#earliest one still reminiscent of my older style
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IRONY OF IRONIC FASHION
As consumers, we are so caught up in the speed with which new designs come our way that we often fixate on originality more than taste. Brands push to catch the eye of a generation accustomed to scrolling quickly and mindlessly. They rely on nostalgia and humor when simple intrigue no longer feels like enough. This has spawned a movement within the fashion industry that capitalizes on irony. Ironic clothes are traditionally and universally recognized as ugly, ridiculous, cheesy or cheap. The appeal is therefore not only in the way the clothes reference the darker fashion days of our childhoods and the whimsy that was present then. It is the fact that your grandmother will never understand, but you and your fashion-forward friend will.
Fashion houses like Balenciaga, Gucci, Moschino and Vetements are among the many embracing irony in the pieces they send down the runway. Gucci’s “web” or “grip strap” sandals are just two of the styles reminiscent of required attire for a whitewater rafting trip, and their jelly sandals are just a slightly upscale version of the shoes my parents put me in when I could not be trusted with destructible fabric. Balenciaga has turned crocs and dad-sneakers — seemingly antithetical to anything fashionable — into almost $900 shoes. Moschino created a garment bag-inspired dress while Vetements has turned slouchy t-shirts and sweatshirts into high fashion. For all brands involved in this movement, the expensive price tag and revered logos that adorn the garments, turn the clothes from cheap to chic. While theoretically promoting inclusivity and creativity in the fashion realm, this trend loses its potential for good in its promotion of cynicism, as well as intellectual and economic elitism.
The advent of ironic fashion was not as recent as its supposed originality might imply. The ‘90s saw the rise of ironic fashion similar to what we see today. As target consumers of high fashion were then not only educated, but also newly immersed in television and advertising, ironically embracing the banality of mainstream trends seemed genuine and refreshing. The notion of the hipster was still novel.
Even before that, the concept was not foreign in art in general. “Kitsch” used to describe cheapness, or art that draws from pop culture and therefore is easily accessible and generally unexciting. Kitsch took on a new meaning, however, in the mid to late 20th century. Skewed to mimic but still mock pop culture influence in art, the notion of “camp” grew from the appeal of exclusivity. It takes knowing that it would be ridiculous to take the conventionality of the work seriously to appreciate the humor in it. Thus jeans became a staple of everyone’s wardrobe. Guided by heavy advertising, a once practical piece of work attire became a comedic distortion of what it was. Jeans still held a relatable, one-with-the-working-class connotation, but high prices also said that the person wearing them “knew better.” Jeans were one of the earliest and largest reversals of the intended meaning behind a piece of clothing: their prevalence tells us that embracing anti-fashion as couture is natural.
I must admit that this movement makes sense — there is something to appreciate in anti-fashion fashion. Comfort, for one, is a valid reason to support the emergence of “ugly” fashion. As chunky sneakers and oversized sweatshirts replace stiff heels and fitted dresses, it is no surprise that women in particular are drawn to the change. There is also a sense of freedom that comes with abandoning mainstream styles: people can make expression a personal endeavor rather than one dictated by external standards. In theory, anti-fashion fashion is freeing in that it is relatable. It reminds us of the items we have hidden away in our closet or the ones we wear when one no one is looking. Older generations may make fun of those paying for Balenciaga crocs like they do those buying pre-distressed jeans, but the consumers are operating with the same intent: there is a casual and accessible appeal. It feels unedited, especially for people who feel excluded from the more classic take on the fashion world.
And while many of us welcome this opportunity to excuse a wardrobe disaster as deliberate, we find ourselves asserting that it is “ironic.” This need to be ostensibly “in the know” is telling of the problem with ironic fashion — it is not as inclusive as it appears.
The fact that this movement is not new is part of that problem. It is cynicism for the sake of cynicism rather than cynicism with any sense of originality. We have all seen and tried the hipster act and it has lost its novelty. We have come to the same realization: thinking you are better than everything is only entertaining for so long and it is no more tasteful than the lack of taste it mocks. Ironic fashion capitalizes on the whimsy that kitsch provides but demeans it, which besides feeling immoral, feels nonconstructive. It does not offer an exciting alternative to the “boring” mainstream nor a serious one to the ridiculous camp. The result is a movement that feels posed. It tries desperately to say something different, and consequently says nothing.
Yet, the potential benefits of an anti-fashion fashion movement, such as comfort and creativity, are ignored. First, the movement is only accessible to the generation that is both young and old enough for the pieces to be ironic, so any sense of creativity does not extend far. In addition, the qualities of these pieces that the mainstream loves become irrelevant, as they oppose the elitist outlook established. The excitement of ironic fashion is not the surprise itself, but the haughtiness of understanding the surprise when others do not. It prides itself on inherently elitist intellectualism, as understanding the irony in a piece implies a level of understanding of fashion (or art) history.
Finally and most obviously, the exclusivity of “ugly” fashion is also financial. To be done right, the irony has to be so obvious that it cannot be mistaken for being simply ugly clothing. For those who cannot rely on their ethos to tell others that they are, in fact, clued in, so much of kitschy clothing centers around logos and other forms of brand recognition. It is never just wearing the sandal, but wearing the $900 version. The movement becomes inaccessible to all those unwilling to spend hundreds on the best plain hoodie or platform sneakers. The pieces become acceptable not because they say something clever or funny, but simply because they are expensive. One need not even be clued into the intellectual side of camp to participate which undoes its (already flawed) purpose.
Vetements founder Demna Gvasalia said in his interview with SSENSE, “we do not want to be part of an idea of fashion that is about glamour and about something unattainable or super exclusive.” While his work was certainly not about glamour, it was perhaps less attainable and inclusive than “glamorous” fashion, which was not built on exclusivity. I do not mean to say that we need to leave behind our ugliest outfits and focus only on serious, conventionally beautiful clothing. I just mean that the movement as is feels arbitrary and limited. It does not need to center around knowing more, having more and poking fun, but around experimenting with choices, taking risks and taking things more lightly. In essence, the movement needs the sense of humor that it disingenuously nods to.
WORDS BY ALI ROTHBERG
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recent genshin impact paintings from my instagram / twitter
#genshin impact#zhongli#ning guang#kaeya#arataki itto#原神#hanfu#dunhuang#i'm still logged in! taking the opportunity to mass-post#you can see the recent spurt of evolution in my style from bottom (earliest) to top (latest)#earliest one still reminiscent of my older style
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Count-Down: Number 23
Welcome to Count-Down! All throughout the month of October, I’m counting down my Top 31 favorite portrayals and reimaginings of the King of the Vampires, Count Dracula!
Today’s Dracula is truly a multi-tasker: he spends as much time chewing scenery as he does biting necks!
Number 23 is…Richard Roxburgh.
I’m fairly certain that “Van Helsing” was my introduction to actor Richard Roxburgh, and I’m equally certain this was one of the earliest “serious” interpretations of Dracula and various other famous monsters from cinema and literature I ever got to see. I use quotation marks with the word “serious” because…well…as anyone who has seen this film will tell you, I think it’s hard to say this is a proper dramatic reimagining and do so with a straight face.
“Van Helsing” was the brainchild of Stephen Sommers; Sommers had first made a big break with his action-adventure, B-Movie-With-an-A-Movie-Budget remake of “The Mummy,” which is still considered by many to be, if nothing else, a fun reimagining of the classic titular monster for a new generation. However, after this first blockbuster, Sommers’ projects with monsters tended to fall flat of expectations, as his later Mummy movies never really held a candle to the first…and he did Van Helsing, which seemed to be universally panned by critics and audiences alike at the time, despite having a LOT of hype built up around it, and a lot of money thrown its way.
Truth be told, I actually rather like Van Helsing. It’s dumb, but it’s a fun kind of dumb: the film was meant to be a modern-era sendup of the old Monster Mash movies of the 1940s and 50s. In this picture, we have a whole cavalcade of classic creeps appear, most notably Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolfman…and, of course, Count Dracula. And truth be told…that’s exactly what it feels like. Keep in mind, those old Monster Mash movies were over-the-top, ridiculously plotted, had effects that don’t hold up particularly well, and tended to ignore a lot of continuity and canon elements. This movie does all those things, and just like a lot of those older movies, I still find it immeasurably entertaining: for all its flaws, there’s just a sense of ludicrous fun to it. It’s rarely truly scary, and there’s plenty in it one can mock, but for a kid watching it, I thought it was a blast! And as an adult revisiting it? Yes, it’s completely absurd, but it’s got a lot of good things buried inside it, and I still have a soft spot for it…again, just like those old movies. Whether all this was INTENTIONAL or not is up to debate, but the bottom line is that the film, in paying homage to those older pictures, ends up having a similar legacy: it’s hard to call it a good movie, but it’s also hard to say it’s not an entertaining ride, at least for me.
A key example of this sense of “updating the old” – both for the better AND the worst, one could argue – is Roxburgh’s performance as Dracula. Roxburgh is an actor known for being something of a ham; this is partially because the projects he does are often rather over-the-top in nature, to be fair, so he’s really just playing to the style, but I guess it doesn’t help the actor’s reputation. All that hammy goodness is on full display as Dracula, who honestly feels, in many ways, like a more modern, “edgier” version of dear old Bela Lugosi. Roxburgh’s thick dialect is certainly similar, as are some of his gestures and facial expressions. But while Lugosi’s melodrama was the commanding, powerful, charismatic sort, Roxburgh gives Dracula a more flamboyant, almost “glam rock” sort of performance. One person at least compared his Dracula to Jareth the Goblin King from Labyrinth, and…I actually find it hard to disagree. There’s something vaguely reminiscent of David Bowie in the way Roxburgh seems to glide from scene to scene, arms gesticulating theatrically and moving from classically debonair to gnashing his teeth like a wild beast.
For all his bombastic insanity, however, Roxburgh’s Dracula is, at times, legitimately effective, and while the CGI in the movie is notoriously “meh,” I do love the DESIGN of his “true form,” an idea with Dracula that didn’t START with Roxburgh, but I think MIGHT have been popularized by him. It’s one of the first versions of Dracula I think of when I think of that particular trope, and his Brides in this film – who are equally over-exuberant in their performance – are actually the first versions I think of when I think of those characters, too, bizarre as that may seem. The same goes for a lot of other things in the picture; again, it’s silly, but much like Roxburgh’s portrayal of the Great Undead, there’s still something of value here.
Besides, it’s hard to COMPLETELY hate anything Hugh Jackman is in…at least in my experience. (I’m sure there are some things you can completely hate with him involved, I just don’t intend to see them. I’m looking at you, Movie 43: YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE.)
Tomorrow, the countdown continues!
Hint: A Forgotten Return for the Great Undead.
#count-down#top 31 draculas#dracula#count dracula#halloween advent calendar#october special#number 23#van helsing#richard roxburgh
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BUTTER KNIFE SLIDE
In the early ’90s, I was the Editor-at-Large at The Welcomat, a Philadelphia-based alternative weekly. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, but every Thursday I would hop on a NJ Transit commuter train for the three and a half hour trip to Philly. After arriving at 30th Street station, I’d walk across the river into Center City to the paper’s offices, which were housed in a building on the corner of 17th and Sansom. I’d make a right in the building’s small lobby, take the elevator to the Third floor, and walk to the back, where the editorial department was located. Even before saying hi to the other editors, I’d drop my bag on my desk, step over to the office boombox, sort through the small batch of cassettes stacked next to it, throw in Delta bluesman Cedell Davis’ debut album, Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong, and punch the play button. Without fail, once those first notes hit the air, an audible and pained collective groan arose from every throat in the room.
While my own aesthetic sensibilities were just as offended as my co-workers’, over time I came to have a real and solid affection for Davis, the same way you come to cherish a middle child with a droopy eye or a pet rabbit with the mange.
To the uninitiated, the first moments of the opening track on Davis’ album, “I Don’t Know Why,” might have been produced when a large bull walrus with a head cold and an untuned autoharp were tossed into an enormous blender together. Those same listeners might even cynically conclude the album’s title was a direct reference to the last thing Davis muttered before stepping into the recording studio. At the very least, Davis’ caterwauling guitar and his own strangled yelping vocals might be seen as proof positive there really is such a thing as an authentic Delta Blues singer who is absolutely godawful. As one friend put it, “If you’re bad enough, you get to be ‘authentic’.’”
That said, over the years Davis idiosyncratic style also earned him some fierce, high-profile defenders. Love and respect him or cringe at the mere mention of his name, no one can deny Davis had a legitimate claim to the blues.
Ellis Cedell Davis recorded Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong for Fat Possum Records when he was sixty-eight years old, but his career as a workaday delta bluesman began roughly half a century earlier.
Davis was born in Helena, Arkansas, in 1926. At the time Helena was a bustling Delta port town, where his father ran one of the city’s countless juke joints and his devout Evangelical mother, while working as a cook, was better known among locals as a faith healer. Perhaps on account of all the sordid temptations waiting around every corner in Helena—it was a town rife with bootleggers, gamblers and hookers—young Cedell was sent a ways upstream to live with his older brother on the E. M. Hood plantation. There he became friends with Isaiah Ross, and the pair, only seven or eight at the time, began playing blues. Davis’ mother insisted the music was the handiwork of Satan, but it was the music that surrounded them, it was the music they knew, the pair often sneaking into local juke joints to catch live performances. Davis began with the diddly bow, a single wire nailed to a wall and plucked, before moving on to harmonica and guitar. Ross, meanwhile, stuck with the harmonica and would later be signed to Sam Phillips’ Sun Records as Dr. Ross, the Harmonica Boss.
When he was ten, Davis contracted a severe case of polio which left him nearly paralyzed. He returned to Helena, where it was hoped his mother’s healing powers might be able to save him. Well, Davis survived, but the muscles of his legs were so deteriorated he was forced to walk with crutches. Worse for the budding musician, he lost a good deal of control over his left hand, and his right was gnarled and completely useless. Being a right-handed guitar player, this was bad news.
In the early ’80s, Davis told New York Times music critic Robert Palmer—a tireless champion of Davis’ music—that it took him three years to figure out how to play again.
He flipped the guitar around to start teaching himself to play left-handed, but even then, with his right hand unable to work the fret board, he knew he needed something to use as a slide, so swiped a butter knife from his mother’s silverware collection, using the handle to work the frets.
In 2017, shortly before his death, Davis told an interviewer. “Almost everything that you could do with your hands, I could do it with the knife. It’s all in the way you handle it. Drag, slide, push it up and down.”
To unsophisticated ears, the grinding shriek resulting from the butter knife slide working the strings might be reminiscent of a cat in heat caught in a ceiling fan, but Mr. Palmer, being a rock critic, recognized its virtues, describing it as only a rock critic could: "a welter of metal-stress harmonic transients and a singular tonal plasticity.” Palmer also argued that Davis’ wholly unique sound wasn’t merely the untuned inchoate noise so many claimed, noting the subtleties of the guitar work remained consistent performance to performance.
In the early 1940s, while in his teens, Davis started playing on street corners around Helena, sometimes working as a duo with Ross. Soon enough he found himself booked in the local juke joints, playing house parties, and appearing on local radio blues shows. He became friends with a number of the era’s most notable Delta Blues luminaries, including Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Joe Williams, Robert Nighthawk and Charlie Jordan. In 1953 Davis teamed up with Nighthawk, a famed slide guitarist in his own right, and the pair began playing all over the Mississippi Delta region, eventually relocating to St. Louis. Davis, it was said, had a Buddha like presence on stage, a radiant calm that seemed to defuse even the most unruly of crowds. It apparently didn’t always come through.
In 1957, while the pair was playing a gig at a bar in East St. Louis, someone in the audience pulled a gun. This sparked a panic in the crowd that only escalated when cops raided the place. Davis was caught in the resulting stampede, and trampled under lord knows how many feet. The bones in his legs weren’t merely broken, they were shattered, confining him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Just as he was determined, for better or worse, not to let polio and a ruined right hand stop him from playing music, he didn’t let the wheelchair slow him down either. Shortly after he got out of the hospital, he and Nighthawk returned to Helena, where the duo continued performing together. When Nighthawk snared them a regular house gig at a nightclub in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1961, Davis picked up and moved there.
(As an interesting side note, Pine Bluff was home to an enormous U.S. Army chemical and bioweapons storage facility. It’s unclear if these two things are connected, but if you take Davis at his word, the town also boasted the fattest women in the world, an observation that inspired his song, “If You Like Fat Women,”)
Davis and Nighthawk went their separate ways in 1963, after ten years of playing together. Davis would remain in Pine Bluff for the next few decades, still playing the juke joints around the Delta.
(As another side note, throughout his career Davis remained adamantly vague when it came to questions about his marital status. He might have been married twice, or maybe not at all. It’s unclear. He knows he had a few kids, maybe even some grandkids, but he was no longer in touch with any of them.)
In the mid-’70s, like so many other folklorists inspired by Harry Smith and Alan Lomax, Louis Guida began trolling the Deep South with a tape recorder, hoping to make field recordings of some as-yet-undiscovered authentic blues legend along the way. In 1976 he stumbled across Davis playing in a bar, and those first recordings appeared on Guida’s compilation album, Keep It to Yourself: Arkansas Blues Volume 1, Solo Performances, which came out in the early ’80s.
And here we go. Robert Palmer heard that album and headed to Arkansas to catch Davis’ act, writing the first of many stories about him for the Times and other publications. Over the course of the decade, Palmer’s endless championing of Davis earned the man with the butter knife slide gigs not only all over the country (including a multi-night stand in NYC), but around the world as well. Suddenly Davis, who prior to that had ventured no further than St. Louis, was starting to get some recognition within the international blues community. Not all of it was as laudatory as Palmer, but still. In 1993, it was Palmer, not surprisingly, who brought Davis to the attention of Fat Possum Records.
The indie label had been launched by three white college buddies from The University of Mississippi in 1991, their goal being to promote (which sounds so much better than “exploit”) previously unknown bona fide aging black Delta blues musicians. Along with R.L. Burnside and T Model Ford, Davis became one of the earliest acts signed to the label. In 1994, with Palmer himself producing and assorted label mates like Burnside acting as sidemen, Davis went into the studio to record Feel like Doin’ Something Wrong, which featured a smattering of classic vlues covers mixed in with Davis originals, including “Murder My Baby” and the above mentioned “If You like Fat Women.”
Going back to the album now for the first time in roughly twenty-five years, it doesn’t seem nearly as comically awful as it did back in The Welcomat’s editorial office. In fact it’s pretty good, if you’re a fan of unpolished, dirty, gritty roadhouse blues. If you aren’t conscious that he’s playing with a butter knife, Davis’ guitar work merely sounds a little squeaky and rough, but not all that different from what you might hear from others of the time.
If there is a downside, it’s that the album’s a little one note and generic. Apart from the covers, Davis relies on the same simple blues progression for nearly every song, which, yes, can be a little tiring if you’re listening carefully. But if all you wanted was some generic roadhouse blues to put on as you go about doing other things, it fits the bill.
In a strange move considering he’d only put out a single album at that point, the following year saw the release of The Best of Cedell Davis, this time spearheaded not buy Palmer, but by popular jazz fusion bandleader Col. Bruce Hampton, one of Davis’ newfound fans. None of the album’s ten tracks appeared on Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong, so I can’t say for sure if these are new recordings or songs taken from his appearances on earlier Delta blues compilations, but a couple, like “My Dog Won’t Stay Home” and “Keep Your mouth Closed, Baby,” are kind of fun.
Shortly after the Best of came out, Palmer died, and Davis lost his most influential benefactor. But Palmer had gotten Davis on the map, and it was up to Davis to carry on as he always had.
In 1998 he released Horror of It All, an album whose title once again played right into the hands of the Davis naysayers. In fact, It’s an album, despite promising song titles like Chicken Hawk,” “Keep on Snatchin’” and the mind boggling “Tojo told Hitler,” that seems determined to prove the naysayers were right all along. With the exception of a new iteration of “If You Like Fat Women,” there are no drums, no side guitars, nothing but Cedell and the naked glory of his butterknife slide. It’s Cedell laid bare, and it can be painful, especially as Davis keeps playing those same simple blues progressions over and over. Yes, he has an absolutely unique sound, a bit like Joseph Spence, but ouch. It really is godawful, but like the equally godawful Godzilla vs. Megalon, may be the album that cemented his reputation among blues critics and fans who weren’t Robert Palmer.
(Oddly, Horror of it All is the album I keep returning to, as it best captures my initial impressions of the Davis sound.)
After Horror of It All came out Davis decided to take a break from recording to write more songs and return to playing the juke joints where he was most comfortable.
It’s a funny thing. If you don’t know the back story, Davis’ music, while perhaps not as awful as I once maintained (and countless blues critics still insist), doesn’t get much beyond the merely adequate. When you do learn his story, though, well, that elevates things, right? Knowing he’s confined to a wheelchair and using a butter knife in his crippled right hand, it’s really something he plays as well as he does. It also sure makes for a swell and effective marketing gimmick. He may not have been the worst bluesman who ever lived, but without that gimmick he was nothing. If he’d merely been blind it would’ve been no big deal—blindness just comes with the territory—but Davis was all messed up, and never let it stop him. Again, for better or worse.
As has happened so many times before, if you have a performer whose abilities make at least a stab toward the adequate, then add a mental or physical disability on top of it, all you need do is step back for a few moments and wait for the hipster celebrities to start lining up, hoping to get their claws in him. Consider the cases of Larry “Wild Man” Fischer or Daniel Johnston.
Sure enough, when word of Davis’ condition began circulating along with those first couple Fat Possum discs (the label having become quite popular among white hipsters), the white hipster celebrity musicians began clamoring to get on board.
Davis’ returned to the studio in 2002 to record When Lightnin’ Struck the Pine. The accompanying press release claimed he had personally signed R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin to be in his backing band. Why do I find it hard to believe a 76-year-old black bluesman from Arkansas had ever heard, let alone heard of, R.E.M. or the Screaming Trees, or that he would personally sign a couple white hipsters to be in his band?
Well, whatever. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it really did happen that way, and there wasn’t some heavy conspiring between Buck, Martin, and the white boys who ran the label to get them in on those sessions.
Well, however it came about, the resulting album was, much to my amazement, um, pretty good. The sound is as grungy as ever, but much fuller than it had been on his earlier albums, with the addition of organ, piano and sax together with Buck and Martin. And as it should be, Davis vocals and butter knife slide are front and center. The energy level’s been ramped up considerably, and best of all, Davis, both in the songs and a few candid recordings from the studio, seems to be having a fine time of it.
Three years later in 2005, Davis had a stroke and was forced to move into a nursing home in Hot Springs, Arkansas. This time it was definite and final—he could no longer play guitar. But if polio hadn’t stopped him, and crushed legs hadn’t stopped him, it’s little surprise a stroke and no longer being able to play the guitar wasn’t going to stop him either. He could still sing, and so kept writing songs and recording. And the hipsters kept piling on.
His 2015 album, appropriately if ironically entitled Last Man Standing, featured an 88-year-old Davis working through a greatest hits set in front of a backing band that again included Barrett Martin, as well as Jimbo Mathus and Stu Cole from the Squirrel Nut Zippers and noted blues guitarist brothers Greg and Zack Binns.
The resulting album, as you might expect, was a far cry from his debut. The production was clean and sterile, with the all-star band’s three guitars pushed to the front of the mix and Davis’ butter knife clearly absent for obvious reasons. At least none of the involved made the mistake of trying to recreate his trademark sound. It sounded like a bunch of white hipster musicians playing standard blues riffs behind an eighty-eight-year-old mumbling bluesman.
If you hadn’t smelled it already, to drive the Bad Faith of the whole project home, the album also contains three or four tracks of Davis just talking to the band in the studio, clearly trying to tell stories about his life and career to these youngsters who not only don’t know who the hell he’s talking about, but can’t understand what he’s saying. While similar tracks had been included on Lightnin’, this, unlike those, had been recorded after Davis stroke. The clear intention was to say to listeners, “Hey, get a load of this crazy old mumbling Southern black bliuesman! Is that authentic or what?”
Somehow, the following year he released yet another album, Even the Devil Gets the Blues, this time with someone from Pearl Jam in his backing band. Then in September of 2017, Davis had a heart attack, and died from complications a week or two later at age 91. Not surprisingly, at the time of his death, he was still scheduled to play a gig at the end of the month.
I’m not sure who the final Great Cosmic Joke is on, those hipster musicians who thought playing with a bona fide authentic Delta bluesman would bolster their street cred in some way, or poor Cedell—whom I adore and admire more with each passing day—who might have been conned into believing all that support from white institutions from the NY Times to R.E.M. would push him over the top. Whatever it may be, a mere three years after his death, and after seventy-five years of making a go of the blues against all imaginable odds, Cedell Davis remains virtually unknown and forgotten, even among serious blues aficionados. In fact it seems, and this may be the saddest thing of all, he’s only remembered nowadays by people like me.
by Jim Knipfel
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Naya Rivera: A Film Critic’s Appreciation of a TV Star
https://medium.com/@tomcendejas/naya-rivera-a-film-critics-appreciation-of-a-tv-star-8857ddf4e69
Naya Rivera: A Film Critic’s Appreciation of a TV Star.
I was much older than the target demographic for ‘Glee’, but I watched it semi-faithfully for these reasons: A) the intentionally diverse casting and primetime representation of many marginalized groups B) the clever reinvention and integration of pop songs and C) Naya Rivera.
Truth be told, since the show could be so wildly uneven, Rivera was often the ‘A’ reason I tuned in, always hoping she’d get a scene or a number.
Naya Rivera portrayed Santana, the tart-tongued (to put it mildly) captain of Glee’s cheerleading squad. By casting an Afro-Latina actress in the part, the show’s producers were already trouncing on stereotypes; by the year of the show’s debut, curtly dismissive cheerleaders were a staple of teen-centered entertainment, but they were usually white and hetero. As the show progressed, Santana fell for her teammate Brittany, came out to her family and friends, graduated from high school, tried to make her way in the big city, and eventually married Brittany. As a queer Latinx young woman with entrenched defense mechanisms, the character of Santana had to bear a lot of ‘representation’ duty, like an extended cheerleading ‘shoulder sit.’ But here’s the thing: Naya Rivera made it all seem as if it were as easy as a pony-tail toss.
Re-watching the early episodes, with Santana barely getting a cutaway, it’s easy to believe Ryan Murphy that the producers didn’t realize the size of talent they had on their hands when they first cast her. Rivera didn’t so much fight for more screen time as her talent compelled it, willed it. She’s mostly background in the first few episodes, until Santana and Brittany (Heather Morris) get drafted by Jane Lynch’s villainous cheer coach Sue Sylvester (the show does not lack for antagonists) to infiltrate the new Glee club and destroy it from within. From her earliest numbers and ultra-snippy encounters with the other kids, Rivera’s Santana starts to steal scenes.
This wasn’t just a function of the writing and directing. In fact, as clever, campy, sincere and delectably witty as ‘Glee’ could be (rewatching it this week, I chuckled at lots of throwaway lines) it could also be clumsy and over-reliant on whimsy and parody, sometimes in the same scene. In order to make the repeated point that Santana was caustically tough on the outside because she was hiding deep anxiety on the inside, the writers gave her so many withering and cruel things to say that emotional reality was often sacrificed on the altar of ‘Bitchy Quirkiness’ and frankly, because you imagined the writers were cracking themselves up at the saltiness of their latest insult. (Some were classics; too many of them hung on the lower rungs of humor, including easy body function jokes.)
But here’s the next thing: no matter how ridiculously florid the abuse Santana hurled at a classmate or teacher, Naya Rivera delivered the lines with alacrity and impeccable timing. And that’s what really made me sit up on my sofa and take notice.
Here was an actress who seemed to have the range of the marquee women from Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ of the 30s and 40s. The tumble of words the ‘Glee’ writers gave her didn’t faze her; she could deliver them with the rapid screwball comedy chops of Rosalind Russell or Jean Arthur. In an era of more tentative, introspective actors, Rivera had the steely drive of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. Her larcenous way with a wry line was reminiscent of the great character actress Thelma Ritter; her ‘brassiness’ recalled Joan Blondell; the blaze in her eyes felt like the one emanating from Ida Lupino. (The comparisons had a visual equivalent — Rivera’s red-carpet personal style often favored form-fitting pencil skirts, modern iterations of a forties ‘dame.’)
Probably no greater compliment I can give is to say Rivera reminded me of the legendary Barbara Stanwyck. Able to navigate romantic comedy, drama and detective noir with husky-voiced fervor, Stanwyck could be devastating when she was furious yet hard to resist when she worked her charms. She was slight of figure but imposing of presence. Rivera had those cinematic assets as well. Because she started as a child actor, on ‘The Royal Family’ and especially on the great ‘The Bernie Mac Show’, by the time she got to ‘Glee’ she knew how to work a camera, as self-possessed and confident in her talents as Stanwyck was. Why this is important is that when an actor is too self-critical or tentative, we get uncomfortable or pulled out of the story. Reading testimonials from her cast mates (Chris Colfer says he sometimes was so in awe of her performance he’d forget he was in the scene with her) we see they also marveled at her self-assurance, and Rivera cannily used it to make Santana both poised and poignant.
Where Naya Rivera carved out her own space, different from most of our past silver-screen sirens, is that she could sing, and she was Afro-Latina, multi-racial, far from the whites-only casting of the Warner Brothers and MGM eras. That meant something to me; as a Chicano man of a certain age, I can remember times when I was a kid when my family would count all the ‘Latin’ movie stars we could think of and we often stopped literally with the fingers of one hand.
As someone who studies and loves writing about film, my head was nearly scratched raw from trying to figure out why Naya Rivera wasn’t swooped up from ‘Glee’ by the 2010s studio gatekeepers and given the chance to be a film superstar in vehicles that were worthy of her, bypassing the B-movie stage. She didn’t even get the big-screen ‘best friend’ parts in Hudson or Witherspoon rom-coms, which is what actresses of color with comic chops were often relegated to in the 2000s. Why this oversight happened, and I’m sure there’s a lot of background showbiz politics and personal reasons as to why, the result is we were denied someone who could have been a major screen star and given us the pleasure of an above-the-title, singing-dancing-acting triple-threat. If Rivera had been white, the big-screen star-making machinery would have overcome all obstacles to not just take a risk on her, but bet on her.
It really felt like Naya Rivera could do it all. Stanwyck and Davis had formidable talents, but singing wasn’t considered one of them, so that made Rivera a modern-day extension of their bravura, as though they’d been reincarnated in a child actress who was bristling at the confines of Disney channel and tv screens.
And Rivera had that voice! Some of us have our own version of a sort of ‘opposite ASMR’; we derive pleasure from singers who have a husky rasp in their voice, and rather than whisper, know how to belt. In this regard, Naya Rivera was a godsend. It gave her the ability to tackle songs associated with Tina Turner and Amy Winehouse and Stevie Nicks, no small feat. Yet Rivera could also narrow the grit in her wide voice to just a few flecks of hurt and hope, as in the poignant moment when she confesses her love to Brittany in a plaintive version of Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Songbird.’ (This will sound like sacrilege to other Fleetwood Mac fans — I’ve seen the band in concert many times — but I just never really responded to McVie’s performance of her song except in cool, admiring ways. But I found Rivera’s vulnerable cooing of the song transfixing.)
Rivera’s musical performances on ‘Glee’ traversed many genres, but nothing seemed to catch her off-guard. I enjoyed many of the singers on ‘Glee’ —the show had over 700 musical numbers! — but if Rivera was given the lead, you knew you were about to get a showstopper, complete with signature focus, considerable ebullience and precision as a dancer. These gifts were captured best when ‘Glee’s’ hyper-active camera and editing stood still and just let her perform.
Rivera tackled Turner’s ‘Nutbush City Limits’ with ferocity. It’s too bad that the way she was filmed — with the aforementioned slice-and-dice, even leering editing — forever leaves us with a case of ‘what might have been.’ We get precious snippets of seeing Rivera singing, while the musical filming style of ten years ago, influenced by ‘Moulin Rouge’ and ‘Chicago’, attempts to whip us into an erotic frenzy with close-ups of halter-top abs and pom-pom zooms. This was a shameful miscalculation, because it has the opposite effect. If the camera had just stood planted and simply recorded the performance, Naya Rivera would have delivered the sexual fire and then some.
The best musical numbers with Rivera showcase all her talents — the ability to act out a lyric, the Fosse-flavored choreography, and a singing voice alternately tender and roof-raising. Her performance of Winehouse’s ‘Valerie’, in which she gets to ditch the ‘Cheerios’ uniform and stomp the stage in a party frock stands out as one of ‘Glee’s’ best and most effortless songs overall — it really looks like a romp that captures teenage brio and which would be electric to see live. (Later in the show, when Rivera sings ‘Back to Black’, you even got a glimpse that, as criminal as it might seem to suggest to purists, there’s a helluva Amy Winehouse jukebox Broadway musical waiting in the wings somewhere, and Rivera could have easily been its star.)
As commanding as Naya Rivera could be as a solo singer, her duets were full of a delicious tension. The job in a duet is to share the scene as democratically as possible while still bringing out the best in your partner and elevating the song. These were skills many in the cast had, though they occasionally had to juggle the meta-element that when the show became a phenomenon, the behind-the-scenes who-likes-who, who-hates-who gossip that fascinated early social media audiences could be at odds to the show’s scripted plot (though it seems the show’s creative team also deliberately worked the real-life stuff into the fictional stuff. A notable example of this was when Rivera and Lea Michele, who were rumored and since confirmed to be clashing backstage personalities — and as recent reports show, Rivera wasn’t the only one to find Michele difficult — sing a sweet song called ‘Be Okay’, almost as though they were ordered to by the network. Both are thoroughly professional, and by the end you don’t just think that maybe Santana and Rachel are really friends, but that Rivera and Michele had buried all their hatchets in a Fox studio wall as well.)
The duet partner for Santana I liked best was provided by one of ‘Glee’s’ other volcanic vocalists, Amber Riley. As Riley has since shown in her London West End role as Effie in ‘Dreamgirls’, and in TV productions of ‘The Wiz’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’, she is a formidable talent. Yet watch one of their songs together, ‘The Boy is Mine’, and see if your eyes don’t want to stay just watching Rivera’s performance in its entirety?
To see a more dynamic and perfectly matched dual performance, ‘Glee’ gave us the galvanic gift that is Amber Riley and Naya Rivera alternating and harmonizing into their own ‘wall of sound’ on the Tina Turner classic, ‘River Deep Mountain High.’ Turners vocals on the original are so singular, nothing can touch them. Just the way she crests the first line with a jagged crag in the middle of a note lets you know this is going to be sung from a place of both ache and power.
The ‘Glee’ version leans into the power angle. Santana and Mercedes brim with the ‘girlpower’ term used at the time, the youthful brio of being able to dream of scaling mountains. The choreography then counter-points and really gets it right by giving the singers the dance moves reminiscent of 60s girl-groups, and while it starts out sort of cute and ironic, by the end the choreography becomes mature and electrifying. When Riley sings the first verse, she has gospel runs and exquisite phrasing. She could easily overwhelm anyone. Rivera’s choice is to find her own place to put the appealing but melancholy cracks in her voice, harmonize beautifully, and then release her own blasts of power. The performance says more about ‘empowerment’ than pages of script could. ‘River Deep Mountain High’ is also notable for giving Rivera a chance to be charming in ways she usually didn’t get to be with all her ‘mean girls’ posing; when they get to the part about the ‘rag doll’, both singers mug, but Rivera’s brief clownishness when acting out that rag doll is unexpectedly loose and charming.
Of course, the journey for Santana on the show, and you’ll find many ‘Glee’ fans and pop culture critics who will argue that the show ultimately was about Santana, crucially centers on the classic ‘finding your voice’ view of young adulthood, and central to that, the relationship between Santana and Brittany. Nearly any news or lifestyle site of the past week that had a space for pop culture featured the heartbroken, deeply affected voices of many lesbians and queer people writing about the deep connection they felt towards the relationship and the visibility and identification it gave them.
Of more than passing interest, depending on how transgressive you thought of it, was the pairing between an Afro-Latina character and a white blonde cheerleader who could have stepped out of the background of a Taylor Swift video. Think of where we were in 2009 and that still would have been pushing boundaries. (The show was one of the first to normalize same-gender kisses.)
In Rivera’s scenes with her non-accepting Abuela (the great Ivonne Coll), she is as real as it gets — not only deeply hurt, but uncomprehending in the way so many gay kids can be when they are rejected simply because of their orientation. “But I’m the same person I was a minute ago.” One can imagine these scenes (and the contrapuntal ones between Kurt and his more accepting father) provided a lifeline to young queer people themselves caught up in the process of making decisions about how to come out, and in particular, to Latinx queer people, who found representation and resources hard to come by and certainly not in the media.
And in real life, Rivera, who did not identify as gay, proved to be a significant ally. She responded to queer fans, particularly young women, and she represented by hosting the GLAAD media awards, advocating for The Trevor Project and by speaking responsibly and articulately about what her fans had confessed to her.
The way the show frequently featured LGBTQ imagery was playful and willful. They weren’t representing all queer women; they were representing these two using a particular transgressive iconography. Teen lesbian cheerleaders weren’t invented with ‘Glee’; the queer film ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ was released in 1999. But by keeping Santana (as well as the other ‘Cheerios’) in their squad outfits 24/7, Rivera started to look like it wasn’t just her cheer attire, it was her superhero uniform. You have your masked and fully-covered marvels; here was a fearless teen titan in sleeveless emblematic mini-skirt cutting through the hallways. Her superpowers? A withering glare that could refreeze the Arctic, an ability to shoot insults like a laser beam, and a pinkie-finger-linking with Britney that could heal your heart. Most of all, a voice that could fill a canyon and fleet feet that could leap over all calamity.
Until she couldn’t. When superheroes die, mere mortals look to the sky and feel, perhaps unreasonably but still undeniably, abandoned. Shocked, stunned, grievous. We look backward, because looking forward has just been removed as an option, and the realization of what will never be is too excruciating.
I couldn’t figure out what happened to Naya Rivera after ‘Glee’, given my hopes and expectations. She released quite a catchy single, ‘Sorry’, and later a memoir, ‘Sorry (Not Sorry.’) I didn’t realize she had joined a new show, the Youtube continuation of the ‘Step Up’ series, but now I do and she’s terrific in it. But to those of us who dropped our eyes from her a bit, I just remember it was because it seemed like there was tabloid stuff, personal tumult, a few seemingly misguided appearances or comments here or there. I was a hopeful, hopeful fan of her talent, not slavish to any TMZ notorieties — but those great female stars of the 30s and 40s? They were no strangers to splashy headlines either.
When I did watch ‘Turner Classics’ or my library of DVDS with some of those ‘Golden Age’ actresses, more than a few times I’d think of Rivera, search IMDB to see if she was getting that Oscar-worthy role yet. Or when there were increasing public discussions that called for better representation of people of color in media, I’d think: Naya Rivera! What’s she doing now? Why isn’t she in a big movie, headed for her superstardom? How did Hollywood’s famously white-screen blindness eclipse even gifts this generous?
So I’d check in the way we do now, with her IG feed or in passing hear about the occasional tweet. There would be a picture of her beauty, sometimes posed in the ‘sexy’ currency that builds and keeps ‘followers’ entranced and ‘promotes content.’
But occasionally Naya would post a picture with her son Josey, who she eventually was raising as a single mom. As many of her followers saw, in those fateful days of early July, I ‘liked’ a beautifully tender picture with Mom and Josey, eyelash close, captioned ‘Just the two of us.’ It seemed so peaceful. This must be what she wants to be doing, I thought. Happy for her. One of the miracles of ‘Glee’ was how they put on hour-long musicals once a week for six years, with 18-hour days. Who could begrudge anyone some rest after that?
But selfishly I also still wanted that album, that movie, that new film directed by her, something more from the force of nature that is, was, Naya Rivera and I gave more than a passing thought that with today’s reckonings, with greater sensitivity to the racism that undergirded so many institutions, the world would finally open up to her in the way it did for so many white actresses before her. It was her time.
Until it wasn’t.
That’s hard to reconcile. We’re supposed to say, as fans from afar, our grief is nothing compared to that of her family, friends, cast mates and of course that’s true. But it’s also true that the grief of a fan is not nothing. Those of us who didn’t know her personally, but were in awe of her talent, shouldn’t shut feelings of loss down. I think it honors Naya Rivera to mourn publicly the way so many fans have, ‘Gleeks’ or not. She was someone who had such hard-won achievement yet still such potential. And for some reason, the power brokers that be didn’t see it or find a place for it in time. We can grieve that mistake, and that which can’t be brought back or won’t be left as a long-career legacy.
That someone with so much soulful presence could suddenly disappear from this earth, at a time when we are all so careful not to lose each other, was wrenching. In consolation, I turned to a lot of Rivera’s performances from the show, though now of course they all carry a melancholy, stinging twinge. (For more on this, just look at the many comments on the pages where the videos are originally posted.)
You hear Naya Rivera sing Winehouse, and it’s hard not to think of how they both died young. You see her love for Brittany acted so convincingly, you think about Heather Morris, the actress who played her and wonder how she will weather this — thoughts that are none of your business, but you still have them. I found myself thinking of Kevin McHale who played ‘Artie’ on the show, and who seems so clear-headed; what would he say? You read Chris Colfer’s tribute to her and shed more than a few tears. You hear her sing ‘If I Die Young’ in tribute to Corey Monteith, and you recall that Rivera’s body was finally found on the day that Monteith died. It’s a lot.
There’s a memorable moment in the early run when Monteith’s Finn stops Santana in the familiar Glee alley of lockers and linoleum. She’s annoyed that he has outed her, and indeed he’s done her wrong. But the character is also written as sincere. Finn’s logic may be that of a teenager’s but he tells Santana that he didn’t ‘out’ her to hurt her, but to help her realize that she would still be accepted. He’d heard of someone who recorded an ‘It Gets Better’ video but later killed himself. He doesn’t want that to happen to her; ‘you mean something to me.’ He tells her that if something ever happened to her and he didn’t do everything in his power to stop it, he could never live with himself. Santana is left speechless at the tenderness, even as she’s furious — Rivera could convey both in a single look.
The context we have now in 2020 makes the brief scene heavy with portent and sadness. In actuality, Rivera was saddened that she couldn’t do more to stop Monteith’s untimely death from a drug overdose. That would be subtext enough. But now, with the timing of her death and the anniversary of his? It’s shattering. But I kept watching, and there was something that reminded me of my own experience teaching high school. A few minutes later, or a few episodes later, the kids are singing and dancing and throwing ‘Big Quenches’ at each other, and seldom has the show’s mission to show the fullness of life seemed so clear. I’ve found that to be true when I’ve gone through difficult times, or my school has, and still had to walk through the classroom door. No matter how sad I’ve been, there’s always a student offering, well, cheer.
Maybe we did get the movie Naya Rivera was on this earth to make after all. Because that scene between Santana and Finn was early in the show’s run. By ‘Glee’s’ end several years later, Santana didn’t hurt herself. She survived high school, she stumbled a little but recovered, she found her way, she was able to get onstage at a Broadway audition and sing ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ and give us a big, big moment of triumph; maybe she’ll get the part, she’s definitely going to get the girl. Just like an old musical.
And that’s why I wrote this: we talk about ‘Glee’ as a TV show, but maybe it was one long film. If you go back and watch ‘Glee’ with a particular focus on Rivera, you’ll see an extraordinary rise-and-fall-and-rise-again achievement; she’s one of the major leads of an epic. Sure it’s a movie full of silliness, toss-aways, occasional meanderings or repetitive plotlines, but it’s also full of heart and compassion. This seasons-long coming-of-age starred this African/Latina/Queer Ally/Queen who reigned with a crackling laugh, a stunning beauty and vivacious spirit.
If that’s all we were fated to get of Naya Rivera, she hit her mark — the line where enough and not enough meet. Maybe the silvery phantoms of Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, who all knew their own injustices within the Hollywood system, maybe they were all waiting in the wings as she sang the curtain down. “Come on kid,” they might say, in old movie parlance. “You went out there a youngster but you came back: a Star!”
✍️The Couch Tamale✍️
Film, Music, Peak TV, Diversity— Tom Cendejas is sitting on a sofa and unwrapping Pop Culture with a Latino eye, one husk at a time.
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Thundercats Roar thoughts...
So a friend of mine showed me this trailer a few weeks ago, and for a second I didn’t believe it was real. But, before I get further into my thoughts on this thing everybody else on the internet has already covered, let me go into my history with Thundercats.
Despite never drawing much fan art for the series, Thundercats is a property I love, and one of the biggest parts of my life in my earliest years. Born in ‘86 with three older siblings, I was just in time for the original Thundercats. My family already consisted of die-hard fans, so it was naturally one of the first franchises I got into. From the time I was born to when I was about 4, Masters of the Universe and Thundercats were what it was all about. It wasn’t until ‘89 that I got my first TMNT toy, and about a year later that was literally all I cared about.
But before my TMNT obsession, there was Thundercats. While I do have many fond memories of watching the show, my most beloved memories of it are simply being a fan. Collecting the action figures, listening to my siblings talk about the show, and playing Thundercats. Not a video game, though. On nights when my Mom was out, my Dad would host He-Man or Thundercats games where he’d be either Skeletor or Mumm-ra, my oldest sister and brother would be She-Ra and He-Man or Lion O and Cheetarah (while my other sister would be... somebody) and I, being the baby, would always get stuck being Orko or Snarf. All us kids would wrestle our dad and beat up on him as he’d try to defeat us. Epic stuff. Some how the younger of my two sisters would usually end up horribly injured after each game, though...
Simply put, Thundercats was the real deal with my family when I was little. The action was great, the evil beasts were awesome, the toys were a blast, and Cheetarah, along with the He-Man girls, made me feel things my tiny self wasn’t yet ready to feel.
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I revisited the show, and, honestly, I was surprised how much it held up. Especially considering in high school I was “too cool for everything” yet I still acknowledged its quality. Yes, it was corny in the way all old children's’ shows were at the time (I have nothing but love for that tone, but I can see how it would be hard to digest for later generations), but it still had great, smart, sophisticated writing for its time, amazing animation and artwork, good characters, and one of the most hype intros ever.
In 2011 a reboot was made. This reboot was far darker and more built on political commentary. It was an understandable progression. The fans had grown up, so the franchise did too. While I wasn’t a huge fan, I can respect the quality of the writing, art, and over all work that went into it. It was a sophisticated piece of art. I felt it went a bit too extreme with the tone it was pushing, and as a long time fan of the original, found lots of the changes and design choices hard to digest. But again, it was a good show, and I respect what it attempted to accomplish.
However, the show was canceled before season 2 could air. This left a lot of fans mad, confused as to whether it was low ratings, low ratings as a result of its switched time slot that was far from ideal, or just a business decision to sacrifice a popular show just to make way for a potentially more popular future show. While I can understand the upset from fans 100%, I didn’t feel it as I wasn’t a regular viewer.
So, fast-forward to earlier this month when my friend shows me this trailer. As I said, at first I thought it was a joke, like College Humor or something. Then when the realization sunk in that it was real, I hated it. But, quickly I told myself that I don’t know enough about it yet to fully judge. I haven’t seen an episode. Sure, it looks awful from what I’ve seen, and I can clearly see the “monkey see monkey do” going on here with the copying of other successful modern cartoons. But, again, I haven’t seen it. Before I get into my final thoughts thus far, I need to address the elephant in the room...
...the similarities everybody has seen in this and Teen Titans GO!
While I wasn’t a die hard or anything, I did watch the entire first two seasons of the original Cartoon Network Teen Titans series when it was new, and I did like it. I thought it was very well-written, well-acted, had great characters, great character development, great stories, and great action. The characters worked off of each other beautifully. However, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I had some issues with it.
UNPOPULAR OPINIONS AHEAD - PREPARE TO HATE ME
Since its release I have always found the art style to look very under-developed and unappealing. It looked like an awkward imbalance of the (already bland in my mind) Justice League cartoon style and a newbie anime style. The best way I can describe it was it resembled the artwork of a junior-high kid who just started drawing anime. Also, I found a lot of the anime-inspired elements to feel forced. When characters would mutate into chibi disasters or tropes like sweat drops scrolling down their faces would happen, it was always a bit cringy and out of place. It felt like it was shoehorned in rather than rightfully fitting in.
But the most notable thing about the show was it was a pretty huge departure from the original DC comics. Gone was the realistic art style of the comics. Now the characters all had big, round heads, twig-like limbs, huge hands and feet, and big anime-eyes. Everything was very simplistic, sharp, and jagged. There was far more comedy, some great, and some that cringy chibi stuff I mentioned. The integration of anime tropes and far more kid humor was a huge departure from the comics. So, basically, despite being a good show, Teen Titans, the show, was a huge departure from its source material.
Then comes Teen Titans GO! and overnight it becomes one of the most hated (and most popular) cartoons of this age. I didn’t quite hate it, but wrote it off as crap without seeing it. It is a shame that the original show was canceled before it got to be finished, but putting fans’ anger towards that aside, the creation of TTG makes perfect sense. The characters proved extremely popular and marketable, largely because how comedic they could be when bouncing off each other (and the original show had been canceled. Continuing a canceled show years later is a difficult task, regrouping the team, dancing through the legal BS, and finding enough staff and people to fund it to be on board, as well as a network to accept it). More simplistic art styles were becoming more popular, and after the post-Adult Swim days, hyper, wacky, odd comedies have become the norm.
To be honest, any time I have seen Teen Titans GO!, which has only been about three episodes or so, I laughed. I don’t care what people say, the show is legitimately funny. Is it the greatest show ever? Not by a long shot. Is it better than the last TT show? Probably not. Is it a shame it exists while the original never finished? Kinda. But is it a bad show? Honestly, no.
TTG knows exactly what it wants to be and delivers. It may not be the sequel show old fans wanted, but if you put aside the hatred, you’ll see it’s not only a funny cartoon bursting with energy and very well-defined and appealing character designs reminiscent of shows like Dexter’s Lab, but also a huge love letter to the Titans, the last show, and all things DC. It is clearly made by DC fans. I may be biased because I love Weird Al and The Golden Girls, but, man, this is funny right here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ICmOMLX3rQ
Admittedly, even the movie trailer looks funny, and I’ll likely see it, despite not really being a fan of the show. Just like the 2011 Thundercats, I see what the TTG team is intending to do, and I appreciate how well they do it, despite not being a regular supporter of it.
And, well, that brings us back to ‘Roar’. Will I like it? Based on what I’ve seen so far, likely not, but who knows. It could end up being the next Sonic Boom. I do strongly dislike the art direction for Thundercats Roar, and the footage shown thus far did not make me laugh (except Mumm-ra learning about the cats being on Third Earth by reading it in the newspaper. That actually got a chuckle from me). But, as much as my gut is telling me to hate this show, I won’t pass judgment until I’ve at least seen a couple episodes. It’s definitely not the Thundercats I love, but to be honest, I didn’t want a TC reboot. I was fine with it just being as it is. So if somebody’s going to reboot it for a new generation, I’ll be glad to see my favorite franchises get passed down, so long as it is done lovingly. If the show truly is a love letter to the history of the franchise as it claims to be, and if it’s a decently quality product that obvious care went into, I’ll be fine with it.
It would be so easy to tear it apart and hate it, but as I get older I find myself growing more accepting of such change. I’m not EXPECTING to like it, but who knows, I also wasn’t expecting to like Sonic Boom. Basically, so far I’m not digging what I’ve seen, but I’ll keep an open mind and stay hopeful. Here’s hoping they can change my mind with the final product.
The End
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Pretender To The Throne (Chapter 1: My Fairy King (1967-1976))
Rolling Stone: “In the early 1970s, when [girlfriend Mary] Austin suggested they have a child together, Mercury allegedly responded, ‘I’d rather have a cat.’”
Some of Sky’s earliest memories were of Queen songs.
Most were off-key (read: horrible) renditions sung by his mother, but the words were still the same.
“In the land where horses born with eagle wings
And honey bees have lost their stings
There’s singing forever, ooh yeah…
Lion’s den with fallow deer
And rivers made from wine so clear
Flow on and on forever…
Dragons fly like sparrows thru’ the air
And baby lambs where Samson dares
To go on on on on on on…”
My Fairy King was his favorite, right from the moment it came out on shiny vinyl record, when he was just six years old. He had his own copy too, played it so hard and so often that it was scratched and worn to high heaven.
But it wasn’t the same without his mother to hold him close and sing terribly in the wrong key, flubbing up the transitions and cues. She always tried, he had to give her credit. It was her favorite too.
She liked all of the songs about Rhye.
“It reminds of your Daddy, Rhys.” She would whisper to him, as they huddled together on an old futon, in their gross one-room apartment, the black mold on the ceiling grew in funny ways reminiscent of the animal crackers she would often pack away in his lunch-kit. “He was My Fairy King.” She would look away, almost wistful for a moment, before covering his tiny body in kisses that made him squeal indignantly, desperately trying to bat her hands away.
“And you're My Fairy Prince!” She would say. “So I’m going to eat you all up! Sugar and spice and everything nice!"
Making monster noises as she tickled the everliving daylights out of him. He would laugh until he was crying and breathless, watery eyes staring up at her with cheeks flushed pink.
"No, Mama!” He would protest in mock-offense. “I’m a boy! Those are for girls!”
“Ah!” She would pause as if it were some great revelation. “Snips, snails and puppy-dog tails! …Oh no, that doesn’t sound anything like my little Prince Rhye at all!"
She named him Rhye after the make-believe world that his father had created in his youth.
According to her, he used to tell stories about it to anyone who would listen and sketch out the most beautiful scenes in the margins of his notebooks. They grew closer during his last days at Isleworth Polytechnic, right before he transferred to Ealing Art College in London. He was so gifted, so smart. They only shared a few classes together in a handful of months, but it was enough to leave her smitten. He was charismatic, beautiful and almost as otherworldly as the dreams he’d had for himself.
He’d had the most lovely smile, those protruding teeth that she’d always found so adorable, but that he’d always expressly hated.
She loved how Sky had inherited that same smile.
When his adult teeth came in and the sight alone made him cry, she told him he looked positively exquisite in their distinctness. (Sky thought he looked like even more of a sideshow freak).
Of all the things in life, that were either foisted upon him or lovingly given, he actually picked the nickname Sky.
Coined it as a toddler when Rhye was too hard to say, it was a made up name anyway. Only his mother (and then Cole in later years)was allowed to call him that, or any little pet-names derived from it. Rhys. Rhy-Guy. Prince Rhye…
Rhye Halley Bulsara. Named after a pretend land, a comet and a man who didn’t even know he existed.
But that was okay.
It was okay, because he always had his mother. She was his everything. She loved him for his weird eyes (that his classmates always made fun of without fail. Until they realized he knew all his math facts and could easily prove them stupid. Or you know, use his teeny tiny fists to cave their faces in) and the bulky teeth too big for his mouth. She loved him for his sparkly tutus over his stripey tights and brightly colored wellies, (that always found their way into the biggest puddles as they walked down the crowded streets of New York City). She loved him for the little songs he would make-up as he marched all his stuffed bears across the floor and the way he scrunched up his speckled nose when he laughed.
She loved him because he was her son in every ounce, not just his father’s prodigal.
She was also the strongest woman he ever knew.
A single mother at nineteen, working two dead-end jobs just to keep them afloat, no insurance to speak of, no money for anything better, and no family to help her.
Then she woke up one morning to find her nine-month-old baby turned ashen gray, and with a fever that boiled beneath his skin like a blazing hellfire. He went from being able to crawl fervently and tug himself into standing positions on furniture, with a gummy smile, to not being able to raise his own head.
Polio.
The Crippler of Children.
Within mere hours he couldn’t breathe on his own, eyes blown wide and lips a swollen sickening gray-blue, gums a bloodless white. Already wearing the guise of a corpse.
The doctors told his mother that he wouldn’t last the night. They even asked if a baptism and last rites were something she wanted.
Nineteen years old and she realized that there was no word for a parent who loses a child. A widower loses a wife, a widow loses a husband, an orphan loses their parents, but no one was ever meant to outlive their child.
She could’ve collapsed to pieces right then and there.
She could’ve just given up on him, like all the doctors and medical personnel who already had, and simply let him go. To join the ranks of the ghost children who’d died of the same crippling disease within the same beige walls of the fever hospital. Instead, Roberta Rhodes, affectionately called Birdy by all who knew her, demanded the best care for her child.
She held him tight as they shoved a needle through the narrow slats of his spine to collect infected fluid. She sang every song she knew until her throat was raw as they bundled him up in an child-sized iron-lung to breathe for him. It was the late 60s, the heyday of polio was over, but for those few still unvaccinated, it never ended.
Sky, the tiny boy that they told her wouldn’t last the night, lived till morning.
And then he did it again and again and again.
The full-body paralysis set in after ten days of being at death’s door and the coming back was rough. It was months before he regained the use of his lungs independently. Longer still until his arms were back under his control.
He celebrated his first birthday in the hospital, looking eagerly at the fireworks that lit up the night sky, just outside his window. The next three birthdays were very much the same. Only for his third birthday: he got crutches, a hard plastic back-brace, and leg braces from his toes to his hips. Braces that had to be changed as he grew, lest they rip open his skin while he hobbled along.
He drew pictures and finger-painted across his chest plates, a million smiling sunflowers and bright hand prints adorned each and every one. The beginnings of his love for art.
By four, all he needed were the leg braces and the crutches. By six it was just the leg braces and within a few months, not even those anymore. The countless painful surgeries to release the tight bits and replace the dead tissue in his legs worked wonders. Of course they also left scars that puckered and resembled the limbs of a stitched up voodoo doll, but they worked.
He could run and jump and play, just like the rest of the children on the block.
He could bounce around in puddles with his brightly colored wellies and be a prince with a toy crown and a scepter made of cardboard and pipe-cleaners. A style he would never really grow out of… something only furthered by the fact he always got at least one toy crown or tiara for his birthday each year.
”My fairy king can see things…
He rules the air and turns the tides
That are not there for you and me
Ooh yeah, he guides the winds…
My fairy king can do right and nothing wrong…“
His eyes changed after the polio.
They had always been heterochromic, two different colors. The right, a sharp cerulean reminiscent of his namesake, the left, a rich chocolate brown like melted down Hershey’s bars. Hard and soft, all at once.
His mother had always found his eyes charming, a little piece of her and a little piece of his father. But after the polio, they changed. His pupils, the round little black discs in the center of his irises, exploded. They went from uniformly tiny circles to starbursts, with ragged edges stretched across both irises. The doctor who examined his eyes said that he’d never seen anything like it before, but that it was likely a birth defect. She just hadn’t noticed it beforehand.
That was a lie, as she had spent countless days and nights after his birth just staring at him. Trying to catalogue each and every feature. Nose? Hers. Skin tone? Hers. Cheek bones? Freddie’s. Hair? A mix of them both, her unruly curls with Freddie’s coloring. Eyelashes? Freddie’s.
Those beloved eyes had never had starbursts within them before.
But it was more than just his appearance.
It was what he could see with those eyes and do with the things he saw, that made all the difference…
The nurse had thick curly black hair like his own, big blue-gray eyes and wore a different outfit than the rest of them on the ward, hers looked older somehow, as if she’d come straight out of a sepia photograph. Wearing a strange bent flyaway cap on her head, one that did little to cover up much of anything at all. She would hum to herself quietly as she straightened up the blankets on his bed. But if he stared too long, the edges of her habit would darken and curl upwards, sparks flying and dying in front of his eyes.
He saw her a few times, but they never spoke.
Her lungs had been scorched into veritable ash by the fire that had sent the fever hospital into ruin during the early 1920s, they’d had to rebuild it from the ground up. So she wouldn’t have been able to speak to him anyway.
It was the first time he saw The Dead walk.
But it wasn’t the last.
His mother would hold him by the hand and tug him along when they walked through the city.
She had to, lest he stop to talk to those nice boys on the corner who’d died in the Revolutionary War, or the young Italian immigrant girl hovering around the flower shop, who’d lost her life in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, not even that little girl huddled in the gutter with her sallow skin and soiled a white dress, who’d succumbed to a turn-of-the-century Yellow Fever epidemic.
His mother never saw the spirits, but the fact that he did was enough for her to believe in them.
Birdy Rhodes, being the exhausted young woman she was, with fine yet incorrigible blonde curls that would slip from her bun after a long waitressing shift and a childhood touch of magic that never quite left her; would never make her son feel like he was a freak for any of the things he could do or any of the things he couldn’t.
She just loved him with everything she had and did her best to be everything he needed her to be. Hell, she would’ve given him the whole world if it had been hers to give. As it stood, the best she could offer was a grand old name and all the blossoming love in her heart.
Sky may not have had the greatest clothes or technology or living arrangements or even a father, but he had love. Even in those early years, he’d had love.
From his mother, the center of his whole universe.
From the young couple who ran a small records store on 7th Avenue.
They always saved copies of the latest Queen records for the small family and either sold them the vinyl at a dirt-cheap price or gave them to him and his mother for free.
Surely they saw the same very distinctive teeth on him as they did on the frontman of the British band, the same cheekbones, the same dark hair, the same fledgling face shape. They knew. They had to have known. But they never said anything about it. Never called the newspapers or prodded with uncomfortable questions. They just loved. And gave some of that burgeoning love to him and his mother.
From the spirits who sought him out for comfort.
Apparently being earthbound was a fate worse than death. It was tantamount to living in a world full of muted grays and emptiness, except for people like him. Lighthouses, one spirit told him, a boy with the glassy eyes and hoarse voice of a diphtheria death, you’re like a shining lighthouse in a storm. You come in color, all warm oranges and yellows turned gold.
So a flashlight, he surmised.
From his Cole.
Coltrane Brennan was an Irish kid turned American expat, named after the great American saxophone player and the only reason Sky learned about his real Gift at all. The seeing dead people thing was only part of it. The easier part.
As it turned out, he could give out just as much love as he got, just in a different way. Cole taught him that.
Cole was the first.
It all started: with a bully stealing Sky’s ratty sketchbook as he sat quietly on the swings, scribbling away.
It ended: with Cole holding said sketchbook aloft, blood streaming from his nose and mouth, as well as a nasty cut on his forehead near his hairline, yet with a smile alight in sweet victory.
The bully lay crumpled in the dirt.
It also ended with Cole joining him, as Sky snatched back his sketchbook and planted one leg-braced orthotic shoe on the chubby blonde’s chest. A tiny six-year-old black-haired devil child who grit his ever-prominent buck teeth and hissed with pure venom: "Don’t you ever fight my battles for me again, Coltrane Brennan. Or I’ll knock your teeth in."
"You’d know all about teeth wouldn’t you?” Cole had wheezed, all two years older and indignant, a flush high in his cheeks.
Then he uttered those few accursed words: “Are you sure you aren't an elephant? You’ve got tusks just like one!…And those weirdo eyes to match!"
By the time a flustered teacher came to drag them both to the principal’s office, Cole was bleeding even more profusely than before and Sky was smiling smugly, two fistfuls of blonde hair in his grasp and one of Cole’s front-teeth embedded in his denim jeans.
They sat outside the office in silence, with only a small hard-backed chair between them. The only interruptions to the stillness were the squeak of Sky’s braces when he swung his legs off the ground or Cole’s pathetic sniffling as he tried to staunch the flow of blood from his face. Sky was scowling, still resolute in his righteous fury and absolution. Until he realized Cole wasn’t just sniffling from the blood…
He was crying.
Instantaneous guilt burnt in Sky’s chest like he’d swallowed a lit match, and poof, all the anger and indignation was gone. A rarity for him.
"Are you crying…?” He asked, softly.
But the moment Cole realized he’d been found out, he instantly straightened up in the stiff uncomfortable seat and turned away, as if pretending it was nothing at all. He snorted and scrubbed at his face with the one hand that wasn’t full of crumpled up bloody tissues. His voice shook when he spoke, wavering and hoarse. Damning evidence of the tears that boys like them just couldn’t admit.
“I'm not crying! Only babies cry! Little crippled babies just like you!"
Sky recoiled, his scowl deepening as the red-eyed older boy carried on running his mouth. "I told them not to steal your drawing stuff, cause there’s just no point really. You're soppy and sad enough as it is, without them messing with you…” Cole only managed to button his lips when there was a familiar fist pressing just under his swollen nose, against his chapped lips.
“I swear to God I’ll knock another one out if you don’t quit it! I’m not a crip and I’m not a baby, and don’t you ever forget it.” Sky spat, his funky eyes turned caustic.
It only abated as he forced himself to apologize. Temper having run away from him once again. It was his most adamant personality trait.
“But I am sorry about earlier... Thanks for getting my sketchbook back, I guess.” He bit his bottom lip and couldn’t look the older boy in the eyes.
“…Do you wanna see what I was drawing?“
Cole paused, then nodded. Curiosity alight in his green eyes.
Sky reached for where the teacher had roughly deposited both their backpacks, probably assuming they would be either sent home or in the office for a while, his ratty sketchbook was sitting on top. Hastily flung across both sacks as if the woman had no idea who it had belonged to. He dug through the heavily lined and crinkled pages to find his most recent creation.
”Oh.“ Cole leaned over to see properly. "That’s… really good actually."
Sky quirked an eyebrow. "Were you expecting something bad?”
“No! I just…” He peered even closer, almost close enough to brush his fingers across, but he didn’t dare. “It’s like a grown-up did it. Did you copy it from someplace?"
The younger boy shook his head. Looking down at the scene he’d drawn, a fairy Queen of spring with lush curls and a smile as she sat upon a mushroom cap, her gossamer wings folded beneath her and a tiara made of tree branches and new leaves twisted in her hair. She was looking up at her King, he was dressed in wintertime clothes, snowflakes adorned his cape and the winds brought life to his frosted wings. He was cold and still, with long dark hair and piercing dark eyes. She looked like the growth of new life, he looked like the one who took it all away. But still, they reached for each other.
"It’s the king and queen of Rhye."
He whispered, knowing very well that Rhye fell to ruin.
Good things didn’t stay.
He felt something warm fall on his hand and noticed a few ruddy droplets of blood. Cole was bleeding still, the older boy quickly turned away, sniffling back into the tissues as if that were somehow going to do the trick. ”Sorry…“ He mumbled, shame and embarrassment coloring in the contours of his voice.
"How bad is it? Let me see."
Sky commanded, sounding petulant as he reached out his hands. He gently caught Cole’s chin in one, then jumped back on recoil, like he’d just been electrocuted.
The moment he’d touched Cole’s sticky skin, desperate to see how bad it was so that he could make him feel better, his hand had felt like he’d stuck it into an open lit flame. It burned like holding the sun. He even flipped over his hand to gawk at his palm, certain that there had to be some kind of acid burn there or something.
There was nothing.
"What the bleeding heck was that?!” Cole squealed, pulling the tissues back from his face. His nose and mouth had aptly stopped bleeding. Even the cut on his forehead had stopped. As if the faucet of the gaping maw had run dry.
“You burned me!"
Cole looked incredulous at the accusation. "No I didn’t! You burned me!"
"Nuh uh!"
"Yeah huh!"
Then Cole’s expression changed, it turned surprised instead of upset, as his tongue poked at the inside of his cheek. "It's gone...” He whispered, wondrously. Looking at Sky with new eyes.
“What’s gone?"
"When you punched me, I bit a whole chunk out of my cheek! It’s why my mouth was bleeding so bad!” He took hold of the right side of his mouth and tried valiantly to flip it inside-out so that Sky could see. The younger boy couldn’t see anything except for spit and pink healthy skin.
“I don't see anything…"
"That’s the point! It’s gone…” He flipped it back over with eyes wide. “Gone.” He stressed again, as if Sky had missed it the first time. “Can mouths heal that fast?” Sky just shrugged, rubbing at his palm where the burn would’ve been, it tingled and itched, fingers twitching to do something else. Though he wasn’t quite sure what.
“How should I know?” He grumbled. “I’m not a doctor, I'm six."
He swung his creaky braced legs back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, trying to drown out the world. Cole stopped him with a hand on top of his own. Green eyes met his own strange ones. "Touch me again.” Sky furrowed his brows tight.
“What?"
”Touch me again!“ Cole demanded, jutting out his bottom lip. Sky rolled his eyes and did as requested, pressing his hand against Cole’s chin again. There was nothing. No burn, no toasting warmth or electric shock. Nothing at all. Cole frowned, disappointed as he reached up to touch the gaping slit on his forehead, still as garish as before. What he needed were some stitches, or some wound glue or something. "No!" He whined. "Do it like before!”
“I did." No, he didn’t.
He covered his stupid horse teeth with his hand and closed his eyes. I want Cole to feel better. I’m sorry for hurting him. It was a mistake. I’m sorry. I want to make him feel better. I’m sorry! He slammed his other hand against Cole’s chest. So hard that the older boy gave off a slight oomph. Fire burned between them. Like lightning against a black sky, everything was illuminated for just an instant. He saw spiderwebs of light scorch themselves across the backs of his eyelids, his mouth was full of ash. His nose was full of the stench of burning rubber.
When he finally let go and released his mouthful of air, he half expected smoldering embers to come out instead.
He blinked back into reality to find Cole staring at him slack-jawed, tissues turned limp in his hand. There was dried blood on his face, sure. But no burns. No swollen nose, no bruises, no black-eye and no cut on his forehead. It was almost like they had never been there at all.
”Whoa.“ They whispered at the same time, two pairs of eyes stretched wide as saucers.
He described the whole thing to his mother that night. She sipped her gross watery diner coffee and just listened. He ate pancakes covered in sprinkles and whipped cream. Wearing his plastic toy crown and sunset orange tights under his oversized yellow bumblebee sweater and clunky braces.
When he couldn’t talk anymore, she leaned over and pressed a kiss to his forehead.
"Mama, am I a freak?"
"No, baby."
"Then why can do the things I can do?"
She paused.
"Did you know that there’s a type of plankton, little tiny bits of fish, algae and debris in the ocean, that can glow in the dark? It's bioluminescent. They’re found in the Maldives, on this tiny little island. They call it The Sea of Stars.”
She had the same far-off look in her eyes that she did when she talked about his father. “Daddy seahorses give birth instead of mommies. Baby turtles are born knowing exactly what they have to do and where they have to go. Then they go back to the same spot to start the cycle all over again.
…Sometimes fall leaves change color to orange, sometimes yellow, sometimes red and sometimes not at all.
Your father and I, managed to make a perfect little boy and now he’s sitting right in front of me."
Her hands cupped his chin and there was no scent of sulfur or burning.
"All those things are miracles." She pressed another kiss to his cheek. "There will always be magic in the world, my little Prince. So enjoy it when and where you find it."
Cole was his best-friend from that day onward.
In every one of his scenes drawn in smudgy pencil or old pastels, there was a new face. A young blonde knight, a yellow dragon, and a sword held aloft beside his own.
Three years passed quickly, even faster than those he’d spent in the sanitarium/fever hospital.
Three years of pictures with the camera Cole got for his ninth birthday.
They used up so many rolls of film that it was hilarious. They never had their pictures on time. It would be months upon months before they got around to getting a recent roll developed and by then it wasn’t so recent anymore.
Cole’s mother would give him free piano lessons every Thursday and Friday, desperate for anyone who was even remotely gifted at it. As Cole, despite his namesake’s musical prowess, was as tone-deaf as they came.
Cole’s father loved listening to the music they made together, and even insisted on imparting some special knowledge on the boys himself.
He taught them how to dance.
But not just any kind of dancing, traditional Irish dances that made him feel like his feet were flying.
Suddenly the little boy, who’d spent his childhood in heavy cumbersome leg-braces, could keep up and do even better than someone without his painful history or messed-up scarred legs. He suddenly found beauty in a part of himself that he’d always hated, and it was because of Mr. Brennan.
He promised to take them both to a Ceili in Ireland when they were older. Where they could dance with more than just him or each other.
Luckily, because of Brooklyn’s burgeoning Irish community, they were in a few tiny competitions for step-dance, usually performing together and placing high. It was a running Brennan family joke that Sky was actually more Irish than the lot of them. With his skill in the dances, his ability to pick them up so quickly, that mop-top of jet black curls and porcelain skin envied by most of the dancing girls, he looked more like a boy come fresh from the Cliffs of Moher than a mix of Scandinavian and Persian. Not to mention how quickly he picked up a working knowledge of Irish Gaelic.
But when they weren’t in lessons or at school, they were laying sprawled on their bellies in the library, flipping through old musty books and sometimes reading aloud to one another.
Sky’s favorites were The Scarlet Pimpernel, Little Women, The Grimm Brothers’ Fairytales, Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairytales and Stories.
Cole’s were Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Allen Poe’s Complete Works, Carrie and 'Salem’s Lot.
He was pretty sure half of Cole’s horror obsession was rooted in trying to understand Sky and his assorted oddities. Or his Gifts as his mother and Cole liked to call them.
One afternoon, as they were flopped on the floor next to each other, legs kicked up and resting on the shelves. Fingers intertwined where nobody else could see, behind the stacks where they were by themselves. Cole regaled him with yet another half-baked theory.
"What if you’re a witch!"
Sky couldn’t help but laugh out-loud, but because it was a library, he tried to be quiet by just snorting into his free palm.
"No, really!" Cole squawked indignantly, waving his free hand around emphatically. "What if that’s why you can heal and see dead people! Sky, you’re downright spooky! You gotta be!” He looked over eagerly, probably hoping to see a revelation dawning in his best-friend’s eyes, instead what he saw was the younger boy practically dying of his own withheld laughter.
“Rhys…” He whined, plaintively, but the boy in question could only grin impishly.
“Sorry, Cole…” He hiccuped through his muffled laughter. “That sounds groovy and everything, but this isn’t an episode of Bewitched!”
He snickered again and Cole stuck out his tongue to blow him a raspberry.
Sky wasn’t exactly sure when his feelings for Cole became more than just best-friend feelings.
He knew that Cole was a boy and that a lot of people didn’t like it when boys had feelings for other boys. But what he felt for his best-friend didn’t feel like a bad thing. It was good. It felt warm and happy and safe.
They didn’t hold hands until they were by themselves. But he was pretty sure his mother knew, she just didn’t mind it. She would look at them fondly as they played buck-buck and stickball with the neighborhood kids and spent all night talking together afterwards, flopping onto and cramming into their one mattress, like sardines in a can.
She was just happy he was loved.
Cole’s parents likely suspected something as well. But Mrs. Brennan still gave Sky free piano lessons with a genuine silky smile on her face and Mr. Brennan would still eagerly teach them both how to play soccer, as well as dance.
Then they would have weekend tournaments. Mr. Brennan would race over and sweep both of them up into his hairy arms when he wanted to score without little feet getting in the way. Sky so often shrieked with joy and childhood abandon in those days, as he was held over the stocky Irishman’s shoulder for so long that his blood whooshed loudly in his ears.
He was loved.
It didn’t matter by who, or what, it just mattered that it happened. He was loved.
Then predictably… everything all went to shit.
Rhye fell, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
“Ah, then came man to savage in the night
To run like thieves and to kill like knives
To take away the power from the magic hand
To bring about the ruin to the promised land, aah, aah…”
Sudden. Cardiac. Death.
Those were the three words a kind-eyed grandfatherly doctor told him at the hospital. His birthday was in just two days. He was turning nine on January 1st and wanted to see the smoggy sky full of lights once again, to see the ball drop in Time Square. But what did it matter…
Now that his whole world was dead and gone?
He’d been playing with Cole out in the snow that day, New York City was beautiful in the wintertime.
While he was making snow-angels, his mother had collapsed to the thinly carpeted floor of their studio apartment. As his little hands packed together fluffy snowballs with the same kind of pressure she likely felt in her chest, her heart beat erratically. He and Cole caught snow flurries on their tongues and compared the shapes caught in their soft mittened hands, while his mother’s heart stopped. He remembered blinking up at the overcast snowy sky above and grinning a toothy smile. While his mother’s organs stopped getting oxygen and the tissues died.
By the time ash filled his mouth and hellfire blazed beneath his skin, it was too late.
He was up and running towards the apartment without even a word to Cole, who chased after him, calling his name with concern alight in those Emerald Isle eyes. Shadows were flickering in the corners of Sky’s vision, and the present ghosts were all staring at him solemnly, even the spirits he had considered his friends. Their sadness was strangling him and he could barely breathe. Their hands reached for him, sporting vast empty holes where eyes would’ve gone. For the first time, he was genuinely afraid.
Your mother, your mother, your mother, your mother…
Their whispers followed him like a burial shroud. No matter how fast he ran, he couldn’t escape them.
“Prince Rhye? Rhys? Jesus, what’s wrong?!“ Cole yelled, forgetting just how fast Sky was without the braces and crutches. The snow was far too heavy to run through. "What did you see?! Sky!” He screeched.
Sky raced up the steps of his apartment building, nearly slipping over the edge numerous times and giving Cole mini heart-attacks as he did so. He threw open his front door and then…
Everything went horribly, frighteningly, devastatingly… quiet.
“They turn the milk into sour
Like the blue in the blood of my veins
Why can’t you see it?
Fire burning in hell with the cry of screaming pain!
Son of heaven set me free and let me go…
Sea turn dry, no salt from sand,
Seasons fly no helping hand,
Teeth don’t shine like pearls for poor man’s eyes, aah…”
There were fireworks on his birthday. The ball dropped in Time Square.
Just like every year, no matter what happened in his life, there was always a party.
That just happened to be the morning his mother was buried.
The snow held no joy for him anymore. The sky was gray, the ground was white and his heart was somewhere beneath the frozen dirt. The only reason he got through the miserable funeral at all, was the feeling of Cole’s arms around him, Mrs. Brennan humming Für Elise under her breath, and Mr. Brennan scooping him up to carry him out of the graveyard like small child. He buried his face in the Irishman’s stubbly neck and Mr. Brennan just rubbed his back sadly, whispering the story of Tír na nÓg.
Sky had just assumed that he would be with them afterwards.
The Brennans were not rich by any means, they all lived in the poor Irish/Immigrant bit of Brooklyn, but they had more than enough to feed another mouth. They had a place in their hearts for another son. A place in their modest home. A place in their lives.
They’d already taken him in, both mentally and physically, during that first night in the hospital. When it was confirmed that Birdy Rhodes had left this world.
But it was not to be.
Social Services came a-knocking on the very night of his birthday. To inform them all of its lovely archaic practices, which dictated that it didn’t matter how much the Brennans wanted to take care of Sky. Or how much Cole didn’t want to lose his best-friend (and perhaps more).
It simply read that if there was a living parent, the care of the child had to go to their living parent. And if that parent was somehow unfit, then it would take a miracle for him to be placed with them again. A miracle that would take years to come to fruition.
What that meant was, on the day after his birthday and the burial of his mother, Sky would be torn from their lives like a misplaced postage stamp. All packaged up and put on a plane to another country, where he would then be dumped on the father he’d never met. Who didn’t even know he existed. They didn’t see any issues with that at all.
Sky, or Rhye as his social-worker insisted on calling him, who was oft a well-behaved child (Ha!) unless pressed the wrong way, screamed and wailed like a banshee as he was dragged away from the Brennans and everything he knew.
Tiny, puffy-eyed, wearing rumpled hand-me-down pajamas and his current favorite toy crown gifted to him by Cole the night before, paired with an acidic scowl.
He refused to change when prompted and buried his face in his single overfilled rucksack whenever given a command.
His caseworker tried to placate him the whole flight, giving him snacks and little crafts to do. Write down everything you want your father to know about you, sweetheart! Make him a little card! But to no avail. He’d never even left New York City, let alone been on a plane and he couldn’t even bring himself to enjoy the experience. It was horrifying. Not even drawing or the smell of a few Brennan shirts that he’d borrowed could make things any better. He was like a small boat drifting away from his moorings. Something untethered to the earth or to anything at all.
You could’ve healed her if you’d been there. His inner voice chastised him mercilessly. What’s the use of having a Gift like that if you can’t even save the ones you love? If you can’t even save yourself?
He spent the night at the American Embassy in London, sleeping on a few uncomfortable chairs pushed together to make some sort of semblance of a bed.
The officials were trying to get in contact with his father. Something made remarkably difficult by the fact that he was a celebrity and a deathly private celebrity at that. Who had body guards and people trained specifically to avoid the paparazzi and crazy fans at all costs.
He cried himself to sleep that night, jet-lagged and sick with grief. Wishing he was back in New York City, on his shitty shared mattress but still held tight in his mother’s gentle embrace. I love you, my little Prince Rhye. I love you so much.
Not even singing to himself helped. He just cried even harder.
It felt strange not to take solace in the few emotions he understood, like indignation and anger.
“Someone, someone has drained the colour from my wings…
Broken my fairy circle ring
And shamed the king in all his pride
Changed the winds and wronged the tides…
Mother Mercury… Mercury…
Look what they’ve done to me!
I cannot run, I cannot hide…”
Nothing was right anymore, everything was broken into bits and no matter how hard he tried to put them back together again, it was to no avail.
It was incurably eviscerated.
His life and his heart.
All Sky could do was cry.
#fic#submission#au#freddie: parent#5-10k#series: pretender to the throne#author: brooklynbugleboy#relationship: platonic#theme: parenting#theme: death
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McCartney 3,2,1 Review: Hulu Doc Examines a Beatle
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Hulu’s Original Docuseries McCartney 3,2,1 is a laid-back sit down with Paul McCartney, the man who believed in yesterday, reminiscing about all those years ago. Long-time Beatles fans will have heard most of the stories before, though there are a few new tidbits which have been buried in the mix. The casual conversation provides a wealth of tonality when McCartney talks about the sounds behind the music.
For the chat, McCartney sits down with Rick Rubin in the most familiar of settings: a recording studio, with easy access to the songs being discussed. The six-episode series explores McCartney’s work with The Beatles, Wings, and solo releases. Directed by Zachary Heinzerling, the interview is relaxed, although Paul is often very animated. He fiddles with console buttons, pops up for quick runs at a piano or guitar, and air drums throughout. The black and white filming makes the conversation feel intimate and timeless. It also calls attention to the splashes of color which come in archival footage and photographs. Some are so rare, they might be exclusive.
Besides footage of the Beatles and McCartney, we see clips of the artists who influenced the band, or who were with them at the start, like Little Richard or Roy Orbison. Most of this footage is used in service to a musical point. One clip, for example, compares two-part harmonies performed by McCartney and John Lennon with a performance by Phil and Don Everly.
The first episode, “These Things Bring You Together,” focuses on the early days. While we don’t get deep information on Paul’s early relationship with his songwriting partner, we get something from omission. Paul talks about his loving home, and how different his childhood was from Lennon’s. He points out that John lost his mother at 17. Paul lost his mother at 14, and most books on the Beatles emphasize this bond between the two.
Paul adds some depth to what we know about his pre-Beatle bond with George Harrison. The public knows they met on the bus to school, and connected over music when they were kids. But we didn’t know they cooked pudding on the side of the road. Paul also pulls out one of his pre-Beatles songs, “Thinking of Linking.”
One unexpected revelation comes with the song “Michelle,” which Peter Brown’s book The Love You Make categorized as McCartney’s attempt to class up his act for his then-girlfriend Jane Asher. Paul brings the song back to the parties he attended with Lennon while he was still at art school. Paul says he would put on a turtleneck and pretend to be a French coffee house singer. Sometimes it worked as far as connecting with the older, more sophisticated women, he says, humbly. It apparently made an impression on Lennon, who Paul remembers telling him to finish years later.
In “The Notes That Like Each Other,” McCartney admits that what made his musical styling unique was a combination of his influences from Bach, Fela Kuti or the tunes his father played at the piano, and lucky accidents. He also talks about keeping it all rock and roll. A studio musician would be too sensible to do the bass line on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Most of his innovations come through the energy of quick takes.
McCartney lays out structural lessons. He explains how to use a pick to bring out more treble in the bass. He points out how three fingers, evenly spaced, make a chord no matter where you put them on the piano, and why the possibilities are endless. He demonstrates his first song, an instrumental which begins with musical counterpoint, which was written before he knew what counterpoint meant.
“The People We Loved Were Loving Us!” highlights McCartney’s influences but also talks about why the Beatles needed to take the trip to India. The band met most of the artists they were listening to as they were coming up through the different levels of entertainment. But Paul also noticed his contemporaries. He’s told the story about seeing Jimi Hendrix ask Eric Clapton to tune his guitar before, but it’s a different whistling of the melody.
It is a special treat to hear Paul talk about the Kinks, who were a supporting act during some of the Beatles performances in 1965. Ray Davies spoke about enjoying his very privileged view of the band in his book X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography. So, hearing that the Beatles stood on the side of the stage to take in their opening act is especially satisfying.
“Like Professors in A Laboratory” lets McCartney explain some of the experimentation which went into the output. The Beatles were allowed to break boundaries because they had success. If there was a way to get more treble on Harrison’s lead on “Nowhere Man,” they had the clout to ask the engineers to bounce a track for it. Paul also gets into what made him and Ringo Starr special as a rhythm section.
As always, Paul gives credit to the Beatles’ longtime producer George Martin, including one piano part which has gone heretofore uncredited. Martin did more than help the band translate their sounds, he often played on tracks, and as an in-house arranger, was invaluable. Paul has spoken about the intercontinental rivalry which saw the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds spurring him on to undertake Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But, until now, he hasn’t slipped in the bit about getting the title from mishearing someone ask him to “pass the salt and pepper.”
“Couldn’t You Play It Straighter?” gets to the bottom of the beat. McCartney admits he has been accused of overplaying, and has no regrets. The bass can lead a band, as he shows in the isolated tracks of “Come Together” and “Something,” or it can function as squarely as a tuba. Paul then demonstrates how he gets that effect on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” through strict staccato playing. He also discusses how Mal Evans had a heavy hand when playing the anvil.
One of the most musically meaningful revelations is how McCartney’s playing was freed by listening to James Jameson, who played bass for Marvin Gaye, among others. Another interesting note is how McCartney intentionally juxtaposed older, more traditional melodies with the new sounds afforded by technology. He admits it was fortuitous to have Robert Moog on hand in EMI studios with one of the first synthesizers.
There were no portable phones, and most recording devices which were available during the Beatles’ most creative period were bulky devices. This forced the songwriters to write memorable songs. This is the basis for “The Long And Winding Road,” where McCartney focuses on the craft of songwriting and how he worked with Lennon. The duo’s earliest bond was creative communication. They spoke chords, not sports. He also discusses the importance of developing a separate musical vocabulary as a solo artist, and how he wouldn’t even Beatles songs onstage for years. The most important skill, he says, is knowing when to stop.
Every time a new interview special with a former Beatle is hyped, it makes me think of the David Letterman joke about a special edition of Anthology coming out because Ringo remembered a new anecdote. It is fun to hear McCartney retell the “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” story again, as if he’s telling it for the first time. It’s been told so many times, even Julian no longer buys it, and he’s the one who drew the picture.
Paul has never been a forthcoming public figure, historically. He has always been less communicative about his personal life than the other Beatles. It’s not that he’s being cagey, though he certainly can be when he wants. His song “Got to Get You into my Life” is his love song to marijuana, and who knows what he was carrying in “I’m Carrying.” But he is more practiced at the art of self-presentation. When John Lennon gave his Playboy interviews, the transcripts even caught Yoko asking if he might be sharing a little too much.
McCartney never had that problem. All the Beatles knew how to hide even the most controversial of themes behind humor. In a vintage press conference clip, when the media asked about prostitutes in “Day Tripper” and lesbians in “Norwegian Wood,” McCartney said he just liked writing songs about prostitutes and lesbians. He learned an invaluable lesson when he copped to taking LSD in front of a TV camera, even telling them not to air it. Paul sticks to too many known talking points.
The intimacy of McCartney 3,2,1 is deceptive, however. Each episode runs about 30 minutes, and the stories are shallow by necessity. Peter Jackson’s upcoming cinematic remastering The Beatles: Get Back will provide a much deeper dive into the mechanics and backgrounds of the band’s process. McCartney 3,2,1 feels like a countdown to something bigger.
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McCartney 3,2,1 debuts July 16 on Hulu.
The post McCartney 3,2,1 Review: Hulu Doc Examines a Beatle appeared first on Den of Geek.
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Home Run: What We Can Learn From Sonic Mania
Over a year after the 25th anniversary of the release of Sonic the Hedgehog for the SEGA Genesis, the Blue Blur’s first commemorative quarter-century title has finally hit digital shelves – that is, for owners of the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and Nintendo Switch consoles. While PC players have to wait an extra couple of weeks to download the game, Sonic Mania’s historical significance in the world of video games is lost to no one. Mania is one of the earliest examples, if not the earliest example of a notable company handing the reigns to one of their flagship series to their fans and seeing how they fare. Put together by a dream team of Sonic fan creators, such as Christian Whitehead, who also worked on enhanced ports of Sonic 1, Sonic 2, and Sonic CD, Tyson Hesse, who provided artwork for a number of Archie Comics’ adaptations of the franchise, Tee Lopes, known for his extensive backlog of Sonic music remixes, and a talented group of other fan creators, Sonic Mania utilizes resources from SEGA to present a letter of true love to the classic Sonic titles of old. By bringing unique, creative design ideas to tried-and-true level construction, and implementing an expressive, nostalgic aesthetic style, Mania manages to overcome many of Sonic’s rockier elements and outshine its flaws with a game that not only reminds us what we loved about old Sonic games, but also to bring new ideas for the table that leave us excited for future possibilities.
Sonic Mania takes everything there was to love about classic Sonic level design and turns it up to eleven. Long, twisting paths traversed at breakneck speeds, thrilling stunts, and extreme 90’s grandeur are all front-in-center, putting the player in an exhilarating position of awe while needing to maintain a quick thought process in order to keep the hedgehog on the right track. When Sonic isn’t bursting forward at the speed of sound, he’s required to traverse carefully crafted puzzles and platforming sections that ask the player for a bit of clever thought. All of this has been present in Sonic games before, but never so well-balanced as it is in Mania. Whenever the player is going fast, (ha) it feels like they are doing just that, not like they’re just along for the ride, a noted flaw of many older Sonic games. The player is given just enough control and asked to make just enough decisions during these high-speed sections to be given a feeling of agency many might say Sonic has always been lacking. The low-speed areas are portioned and placed just right so that they don’t feel like they’re hindering the player’s speed, but rather, these lulls only serve to build anticipation, getting the player more and more eager to hit the “open road” of the speedier areas, so that when they finally work their way through the tricky yet engaging platforming segments, the subsequent speed feels like a reward for their good thinking rather than giving the impression that they’re finally getting back to the “real game.” With old ideas being improved upon, the development team also implemented numerous newer ideas, each worked into the game in shockingly creative ways – I won’t spoil anything, but this marriage of old and new ideas is especially prevalent in the boss fights. Each one brings back a classic component of Sonic history and presents it in such a unique, clever way that the battles are honestly my favorite part of the entire game. The game similarly uses its distinct new concepts to escape the trap of monotony, as each level has its own unique design cues and constructive elements so that the game never feels the same from one Zone to the next, yet also manages not to lose the feeling of consistency. Each part of this game manages to capture something timeless about the Sonic franchise and spin it around so that we are able to see it in a totally new light, leaving us in awe of it once more.
In terms of visual style, one might say that Sonic has never run so smoothly. All of this game’s motion is nearly seamless, giving us a clearer picture of the fluidity and momentum we’ve come to expect from the Sonic franchise. The Sonic series has additionally never looked so expressive – with colors appearing to be the brightest they’ve ever been, and exaggerated movements and shapes abound. Every action and object in this game is distinct and draws attention in such a way that the player, while speeding through the game’s environments, is still able to perceive and appreciate each and every creative touch sprinkled throughout the scene. In addition to being packed with visual creativity, the game also boasts an impressive soundtrack, composed by Tee Lopes. Lopes presents us a throwback to the funky, ambient tunes of Sonic CD, while managing to keep levels from other previous entries in the series both true to their original styles and revamped to fit the sound of the new game. Lopes has once again shown his prowess when it comes to adding a fresh yet fitting twist to classic Sonic tunes. The game additionally boasts phenomenal animated cutscenes, directed by renowned web-based artist Tyson Hesse. Hesse applies a flexible and vivid lens to the classic Toei animations we saw back in the 90’s with Sonic CD and the Sonic the Hedgehog OVA. The distinct shapes, colors, and animations shown in these scenes give us view of what is, in my opinion, some of the best Sonic the Hedgehog artwork currently available anywhere.
Unfortunately, the game is, like any other game, not without its shortcomings. Over time, it becomes evident that some of the enormous and complex level design, might be a little too meticulous, with some portions of the game abruptly bringing Sonic to a halt to solve puzzles the player simply isn’t in the mindset for. These roadblocks can get to be quite frustrating and confusing, as the player is still in a mental state in which they want to go fast, (ha) and as a result, one often gets caught up trying to find a quick, reckless solution to a problem that requires a more careful, delicate touch. Additionally, the eye-catching visuals can, at times, complicate the experience. While it’s true that virtually every part of the levels in visually interesting, this can sometimes work to the game’s disadvantage, as, during some of the more complex areas, the attention-grabbing visuals can clutter up the screen and be quite distracting, making many dilemmas much harder to resolve than they need to be. Lastly, while it’s true that the soundtrack brings a lot of energy reminiscent of the Sonic CD OST, sometimes the chill, environmental jams can get to be just a tad too atmospheric. Much of the music that Sonic is best known for is upbeat, melodic, and intense – and CD’s smooth grooves can, at times, betray the game’s high-speed, adrenaline-driven nature. Lopes has shown time and time again that he’s more than capable of giving music befitting of Sonic titles other than CD - in fact, many of his remixes are arguably even more fitting for their respective levels than the songs they’re based off of, so it’s a tad disappointing we didn’t get to see a larger spread of his potential in this game than we did. My last issue with the game lies in its story. While I’m often one to argue that a game’s story usually matters very little when judging its overall quality, I must admit, I was a bit distracted by how confusing the game’s plot was. The story centers around a powerful gem that Dr. Eggman acquires on Angel Island… which… isn’t floating? Even though it went back to the sky at the end of Sonic 3 & Knuckles? Similarly, the Death Egg is still shown in Lava Reef Zone, despite being destroyed in the same game? And Tiny Planet is still chained to Sonic’s world, even though the chain was broken at the end of Sonic CD? There might be a sensible explanation if the gem induced time travel – though this would be the 5th time in the series that this was used as a key plot element – but it’s unclear whether the gem warps Sonic through time to his past, or if it sends him to places he’s visited before in their present state. Whatever the case, the story created a lot of conflicts for me, especially when trying to consider how this game affects the canon of the franchise as a whole.
Still, the story of a game does usually matter little to me, and this game does more than enough right to keep me true to that philosophy. The mechanics and design of the game add new twists to old ideas, making their return even more welcome than it would have been to begin with. The game’s style is absolutely delectable, bringing a dynamic energy to Sonic that could hardly be more fitting for the speedy blue hedgehog. It brings out the franchise’s strengths to help it leave its flaws in the dust, and managing to do the same for its own issues. Sonic Mania is a stunning example of how well a project can come together when worked on by people who truly love it. SEGA gathered a team that displayed a great creative passion for Sonic, and their passion showed in the love and care that is clearly present in the crafting and presentation of this game. By working with their fan-creators instead of against them, (as many game developers are wont to do) SEGA managed to create not only a true testament of their fans’ love for Sonic, but also a game that exceeds expectations entirely, standing out as one of the best, if not the best, Sonic the Hedgehog game of all time.
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LANDMARK by HIPPO CAMPUS [review]
LANDMARK is exactly what it claims to be. It is a turning point in the four-piece Hippo Campus’ career, a milestone in the lives of their most dedicated fans, but most importantly a “Landmark” in indie rock as a whole. Landmark embodies an impressively mature adolescent mindset, contrasting but not abandoning the juvenile spirit that carried their 2015 album Bashful Creatures. The change they have gone through within these two years is audible in each of the thirteen songs they offer (yes, including the two instrumental tracks).
We begin the album with an instrumental intro with heavy lo-fi tones, gritty vocals, casual muted dialogue and ambient noises. Sun Veins soon makes an unexpected transition into the following track, Way It Goes. Within this first eerie minute, we already know this album is going to be a huge shift from their last. Way It Goes, their most popular single release from this album, is the best example of their renovated musical style. Rolling guitar riffs, reminiscent of Mac DeMarco (This Old Dog out May 5th), guide the chorus to achieve an incredibly dreamy result. Frontman Jake Luppen’s raw and passionate vocals bring us back to his powerful performances in their earliest endeavors, before dropping off into wavering falsettos in the verses. The grooving bassline and vivacious, full drumming we know so well take a seat on this track, drawing the spotlight on Luppen’s fresh voice and matter-of-fact lyrics, as well as the hot and sweet guitar licks. The song takes a break for a muted slide-guitar solo, epitomizing the mood of the track as a whole. It begins its crescendo with light cymbal and staticky vocalization before coming together. At this point, you know the words, and you’re definitely singing along.
Boyish, the third-to-last song, mirrors the youthful maturity that Way It Goes introduces, but with a more inclusive production. Bass and drums join (possibly over-power) the rhythm and lead guitar, and are accompanied by a brass section. Upon its release in 2016, I listened immediately and was astonished by the shift in direction from their older work. Little did we know that it would be the perfect introduction to their new sound. Boyish was a statement for Hippo Campus’ listeners that “yeah, we did that.” It was a promise that production would be taken to a whole new level, that less trivial subjects would be tackled (from “peace, weed, cocaine, and mushrooms and shit” to “dropping hallucinogens”) and that Luppen was indeed capable of prolonged falsetto. Vacation joins Boyish and Way It Goes, as it exudes juvenescence while demonstrating the growth Hippo Campus underwent in their recently-abandoned teen years.
We exit lo-fi dream Way It Goes with a soft fade before entering Vines, a song that could very well fit on their 2015 South EP. Just as spry and bright as the closing track Buttercup, Vines is full of that teenager spirit. Vines’ “I get the feeling that I’ll never leave this house again” and chorus opening line “Nighttime in the basement, screaming about our feelings” alongside Buttercups’ infectious “I’ll be fine on my own, she said, I don’t need you inside my head” line are proof enough that the angst we know and love plagues (in a good way) these two songs.
There is no denying that Landmark is full of a boyish (...sorry) wonder, and Hippo Campus certainly don’t want you to forget it. There is a constant mention of youth in their lyrics. Take these examples from the album’s middle tracks:
“Sweet love, kiss on the eyelid, bruised up, chasing the sky. Did you say something about her? My legs brushed up beside her. Too young, looking for trouble. New god, lost in the struggle. One more night in the backyard. This simple season...” (Simple Season)
“Alcoholic tendencies underneath our fingertips. I think I love you, I think I know you. Or is it only the liquor speak? I want to love you, I wanna know you.” (Tuesday)
“I just love this, I swear I’ll go viral, from the ‘burbs to the streets now. It’s a revival, the spirit is found in the idealistically idle age of excess.” (Western Kids)
These giddy tracks ooze summer vibes and pure fun. From the childlike backup vocals in Simple Season to Tuesday’s happy-go-lucky atmosphere and Western Kids’ teenage arrogance, Hippo Campus show us that they are still youthful, they still have ambition, and they still have a ways to go.
But that’s exactly what they proved with Bashful Creatures. What separates these two albums the most are the surplus of glum tracks they offer. Epitaph (which, by definition, is a song played at a funeral), Poems and single-release Monsoon are mellower, watery, and downplayed. Each song is honest, although casually cryptic. Phrases we can understand by themselves are joined together like puzzle pieces to form the lyrics of these songs. Hippo Campus are completely rejecting the popularity formula that has worked for so many pop and indie pop groups. They neglect the purposefully vague lyrics (that can apply to any tween girl that’s willing to spend all of her college savings on MP3s, merchandise and tickets). They don’t rely on C-major and a I-V-vi-IV progression. They don’t hide behind a painfully optimistic outlook on life. Hippo Campus bare all sides to adolescence. The carefree summers, newer, more raw emotions, the hopeful future, and loss.
Frontman guitarist/vocalist Jake Luppen, guitarist Nathan Stocker, bassist Zach Sutton and drummer Whistler Allen took a risk with this new album. They challenged their own standards as well as those of the indie community. Hippo Campus maintain the lively and energizing reputation that Bashful Creatures and their other EPs set forth. This fresh LP is woozy, yet passionate. Young, yet mature. Blunt, yet enigmatic. Landmark is a picturesque archive of human progress, with innovative production quality to match its innovative perspective. I’m sure that other indie bands will notice this lo-fi sound that Hippo Campus have expanded on, and so will major indie music curators (AltNation already has). The four-piece were not the first to leap into a new territory--or to switch to this territory in the first place--but they are among those who have succeeded greatly.
NINE HIPPOS / OUT OF TEN
***note: the transition between Sun Veins and Way It Goes is the best thing that has ever happened to me
#hippo campus#landmark#music#review#new album#album review#alternative#indie#indie rock#music review#jake luppen#zach sutton#nathan stocker#whistler allen#bashful creatures#the halocline#opinion
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An Interview with Interregnum
Could you introduce the group? Who you are and what you do in Interregnum?
Gregory: The idea for the project has been evolving for around two years. Joshua and I met through Tumblr, when he submitted a collection of short stories to Cutlines Press (I was acting as co-editor). It turned out that we shared so many interests, from music and literature to occultism, that we began working on a publication that came out last December, a literary collection called Collapsed Cartographies. [http://www.cutlinespress.com/category/e-book/] Other authors and artists contributed, and Joshua and I recorded an album to go along with the literary material. [https://collapsedcartographies.bandcamp.com/album/collapsed-cartogrophies]. In the group I do vocals, synth, harmonium, stick dulcimer, bells, rattles, field recordings and samples, etc…
Joshua: Hello, there. My name is Josh. I play things in Interregnum, I suppose. I sample stuff as well. Gregory and I kind of play everything. I don’t think we have set roles in the project. He plays the harmonium. I can’t play that. Or, at least I don’t own one. It’s my favorite part of our sound, though.
What's the origin of the project? Why the name Interregnum?
Gregory: As I said, we began with a pretty ambitious literary collaboration, and that has grown into Interregnum as a specific musical outlet. The word “interregnum” means an interval or pause, and especially a period between reigns, of governmental transition. I first encountered the word around a year ago, and have found it increasingly useful in terms of political analysis. I think that, globally, we are definitely in a disorienting situation, where the coordinates of the 20th century (the Cold War, for example), are no longer adequate. I came of age during the era of the Bush administration in the U.S, which was a time when it looked like the U.S. was going to be able to set the agenda for the world, on the heels of the 90s boom, and so on. Now—after the global financial crisis, the failure of U.S. imperial policy (reminiscent of the decline of Soviet power, e.g., in their inability to control Afghanistan) all the ideas even of the Bush era seem totally inadequate. So many big projects and visions have failed, whether we are talking about U.S. imperial “democracy,” 20th century socialism, or even the new age movement – the whole millennial atmosphere of the turn of the century is dispersing. We’ve had record temperatures worldwide every month for almost a year. I mean, I saw spring flowers blooming in the middle of winter here in Louisiana in 2015. I am interested in exploring these zones of in-betweenness musically.
Joshua: Gregory and I actually met through the kind of transgressive literature scene. He published a few short stories of mine. We still connect on that level I think. I’m working as a kind of third creative mind on his novel The Ugly Spirit, which is fucking great, by the way. I’m the E.K. to his Edmund Spenser. We started making music together to soundtrack the publication and we just clicked. We both have hands in the same kind of experimental sound.
Why the choice of Scandinavian mythology as a concept for the Wolf Age album?
Gregory: I don’t have an exact answer of why we decided to focus here. I have worked with Odin and the runes in the past. The mythology is something that comes up periodically in my life. After working on Collapsed Cartographies, Joshua and I were talking about a possible EP centered around Norse mythology. I suppose I’ve always been drawn to the apocalyptic current in northern mythology (i.e. with the idea of Ragnarok), and that seems like a fitting motif for the times, given that we are in some kind of interregnum.
Joshua: Gregory contacted me regarding putting together a project based on Norse Mythology. We both have a complicated relationship with the occult. I think our concept for the album, the lack of gender binary in Norse folklore, has a good academic basis and also might stop neo-fascist, dude-bro Asatru types from listening to our music, which is good.
During the creative process of the album there was some sort of material (musical, literary, artistic, etc.) or personal experience that influenced your way of work?
Gregory: At a highly abstract level, the mood suggested by this corresponded with a number of things happening in my life at the time. My grandmother was dying and I was also coming out of a period of pharmaceutical drug addiction, so I was in a dark and foreboding mood, but also being forced to start over on various levels. Joshua began sending me skeletal tracks with titles referring to specific episodes in the Poetic Edda. From there I added vocals or whatever else I felt inspired to add. In retrospect, I think that I benefitted by being prompted to create around mythic themes, which drew me away from the purely close-up view of my own life. In everything I did, I tried to maintain a certain fidelity to the stories in the Edda.
Joshua: This was recorded during a period of immense, but painful personal growth for me. Lots of stuff changed while we were making this. As far as artistic influences, a lot of David Bowie. Old gay pornography. Death in June. Metro Boomin. The devil, perhaps.
Could you describe the process of recording?
Gregory: We did everything remotely. Joshua would send me a base track, or I would send him one. He would add something. I would add something. I think we both gravitated toward a combination of improvisational, noisy approaches, with a structured style of song writing. I definitely wanted to have choruses, verses, and all of that sort of thing, but also a tendency for that coherence to dissolve, and then come back together.
Joshua: We recorded our parts separately and then emailed them to each other. Postal Service style.
Wolf Age possesses a strong ritualist vibe. Is there some sort of proceeding to fully appreciate the music as a listener?
Gregory: My approach to music reflects my life-long interest in the occult. I haven’t made any music specifically for rituals, but the music is, as you say, ritualistic. I do hope that listeners will have some interesting experience with the music. The tracks on this album refer to a mythic temporality, as does ritual. I would like for listeners to have a sense of being transported outside of our mundane sense of being in the world.
Joshua: Not for me. Take from it what you will.
The album is going to be released in cassette, could you comment briefly about that and why this media was chosen?
Gregory: We both have a strong interest in analog musical instruments. We use analog synth, drum machine, etc. I’m a good decade older than Joshua (30), so I have a certain nostalgic interest in these formats. The first album I ever bought was on tape, and my earliest sound experiments were with tape recorders. On a very pervasive level, this continuing interest is related to my long-term engagement with the work of William S. Burroughs, and the tape recorder-fueled influence that he had on a certain moment in time, particularly in the U.K. My primary touchstones, musically, are Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Current 93, and that whole occult musical scene…I see myself as continuing Burroughs’ research, as it were, to the point where I’ve literally done magical work to be in contact with Burroughs from beyond the grave. Also there seems to be a cassette revival going on now, like what has been happening with vinyl. I am interested in being part of that, precisely because it doesn’t seem to be purely backwards-looking. In fact, through the establishment of networks, particularly online, the cassette revival is intertwined with a lot of musical innovation. I like what Croatian Amor is doing, for example. There are so many new cassette releases at the moment.
Joshua: It’s just the classic underground music format. I love the scale of it. I love that it can be manipulated and destroyed and reshaped.
Do you see any relationships between the religious traditions of New Orleans and the ones practiced by the old Scandinavians?
Gregory: That’s an interesting question. In short, yes.
There has always been a lot going on in Louisiana. On the one hand, it is certainly a U.S. city, but it is also part of the Caribbean—in many respects the northern limit of the Caribbean. Many of the forces that have operated in Latin America have also been present here, so we have this kind of imported Mediterranean/pan-Latin/Catholic thing going on. For instance, I grew up outside of New Orleans in a rural, Sicilian ethnic community, embedded in a majority black town. It’s an odd experience of race and culture, considering, say, the historical composition of the Midwestern U.S. Another part of my family is from a Canary Island immigrant community, here. So I grew up around official Catholicism as well as folk Catholicism. The latter involved many essentially magical practices and orientations. Now, living in New Orleans, I see the ways that Hoodoo is still alive here, along with growing practices of Santeria, Mexican curanderismo, the Santa Muerte cult, etc. I’ve practiced Golden Dawn-style ceremonial magic for a long time as well. I feel very close to that, but there is something missing in that sort of practice, namely the veneration of ancestors and things like that, as I see in folk Catholic practices. I suspect that there are similarities between these kinds of approaches and how northern Europeans, in a shamanic culture, would have related to reality. I have more understanding of the contemporary traditions I just mentioned, whereas northern paganism is a reconstruction, except in the sense in which it survived and came down through fairy tales, folk songs, and so on. In that regard, we’re left speculating based on textual evidence and our own spiritual experimentation. Freya Aswynn has said that she sees similarities between northern paganism and West African diaspora religion. Something to think about.
Joshua: I’m actually not from New Orleans. I’ve been there a few times, though. Last time I ended up drinking absinthe with Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys. Wild.
In your opinion, what type of role does paganism exert in our contemporary society?
Gregory: Modernity brought about a radical de-centering, so that the Christian God is no longer at the center of social life in western civilization, or whatever we want to call it. Global capitalism has created a situation where extreme mixing of cultures is an accomplished fact. I don’t see any potential in resisting that mixing; we have already lost the ground of former identities, such that they ever existed. In some respects, maybe this is like a hyper-driven version of what happened in late antiquity, where Egyptian and Greek religious practices blended together, and Hermeticism and strange Gnostic cults flourished amid wild experimentation…This was brought about by the existence of a cosmopolitan empire that foreshadowed capitalist globalization. Gods abounded. This was the death of an old world but also a time of great creation.
Joshua: Paganism IS our society. Everything humans will ever do that is not directly related to our baseline survival implies faith and implies symbolism and implies archetypal thinking.
Any message to your listeners?
Gregory: If you’re out there, I want to connect with you! I want to find others who have the same deep longings that are driving me create art and think about the world, even in the face of the major disasters that are unfolding around us.
Joshua: Don’t ask permission.
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Tony nominees dish on how they fell in love with theater
You always remember your first time — or your first present, particularly when you wind up writing, choreographing or starring in one later. Almost a dozen of this yr’s Tony Award nominees informed us about their early forays into the theater, each on Broadway or off. Whether or not they have been puzzling over the fast-talking salesmen in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” or dreaming of the day they’d play Mimi in “Hire,” it’s a reminiscence they’ll cherish endlessly. Laurie Metcalf(featured actress, “Three Tall Ladies”) Brigitte Lacombe “I used to be in highschool in Evansville, Unwell., and we went to St. Louis to see ‘Godspell.’ All of us had horrible seats in the nosebleed part and the actors most likely weren’t a lot older than we have been, however they appeared like they have been having the time of their life. It was energetic, colourful and the music was — how would I describe it? Revolutionary. All the things about it made me lean ahead. I gained’t go to date that I assumed, ‘Oh, I can do this,’ however I did suppose, ‘I’d love to try this.’ I’ve [still] by no means performed a musical. However then, I can’t sing. So there you go!” Jamie Parker(main actor, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Little one”) Getty Photographs “The earliest present I can keep in mind is once I was four or 5, and my sister and pop have been in an beginner manufacturing of ‘The Music Man.’ All I can keep in mind is my sister coming on in her little band uniform holding a brass instrument, and all these youngsters coming on to be a part of ‘76 Trombones.’ Being keen to simply accept what you see onstage has by no means been an issue for me — everyone knows: It’s only a play.” Taylor Louderman(main actress, “Imply Women”) Getty Photographs “I moved round rather a lot with my dad’s job and grew up in a small city close to St. Louis, the place the cattle inhabitants exceeds the human. I used to be most likely 13 once I got here to New York for a theater camp, and the director wished to see ‘Glengarry Glen Ross.’ I didn’t perceive what was going on — the plot was means over my head, however it was good watching the actors. I keep in mind looking at all people in the present, overwhelmed with the entire Broadway expertise.” Ethan Slater(main actor, “SpongeBob SquarePants”) Joan Marcus “One of many first exhibits I keep in mind seeing was ‘Rattling Yankees.’ I will need to have been round 10 or 11 years previous and was obsessed with baseball. I keep in mind pondering [the actors] have been doing precisely what I wished to be doing, not solely singing and dancing, however enjoying baseball, too! I feel that was the primary semi-understanding I had of what it actually meant to be an actor: You get to inhabit lives that you just may not in any other case dwell.” Jessie Mueller(main actress, “Carousel”) WireImage “I feel I used to be four when my dad was enjoying John Adams in a manufacturing of ‘1776’ in Chicago. I will need to have seen it early in the run, as a result of I’ve a reminiscence of opening evening. My dad and mom had gone out for a celebration, my cousin was baby-sitting and my sister and brother and I have been appearing it out in our room. My dad and mom got here house and located us. We thought we’d get in bother as a result of we have been up so late, however they simply laughed.” Lauren Ambrose(main actress, “My Honest Woman”) “I noticed Leslie Uggams in ‘Something Goes’ once I was about 7 or 6, possibly even youthful. My grandmother’s brother was an actor and he got here up from Florida and wished to take me to the present. I received the [cast album] and memorized it! Simply seeing all these our bodies onstage, creating this alternate world — to this present day, that’s what I love most about this work, the collaboration of a novel group of individuals working collectively … and seeing what comes out of that.” Ariana DeBose(featured actress, “Summer season: The Donna Summer season Musical”) “My first Broadway present was ‘Hire.’ I feel I used to be 9 and sitting in the mezzanine with my aunt and my mother and uncle. I wished to be the woman in the blue shorts and the leopard coat — I wished to be Mimi, who made me cry. To this present day, I by no means performed Mimi. However I assumed even then that I may make individuals really feel one thing.” Itmar Moses(e-book for a musical, “The Band’s Go to”) Andrew Eccles “I used to be born in California and didn’t spend a variety of time in New York till faculty. Someday over my winter break in freshman yr, my dad and mom got here out and we noticed Terrence McNally’s ‘Grasp Class.’ It’s actually in the type of a grasp class, with Zoe Caldwell enjoying [opera star] Maria Callas. A younger actress performed certainly one of Callas’ college students, and she or he was phenomenal — Audra McDonald, who was simply out of college herself. Whereas honoring her character, she managed to go toe to toe with the all-time nice Caldwell, and that’s what caught with me.” Christopher Gattelli(choreography, “My Honest Woman” and “SpongeBob SquarePants”) WireImage “A pal of our household introduced me and my sister to ‘Dreamgirls.’ I used to be 14 or 15, and it was mind-blowing! The set was mainly 4 massive towers that had lights on them, and [director/co-choreographer] Michael Bennett had the towers moved round in ways in which steered areas and passages of time [and] you all the time knew precisely the place you have been. All the things I’d seen up until then was conventional. To see one thing that was so spare, but appeared so full and dramatic and emotional, was extremely inspiring.” Share this: https://nypost.com/2018/05/15/tony-nominees-dish-on-how-they-fell-in-love-with-theater/ The post Tony nominees dish on how they fell in love with theater appeared first on My style by Kartia.
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