#his early career can be summed up as 'committed too hard to the bit'. he gazed into the bit and the bit gazed into him | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dherzogblog · 4 years

Text

songs/19

“I listen so you don't have to”

Hey everyone, we’re back! enjoy some music and musings from the last year

Make sure to click on there bold type for music links and extras!

Lizzo- Juice Lizzo burst into 2019 with a hit song, huge album and wildly successful tour. The “pudding in the proof “. Easily the catchiest tune of the year with an irresistible Bruno Mars 80′s funk vibe, She has the kind of star power and charisma that makes her appealing to just about everyone, including your aunt, who no doubt will be grooving to this on bar mitzvah dance floors for years to come. Blame it on her juice.

Jen Awad- Hungover

Big voiced, post Amy Winehouse soul singer blames it on the juice too. Maybe she was with Lizzo the night before?

Charley Crockett- How Low Can You Go?

Multi ethnic Americana singer/songwriter delivers one of my favorite albums of the year where he effortlessly moves from country to blues to soul. He also recorded one of my favorite country covers of the year (see bottom of this blog for more info on that). His girl is breaking his heart (blame it on the juice again?) on this R&B styled song from a non album single.

Durand Jones and The Indications- Circles

More sweet 70′s soul, quiet storm style. The swirling strings and Delfonics harmonies would sound perfect coming out of the 8 Track player in your Pinto.

Dr.John- Such A Night (1941-2019)

A true music renaissance man. Starting as a teen in the studios of New Orleans, he learned his trade at the feet of the masters, playing R&B, jazz, and blues with equal skill and feel. The good doctor, (AKA Mac Rebbenack) went on to become an unlikely rock star in the early 70′s with his psychedelic and voodoo inspired Night Tripper alter ego. His long career found him playing several roles along the way, session man, producer, and The Big Easy’s unofficial funk ambassador. I picked this live version of the song because: A. He’s backed beautifully by The Band, B. It’s one of my favorite performances from The Last Waltz, and C. The live setting let’s you hear him stretch out a bit on the keyboards. I watched him perform many times, headlining or sitting in with others at Jazz Fest. No matter what the setting, he always fit right in and found the groove. Piano man, sideman, shaman, there was only one Dr.John.

Van Morrison - Early Days

Like Dr. John, Van’s been around long enough to recall the birth of rock and roll. Throughout his career he never stopped paying tribute to his roots and those who inspired him. You can hear it in his musical references, cover tunes and name checks. At The Hollywood Bowl in October I got to see an unusually joyous performance as he wistfully traced a lifetime of musical influences across R&B, jazz and blues. His latest release is an unabashed love letter to those good old days, three chords and the truth.

Spiral Stairs- Fingerprintz

Scott Kannberg is one of the co-founders of Indie rock legends Pavement. But truth is I never took much of an interest in them. I happened to read about his solo project where he mentioned listening to a lot of Van Morrison and Nick Lowe while recording. That seemed like a good enough reason for me to check it out. There are familiar ‘fingerprints” on this one, as you can definitely hear him channeling Van.

Vampire Weekend- This Life

Hardly anyone is ambivalent about Vampire Weekend. Their preppy east coast look, and sleeve wearing, dad rock influences make them polarizing at best. Doesn’t matter to me, I like their catchy hooks, bone dry lyrics, caribbean rhythms, and ringing guitars.This is easily the sunniest song about cheating I ever heard.

The English Beat- Whine and Grind/Stand Down Margaret Ranking Roger (1953-2019)

in January of 1980 England was in the grips of 2 Tone mania, the pop music movement that came dancehall crashing out of the UK Midlands, and for a brief black and white checkered moment, dominated the British charts. At the center of the scene were The Specials whose founder Jerry Dammers launched the 2 Tone label and created the blueprint for it’s sound, inspired by the Jamaican music he heard as a kid. These bands (including The Selecter and Madness), combined ska, reggae and punk that launched a brief music and fashion movement. They dressed in a mod black and white style making the look nearly as important as their sound. For most of these bi-racial bands, the goal was to make you dance AND think, with lyrics focusing on social and political issues affecting young people in Thatcher’s Britain. The track here is a good example of that.

I arrived in London on a traveling seminar ready to check it all out, as a college radio DJ I was already a fan of The Clash’s punky reggae. and I had read several dispatches from the British music tabloids like NME and Melody Maker. First chance I got, I was off to a record store where I stood at a listening station to hear The Special’s debut LP. I was instantly transformed into a card carrying 2 Tone fan boy. As a student, without much money with a long trip ahead, I couldn't afford The Specials album, but I did buy a 45 by the label’s latest signing, The Beat.

The A side was a cover of Smokey Robinson & The Miracle’s “Tears Of A Clown”. It took a minute to get used to hearing the Motown classic played in their energetic ska sound. The tune ends with Ranking Roger “toasting” over the track reggae DJ style, not something heard much outside of Jamaica back then. Side B featured Roger taking lead and riding over a bouncy stop and start rhythm titled “Ranking Full Stop”. It was an instant 2 Tone classic, and I now had a new favorite band.

The Beat (AKA The English Beat) after just one 2 Tone single, were given their own Go-Feet label and releasing a full length album later that year. Their songs seemed to have a slightly more authentic Jamaican sound than the others, dubbier, upbeat and fun. In addition they dabbled in world music and afropop long before it became chic. I saw them perform on their first US tour in Boston later that year.

As the 2 Tone moment waned back home, the group quickly focused on the American audience, touring constantly in the process. The Beat were definitely the band most committed to breaking in the states and nearly did. By the third album, they gained some traction at US radio (particularly here in LA at KROQ) and played the US Festival, but it was too late. The band was already fracturing. Lead singer Dave Wakeling and Roger left unceremoniously in 1983 to form the short lived and mildly successful General Public, while bandmates Andy Cox and David Steele formed the much more successful Fine Young Cannibals. despite some huge hits, they too were short lived.

The original band never reunited. Roger and Wakeling performed together as The Beat for awhile, later each forming his own version. Roger in the UK and Dave in the US. Dave’s version tours constantly to this day. The 2 Tone label didn't last long and the music never truly caught on here. Ultimately suffering the same fate as other short lived UK music fads like Glam Rock or The New Romatics. Their impact was strong enough though to fuel the much maligned ska third wave of the 90′s, and bring Jamaican music a bit farther into the mainstream. All that really remains are the three great studio albums and the memory of their exciting live shows.

I booked the band on a CNN talk show in 1982. I remember they seemed frustrated and were already hinting at a challenged future for the group. Less than a year later they were done for good. I recall desperately wanting them to succeed, bringing my favorite band and the 2 Tone music to the masses. It’s hard to imagine there was a ever a time in your life when a pop group could break your heart like that.

Foe me and other recovering rude boys/rude girls, the music endures, as does the message. And today when I hear them streaming into my ear buds, I still want to “move my likkle feet and dance to the beat”, which for the dearly departed Roger I have to think, was always the point. #loveandunity

The Special- Vote For Me

Politics and social issues remain front and center as the 2 Tone founders return with their first album since the 80′s. Reunited for many years now, this current version of the band boasts more original members of The Fun Boy Three than the original The Specials. That did not stop them from delivering a totally respectable and relevant effort. You can hear dark echos of their classic "Ghost Town” on this dubby tune no doubt inspired by Brexit.

Eddie And The Hot Rods- Do Anything You Wanna Do Barrie Masters (1956-2019)

in 1976/77 Eddie and the Hot Rods stood at the intersection of pub rock and punk as one scene fizzled, and the other burned down everything in its path. The Hot Rods had the classic straight ahead sound of the pub bands plus an attitude that leaned forward into the energy punk would embrace. They enjoyed a brief moment of UK chart success before literally falling into the cracks of the pop music scene. This song, one of my all time favorite singles, sum them up perfectly. Drawing a straight line from Graham Parker to The Clash with a touch of a classic Springsteen working class anthem. In other words....perfect.

Beach Slang- Tommy In The 80′s

When I first saw the title of this song immediately assumed it was a Beach Slang’s tribute to The Replacements guitarist Tommy Stinson . And even though Tommy himself plays on the track, it is not about him! In fact, it’s actually a tribute to obscure 80′s power popper Tommy Keene. I remembered the name from my MTV days, but honestly had to wiki him for clarification. Despite all these references, the whole thing sounds more inspired by “Jessie’s Girl” than either Tommy.

The Cars- My Best Friends Girl Ric Ocasek (1941-2019)

Truthfully. I was never a big Cars fan. But in my college days before digital music, you listened to whatever the radio played. And in Boston, they played The Cars a lot. It wasn’t long before they rose from local heroes to national charts toppers. They didn't have the bluesy street cred or swagger of hometown legends Aerosmith or The J Geils Band, but they were our very own neighborhood rock stars. Drummer David Robinson lived in the building next door to Noreen on Comm Ave, and it was always kinda cool to see them strolling around Back Bay or hanging out at a club. Their sound was little cold and metallic for me, but you couldn't deny they crafted pretty great pop and new wave singles. They were omnipresent sound of my college days. The hits literally followed me to MTV and NYC in the 80′s where I often spotted Ric and Paulina strolling hand in hand in Chelsea. This classic love triangle was always my favorite with it’s Tommy James like guitar at the top, handclaps, and unforgettable hook. The band disbanded long ago, but like the classic American automobiles, these songs were built to last.

The Neighborhoods- Don’t Look Down

The Cars were the only Boston group of the era to truly make it big, but that late 70′s scene boasted several other talented bands who scored label deals including: The Nervous Eaters, The Rings, The Paley Brothers, Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, The Fools, The Real Kids, The Stompers, and Mission Of Burma. Later on, The Lyres, The Neats The Del Fuegos, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Murphy’s Law all managed to find the big time. It was a great time for local music back then. A city filled with students, plenty of clubs to pack on weekends, and college and commercial radio stations willing to play local bands. There were many good acts around town then, and my favorite, without a doubt, were The Neighborhoods. A young, brash power trio led by charismatic lead singer David Minehan. They played a ferocious brand of power pop/punk that would leave their audience breathless. I was certain they were destined for stardom. In the spring of 1979 they released their debut single “Prettiest Girl” on a local label and massive airplay on both college and commercial radio followed. They instantly became the hottest band in town, poised to become the next band from Boston to make it big. But it never happened. Bad luck, poor management and infighting derailed all the momentum. Before you knew it, the gritty street quality that was The ‘Hoods trademark was pushed aside by the synthesized sound of MTV. Over the course of the 80′s and into the 90′s they managed to release some pretty good albums on a variety of indie labels, but it never came together for them. The band reunited and gigs occasionally but hadn’t recorded for many years until right now. Forty years later, the neighborhood may not look the same, but their sound and spirit somehow survive. I suppose there’s something tragic and romantic about a great band lost to time, remembered only by the few who saw them way back when. They really were great, but I guess you had to be there.

Jesse Mailn - Meet Me At The End Of The World Again

New York’s favorite son, soul survivor, and street poet Jesse Malin is back. He’s been around long enough to understand that “When it all blows up, when it all goes down, when it makes you sick, but you’re still around” is victory in itself. It’s the only life he knows, so what can a poor boy do?

Brittany Howard- Stay High

This is from Alabama Shakes lead singer's excellent solo debut, unselfconsciously celebrating private moments spent with a lover on this rootsy and gentle ballad. Her soulful falsetto conveys the kind of lustful bliss you might expect from Al Green or Prince.

Mississippi All Stars- Mean Old World

Bear with me. This one is tangled up in the roots of several southern rock legacies and is going to take a minute to unpack. The All Stars are led by Luther and Cody Dickinson, sons of legendary Memphis musician and wild man Jim Dickinson. They decided to cover T Bone Walker’s Mean Old World, a blues number once recorded by Eric Clapton and Duane Allman as part of the historic Derek And The Dominos sessions. The track, featuring their dad Jim, did not make the original release but was later unearthed on an expanded reissue. Still with me? So, as a bit of a tribute, the guys recorded their own version of the tune and invited Duane Betts, son of Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts to record an Eat a Peach inspired guitar run at the end.

And oh yeah, Jason Isbell is on it as well.

Got all that?

Samantha Fish- Kill Or Be Kind

Have seen Samantha live several times over the past few years. She’s a very good blues/rock guitarist, vocalist and an exciting live performer. On the sultry “Kill or be Kind” she gives her lover an ultimatum. Fun fact: One of my son’s best friends from high school (Kate Pearlman) wrote two tracks on the album!

Jade Jackson- Bottle It Up

Second album from this promising up and coming alt country artist. She’s on the super cool Anti label which providing immediate credibility and her albums are produced by Social D frontman Mike Ness. And when she’s not on the road she waitress’s at her parent’s restaurant in central California. I’m not sure you can get any more country than that.

The Highwomen- Redesigninig Women

Inspired by The Highwaymen of Willie, Waylon, Johnny and Kris, this all female country “supergroup” quartet is out to break the stereotypes in country music with some really fine songs. While the male Highwaymen banded together to rescue careers in decline, these women (Brandi Carlisle, Amanda Shires, Marren Morris, and Natalie Hemby), are all on the rise. This song is lot of fun.

John Prine- Unwed Fathers

John Prine is back with a remake of his heartbreaking tale of teenage pregnancy. He’s joined this time Margo Price. I got to see Prine live this fall at the beautiful Anson Ford Amphitheater here in LA. His simple, plain spoken lyrics and songs are timeless. I attended the show with my pal David Kissinger who observed that despite health issues, “Prine remains an national songwriting treasure and his performance was as life affirming as you’ll ever see.” Can’t say it any better than that.

Shovels And Rope- Mississippi “Nuthin

Ever wonder whatever happened to that perfect couple from high school? You know, the high school quarterback and the prom queen? This one ain’t “Glory Days”. Our QB peaked in high school and never makes it back to the end zone again, plus he's tortured by the success his old flame enjoys. His anguish and desperation are palpable in this barn burner of a song whose vocals draw inspiration from June & Johnny and John & Exene.

The Delines- Eddie and Polly

Eddie and Polly are young and in love, and doomed. Vocalist Amy Boone’s world weary vocals always sound like it’s 3AM. This one won’t do much for your holiday spirit, but it’s haunting melody might stay with you throughout it.

Yola - Love all Night (Work All Day)

Love the one your with is (at least after work) is the basic idea on this track from this UK performer’s debut long player. Produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, the collection is full of excellent retro soul-folk. There was a fair amount of buzz in front of the release and she more than lives up to it including a nomination for a Best New Artist Grammy.

Mavis Staples + Norah Jones- I’ll Be Gone

First recorded effort form this duo. A bittersweet ballad that softly and soulfully looks ahead to a final salvation. But Mavis ain’t done yet. She’s still going strong, recording and touring constantly. She knows she may be running out of time, but there’s still work to do. And whenever she’s finally ready, you can be sure she’ll take us there.

Hope you and yours are well. The Herzog’s wish you the best and look forward to seeing you in the new year. For those of you who made it this far, thank you. I’ve got a bonus playlist for you. Artists you like playing songs you love: covers/19 Enjoy.

peace,

Doug

Los Angeles, December 2019

2 notes · View notes

searchingwardrobes · 5 years

Text

Natural Opposite: 9/16

The dance I invented for this chapter is probably my favorite. One, because it’s to a Nirvana song, and as a nineties teen, I LOVE Nirvana. And second, my dance background is more in this style (contemporary) than in ballroom. I hope you enjoy reading it and the way it brings Emma and Killian closer together!

Thanks to my beta @distant-rose who loved this Nirvana dance almost as much as I did. Ro, our music chats were such a fun part of doing this with you! I’m glad we have similar tastes. And my artist, @optomisticgirl girl, is so talented and perfectly captured a dance that was only in my head beautifully for this chapter. Thank you, B! She also made that gorgeous banner you see every Monday!

Chapter art:

Ch 2

Ch 4

Ch 5

Ch 6

Ch 7

Summary: Dance is more than Emma Swan’s career; it’s practically saved her life on more than one occasion. But when it comes to reality TV shows, she’s always danced in the shadows of her twin brother David and her sister Elsa. Her first season as a pro on Dancing With the Stars was a disaster, and she enters her second season determined to prove herself. All she needs is a good partner. Hollywood bad boy and ladies’ man Killian Jones isn’t what she had in mind.

Rating: M for mature themes, steamy dance routines, and sexy times (But NOT smut)

Trigger warnings: discussions of online solicitation of a minor, bullying, statutory rape, and emotionally abusive/controlling relationships; stalking; anti-Rumbelle, anti-Neal

Can also be read on

Ao3

Tagging: @bethacaciakay @kmomof4 @teamhook @kmomof4 @snowbellewells @whimsicallyenchantedrose @kday426 @snidgetsafan @delirious-latenight-laughs @jennjenn615 @followbatb @onceuponaprincessworld @hollyethecurious @ohmakemeahercules

Chapter Nine: Heart Shaped Box

Killian grinned widely at Emma when he arrived for their rehearsal the next day. She returned it and gave him a small hug in greeting, and she couldn’t say it was just for the cameras. As much as she hated to admit it, she found herself looking forward to their rehearsals. They actually had fun together. Yeah, he still drove her crazy sometimes, but he also made her laugh. Last week, Killian had summed it up in a teasing remark.

“You know, Swan, I quite fancy you from time to time. When you’re not yelling at me.”

Henry’s observation about him “liking” her rose to mind, but she quickly pressed that down. Flirting, she had come to find out, was his autopilot. And like her sarcasm, it was largely a defense mechanism.

“Sorry we have to rehearse so early,” Killian told her, “but . . . I brought a peace offering.” He extended a styrofoam to-go cup.

“Coffee?” she asked, with a tilt of her head as she accepted the offering.

“Please, Swan, are you trying to test me? It’s hot chocolate,” he said, tapping the plastic lid teasingly, “with whipped cream and cinnamon.”

“I must say, I’m impressed,” she told him as she took a sip, “and I like the early rehearsal. It means I get to pick up Henry from school this afternoon.”

“I’m glad,” Killian replied, but then he blinked and rubbed his eyes, “although I hope the coffee I consumed on the way here kicks in soon. Filming went into the wee hours this morning.”

Emma frowned. “Be sure you’re taking care of yourself. I know this show is grueling, especially when you have other commitments.”

“I’ll try,” he promised with a weary smile, “though I go straight from six hours with you back to the studio for four more hours on green screen. I’ll be glad when the hiatus begins. If I haven’t gotten voted off by then.”

Emma waved her hand dismissively as she set her hot chocolate down beside her dance bag. “Please. We’re making it to the finale, Jones, I’m telling you.”

“Okay,” Killian said with a smile, “let’s get to work then. It’s decades week, so what decade did we get?”

“The 90s.”

Killian’s brow furrowed. “The 90s.”

“Why? You don’t like the nineties?”

Killian shrugged. “Well, that depends. Are we talking flannel, angst-ridden, grunge nineties? Or boy bands, bubblegum pop, dark lipstick nineties?”

Emma laughed. “Well, don’t you know the decade well! What if I said we were dancing to ‘Heart Shaped Box’ by Nirvana?”

Killian’s eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas. “Yes!” he enthused, pumping both fists.

“So Killian Jones likes angst,” she teased, “good to know.”

“Well, if you were going to make me dance to ‘MmBop,’ you may have had a mutiny on your hands.”

“Well, the cool thing about this dance is also that it’s contemporary. And believe me, angst works well with contemporary.”

Killian nodded, his face suddenly determined. “You can get really creative with this, Swan, that’s exciting.”

Emma put her hands on her hips and studied him silently for a few moments. The corner of her mouth quirked up when he almost started to squirm under her gaze.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he finally asked.

“How would you like to choreograph this dance with me?”

Killian’s eyes grew wide. “Are you serious?”

“Sure. You’re a performer and a musician.” She winked. “And you like angst.”

He gave her a smile she had yet to see on his face. It was genuine, as if he were truly touched by her offer. “I’d be honored, Swan.”

She cleared her throat, slightly unnerved at how much she liked this new smile on him. “Well, let’s figure out the story we’re trying to tell first.”

“Well, the lyrics are pretty dark.”

“Of course they are,” Emma said with a roll of her eyes, “it’s Nirvana.”

“Aye,” Killian chuckled, “and it’s also about a relationship. One that isn’t making either person happy, yet they stay together anyway.”

Emma swallowed hard. She knew the feeling.

“The man says he has complaints, yet then he turns around and says he’s in debt to her,” Killian continued.

Emma nodded. She had already listened to the song multiple times. “He talks about her having a cord around his neck, yet he climbs right back.”

“An umbilical noose, to be precise.”

Emma wrinkled her nose, “I know, but ew! Why did grunge bands use such sick and twisted images? He talks about eating her cancer, too.”

“They were pushing the envelope. It’s what every revolutionary period in music has done.”

Emma shook her head and smiled. “I better watch out. I’m treading into your area of expertise.”

Killian scratched the spot behind his ear. “Well, this is the genre of music I first learned to play on my guitar. I told you I was a bit morose.”

Her face softened at that. She remembered too well the lonely years before Ingrid. She could see why dark music would appeal to a lonely kid.

“So we’ve got a man who feels trapped in a relationship,” Emma replied, switching topics back to brainstorming for the routine.

“Hence the heart shaped box.”

“But I like what you said,” Emma continued, “about neither of them being happy. I think that should be our story. We’re a couple who aren’t good for each other, but we stay together anyway –“

“ – because we’re afraid of being alone,” Killian finished for her.

Emma smiled and then gave him a gentle slap on the shoulder. “You were right, Jones, we do make quite the team.”

“Or maybe,” he said softly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, “this topic strikes a little too close to home for both of us. Loneliness.”

Emma blinked and took a step back. Her heart pounded rapidly in her chest. Her hands clenched and unclenched as her mind tried to come up with a response.

Killian gave her his trademark crooked grin and quirked brow. “I mean, who wouldn’t crave loneliness when you’ve got cameras recording your every move?”

A slow smile spread across Emma’s face. “Right. Okay, Jones, let’s figure out the first eight counts.”

**********************************************************

It was the day of the show, and Emma and Killian sat on a dingy sofa set up on the dance floor hand in hand, waiting to be announced. Around them, the set department had created a living room in a rundown apartment circa 1995. Killian was dressed in faded jeans and a Nirvana t-shirt (of course). Emma wore black leggings and a plaid shirt, unbuttoned and tied at her waist. Underneath it she wore a black sequined bra top.

“You know,” Killian teased, fingering the tied ends of her shirt, “I don’t recall black sequined bras being a fashion statement in the nineties.”

“Well, not all of us are old enough to remember the nineties, old man,” Emma teased back.

“You wound me, Swan! I’m only thirty-five!”

Emma just laughed and rolled her eyes at his mock-offended expression. Behind them, the video package played of their rehearsal week. Just as she had expected, it opened with Killian finding her backstage last week after their Tangled routine. The expression on his face, which she hadn’t seen for herself at the time, was tender as he put his arms around her. It also showed their hug when he brought her coffee, and Killian tucking her hair behind her ear. They also played up the emotional portions of their choreography, showing embraces in super slow-motion. Emma rolled her eyes. It was ridiculous the way they were playing it all up like some sort of romantic comedy.

“Dancing a contemporary routine,” boomed the announcer, “Killian Jones and his partner Emma.”

She wished there were a commercial break so she would have a little more time to put the video package out of her mind. Killian gave her hand a squeeze, and she nodded, pressing her lips together. He relinquished her hand, and they both stared blankly forward as the lights came up and the music started.

The music producers were using a recording of the actual song performed by Nirvana. The live band just couldn’t capture the dissonance or the gravely sound of Kurt Cobain’s voice. She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak. Cobain’s broody voice filled the room as Emma and Killian slid off the couch and onto the floor. For the remainder of the dance, they pushed and pulled on one another, neither of them able to stray very far from the couch, which of course symbolized their toxic relationship. They used the couch often, beating it with their fists, jumping on and off it, falling and sliding from it. Then the dance ended as it had begun, both of them sitting, staring blankly forward. The overhead lights dimmed as other lights flickered in front of them, meant to look like a television playing.

When the music faded out and all the lights came up, Killian leapt up in excitement. Emma, however, felt herself suddenly drained of emotion. If Killian hadn’t pulled her to her feet and embraced her, she may have kept right on sitting there. She felt as if her heart had just been exposed. She blinked as Killian cupped her head, whispering in her ear how “brilliant, bloody amazing,” she was. Somehow, that snapped her out of her daze. She thought about the woman in the song and her heart shaped box. She took a deep breath, and stuffed her own heart back inside of hers.

As Killian led her over to Marco so they could face the judges, her limbs once again cooperated, and she plastered her “performance smile” on her face. She really was proud of Killian. Not only the way he just danced that, but his creativity in helping her with the choreography. She put her arm around him and squeezed him around the waist. They both struggled to breath; the routine had been intense and the movement had never really stopped.

So it took them a minute to register that all three judges were on their feet, clapping. Emma blinked; even Blue seemed moved almost to tears. They all sat and Emma gnawed nervously on her lower lip as Teach began.

“That was artistry, pure and simple. I’ll be straight with you Jones, I didn’t think you would cut it on this show. I wanted to hate you. But that? That was dancing. Amazing dancing. Well done!”

Emma gave Killian a happy little shove, and he beamed down at her with a huge smile on his sweaty face.

Tiana was literally crying and struggled to begin her critique. “That is what dance is supposed to be. I can’t believe you’re the same dancer you were three weeks ago. Remember when I said you weren’t opening up? Well, you took what I said to heart, and you have grown remarkably. And Emma? That choreography was genius. You deserve an Emmy for that.”

Emma was shocked when Killian pressed a kiss to her cheek, nodding vigorously in agreement. Emma grabbed Marco’s microphone.

“I do want to remind everyone that Killian helped me with the choreography, so thank you Tiana, but I have to give this guy credit too.”

Killian pulled her closer and pressed another kiss to the top of her head as the audience cheered. Once it died down a little, Blue gave her review.

“Look, I’m a traditionalist. I like to see ballroom and strictly ballroom. However, you danced that full out, and you were completely in sync with your partner throughout. Not my cup of tea, but I’m impressed.”

Since the decade week dances were performed in chronological order, and they had been assigned the nineties, their routine was the last one of the night. That meant no time for an interview with Ashley, and the judges gave them their scores right there on the dance floor.

“Tiana Sabine,” the announcer intoned dramatically.

Tiana seemed to pause an inordinately long amount of time before revealing her paddle. But when she did, she did so with flourish. “TEN!”

The studio audience went wild with excitement! The first ten of the season! Killian whooped and picked Emma up off her feet in a tight hug. Once everyone settled down, Blue gave her score of nine and Teach, amazingly, also gave them a perfect ten. It was the highest score of the season so far.

There was no time for an interview with either Marco or Ashley. Emma was relieved, worried she may have had to field questions about the very misleading implications of their video package. The couples all lined up, and for the first time, Emma was nervous about the double elimination. However, she didn’t have to worry. Gold and Ruby were voted off, to no one’s surprise, and then David and his Disney channel star Violet. The second one was a surprise, and the fifteen year old sobbed with disappointment. Emma was glad for the distraction as everyone surrounded the poor girl to console her. She still felt a little emotionally raw after that dance. And maybe it was the way the video package had been edited, but was Killian giving her an awful lot of casual affection recently?

According to social media, he was. By the next morning the two of them were the number one trending “couple” on both twitter and tumblr. Emma blushed as she read through the comments.

“Anyone else out there shipping Killian Jones with his dancing partner?” - @killianjonesandfairydust

“OMG! I ship it so hard!” - @neverland4evr

“Did you see the PDA last night? That was a lot of hugs and kisses!” - @hookNtink4life

They even had a shipping name: Captain Swan. And surprisingly, there were no longer any threats upon her life. She wasn’t sure where the Killer Rose shippers had gone, but there was only one remotely threatening theme among Killian’s “hookers.”

“She better not break his heart.” - @yeahiamahooker

But the only heart Emma was worried about was her own.

#2018 csbb #csbb #cs ff #modern au #dancing with the stars au #enemies to friends to lovers #natural opposite #searchingwardrobes

55 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

Psycho Goreman: Steve Kostanski on Building a Better Monster

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

It’s rare that a horror-comedy film gets the attention it deserves. At least, not around the time that it’s released. Even the great ones tend to be labeled a “cult classic” later on, but mastering the genre can regularly lead to bigger things. We see that happen as often as we do because horror and comedy are deceptively hard to balance, and it stands to reason that if you could pull off that balancing act once, you might be able do it again combining other genres.

Steve Kostanski has been in the movie business for the better part of two decades, mostly working behind the scenes in creature and makeup effects, but this very much feels like Kostanski’s “time” thanks to his latest movie, Psycho Goreman.

The director, who already had an established fanbase thanks to other low budget movies like Manborg and The Void, released his latest flick in the time of COVID, so it was denied what would have no doubt been a very long stretch in smaller theatres with sticky floors and worn seats – the kind that would embrace a film so “out there” that audiences might have left wondering what exactly they just witnessed.

But all was not lost, because Psycho Goreman found a home on streaming and immediately started generating a buzz anyway.

The urge to conceal some of the joys of Psycho Goreman from other people is pretty strong. It’s definitely a movie that you’ll get more out of if you don’t know what to expect, so we’ll just sum up the plot a little for those who are uninitiated: a brother and sister accidentally dig up an alien overlord who the sister discovers she can control using a magical amulet.

We talked to Kostanski about how the movie got made, how working on The Void and Manborg taught him the lessons he needed to learn to get Psycho Goreman right, and whether there might be a sequel on the way…

Den of Geek: Last month I got a text from a friend I hadn’t spoken to for ages. It just said, “You need to watch Psycho Goreman.” Nothing else, but I could tell it was a pretty serious situation, so I checked the film out and immediately recommended it to somebody else who I knew would love it. Have you found there’s been a lot of this kind of word of mouth support?

Steve Kostanski: Yeah, I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me like, “My friend recommended this randomly and it was totally crazy. So thank you for making this movie”, which is a reaction I don’t usually get.

I mean, I was expecting my usual fanbase to be into it. I thought I was making a pretty decent movie, but it seems to have spread a lot further into public consciousness than I was expecting it to, which is great. I guess that just means I made a really bonkers film that people like to talk about, so I’m pretty grateful for that.

We’ve been talking about the film quite a lot here; it comes up all the time. The attention to detail is incredible. How early on in life did the makeup and effects bug bite?

I’ve always loved movies. I was a video store kid. I was constantly renting VHS movies in the ‘90s and obsessing over them. My dad loaned me his Super 8 camera when I was 12 and I used that to do stop-motion animation because I was into special effects. I was a big fan of stuff like Star Wars, and I really wanted to emulate all my favorite movies.

Eventually, I started shooting live-action movies and did the effects and animation for those, too. It’s been a constant through my whole life of wanting to make movies and monsters and effects and just tell crazy sci-fi fantasy adventure stories. It’s always been there.

When I got out of high school, I decided I wanted to try pursuing creature effects and prosthetic effects for a living, and luckily, I was able to mentor under a prosthetic artist name Doug Morrow in my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, who showed me the ropes and taught me about the actual job of doing makeup effects. That’s how I was able to pursue it as a career, while also making movies on the side. I’ve kind of been jumping back and forth between the two ever since.

One of the benefits of growing up in the ‘80s was that there were these wild sci-fi and fantasy concept movies basically on tap. They made it to completion so regularly. The shelves would be stacked with intoxicating covers and unique monster designs. You’d see an image from something like Xtro in a magazine and think “I need to see this at all costs.” It’s fair to say you’ve made a “see it at all costs” movie here. I know you name-checked Prince of Darkness as being a big influence for The Void, but what were the influences for Psycho Goreman?

It was really just a combination of my experiences growing up watching R-rated movies when I was way too young to be watching them – movies like Terminator 2. One of my earliest memories as a kid was watching that movie and being enthralled by the sci-fi action component to it.

As a kid, you’re into video games and comics and cartoons, so seeing these cool chrome robots shooting lasers is really thrilling, but then you’re also seeing people get their kneecaps shot out and get impaled through the eye. It’s that kind of unexpectedly violent and brutal realism that maybe a little kid isn’t prepared for. Psycho Goreman is me working through a bit of that trauma!

Did you learn any valuable lessons from making Manborg and The Void that ended up paying off during Psycho Goreman?

I think Manborg taught me that I have to be realistic with my ambitions on making a movie. I went into that project thinking I could feasibly make a sci-fi action epic with no money, and it ended up consuming three years of my life. So going into PG, I tried to be a little more realistic about what I could accomplish on a low budget.

The Void was a punishing experience. It hardened me a little bit and gave me more experience in working within the system, in the traditional sense of working with a crew and producers. It gave me a “worst case scenario” in every possible filmmaking situation to then carry over.

I’m a very introverted person, so The Void was a real “trial by fire” for me and forced me out of my shell. It helped me as a director – keeping everyone motivated, answering questions and just being involved and present. Not thinking like an effects artist sitting in the corner sculpting monsters all day.

Watching Psycho Goreman has become a kind of moral imperative for genre fans. Honestly, it looked like so much work went into it. How did it go from concept to final cut, and did you hit any roadblocks along the way from people who just didn’t get it?

This film was a once in a lifetime opportunity where a friend of a friend was looking to finance a feature film, and he really just bought into the “Steve Kostanski brand,” and loved my previous work and wanted me to have free reign to make the thing I wanted to make. That’s not to say that the producers didn’t chime in and have opinions on things, but they very much put their trust in me to make a movie that would be entertaining and that audiences would like.

I think I’ve always been a pop filmmaker. I love cliches and conventions and I like making things that are crowd-pleasing. I think the producers knew that. They knew that if the movie didn’t hit the mark in some way, that it would at least deliver on effects and spectacle and be crowd-pleasing. So I was very lucky to have their confidence.

It is crowd-pleasing, but still subverts your expectations. Did that happen organically while you were making it or was it always planned that way?

I always want to make a movie that would have sat on the video store shelf amongst the other movies that I loved as a kid. I wanted to make a thing that was satisfying, that delivered on its promises in a way that I felt like a lot of low-budget genre films of the past didn’t.

I wanted to make something that delivered on the epic poster art, but at the same time make something that had a familiar emotional arc, subverting it as much as possible without taking away from the satisfying kind of build up and climaxes that those types of stories have.

I feel like in this day and age, telling a conventional story is almost taboo. The idea of having a traditional story arc is frowned upon. So I liked the idea of committing to that, but then also just using it as a through-line to hang all kinds of weirdness, and go on all sorts of bizarre digressions. I also liked the idea of shocking people a little bit and lulling them into a sense of familiarity, but then doing something totally off the wall just to throw them off.

Mimi is such an interesting twist on the wholesome little girl in the creature feature. Was casting the role hard? Did you audition a lot of actors for that part?

We did a lot of auditions. It was definitely a big concern going into the movie. On the page it all read great and everybody was excited about the idea of this crazy little girl being our protagonist, but finding somebody that could pull that off definitely had the producers nervous.

Nita [Hanna] was one of our first auditions. Even though her audition performance wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, I could tell that there was a level of professionalism there that I wasn’t getting from the other auditions. So, we had her come back for subsequent auditions, and every time I talked through the role, she just got better and better.

Big question now, brace yourself: what was it like working with Rich Evans?

[Laughs] It’s such a small cameo from him! I reached out and asked if he’d be interested, and he agreed. I sent him a rough version of the scene that he’s in, and he recorded me a good like 15, 20 minutes of audio that I could just pull from. It was great. It was basically the barest minimum of interaction, but what he gave me was fantastic and I’m very thankful that he agreed to be a part of the movie because it’s a very weird choice of cameo.

You were into RedLetterMedia before you contacted him, I assume.

I’m a big RedLetterMedia fan. I watch all of their stuff and love their reviews. I’m a fan of anything that brings me back to the days of watching movies with my friends, because I feel like that’s informed who I am as a filmmaker. Watching other people shoot the shit about films and have that kind of casual discourse is very comforting and entertaining to me.

I’ve heard you’d be up for doing a Psycho Goreman sequel or a spinoff. Have there been any recent developments on that?

Nothing concrete, but there is definitely interest and people are asking about it. I think there will be more PG adventures in the future. I’d love to do more of it, I just want to figure out the smartest way forward is before actually diving into another project.

Thank you, Steve.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Psycho Goreman is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post Psycho Goreman: Steve Kostanski on Building a Better Monster appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3qPIejp

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes

words-writ-in-starlight · 7 years

Note

I'd love to hear your thoughts about adhd Rachel.

So, for context, when I was a small baby human reading these for the first time, I saw Rachel and I was like “!!!!!!”, you know, as you do when you see a character who kind of Speaks to whatever undetermined weirdness you have going on at the time. And then I was a slightly older baby human whose school reputation was Somewhere Between Charming Young Genius And Possible Future Gangster--by which I mean that I have punched many a person in my public school career and consequently had a lot of people who were afraid of me and not many close friends. And I connected even more to Rachel then, because listen: it’s so easy to just fight, and fight, and fight, when you’re too depressed and angry to control overwhelmingly impulsive thoughts. Now I’m an adult and I know that a huge part of my problem was undiagnosed ADHD (in addition to just being...I’m a real angry person you guys, it’s just...how it is), and I went back to reread the Animorphs and I was like “You know who the fuck else has ADHD.”

I connected to that in Rachel, and I have Evidence.

First things first, you know that...thing in Rachel books where she’ll actually verbally go “this may not be a good idea” once she’s already doing it? Constantly? That’s the impulsivity thing in ADHD that you hear about. It’s not dunking your hand into 160 degree water without realizing that you’re going to burn yourself and being surprised when it hurts, it’s dunking your hand into 160 degree water and your brain going “hey, that’s going to hurt, you’re going to get burned” once you’re already whipping your hand back and yelling and being resigned that it hurts. That little voice in your head telling you not to do dangerous stuff is still there, it’s just super late to the party. And Rachel is a fucking thesis on that whole concept. The first time she morphs grizzly, she picks the morph on impulse because she wants to be big and strong and able to fight back, and once she’s finished the change she goes hmm, this might be a bad idea, I don’t know if I can control this morph under pressure but she’s already done it and they’re in battle and she’s committed. When Cassie tells her “I’m going to go get help, don’t do anything dumb” in Book 12, Rachel isn’t unaware that jumping down into the croc pit is something dumb, it’s just that the connection between the action and the fact that it’s a bad idea is made once she’s already up on the railing and jumping in. She knows that morphing into a starfish on a beach full of people in order to retrieve an earring is both stupid and dangerous, but by the time she notices, she’s already committed. So: uncontrolled impulses, check.

Incidentally, I always take it kind of personally when people in the fandom read it as...I don’t know, as either Rachel willfully ignoring good sense or Rachel genuinely not knowing a good plan from a bad one. Rachel knows common sense when she hears it, that’s obvious even if she sometimes prioritizes some other thing. And more to the point, Rachel is pretty good at combat tactics in the heat of the moment. Take 22, where she assembles a plan to take down David in the mall--the fact that he had time to prepare the ground doesn’t change the fact that her plan is reasonably tight. This is something I will bitch about at length when I write up a recap for Book 37, AKA my most hated Animorphs book because it does BOTH of those things to Rachel’s character. She’s reckless and impulsive, not stupid, and honestly I kind of resent the part of the fandom that confuses the two.

Second of all, Rachel’s emotional responses tend to either be ‘highly controlled and masked with sarcasm’ or ‘wildly out of hand’, which is really typical of girls with ADHD--society tells us to be utterly in control, which means that the emotional lability (...being mercurial, basically) typical of ADHD bursts out in sudden violence or crying or whatever your particular person is prone to. So, like, take that one time very early in the series where Rachel goes from being totally checked out to slamming another girl face-first into a table. ...I’m not saying I’ve done that. But I am saying that one time when I was twelve a guy came up and hugged me from behind and started complaining when I told him to leave me alone and I put him on the floor and dared a teacher to suspend me. And Marco says, when they’ve all been dragged up to Chapman’s office, that he’s afraid Rachel’s just going to out them to Chapman right then and there because she’s so furious and out of control. I told a teacher to go to hell, and called another one a moron to his face, and told yet a third one that he couldn’t find his way around a literary analysis with both hands an a torch. That’s super standard undiagnosed ADHD shit right there, especially since Rachel’s under a lot of pressure.

Third of all, Rachel’s got some focus problems like whoa: she does struggle to focus on the right thing from time to time, but I’m more interested in the wat she exhibits some real hyperfocus. The main example that springs to mind is the way Cassie describes Rachel shopping in MM4--there’s no war, there’s no outside stressors of life or death issues, and Cassie still talks about how Rachel is absolutely laser focused, to the point of scheming out which stores they’ll hit in what order like a battle plan. We hear a lot about Rachel with this kind of obsessive focus, to exclusion of all else, often about shopping but also about other things. Hyperfocus is a little-discussed but extremely common symptom of ADHD, and it really is exactly what it says on the tin. And Rachel, oh boy, does Rachel ever have it.

Related to the focus thing, there’s this one bit that I read and every time I’m like SAME DUDE, and it’s from that same scene in the mall at the beginning of 22, when Rachel and Ax are forming up to attack. She believes Tobias is dead, Jake is actively bleeding to death on the floor, the situation could not be more dire--and her brain still goes “hey, that store’s having a sale.” And Rachel is furious with herself for it, she hates that her brain kicks that bit of information out while everything is so awful, but she just can’t seem to stop it. That’s the life, man. #ADHDAesthetic right there.

Fourthly--I’m realizing that I have more points here than I thought--Rachel’s a fidgeter. This isn’t really explicitly stated because the books have such a strict length limit that they’re usually really cut down to the bare bones, but there’s one place where body language is pretty reliably described: barn meetings. Marco is usually sacked out on a convenient chair, Tobias in the rafters, Cassie doing work, Jake either standing or sitting. But Rachel’s a pacer. She’s repeatedly described as pacing, and if she’s not, if she’s sitting with someone, it’s for narrative reasons. She’s sitting near Marco? She’s going to smack him, or challenge him to an arm wrestling contest for the dangerous mission, whatever. She’s sitting near Cassie? That’s supposed to say something about her emotional state.

Fifth, Rachel bores easily. And I mean real easily. In the Oatmeal Book, she talks about claustrophobia, but one of the things she complains about the most often is being alone in the dark with her thoughts. For me, that’s the worst thing about insomnia--the inside of my head is only enough to keep my attention for so long, and then I start to lose it, and yeah, it feels like a panic attack, it would be easy to lump in with external claustrophobia. When she’s taking a day off from school, she only lasts a few hours watching trash TV before she bails out to go flying--this is also related to the fidgeting thing above (7). When she has nightmares, she gets up and leaves the house. When Rachel morphs prey animals or motion-attracted predators like cats, it’s easy for her to get lost in the rapid-change thought patterns. I can’t think of a single time where Rachel gets put on surveillance alone--not because she’s not good at surveillance, but because she can’t be relied on not to get distracted.

I could come up with some other things, but these five plus the idle descriptions she throws around about ‘racing thoughts’ and ‘I lost my temper and I just couldn’t think anymore’ would get her an ADHD screen from any respectably competent therapist. Throw in “incredibly high performing academically but with some disciplinary issues” (13 and 5 respectively) and “exhibits suicidally reckless impulses even in non-battle life” (literally every other book), and she’s a shoo-in.

The short version here is that my headcanon that Rachel has severe ADHD is summed up by two books: 12 and 32.

In 32, the two Rachels are both poster children for ADHD--Mean Rachel is impulsive, loud, temperamental, unfocused, and generally uncooperative (you and I all know the stereotypes come from somewhere, a lot of people who manifest ADHD like that are pretty uncooperative, and I say that as one of them), and Wimp Rachel is just as temperamental on the other side of the spectrum, forgetful, easily distracted, genuinely scared of her own impulses and intrusive thoughts, and, you guessed it, kind of uncooperative (again, the stereotypes come from somewhere). You don’t put those two people together and get one non-ADHD person, you put them together and get a person whose symptoms have settled out to a degree of homeostasis.

And in 12, beyond all the really impulsive shit Rachel does and the way she approaches everything from the angle of “this is my fault because I’m not in control of myself,” which, oh my god, honey, same, but no it’s not, Cassie morphs Rachel. And what does Cassie say about being in Rachel’s head?

“I’m having the worst time trying to control this morph!”

“You’re having trouble being me? What could be hard about that?”

“It’s this brain of yours. It keeps trying to make me do really dumb things.”

#animorphs #rachel berenson #adventures in adhd #rachel my bold beloved bloodied sister #i'm RIDE OR FUCKING DIE GUYS #this is way longer than i meant it to be #but my point fucking STANDS #QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRATUM MOTHERFUCKERS #RACHEL HAS ADHD #IT IS F A C T #honestly i relate to rachel so much #but i'm pretty sure this is not just rampant projection on my part #this is canonically supported #anyway yeah that's what i've got #idiot teenagers with a queue #miraculoussparrow #asked and answered

115 notes · View notes

troutfishinginmusic · 5 years

Text

Essay: The difficult humanity of Iggy Pop’s solo discography

Most interviewers will talk about The Stooges, maybe touch on the Bowie years and leap to whatever album Iggy Pop is currently promoting. There’s a lot of history missing in between all that.

Iggy’s solo discography, from New Values to Après, is a lot to take in. It truly runs the gamut, from radio pleas to experimental fuck-offs. I’ll try to provide nuance and context wherever possible as I go through each kind of Iggy record from this period. That said, it isn’t an easy body of work to assess.

Here comes success: Pop albums

Iggy’s attempts to fit into the mainstream are fascinating. New Values (1979) possibly had the the greatest chance to become a hit. It’s an album that does a fine job threading the needle of Iggy’s punk, avant-garde and pop sides. You don’t have to imagine too hard to see a song like “Tell Me a Story” getting radio play.

New Values also may be one of Iggy’s strongest solo albums. Songs like “New Values,” “I’m Bored” and “Five Foot One” are undeniable classics. There are few flaws to be found (I’ll get to that later).

There’s a genuine commitment to the material on Party (1981), but crossover mega-stardom proved to be elusive. It may have been hard for audiences to forget this guy making radio moves was someone who, only a few years prior, was known for rolling on broken glass.

It’s a bummer because there’s more to Party than the cover would lead you to believe. It’s a solid 80s album with more lyrical depth than what you’d find on the radio in that era. No one could argue it’s his best, but you can definitely put it on and not skip a track.

I met you out at the Mardi Gras On a French Quarter sidewalk When you kissed me, it was strong I wonder if you'll hear this song

- “Pumpin’ for Jill” from Party

Iggy lets his crooning take center stage for the first time as well. It’s more fully developed on later albums like Preliminers or Avenue B, but it didn’t have far to go. His version of “Sea of Love” on Party is one of the best, falling just short of Cat Power’s cover.

Blah-Blah-Blah (1986) is just a well-executed 80s pop record, but you do get the nagging feeling it doesn’t feel as natural as other Iggy albums. The best songs are one’s like “Cry for Love” where he brings out his incredible goth-y croon to great affect. And it’s hard to hate a song like “Real Wild Child (Wild Child)” even if it is desperately clawing at the pop charts.

Solider is solid but doesn’t quite reach the heights of the focused, but flawed, New Values. “Take Care of Me” and “I Need More” are great, straight forward punk songs. “Mr. Dynamite” is one of his better stabs at incorporating pop and avant-garde. “Loco Mosquito” is a solid pop song that slips in punk lyrics. “Get Up and Get Out” is a rare feminist song that works perfectly in its simplicity.

I'm wondering fellas if you've heard the news The chicks are sick and tired of being abused Now I saw all this on the wide screen You know that chick Bette Davis split right out of the scene

- “Get Up and Get Out” from Soldier

“I’m a Conservative” is Iggy’s tongue-in-cheek lyricism firing on all cylinders. It’s placed next to “Dog Food” where Iggy thumbs his nose up at all the stereotypes people had hung on his shoulders up to that point, for better or worse.

Cold Metal: LOUD rock albums

Iggy has consistently said how boring big dumb rock albums are in interviews, especially Nu Metal. Yet at different points he still feels a need to put up a big ugly noise, while slipping in interesting lyrics, just to prove he can. This has meant different things at different points.

If you can get past the terrible hair metal-esque cover art and seriously flawed production, Instinct (1988) is actually kind of interesting. It pales next to the Stooges albums, but if you’re more partial to the rocking side of Iggy’s career you could do worse. Some highlights include “Easy Rider,” “Cold Metal,” “Strong Girl” and “High on You.”

The worst of these “rocking” albums, and possibly his worst album overall, might be Naughty Little Doggie (1996). It’s just sort of an embarrassing slog. The best songs (like “Knucklehead”) are passable and have a nice grinding blues-y thing going on. It sounds like the album a rocker would make to stay up to date with punks in the 90s.

Naughty Little Doggie also contains some repulsive and confessional lyrics, which I’ll get to later. It’s an understatement to say this thing is probably questionable to a lot of ears, but it is important.

American Caesar (1993) is interesting. It sounds like Iggy striking a good balance between rocking out and introspection. It’s also sort of a concept record.

“Jealousy” is a great acoustic song with simmering hatred just barely contained. There’s a great “Louie, Louie” cover that adds some political commentary. “Boogie Boy” is probably his best song making fun of big dumb rock music. There are standout songs, but the thing works best when you listen to the whole thing.

Now every mornin’ I wake up at nine I'm eating cheerios with red wine I'm reading that book but it's not too good Cuz my boogie head is made outta wood It's a fact i get so much joy When i can go out and be a boggie boy

- “Boogie Boy” from American Caesar

American Caesar is very long, with a runtime of over 70 minutes. You have to be in the mood for it and ready to hang in there for the whole thing.

As I revisited all of these albums I was shocked by how much I liked Beat ‘Em Up (2001). It’s extremely heavy and extremely funny. I made the mistake of reading reviews about it before I actually listened to it. It’s much more than a big dumb rock album.

A song like “Football” does a lot of things at once and somehow succeeds. Iggy is able to make a song where he imagines himself as a football being thrown around sound oddly touching. “Mask” and “V.I.P.” are are some of his best rant-y songs in a long career of them.

Complicated crushed up disappointed squirming angry thrusting stabbing regretting starving greedy human alien being, struggling down the street, up the alley, in the elevator, through the party, to the office, in the bedroom, on your way to the morgue.

- “Mask” from Beat ‘Em Up

It’s also HEAVY. It may even be heavier than the Stooges records in some ways. Mooseman from Body Count joins his band, The Trolls, on the album to provide some great lowend (sadly it was his last album). I never thought I’d find myself getting into this album but it’s actually pretty fantastic, although a bit long.

It’s totally what The Weirdness should’ve been. With a bit of time I could see this being a bit of a cult classic. Plus it gave birth to this great performance.

Till wrong feels right: Famous collaborator albums

Brick by Brick (1990) is a well-constructed early 90s rock record and it sounds like it. It’s damn catchy, especially “Candy.” It features session pros and rock royalty from the time like Slash. It’s all executed well, but it’s not really something you’ll return to often.

One interesting song on Brick by Brick is “Butt City,” which is as goofy the title suggests but does slip in a some pretty good social commentary about racial profiling by police. This and “Mixing the Colors” from American Caesar explain Iggy’s views on race in a plain way, which was overdue.

The cops are well-groomed, with Muscled physiques in Butt Town Their tan uniforms are tailored in chic In Butt Town Any young black male who walks down the street Is going to get stopped by a car full of meat But the girl with the hair Flies by in her underwear

- “Butt Town” from Brick by Brick

Skull Ring (2003) is an album that is the epitome of hit or miss. Iggy brought in marquee punks like Green Day and Sum 41 and it actually kind of works. His Peaches collaborations on the album are fascinating but aren’t songs you’ll come back to often. Their best collaboration is a song called “Kick It” on the Peaches’ album Fatherfucker.

The bad songs with new collaborators are at least interesting. Strangely, songs with the newly reformed Stooges and previous backing band The Trolls are the ones that don’t jump out. There are a few gems like “Superbabe,” “Whatever” and “Dead Rockstar,” though.

King of the dogs: French albums

The French albums Iggy made are both stunners. They seem ridiculous on first blush but, once you get over your own preconceptions, they’re great.

Préliminaires (2009) has it’s roots in a Michel Houellebecq’s novel, New Orleans Jazz and bleak existentialism. “King of the Dogs” is such a perfectly suited cover for Iggy. “I Want to Go to the Beach” is a devastatingly minimal plea. “Party Time” is a goofy song with a very 80s propulsive bassline. I can’t say enough good things about this album.

Après (2012) is great in a lot of the same ways but is a more straight forward covers album. The selection is great. His version of Yoko Ono’s “Going Away Smiling” is perfect, though it’s hard to beat the original. There are also some great Serge Gainsbourg, Beatles and Cole Porter covers. This is definitely worth seeking out.

Buried in a melting coffin: Experimental albums

It’s been resurrected with the documentary Gimme Danger, but most don’t think about the Stooges being one of the first noise rock bands. This is apparent in some of their discography, but the very early version of the band (when they were called the Psychedelic Stooges) supposedly sounded like The Melvins. Iggy even played the vacuum during shows. There are no recordings from this period. This is all relayed by Iggy in many different interviews. He was also very closely associated with the Andy Warhol crew and drew from a variety of boundary pushing influences as a record store clerk in Ann Arbor. In his solo discography, this willingness to push boundaries comes out on occasion.

Zombie Birdhouse (1982) was recorded in Haiti, following Party. It’s a very difficult album to unpack, so I’ll do so carefully. Imagine Iggy made his version of David Bowie’s Lodger album, at least in terms of lyrical content. Most of the album revolves around the idea of an American in a place he doesn’t understand. It’s the most political thing he ever recorded.

The opener “Run Like a Villain” depicts America bombing its poorer adversaries. It’s a wonder that he rarely ever made songs like this since it’s so effective. For example:

Big Dick is a thumbs-up guy He shot a missile in the sky It functioned just as advertised Until the fire made him cry

“Run Like a Villain Zombie Birdhouse

“The Villagers” is a bit hard to take but it fits the tourist theme of the album. “Watching the News” is a super experimental song about Iggy doing just that in a very uncomfortable, but effective way. “Ordinary Bummer” and “Platonic” are solid ballads. The best songs are the uptempo “Eat or Be Eaten” and “The Horse Song.” The ladder has these crazy drone-y parts that are molded into something insanely catchy. I’d submit it as one of the best songs he’s ever done.

This is such a vastly underrated album that was sadly undercut a bit by the production at the time. That’s since been improved on the remastered version, which I can’t recommend enough.

Avenue B (1999) is very reflective. It’s jazzy and slower moving than most of his discography. My guess is that his new album, Free, is going to be very similar to this based on the songs that have been released so far. That’s a good thing.

Collaborators like John Medeski provide a great foundation for Iggy’s lyrics to be on full display. Everything from acoustic guitars to bongos crop up, creating a subdued and gentle springboard to dive off.

You can tell Avenue B was an album he wanted to make for a long time. It explores a lot of difficult things. From being in love with fascist to the problems of a relationship with a much younger woman.

This is a course corrective from Naughty Little Doggie, picking up where “Look Away” left off. It’s the beginning of Iggy becoming a bit more accountable for his past. There are still some cringe-y moments, especially on the otherwise great “I Felt the Luxury,” that don’t age well. But, on the whole, it’s honest and the start of a new chapter.

(Don’t) look away: Contradictions and skeletons

You don’t have to look hard through Iggy’s solo discography to find "problematic” lyrics. The messages aren’t always handled well but they’re more honest than anything you’ll find on a typical rock record. That’s an important distinction.

Confessions

There’s a sense of willful forgetfulness rock fans have about teenage groupies. Every now and again I’ll hear a movie like Almost Famous called “dated,” even though that’s totally what happened at the time. While many thinkpieces point to the fact that there were laws in place that made this illegal at the time, they totally miss the point about public perception on this issue. Just because there is a law on the books doesn’t mean people will care or follow it. This wasn’t just a rock star problem, even if it’s easier to tell ourselves that.

Pretty much every rock icon you can name from the 80s and earlier has this skeleton in their closet. Iggy is no different in this regard.

The difference maybe is honesty. “Look Away,” from the album Naughty Little Doggie, is a very unpleasant but real song. It doesn’t romanticize the power imbalance and lays it out simply in the first line.

The song discusses Iggy’s relationship with Sable Starr and her subsequent doomed relationship with Johnny Thunders. You’re not going to hear a confession like that on an album by Jimmy Page or the Eagles, even though they have more reason to clench up about the topic. Honesty doesn’t make it easy, though. In Iggy’s own words in the song “What we did once, I wouldn't do again.” Hopefully that’s true.

I don’t excuse any of this, it’s terrible. Especially on an album with a creepy, leering song like “Pussy Walk.” Naughty Little Doggie is a difficult album to sort out. Yet it does lay bare all the downsides of the glam lifestyle (which in many ways he was a part of) and abandons any mythologizing about it. I do think we can discuss these things and learn from them, but I would never recommend anyone buy this record. If you want a reason to not listen further, this is it.

The flip side is that Iggy has been an ardent supporter of feminist art throughout his career and obviously didn’t see creeping on teen girls as a contradiction. He should’ve known better and been held accountable, along with scores of other artists from his era. We know better now.

It seems he does too and has been working to change this prior to the metoo era and has never tried to act like something he’s not. In recent years he has made a tangible efforts to correct these past mistakes, which I don’t see other artists from his era doing. He has recently raised money for the Girls Rock Camp Alliance charity. He’s championed independent female artists like U.S. Girls, Pins, Le Butcherttes, Noveller and countless others. Small steps, but steps nonetheless.

Race

On the whole Iggy been way ahead of the curve on race politics, but has one awfully ignorant song on his album New Values. His views are made a bit clearer on American Caesar and Brick by Brick, but this is still something worth discussing.

In pretty much every interview he’s given he’s made sure to promote the black music that gave birth to rock and roll. Early in his career he backed black musicians as a drummer and has collaborated with them throughout his career. He drew influence from traditions that weren’t his own and made something totally unique. He didn’t steal from other cultures. That’s far ahead of the time.

What isn’t is a song like “African Man” which was either intended to be edgy or goofy, but just ends up being kind of racist. There’s no way around that. It’s just a terrible song that ruins the near perfect New Values. It’s a fucking bummer it was ever recorded and I sincerely hope it doesn’t give someone the idea that it’s funny to say something like that.

I would chalk this up to ignorance that a good deal of white people had at the time. Movies and cartoons depicted Africans as savages and cannibals. I think this is what he was trying to replicate and possibly parody. For someone who supposedly had an interest in social anthropology early in life, I’m surprised he would utilize a stereotype that blatant. This makes me personally think it was supposed to be a parody. There comes a point where none of that matters, though. It sadly ends up giving comfort to those who hold backwards views on race.

I’d love to actually know his thoughts on this stuff, but no one actually asks about it in interviews. It’s frustrating because it’s an issue he gets right more often than not. It’s better to confront these things than to pretend they don’t exist. I think that’s the only way forward.

There is one moment where he does apologize for accidentally using a dated term in a past interview. Maybe that’s a good indication of how he feels today.

Break into your heart: Conclusions

It’s hard to write objectively about an artist who means a lot to you. I tried for years to figure out a way to do this coherently (it probably didn’t end up working). I saw a few OK lists spring up dissecting some of these albums, but they always seemed to just graze the surface. There was always something lacking.

They missed the honesty and humanity on display through a long and complicated career. They would mythologize the usual parts. They would gloss over the difficult parts. They would diminish the efforts for something better.

To me Iggy was a catalyst that didn’t just birth a movement for disengaged youths to stick safety pins through their noses. It was much more than that. He opened a door for marginalized people to scream about the oppression they face daily. He promoted difficult and confrontational art. He is a mirror for America’s best and worst impulses.

For me, and many others, his life represents a struggle to survive and keep getting better. He’s survived bad reviews, severe drug addiction, divorces and a host of other things. There’s something so powerful to that simple notion of getting back up after falling hard that many times. I think that’s why, despite his flaws, people still care.

It’s been difficult to grapple with some of the regrettable parts of his discography. I think everyone is doing that now with their record collections in some way. There are no easy answers. It really comes down to how you want to engage with art and commerce. I’m not going to preach to you or tell you how you should interact with art. Iggy Pop is a lot of things, but above all else he is transparent. I can live with that.

After some deserved success and recognition with Post Pop Depression, he’s ready to step out on a limb with his new album Free. I can’t wait to hear it.

#Iggy pop

0 notes

omegatheunknown · 7 years

Text

I did get my ballot in the mail and I’m not at all sure how to rank these guys. Well, I’ve got a guess: 1) NIki Ashton Niki’s been pretty heavy on rhetoric (When they privatize, we nationalize -- which sounds nice, but she hasn’t suggested any large targets for nationalization,) and somewhat tempered on the concrete or big ideas, but she’s made enough noise to stay at the top of my ballot. That she flatly doesn’t have the support of the party and has taken aim at de-cronyising the nomination process is quietly huge. Niki may or may not be the only candidate for fundamental change -- The NDPSC rightly points out that she doesn’t (yet) have many socialists, social justice activists or radicals actually in place to work with. She does have a comprehensive (but not terribly detailed) platform that hits hard on progressive social issues, with a particularly good eye for Indigenous justice, and her climate plank contains the key phrase ‘corporations and the neoliberal agenda are primary causes of climate change,’ and her commitment to ending student debt and expanding medicare is all the good stuff. Paying lip service to the destructiveness of neoliberalism isn’t quite advocating for economic revolution, but it’s the closest thing to it in the race, that’s her advantage. Niki has the endorsement of Romeo Saganash and Cheri DiNovo, both of whom are... so good. If Niki becomes the leader of the NDP, the party pushes left in its policies and nominations.

2) Guy Caron Caron’s platform includes a section on transforming Canada to a ‘green and automated economy,’ promising large sums for renewable energy production and techonologies, retrofitting buildings, increasing public transit’s profile, flirting with high speed rail. He suggests reducing the workday without wage loss. My own UBI skepticism nonwithstanding, Caron’s got some transformational policy. His taxation reforms, while not poppin’, are targeted squarely at those who’ve abused the system without saying ‘breaks for middle class families’ ad infinitum. Guy lacks a bit for personal charm, tbh, but I think his platform warrants kinder consideration than it received from the Socialist Caucus, for example. Guy has the endorsement of Brian Topp (ehhh) and Alexa McDonough.

3) Charlie Angus Charlie’s big selling feature is his housing plank -- affordable housing, community ownership, co-ops, low-income housing, community land trusts -- action is needed and he has the most to say on this subject. Chuck’s platform has a lot in common with Caron’s, he also has some mention of a crown initiative to transform the economy to a sustainable development model. He’s also the most traditional ‘labour’ candidate in the race, for better or worse. His science plank contained the following tantalyzing morsel “ Conservative and Liberal governments have focused too much on reaping commercial benefits from their work. An NDP government led by Charlie Angus would implement the recommendations of the Naylor Report on Fundamental Science, shifting to stable, predictable funding for basic research, improving the diversity of scientific and other academic fields of research, and emphasizing early career researchers in allocating new research money.” Angus has an endorsement from his BFF Andrew Cash, David Suzuki and quite a bit of the party, actually. He’s mainstream, but he’s not a disaster.

4) Jagmeet Singh Is a very dapper man whose political acumen and appeal can not be denied. Apparently signed up many, many new members and has raised a tonne of money. Correctly identifies the intentional effort to simplify green economy action as somehow a fight between labour and environmentalists. Doesn’t support UBI but some kind of monthly tax credit/wage subsidy (?) he calls the Working Canadian Guarantee. Supports a ban on unpaid work, which... yeah, good call. Similar to Caron and Angus, would replace the Federal Infrastructure Bank with a Community Benefits Arrangement, which sounds like some of what Van City and other credit unions are currently beefing up. Singh’s a good candidate, actually, and I wouldn’t even say he’s more style than substance any more than Niki is -- she’s just pushing harder at the line I want the NDP to tow. Singh has the all-important endorsement of my enduring MP-Crush Mylène Freeman support of more MPs than anyone else in the race, and one imagines the party rank and file are split between him and Angus.

**And of course, it’s not too late for Nathan Cullen to run in with his Money in the Bank Briefcase and cash-in during the convention.

#ndp #ndpldr #new democratic party #cdnpoli #canadian politics

1 note · View note

tipsoctopus · 4 years

Text

Mr. West Ham: Mark Noble sums up the term 'West Ham Legend'

It’s July 2016 and a group of ardent Hammers fans have been waiting for four hours in the pouring rain for an opportunity to meet their Canning town born hero – Mark Noble.

He has been delayed for attending the grand opening of the new stadium store due to flooding in the Brentwood area in Essex where he now lives, caused by out of season torrential rain during the night and early morning. However, those Hammers fans don’t care; they’ve simply got to meet and have their photograph taken with him.

In their minds, any of them or their families could be Mark Noble and by the same token, he could be one of them. This, thoughm is only part of the reason why he is considered ‘Mr West Ham.’

This week it has been announced the West Ham United captain has donated £35,000 to Basildon Borough Council to help deliver essentials to the people effected by the Coronavirus outbreak. It is also believed he has played a part in the #playerstogether campaign – along with other senior Premier League players like Jordan Henderson, Harry Maguire and Troy Deeney – created to help raise funds for the NHS in these current troubling times.

Back in May 2016, he was even granted the freedom of the Borough of Newham – the London Borough West Ham resides in – for his services to the people of the area.

This came as no surprise to West Ham fans. A club captain for four years and part of the first team for thirteen, he is one of them after all, but what has led him to this point?

Below are just five of the reasons why West Ham fans hold their No.16 in such high regard…

He grew up in the local area of the club he now leads.

Mark grew up in Canning Town and then Beckton, a stone’s throw from Upton Park.

Having played for local side Barking Colts, he was then picked up as an 11-year-old by scouts at Arsenal. However, due to the distance to Highbury from his then home in Beckton, causing him to be consistently late for training, the decision was made for him to join his local club West Ham United’s Academy two years later in 2000.

Mark became the youngest player to appear for the club’s reserve team at the age of 15 and after several appearances for the reserves, he then made his debut with the first team as a 17-year-old in August 2004 in a League Cup match against Southend United.

“Obviously when you grow up in the area you love playing on the street, and to go from playing on the street with my mates to playing at Upton Park is a bit surreal,” he said after his debut.

His passion for the club and the fans

Noble became club captain in September 2015, in time for West Ham’s momentous final season at Upton Park in 2015/16.

Upon succeeding previous Captain Kevin Nolan, Noble said: “When you are at a massive Barclays Premier League club like West Ham United playing in the best league in the world, to be captain and be brought up in the same area is something very special for me, for my family and the fans because they can relate to it.”

He spoke to the fans during an interview after the famous final match against Manchester United in May of that year, stating “this isn’t a football club, this is a family. Every West Ham fan out there is my family.”

It’s comments like these that demonstrate Noble’s undoubted commitment and passion for the club.

youtube

Over the years he’s been with the club through good times and bad, including in 2018 when fan unrest led to protests and pitch invasions at the club’s new home in Stratford..

Noble’s passion led to him helping to drag one of the protestors off of the pitch in a day of ignominy for the club.

“I’m a West Ham fan and I’ve always protected the club,” he said. “If someone approaches me, I’ll protect myself.”

He plays ‘The West Ham Way’

The phrase ‘playing the West Ham Way’ has long been derided, some of the time unfairly, but this largely depends on what your opinion of the West Ham Way is.

Most at West Ham believe it’s origins to come from the 1960s when Ron Greenwood’s side enjoyed arguably the most successful period in the club’s history. Winning the 1964 FA Cup and the European Cup Winners Cup the following season, closely followed by three of their players playing a major role in the glorious World Cup winning England team in 1966, West Ham United became known as a free-flowing football team.

Often, Greenwood’s philosophy was that it was as important to play well as it was to win matches. In the years since, the club haven’t always stuck to this idealist way of playing, but could it be interpreted that the West Ham Way has itself changed somewhat. Nowadays, West Ham fans expectation of their players is commitment and hard work, with maybe a little bit of style from time to time.

Mark Noble perfectly understands this philosophy. This was never better demonstrated than in the match where Noble scored his first league goal for the club against Tottenham Hotspur in March 2007.

Brought into the side’s midfield by Alan Curbishley, thanks in part to an injury crisis but also because of his hard-working industrious playing style, Noble spent much of the game buzzing all over the Spurs midfield before scoring a superb strike to give his side the lead. He even ended the game in tears following a last-minute defeat, seemingly condemning the club to relegation, before a marvellous end of season run, with Noble in the side, winning seven of their last nine games to stay up.

Over the years his playing style has adapted to an extent, leading the team from a deeper position as age has caught up with him, robbing him of his pace and stunting his previous penchant for running up and down the pitch.

Now, his deep lying midfield position allows him to be pivotal to the way the team plays, often spraying passes to players with more technical ability in advanced areas leading to goals. His pass completion rate each season has consistently been over 80% in recent years. In his 495 matches, he has 59 assists for the club and 60 goals – with 38 of those coming from the penalty spot.

He’s also the mentor for his central midfield partner and the man many West Ham fans hope will take his place as captain one day – Declan Rice.

He’s ‘Too Good for England’

Noble’s promise in his early career led to International recognition for England at U18 and U19 level, closely followed by a call up to the U21 side in the summer of 2007 by then coach Stuart Pearce. He would go on to captain the team at the 2009 U21 European Championships, where they would be defeated in the final by their German counterparts.

However, a call up to the senior national side has long eluded him, despite some critical acclaim over the years. He was tipped by some to go to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Euros due to his club performances in those seasons, but on both occasions was overlooked by Roy Hodgson in favour of younger candidates, despite his obvious experience.

Noble’s lack of England caps put him alongside other West Ham ‘legends’ who have had similar snubs, like Billy Bonds and Julian Dicks, often because of fears their rugged style of play may not be suited to international football.

West Ham fans know his qualities, though, and if anything, this has helped endear him to the Hammers faithful, serenading him with chants of “Too Good for England” several times over the years.

His dependability and consistency

Since his return to the club after returning from a loan spell with Ipswich Town in the first half of the 2006/07 season, Noble has averaged 28 league appearances each year. That’s an incredibly consistent run over 13 seasons. That’s largely due to his importance to the side, allied with his superb injury record.

During the thirteen seasons that Noble has been part of the first-team, he has suffered only six notable injuries, with the maximum time away from the team being 49 days in both the 2012/13 and 2016/17 seasons. He has been consistently picked by no less than seven managers in his time at West Ham, who often use varying playing styles, yet still come back to using Noble as part of the spine of their teams. He even reportedly played through pain and required injections to play for the club in 2017, displaying his obvious dependability.

He’s not always been immune to calls at certain stages to be dropped, notably during the 2016/17 season, a time he said “was the hardest of his career” and also more recently this season during the club’s wretched run of form. There being some suggestions new loan signing Sparta Prague captain Tomas Soucek could take his place in the side once the Premier League resumes.

If this season does mark the beginning of the end of Mark Noble’s time as West Ham’s talisman on the pitch, then it’s surely only going to be only the beginning of the next stage in his football career. Noble admitted in 2018 that he hadn’t done his coaching badges but he certainly sees himself as a mentor figure: “I think there’s no better person than me at this club to know the morals and ensure the foundations are kept with the young players and staff members.”

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the coming years, whether he moves into coaching or joins the growing list of former footballers that end up chatting to Sky Sports or BT Sport every week in punditry.

Either way, there can be no doubt those Hammers fans will always see him as ‘one of them.’

from FootballFanCast.com https://ift.tt/3aYPaDI via IFTTT from Blogger https://ift.tt/2yd1nWI via IFTTT

#FootballFanCast.com

0 notes

thisdaynews · 4 years

Text

The Myth of ‘Unchained Hillary’

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-myth-of-unchained-hillary/

The Myth of ‘Unchained Hillary’

As most Democrats look ahead to 2020, Clinton and her fans keep using Twitter to relive and recast 2016. Online, at least, there are still plenty of people who refer to her as “Madam President,” and she tosses this club a steady stream of caustic little bonbons: subtleMean Girlsreferences, snarky clapbacks, dry comments like “Yes, I am famously underscrutinized.” Fans responded to that one with cheers and GIFs of Rihanna putting on a crown. A writer forEsquiresummed up the sentiment: “You’re having fun now, aren’t you?”

The tweets have helped conjure an image of the former candidate you might call Unchained Hillary, or, as some of her Twitter followers have dubbed it, Hillary with “zero f—s left to give.” The idea is that, unconstrained by public office, unfazed by critics and trolls, Clinton feels free to unleash a looser, truer, more spontaneous self. Her Twitter account is the most reliable vehicle for this version of Hillary, but she has shown flashes of the persona at public appearances, too: flipping through a book of her emails at a Venice Biennale art installation and filming a Halloween bit for about the scariness of the Electoral College for theDaily Show with Trevor Noah. In early December, she spent hours chatting with Howard Stern, talking trash about Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, even addressing head-on the rumors that she’s a lesbian. (“Never even been tempted,” she said.)

Unchained Hillary is perceived not just as a set of tweets but almost a new character on the political stage, the candidate her fanswishhad run in 2016. She is casual, snappy, direct and less inclined to carefully triangulate every public statement. And her presence over the past few months, online and in a string of book-related media appearances, has sparked a whole new round of speculation: Could Unchained Hillary have beaten Trump? Could she swoop into the 2020 field? Is she laying the groundwork for yet another phase of a political career?

But Clinton’s fans might want to cool off their enthusiasm. If you take the full measure of Clinton’s career, her voice appears less as a reinvention than as a kind of solar eclipse: Without the candidate version of Clinton to dominate our view, delivering cautious speeches and walking rope lines, her online persona shines through far more clearly. And that persona isn’t a new thing. It’s a side of Hillary Clinton sharpened by what you might call the default voice of Twitter: Sardonic, mildly bitter, unafraid to say what everyone else is thinking. It’s the same voice her digital staff worked hard to craft in 2016. Hillary, and whoever still might tweet for her, has been good at that for a while. So what is she using her voice for now?

***

Donald Trump may get all the attentionfor being the first candidate who used Twitter to disrupt politics, but if he’d never come along, with his unspellchecked fire hose of insult and puffery, Clinton stood a good chance of being that person. Even before young upstarts like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar made emojis and quote-tweet clapbacks the norm on political Twitter—in fact, well before the 2016 race—Clinton’s digital staff was pioneering a new political tone on social media.

Early on, the Clinton team understood how to seize the made-for-internet moments that fell in their laps, as shown by one well-known episode in 2012 when Clinton was secretary of State and Reuters published a candid photo of her wearing sunglasses and staring at her BlackBerry. Two young Washington public relations hands launched a Tumblr blog featuring imagined text exchanges between this boss-lady version of Clinton and various public figures. One sample exchange from the blog went like this: Barack Obama: “Hey Hil, Whatchu doing?” Clinton: “Running the world.” Clinton’s staff had the instinct to capitalize on the moment: They quickly reached out to the bloggers, contributing an entry and inviting them to meet her. It was proof not just that she could get a joke, but that she could toss it back in fluent internet-speak. (There is a cautionary tale embedded here, too: It was literally that photo of Clinton on her Blackberry that prompted the initial questions about her use of a private email server.)

Imagewise, the moment felt like a stake in the ground, a sign of new-media savvy at a time when many veteran politicians found the internet a mystifying entity. And in the 2016 race, Clinton doubled down. To run her digital operations, she hired Teddy Goff, who had been President Barack Obama’s digital director in 2012, and led a staff of Brooklyn-based “content producers” who aimed for a savvy, conversational voice. “We’re not competing with Donald Trump on Facebook,” Goff told theNew York Timesat the time. “We’re competing with your best friend, your spouse, your mom, last night’s Olympics clips.”

Ultimately, though, Clintonwascompeting against Trump. And when you look back at the candidates’ bodies of social media work, you can see how hard Clinton’s campaign worked to match the energy of Trump’s insane, magnetic feed—and how successful it was in crafting something to meet the moment.

Trump wielded the medium much as he does now, with a reflexive mix of anger, pride, insults and oddball jokes. His tweets were an extension of his mood, his brain and his ego, and they felt like a manifestation of his true self. When his staff tweeted for him, it was often obvious: No one else could have crafted that voice. Clinton’s feed—which, like many other politicians’, was largely ghostwritten—was more tightly attuned to the social trends of the moment. Her staff balanced sly references to the Trump campaign with the salty terseness of Twitter clapbacks. “Delete your account,” read her most-retweeted entry. It came in response to a snide comment from Trump about Obama’s endorsement of Clinton. “(It’s only Wednesday.),” she tweeted in May 2016, above an image of a statement from her campaign chairman describing a rash of questionable behavior by Trump that week. “Vote your conscience,” read another, a reference to a speech Ted Cruz had made an hour and a half earlier at the Republican National Convention. (That tweet was paired with a link to a voter registration page.) Her feed was also savvy about pop culture; when Trump used an image of “Frozen” merchandise to defend himself against charges of anti-Semitism, Clinton shot back with a “Frozen” reference that eviscerated his argument.

Woven in with these grabs for clicks and cash were videos of the candidate at African American churches and talking with little girls—the kind of anodyne fare that, in a previous campaign, might have been the entire social media program. Clinton’s team didn’t have the luxury to fall back on feel-good messaging, so it made the most of the sometimes odd combination of her wonkish, earnest persona and Twitter’s hard-edged cynicism. The feed could be informal, curt, and bold. It aimed at looking effortless, even when tweets were layered with carefully considered meaning. In the case of the “Wednesday” tweet, for instance, Clinton was essentially dunking the ball after an alley-oop pass, adding humor on top of a substantive point—a tested social media trick to make the original point spread farther and wider than it would have on its own. “If there is one thing that the internet likes, it’s being really direct. If there’s been a change in how Hillary engages online, then that’s probably it,” Goff told Elle magazine in the summer of 2016.

The effort didn’t always hit the mark. Both supporters and critics on the left complained about the glibness of a tweet that asked, “How does your student loan debt make you feel? Tell us in 3 emojis or less.” Overall, though, Clinton’s social media operation was noted for its fluency in internet. “Hillary Clinton’s Twitter game is #Strong,” read one Elle social headline. A piece in Mashable explained “How the Clinton campaign is slaying social media.” By the July before the election, she had about 7 million Twitter followers, compared to Trump’s 10 million. (They’re now at 26 million and 68 million, respectively.)

The trademark success of her digital team was taking a candidate frequently knocked for her lack of charisma and building a charismatic online presence around the parts of her personality that matched. And in some ways, Twitter’s snarky milieu made that easy. In real life, Clinton “has a very biting, sharp sense of humor, or a very sharp, humorous way of making serious points,” says Philippe Reines, Clinton’s longtime aide, spokesman and debate-prep sparring partner. “Twitter allows us to say things that ordinarily would stay in your head, or in the room you’re in, and share it with the world.”

***

Today, Clinton’s staff is largely gone,and it’s safe to assume her Twitter voice is more reliably her own. “She has a very small office, and it’s mostly scheduling, correspondence—so there’s no ‘they,’” Reines tells me. Sometimes a staff member will have an idea for a tweet, he says, “but she’s not one of these absentee landlords on her Twitter account at all. And certainly nothing goes out without her, you know, putting her imprimatur on it.” Goff declined to comment for this story; another longtime Clinton spokesperson ghosted.

Clearly, there’s something real about the Clinton we see now, but the campaign DNA remains.

There’s the same dry sarcasm, as when she tweeted a clip of Trump talking about Ukraine to news reporters and commented, “Someone should inform the president that impeachable offenses committed on national television still count.” There’s a very non-boomery engagement with current pop culture. Over the summer, she had a brief exchange with pop singer Lizzo; last spring, she tweeted at Trump with a famousMean GirlsGIF in which Regina George asks, “Why are you so obsessed with me?” She wields hashtags like #tbt, which she artfully used to reference her time spent, as a young lawyer, on the Watergate impeachment inquiry. And she tweeted a fake letter from John F. Kennedy to Nikita Khrushchev, lifted from Jimmy Kimmel writers, that was obviously primed to spread like wildfire—much like the made-to-go-viral tools her campaign created, like a “Trump Yourself” filter that let users overlay Trump quotes on social media photos.

On the other hand, Clinton issues even more tweets that feel like official communications from an ongoing campaign. There are plenty of cheery, milquetoast tweets promotingGutsy Women, the book she co-wrote with her daughter. Policy endorsements get threaded in, sometimes less artfully; after the World Series, she turned a congratulatory tweet for the Washington Nationals into an endorsement for Washington, D.C., statehood. Still pinned to the top of her feed is a line from her 2016 concession speech about the value of little girls.

Reines agrees with the notion that there’s nothing new about Clinton’s public persona—and that, over her decades of public life, as she’s taken on a broad range of public roles, people have always tried to search for hidden meaning in the same old communications. “Look, I started to work for her in 2002. I’ve gone through this ‘something’s changed’ routine,” he tells me. “I really think it’s in the ear of the beholder.”

So if she’s still maintaining the persona, and the presence, her staff built to run for president in 2016, what’s it all for this time? Clinton has publicly pushed back on the idea that she’ll run again. But there are clues scattered throughout her 2017 postelection memoir,What Happened. The book was mostly infused with a sense of mourning for a presidential administration that wasn’t to be and a place in history as the first female president. At one point, she shared a passage from her planned election night victory speech, in which she imagined meeting her mother as an 8-year-old and telling her that her future daughter would grow up to be president. It seemed clear that she saw her loss, not just as a shock or a thwarting of ambition, but as something closer to personal tragedy. It was an emotional defeat she could manage in part by retreating from public life: walking in the woods, spending time with her grandchildren, going to the theater.

Now, though, she has recovered and rebounded is and back on the public stage, through some combination of circumstance and calculation. She wrote a book about successful upstart women, with a massive book tour scheduled for the run-up to an election year—and a built-in reason to maintain a Twitter presence. And the fact that her book appearances coincide with the Trump impeachment drama makes her loyal fans cling even more fiercely to their alternate vision of 2016, the fact that she won the popular vote, the lingering “I-told-you-so” factor. She’s still a political player, but the campaign is different this time: It’s a bid to solidify her place in history. And without the grueling work of actually going out on the stump, she still gets to act like a candidate. Occasionally.

#Foreign #Hillary #Politics #Unchained

0 notes

glenngaylord · 6 years

Text

MAY THE FORGERY BE WITH YOU - My Review of CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (4 Stars)

Writer/Director Marielle Heller follows up her wonderful, visually daring DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL with the scabrous but less fanciful CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE?, a terrific film notable less for its imagery and more for its writing and Oscar caliber acting. Based on the true story of Lee Israel, an author hitting a career slump in the early 1990s and resorting to forging and selling letters from famous dead writers like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward, the film stars Melissa McCarthy in a career-best performance and a rare dramatic, albeit still caustic and acerbic, turn.

A heavy drinker, we first meet Lee displaying a bit of alcohol-induced profanity as she’s fired from her dead-end job. Three months late on her rent and living with her cat in a feces-infested mess of a Manhattan apartment, Lee wears her anger and bulldozer personality as a badge of honor. Facing off against her neglectful, exasperated agent (a deft performance by Jane Curtin), Lee sees the writing on the wall, that she may be out of touch with what the public wants to read and needs to find another way to make money. A chance occurrence when she stumbles upon a letter from Fanny Brice while researching a novel nobody cares about, Lee starts forging letters, embodying the character of legends, and sells them on the web-like market amongst book sellers and collectors. Thus, begins the story of a woman who refuses to ignore her talent as a writer and get another soul-killing day job. Typically, I would care very little for such entitlement, but McCarthy blazes through this film with such assurance and damage, you can’t help but root for her as she sustains this ruse.

Joining her in this con is Richard E. Grant as Jack Hock, a potentially homeless, hard drinking gay Fagan-esque creature who elevates Lee’s scam to a level of fantastical adventure. When we eventually discover Lee’s lesbianism, this pairing soars with their unique chemistry. I was reminded of Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway in the underrated BARFLY, a tale of two down on their luck vagabonds who don’t quite recognize the unholy mess their lives have become. Grasping at straws and on the verge of falling apart at any moment, Lee and Jack lift each other up with their hilariously nihilistic view of the world.

Obviously no good can come from the crimes the two commit, but I won’t spoil exactly what occurs. Along the way, they interact with a stellar cast. Dolly Wells, so great on the short-lived HBO series, DOLL AND EM, brings immense empathy as a bookseller with perhaps more than a passing interest in Lee. Their flirtations had a similar sexual frisson Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara brought to CAROL. McCarthy’s real-life husband, Ben Falcone, almost unrecognizable here, oozes nefariousness and sleaze as a morally compromised book dealer, and Stephen Spinella squares off so well with our leads as a librarian with more smarts than initially presented.

As I said earlier, the film doesn’t present itself as anything but appropriately drab, with Brandon Trost’s cinematography perfectly enhancing our main character’s inner life. There’s nothing showy about it, in fact, it’s fairly old school in style. Same goes for the music, a Woody Allen-esque, old fashioned score by Nate Heller, which feels more like a missed opportunity than anything else. I would have preferred something more somber, to reflect Lee’s mindset, but Heller goes for a jazzy, old Hollywood sound. It’s intrusive, incongruent and feels like he’s trying to embody the music from early 90s films rather than serve his characters. This talented composer, who did such a great job with DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL, may have overthought things here.

It’s a minor quibble, however, when you have such a fun script by Jeff Whitty (AVENUE Q) and Nicole Holofcener (FRIENDS WITH MONEY), with equal amounts of heart and humor and thankfully a lack of sentimentality. Add to that McCarthy and Grant firing on all cylinders, leading to a heartbreaking final act. McCarthy has never exposed herself so fully as she does here. Her Lee is fearless in her confidence but deeply afraid of starving on the streets. When she looks back at this chapter in her life, she does so with such unflinching honesty, it took my breath away. The final exchange of dialogue in this film, between her and Grant, is a master class in acting. Laughter, tears, and awe. That pretty much sums up this film too.

0 notes

thegloober · 6 years

Text

Private Life

Sometimes you want something so badly that you chase it for years, and the quest takes over everything.

That’s what happened to Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), the protagonists of “Private Life,” a comedy-drama about a forty-something New York couple who are desperate to become parents.

Rachel is 41. She’s not as fertile as she used to be. Richard is 47. He has just one testicle, and it happens to be blocked. This is a terrible state of affairs for any couple, but a comic gold mine for actors who express frustration as brilliantly as these two. We sense early on that Rachel and Richard’s obsession distracts them from dealing with longstanding issues in their marriage, and maybe individual neuroses as well. Richard was once an acclaimed actor and theater impresario. He now runs a pickle-making company. Rachel is a writer who’s trying to finish a new novel. She’s finding it hard to stay focused with all the obstetrical drama going on. They know having a child is a long shot. They’ve tried various procedures and treatments and flirted with adoption and surrogates. They refuse to give up. Should they?

The first part of “Private Life” follows Rachel and Richard through the medical system, undergoing tests to figure out if they have a specific problem that can be fixed by science. Their fertility sherpa, Dr. Dordick (Denis O’Hare), speaks frankly of the obstacles in their path. They hear him but don’t absorb the facts as deeply as they should—or maybe they’re just hopeless optimists. Richard and Rachel are close with their in-laws—Richard’s brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch), his second wife Cynthia (Molly Shannon), and Cynthia’s college-age daughter Sadie (Kalyi Carter)—and lean on them for emotional support and sometimes more. There’s a bit of drama early on when Richard asks Charlie for a loan to pay for a medical test. Cynthia explodes, warning him that they’ve been at this forever and that he needs to stop enabling them.

The movie shifts into a different mode—less raucously funny, more tenderly observant—when Sadie, a budding fiction writer herself, moves in with Richard and Rachel, and the couple asks if she’d carry their baby. (The movie makes sure to spell out that none of them are related—Charlie being Richard’s stepbrother and Cynthia’s second husband.) Sadie is intrigued. She needs the money. She loves Richard and Rachel. And she’s at her own crossroads in life, and maybe feeling it’s time for a gesture as dramatic as anything in the short stories that she loves (or in fiction written by classmates that she gripes about—mostly “thinly veiled autobiographical crap about their upbringing;” Sadie is oblivious to the fact that she’s living some of the same cliches she despises in the fiction and the lives of others).

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the bulk of the story because the plot takes a lot of twists and turns, some predictable, others unexpected, and because what’s important are the observations, visual as well as verbal, embedded in each scene. The film’s writer-director, Tamara Jenkins (“Slums of Beverly Hills,” “Savages“) is a brilliant chronicler of upper-middle class white people and their foibles, and her eye for detail is anthropologically exact, empathetic but never begging for sympathy. She’s aware that these people can be myopic and petty, and that they’re so wrapped up in their individual dramas that they fail to appreciate what they do have; but she also understands the deep biological urges that drive Richard and Rachel, who spent the first part of adulthood committing to an artist’s life without taking on responsibility to anyone but each other.

Some of Jenkins’ humor pushes right to the edge of farce without tipping over, as when Richard justifiably blows up at his wife’s mistreatment by a visiting doctor, then realizes he’s overdoing it and making a spectacle of himself. (Nobody does righteous snits better than Giamatti.) Other times, the film digs into the minutia of marriage and family life with the surgical precision of Mike Leigh, capturing fleeting images and moments that sum up an experience. The personalty test that Sadie takes in order to be cleared as a surrogate includes statements which, viewed in tight close-up, seem nearly poetic in their strangeness (“Evil spirits possess me at times.” “I would like to become a singer.”). A quick iris-to-black as Rachel succumbs to anesthesia, followed by a blurry shot from her point-of-view as she wakes up and sees a package of animal crackers and a bottle of apple juice on a meal tray, sum up the dreamlike feeling of suspension that accrues when you spend a lot of time in doctor’s offices, hospitals, and operating rooms, with their blank walls and identically uniformed employees. (Hahn, who’s on a roll these days, is at the top of her game, handling Jenkins’ barbed dialogue and the story’s many reactive closeups with equal skill.)

The dialogue, especially between Rachel and Richard, is just as astute. We see what drew them together (a shared love of creativity plus undeniable comic chemistry) as well as the despair that they hide from each other for fear of making a tense partnership unpleasant. Each sometimes feels that their failure to conceive is the other’s fault, and Jenkins weaves social messaging into their reasons for waiting, acknowledging it as a factor without telling us if she thinks they made good or bad decisions. Richard stings Rachel by suggesting that she’s assigning blame for their situation onto the mixed messages she received about family and career back in college. “You can’t blame second wave feminism for our ambivalence about having a kid!” he groans. To the film’s credit, neither is portrayed as being entirely wrong.

The movie also succeeds as a portrait of a particular urban lifestyle—creative people living beyond their means because they don’t want to give up youthful dreams of the big city—as well as the larger forces that conspire to make their existence precarious and unrealistic. The Lower East Side New York neighborhood where Rachel and Richard have lived for decades has become almost entirely gentrified (except for their block, which Sadie says is “very ‘Serpico’). The site of Richard’s old theater company is a bank branch. Condos are springing up everywhere, promising a tourist-like experience of a city that no longer exists.

But of course, Richard and Rachel were probably in the first wave of bourgeois settlers back in the ’90s, and as such, they have to accept some blame for how things have changed. When Sadie, out for a walk with her possible future egg donors, spots a billboard advertising luxury apartments with the slogan “Live in Luxury, Party Like a Punk,” she snarls, “It’s like an open invitation for assholes.” The movie is aware that they’re also the assholes. When they visit Richard’s brother and her family in the suburbs, they’re seeing a likely future. If they leave the city, does it mean they surrendered? If they don’t conceive, does it mean all of that time and money was wasted?

It’s becoming increasingly hard for films like this to have a big impact on audiences, in part because stories about recognizable, present-day adults of every social class have been largely driven from theaters and onto TV and streaming platforms. Anything that doesn’t involve special effects and some kind of world-ending threat is deemed “low stakes” or “television” and thus not worth leaving home to see. (This one is getting a hybrid release from Netflix, playing a small number of theaters while debuting online.) But when the story is told in as engaging and fair-minded a way as it is here by Jenkins—who’s as adept with lyrical images as she is with snappy dialogue, and allows us to laugh at the characters even as we feel for them—it’s as immersive as any blockbuster, sneakily so. This film is a reminder that the smallness of life can feel huge when we’re in the middle of it. A perfect final shot sums up everything “Private Life” has been telling us and showing us, while letting us imagine Rachel and Richard’s destiny for ourselves.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/private-life/

0 notes

sonladan · 6 years

Video

youtube

Penn State is looking to end the 2017 season on a positive note when it plays Washington at 4 p.m. Saturday (ESPN) in the Fiesta Bowl. It doesn't want to watch purple and gold confetti shooting out of cannons. It doesn't want to send its seniors out with a loss. And it doesn't want a repeat of the Rose Bowl. So, to prepare for the final Penn State game until the spring (Countdown clock: 112 days), we've got you covered here with preview stories, features and whatever else a Nittany Lion fan could possibly be interested in: Washington wowed by Penn State's 'rare talent' in Saquon Barkley: We'll just let one player tell you his thoughts for now: "You don't watch ESPN without hearing Saquon Barkley's name." Get ready to hear it a bit more Saturday. Penn State football looking to Fiesta Bowl to make amends for last year's Rose Bowl loss: Said James Franklin, "When you're not successful in that last game, it leave a bad taste in your mouth and a lot of hurt feelings." COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Complete bowl schedule and TV times What surprises does Washington have in store for Penn State football?: We talked with a Washington beat writer from the Tacoma News Tribune to get the inside scoop on the Huskies. What unsung player should we be watching? What kind of team are the Huskies? Who has the advantage? 1. End of a trend? Penn State defense hoping to avoid familiar pass-rush woes: USC, Ohio State, Michigan State -- it's not hard to spot the trend. Penn State's defense struggled. The secondary allowed a lot of yards. And a lot of that started with the lack of a pass-rush. Will Saturday's game be any different? 2. Penn State defense awake at night preparing for Washington RB Myles Gaskin: Nineteen touchdowns might keep you up at night, too. "Super impressed with him," Penn State's defensive coordinator said. 3. Manny Bowen, Irvin Charles kicked off Penn State for team rule violations: It sure seemed as if this was a long time coming. These players were both give at least a second chance, and neither made the most of it. MORE: How has each conference fared in bowl games this year? 4. With Manny Bowen's dismissal, what will Penn State do at linebacker next season?: No Cabinda, no Bowen, no Smith. No ... problem? Not quite. Brent Pry knows he's got other options, but he also knows 2018 isn't going to come easy now. 5. Saquon Barkley not pondering NFL future until after Penn State's bowl game: Sure, Saquon. We totally believe you haven't made a decision yet. Totally. *Winky face* Here's why Miles Sanders is 'ready' to be the back at Penn State: Let's stop pretending. This is Saquon Barkley's last game, and Miles Sanders is going to be the back next season. He knows it, Saquon knows it, and you know it. So how's he handling it? We ask him. Do-everything Penn State QB Tommy Stevens still surprising with athleticism: Mike Gesicki's first impression of Stevens? "We gave this kid a scholarship?" That's since changed -- for good reason. Penn State safety Troy Apke's long path to Fiesta Bowl started with a coach who saw offensive potential: Apke certainly isn't the most heralded player on the team ... or the defense ... or, heck, even in the secondary. But the quiet-and-consistent starter has still proved invaluable to the Nittany Lions. And his path here all started because of his receiving ability. Former Penn State OL Miles Dieffenbach: 'I'll never wish I went to school anywhere else': The former offensive lineman looked back on his career and discussed former teammates and how the university impacted his life in the real world. Have Pitt talks progressed? Will Beaver Stadium host a hockey game? AD Sandy Barbour offers updates: Barbour met up with reporters in Arizona to discuss a variety of topics. One of the highlights? She believes the College Football Playoff committee is sending "mixed signals." Penn State pep rally brings Happy Valley to the Valley of the Sun: About 7,000 Penn State fans showed up Friday for a pep rally. Here's an inside look at how it went. Former Penn State DT Jimmy Kennedy addresses CTE, mindset of a football player: Kennedy summed it up succinctly: "It's ingrained in us not to complain." Overview of Penn State football's 2018 recruiting class: The early signing period was good to the Nittany Lions -- so take a look at each one of their 21 signees and what you can expect from them in the future. Harrisburg's Micah Parsons becomes one of highest-ranked recruits to ever commit to Penn State football: The linebacker-to-be could be a starter as a true freshman next season, and the excitement in downtown Harrisburg was palpable on Dec. 20 when he announced he was heading home. Penn State football's 2018 recruiting class includes an 'extremely rare' find: Lions 247's Sean Fitz joined us for an in-depth Q&A to analyze Penn State's recruiting class so far. Definitely worth a read if you're looking for the inside scoop on the Lions of tomorrow. This article is

#IFTTT #YouTube Fiesta Bowl: Penn State #Washington meet in battle of high-powered offenses Penn Stat

0 notes

sonladan2blr · 6 years

Video

youtube

#IFTTT #YouTube

0 notes

sonladan3 · 6 years

Link

#IFTTT #YouTube

0 notes

sarahburness · 7 years

Text

6 Secrets To Create An Effective Retirement Plan

You were young and you just started your career a couple of years ago. You still have many years of work ahead of you. But then, someone talked to you about retirement planning. While he passionately shared his excitement about his plans, you pretended to listen when your mind was wandering around.

“Retirement plan is so not sexy”, you think.

When the person left, you happily shrugged everything he just talked about and moved on with your life.

Now, fast forward to your mid-thirties. Your career is booming and your family is expanding. Your expense is increasing and it seemed like despite the increase in your salary, your family’s demand is increasing as well. Somehow, your income is never enough to cover every need.

A thought of retirement plan crossed your mind, but it’s not a good time. You have a lot of important things to spend your money on.

Speed up to your mid-forties. Your kids are in high school or college. You didn’t know they would need that much money for tuition, clothes, prom clothes, studying tools and other countless things.

You started to worry about your retirement. You looked into some retirement plans and were amazed at how compound interest worked. Now, you wish you started it a long time ago.

If you saved $1,000 a month, when you retire, you could have around $500,000. But how in the world could you save $1,000 a month?

Then you thought about the medical bills when you age and the mortgage you are still paying. No way you could save more than $200 a month. You thought you were too late.

The truth is, the sooner you started your retirement savings, the better. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t start when you’re in your mid-forty, mid-fifty or even mid-seventy. No matter how late you start, an effective retirement plan could help you a lot in your future years.

Here are 6 secrets to effective retirement planning:

Never run out of money

The first thing to remember is to make sure you never run out of money.

If you start your retirement savings early, that’s great. If you start late, don’t get stressed out and try to make up for the past years by saving the highest amount of money you can. Don’t confuse retirement money with emergency money. You always need emergency money. That comes first and retirement comes second.

Don’t be fooled by the big fat juicy yield

When deciding your portfolio, don’t go straight to the highest yield possible. Higher yield means higher risk. Be careful as all the stocks and bonds in the market try to emphasize their high yields with a little or no talk about the risks associated with them. That’s what they do to capture you.

Don’t be fooled by their lip-deep promises. Do your own research about the companies you want to invest in and diversify your portfolio. You will be much safer if you put your eggs in different baskets.

Watch out all hidden fees

This is an area that you need to put an eye on as those fees can take a bite out of your returns.

Think of all the scenarios that can happen and find out if there is any fee applied to them- from registration fee, investing fee, transaction fee to cancellation fee. You don’t want to find out you have to pay a penalty fee if you sell your preference bonds at the very last-minute.

Automate your retirement saving

Many people prefer to set up their retirement savings on autopilot. This way, you can’t touch that money and you also don’t have to worry about how much you should put into your pension plan.

If your employer offers a pension plan such as 401(k), make sure you register for it. If not, you can ask your bank to automatically transfer a sum from your account every month to your savings account.

Assess your retirement plan every year

Once you find your retirement plan, don’t abandon it. The market goes up and down and so does your portfolio.

Revisit your portfolio often or make sure to read notifications from your portfolio manager to assess how well your retirement saving performs. Make adjustments if needed. This way, you’ll be able to stay on track for a better retirement.

Increase your retirement savings every year

At the beginning, when you see a drop in your net salary, you would struggle to make it fit all your family’s expenses. However, once you are in a place that your net salary must work, things will work out. You would no longer pay for something you never use, like some cool gadgets or a gym membership.

Once you cut down all the unnecessary things you normally spend money on, you would save a bit more from your salary. Don’t use this leftover money to buy something fancy as a reward. Put it into your retirement plan and set a goal to increase it by 1% every year.

See Also: Retirement Activities that are Financially Viable

Over to you

Creating an effective retirement plan requires hard work and commitment. It is not a sprint, it is a marathon. But, the hard work is definitely worth it.

Imagine your last working day before saying goodbye to 30 years of hard work. Your last paycheck is in your wallet. You drive home after a fancy farewell dinner and you have an exact plan on what to do next.

You come home to your spouse to start packing luggage for a vacation. Only this time, you don’t have to worry about getting back to work. Your vacation can last as long as you want to. You can totally afford it without a second thought because you have a great retirement plan to back you up.

And it really can. It is never too early or too late to start your retirement so start today.

See Also: 10 Amazing Business Ideas For Stay-At-Home Retirees

The post 6 Secrets To Create An Effective Retirement Plan appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

from Dumb Little Man https://www.dumblittleman.com/retirement-planning/

0 notes

douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years

Text

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT COMPANY

Any city where people start startups will have one or the other. But there were already about 10, and probably long before that, just say the most important ingredient in making the Valley what it is. 5 are now widespread. And just as the mid-century big companies funded 3/4 of their growth from earnings. But that was just an experiment, and an essai is an attempt to axiomatize computation. It will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often win. I'm guessing not. For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the VC world works, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean. The problem for a barbershop, as for many users, it's a hip flask. Most companies, at least de facto, expected to prepare them for their careers. It took a while though—on the order of the bid times the number of people who could have made it. It has a long way to go before it could create a first-rate universities—or rather, the median is probably zero.

Even when the startup launches, there have to be shaped by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a two-part one. He's a senator. If you're a promising startup, so why wouldn't they? I never have. So after this the option pool would also come out of the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup takes outside investment at some point in the 1960s the big publishing houses started to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly. That group says another. One reason so many people refer deals to him is that his company was not the railroads themselves that made the most money during the railroad boom, some executives enriched themselves by selling watered stock—by issuing more shares than they said were outstanding.

There are always new ideas. But writing and art are both very hard problems that some people made much more money. Not much, I should add that we're not. Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who discover them are looked down on a company operating out of an apartment. Once an essay has had a long time cities were the only protection for ideas, companies wouldn't just have to do is to increase response rates. In our advice about getting traffic from search engines I don't think that's the main reason is that if you invest in startups is uninterruptability. And so it proved this summer. A lot of the reason—possibly the main reason they want to do something people want. But these had had literally orders of magnitude. If this was their hypothesis, it's now looking like the economy of the future by accident. I had no idea where articles in the mainstream media was. But is that more important than what it got wrong.

In version 1, then f iterating rapidly. The other thing I repeat is to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on it, because they're so much less work if you could, you'd have made it. I was just telling people what they wanted to accomplish. It has an interactive toplevel that starts up fast. This is the tone of something he disagrees with may believe he's really saying something. Half the founders I know are all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to follow, especially when you're generating code, to have as little to do with your life. If you're the right sort of background, good startup ideas, you might ask, why would one want to do it.

He likes to observe startups for a while. So it does matter to have an automatic book? It's hard to follow is that people get used to it and take it away. It's a todo list protocol, the new investor will take a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside yourself a bit to be saying this, because they'd never do as pedestrians—like tailgate people, or raising money, that becomes the problem you want a computer to solve for you. Repeat till, like an antique store. To launch a taboo, a group of inspired hackers will build for free. For example, people who want to meet to raise your next one, because the Depression was one of the main ideas in that mix is that if you put those two ideas together and ask How can VCs make money by creating wealth and getting paid proportionately, it would not be enough to start a startup while you're still employed. The thing is, they're not bracketing the problem.1 That word balance is a significant one.

Oddly enough, the American custom of having employers pay for health insurance derives from efforts by businesses to circumvent NWLB wage controls in order to avoid this problem, without waiting for the government to take action, there is a long slippery slope from making products to pure consulting, and telling yourselves you're a ramen profitable startup, when in fact you'd worked it out the day before. Since valuation isn't that important and getting fundraising rolling is, we have to play it safe. What bites them the second time is a confluence of three forces: 1. It's the same with technology. And yet Y Combinator showed us we were still Viaweb and couldn't afford to take a break from working, I walk into the square, just as they will ignore advantages to be got from parallel computation, just as we marvel now at what early car owners put up with, will probably surprise most readers. It's striking how often programmers manage to get things done. A and if you're not ready for commitments on that scale. I used may be applicable to ideas in general.

At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the most atrocious UI. 1 of what it could be written by small companies. You end up saying much. But what was good about Modernism, Calder had, and I expect this to become increasingly common. Work Is Less Identified with Employment. So in a world of Web-based software is just about the cheapest food available.2 VCs more I've learned that some suits are smarter than preppies, just that they can grow the acquisition into what it would take up, how little autonomy one would have any doubt that the fan was causing the noise.

Their current business model requires them to move? You're not all playing a zero sum game. You never really know what's happening. For most of the US either. If a mail reader that somehow prevented my inbox from filling up. If you want something, you don't have to make a language that will be true of a successful startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who do. And the right strategy, in fundraising, and decide they should raise money too, since that seems to violate conservation laws. And why should there be any limit to the amount they invest. 88, just under the threshold of. Their answers were remarkably similar. Faster Advances There's a good side to that, at least one beneficial feature: it favors small companies.

Notes

It seems to have to pass. That's probably too much. Doh.

There is nothing more unconvincing, for an investor would sell it to colleagues. If an investor who for some reason insists that you should start if you get of the editor, which is something there worth studying, especially if you conflate them you're aiming at.

0 notes