to, because I already won," she says. And now she has other victories in mind. "Being a good human, a good mother. I want to have a good marriage. I want to be a good wife. I want to win at finding peace. I want to win at finding other hobbies that I'm good at."

But at the same time? "If I'm inspired, I'm going to try to do something with that inspiration." That's the most fun part: whatever else comes after has always been an amazing bonus.

The "Let Me Reintroduce Myself" era, whatever form it may eventually take, isn't a desperate grab at former glory. It's Stefani refusing to evolve for the sake of it. She's poking fun at the whole idea of having to compete with past personas alongside current ones, while acknowledging the fact she's grateful to still be in the game at all.

"You don't know what you're doing," she says, somehow both confident and resigned. "You're a cartoon of yourself at this point, and you don't know what people are thinking. They're wondering, what? Why are you still here? And I'm like, I don't know. They said I could be here. So I'm here!"

Photography: Jamie Nelson Styling: Nicola Formichetti Hair: Sami Knight Makeup: Michael Anthony Nails: Carolyn Orellana Wardrobe director: Marta Del Rio Production: Katrina Kudlick Digitatech: Sean MacGillivray Logo design: Luca Devinu Story: Kat Gillespie

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hlupdate · 5 years

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Harry Styles isn’t exactly dressed down for lunch. He’s got a white floppy hat that Diana Ross might have won from Elton in a poker game at Cher’s mansion circa 1974, plus Gucci shades, a cashmere sweater, and blue denim bell-bottoms. His nail polish is pink and mint green. He’s also carrying his purse — no other word for it — a yellow patent-canvas bag with the logo “Chateau Marmont.” The tough old ladies who work at this Beverly Hills deli know him well. Gloria and Raisa dote on him, calling him “my love” and bringing him his usual tuna salad and iced coffee. He turns heads, to put it mildly, but nobody comes near because the waitresses hover around the booth protectively.

He was just a small-town English lad of 16 when he became his generation’s pop idol with One Direction. When the group went on hiatus, he struck out on his own with his brash 2017 solo debut, whose lead single was the magnificently over-the-top six-minute piano ballad “Sign of the Times.” Even people who missed out on One Direction were shocked to learn the truth: This pinup boy was a rock star at heart.

A quick highlight reel of Harry’s 2019 so far: He hosted the Met Gala with Lady Gaga, Serena Williams, Alessandro Michele, and Anna Wintour serving an eyebrow-raising black lace red-carpet look. He is the official face of a designer genderless fragrance, Gucci’s Mémoire d’une Odeur. When James Corden had an all-star dodgeball match on The Late Late Show, Harry got spiked by a hard serve from Michelle Obama, making him perhaps the first Englishman ever hit in the nads on TV by a First Lady.

Closer to his heart, he brought down the house at this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony with his tribute to his friend and idol Stevie Nicks. “She’s always there for you,” Harry said in his speech. “She knows what you need: advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl.” He added, “She’s responsible for more running mascara — including my own — than all the bad dates in history.” (Backstage, Nicks accidentally referred to Harry’s former band as “’NSync.” Hey, a goddess can get away with that sort of thing.)

Harry has been the world’s It boy for nearly a decade now. The weirdest thing about him? He loves being this guy. In a style of fast-lane celebrity that takes a ruthless toll on the artist’s personality, creativity, sanity, Harry is almost freakishly at ease. He has managed to grow up in public with all his boyish enthusiasm intact, not to mention his manners. He’s dated a string of high-profile women — but he never gets caught uttering any of their names in public, much less shading any of them. Instead of going the usual superstar-pop route — en vogue producers, celebrity duets, glitzy club beats — he’s gone his own way, and gotten more popular than ever. He’s putting the finishing touches on his new album, full of the toughest, most soulful songs he’s written yet. As he explains, “It’s all about having sex and feeling sad.”

The Harry Charm is a force of nature, and it can be almost frightening to witness in action. The most startling example might be a backstage photo from February taken with one of his heroes, Van Morrison. You have never seen a Van picture like this one. He’s been posing for photos for 50 years, and he’s been refusing to crack a smile in nearly all of them. Until he met Harry — for some reason, Van beams like a giddy schoolgirl. What did Harry do to him? “I was tickling him behind his back,” Harry confides. “Somebody sent me that photo — I think his tour manager took it. When I saw it, I felt like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction opening the case with the gold light shining. I was like, ‘Fuck, maybe I shouldn’t show this to anyone.’”

In interviews, Harry has always tended to coast on that charm, simply because he can. In his teens, he was in public every minute and became adept at guarding every scrap of his privacy. But these days, he’s finding out he has things he wants to say. He’s more confident about thinking out loud and seeing what happens. “Looser” is how he puts it. “More open. I’m discovering how much better it makes me feel to be open with friends. Feeling that vulnerability, rather than holding everything in.”

Like a lot of people his age, he’s asking questions about culture, gender, identity, new ideas about masculinity and sexuality. “I feel pretty lucky to have a group of friends who are guys who would talk about their emotions and be really open,” he says. “My friend’s dad said to me, ‘You guys are so much better at it than we are. I never had friends I could really talk to. It’s good that you guys have each other because you talk about real shit. We just didn’t.’”

It’s changed how he approaches his songs. “For me, it doesn’t mean I’ll sit down and be like, ‘This is what I have for dinner, and this is where I eat every day, and this is what I do before I go to bed,’” he says. “But I will tell you that I can be really pathetic when I’m jealous. Feeling happier than I’ve ever been, sadder than I’ve ever been, feeling sorry for myself, being mad at myself, being petty and pitiful — it feels really different to share that.”

At times, Harry sounds like an ordinary 25-year-old figuring his shit out, which, of course, he is. (Harry and I got to know each other last year, when he got in touch after reading one of my books, though I’d already been writing about his music for years.) It’s strange to hear him talk about shedding his anxieties and doubts, since he’s always come across as one of the planet’s most confident people. “While I was in the band,” he says, “I was constantly scared I might sing a wrong note. I felt so much weight in terms of not getting things wrong. I remember when I signed my record deal and I asked my manager, ‘What happens if I get arrested? Does it mean the contract is null and void?’ Now, I feel like the fans have given me an environment to be myself and grow up and create this safe space to learn and make mistakes.”

We slip out the back and spend a Saturday afternoon cruising L.A. in his 1972 silver Jaguar E-type. The radio doesn’t work, so we just sing “Old Town Road.” He marvels, “‘Bull riding and boobies’ — that is potentially the greatest lyric in any song ever.” Harry used to be pop’s mystery boy, so diplomatic and tight-lipped. But as he opens up over time, telling his story, he reaches the point where he’s pitching possible headlines for this profile. His best: “Soup, Sex, and Sun Salutations.”

How did he get to this new place? As it turns out, the journey involves some heartbreak. Some guidance from David Bowie. Some Transcendental Meditation. And more than a handful of magic mushrooms. But mostly, it comes down to a curious kid who can’t decide whether to be the world’s most ardently adored pop star, or a freaky artiste. So he decides to be both.

Two things about English rock stars never change: They love Southern California, and they love cars. A few days after Harry proclaimed the genius of “Old Town Road,” we’re in a different ride — a Tesla — cruising the Pacific Coast Highway while Harry sings along to the radio. “Californiaaaaaa!” he yells from behind the wheel as we whip past Zuma Beach. “It sucks!” There’s a surprising number of couples along the beach who seem to be arguing. We speculate on which ones are breaking up and which are merely having the talk. “Ah, yes, the talk,” Harry says dreamily. “Ye olde chat.”

Harry is feeling the smooth Seventies yacht-rock grooves today, blasting Gerry Rafferty, Pablo Cruise, Hall and Oates. When I mention that Nina Simone once did a version of “Rich Girl,” he needs to hear it right away. He counters by blowing my mind with Donny Hathaway’s version of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy.”

Harry raves about a quintessential SoCal trip he just tried: a “cold sauna,” a process that involves getting locked in an ice chamber. His eyelashes froze. We stop for a smoothie (“It’s basically ice cream”) and his favorite pepper-intensive wheatgrass shot. It goes down like a dose of battery acid. “That’ll add years to your life,” he assures me.

We’re on our way to Shangri-La studios in Malibu, founded by the Band back in the 1970s, now owned by Rick Rubin. It’s where Harry made some of the upcoming album, and as we walk in, he grins at the memory. “Ah, yes,” he says. “Did a lot of mushrooms in here.”

Psychedelics have started to play a key role in his creative process. “We’d do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney’s Ram in the sunshine,” he says. “We’d just turn the speakers into the yard.” The chocolate edibles were kept in the studio fridge, right next to the blender. “You’d hear the blender going, and think, ‘So we’re all having frozen margaritas at 10 a.m. this morning.’” He points to a corner: “This is where I was standing when we were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place.”

It’s not mere rock-star debauchery — it’s emblematic of his new state of mind. You get the feeling this is why he enjoys studios so much. After so many years making One Direction albums while touring, always on the run, he finally gets to take his time and embrace the insanity of it all. “We were here for six weeks in Malibu, without going into the city,” he says. “People would bring their dogs and kids. We’d take a break to play cornhole tournaments. Family values!” But it’s also the place where he has proudly bled for his art. “Mushrooms and Blood. Now there’s an album title.”

Some of the engineers come over to catch up on gossip. Harry gestures out the window to the Pacific waves, where the occasional nude revelry might have happened, and where the occasional pair of pants got lost. “There was one night where we’d been partying a bit and ended up going down to the beach and I lost all my stuff, basically,” he says. “I lost all my clothes. I lost my wallet. Maybe a month later, somebody found my wallet and mailed it back, anonymously. I guess it just popped out of the sand. But what’s sad is, I lost my favorite mustard corduroy flares.” A moment of silence is held for the corduroy flares.

Recording in the studio today is Brockhampton, the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest boy band.” Harry says hi to all the Brockhampton guys, which takes a while since there seem to be a few dozen of them. “We’re together all the time,” one tells Harry out in the yard. “We see each other all day, every day.” He pauses. “You know how it is.”

Harry breaks into a dry grin. “Yes, I know how it is.”

One Direction made three of this century’s biggest and best pop albums in a rush — Midnight Memories, Four and Made in the A.M. Yet they cut those records on tour, ducking into the nearest studio when they had a day off. 1D were a unique mix of five different musical personalities: Harry, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, and Liam Payne. But the pace took its toll. Malik quit in the middle of a tour, immediately after a show in Hong Kong. The band announced its hiatus in August 2015.

It’s traditional for boy-band singers, as they go solo and grow up, to renounce their pop past. Everybody remembers George Michael setting his leather jacket on fire, or Sting quitting the Police to make jazz records. This isn’t really Harry Styles’ mentality. “I know it’s the thing that always happens. When somebody gets out of a band, they go, ‘That wasn’t me. I was held back.’ But it was me. And I don’t feel like I was held back at all. It was so much fun. If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t have done it. It’s not like I was tied to a radiator.”

Whenever Harry mentions One Direction — never by name, always “the band” or “the band I was in” — he uses the past tense. It is my unpleasant duty to ask: Does he see 1D as over? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think I’d ever say I’d never do it again, because I don’t feel that way. If there’s a time when we all really want to do it, that’s the only time for us to do it, because I don’t think it should be about anything else other than the fact that we’re all like, ‘Hey, this was really fun. We should do this again.’ But until that time, I feel like I’m really enjoying making music and experimenting. I enjoy making music this way too much to see myself doing a full switch, to go back and do that again. Because I also think if we went back to doing things the same way, it wouldn’t be the same, anyway.”

When the band stopped, did he take those friendships with him? “Yeah, I think so,” he says. “Definitely. Because above all else, we’re the people who went through that. We’re always going to have that, even if we’re not the closest. And the fact is, just because you’re in a band with someone doesn’t mean you have to be best friends. That’s not always how it works. Just because Fleetwood Mac fight, that doesn’t mean they’re not amazing. I think even in the disagreements, there’s always a mutual respect for each other — we did this really cool thing together, and we’ll always have that. It’s too important to me to ever be like, ‘Oh, that’s done.’ But if it happens, it will happen for the right reasons.”

If the intensity of the Harry fandom ever seems mysterious to you, there’s a live clip you might want to investigate, from the summer of 2018. Just search the phrase “Tina, she’s gay.” In San Jose, on one of the final nights of his tour, Harry spots a fan with a homemade sign: “I’m Gonna Come Out to My Parents Because of You!” He asks the fan her name (she says it’s Grace) and her mother’s name (Tina). He asks the audience for silence because he has an important announcement to make: “Tina! She’s gaaaaay!” Then he has the entire crowd say it together. Thousands of strangers start yelling “Tina, she’s gay,” and every one of them clearly means it — it’s a heavy moment, definitely not a sound you forget after you hear it. Then Harry sings “What Makes You Beautiful.” (Of course, the way things work now, the clip went viral within minutes. So did Grace’s photo of Tina giving a loving thumbs-up to her now-out teenage daughter. Grace and Tina attended Harry’s next show together.)

Harry likes to cultivate an aura of sexual ambiguity, as overt as the pink polish on his nails. He’s dated women throughout his life as a public figure, yet he has consistently refused to put any kind of label on his sexuality. On his first solo tour, he frequently waved the pride, bi, and trans flags, along with the Black Lives Matter flag. In Philly, he waved a rainbow flag he borrowed from a fan up front: “Make America Gay Again.” One of the live fan favorites: “Medicine,” a guitar jam that sounds a bit like the Grateful Dead circa Europe ’72, but with a flamboyantly pansexual hook: “The boys and girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it.”

He’s always had a flair for flourishes like this, since the 1D days. An iconic clip from November 2014: Harry and Liam are on a U.K. chat show. The host asks the oldest boy-band fan-bait question in the book: What do they look for in a date? “Female,” Liam quips. “That’s a good trait.” Harry shrugs. “Not that important.” Liam is taken aback. The host is in shock. On tour in the U.S. that year, he wore a Michael Sam football jersey, in support of the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team. He’s blown up previously unknown queer artists like King Princess and Muna.

What do those flags onstage mean to him? “I want to make people feel comfortable being whatever they want to be,” he says. “Maybe at a show you can have a moment of knowing that you’re not alone. I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows. I can’t claim that I know what it’s like, because I don’t. So I’m not trying to say, ‘I understand what it’s like.’ I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.”

On tour, he had an End Gun Violence sticker on his guitar; he added a Black Lives Matter sticker, as well as the flag. “It’s not about me trying to champion the cause, because I’m not the person to do that,” he says. “It’s just about not ignoring it, I guess. I was a little nervous to do that because the last thing I wanted was for it to feel like I was saying, ‘Look at me! I’m the good guy!’ I didn’t want anyone who was really involved in the movement to think, ‘What the fuck do you know?’ But then when I did it, I realized people got it. Everyone in that room is on the same page and everyone knows what I stand for. I’m not saying I understand how it feels. I’m just trying to say, ‘I see you.’”

At one of his earliest solo shows, in Stockholm, he announced, “If you are black, if you are white, if you are gay, if you are straight, if you are transgender — whoever you are, whoever you want to be, I support you. I love every single one of you.” “It’s a room full of accepting people.… If you’re someone who feels like an outsider, you’re not always in a big crowd like that,” he says. “It’s not about, ‘Oh, I get what it’s like,’ because I don’t. For example, I go walking at night before bed most of the time. I was talking about that with a female friend and she said, ‘Do you feel safe doing that?’ And I do. But when I walk, I’m more aware that I feel OK to walk at night, and some of my friends wouldn’t. I’m not saying I know what it feels like to go through that. It’s just being aware.”

‘Man cannot live by coffee alone,” Harry says. “But he will give it a damn good try.” He sips his iced Americano — not his first today, or his last. He’s back behind the wheel, on a mission to yet another studio — but this time for actual work. Today it’s string overdubs. Harry is dressed in Gucci from head to toe, except for one item of clothing: a ratty Seventies rock T-shirt he proudly scavenged from a vintage shop. It says “Commander Quaalude.”

On the drive over, he puts on the jazz pianist Bill Evans — “Peace Piece,” from 1959, which is the wake-up tone on his phone. He just got into jazz during a long sojourn in Japan. He likes to find places to hide out and be anonymous: For his first album, he decamped to Jamaica. Over the past year, he spent months roaming Japan.

In February, he spent his 25th birthday sitting by himself in a Tokyo cafe, reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. “I love Murakami,” he says. “He’s one of my favorites. Reading didn’t really used to be my thing. I had such a short attention span. But I was dating someone who gave me some books; I felt like I had to read them because she’d think I was a dummy if I didn’t read them.”

A friend gave him Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. “It was the first book, maybe ever, where all I wanted to do all day was read this,” he says. “I had a very Murakami birthday because I ended up staying in Tokyo on my own. I had grilled fish and miso soup for breakfast, then I went to this cafe. I sat and drank tea and read for five hours.”

In the studio, he’s overseeing the string quartet. He has the engineers play T. Rex’s “Cosmic Dancer” for them, to illustrate the vibe he’s going for. You can see he enjoys being on this side of the glass, sitting at the Neve board, giving his instructions to the musicians. After a few run-throughs, he presses the intercom button to say, “Yeah, it’s pretty T. Rex. Best damn strings I ever heard.” He buzzes again to add, “And you’re all wonderful people.”

He’s curated his own weird enclave of kindred spirits to collaborate with, like producers Jeff Bhasker and Tyler Johnson. His guitarist Mitch Rowland was working at an L.A. pizza shop when Harry met him. They started writing songs for the debut; Rowland didn’t quit his job until two weeks into the sessions. One of his closest collaborators is also one of his best friends: Tom Hull, a.k.a. Kid Harpoon, a longtime cohort of Florence and the Machine. Hull is an effusive Brit with a heart-on-sleeve personality. Harry calls him “my emotional rock.” Hull calls him “Gary.”

Hull was the one who talked him into taking a course on Transcendental Meditation at David Lynch’s institute — beginning each day with 20 minutes of silence, which doesn’t always come naturally to either of them. “He’s got this wise-beyond-his-years timelessness about him,” Hull says. “That’s why he went on a whole emotional exploration with these songs.” He’s 12 years older, with a wife and kids in Scotland, and talks about Harry like an irreverent but doting big brother.

Last year, Harry was in the gossip columns dating the French model Camille Rowe; they split up last summer after a year together. “He went through this breakup that had a big impact on him,” Hull says. “I turned up on Day One in the studio, and I had these really nice slippers on. His ex-girlfriend that he was really cut up about, she gave them to me as a present — she bought slippers for my whole family. We’re still close friends with her. I thought, ‘I like these slippers. Can I wear them — is that weird?’

“So I turn up at Shangri-La the first day and literally within the first half-hour, he looks at me and says, ‘Where’d you get those slippers? They’re nice.’ I had to say, ‘Oh, um, your ex-girlfriend got them for me.’ He said, ‘Whaaaat? How could you wear those?’ He had a whole emotional journey about her, this whole relationship. But I kept saying, ‘The best way of dealing with it is to put it in these songs you’re writing.’”

True to his code of gallant discretion, Harry doesn’t say her name at any point. But he admits the songs are coming from personal heartbreak. “It’s not like I’ve ever sat and done an interview and said, ‘So I was in a relationship, and this is what happened,’” he says. “Because, for me, music is where I let that cross over. It’s the only place, strangely, where it feels right to let that cross over.”

The new songs are certainly charged with pain. “The stars didn’t align for them to be a forever thing,” Hull says. “But I told him that famous Iggy Pop quote where he says, ‘I only ever date women who are going to fuck me up, because that’s where the songs are.’ I said, ‘You’re 24, 25 years old, you’re in the eligible-bachelor category. Just date amazing women, or men, or whatever, who are going to fuck you up, and explore and have an adventure and let it affect you and write songs about it.’”

His band is full of indie rockers who’ve gotten swept up in Hurricane Harry. Before becoming his iconic drum goddess, Sarah Jones played in New Young Pony Club, a London band fondly remembered by a few dozen of us. Rowland and Jones barely knew anything about One Direction before they met Harry — the first time they heard “Story of My Life” was when he asked them to play it. Their conversation is full of references to Big Star or Guided by Voices or the Nils Lofgren guitar solo in Neil Young’s “Speakin’ Out.” This is a band full of shameless rock geeks, untainted by industry professionalism.

In the studio, while making the album, Harry kept watching a vintage Bowie clip on his phone — a late-Nineties TV interview I’d never seen. As he plays it for me, he recites along — he’s got the rap memorized. “Never play to the gallery,” Bowie advises. “Never work for other people in what you do.” For Harry, this was an inspiring pep talk — a reminder not to play it safe. As Bowie says, “If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

He got so obsessive about Joni Mitchell and her 1971 classic Blue, he went on a quest. “I was in a big Joni hole,” he says. “I kept hearing the dulcimer all over Blue. So I tracked down the lady who built Joni’s dulcimers in the Sixties.” He found her living in Culver City. “She said, ‘Come and see me,’” Hull says. “We turn up at her house and he said, ‘How do you even play a dulcimer?’ She gave us a lesson. Then she got a bongo and we were all jamming with these big Cheshire Cat grins.” She built the dulcimer Harry plays on the new album. “Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, those are my two favorites,” he says. “Blue and Astral Weeks are just the ultimate in terms of songwriting. Melody-wise, they’re in their own lane.”

He’s always been the type to go overboard with his fanboy enthusiasms, ever since he was a kid and got his mind blown by Pulp Fiction. “I watched it when I was probably too young,” he admits. “But when I was 13, I saved up money from my paper route to buy a ‘Bad Motherfucker’ wallet. Just a stupid white kid in the English countryside with that wallet.” While in Japan, he got obsessively into Paul McCartney and Wings, especially London Town and Back to the Egg. “In Tokyo I used to go to a vinyl bar, but the bartender didn’t have Wings records. So I brought him Back to the Egg. ‘Arrow Through Me,’ that was the song I had to hear every day when I was in Japan.”

He credits meditation for helping to loosen him up. “I was such a skeptic going in,” he says. “But I think meditation has helped with worrying about the future less, and the past less. I feel like I take a lot more in—things that used to pass by me because I was always rushing around. It’s part of being more open and talking with friends. It’s not always the easiest to go in a room and say, ‘I made a mistake and it made me feel like this, and then I cried a bunch.’ But that moment where you really let yourself be in that zone of being vulnerable, you reach this feeling of openness. That’s when you feel like, ‘Oh, I’m fucking living, man.’”

After quite a few hours of recording the string quartet, a bottle of Casamigos tequila is opened. Commander Quaalude pours the drinks, then decides what the song needs now is a gaggle of nonsingers bellowing the chorus. “Muppet vocals” is how he describes it. He drags everyone in sight to crowd around the mics. Between takes, he wanders over to the piano to play Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up.” One of the choir members, creative director Molly Hawkins, is the friend who gave him the Murakami novel. “I think every man should read Norwegian Wood,” she says. “Harry’s the only man I’ve given it to who actually read it.”

It’s been a hard day’s night in the studio, but after hours, everyone heads to a dive bar on the other side of town to see Rowland play a gig. He’s sitting in with a local bar band, playing bass. Harry drives around looking for the place, taking in the sights of downtown L.A. (“Only a city as narcissistic as L.A. would have a street called Los Angeles Street,” he says.) He strolls in and leans against the bar in the back of the room. It’s an older crowd, and nobody here has any clue who he is. He’s entirely comfortable lurking incognito in a dim gin joint. After the gig, as the band toasts with PBRs, an old guy in a ball cap strolls over and gives Rowland a proud bear hug. It’s his boss from the pizza shop.

In the wee hours, Harry drives down a deserted Sunset Boulevard, his favorite time of night to explore the city streets, arguing over which is the best Steely Dan album. He insists that Can’t Buy a Thrill is better than Countdown to Ecstasy (wrongly), and seals his case by turning it up and belting “Midnight Cruiser” with truly appalling gusto. Tonight Hollywood is full of bright lights, glitzy clubs, red carpets, but the prettiest pop star in town is behind the wheel, singing along with every note of the sax solo from “Dirty Work.”

A few days later, on the other side of the world: Harry’s pad in London is lavish, yet very much a young single dude’s lair. Over here: a wall-size framed Sex Pistols album cover. Over there: a vinyl copy of Stevie Nicks’ The Other Side of the Mirror, casually resting on the floor. He’s having a cup of tea with his mum, Anne, the spitting image of her son, all grace and poise. “We’re off to the pub,” he tells her. “We’re going to talk some shop.” She smiles sweetly. “Talk some shit, probably,” says Anne.

We head off to his local, sloshing through the rain. He’s wearing a Spice World hoodie and savoring the soggy London-osity of the day. “Ah, Londres!” he says grandly. “I missed this place.” He wants to sit at a table outside, even though it’s pouring, and we chat away the afternoon over a pot of mint tea and a massive plate of fish and chips. When I ask for toast, the waitress brings out a loaf of bread roughly the size of a wheelbarrow. “Welcome to England,” Harry says.

He’s always had a fervent female fandom, and, admirably, he’s never felt a need to pretend he doesn’t love it that way. “They’re the most honest — especially if you’re talking about teenage girls, but older as well,” he says. “They have that bullshit detector. You want honest people as your audience. We’re so past that dumb outdated narrative of ‘Oh, these people are girls, so they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ They’re the ones who know what they’re talking about. They’re the people who listen obsessively. They fucking own this shit. They’re running it.”

He doesn’t have the uptightness some people have about sexual politics, or about identifying as a feminist. “I think ultimately feminism is thinking that men and women should be equal, right? People think that if you say ‘I’m a feminist,’ it means you think men should burn in hell and women should trample on their necks. No, you think women should be equal. That doesn’t feel like a crazy thing to me. I grew up with my mum and my sister — when you grow up around women, your female influence is just bigger. Of course men and women should be equal. I don’t want a lot of credit for being a feminist. It’s pretty simple. I think the ideals of feminism are pretty straightforward.”

His audience has a reputation for ferocity, and the reputation is totally justified. At last summer’s show at Madison Square Garden, the floor was wobbling during “Kiwi” — I’ve been seeing shows there since the 1980s, but I’d never seen that happen before. (The only other time? His second night.) His bandmates admit they feared for their lives, but Harry relished it. “To me, the greatest thing about the tour was that the room became the show,” he says. “It’s not just me.” He sips his tea. “I’m just a boy, standing in front of a room, asking them to bear with him.”

That evening, Fleetwood Mac take the stage in London — a sold-out homecoming gig at Wembley Stadium, the last U.K. show of their tour. Needless to say, their most devoted fan is in the house. Harry has brought a date: his mother, her first Fleetwood Mac show. He’s also with his big sister Gemma, bandmates Rowland and Jones, a couple of friends.

He’s in hyperactive-host mode, buzzing around his cozy VIP box, making sure everyone’s champagne glass is topped off at all times. As soon as the show begins, Harry’s up on his feet, singing along (“Tell me, tell me liiiiies!”) and cracking jokes. You can tell he feels free — as if his radar is telling him there aren’t snoopers or paparazzi watching. (He’s correct. This is a rare public appearance where nobody spots him and no photos leak online.) It’s family night. His friend Mick Fleetwood wilds out on the drum solo. “Imagine being that cool,” Gemma says.

Midway through the show, Harry’s demeanor suddenly changes. He gets uncharacteristically solemn and quiet, sitting down by himself and focusing intently on the stage. It’s the first time all night he’s taken a seat. He’s in a different zone than he was in a few minutes ago. But he’s seen many Fleetwood Mac shows, and he knows where they are in the set. It’s time for “Landslide.” He sits with his chin in hand, his eyes zeroing in on Stevie Nicks. As usual, she introduces her most famous song with the story of how she wrote it when she was just a lass of 27.

But Stevie has something else she wants to share. She tells the stadium crowd, “I’d like to dedicate this to my little muse, Harry Styles, who brought his mother tonight. Her name is Anne. And I think you did a really good job raising Harry, Anne. Because he’s really a gentleman, sweet and talented, and, boy, that appeals to me. So all of you, this is for you.”

As Stevie starts to sing “Landslide” — “I’ve been afraid of changing, because I built my life around youuuu” — Anne walks over to where Harry sits. She crouches down behind him, reaches her arms around him tightly. Neither of them says a word. They listen together and hold each other close to the very end of the song. Everybody in Wembley is singing along with Stevie, but these two are in a world of their own.

#harry styles #rs #260819 #drug mention

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miss-musings · 6 years

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My List of Top 10 Recurring Blacklisters

For my ongoing "Top 10" lists about different aspects of The Blacklist, today I'm tackling recurring Blacklisters who weren't already included in "My List of Top 10 Blacklisters."

Just for an FYI, I'm also disqualifying Tom Keen and Dembe Zuma, as they both have been regular cast members at different points in the series. I am, however, including non-antagonist entries -- that means that some of these Blacklisters didn't actually end up being 'bad guys,' but instead, either were or later became allies of Red and/or The Task Force.

There actually weren't too many Blacklisters to work with as I'd say about 70 percent of them are one-offs (and I already did a list about them), and many of the better ones who are recurring were already on my other list. But, of the small pool that did qualify, I'm judging them based on:

How much I personally liked them / how compelling I thought the character was

How well the guest star did

How much of a threat they were to Red, the Task Force, the public in general, etc. OR if they were an ally, how much the character adds to Red's or the Task Force's goals

I don't have quite as much time to tackle these entries as I have my previous two lists, so I'm only going to put like a paragraph of explanation for each. Also, no honorable mentions this time.

So, without further ado, let's begin:

10. ISABELLA STONE

I don't really care for Isabella Stone, but it was either her or the Pavlovich Brothers, and I care about them even less. I don't remember much about Stone, other than she was played by that actress who played Jan on "The Office," and at the end of her namesake episode, Red has her chained up in a walk-in freezer or something. I don't remember what she did, or why she was a threat to the Task Force/Red. I know she was hired by Kaplan to do some bullshit, but I don't remember what it was or how she did it.

9. NICHOLAS T. MOORE

I'm not really one for all the cults that this show does. It seems like they try to have 1-2 per season; but I actually didn't mind this one and thought it might be the best cult we've seen so far. It had kind of a "The Village" vibe to it, although I'm still trying to figure out how Moore convinced all those people to join him out in the woods. Anyway, the only reason I included him is because I like the actor -- he played The Warden on "Shawshank Redemption" -- and I thought the way he tricked Aram into getting him his Bible so he could kill himself was kind of clever.

8. THE MAJOR

I also don't really care for the Major, but I thought the actor did well in his scenes with Spader. Plus, he seemed to create a lot of problems (read: drama) for Tom and Liz, with trying to tempt Tom back into a life of crime when he was trying to go straight in S3b. (Am I remembering that right?) Again, I honestly don't really care for or about him, but I thought he was around enough and played a big enough role in Tom's, Liz's and Red's lives that he deserved a spot.

7. SUSAN HARGRAVE

Another Blacklister I don't really care about. (Almost makes you wonder why I bothered compiling this list.) Don't get me wrong. I think Famke Janssen is an underrated actress, and I enjoyed her weird dynamic with Spader in their scenes. I didn't like how she ended up being Tom's mother; I didn't like her ham-handed way of telling those one random dudes about her backstory. She's so open it's like she might as well be an audio-book version of her character. But, again, I think that's more how she was written than how Janssen played her. Even though I don't care about the whole Hargrave/Tom spin-off with "The Blacklist: Redemption," I still think she was an intimidating enough villain in her own right, as she was responsible for breaking Mathias Solomon out of prison and sic-ing him onto Liz while she and Tom were trying to get married. It's interesting that Hargrave was ultimately responsible for attacking her son's wedding and almost getting him killed, and endangering her future daughter-in-law and granddaughter. It's the kind of irony you'd see in a George R.R. Martin work. So, even while I don't like her, I think she deserves a spot because of the impact she had and the threat she posed at the time. Plus, I did think it was badass when Red shot her in the arm and she barely cared.

6. TOM CONNOLLY

Okay, NOW we're starting to get into "I actually kind of like these people" territory. I mean, I don't actually like Tom Connolly. If he were a real person, I would want to punch him in the face. But, as a character, I think he's more compelling than any of the previous entries on this list. Granted, he became a little cartoonish and over-the-top there at the end, but he posed a serious threat. And even though he was introduced to us as "a little too good to not want something" from Cooper / the Task Force, I appreciate that the writers at least TRIED to make his loyalties a little ambiguous or 'on the side of the angels' when he was first introduced. Granted, I don't think it really worked, but they tried. The actor also did a pretty decent job, and I thought his final confrontation with Liz and Cooper (where Liz ends up shooting and killing Connolly) was well-done. It was certainly the most shocking death of a Blacklister I can think of. As mustache-twirling as he was, he still posed a serious threat for Liz, Red and the Task Force. In threatening to kill them or end their careers, he pushed Liz into a no-win situation where if she shot him in an attempt to stop his machinations, the Cabal won by being able to turn her into a criminal. And if she did nothing, they would still win. Okay, anyway, moving on:

5. SMOKEY PUTNAM

I really like the character of Smokey. He's a little wacky, but cheerful and light -- which is something the show desperately needed after the morbid, dark and depressing S4b. Granted, I think how the show introduced him (as someone for Red to track down as a bounty hunter-type person) was a bit forced. But, oh well. I like what Smokey brings to the show and to Red's crew. I also think the actor does a good job keeping up with Spader while also bringing his own bit of weird flair to the show.

4. MR. RALEIGH SINCLAIR III

So, I really just love John Noble, and appreciated that the show was able to nab him to play one of the Blacklisters. And a pretty unique Blacklister at that. I thought his gimmick was really cool and unique, and while I could've done without him killing off all the people he recruited to be doubles, I guess it makes sense. I actually enjoyed when the show brought him back to turn that one guy into a double of Ian Garvey -- that was a nice little twist. I thought his interaction with Spader at the end of his namesake episode was a little too long, but still a hoot to see those two sharing a screen.

3. GINA ZANETAKOS

Our first-ever female Blacklister on the show, Gina Zanetakos was a serious badass. She was clever, fast, brutal and sexy. She absolutely demolishes both Ressler and Liz in fist-fights and she nearly kills Tom. She was quite a force to be reckoned with, both in her initial appearance and in subsequent episodes, and I really appreciated when the show brought her back in S3b. (Which, side note, did she get killed off on the show? I don't remember.) If she wasn't killed off, I certainly wouldn't mind her making a return appearance.

2. KARAKURT

So, fun fact: Karakurt is actually played by two different actors -- one in S2 and a different guy for S3. Not anything I hold against the character. It’s just interesting. Anyway, Karakurt is probably the most threatening Blacklister on this list for our Post Office crew. He easily manipulated Liz into killing a U.S. Senator and even more easily set up the OREA bombing to make it look like her fault. In comparison with his S2 showings, I think his S3 appearances are less-than. He just kind of hung out as a plot device for Tom to track down, beat up and threaten. Much less intimidating, although I appreciate that he didn’t give up trying to get one over on Tom, et al, and escape whenever he had the chance. Just what I’d expect of a Russian assassin and Blacklister extraordinaire.

1. MARVIN GERARD

A weird choice to put at #1, maybe, but I really like the character of Marvin Gerard. He’s just so different from most of the other Blacklisters that we see, in no part because of the fact that HE WAS ALREADY IN CUSTODY when he was introduced. Instead of Red giving the Task Force a name so they can track them down and put them IN JAIL, Red asked for Gerard to be brought to him so that he could break him OUT OF JAIL. Unlike most Blacklisters, or hell just characters on this show in general, Marvin Gerard is very calm, collected, calculated and can talk sense into Red when few other people can. But, he also feels very grounded in reality. He just kind of seemingly wandered into a hostage situation in 3x02 like “IDK what I’m doing here. WTF is going on?!?!” and then just kind of got back into a groove with helping Red and Liz with their plans -- both in 3x02 and throughout the rest of S3a. And, speaking of: whatever happened to Marvin Gerard? I feel like Red called him in Cape May about shutting down his business or something, but I don’t think we’ve seen him since 3x10. Hopefully he makes another appearance on the show, because I really appreciated how unique he was as a Blacklister and what he brought to the show as a character and to Red’s team as an asset.

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thejonzone · 3 years

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It's True that Kendall Jenner Loves Neil Young

On the Beach, Neil Young’s ode to perserverance, plus its direct predecessor, Tonight’s the Night, represent my favorite section of Young’s discography. These albums are motivated by grief, the death of Crazy Horse’s guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, both to overdose. Young begins Tonight’s the Night with the title track, and gives a concise obit for Berry-- Bruce Berry was a working man / he used to load that Econoline van. The albums arrange Neil’s grief and combine with his desire to isolate in reaction to the huge success of his music.

The two albums are incredible-- inherently searching, Tonight’s second half takes place on the road, as Neil drives and sings and smokes and cries, intent to get out and away. And while Tonight is ramshackle, On the Beach is more polished, and has a bit of a wider scope, not so much blindly in reaction to death and fame but taking in the larger landscape of his life and his era, trying to make sense of where he was.

What makes Neil Young’s music appealing to me is that his cadences, melodies, and pacing always seem to match my depression. Often downtrodden and lethargic, his music moves to the same slow-thumping heartbeat in me that thinks about throwing it all away.

On the Beach has always struck a chord with me, not even considering the music, because of the album cover. A car lies crashed deep into the sand, only it’s back bumper still sticking out. A pair of beach chairs sit empty underneath an umbrella. Neil is in the background, hands in his pockets, looking out at the water. It sets the tone for the album, with Neil as maybe a bit of a party pooper, contemplating rather than reveling, on the outside looking away.

It is a little bit strange that I found Neil Young’s title track to On the Beach in the middle of Kendall Jenner’s Apple Music playlist “Summer of ZAZA”. Certainly, Kendall herself didn’t put this playlist together, but why is “On the Beach” included? One keyword search led to another, yada yada yada, now Neil’s song about the disillusionment of fame lands on a collection of “sunny, beach-ready songs”.

It’s easy to think that Neil’s song’s placement here is a mistake. But what if it isn’t? Is it such a stretch to imagine that Neil Young and Kendall Jenner are more similar than different?

But first...what exactly is a summer of ZAZA? Is it short for pizza pizza? Or perhaps a nod to Hungarian-American actress Zsa Zsa Gabor? Zaza is, I believe, a slang term for weed-- is Kendall endorsing a summer of flying high on grass? Maybe ZAZA is a new term, one that Kendall wants to get the ball rolling on. “How was the pool party?” “Oh, simply zaza, darling.”

The playlist is, surprisingly, melancholy. And that’s not just because Gorillaz’ “On Melancholy Hill'' is included(???). Some songs are sad and don’t feel like beach-hangin’ standards, like Linda Ronstadt’s cover of Blue Bayou, or Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Idaho”, a song I do not know but who’s lyrics include: Now it’s white as snow / watch the evening glow / across Idaho. Which are not summertime fun lyrics! Sure, there are 2019 summertime hits like “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo and “Venice Bitch” by Lana, but Yo La Tengo’s “Today is the Day”? Maybe included because it is on the album Summer Sun. SahBabii’s incredibly horny "Squidiculous" is here (Skinny jean king, can’t fit my nuts in this bitch), but why is that alongside the yearning coo’s and admittedly not fun in the sun vibes of Bobby Vinton’s “Please Love Me Forever”?? The playlist is strange in this way, and makes me wonder if Kendall Jenner is sad.

“On the Beach”, the most out of place song with the best SEO, does line up in some ways with Kendall Jenner. Young moved to Los Angeles in the late 60’s and found a lot of success there, helping to define the Laurel Canyon folk sound. Not only was he a part of Buffalo Springfield and CSNY, but upon going solo he had a megahit with 1972’s Harvest. Neil Young’s level of fame might not have reached a Kardashian level ever, but it’s not like he was some podunk folk singer playing to three people in a basement. He was a star.

And he had trouble with it-- with people’s expectations of who he should be, of what he should make next, of everything he ended up representing. It weighed on the guy. And it’s clear on On the Beach’s title track that Young is torn between the visibility fame gives him and his desire to be alone and hidden: I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day to day / Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away / I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day to day, he sings.

I’m not here to say I understand or know how Kendall Jenner feels. But I imagine that if I had cameras constantly pointed my way, making posts for my millions of faceless followers to support the empire of attention that had been built around me, I might relate to Neil.

But then again, I’m not so sure Neil and Kendall would get along. On the Beach is full of moments where Neil is quite candid and straightforward in his wish to smash Los Angeles’ rose-colored glasses, like in “Revolution Blues”, when he sings Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars / But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars.

Just like Neil considers the body of water before him on the beach, so have I, staring out, taking in the contours wind creates on the surface, watching cormorants dive underneath for fish, waiting for them to re-emerge. Sometimes the world comes back together when you take a step back. Neil’s album is so great because it hits on something that I think is universal-- we watch water and it causes us to think past ourselves. I want to believe that Kendall goes out to her private section of the Pacific Ocean and stares out at it. Maybe Neil’s plaintive harmonica floats around her head as she fantasizes about giving it all up, taking up an alias, and moving up to Alaska. As Neil sings later on in the album, on "Motion Picture (For Carrie)", Well all those headlines they just bore me now / I’m deep inside myself but I’ll get out somehow. The Summer of ZAZA was almost certainly made by an overworked Kardashian-employed social media person who typed “on the beach song” into the Google search bar. But maybe right now Kendall is staring out at a cloudy California beach, running “Ambulance Blues” back, and considering which Zuma deep-cut is going to make this year’s playlist. I’d rather the latter be true.

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helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog · 7 years

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EXCLUSIVE: Why Trevor Noah’s ‘Daily Show’ Isn’t a Place for Playing Games

With an unyielding news cycle churning around President Donald Trump and other heads of state, like Turkish President Erdoğan, Trevor Noah has found his stride as host of The Daily Show, erasing any apprehension over Jon Stewart’s departure. Each episode, he leaps between topics like Erdoğan possibly ordering violence against American protestors on U.S. soil to Trump signing things that look like bills but are actually just memos he’d like to send to Congress with ease because, honestly, unrest often breeds the best jokes.

As a child in South Africa during Apartheid, Noah writes in his book, Born a Crime, that he was the product of an illegal relationship between his black mother and white father when interracial dating and marriage was outlawed. Instead of playing outside like most kids, he was kept indoors, and when he walked on the street with his mother, she dressed like his nanny to avoid questions. Noah credits his mother for her strength and sense of humor in the face of shocking situations like being shot in the face, after which she told him that he was now the best looking person in the family.

EMMYS 2017: The Standout Performances on TV

With that influence, Noah made a career as a popular comedian on the world stage before joining The Daily Show as a correspondent. In September 2015, he was given the coveted opportunity to fill Stewart’s shoes -- a transition that was met with intense scrutiny and media attention. And in some ways, it was almost as if people had forgotten that Stewart, not much older than Noah at the time, had taken over the gig from Craig Kilborn.

Now, a over a year and a half as host, Noah is now drawing record viewer numbers, averaging 1.05 million during the week of May 15. As he continues to strengthen his stride, Noah has picked up a Writers Guild Award nomination and the MTV Award for Best Host in 2017, with the promise of adding more hardware to his trophy shelf.

“I acknowledge the prestige that comes with winning an award, whether it is an MTV Award or an Emmy, but I don’t only work for those things,” Noah says. “But I do acknowledge that recognition helps everyone who comes together to make the show. I don’t take that for granted at all.”

Following his record week on air, ET spoke with Noah about how to engage with those he doesn’t agree with, how he handles shifting public opinions and his responsibilities to viewers.

ET: At the beginning of last year, it was reported by some outlets that The Daily Show was floundering, and last month, you attracted more viewers than your debut week in September 2015. How do you handle the shift in public opinion?

Trevor Noah: I’ve learned that I can’t control what people think I’m thinking or what they think I think of the show; all I can do is make the show. The only people I have to be worried about are the fans; the press is going to press.

With so much breaking news each day, is your head spinning to keep the show timely?

If anything, I enjoy it. I used to get so sad whenever House of Cards finished, and now I feel like I’m watching House of Cards every single day. This is the pace of news that I’m used to in South Africa, my President Jacob Zuma has the ability, very similar to Donald Trump, to create a lot of news at one time.

Are you exhausted?

Oh, no. I tell people that if you’re doing stand-up right you should be chilling. That’s where I go to be by myself and enjoy myself with an audience. Stand-up is where I go to be completely at peace with myself.

You interviewed conservative online commentator Tomi Lahren, and some accused you of normalizing her views. Do you feel it was akin to Jimmy Fallon playing with Trump’s hair and normalizing his platform?

You’ve got to be careful. Are you giving a platform or are you engaging? There’s a distinction between the two; that’s often why we’re criticizing the news. If your views have not been challenged, then you were handed a platform. But if people now recognize you for the hypocrite you are, then I would safely say that’s what debate is all about. You can’t exist in a political space and not talk to people you don’t agree with -- then you’re in the world of self-congratulation, not in a world of engagement.

It’s different [from] if I was playing games with people. Then, appearing on my show could be considered a platform because there is no way that you’re going to walk away unscathed. But if you come on my show -- whether you’re John Kasich or Ben Carson or Tomi Lahren -- I will have you on the show because I wish to engage you and your views.

A lot of people are confident when no one’s talking back to them, and that’s what it’s about as well. You say we got flack for that interview, and I’d say that we got more praise for it. You need to be willing to go head to head with a person you completely disagree with, and if [their opinion] is the truth, it should be able to stand up.

Is there anyone else whose ideas you’d like to challenge?

There are a few, but now they don’t want to come on the show anymore. Before Trump was a serious contender and in [the White House], we had Republicans on and we’d have conversations that were really spirited about their views and ours. It was fun, but I won’t lie to you, once Trump got in, everyone became afraid. We had Omarosa booked and then at the last minute, she pulled out on us. I’d love to have Speaker Paul Ryan or Senator Mitch McConnell on, but I think we’re in an age where people don’t want to engage.

Is there a line you won’t cross when covering Trump?

I will always afford Donald Trump the respect of the presidency, but as a person, there’s still a level of respect he has to earn. When making the jokes on the show, I don’t set out to be particularly disrespectful, and if I can’t make jokes based on what he’s done or said, if I have to dig to a personal level, then I’m failing. There are so many real things that Donald Trump has done that I don’t need to make up anything to bolster my comedy. I stay in the space where I’m not trying to be mean for the sake of being mean, rather I’m using the comedy to say something.

Is it weird watching racism tear apart America in the same way colonialism has torn apart England?

It’s weird but it’s standard. People don’t often look at history; everyone acts like they’re living in an isolated period of time that has nothing to do with another period of time. When I see that, I can only laugh. Everything has a cause and effect.

When it comes to all of these conversations and what’s happening in America, the key is to provide context, because a lot of young people don’t know. For many, they are experiencing this for the first time. They don’t know the history of how things came to be or how laws come to be made. That’s a space I enjoy being in: I get to ask questions that everyone feels they know the answer to but oftentimes, they don’t.

What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned from your debut as host until now?

The biggest thing I’ve learned is the same thing I learned from stand-up comedy: You don’t let the good shows get to your head and you don’t let the bad shows get to your heart. You have to keep creating what you feel you would want to create and you have to strive to be in the place that you’d always want to be in. That’s all I can do.

Is that what sets you apart from the other Daily Show alumni?

The biggest difference between me and many of them is that I’m probably the only person that doesn’t share a distinct DNA with Jon Stewart. The way I see the world and how I’ve been trained in it is different. I remember Jon said his favorite thing about me was that I wasn’t going to try to emulate him in any way. I want you to watch The Daily Show in two or three years and say, “Man, that show is completely different. It’s trying to do something that is still similar -- in that we’re still calling out BS -- but in a completely different way.”

Have you thought about an end date at all?

I’ll know it when I see it. This is my journey, this is my world. It’s a responsibility and an opportunity. I don’t take it for granted.

I’ve got a platform and I have people who appreciate the many voices that are represented by the show. I remember one young man said to me in an airport, “Hey man, I just wanted to say thank you because if it wasn’t for you, I don’t know where I’d be seeing anyone in the mainstream talking about the police shooting black people, because you guys aren’t afraid to talk about it.” That’s a space that needs to be occupied and I’ve come to realize that it’s something I don’t have to be afraid of or ashamed about.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

#_revsp:new_provider_with_logo_342 #_lmsid:a0VK0000001yfWcMAI #_uuid:1b8150b5-5113-3287-bffb-dc7d22aa9ebb

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melissarosegold-blog · 7 years

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COLOURPOP: Ultra Blotted (DOOZY & ZUMA) and Blotted Lip (CANDYFLOSS & DRIP) Swatches ♡

When Colourpop released their blotted lips and ultra blotted lips, I knew I had to get some! I had used the Alexis Ren x Colourpop collab blotted lip in Deja Vu and fell in love with the colour and texture. I only picked 4 of the products in total. From the Ultra Blotted line I picked Doozy and Zuma. For the Blotted line, I picked Candyfloss and Drip. It’s honestly no surprise that I would pick these colours haha. My skintone is light-medium warm + very yellow and all four of these shades suit it very well!

I prefer this style of finish so much more than their ultra mattes and even ultra satin! But that’s because I prefer more natural every day lip looks and these are perfect for that. The great thing about these is that you can apply less for a more soft look or build it up to make the colour pop more! They are very pigmented and are very comfortable on the lips.

Let’s start with the Blotted lips! “Sheer matte lipstick that creates the perfect popsicle pout! Formula is lightweight, matte and buildable for light to medium coverage.”

Both swatches are from one swipe. Candyfloss is a warm terracotta colour, while Drip is a warm rosey mauve.

Now onto the Ultra Blotted lips! “A medium coverage matte lipstick that creates a soft, diffused look. It is completely transfer-proof and long-wearing but also lightweight and comfortable. No cracking or flaking! Leaves lips smooth and fresh.”

The ultra blotted lips are in liquid form and these swatches are also from one swipe. Doozy is a warm rose colour, and Zuma is another warm rosey mauve but less mauvey compared to Drip from the Blotted lip line.

Here are the swatches side by side ⬇

BLOTTED LIP SWATCHES

ULTRA BLOTTED LIP SWATCHES

For more fuller looking results, I would recommend using a lip liner - which I didn’t use in these swatches :P

♡ Pigmentation 10/10 ♡ Wearable every day colours ♡ Colour is buildable ♡ Ultra Blotted is transfer proof (Blotted has slight transfer) ♡ Lightweight and comfortable on the lips ♡ Easy to apply and to remove

✖︎ The packaging for the Blotted lips are quite flimsy ✖︎ The tube of the Ultra Blotted ones were clearly not full ✖︎ Doozy can accentuate dry patches

I am so so happy about all four shades and I highly recommend these two lines. They are not as long lasting as the Ultra Matte or Ultra Satin but that doesn’t bother me at all. For those with dry lips, make sure to exfoliate or apply lip balm because these can feel a bit drying.

Happy Colourpop-ing! Hopefully they restock the ones that are sold out asap :D

#colourpop #ultra blotted lip #blotted lip #lip #doozy #zuma #drip #colourpop doozy #colourpop zuma #colourpop candyfloss #colourpop drip #colourpop doozy swatch #colourpop zuma swatch #colourpop drip swatch #colourpop candyfloss swatch

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goodvibesatpeace · 7 years

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The Secret Human History of Earth

I know it bothers you, it bothers me too but I am not afraid to talk about it... There are many things we believe to be true which are not. Follow me along this journey to discover what makes maybe the true story of human origins, some theories first.

We have been told that human life began six thousand years ago, according to biblical accounts the first man was Adam and the first woman was Eve. Another theory is that some scientists say that human beings share a common African genetic ancestor going back two hundred thousand years called Lucy. A recent theory suggests that ancient humans rampantly interbred with Neanderthals and a mystery species called Denisovans.... but what aren't people talking about which may be the missing link? Is there more to this story that we have been led to believe? Was there an advanced civilisation before this one? Have you ever wondered why there is so much nonsense on the Internet... Distractions, complete junk? Where did this all come from? Language, Time, Religions, Government, Money? Why do you have to go to work? Pay your Taxes? How did we get here? These are bold questions for bold people in interesting times. Lets see if we can dive a little bit deeper to unlock the mysteries of human creation. Finally, I must warn you, everything you know or think you know is about to be questioned.

Long before the dawn of recorded civilisation, in an era that has been called ' the Golden Age', mysterious priesthoods developed a powerful method of obtaining spiritual ecstasy. These priests were called 'The Shining Ones'... members of an advanced culture that was almost lost but who's wisdom and power has lived on... carried across the ages by a secret group of initiates. The missions of these select survivors is to preserve their ancient knowledge is apart to serve humanity and in part to control the development of the world. So who are 'The Shining Ones', a shermanic priesthood?... from Ancient Zuma to Ancient Egypt, in almost all ancient texts there is talk of beings coming from outer space from the heavens who fell down to earth... they became known as 'The Watchers', Eloheem, Nargas, Neteru, Djinn, Anunnarki, Angels, Nephilim (Giants walking upon the Earth), feathered serpents, Apacarlu, Elders... the list goes on.

Throughout the ages, the ruling elite has known humans are not alone in the universe, there is archaeological evidence that suggest that long ago planet Earth was visited by extra terrestrials, these alien being's have been mythologised as Gods. Traditional Archeology tells us that approximately one hundred thousand years ago, human kind homosapien apparently split into homosapiensapien.. modern humans. However in Germany, Archeologist's have found three circular structures made from bone and stone dating back from around four hundred thousand years ago... in fact vast numbers of tools and religious artefact's from 2.5 million years to 125,000 years ago have been discovered in Gona, Ethiopia and Europe. These included bones dusted with red orcha and skulls packed with clay which were raised up on posts. Is there something we are not being told?

Across the ancient world, human beings shared the belief that the Sun was the giver of life and this is the key to understanding 'The Shining Ones'. Sun and Moon cults can be found all throughout the ancient world, light and dark make up the very nature of our existence. The Shining Ones are said to be the founders of these cults and of Medicine and all Sciences, giving the Indus Valley civilisation the Chakra system and giving the Ancient Egyptian civilisation knowledge to build the Great Pyramids which are Mathematically sound. The earliest accounts of 'The Shining Ones' can be found in five principle sources;

The Sumerian tablets from the library of Nepal where they are named 'The Anunnarki',

The Biblical book of Genesis swear they were given the name 'Eloheem'

An account in Greek by the Babylonian priest Berossus

The book of Enoch where they are referred to as Angels, Watchers and Nephilm

The book of Jubilee's

According to the Sumerian creation myth, Angels known as 'The Anunnarki', great sons of Anu, where the founders of their culture and Sumerian. The chief sky sun god, and his name means shining... the Anunnaki are therefore the sons of 'The Shining Ones' of sons of light. The Sumerian account states mankind learn from 'The Shining Ones', they set things in order but why would they need to do this? 'The Shining Ones' warned the Sumerian's of a great flood that would end up destroying their homeland, similar to the Noah story. Did the ancient astronomers of The Shining Ones have profound knowledge of processional cycles? According to Zecharia Sitchin and his interpretation of ancient Sumerian text, The Anunnarki needed gold... the gold was sought after as it was rare on their planet called 'Niburu'.

Coming to Earth, they found it a long task to mine for gold as they were not originally from here.... the God Ea who's Sumerian equivalent was Enki is one of the three most powerful gods in the Mesopotamian Pantheon along with Anu and Enlil, he resides in the ocean, underneath the earth, called the Abzu.

In effect, Enki proposed... let us make Man and Woman in our image, after our likeness; given the go ahead, Enki and his half sister Ninki created Man and Woman.... Homesapiensapien from genetic engineering for the sole purpose of providing workers to mine the gold. Man and Women was created by crossbreeding homo-erectus with an extra-terrestrial. The Shining Ones can also be seen in Ancient Egypt, in the heliopolitan creation account; The first ruler on Earth was Osiris, a son of Atum ra... we were told he was a shepard of men bringing knowledge and developing the mystery schools of secret arcane sciences.

So where does this leave us? From Ancient Zuma to Ancient Egypt we have seen how The Shining Ones have ruled the world to become the lord of rings.... Where are The Shining Ones now? Right in this very room! When you look outside your window traces of them can still be seen.. hidden in plain sight. From Health, Education, Politics, Entertainment.... their influence can be seen everywhere.... the greatest trick of the magician is to show you something that is not there and make you believe in something that is not true.

The real secret is that the power is you! For you my friends, are The Shining Ones! Reclaim your power, follow your greatness... and don't look back. While there may not be a definitive answer to the exact truth of human origins, there are definitely questions to raise eyebrows.

In becoming your greatest version, you must always question your reality...... and what you do with this information is the choice I leave with you. Let Love guide you, not Fear.

Much Love to all... There are many deep waters out there!!.. go in peace my friends :)

#earth #human history #history #ancient egypt #ancient history #evolution #sumerian #the shining ones #ancient zuma #neanderthals #homosapiens #homosapiensapeins #homoerectus #denisovans #extraterrestrials #aliens #eloheem #anunnarki

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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How Can I Write About Video Games Right Now?

June 3, 2020 3:00 PM EST

How can I possibly write about video games right now? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now.

Featured image credit: Tyler Tomasello/Zuma/Rex/Shutterstock via The Guardian.

How can I possibly write about video games right now?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now. With the world seemingly burning down around me, writing about video games seems like the least important thing in the world. And, to be fair, even before 2020 started, most of this job felt somewhat superfluous.

I mean, I obviously value games criticism and love getting to add dumb jokes about Waluigi being grown in a vat at Nintendo, but I don’t place some huge level of importance on my job. It’s good work. It’s (usually) fun work. But I wouldn’t call it strictly necessary.

While this has been something on my mind for a few months now, the events of the past few days have really brought it to the forefront. Does the world really need me to talk about the Sega Game Gear Micro when so many people are out protesting against police brutality every night? Do I even want to publish an impressions article for Bug Fables when it could, theoretically, take eyes away from important news taking place around the country?

The easy answer is undoubtedly, unequivocally no. In the grand scheme of things, video games aren’t that important. However, in 2020 there really aren’t any easy answers.

As I struggle to answer the question for myself and decide the best course of action to take, I can’t help but think back to my childhood. Growing up in rural Oklahoma, racism was pretty common. My graduating class had around 185 kids and only one of us was black. The only other black kid in my high school was his younger brother.

I remember very vividly showing up to a Halloween dance off-campus and seeing a group of seniors outside handing out forms to join the KKK. Hopefully, it was just a bad joke, but, given some of the other stuff I witnessed, I wouldn’t be surprised. At one of our after-proms, a few kids showed up in white hoods. In my first year of college, a good friend told me, in great detail, his plan to shoot President Obama if he got elected.

And the most terrifying thing to me is that I just had to see it. I never had to live with that fear that I can only imagine every single day of my life.

It’s weird thinking back on growing up in such a backward place. Like, how did I come out of that not being a complete racist? A lot of it probably has to do with my parents being decent people, but I think I owe a decent amount of gratitude to video games.

I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up and got bullied for being overweight quite a bit. So, like many, I turned to video games to escape my reality. Sure, there was only one person who would talk to me in homeroom. But if I could click buttons well enough, people loved my barbarian in Diablo 2.

One of the most formative games from my childhood is, without a doubt, NBA Street Vol. 2. But it’s not the gameplay that has been so incredibly influential on my life, it’s the soundtrack.

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Featuring tracks from artists like Black Sheep, Talib Kweli, Pete Rock, and CL Smooth, that collection of music shaped most of my musical interests to this day. While everyone else in my school was listening to Garth Brooks or Britney Spears, I was downloading every track from Nas, De La Soul, and Mos Def I could find on LimeWire (y’all remember LimeWire?). I was actively engaging in learning more about a culture I would never in a million years encounter inside my own little bubble.

That’s not to say that listening to hip hop made me understand the plight of being a black person in America. I could never do that. I’m also not saying that knowing all the lyrics to most of Common’s library makes me not a racist. I am still a racist. Don’t doubt that for a second. It might not be overt racism, but it’s still there.

Case in point, over the past few days several of my colleagues at DualShockers, people I love and respect, are getting opportunities to jump on a bigger platform and talk about what all this means to them. 99% of me was immediately elated for them. However, there’s that little voice inside saying “hey, I work just as hard as anybody here, and I never get asked to be on podcasts. What the heck?”

And in that moment, I know I still have so much work to do. I absolutely work hard, and if I keep doing it well, I’ll get my own opportunity, but me internally whining about not getting on a podcast is such a joke. “Come on, dude,” I have to exasperatedly say to myself.

So, NBA Street Vol. 2’s soundtrack didn’t magically cure me of my racism. But, it did make me see it. It made me know it was there. And, most importantly, it made me recognize how easily ingrained it is. Which is something that never would’ve happened without the game.

That’s why I think it’s important to keep writing about video games. Because there are some incredible creators out there, making things that more people need to see. And the only way I see for us to move forward as a people is to start to actually recognize and empathize with people who are “different”: whether that’s skin color, sexual orientation, or whatever.

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If I can put somebody on to their own NBA Street Vol. 2, then I’ve done my job as a games writer and a human being. Plus, it’s not like my personal journey to become not just an overt racist, and instead actively anti-racist, began and ended in 2003. That’s obviously a battle I’m still fighting today by seeking out these games and other media for myself. It’s a fight that I want to continue to fight each and every day.

One of my unspoken goals at DualShockers has always been to highlight smaller games. If you take the time to go back through my published articles, you’ll notice I cover a lot of indie titles. That’s on purpose. In many ways, those games are more important than much of what the AAA side of the industry is putting out. Those titles are highlighting underrepresented creators or telling stories that probably wouldn’t sell a million copies. But they’re meaningful. They’re needed. They push us as people forward.

Unfortunately, what hasn’t always been on purpose for me is looking for games made by or starring people of color. Sure, I’ll highlight them if the game looks cool, but I don’t actively seek them out. Most of the time I really don’t pay attention to the person behind the games I’m playing or writing about. I think it’s time to change that.

So, look for more of that in the future out of me. In the meantime, check out Umurangi Generation, Dandara, and Afterparty. Those games are rad and worth a look. I also think we’ll have a separate article up soon that will be of interest.

And if anybody reads this and wants me to come on your podcast, I’m not available. That said, I know a few excellent people who are.

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Additionally, here are some resources and a select few gaming-focused forms of media to share. Bear in mind that there are many more scattered around social media and websites.

Black Lives Matter has a resources page that you can visit that will take you to numerous PDFs, for example, the Healing Justice Toolkit was created to “collate, condense, and share the lessons we have learned in ensuring that our direct actions are centered on healing justice.”

Jesse Sparks published a blog post titled, “7 Virtual Mental Health Resources Supporting Black People Right Now” In a time where there’s a lot of tension and activity, this could prove useful for those who may need some support.

This document titled, “Anti-Racism Resources” is a list of various types of media that act as a “resource to white people and parents to deepen our anti-racism work”. It’s extensive, but very detailed and worth reading.

The Spawn On Me Podcast looks to spotlight people of color in the gaming industry and is hosted by Kahlief Adams.

Gamertag Radio is a podcast about video games hosted by Parris Lilly, Danny Peña, and Peter Toledo.

Spotify also released a Black Lives Matter playlist featuring songs about empowerment and pride featuring a lot of Black and POC artists.

Game Devs of Color Expo has tweeted for Black game developers who may need support.

Black Game Developers is a website that showcases Black game developers across the world.

Here are some charities and movement suggestions you may wish to consider supporting.

June 3, 2020 3:00 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/how-can-i-write-about-video-games-right-now/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-can-i-write-about-video-games-right-now

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gsbrandson · 4 years

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Laurels by the Bay

There was an echo in the canyon, that’s for certain. I believe the year was 1966. Sixty-six was the year where the doors of Capitol records were the entrance to paradise. Not because I could sing or play, but because I could watch and I could record it. Before what you all call the Summer Of Love, there was a lot happening in Los Angeles that really set the tone for the nitty gritty, down and dirty stuff, you know? And I’m happy to say that I was a fixture there. There were films being made in and around our homes, sure. Model Shop being one of the big ones. But no one captured what I did. Everything was stylized so naturally, you see. You can’t cut and retake the pure essence of the canyon. You have to just let it be. You have to let her speak. And she did, through all of us.

I think it was one of the record shops on Sunset that made it all clear for me. I used to sit in the listening room on these modern style chairs that were upholstered with orange leather. The spiraling cord from the KLH stereo to my ears I thought was my connection to heaven. I loved the jazz that birthed rock n roll and the local stuff, of course. Those shops were our beacon of hope and killed our worries for just a moment during the sirens of Vietnam. Those shops are where I first discovered the art of film.

Down the street a ways from Tower Records was a brand new camera shop simply called Camera and Darkroom. And I was the Levi 501 darling of the boulevard. Well, at least one of them. There weren’t any flowers in my hair yet, but that was soon coming. Outside the camera shop they were demoing the brand new Super8 camera by Kodak. I posed and waved for the camera on the street corner and was told to come back in a week to see myself on the screen. They had a reel going in the darkroom on a white sheet. The owner of the shop had filmed his wife creating a flower arrangement in their kitchen. And of his baby boy making a sand castle on the beach on the fourth of July. I couldn’t help but cry as I watched his life on the screen. How beautiful and how precious were his memories. In live action and in color, repeating again and again. I walked through the projection and reached for a flower in the hand of his sundress wife and it hit me. I had to have one to.

It was my newest thrill. I had my own Super8 after saving up two paychecks, getting a loan from my father in Connecticut, and telling my landlord that she would receive the rent a week late, as I was “having an emergency”. I started to shiver and squeal when I loaded the first reel of film. My first few shots were out the window of a taxi down Sunset. I loved how the glow of the neon signs came back after development, and so I walked down the strip and filmed the flickering lights of the Whisky A Go Go and the people passing by and waving at me. That’s how I met Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys and how I received my introduction to the Canyon.

I met Brian post mental breakdown, on one of the few nights he spent out of solitude. He saw me in the street getting a shot of the cars passing by and asked what I was doing. His brothers stood behind him.

“This is a Kodak Super8,” I said. “I’m making movies.”

He invited me up to his house in the canyon and said he had something for me to film. At first, I thought he was coming onto me. But that wasn’t his way. We walked into his living room and it was empty. Apart from a white grand piano and floors covered in three feet of sand. I cannot lie, I was confused. He said, “Sit down, let me explain.” He sat at the piano, Dennis got on drums, and Carl on bass. I started recording. They performed a half buzzed version of In my Room, which I had heard in the record shop a couple of months before. A lot of people believed that God spoke through these boys, as they created the California Myth, especially Brian. And my, my, could he write. The reel from this night is marked with a California surfing edition postage stamp in my archive. I watch it from time to time and pour some Zuma Beach sand that I keep in a bottle by my bed into my hand.

The footage I have of Dennis’ run in with Charles Manson is now the property of the FBI. I handed the reels over after the murder of Sharon Tate and Charlie’s arrest. One reel is of the state of Dennis’ home after the family’s stay in the summer of 1968. Another is of Charlie pulling a knife on Brian and Dennis at Capitol after receiving constructive criticism on his music. He could never handle that. There is one reel that I kept without the officials knowing. It begins as a pan of Malibu beach, the frame finally resting on a meditating Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson. Both shirtless and in shorts, sitting, legs crossed on large rocks by the sea. Their fingers are out in OM. They wear prayer beads around their necks that were made by the girls in the Family. A peaceful sounding scene, yes. But the way Charlie looked back at the camera is something I will never forget. His eyes looked animal, and that sinister, almost demonic smile haunts me to this day. I believed my camera to be cursed after that. I applied holy water on its handle and the Ladies of the Canyon joined hands in a circle and said seven hail Mary’s over its body. The reel is marked with a red X in my archive, and I haven’t watched it since 1975.

I was introduced to the Byrds by I don’t remember who. I used to take a car up to their place in the canyon to film them practicing for the Fifth Dimension Tour. They brought me along to their shows on the beaches and to some of the major cities to film a backstage diary. I made them perform Wild Mountain Thyme over and over again to get the right shot. I got so many close-ups of their dark eyelashes on their cheeks when their eyes were closed. We were all so rosy and sun kissed in California. And so much in love. Not with each other, but with the music. So many girls came around and put flowers in their long messy hair and tailored their blazers for television by hand. My favorite reel of them is their TV appearance and performance of Mr. Spaceman. I was front row, and David kept looking down at me and singing through his smile. They were so nervous before that performance, and so happy. This reel is marked with a backstage photograph, rubber banded around the box. Of the boys in their nicest dressing room yet, and it’s titled with a quote from David, saying “Well boys, I think we’ve made the big time.”

Joni Mitchell sang jazz to me and the music of the world. I was there to watch her switch between mediums. I filmed every brush stroke on canvas and every movement of her gold hair in the sun. She wrote Ladies of the Canyon on a green velvet sofa and in front of a picture window. She watches as I dance with Linda Ronstadt on the rug from Santa Fe. She laughs. And in the morning, she is topless and in jeans. She paces and drinks tea from a daffodil painted cup and saucer. She eats raspberries from a white china bowl. She scratches her head. She smells of the lover’s musk that he gave her just this morning. She keeps smelling her shoulder and writing things down. But she was my flower. She would say to me, “It’s rose day at the market. It’s about a dollar fifty for a bouquet, and about a penny for your thoughts.” These reels are on the top shelf of the archive. They are marked with some of her favorite news clippings about jazz musicians in New Orleans, a poem she wrote for me, and a single dried daffodil.

Young girls were indeed coming to the canyon. Cass Elliot kept a pill bottle of sugar cubes in her kelly green makeup case. They were laced with LSD 25. She sets her hair in the morning and watches the soap operas on NBC. Her closet was full of colorful floral trapeze dresses. Choosing one each morning was her favorite part of the day. All of the boys told her she was a stallion. Strong and majestic, yes, but her false lashes and glamour girl curl set inspired the flowery woman calls of the decade. She was a force to be reckoned with. Could sing the birds out of the trees. And now she had opened her head.

I filmed the Papa’s thin. The doctors said they were almost to the point of no return. A pin dropping, to them, was a clap of thunder. The group had just made their sixth television appearance for the week, and I was in the dressing room filming the prelude to the California full tilt boogie. The surf shops down the coast dedicated their business hours to the ones they loved. We echoed back. That part wasn’t hard for us, my baby. It was the first time the Mama’s and their Papa’s hit the waves. I have footage of the sun-bleached surf boys teaching us the zen motions of applying sex wax to our boards. They had tan skin and bright white teeth, and they always smiled so big for my camera. I’m afraid that Papa John and Denny couldn’t tell where the waves began. They stood there, twenty feet from the water break, staring into the blue. As loud as she could, surfboard under arm, Cass ran up shore and sang “Come on in, the water’s fine.” And at that moment, the boys returned to Earth. To this day, they owe the ending of their bad trip to Mama Cass. I don’t think they dropped acid again after that. This reel is wrapped in the archive with Cass’ paisley handkerchief that she used to sop up her nosebleeds and a single sugar cube laced with LSD 25.

It was the man that I fell in love with at the Dog Bar on the coast that brought me, for the first time, into the home of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Zappa was sitting at a piano, topless and in jeans, prayer beads around his neck. The top of the piano was covered in stacks of sheet music that he had written himself. I wondered almost immediately how many of them would make the final cut of a record and how many hours a day he spent under his desk lamp with his pen. Before saying hello to me, he said, “Come here for a minute, will you tell me if this sounds ugly?” Frank was writing a song about a CIA man lurking around Laurel Canyon, which later I found out was about Brian Wilson’s schizophrenic paranoia. I was setting up my camera in the corner of the music room and before I could reply with a reassuring “No, it doesn’t sound ugly at all,” there she was in the doorway. This moment caught on tape is to this day, one of my favorites. She was the girl from the Tropicana Motel that he had found in a mini skirt and with a bright floral suitcase. She was looking for rock stars and in a way, he was looking for her. Some say she’s the girl Lou Reed wrote Femme Fatale for after traveling to LA with Warhol. But that’s just a rumor, and she liked it that way.

On this day she entered the room wearing a tiffany blue mesh robe with feathers on the trim. She had a golden fringe bang and white boots up to her knees. She knew without looking straight at us once that the camera was rolling. She sits on Frank’s lap as he continues to play and she wraps her arms around his neck. I’ve taken photographs of the screen at this moment when he looks up at her. I have it timed just right. She was not his wife, but she was, most definitely, the love of his life. She notices his eyes all lit up and laughs. She kisses him bigger than usual. Do you want to guess what he says? He says, “Suzy Creamcheese, oh baby, now, what’s got into ya?”

I don’t think I really learned what poetry truly was or really felt it until I found Jim. I found him In the lobby of the Chateau Marmont and I asked him what his sign was with a lollypop in my mouth. He smiled so big as he said Sagittarius. He was such a beautiful angel boy. And I was over the beat poets already. Jim had a way of making you feel like you were floating. I lived next door to him at that hotel, I kid you not. At night I used to hear him singing in the bathroom from the comfort of his clawfoot tub. He wrote Blue Sunday there. He was in love again, in love every five minutes. I set up my camera and filmed the goings on out the French doors and hoped that the tape recorder as close to the wall as I could get it, would pick up his humming. I eventually gathered enough courage to intrude on his bath for the shot. A wild request, I know. But he didn’t mind. I knocked on the door and received a sing song “Come in!” I heard the water splash as he moved. I believed him to be high out of his mind. The stolen flowers in the bath floated perfectly around him. He criss crossed his arms and held his shoulders. Looked at me like a starlet photographing boudoir for her husband. I think you can hear my sigh on the sound tape. He asked for more rosewater in the bath which I obliged. I have what he said next written in red ink on the reel box. He said, “This is the water of yesterday, and the flowers of tomorrow.”

There were laurels by the bay in the summertime. And there was only one time where all of us were together. It was the beginning of a new age. The discotech revolution would follow Jim’s death in 1971. Paris, France has him forever. We could all feel a shift after Woodstock. Many of our friends and the voices of Laurel Canyon would be laid to rest in the next two decades and somehow, on this particular day, we all knew it. We were so proud to be from California, even if honorarily so. We spent our final days of love in the ocean spray and in the sun. I do believe whole heartedly that this time altered our ideas of God. We had all been looking for him since 1960. It was 1970 now and it felt like the moon had at last fallen in line with the sun. We were all flying so high above it all for so long. We had pioneered so much and I don’t think any of us went into the 60s knowing what we could reach.

The reels I have of all of us were shot in God’s country. At Pfeiffer beach and at Big Sur. I still have my admission ticket taped up inside my windshield. This is the footage that I watch the most. It’s the footage that the historians and television stations offer me the most money for. I always decline. I suppose because you can’t put a price on this. These memories are mine. How beautiful and how precious they are. We were all like children climbing through the rocky caves with bare feet and laughing with every wave hit. We were on our beach towels and in large sunglasses, drinking sangria out of a clear mason pitcher and dancing until we were out of breath. We thought the sun could never set on us. The sand was our stage that day. We performed the Ballad of the Bonfire Children, 1969 at nightfall. Our grand finale at the West Coast cabaret. I believe the tourists mistook us for the sirens of the cove or the choir of the sea. “It’s just so hard to leave work at work.” We would all say and laugh. I miss them, all of them. How beautiful they were with their sea salt curls and their tanning oil skin.

You should have heard them harmonize in the footage on the last reel. They brought us back to 1963 when it all really began. All of them stood around the fire and sang Brian’s Surfer Girl. I have a sound cue on the tape of my thumbs up extending from behind the lens. On the sound tape you can hear me count them in. You can hear the crackling fire in the background. And you can hear me blubbering when they sing “So I say from me to you, I can make your dreams come true.” Because they had.

Dennis Wilson would succumb to a shallow water blackout in 1983. I find it so fitting that he ends our era with one line, well, technically two. He walks to the camera and puts his face so close you can see the sand on his cheeks. He was elated and wrinkled just a bit from sun exposure. When you read his lips, you can almost hear him speak. He says, “This is it, we’re signing off.”

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islamcketta · 4 years

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2019 has been a busy year. Between raising a 4 year-old, investing in my adult relationships, making Head of Content at my day job, and trying (always) to keep writing, I have not blogged here as much as I’ve wanted to. I have been reading, though, and I thought I’d take one quick pass at sharing all the things I loved most with you in one fell swoop. I’ve linked to longer reviews that I did manage to write, and at the end of the post I’ve included links to where my own (recent-ish) work can be found.

On Being an Artist

Witches’ Dance by Erin Eileen Almond

Classical music, madness and a tale of genius that doesn’t go quite the way you think it will? Mix that all up with some great writing and you have Witches’ Dance. This book helped me get past some of the fears I have about committing to the artist’s life (and I’m so grateful).

What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World by Robert Hass

This book sits in the precarious pile of “books I can’t live without” to my right as I type right now. Bob Hass is always thoughtful and intelligent and this collection of essays covers so many topics I love—from poetry to fiction to art—and reading it was like spending an evening in deep conversation with the dearest of friends. In one essay where he’s writing of Judith Lee Stronach, Hass says, “the practice of poetry was for her, a centering, a way of being clear-eyed, of discovering feeling in verbal rhythm” which helped me see why I’ve returned to this essential practice in recent years.

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat

There are many things to admire about this collection of essays by Danticat, but what I connected to most was the connection she made between being an immigrant and being an artist. “Self-doubt is probably one of the stages of acclimation in a new culture. It’s a staple for most artists” perfectly captured for me the combination of humility and striving for better that drives my own artistic practice. Danticat’s insightful reflects on her own experiences and those of other artists living between cultures is a worthwhile read, whether you’re interested in art or simply the human condition.

Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet by Christian Wiman

Somewhere in the middle of musings on the loneliness of poetry, the need for technique in writing, and the importance of the negative space that silence imparts in poetry, Wiman accomplished the very rare achievement of making me laugh aloud while reading. He also reminded me that part of the beauty of America (which can be hard to see these past years) is how much change is part of our very essence. This is a good book to read to osmotically improve your work while growing your own artistic survival suit.

On Womanhood Today

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

Red Clocks is the dystopia we all fear is right around the corner. It’s brilliantly constructed to portray a myriad of women’s individual experiences while also reflecting the many sides of what could happen if we don’t protect the rights of women. It scared me right into action and I’d highly recommend it if you need a kick in the pants.

Landscape with Sex and Violence by Lynn Melnick

I read this book in a hospital in Spokane while someone I love was being ravaged by a surgeon’s knife. It was strangely appropriate and adequately devastating given that the book is about the life of a sex worker. It’s a painful book to read and also an important one as it humanizes the women we so often fail to see. It’s helped me look more deeply at the lives of those forgotten women in my own community, like learning about the number of serial rapists victimizing them within a few miles of my home.

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

Mothers and daughters… it’s a fraught landscape that’s ripe for literary mining. The essays in this book do just that. From abuse to deep love, it’s a worthy read that’s helping me heal.

blud by Rachel McKibbens

I saw McKibbens perform one of the poems from this collection at AWP this year… about the rape of her grandmother and how the man helped her make sandwiches for her boys after. The mundanity of the violence against women in this book is devastating, because it’s everywhere and it’s accepted and because McKibbens is brave enough to look it right in the face and name it.

The Guineveres by Sarah Domet

Being a teenaged girl is hard. Being a woman trying to love the teenaged girl you once were is not easy either, but this book put me sweetly in the mindset of that time in my own life in ways that helped me heal a bit (all while telling a compelling story). I loved the myriad portraits of the different Guineveres—they were a good reminder to look deep into any group to see beyond the stereotypes you think define them.

Educated by Tara Westover

If you haven’t yet read this memoir of growing up in a fundamentalist LDS household in Idaho, you might be alone. I read it while flying over Idaho and Montana and it brought back so many memories of what it was like to live in a place where individual rights are paramount to everything. Westover’s writing is really, really good and her portraits of a very flawed family are as loving as they are terrifying.

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This little book speaks big, even just from its title. I was gifted this book during a semi-annual Ladies and Literature event that I live for because it’s an evening filled with intelligent, worldly women talking about the books they’ve loved. The premise seems so obvious and yet I know how necessary it is. The woman who gifted it to me said she was glad I was getting it because someday my son should read it, too. It’s based on Adichie’s TED talk, but goes deeper, so start with this video and then commit to the full 52 pages some afternoon when you have a moment to become a better human:

For the Craft

The Story of My Face by Kathy Page

If you struggle at all writing compelling suspense, this book is deeply educational (and it’s a great read to boot). We learn very early that this strange story begins with the protagonist’s face being horribly disfigured as a teenaged girl. As the book weaves between the now of her adulthood investigating the odd religious sect she once encountered and the then which led to her injury we are constantly reminded that there is a story to her face. But Page knows that all the details leading up to that story (both in the then and in the now) are compelling enough that she can dangle the mere mention as we follow her like salivating dogs through the full narrative. It’s a fascinating read for a non-writer. For a writer, it’s essential.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction

I could have put this book, deservedly, under any number of categories, but I chose this one because the essay by Stephen Graham Jones shook me to my artistic core. It’s a gorgeous collection of writing by Native authors and I learned many names I should have known long ago. This anthology is filled with artful essays about everything from literary craft to the deep pains inflicted on Native peoples as the US was colonized. I am grateful to the editors (one of whom I call a friend) for expanding my reading horizons and allowing me to read much more deeply about the country I call home.

The Paris Review, Issue 228

I’ve been reading The Paris Review for ages, because it made me feel smart, cultured, and literary long before I had the guts to just write already. But I haven’t always connected with the work in the magazine, especially the poems. This is the best issue of the magazine I’ve read to date. The interviews introduced me to new and exciting ideas, the stories were fascinating, and I think I loved every single poem.

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

Is there any fame in saying I loved Tokarczuk before the Nobel? This book is layered and complex and exceedingly well written. I wanted to read it because it reminded me of the Poland I once knew, but what I got was a much better understanding of how telling a story from a wide variety of perspectives yields nuance and beauty.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

I already wrote in depth about how very much I enjoyed the braided narrative of this book. It’s accessible and yet complex and I was recommending it to a friend just this week. I love Ozeki’s work. This might be her best book yet.

Field Notes on Science & Nature

I learned about this book in a session on poets who cheat on poetry with prose during AWP. Or maybe it was about prose writers cheating on prose (with poetry) but the upshot is that there are so many ways to see the world that we ignore if we’re just looking at literature. This book included a wide variety of scientific perspectives that were fascinating and also very enriching. I loved it so much I bought if for my sister-in-law. I also shoved my copy into my husband’s to-read pile. When asked recently what was the thing I loved most about my son I said, “He’s curious about the world.” This book is for the curious. Enjoy!

To Love Widely the World

McSweeney’s #52

This particular issue of McSweeney’s focused on stories of movement and displacement and I adored it. I met authors I’d never read before (particularly a couple from Africa that blew my mind) and felt that glorious thrill of seeing how very similar and how very different we are at the same time. I learned new techniques of storytelling and dug into histories I’d never really understood before. It’s a fantastic read that only lacked for not including anything by Elena Georgiou.

Night of the Golden Butterfly by Tariq Ali

When I started this post I’d only read this last book of Ali’s Islam Quintet and I wanted to recommend it here because I loved the ways the diverse array of characters helped me look at modern-day Pakistan anew (and also because it reminded me of travel tales my dad would tell me about the Khyber Pass when I was a kid). But the holidays wore on and I continued to be obsessed with this series and I’m now almost done with three more books in it. I’ve learned about Muslim Spain, Saladin, and turn of the (last) century Turkey and I can’t get enough. The best books are the ones where Ali really flexes the dialogues between the characters, but I’m loving them all and how they’re adding layers and layers to my understanding of the world.

Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers by Frank X. Walker

A poet friend recommended this book to me at AWP this year and I was very glad I read it. Not only did it help me expand my own understanding of the Civil Rights era in the US (something we could all use a refresh on, it seems), but I learned specifically about Medgar Evers. The switching of voices between Evers’ wife and that of his killer and his killer’s wife was devastating and rich. Read this to break through “our great tradition / of not knowing and not wanting to know.”

Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East by Pico Iyer

I love Pico Iyer’s way of looking at the world as a sort of permanent exile. The experience of being in-between cultures is something I always relate to and it’s in his work that I feel most at home. I don’t know if this book is better than The Global Soul, but it’s the book of his that I’ve most recently read and I very much enjoyed the throwback feeling of reading about a completely inaccessible China (among many other things) and thinking about how far we have (and have not) come.

BOMB Magazine, Number 146

BOMB has to be my A-1 magazine for inspiration. Although it’s only published quarterly, I carry it with me for weeks on the bus as I read interviews between artists of all types to learn about the synchronicities in artistic practice and what parts of the zeitgeist different disciplines are feasting off of now. This particular issue is one of the best so far. I don’t know if it’s because the throughline of water helped me look deep into the very many ways that one subject can be approached or if it’s because it raised my environmental and social awareness or maybe because it exposed me to more Native artists than I’ve ever encountered. But it was fantastic and I hope to carry it on the bus for many weeks to come.

If you’re interested in reading any of these books for yourself, please visit Powell’s and I’ll earn a small commission.

My Own Publications

Touting your own work is always a little weird, but I am proud of my writing and this has been a good year for getting poems published with 34 submittals (most of which contain multiple poems) and four acceptances. Two aren’t yet published, but here’s where you can find the two that have been, plus some other work I may have forgotten to ever mention.

“Bhanu Kapil in the Night.” Minerva Rising: Issue 17. In print only. “Kenneth Patchen on a Bookshelf.” {isacoustic*}. Online. “Re: Emergence.” Riddled with Arrows. Online. “The Needle.” antiBODY. Online “Swans.” Towers & Dungeons: Lilac City Fairy Tales Volume 4. In print only. “Marco Polo.” Poetry on Buses, 4Culture, King County. Online.

I also published “Yet All Memory Bends to Fit” at Cascadia Rising Review. Their site is currently under construction, so I’m including the text here:

“Yet All Memory Bends to Fit”

Reading Harjo I see the end of my memory— her ancestors, my severed line not at the ocean, but even after. Though we paint pysanki, our frozen pierogi are served with a side of poppy seed cake, courtesy of Moosewood. And the branches more established? Daughter of the American Revolution, I once ran a welcome wagon (kind of) until my wealth ran out, or I was given up, my siblings too many. I Rosied rivets and spoke Welsh with the old nostalgic for an accent I’d never heard. What can I claim? How can I know where I start if I can only love the memory of coal dust that darkens upper leaves. And maybe that’s what’s with this city wrong, where so many of us came to start anew— severed, floating while all around us Natives hunkered down, frozen shadows, street corners and basements— a tripline of roots we’d rather not see.

Cheers to a new year of reading adventures in 2020. Please always feel free to share your favorite books with me. It’s a wonderful way to connect to what makes us human.

The post The Best Things I Read in 2019 appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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igotopinions · 5 years

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Books I read in 2018

* = Re-read Check out past years: 2012, 2013 (skipped), 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. Follow me on Goodreads to get these reviews as they happen. 1) You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier 2) Binti by Nnedi Okorafor 3) Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stewart 4) McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh The ending is clear almost from the first page, but you keep reading anyway*. Great stuff. *It's almost as if there is MORE to enjoying a story than being surprised by the ending???? 5) They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy Ah yes, the violent and bloody underbelly of....the marathon dance craze??? Marathons that last upward of a MONTH??? Incredulity, if nothing else, keeps you reading right to the end. 6) What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing by Peter Ginna I've no interest in becoming an editor, but as an author I figured there'd be some useful stuff in here. From that perspective I'll say this - writers, even ones who only want to self-publish, would do well to breeze through this to get a better understanding of a process they've been through or want to go through, but also a better understanding of the editors themselves. 7) Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander 8) The High King by Lloyd Alexander 9) The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander 10) The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson 11) Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane Beautiful stuff, and a great reminder of all sorts of precious sensations to be found out in the world or in your childhood memories. 12) Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches by John Hodgeman I like John Hodgeman in general, but honestly haven't dug any of his books of false facts or the stand-up routines centered around such things. That stuff just feels like someone scatting nonsense (Blood tornado! Deranged millionaire! DOG STORM! Yeah!) to the tune of a particular vibe (the doodles in the margins of your high school notebooks). But it's clear the guy can be a consummate storyteller and so I happily picked up this book of his ostensibly true tales. It's charming, funny, and sincere. Huzzah! I look forward to whatever comes next from Hodge Man. 13) The World of Late Antiquity 150-750 by Peter R.L. Brown 14) The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch 15) The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Scammell (Translator) 16) The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander 17) Blindsight by Peter Watts 18) Killing Gravity by Corey J. White 19) How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow's World Today by John Thackara 20) Echopraxia by Peter Watts 21) The Colonel by Peter Watts 22) The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God! by Joe Eszterhas It’s a big book of quotable notables intermixed with a guy who really wants you to know he slept with Sharon Stone. There’s some chuckles to be had, especially if you’re irritated by Robert McKee, but let’s just say I’m glad I got this half-off from a used book store. 23) The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks Writers of fiction would do well to read this. 24) Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It by Kate Harding *25) The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut 26) Red Clocks by Leni Zumas A reminder that dystopian tales don’t have to be cranked to eleven, and are often much more effective that way. 27) Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG by Goodman Games I don’t normally include RPG books in this list, but at about 450 pages I reckon this one earns a spot. I had a lot of thoughts about it, which you can read here. 28) Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria by Lin Carter Look man, either you want to read a Conan rip-off where a convenient flying ship pulls our hero out of trouble at Just. The. Right. Time. or you don't. Nothing I say here will change that. I dipped into this soon after discovering the infamous Appendix N reading list. 29) Dear Life by Alice Munro 30) A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire by Anthony Kaldellis 31) Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann 32) Writing the Pilot: Creating the Series by William Rabkin 33) Ways of Seeing by John Berger If you've already done some university level art studies you may find most of this old hat.But if you haven't? It's a great primer, and I strongly recommend it. Heck, I wish I'd had it put in front of me in high school. 34) Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado 35) A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah 36) Polyamorous Love Song by Jacob Wren This book came out a few years ago. Just a few days ago I found it on the dollar shelf at a great used book and record shop in Montreal (Cheap Thrills). I never bother with stuff from the dollar shelf because it's usually about as good as the price suggests. But. The title & cover grabbed my eye. Then I stood and read the entire first chapter, not because I needed that much to erode any skepticism but because it gripped me. Your mileage may - nay, will - vary, of course. For me, the contents of this book were exactly what I needed. It might be what you need too, especially if you are someone who creates any kind of art and is struggling with it in the face of an increasingly rabid world. 37) Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith 38) Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed by Jacob Wren 39) Rich and Poor by Jacob Wren 40) Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh 41) Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh 42) Room to Dream by David Lynch, Kristine McKenna A great book whose format of a conversation between biography and autobiography really works! Both halves strangle the "lone genius" bullshit almost right out of the gate and, especially in Lynch's chapters, there's some kind of amusing punchline at the end of every other paragraph. An excellent read that is enjoyable even if you haven't seen every minute of his creative output. 43) Warrior of World's End by Lin Carter This book contains a sentient metal bird called a "Bazonga" and a chapter called "Flight of the Bazonga", to give you an idea. It's fun and dumb and yes. 44) Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler 45) Twelve Tomorrows by Wade Roush (Editor) *46) A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh 47) The Dying Earth by Jack Vance I was going to write my own review but then I saw BIll's here and it's just so much better than what I was going to say, as well as echoing much of my own thinking. 48) Dune by Frank Herbert It is Dune. 49) Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison This book does not in fact contain the famous twist from the film. That changes a lot, an awful lot. Frankly it evokes, read now, climate change at least as much if not more than overpopulation. I'm not sure if I'd recommend reading it, frankly, though not for any lack of talent on Harry Harrison's part. 50) Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell 51) Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt 52) The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason by Chapo Trap House *53) Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Though it gifts us a few of his best quotes, such as “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”, I feel like Mother Night is only necessary reading for completionists. It often feels like a short story filled out to novel length, and lacks any of the fantastic or meta-textual elements of his other works. 54) Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, Michael Witwer, Sam Witwer STATS Non-Fiction: 20 Fiction: 34 Poetry Collections:0 Comic Trades: 0 Wrote Myself: 0

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