#how to tell the people who write in silly questions to the new yorker that the editors are not going to hire you for saying it Like That
Note
I absolutely love all of your stories and was hoping to give you a prompt! I haven’t seen you write Tony or Peter as superheroes, but I would love a story where the team goes on a mission that goes wrong and they think Peter is dead. A few months pass, and Spider-Man pops up in a different color costume next to a big baddie (Quentin? Rumlow? Whoever it is def has a crush or Peter lmao). If you can’t write the prompt, no worries.❤️
(...)
“Thank you so much for taking my prompt omgggg! To answer your question, Spider-Man pops up as a baddie, and he works with/for another baddie”
You’re too sweet and kind, my dear, thank you so much! I’m so sorry this took so long, something happened in my personal life and I was too heartbroken for love stories for a while there hahaha Everything’s fine now. I hope you’re still out there to read this and I really hope you enjoy it! <3
[*]
This takes place a few years after Civil War. A few details were changed – Peter was recruited at 18, while attending MIT; Endgame never happened, they defeated Thanos in Titan; Tony and Pepper never got back together after their break-up somewhere between IM3 and CACW.
TW: Mentions of blood, alcoholism, grief and death. I guess that’s it, let me know if you find anything else triggering!
[*]
“It’s him.” Tony stood there paralyzed, staring at the hologram projected from Nat’s phone, heart pounding, ears ringing. “It’s him,” he repeated, running his hands through his hair, trying to get a hold of himself, trying to make sense of what was happening, of what he was seeing. It was too surreal – impossible! – he had to be hallucinating. Right? Maybe dreaming? Had he drunk himself into a stupor again? Had he finally gone mad?
It was a regular day, Tony had been down in the lab for an unknown number of hours when Friday announced Steve, Nat and Bruce were at the door, which was unusual. Usually, they’d visit one at a time, an unspoken agreement not to overwhelm the engineer, but that particular day they all marched into his house saying that he needed to see something. He was too exhausted to tell them to fuck off, so he just poured himself a drink and shrugged, gesturing towards the living room.
Nat proceeded to project a video from her StarkPhone and what he saw took away the ground from beneath his feet. He tried to sit down, but he didn’t make it to the couch, his legs were not responding, he fell on his butt in the middle of the living room. The blood felt like ice in his veins, his throat was closing up, his eyes were burning and his hands were shaking so fucking badly. He was boneless and petrified all of a sudden, as he watched him swing from building to building on his webs, a black and white blur.
Peter.
He felt Steve and Bruce on either side of him, trying to help him up, but he didn’t take his eyes off of the projection. It was him. My Peter, you’re back, you came back to me, you’re okay, you’re alive–
“Tony, it’s not him.” Steve’s voice brought him back to the real world, and he looked around. Natasha and Bruce both stared at him with worry in their eyes, like they agreed with Steve.
“What, are you fucking insane? Of course it’s him!” His voice was firm, angry, even though his hand was shaking when he pointed at the hologram, to the short video that kept replaying on a loop.
“Tony, he robbed a bank. He put civilians at risk. How could you think this is Peter? Are you insane? Don’t you know him? Look, we had to show you this because it’s going to be all over the news soon and whoever this is, they’re trying to tarnish Peter’s memory and we can’t allow it, but this – this isn’t him, Tony. I’m sorry.”
The older man stopped for a second, taking a deep breath. Was he going insane? Was he seeing things, was his mind playing tricks on him again? It wouldn’t be the first time in the last few months. He focused on the images. The bank’s alarm was sounding loudly, as people started running wildly out the front door. Seconds later, someone wearing a cape and a – helmet? Fish bowl? – on their head walked out, then finally him.
Not him, Steve said, but how could it be anyone else, when Tony could clearly see it was Peter gracefully swinging around on the webs. Not him, Steve said, but how could it not be him when Tony recognized every inch of his body? The long neck, the narrow, yet strong shoulders, thin waist, round ass, strong thighs, small feet, long hands and thin, wiry arms. How could it not be him when Tony could recognize the way he moved, the way he leaped and landed effortlessly, the grace with which he swung back and forth?
“It’s him, Steve.” Even as the words left his mouth, his eyes were fixed on the boy in the video. The suit looked a lot like the one Tony made for him, but it was slightly different. Black, instead of blue. White, instead of red. But it was him. Alive and breathing. “It’s Peter, I know it is.”
***
It was supposed to be an easy mission. Even though it called for every Avenger in town, it was just a security measure, Steve told them. They intercepted a terrorist group communicating online, planning a coordinated attack on Stark Tower, the Avengers Compound and Times Square. They were professionals, but only human. They thought they’d be enough: Captain America, Black Widow, Iron Man, Spiderman, Winter Soldier and even the Hulk as a safety net.
In a way, they were sufficient. They were able to avoid the attack and arrest almost every single one of the terrorists that weren’t killed during the mission. But the cost was high – way too fucking high.
Peter.
Tony knew what happened the exact moment when it did. He knew there was no saving him when he opened his lips and tried to call out his name and instead of words, blood came out. Thick, dark blood. He saw the life leaving his eyes when he looked at him one last time, eyelids drooping and then closing. There was no saving him, Tony knew that, and yet he tried. He flew as fast as the suit would allow him, even though he had no idea what he would have done if he had reached him in time. Which he didn’t.
Peter disappeared before his eyes, along with the man who had put a knife through his heart. And not just any knife, not any metal would have been able to pierce the suit. It had to be vibranium. Whoever that man was, he knew that, maybe he had Peter in mind all along. The only thing Tony remembered about him were his wide, blue eyes. Cold and wild. The sadistic smile when he heard Tony’s wail of despair. Tony thought he knew him somehow, but couldn’t be sure.
They just disappeared. One second, they were there, right within his reach, the next, they were gone. He’d lost him. The person he’d sworn to protect at all costs, at the cost of his own damned life, but he was useless the moment Peter needed him the most. Gone. Disappeared before his eyes, Tony couldn’t even bring his body home.
He remembered crumbling to the ground, broken and unbelieving, staring at the empty space where Peter once stood.
“Tony...” Steve crouched down next to him, looking pained and devastated, and the older man broke down.
“I lost the kid, Steve. I lost him.”
He didn’t remember a lot of that day, he’d passed out drunk in his room for the first time in ten years, woke up hours later in the med bay with Steve, Rhodey and Pepper speaking in hushed voices. He didn’t care what they were saying, because the first thought he had when he opened his eyes was that he’d lost the love of his life. His Peter.
***
“Boss, I was able to acquire the footage from the bank’s security cameras.” Friday’s voice brought him back to the present and they all jumped up, all eyes turning to the huge screen facing the couch.
“Good girl, play it,” he answered quickly, taking a seat because he knew he would need it.
It started with a normal day in a bank, people walking around, standing in line, talking to each other, nothing out of the ordinary. Then the guy they’d seen leaving the bank in the other video – Fish-bowl-guy – appeared out of nowhere, levitating above the patrons, slowly floating down.
“My fellow citizens, do not fret, I mean you no harm.” Of course, New Yorkers wouldn’t take his word for it, not after everything they had gone through over the course of the last decade. People started screaming and running, trying to get to the exit, but Peter stood there by the door. When they tried to push through him, he webbed some of them to the walls and the others froze, slowly stepping away from him. “This will all be over soon, I promise.”
Fish-bowl-guy demanded the tellers filled bags with money from their drawers as Peter guarded the exit. He didn’t say anything and it was driving Tony crazy, because he was dying to hear him. Both because he wanted Friday to run the audio through a voice recognition software to prove once and for all that it was him, but also because for six months he hadn’t been able to even look at pictures of Peter, let alone hear his voicemails or watch his silly videos. And he had several of them, the younger man sent him at least a video a day – his daily vlogs, he called them – even if they were just in different rooms.
But Peter didn’t say anything, he just stood by the door as Fish-bowl-guy talked to the patrons.
“I know we seem like the bad guys right now, but I promise you, we’re not. We’re the heroes here, really,” He started, overlooking the tellers as they filled the bags with cash. “We’re here to take the city back from those who took it from us. You know what I’m talking about, right?” The man looked at the patrons as if he was expecting an answer, but no one said a word. “Tony Stark and his little army. He took over his daddy’s empire, now he thinks he can just take anything and claim as his own. He’s done it to this city, even if some people haven’t realized it yet. We’re his hostages. He built himself an army and they control this city, the country, even! They fake threats and then come to ‘save us’, they destroy our homes, they kill our loved ones, they don’t care about collateral damage! Some of us have lost everything, because of Tony fucking Stark and his minions. But it will all be over soon, I promise you. I will set you free.”
He took the twelve bags full of money that the tellers placed on the counter and gestured for Peter to come closer and the young man webbed his way to him, until he was standing by his side. That was the moment people started running out of the bank, the moment they saw from another point of view in the other video. As they watched people leaving, Fish-bowl-guy placed an arm around Peter’s shoulders, pulling him close in a very friendly way, it made Tony’s blood boil and his heart sink.
“You’re doing great, honey. You’re doing the right thing. Come on, now.” He stroked his shoulder softly then walked outside, followed closely by Peter and then the video was over.
The room was silent for a few seconds after that as they tried to understand what they’d just seen. Tony didn’t want to read too much into it, Peter was clearly not in his right mind if he was robbing a bank, but still – the guy called him honey. He was… comforting him. And Peter let him.
“We have to find him.” Tony quickly ordered Friday to do a thorough search on the web, check surveillance cameras all over New York, police database, anything that could give them a clue on where they might have escaped to – or where they had come from. The news said they were followed by the police for a few blocks, then they simply disappeared before their eyes. It brought back terrible memories.
“Yes, we do, but not for the reasons you want, Tony.” Bruce frowned, coming to stand next to his friend. “You have to agree this – it’s just not possible. Peter is dead, he would never –“
“Then where’s his body, Bruce? Huh? Can any of you answer me that?” He looked around the room and they all avoided his gaze, as if worried they’d break him if they dared to say what they thought. “He disappeared. Right before my eyes, Bruce. Friday couldn’t connect to Karen, we have no idea what could have happened after that.”
“Tony, his heart was pierced.” It was Natasha’s turn to try. Tony could see it was hard for her too, she had a soft spot for Peter, from the very first time Tony recruited him, when he was still an eighteen year-old kid. “He couldn’t possibly –“
“He was enhanced!” He yelled, annoyed they were all so ready to discard the possibility that the person in the video could be Peter when it very clearly was. “Is! He is enhanced! I was never able to measure just how far his healing factor went, Friday could only estimate with the amount of information we had at the time, but clearly–“
“Tony, listen–“
“No, you listen! You listen to me, okay? That’s my fiance! I’m telling you this, that is the man I love, the man I sworn to protect and then abandoned for six fucking months assuming he was dead, when I didn’t even try to look for him! I just fucking drank my days away when I could be looking for him and now he needs my fucking help! So you can either help me find him, or you can fuck the fuck off, ok?” He was breathless by the time he was done, and they all looked at him like he’d gone insane for good.
“What do you suppose happened?” Steve asked quietly, and Tony frowned. “What do you think could have happened in these past few months that would turn Peter into that?” He pointed at the screen. “If he was alive this whole time, why not look for you?”
“I don’t know, Steve, we’ll have to ask him.” Truth was, Tony was terrified of the answers to those questions. He couldn’t think about it at that moment, he had to find him first. “What happened to Barnes? You of all people –“ He didn’t need to finish the sentence, couldn’t. He sighed and Steve flinched, eyes growing wide as the familiarity of the situation seemed to dawn on him. “Do you think you could’ve mistaken him for someone else? Ever?” Tony’s eyes were burning, but he didn’t shed a tear, he didn’t have time for tears. He needed to find him.
Steve was stunned silent after that, watching Tony with huge, watery eyes.
“Tony, we just don’t want you to get hurt,” Bruce intervened again, approaching him carefully. “We don’t want you to go through the pain of losing him again in case...”
“It’s doesn’t get any worse than this, Bruce,” Tony sighed, because he knew that nothing could hurt more than the thought that he’d failed Peter. That he didn’t try to look for him. That Peter had been held captive by a fucking terrorist organization for six months because he was too drunk to get out of bed and fucking try to look for him. Because he just lost hope and never thought Peter might be out there, waiting for him to come, to save him. “There’s nowhere else to go but up, from where I’m standing.”
Nobody said anything else after that, but later that day he got a message from Steve saying they would find Peter.
***
He was in the hospital for three days after Peter’s death. He was a fifty-year-old man with a shitty heart, after all. He was sedated for most of it, whenever he woke up he was so out of his mind with grief that they put him right back to sleep. When he was finally able to go home, he insisted he was left alone, but to calm Pepper and Rhodey down, he activated Friday’s babysitter protocol. It was Peter’s creation. It would let them know if Tony wasn’t eating well, or if he harmed himself in any way. If he tried to deactivate it, it would notify them immediately.
So he was left alone, at least most of the time. He spent his days in the lab, drinking, working, crying, thinking. The memories came and went unsolicited, specially when Tony was too out of it to control them. Suddenly, he’d be back in the boy’s dorm room in Boston, looking at that ridiculous onesie that he hid in a box of books under his bed, watching him stutter as he tried to explain it was just a cosplay.
“A cosplay of some dude who does stunts on Youtube?” Tony raised a brow, amused, and Peter’s face grew red as he scrunched up his nose and frowned in annoyance.
“He’s not some dude doing stunts, he – he’s helping people!” He argued, taking the “suit” back from Tony’s hands and stuffing it under his tiny bed, before sitting on top of it.
“Sure, if you consider doing back flips for the camera helping people, then Spider-boy is doing great,” Tony shrugged, sticking his hands in his pockets nonchalantly, only to watch him grow even more irritated.
“Man! Spider-man! And I don’t just do back flips, I– He...” He stuttered and Tony took pity on him. His expression softened and he sat next to him on the bed, feeling the tension coming in waves from him as he muttered a quiet “fuck” under his breath.
“Peter, I know. I know. Okay?” He clasped a hand on his shoulder and the young man looked at him with huge, round eyes. Scared. Unsure. “I’ve been watching you for years. Your secret is safe with me. I’m not here to expose you.”
“Then why are you here?” He raised a brow and Tony took a deep breath, trying to organize his thoughts.
“I kinda picked up a fight with Captain America about signing some papers and then he met this friend who was supposed to be dead, like, eighty years ago, but is somehow alive and possibly a mass murderer? Now I need all the help I can get to fix it.” He winced and watched the boy’s face for his reaction, but he just raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
There was silence for a few seconds as Peter looked around the room, then back at Tony.
“So when do we leave?”
That was the thing about Peter. He trusted Tony blindingly, he never asked too many questions before jumping headfirst into whatever the older man proposed him. No matter how crazy, how inconsequential, how inappropriate. So he wasn’t too surprised when the boy said yes when he asked him out.
They had just arrived at the compound after Strange teleported them back from Titan, they hadn’t even showered yet, they were both covered in bruises and blood, but he looked at Peter and couldn’t help but think he could have lost him. They could have died, and he would have died without knowing the answer to the question that had been sitting at the back of his throat for months by then, which was–
“Yes,” Peter nodded, a faint blush taking over his dirty and bruised cheeks, and Tony blinked a few times.
“Don’t you want to think about that for a minute?” He asked, tilting his head to the side, and Peter frowned.
“Um, no? Why?”
“Because you’re twenty and I’m twenty-seven years your senior, kid.” It was terrifying to say that out loud. Peter was twenty. Tony was forty-seven. Twenty-seven years separated them. Tony was full grown man when Peter was swimming around in his father’s testicles.
“You just asked me out, you can’t call me kid anymore, I’m sure that’s written in some rulebook somewhere.” Even though he was still blushing, he found it in himself to be sassy and annoying. Tony rolled his eyes playfully.
“Fair enough. So, should I call you later?” He pointed over his shoulder, signaling that he was going to his quarters to shower and rest for a few hours. Peter frowned.
“For what?”
“For your answer? About that date?” Peter just looked at him like he’d asked the most stupid question ever.
“I just said yes.” He said, raising an eyebrow, and Tony sighed.
“I thought we agreed you’d think harder about it.”
“Uh, no, you just chickened out for a second there, but my answer is still yes.” He shrugged with a playful smile on his lips and Tony gawked at him.
“I didn’t chic – ugh, you’re such a brat.”
“I’m sure brat is off-limits, too.” He winked, walking away towards his quarters.
Tony worried about their relationship – as did everyone else, specially their close friends and May. Peter was so young and, to make matters worse, he sort of worked for Tony. Ever since Germany, the older man paid him a hefty salary for being a part of the team – he was always on call, after all, and always trained at the compound whenever he was in New York.
But as it turned out, his worry was unnecessary. Although young, Peter was mature beyond his years and acted more like an adult than Tony did most of the time – they sort of met in the middle. As for the power imbalance, it actually felt like Peter was in control more often than not. It was subtle, though, Tony only noticed because Rhodey pointed it out once.
“That kid’s got you wrapped around his little finger.” He laughed into his beer bottle as he watched Peter walking away. Tony blinked, having a sip of the tea the younger man had just brought him. Peter was dead set on getting him on a healthier diet and tea was somehow involved. The young man insisted it would help with his sleeping schedule, so Tony just agreed, even though he thought most teas tasted like dirty water. “If he says jump, you ask how high.” Tony was going to argue, but then stopped himself. He tried to think of the last time he’d said no to Peter, the last time he’d denied him anything, but not a single memory came to mind. “I’m not judging, it’s a good look on you. Whipped boyfriend.”
Tony noticed, then, that he was. Whipped, that is. Peter was always telling him what to do – gently, of course, and always with his best interests at heart. And he listened, because, as it soon became apparent, Peter was usually right about most things. Tony was more practical, he was in charge in the lab, what with decades of experience over him, as well as in the battlefield, for the same reason. But when it came to their personal lives, Peter called the shots. And it was fine. It was good. He felt loved and cared for like never before and he loved it. He loved Peter.
But he’d lost him.
And he couldn’t help but feeling guilty. It was his fault, had to be. He was in charge out there. He was supposed to look out for him in the field, he was supposed to keep him safe, bring him home alive and well, but he couldn’t even bring his fucking body back. He had nothing left of him but terrifying memories of cold, dead eyes and bloody lips trying to call out his name.
Days and weeks and months went by, but he barely noticed, barely left the tower anymore. He was vaguely aware of people coming and going – Pepper, to check on him from time to time; Rhodey, trying to get him out of the lab; Steve, with constant reports on what the Avengers were doing, as if he cared; Bruce, with excuses about projects he was working on; and Nat, for unclear reasons. They never asked him to suit up, though, not for anything. Not in a Tom Ford three-piece, not in Mark L. They just let him be. Which was good, it felt good to be forgotten up there in the workshop, which used to be their favorite place in the world.
Over those three years they’d been together, Tony had taken Peter everywhere – and he meant everywhere. A boy who had barely left Queens before he met Tony got to see so may different cities, so many different countries, even if just for one night sometimes, just for dinner, before they had to get back to their hectic lives.
But they always went back to their favorite place, Tony’s workshop, filled with so many memories it sometimes felt like it was haunted by their ghosts. Both of them. Because some part of Tony must have died with him and sometimes, when he got distracted, he saw them. Specially on the floor by the couch, that was too tiny for the two of them and Tony kept saying he was going to buy a bigger one, but for some reason he never did and they always ended up on the fluffy rug on the floor.
“You feel amazing,” Tony whispered as his fingers enveloped Peter’s hips, pulling him down lower, and the younger man moaned quietly and smiled as the words left Tony’s lips. He leaned forwards to kiss him as rocked his hips in a slow, lazy pace. “You are perfect, my love.”
“If you keep feeding my praise kink like that, I’m not gonna last two minutes here.” He laughed quietly against the older man’s lips, who sighed when he felt the boy’s muscles tightening around him.
“I won’t complain too much about it.” He tightened his grip on Peter’s hips when he sat back up and started moving up and down in a way he knew would drive the engineer insane. “You’re gonna kill this old man someday, I swear.”
“I really hope not, I kinda like him a little.”
And their ghosts giggled together and disappeared into thin air, like dust in the wind, and only a half-dead Tony remained with a glass of whiskey in hand, staring at the rug on the floor.
***
Friday was monitoring the press and the internet for any sign of Peter, but there was none to be found. For the first couple of days, Tony was restless, but hopeful. Peter had been missing for six months, there hadn’t been any sign of him for all of that time, so the fact that he appeared out of the blue that day meant that something had changed. He was sure he would show up again at any second.
As days went by, though, his hope started to dwindle. He grew desperate by the hour thinking that he would have to go another six months without seeing Peter, perhaps even longer – perhaps he’d never see him again. Sometimes he wondered if he was wrong, if that wasn’t even Peter in the video, if maybe he was really dead after all, but whenever he watched the video again he was sure of it. It was him.
So he couldn’t help but think that he had to be locked up somewhere. It brought back terrifying memories of those three months he spent in that cave in Afghanistan and how he never really recovered from that – he still had nightmares about it, twelve years later. Peter had been gone for six months, seventeen days, four hours and thirty-three minutes. And counting.
He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, the only thing he could think about was Peter, and the cave, and Barnes’s sessions with BARF, and Hydra’s brainwashing methods. He drove himself mad with all the possibilities of what could have happened to Peter – what might be happening right at that second as he waited for answers.
He’d been awake for almost sixty-two hours straight when it happened.
“I think you should see this, boss.” Friday’s voice interrupted the loud music and Tony frowned as he raised his eyes from his latest project – a new suit for Peter, one so sophisticated and impenetrable, not even vibranium could pierce through it. Friday wasn’t supposed to interrupt him unless the world was ending or she had news about Peter, Tony was very specific about that, so, yeah, he was a little freaked out when he heard her voice.
She showed him footage of Stark Tower’s security cameras, Tony’s heart almost stopped when he saw the boy sneaking in through a window, along with Fish-bowl-guy.
“He’s here.” He whispered to himself, unable to move for a second. His first instinct was to run to him, but he couldn’t be irresponsible, there were lots of people in the building, he couldn’t predict what could happen, so he had to take a few precautions. “Friday, where’s Pepper?”
“Miss Potts is not in the building, she’s caught in traffic a few miles away, boss.” Tony nodded to himself, taking a deep breath, then he started moving.
“Evacuate the building immediately, but don’t cause a panic, I don’t want them to know I know they’re here. Call Pepper, tell her to stay away. Where are they headed?” As he barked out orders, he watched Peter climb into the vents.
“They seem to be heading to the mainframe, boss.”
“Revoke Peter’s access to the systems,” Tony rushed to the elevator, the mainframe was situated right below his penthouse, it took up the whole floor and there was no way in or out other than the elevators and the air vents.
“Done, boss.”
Tony’s heart was beating wildly in his chest, filled with mixed feelings. He was going to see Peter for the first time in six months, after he literally rose from the dead – he’d gone to his funeral, for Christ’s sake – but it wouldn’t be a heartwarming reunion. He knew Peter wasn’t himself. Something had happened to him and he wasn’t okay, he was worried about what might happen, but the anxiety to see him again in person after so long was stronger than anything else.
He activated Mark L and when the door to the elevator opened, the room was quiet. It was huge, the light was low and blueish, there were at list seventeen rows of processors from one end of the room to the other, and Tony knew that at the very back, in a corner, there was a computer. He walked down the aisles quietly until he saw them. Peter had his back to him, but there was no mistaking the line of his shoulders, his neck, the way he stood, his quick fingers flying over the keyboard.
“Peter...” It came out as a sigh, but it was loud enough for both of them to hear and turn to him. For the first time, Fish-bowl-guy had his helmet off and Tony could see his face – the same face that took Peter away from him months earlier. “You!” He stalked towards them, but Peter webbed his feet together. Tony could easily break it, but stopped in his tracks, he didn’t want it to escalate to a fight. “What are you doing, Pete?”
“How dare you talk to him, Stark! After everything you’ve done?” Those eyes were so familiar, but he couldn’t place them. Tony frowned, taking a step closer, breaking the webs around his ankles.
“What– Pete –”
“You revoked my access?” Peter asked, exasperated and nervous when the computer announced his access was denied. That voice. That sweet, honey-like voice...
“So it is you.” Tony took yet another step closer, reaching out to him, but Peter got into a fighting stance.
“Why did you have to do that?” To Tony’s surprise, his voice trembled, like he was actually hurt by that. His heart broke in a million pieces. “You used to love me, you said–“ He shook his head, taking a deep breath. “You leave me no choice.”
“Peter, please–“ Before he could say anything else, the younger man leaped at him and almost managed to rip the faceplate off his face as he sat on his shoulders and started pulling it, but Tony was able to grab him and throw him away, but not far enough to hurt him. He stumbled a few feet and got right back up. “Pete, what are you doing, just stop!”
“No! You stop, Tony, please! How could you–“ He came at him again, and Tony flew out of the his way, but was caught by his web around his ankle. Peter swung him and threw him to the floor, but Tony quickly got up. “Please, Tony, you –“
“Don’t talk to him, Pete, he’s gonna try to manipulate you! We have to kill him, there’s no other choice!” Fish-bowl-guy was typing furiously at the keyboard, but Friday was keeping Tony updated. He was good, definitely above average, but he probably wouldn’t be able to hack into his systems. “Once we’re done, we can’t let him live, Peter.”
“What the fuck is he talking about! Kid, it’s me, it’s me, what are you doing?” Tony tried to reach Peter again, but he shot webs at him, trying to tie his arms to his torso, which was useless. The engineer knew Peter was going easy on him, he was almost as strong as Mark L and if the suit he was wearing was anything like the one Tony made for him, it had an instant kill mode. Still, he kept trying to bind him, not hurt him.
“I can’t let you release Extremis to the public! Please, I’m begging you, let me help you, we can–“ Fish-bowl-guy grabbed Peter’s arm, pulling him away and shaking him.
“Peter, stop fucking around! He’s dangerous!”
“Don’t fucking touch him!“ Tony had had it with him, he charged his repulsors and was going to aim right at his head, but for a short while, the room went dark, then when the lights came back up, only Peter was there. He had his mask off and, for a moment, Tony was free to breath. For the first time in months, he could fill his lungs up with air because his beautiful face was right there in front of him, within reach. Alive, healthy.
And staring at him with hatred.
“You’re disgusting, Tony. How could you do that to me? You groomed me, you sick fuck, I was just a boy, you molested me!” He started walking towards him and Tony blinked in shock.
“What?”
“You’re a good for nothing piece of shit, you left me for dead months ago, didn’t even come looking for me, I bet you found some younger ass to fuck, didn’t you? You old perv.” Tony took a few steps back, heart beating loudly in his ears. He’d never seen such hate in his eyes in all those years they were together.
“Pete...”
“You came after me because you couldn’t find someone your own age who would put up with your crap, right? The drinking, the nightmares, the fucking panic attacks, I was so fucking done with it! All of it!” He couldn’t believe his ears, Peter – he would never talk to him like that. Right? Or was that how he felt the whole time? “Give me access to EDITH, Tony.” He demanded and Tony frowned. EDITH was an AI that gave its users access to Stark Industries's global satellite network along with an arsenal of missiles and drones. It was only supposed to be used in case of Tony’s death, Peter knew that. “If you want to redeem yourself, you’ll do it, and I might forgive you.”
“Boss, I think you should see something,” Before Tony could answer, Friday activated the suit’s thermal imaging and Tony frowned. Peter was not standing in front of him. In fact, he was nowhere to be found and there was nobody where he stood just seconds ago. First, he panicked, thinking he had disappeared again, but it just took him five seconds to realize what was going on.
“Where is this hologram coming from, Fri?” Friday deactivated the thermal imaging and Tony was shocked by how realistic the Peter staring back at him was. So realistic that only one person in the whole world could have made it: himself.
“There are five drones projecting images in the room, sir.”
“Take them out.”
In seconds, five tiny missiles were launched from his suit and the drones fell to the floor, lifeless, and suddenly the whole room changed. It was still the same setting, but it somehow looked more real then, and of course, Peter had disappeared.
“Tony? Tony, where did you go?! What – what happened?” He heard Peter’s voice on the other end of the room and he rushed to get there.
Peter was curled up in a corner, looking scared and desperate as he looked around him in confusion. The other guy was kneeling next to him, trying to comfort him again.
“Pete, whatever he showed you, whatever you saw, it wasn’t real. He’s using BARF!” He tried to approach the young man, but his eyes were wild as he shook his head. He pushed the other guy away but kept crawling backwards, away from Tony as well.
“Stay away from me, please, don’t come any closer. I-I don’t wanna hurt you, please, Tony, please...” He was still looking around like he didn’t expect to still be there.
“Why do you always have to ruin every-fucking-thing, Stark? Why do you have to stand in the fucking way of every single thing that I do?” Fish-bowl-guy got up and started marching towards him, furious.
“I have no fucking idea who you are, you fucking weirdo.” Tony aimed his repulsors at him and the guy stopped, laughing incredulously.
“You hav – you motherfucker! You think you’re a God, don’t you? Above everything and everyone, literally wrapped in wealth and technology you’re unfit to wield. Like the holographic system I designed. A revolutionary breakthrough with limitless applications, that you turned into a self therapy machine and renamed it BARF! My life’s work, Stark, and you renamed it BARF! I told you it was a mistake, that my technology could change the world and then you fired me. You said I was… unstable. Ring any bells?”
It clicked, then. The crazy, wild eyes, the hand gestures, the insane world domination plans.
“Beck.” No wonder Tony had forgot about him, the guy was brilliant, but completely insane. He helped develop the technology behind BARF, but once he started talking about weaponizing it, Tony decided to let him go. “I didn’t steal it, it belonged to me, it was my idea, I made you head of the project because I thought you could see it through, but your ideas for what it could be used for were clearly unhealthy and a fucking threat to the world. So, yeah, not sorry for firing your ass, I was clearly right. What even is your endgame here, Beck? What do you want?”
“These days, you can be the smartest guy in the room, the most qualified, and no one cares. Unless you’re flying around with a cape or shooting lasers from your hands, no one will even listen. Well, now I’ve got a cape. And lasers. With my technology and with EDITH, I will be the greatest hero on Earth!” He spread his arms and laughed like the madman he was, and Tony frowned.
“Yeah? Where are your lasers now?” The guy looked at him like he had just realized he had nothing. Peter was curled in a corner, too confused to act, his drones lay limp on the floor, and he had no way out of the room. “Better luck next time, asshole.” Tony wanted to kill him, he did, but he controlled himself and just knocked him over the head. He fell heavily to the floor and Tony turned to Peter, who was still looking at him like the whole world had been turned upside down. “Peter, baby, c’mon, it’s me, it’s Tony,” He tried to approach him, but he shook his head violently.
“S-stand back!” He panted, eyes flicking between Tony and the guy on the floor. “What’s happening, I don’t understand, I don’t… We were… Outside and you…You killed people, how…”
“It’s fine, it’s gonna be fine, I promise, just trust me, I will take care of you, I’ll take care of everything, I –“
“Stay away from me!” Peter got up and run towards the elevator, Tony had no choice other than shoot him with the tranquilizer he used on Bruce when he hulked out at the wrong time. He rushed to catch him before he hit the ground and carefully cradled him in his arms.
Finally, in his arms. Warm and alive, solid and breathing.
“I’m so sorry, Peter. For everything. I’ll make it up to you.”
***
Tony startled awake when he heard screaming. His heart almost jumped out of his chest and he was on his feet in a matter of seconds the minute he registered it was Peter’s voice. He was distressed, possibly hurt, so he flew to his side, but was quickly pushed away by nurses and doctors that rushed into the room and Tony remembered the last 24 hours, where they were and why.
“Tony! Tony!” Peter called as he gasped for air, and that was more than enough for the older man to force his away back to him, grabbing his shaking hand.
“I’m here, baby, I’m here, are you okay?” He asked in a rush looking into his wild, scared eyes, and the kid just looked back at him for a few minutes, blinking several times, before he nodded slowly.
“Are you – are you real?” He rubbed his forehead, panting, and Dr. Cho approached him to run a few tests. Peter had been out for a whole day after the Hulk-sized dose of tranquilizer Tony shot him with, even with his fast metabolism.
“I am. Do you feel that?” He brushed his thumbs across his cheeks and Peter closed his eyes, sighing and nodding slowly. Tony took his hands and pressed them to his own face, down his scratchy cheeks that hadn’t seen a razor in weeks, and Peter smiled. “It’s me, I’m here now, it’s over.” Tony explained to him as doctor Cho checked his blood pressure and his pulse, asked him a few questions, then once she was satisfied, she nodded.
“You’re okay, Peter. You just need a lot of rest, ok? Most of your wounds from the fight have already healed, but I’m going to keep you here overnight just to be sure, then you can go right home, ok?” He nodded and she smiled. “Welcome back.”
She left the room and silence took over for a second, but they still looked at each other, as if afraid that if the looked away the other would disappear. Nat had interrogated Beck and figured out his plan. The terrorist attack was an ambush, it was his goal to kidnap Peter all along, he knew he was the only person, besides Tony, who had access to EDITH.
He made them see Peter’s death as he kidnapped him with an illusion of Tony. He was holding Peter in a warehouse in Queens and the sad thing was, he didn’t even need anything to contain him. He kept him there with illusions. Peter thought he was at Stark Tower the whole tome, living with Tony as if nothing had changed.
Well, with a few changes. Beck’s Tony was slowly going mad, called himself Superior Iron man and planned to take over humanity by spreading a virus called Extremis 3.0. When Peter refused to help him, he was turned into a hostage. Peter was “Tony’s hostage” for months before Beck “rescued him” – by keeping him in the same warehouse, with different illusions. He managed to make him believe the Avengers were in on Tony’s plan and they had to stop them. The bank robbery was necessary to weaponize the few drones he was able to build after he left Stark Industries.
“How… How are you feeling, Pete?” He braced himself for the answer, because he knew it would be nothing short of horrible and he knew that whatever happened to him was his fault. The younger man bit his lower lip, frowned, and shook his head slightly.
“Confused. Scared.” He confessed, tearing up, but he kept holding Tony’s hand tightly. “Not sure if any of this is even real. If you are real.”
Tony could see that he meant it when he looked into his eyes. He was terrified. The older man took a deep breath and sat beside him on the bed.
“Do you remember our trip to Brazil?” He placed Peter’s hand on his own face again, kissing its palm. Peter nodded with a small smile. “Remember our last night there, on the hotel suite’s balcony? We had been together for, what, two, three months at the time? Remember what I said to you?” A tear ran down his cheek when he whispered yes. “I’m gonna marry you someday, kid.” Tony whispered back, joining their foreheads.
“And I said you couldn’t call me kid when you were making marriage plans.” Peter laughed wetly between tears, leaning up to place a gentle kiss on Tony’s lips, sighing in relief. “I should have known that could have never been you…” Peter’s hand slid from Tony’s cheek, to his shoulder, down his arm, until it reached the little cuts on his hands, the rough pads of his fingers. Peter took a deep breath, closing his eyes. “How long?”
Peter didn’t have to ask the whole question, Tony heard it, and he squeezed his hand.
“Six months.” He winced when Peter’s eyes grew large as saucers.
“Fuck... Fuck! Tony – I feel so stupid… I should have known, I should have fucking –“
“Hey, hey, don’t, don’t you dare blame yourself, you hear me? He fooled us all, Pete. The reason why I didn’t come looking for you before was because... For six months, I thought you dead.” He cradled his face in his hands and Peter gasped.
“Oh, God, Tony.”
“I saw you die, Pete,” He whispered, lowering his head so Peter didn’t have to see his tears. “I saw you die before my eyes. And I – I believed it, too. I never went after you, kid. I’m so sorry, I could have saved you, but I–“ before he could finish, he felt the boy’s fingers under his chin, lifting his head, and he was met with an equally wet face staring back at him.
“I’m here, now. And so are you. We’ll get through this together, okay?”
“Pete...”
There were no more comforting words to say other than his name. The name he hadn’t dared to say for so many months. He knew they had a long way to go, he could predict the sleepless nights, the nightmares, the anxiety attacks, the absolute terror of thinking of ever losing him again. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but they were going to do it together, they would heal together and relearn how to recognize each other blindly once again. One step at a time.
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Out of Fenway Park
About: A SoCal born-and-raised reader relocated to Boston, where the very last thing she expects is to run into Chris Evans at a Red Sox game with beer dripping down her head and his hotdog plastered to her shirt. Literally, running into him, and then somehow still getting a date out of it.
Word Count: 3,365
Requested By: Anon. Thanks so much for sending this in! Absolutely love this story, thanks for giving me the opportunity to write it. Feel free to send in any other reqs!
P.S. I’m sorry but, as deeply as I love Boston, I’m just a New Yorker, posting a fanfic on the internet, asking you to forgive me for my inability to give the Red Sox the dignity of winning- feat. the best gif I could find of him repping the team
The sun was the only reason I agreed to go to this baseball game anyway and even that had failed me. I was looking forward to sitting back with its warmth washing over my skin so I could close my eyes and try to pretend like I was back on a beach in Southern California. Instead, it was borderline freezing rain and all I could think about was the ground being even muddier with the still melting snow and how I couldn’t tell if there really was rumbling thunder or if it was just the shouts of countless Bostonians surrounding me, cheering on the Red Sox. They were up against the Yankees and even I could tell it wasn’t looking good, but that didn’t dampen their home-team spirits.
My coworkers were maybe the worst of the bunch, drunkenly yelling profanities at the players while they sloshed their beers in agreement with one another’s profane criticisms of the pitcher. I was almost regretting giving up SoCal for a job offer I could hardly dream of fresh out of college with the only downside being that it was on the east coast. Anyone could’ve told you I despised the cold, being too far from the ocean, and the Patriots, maybe not in that order. But even more than that I knew I’d hate myself if I passed up this opportunity. So, without giving more thought than I maybe should’ve, I packed everything I could into three suitcases and a carry-on and moved across the country, hopes probably higher than the plane.
Winter, however, brought me crashing back down to reality. Everything in nature either died or got the right idea to chase the sun south. I was stuck with snowbanks higher than my knees and a proper coat was nowhere in sight. Not that it mattered much anyway, the weather felt like it was freezing my bones to their core no matter what I wore. Initially, I had this glamorous idea of curling up by the window with a blanket on my lap as the fire crackled, holding a book in one hand and a hot chocolate in the other. Hitting the pavement after slipping on ice knocked the ignorantly blissful can-do attitude right out of me the first time. And the second and the third and I lost count after that.
Which is exactly why I agreed to come to this baseball game in the first place. Back home, spring meant warmer days and blooming flowers and short sleeve t-shirts. I thought I’d get to enjoy a little bit of sunlight at the very least, maybe get to finally connect with my coworkers in a meaningful way outside of asking for help to unjam the copy machine. However, the start of the season in this hell hole apparently included a lot more of the lion than the lamb and a rowdy crowd of Red Sox fans who thought it was good enough for shorts anyway and drank like alcoholic fish to top it all off.
A girl I shared the wall of my cubicle with, Alex, wrapped a lazy arm around my shoulders, pulling me too close into her Heineken haze than I was comfortable given the fact that I barely knew her. Plus, being the only sober one was never any fun. I had a feeling they only invited me under the guise of getting to know each other better considering all I’d become familiar with was the smell of their beer burps. After all, being barely of-age and the new kid made me their permanently designated driver, even though we’d taken the T here.
“Know the difference between a Yankee and uh,” Alex paused to laugh at her own joke and let out a hiccup, “a pothole?” She was hanging onto me for support, speaking close enough to my ear that it could’ve been a secret though she was saying it loud enough for the rest of our group to hear over the boom of other fans. “I’d swerve for the hole!”
I chuckled a little to be nice, although I didn’t think it was very funny. Our coworkers to Alex’s right, on the other hand, guffawed as if it was the most hilarious thing they’d ever heard. Preferring their reaction and acting almost in slow motion, she raised her cup in cheers of herself and simultaneously turned to the others, sloshing the frothy drink until it rained down on me.
I shot up out of my seat as the cold beer trickled down my back. Everyone paused, eyes glued to me for my reaction as I tried to maintain my temper. I used my hands like windshield wipers, tossing the liquid on my face to the floor with an angry snap of my wrists. Alex started to profess a slurred apology, but I held up my hand for an extra second or two to compose myself. “It’s...” I paused to suck in another deep breath. “It’s okay. Accidents happen. I’m gonna go clean up.” Before she could offer to help, I whipped around and jumped down the stadium’s stairs two at a time.
My cheeks were hot with embarrassment as I scanned the hall, looking for something resembling a bathroom sign frantically. People were probably busy enough with their own agendas, be it getting back to the game or buying a baseball hat, but I still felt every set of eyes boring into me. So I tried to put my head down and run to the closest restroom until I hit a wall instead.
Literally, it sent me tumbling to the floor until I landed on my ass, melting into a messy puddle of beer mixed with my former self. Contrary to my belief, someone said, “I didn’t see you there.”
My eyes left my hands, where I’d tried to bury my face like an ostrich in the sand, to see a broad man bending down on his knees before me. He had a Red Sox cap pulled low over his face, a thick beard, and a light grey t-shirt with a dark wet patch in the middle of his chest. Must’ve been where we collided. “I’m so sorry,” he continued with the exaggerated o’s and r’s that sound like ah’s, still so wrong to my west coast ears. I spotted an empty disposable food tray in his hand and looked down to see the hotdog it’d previously housed glued to my stomach by its condiments. Exactly what I needed.
“Are you alright?” He extended a hand to help me up, but I couldn’t move. Instead, I just sat sprawled on my butt at Fenway Park, reeking of somebody else’s alcohol, staring at this beautiful stranger. His concerned look turned a little suspicious the longer I sat there without grabbing his hand, my mouth moving like a fish out of water. All I had to say was yes or I am or something, anything really, but I couldn’t even manage a three-letter sentence.
Instead, I peeled his hotdog off of my shirt and returned it to its little white boat. “Oh, uh, thanks I guess. Or sorry, I mean.” He adjusted his hat and cleared his throat before extending his hand again. “Is there anything I could do to… help?” His eyes scanned me again as if he were sizing me up, making me even more self-aware of the awful state I was in.
“Bathroom,” I blurted out as my mind caught up, barely able to rip my eyes from his biceps. He stitched his eyebrows together, back to confusion again, though I didn’t give him any time to ask questions before I all but snatched his hand and he hoisted me up.
“Nice to meet you, Bathroom. I’m Chris,” he said with a smirk, teasingly shaking my hand. “You didn’t hit your head, right?” He tried to subdue a laugh, but the playful look in his deep blue eyes betrayed him as he reached to brush off my shoulder.
“Very funny,” I shot back with an exaggerated roll of my eyes, betting my smile gave me away. “As in Evans, right? You look too much alike for it to be a coincidence.”
He played with the sunglasses tucked into his shirt’s collar, probably wishing he’d kept them on for the sake of a disguise. Chris only shrugged, claiming he would neither confirm nor deny. I didn’t need him to though, I’d been stuck watching Marvel movies with my brothers long enough to recognize those cheekbones anywhere. “I’m more of an Iron Man fan anyway,” I tried to emphasize my nonchalance in the hopes that I wouldn’t scare him off. “What I meant was I need help finding the bathroom.”
“Oh, yeah. Just passed one over there I think…” Chris trailed off as his eyes swept over the stadium, looking with much more of a level-head than I could. He found one almost immediately and laced his fingers between mine so it was more like we were holding hands. In a silly school-girl kind of way it made my cheeks flush, which was awfully embarrassing that, given my condition, holding hands with a cute boy was what had turned me into a tomato. Then he tugged me in the direction he came from and I wasn’t in the position to protest.
There was only so much I could do with thin paper towels, lukewarm water, empty soap dispensers, and a tide stick from a kind woman who took pity on me. Still, I spent a while scrubbing at the mustard and ketchup stains and wringing my stringy hair over the sink. It was long enough that I was more than surprised to see Chris leaning against the wall coolly. One foot was pressed against the wall and his arms were crossed over his chest while he whistled a tune.
“Is that The Little Mermaid?” I asked with a wrinkled nose, sounding more dumbfounded to hear this burly, bearded, lumberjack-looking man all but belting out Under the Sea than I was to see he’d been waiting for me.
Chris only shrugged, a crooked grin softening his features.
“Is that a problem?” He cocked an eyebrow and flexed his arms as he crossed them as if to challenge me. But there was this twinkle in his eye that betrayed his demeanor so all I did was shake my head. I tucked some hair behind my ear as I glanced back at Chris, who looked far too satisfied with himself as he said, “Good thing since I owe you some ice cream.”
Chris started walking away, taking quick steps so long I had to take two for each of his to keep up. I called his name but he ignored me until I grabbed his hand to get his attention, which it certainly did as he squeaked to a halt. He squeezed mine before letting it go, looking at me curiously.
I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I was going to say until it was already tumbling out of my mouth. “If anything I owe you a hotdog,” I muttered, avoiding his stare. Not that I was uncomfortable waltzing off with a stranger in the limelight, which I totally was. Not that my coworkers were waiting for me and would never believe I’d been getting ice cream with Chris Evans, which was also true. Not any of the totally valid reasons to feel a little funny about this whole thing. Instead, I insisted on buying a hotdog for a guy I was sure had more cash sitting in his bank account than I’d ever see.
“Don’t be ridiculous, my lunch had it coming,” Chris insisted with a swipe of his hand, playfully brushing me off. “Your shirt, however, did not deserve that stain.” His pointed finger dropped to the orangey Rorschach test permanently painted just below my chest, getting a laugh from me.
“Here,” Chris said as he untied the hoodie around his waist. I tried to keep my eyes from wandering to his stomach, where his shirt lifted a little higher than it should’ve been allowed, revealing the curve of his chiseled hips and the beginnings of a fuzzy trail dipping below his belt. “Take this to cover that up.” He handed me his sweater covered in pet hair and I slipped it on immediately, hoping it would hide my wild blush for a few seconds at least until I popped out the other side. It smelled like a dog had been curled up to it coupled with an intoxicating cologne I didn’t recognize and crisp air right before it rained.
I thanked him but Chris shrugged and puffed out his bottom lip before resuming his long strides to the concession stand, tugging me behind like luggage. “Plus, the game is already over. I don’t have to watch my boys actually lose. Maybe if you’d been a Yankees fan, I could’ve excused the whole sweeping you off your feet thing... but come to think of it you aren’t repping the Red Sox either.” He side-eyed me suspiciously without pausing until he nearly hit someone else’s back.
“That’s an awfully nice way to put sending me tumbling to the concrete,” I scoffed, skidding to a stop at Chris’s side in line. “And sports culture is just misplaced nationalism if you ask me.” I crossed my arms to emphasize my point when I was met with raised eyebrows and a slack jaw.
“Then what are you doing here exactly?” He asked, keeping one eyebrow perched a little higher than the other. There was something about the way he smiled at me, all genuine and gentle, and this look in his wide eyes. Whatever it was, I felt like I could tell him everything. So I did.
“All I wanted to do was sit in the sun,” I started, completely aware of how much I sounded like a toddler who missed her nap as I launched off into everything as if he’d been the one pulling up to watch my origin story with popcorn in hand. I told him about how much I missed California and how I felt like I hadn’t met anyone here who got me the way my friends did back home. And how much I loved the work I was doing, the way the end of every day left me feeling complete until I left the office, and how I didn’t think I could survive another Nor’easter for it. I spilled my guts along with the can of worms Chris didn’t mean to open as the concession line grew shorter until we were at the front.
He ordered chocolate and vanilla cones, giving me the choice between the two once they were handed over so I thanked him. We walked around the stadium for a while, bumping hips on occasion and crunching on our cones while we chatted about anything and everything except what I’d said earlier. That was until Chris suddenly stopped to sit on a bench, grabbing my hand to take me down with him. He cleared his throat before speaking with more of a serious air to him so I knew to brace myself for what was coming.
“You’re young, yeah?” he asked, shoving his napkins into a nearby bin. I nodded as I sucked what I could out of the bottom of my cone, though I felt like I’d done a lot of growing up lately. “You’ve got a lot of time to figure these things out. Trust me, I know California is nice, but there’s a reason why I keep coming back to Boston.”
I thought about what he’d said for a beat or two, but I’ll be honest, it was difficult sitting next to him. It was awfully cold with the sun tucked far behind the clouds all day so I was grateful that Chris was so warm. Even his hoodie retained his heat, although I still curled up a little deeper into his side than I might’ve if he wasn’t a human radiator. “Mind telling me why?” I asked, popping the last of my ice cream into my mouth.
He shook his head as he said, “Sure, oh man. So many reasons…” I watched as his blue eyes rose as if he could see the sky through the stadium ceiling, the corner of his jaw flexing as it clenched and relaxed as he thought about it. “Other than my family being in Mass, there’s always something to do. We’ve got the best museums and such a rich history, if that’s your sort of thing,” he paused to scratch his beard as he thought a little more.
His blue eyes nearly popped out of his head as another thing occurred to him. “The culture is something else. There’s something really special about a middle finger being a sign of affection to some poor sap giving tours in colonial clothing and everyone joining in to sing Sweet Caroline on the T on the way home from a game,” Chris continued with animated, sweeping waves of his arms, talking with a kind of passion for a town I couldn’t imagine having in my heart. He shook his head as he added, “And the food is great, too. I mean, where else do they have a whole word for cod that isn’t really cod?”
I laughed from the bottom of my stomach, where I expected a heavy pit of anxiety to be sitting at the beginning of a conversation like this. My homesickness and unhappiness here wasn’t something that I told anyone before out of fear of disappointing someone or being unable to admit my failure out loud. Chris was easy to talk to, more than a stranger usually was. Their judgment never really mattered to me, knowing that I’d probably never see them again. It wasn’t like that with him though, it was easier than that. I felt like he didn’t really judge me at all. He only tried to understand, help, and make me smile while he was at it. And I couldn’t deny a part of my heart that hoped I’d see Chris again. Not only again, but a lot.
“The people aren’t too bad either,” he smiled sheepishly, bumping our shoulders together and looking at me through his dark eyelashes in a way that made me feel like the only person here. As if I was the only one he was talking about. Chris took a deep breath that puffed up his chest, one he didn’t release until after his arm was comfortably slung over my shoulders. “Just give the city a shot, I think it’ll surprise you.���
I wanted to tell him it already had, really he had, but instead, I laughed dryly and said, “Hell, this city makes me feel like I need a shot.” I leaned my head on Chris’s shoulder as it shook with his chuckle, looking up at him to see how he rolled his eyes even though they were scrunched by his smile.
“Know what?” he said like he was asking himself with a deep, shaky breath. He shot up from the bench as if he’d been shocked. I obviously didn’t know Chris well, but even I could tell he was nervous as he rubbed his palms dry on his jeans. “Let’s go get a drink then, instill a little Boston pride in you. There’s this great pub down a couple blocks with live music and everything. I mean, if you want to…?” He scratched the back of his head with one hand and extended the other to me with his offer.
When I grabbed it, Chris broke out into a grin that made my stomach feel like I was on a rollercoaster. “I’d love to,” I said with a smile that barely held a flame to his. Neither of us made an effort to let go so Chris tugged me toward Fenway’s exit. As we left, I heard tens of thousands of Red Sox fans sigh like deflated balloons before the screams of just as many obscenities broke out. Probably another point for their opponents, but it certainly didn’t make me feel like I’d hit anything short of a home run.
Tags: @patzammit , @thegetawaywriter , @coffeebooksandfandom , @captainsteveevans , @intrepidandabitcrazy , @super100012 , @spilledinkindumpster
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#disclaimer: it's been a while since I went to an mlb game and I've never been to one at Fenway so forgive me#I'm a history nerd who spends my time in Boston at as many museums as I can#Chris Evans#CEvans#chris evans fanfiction#chris evans fanfic#chris evans fic#chris evans x reader#imagine chris evans#chris evans imagine#chris evans drabble#cevans fanfiction#cevans fic#Cevans fanfic#imagine cevans#cevans imagine#cevans drabble#chris evans masterlist#cevans masterlist#steve rogers fanfiction#steve rogers fanfic#steve rogers fic#chris evans oneshot#chris evans one shot#cevans oneshot#cevans one shot
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My story is finished.
I have to thank @ao719, @debramcg1106, @burnsoslow, @the-soot-sprite who told me to post this thing cause its not within my comfort zone to write, Im more of a reader. But my brain wants me to explore this, and I might write more of it if it makes people happy to read it.
” What if….
A tale of two people”
Authors note:
This is a one shot, and my first time ever exploring this
fandom in words. English is not my language so please excuse any mistakes or grammar faults.
Synopsis:
This story explores the What if Drake mentioned in book 2, what if he and Rose (Riley) met somewhere else other than Liam’s bachelor party could their story have become different?
Pairing:
Rose / Drake
Warnings:
None, this is pure fluff, maybe a bit angst because Drake is Drake.
Rating
- PG -
F
riday afternoon, Rose Greer had just clocked off her day shift at the bar where she worked together with her friend Daniel. She had looked forward to an evening having a long bath and then watching a movie since her work required a lot of willpower and she simply did not have a lot of that, but she needed the money and it paid her bills, so she stuck with it.
She had longed for this evening all week and sighed loudly when her phone went off. She looked at the screen “Sandra calling”, Sandra was also one of her good friends in New York. Rose knew this could mean only one thing another blind date. Sandra was well-known for her ability to set friends up with guys, she had an agency that expertise in this and had tried to get Rose aboard several times since she moved to New York. “Yes,” she answered after debating whether she should or not.
“Rose! my best friend in the world”! Sandra’s voice echoed on the other end “I have a proposal for you”, Rose sighed “What now”? Sandra’s voice shrieked with excitement “I have a great blind date for you my friend, you cannot say no this time too good to pass up I assure you”.
“Sandra, I have heard this plenty of times before, why is this such a good opportunity” Rose questioned her friend. “I have this guy who is very handsome, he seems to fit your book of guys really well, tough but indeed handsome please help me out this time will you”. Rose sighed it could not hurt to at least go and see the guy once right, “Okay Sandra, tell me time and place and what kind of clothes I should wear”.
Sandra gave her the info needed, Rose headed home for a quick shower, a change of clothes and then the wait time begun.
7 pm arrived, Rose headed out to the restaurant Sandra told her to go to, it was a smaller one with a cozy decoration. Rose headed inside and sat down by a window, her date seemed not to have arrived yet.
If it was one thing, she hated it was people not clocking in on time, and this person seemed to fit that bill way to good. Five minutes later a guy dressed all in denim entered the place. Rose eyes widened as denim was so out of fashion, this year it was all about style for the guys in New York.
He stood a few moments looking around the area, and Rose got annoyed it was really no other people than her there at that time. He then saw her sitting by the window and walked up. “Are you Greer”? He simply asked hesitating a moment before sitting down opposite her.
“My name is Rose, thank you very much” she said a bit icily since it was not polite to greet the way he did meeting someone the first time. Oh, dear this meeting does not start on the top she thought to herself. The guy sighed to himself Why did I agree to this? The both sat in silence for about five minutes before Rose decided she had to do something, or her night off would be ruined. “Okay, it is clear none of us really want to be here, but why do we not try our best to make it a nice evening for the both of us”? She said and looked at him. He nodded “well yeah okay”. “Why do you not tell me your name to start” Rose said awaiting his reply.
“ Drake” he shifted a bit uncomfortable in his chair “ Look I’m not very good with this chit chat small talk thing with people, I’m also not good at apologizing for my behavior either but I am sorry if I seem like a jerk to you I try not to be it is my personality “ Rose nodded “ it’s all right I do understand, it is not easy to talk to strangers and I am totally agreeing with you about that”. “
Should we start by ordering food and then try go to there making the best out of this meeting for both of us”? She asked, he agreed luckily for him there was both his favorite food burgers and whiskey on the restaurant’s menu. He made his order while Rose looked on with a surprised look “oh we like the same stuff that is good” she said with a hint of a smile. The first smile she had shown that evening. She ordered the same things as him and the waiter left them alone. “So, Drake was it, where are you from and how did you end up in New York”? Rose asked after a while. Drake pondered for a bit before replying “I’m from a small Island called Cordonia, I ended up here because I needed some space from what is going on back there”. Rose listened now more intrigued by this young man. He seemed to be around her age, what could be so terrible he had to leave and go to another country.?
“Wow, that seem like some tough things are going on in your life”? I myself are a New Yorker, my family is normal people and live in another state, but I choose to stay here because it is my home”. Drake simply nodded he was a man of few words but once someone melted his icy heart, he really could be a soft guy but that the would not tell her about, she would have to figure out that one herself if they were to meet again. The food soon arrived, it tasted nice Sandra sure had choose this place for a reason Rose thought as she tried the burger front of her. “Mmmmm this is tasty” she nodded as the first bit was taken in. Drake tasted his and nodded “yeah, its certainly is no bad stuff”. The two of them indulged their food during silence, sometimes its nicer to eat and enjoy the food than interrupting the other with questions. Rose is a girl that like to talk to new people she meets, but if the guy is not so into it, she tries to accept his ways and roll with it. She figured he seemed like a nice but silent guy, perhaps a bit aloof at times but certainly an interesting personality. His looks were no shame though, he was indeed handsome, muscular body type and eyes that could piece into one’s heart at the right moment. Sandra had for once not been wrong that it was a very handsome guy indeed.
Drake had similar thoughts, the woman at that dating agency had stopped him on the streets and convinced him tonight would be the perfect date for him. He would not really believe it, but the woman had insisted so he had obliged to go to the meeting. He was a guy with very little patience for silly girls, he could not stand talking about topics like fashion, movies and the like he was a man of few words. But this girl intrigued him like no one else he had met, he did not know why, it simply felt right. Maybe if he again dared to explore love he might end up happy, might have a life filled of warm, laughter and love but it would take a while to get there, he had to try and make efforts, see where things would go he would have to get over his past girlfriend who left him to be with his best friend, he had to learn to move on with his life.
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Congrats on 500 followers! 😄 And here's something I've actually wanted to ask for a while: as a first-generation American, did you have any struggle defining your identity between your parent's and your birthplace's culture? If so, how did you overcome it? Is there anything I can do to help children who are struggling with that? I'm not exactly a teacher but it's a similar role (We're talking about different countries so it won't exactly be the same, but any tip would be appreciated 😘)
Hi, anon! This is a great question. I can’t speak on behalf of all first-generation children, but yeah, defining your identity as a child when your parents are from a different country certainly comes with a slew of challenges. My parents always wanted to instill Polish culture in me. They spoke Polish at home, cooked Polish food, celebrated Polish holidays, and sent me to Polish Saturday school every week to learn how to read and write in Polish until I was about 14 years old. Honestly, I didn’t start to appreciate their efforts until I was older. As a kid, I found it annoying that I had to go to school 6 days per week instead of 5 like my friends.
Also, my dad has struggled with learning English his entire life. He understands a lot and can speak it when he has to, but he mostly speaks in Polish and has a thick accent when he speaks English. Since he was a stay-at-home dad for most of my childhood, he handled a lot of the parent-teacher conferences when I was in elementary school, and I remember I felt really embarrassed that I had to translate for him to my teacher and vice versa, even though, in retrospect, there were many students in my class whose parents also didn’t know English that well so it wasn’t a big deal. But as a result of all of that, I really tried to distance myself from being Polish.
In retrospect, it all seems silly. Kids feel insecure when they realize they’re different, no matter how small those differences are. I remember I even felt bad about my dad making me sandwiches for lunch using Polish rye bread, and I didn’t like it when he put Polish candies or snacks in my lunchbox. It makes me laugh now. I’m just grateful that I went to school in one of the most diverse places in the world, so I definitely wasn’t alone in my feelings. The most important thing one can do for children is to make them feel like they belong. My teachers did a great job of that, I think. They always taught us that being from a different culture and having parents who are immigrants is something to be cherished. They stressed that America was built by immigrants and that we’re all Americans no matter where we come from or what we look like. I’m very blessed to live in a part of the country where that kind of rhetoric is encouraged rather than discouraged. A majority of my classmates came from different backgrounds so we learned to have empathy for one another. It helped that 90% of my class in elementary school was Latinx and not white lol. And once I started public high school, it was the norm that most of our parents were not from the U.S.
That said, I still consider myself to be more American than Polish because I’ve lived in America my entire life, and that’s always been how I’ve viewed my identity. When people ask where I’m from, I say I’m a New Yorker. Of course, maintaining my connection to Polish culture is still important to me, but I know I will never have the same bond with Poland that my parents have. When I speak Polish, although I think I speak it fairly well, I can’t hide my American twang, and almost every native speaker immediately knows that I didn’t learn Polish in Poland, so I definitely would feel out of place if I had to live in Poland for a long period of time despite the fact that language wouldn’t be an issue.
In terms of overcoming those challenges, I think it’s something you grow into over time naturally. Identity is something we all struggle with over the course of our lives. But the older I got, the less I cared and the less important it seemed. I went from being embarrassed to being proud of being bilingual because I was able to soar through my foreign language classes in high school and college with flying colors. I started to realize what a gift it was, and I think my experiences of having grown up as a first-generation American have taught me how to be more empathetic and curious about the world around me. It’s also why I get extremely pissed off when someone’s American identity is brought into question just because their parents were born someplace else. America is all I have ever known and it is my home, but the only reason I don’t get told to “go back to Poland” is because I’m white. A non-white first-generation American has to constantly assert their American-ness, and I think that’s bullshit because if someone told me to go back to Poland, I would tell them to fuck off lol.
I know that was a long answer. I hope it made some sense and was somewhat helpful. 😊💖
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Some Interviewing Thoughts
My friend is working on a book about how to podcast. He sent me these questions about interviewing and since who knows how much of my answers will actually end up on the pages of said book (which I will plug when it is time, I bet it will be great), I figured I’d just post them here, in case they’re useful to anyone.
If you are not familiar with me or my work, I am the host of the NPR interview show Bullseye with Jesse Thorn (I am the Jesse Thorn of it). I also did a podcast called The Turnaround where I interviewed interviewers about interviewing.
Can you tell us something about your process?
I'm usually at least somewhat familiar with the guest's work - that's why we've booked them. Not always, but usually. So I have that advantage going in to the prep process.
I try to take a full day to prepare. If there's a book, I usually read it over the preceding week or so. If there's a movie or a show, I see it when I can. The rest I cram in before the interview. I don't have Lexis-Nexus (maybe I should?) but I go on Google News and search for as many news pieces as I can about the guest. I prefer big profiles and long interviews. I'll start with whatever's in the Guardian or the Times or the New Yorker, or online sources with deep archives like the AV Club. And I read as much as I can. Usually a few dozen things. Depends on the notoriety of the guest. I'll also read a bit about the work - film or book reviews, just to get other people's perspectives on it, see if there's stuff I haven't thought of. And usually at the beginning and end I'll read... wait for it... Wikipedia. Because it's usually better than people's bios, and it helps me remember the rough narrative of their life and work. I'll also try to listen to or watch at least one interview - maybe when I'm driving in to the studio. That just gives me a feeling of what it's like to talk to them, so I'm not surprised.
While I'm prepping, I keep a document open on my computer in a writing app called Q10 that saves a text file automatically to a folder that's synced across my devices. If a thought I want to make sure to ask about occurs to me while I'm reading, I drop it in there. Not usually in question form, mostly just a phrase, like "loves to play mandolin but isn't good at it" or something. Generally I'm looking to move past what other people have asked. When I read a response that my guest-to-be has to someone else's question, I'm thinking, "what does that response make me curious about?" I can figure out how to do the exposition to get there. And I'm often thinking in a way improvisers call A-to-C. There is a piece of information, I think "what does this make me think of," then I think "what does *that* make me think of?" It helps avoid obviousness. It's important to know how other people ask someone something, so you can ask something different or at least ask in a different way. Because generally you don't want someone's patter, you want a fresh, in-the-moment thought or reaction.
While I'm doing this, if I find media I want to incorporate or ask about, I send it to my producer, who's pulling clips. They'll give me a list of clips, including the ones I specifically wanted, before the interview, and I'll give that a look-over so I can remember roughly what I've got.
In the end, I have maybe a list of six or eight things I want to try and remember to ask about, a list of six or eight clips, and a lot of information in my head about who the person is. Once in a while, I'll have a question written, but generally only because it's something sensitive and I want to say it exactly correctly. Like a question about a crime someone was accused of or a time someone's colleague was harassed or a time someone said something particularly shitty. Those I don't want to be phrasing on the fly. Generally, though, it's just a few phrases so I don't forget to ask about a funny thing I thought of. I just interviewed the soprano Renee Fleming, and the list had "singer breaking wine glass: is that real" on it.
In general, I'm trying to think about a general outline for the interview - like "we'll talk a bit about the new thing first, then circle back to childhood, then through the biography" or whatever. And I'm trying to be curious and think about why they make the choices they do and what I find myself wondering about. Besides that, I want to know enough about the person I'm talking to that I can just focus on conversing with them.
What things do you think are most important or key to your ability as an interviewer?
I like and respect the people I interview. If they seem like an asshole, I don't invite them on my show. They're generally pretty brilliant, or they wouldn't be able to make the great art they make. So my job is to just meet them where they are and talk to them like a person. I probably show a bit more of myself than most folks at NPR do, who are more news-oriented or reporter-oriented, but my interest in the person sitting across from me is sincere. If I share something of myself, it's because I think it might be meaningful to them and help them understand that we are both people, and we're having a chat.
I also don't try to hide my interest behind posturing faux-impartiality. They're there at my invitation, I'd be a real heel if I'd invited them but wasn't interested in what they were saying. I listen when they talk, and react to what they say. I don't try to control the conversation except to the extent I need to do so to make a radio show. I goof around in goofy parts and respond in a humane way in emotional parts. And in general, I know that it can't go that wrong, so I don't really give a fuck. You only get one ticket, might as well enjoy the ride, as Devin the Dude raps.
What do you do to put people at ease or when you sense that they're' holding back? Is there a time you remember when that happened?
I try to put them at ease when I meet them, before I even sit down at the mic. Or before we start if they're in another studio. That really is just basic human stuff. I come out of my office, go over to them, say hi, I'm Jesse. Shake their hand, smile. Let them know we're gonna talk for an hour or so, it'll just be talking, we'll make them sound great. For most guests if there's something that might be sensitive, I'll let them know it isn't live and if there's something personal they don't want to talk about, to just let me know. (That never actually happens.) Maybe I ask them something about their outfit or something I wondered that wasn't really for the air, like about a sports team I heard they like or something. Just talk to them like a nice person would.
If the interview is rolling and they're holding back, I maybe ask them something friendly and surprising, something that makes me look dumb, maybe something silly. If they're really polished but not revealing themselves, I might ask them a question that requires a heartfelt answer - like I dunno... "are you afraid of death?" Mostly though I just know that I have some time and that if I talk to them in a nice human way they'll usually come around to responding in kind.
What do you keep top of mind when interviewing?
The person sitting in front of me. The actual conversation happening at that actual moment.
Could you describe how you go about preparing for an interview, and approx how long that process takes?
I went through it pretty well above, but as far as time goes - outside of consuming the media the person is there to talk about, their book or film or whatever, I'd say I try to give it at least six straight hours. And I'm very fast at it, since I've been doing it now for twenty years. Before it was maybe eight or twelve. But again: that's in the context of most of my guests already being very familiar to me.
Was there a time when something totally unexpected happened during an interview? What did you do in response? How did things turn out?
I once played a clip for Michael K. Williams of a dance track from the 80s, this song where he'd appeared in the video. It was his big break. And I thought maybe he'd be happy to hear it, kind of amused, but he started crying. And he was in a studio in New York, I couldn't really tell if he was sad or hurt or happy or whatever. But I just let him do his thing. Because I didn't need to control the moment. I have him some time, and he shared some incredible memories.
Are there some people you look up to as interviewers? What did you learn from them?
I think Ira Glass is always very deeply interested in other people's feelings. It is absolutely sincere, and he just asks about them. On more than one occasion, I have had him ask me about my feelings when I was interviewing him. He obviously doesn't do the same kind of interviewing I do - he is really looking for a few illustrative or moving highlights - but the way he does that is very inspirational to me.
Terry Gross is extraordinarily modest. She is a brilliant genius, but she is always glad to highlight the guest and what is great or interesting about them. She also always asks for examples, always brings the conversation to specifics and stories when it could be vague.
I did a series called The Turnaround, where I interviewed interviewers about interviewing, and talked to all kinds of famous interviewers, from a variety of media.
Susan Orlean, who writes for the New Yorker, can find a story anywhere. She just shows up and is extraordinarily curious and recognizes when something is interesting and pulls the thread. That's another improv technique - a scene is built on the first distinctive element. You spot it and you grow it.
Larry King is always hyper-present. He did years and years of long live radio shifts. He absolutely trusts his curiosity. He told me he once asked a pilot if, when the plane took off, he knew it was going to land. He is unafraid of looking like a fool as long as he is following his curiosity.
Reggie Osse, Combat Jack, he knew everything about the subject he was interviewing people about. Everything. So he always had a little anecdote or a little insight that opened things up. His show was loooooong, but that was because he was always relating to something someone said about something in a club in 1998, and that led to this, and all of a sudden you're armpit-deep in amazing stories.
Jerry Springer really respects everyone he talks to, and cares about them and their story. Including folks who other people might laugh at or scorn or pity. He just goes in and tries to give them a chance to be heard.
Elvis Mitchell is a real critic, and he has more expertise in entertainment media than anyone I've ever met. I mean he knows more about his seventh-greatest area of expertise than I do about my first. He's really masterful at talking to artists about the actual content of their work. Themes and ideas. In a clear and concrete way. So many people substitute anecdote for insight, and I am very grateful for his insight.
Marc Maron is like a genius puppy. He just pokes and prods and guesses, and he's so smart and is crackling with such energy that he finds stuff because people step up to meet him. He also is so raw, emotionally, that people just try to take care of him by sharing themselves.
Audie Cornish is astonishingly clear-eyed. She knows what she needs to know, she knows the context, she goes and gets it.
Howard Stern will just ask about anything. And you know he will talk about anything. So you feel obliged to tell him. And he always asks about the biggest and most important stuff. Like how did you lose your virginity or do you believe in God or whatever. He just does it and what are you going to do, not answer?
That's only a few, I could list a million more. I would say that something they share is that they are all actually curious. It is not a performance of curiosity; they want to know about others.
Are there any stories you could share of times when you learned some valuable lessons about interviewing? Do's and don'ts?
I once interviewed Betty Davis, who is a legendary (and legendarily reclusive) funk musician. She was on the phone from Pittsburgh, patched through by her label since she didn't want anyone to have her phone number. And she was very polite, but very fragile-sounding. She hadn't done press in a few decades, and hadn't even picked up her ASCAP checks until a fan tracked her down and hand-delivered them. She gave me a lot of one sentence answers to my questions. It was really, really hard, but I remember thinking of something I'd read in Jessica Abel and Ira Glass' This American Life comic, which is that if you don't say anything, people will fill the space. So when she finished her sentences, I just waited. For a long time, sometimes. Like five or ten seconds, which is FOREVER. And every time, she added to her initial remarks. And that saved the interview.
Another time I went to a fancy hotel in west Los Angeles to interview Bill Withers. He's done some press since then, but at the time he hadn't really done any in like fifteen years. He's older and incredibly smart and a little grumpy. And when I sat down, he kind of started giving me the business. Because whatever - I was a young white guy there being presumptuous enough to bother him, a guy who really had nothing to gain from the interview. And I remember at some point he was giving me a hard time and I kind of poked back at him, and he laughed, and after that it was one of the best interviews I'd ever done. I think just because he was like, "oh, this is a person, too. He's not an idiot, he's here because he cares, and maybe he's even interesting to talk to."
What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you were starting out?
That it's going to be fine. I think I learned that from doing the Turnaround. Because I wasn't going to make money from it, I just figured I'd let myself off the hook preparation-wise and emotionally and so forth. Just let it go. And it was some of my best work. Because I trusted it would be fine, followed my actual curiosity, and talked to everyone like a person. Once my therapist asked me why I was anxious about interviews, and I told him I didn't want to mess it up and look foolish. And he said, "Does that happen?" And I was like... "No. I guess not." And he's like, "So, why be anxious?" And I was like, "CHECKMATE DOCTOR CARR."
If there were one thing you'd like someone who's just starting out to know about interviewing, what would it be?
Be curious. Ask open-ended questions. Remember that whoever you're interviewing, whether it's Buzz Aldrin or Michelle Obama or Little Richard is a person just like you are a person. And enjoy yourself!
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Thanks to the lovely @interestedbystanderwrites for taking the time to answer these! Get to know more about lovely Cass, go give her a follow and then show her some love!
These questions are from this list. You should check it out, there’s 50 questions all together and they’d be great to ask your favorite fic writer!
1) How old were you when you first starting writing fan-fiction?
Ha! I was a teenager and it was Backstreet Boys – and smut didn’t exist the same way it does now but that’s another opinion for another day. What I wrote then was cutesy and romantic, probably because that was what I was daydreaming about, I guess. Just a reminder that my blog is NSFW if you’re under 18.
2) Do you prefer writing OC’s or reader inserts? Explain your answer.
I think I can get more depth from an OC but you also risk the Mary-Sue and you may pigeonhole your OC in race, sexuality etc. That can really open a can of worms with the reader, which is wholly understandable. Reader inserts are great in the way you can make it 100% person to the reader. They should imagine themselves (if that’s their choice) and not feel that the writer has alienated them in any way somehow but it is still difficult to please everybody.
3) What is your favorite genre to write for?
I like fluff – I like things that make you smile at the end, give the reader a little cuddle to maybe brighten their day.
4) If you had to delete one of your stories and never speak of it again, which would it be and why?
One that never made my masterlist – a Spider-Man super angst titled “How Long Do You Want to be Loved?”. I thought it as okay, pretty good even – but I guess people just want Bucky or Sebastian smut haha I hear you all!
5) When is your preferred time to write?
Morning when the little guy is napping ☺ Evening is hard because it’s when I play adulting catch up… or try not to fall asleep on the couch.
6) Where do you take your inspiration from?
I have a very overactive imagination, always have. And for most of my fics, I guess it’s pretty obviously the beautiful aesthetics of Sebastian Stan and to a lesser extent, Bucky Barnes.
7) In your Time Only Flies When You’re Around Series, what’s your favorite scene that you wrote?
Chapters 27 and 28 of TOFWYA – more so 28 as you get a pretty interesting insight into Sasha’s and Sebastian’s ways of coping when they’re out of sync. Long story short, they’re a mess.
8) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?
Luckily – none! The joys of a smolblog maybe?
9) Who is your favorite character to write for? Why?
I love writing for Buckster – he’s a complex devil and has a lot of layers to work with and a body to die for. Thumbs up for the material, Sebastian.
10) Who is your least favourite character to write for? Why?
As per mentioned before – Peter Parker. That fic scarred me.
11) How did you come up with the title for the Time Only Flies When You’re Around Series?
It’s actually a song lyric as are the first few chapter titles: Belinda Carlisle – Valentine
I made a rule about you, I made a plan // For getting my feet back on the ground // Bury my face in clouds, for hours on end // But time only flies when you're around
12) How did you come up with the idea for the Time Only Flies When You’re Around Series?
I was just writing some stuff, pissfarting around and all of a sudden I’d written something similar to what Chapter 22 ended up being and that’s how it all began. 150k words of nonsense really.
13) Do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?
Many – but there is a long Bucky multichap fic that deserves more of my attention. As his story has evolves via MCU, the story has changed a little.
14) Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?
I write one shots to TOFWYA, I don’t think I could write the sequel to it though. I’ve considered a full fic for Take Me to the Water but I doubt I will for an AU. Any sequels will be little one shots so at this stage, there is nothing planned.
15) Are there any stories that you wished you’d ended differently?
I ended Next Year very kitsch – I regret the last sentence as it currently is: You gave him a small smile, overwhelmed by his words. “I love you too, Bucky Barnes.” Blurgh.
16) Tell me about another writer(s) who you admire? What is it about them that you admire?
How much time do you have for me to talk about @whostheblondegirlwriting? Truly. My fandom soul mate. We are separated by far too many kilometres and time zones, but between her job and me mummying, we’re chatting at all hours of the day. She is a true gem and I adore her.
17) Do you have a story that you look back on and cringe when you reread it?
Luckily, it’s not available on A03 or Tumblr, but it’s still online elsewhere because I thought about it a few weeks ago – it was a Lords of Dogtown fic… and it was not good. Saying that, anything before that I would cringe at anything I’d written anyway ha!
18) Do you prefer listening to music when you’re writing or do you need silence?
Definitely music or the sound of the baby monitor that I find quite soothing.
19) Have you ever cried whilst writing a story?
Argh. “How Long Do You Want to be Loved” messed me up. Too many parental feels.
20) Which part of your Time Only Flies When You’re Around Series was the hardest to write?
The proposal. I went over it a thousand times. I thought, should it be romantic, should it be grand, should it be this or that? How it happened, just a couple in love, in the city they love, being themselves just seemed to fit when it finally came together.
21) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?
I occasionally outline – but mostly I just write, write, write and then start toying with it afterwards. I’m constantly chopping and changing, but I’m not pedantic about planning. It isn’t that kind of fic. Other multichaps I put a bit more planning and emphasis on.
22) What is something you wished you’d known before you started posting fan-fiction?
You’re only as good as your last fic and its reblogs. If you’re going to get hung up on likes/reblogs/comments, you’ll never publish something again. But it can be bloody disheartening at times.
23) Do you have a story that you feel doesn’t get as much love as you’d like?
Time Only Flies When You’re Around? Haha busted my ass on that beast for over a year. It has the hits but likes and comments are encouraging when received. When. I always considered publishing it on Tumblr, but I don’t know. It’s freely available on A03.
24) In contrast to 23 is there a story which gets lots of love which you kinda eye roll at?
Smut talks – I think Heatstroke is a little silly. But it gets hits.
25) Are any of your characters based on real people?
Nope – any characters, inc OC’s are all fictional. I don’t know if I could handle people in my real life if they were like my OC’s!
26) What’s the biggest compliment you’ve gotten?
Any body that takes the time to leave a ‘yes!’, ‘omg’ to paragraphs of reiterating your story back to you – it’s amazing! Taking the time to leave a writer a comment makes our day.
27) What’s the harshest criticism you’ve gotten?
It still makes me laugh when I read it, not quite verbatim but it was along the lines of ‘I loved this fic but it’s gone a total 180. I’ll see how you continue but you know, I’m probably out of here’. While I know you can’t please anyone, it’s a strange comment. I’m old enough to appreciate constructive criticism. This was neither here nor there, but still hilarious!
28) Do you share your story ideas with anyone else or do you keep them close to your chest?
Back to my love, @whostheblondegirlwriting, we’re constantly taunting the other or beta’ing each others stuff when we have time to help the other (let alone write our own stuff!).
29) Do people know you write fan-fiction?
In real life? No. On this hellsite? I have made some amazing writing friends!
30) What’s you favorite minor character you’ve written?
Ollie in TOFWYA – she’s a completely stereotypical New Yorker, brash, in your face and on the other hand, Sasha’s best friend in the world and they’d do anything for each other. If you knew Ollie in real life, you’d absolutely hate her.
31) What spurs you on during the writing process?
People simply enjoying your work and letting you know is the most amazing aphrodisiac. I’ll never stop writing – whether it’s for myself or for other people to enjoy. Don’t ever be scared to let a writer know if you’ve enjoyed their work or if you haven’t, a writer should be able to accept your constructive criticism and will probably appreciate your feedback if you take the time to provide it respectfully! If you’re going to go on anon and talk shit, just don’t bother. It’s boring, childish and completely unoriginal. Shows true testament to your personality offline.
32) What’s your favorite trope to write?
Friends to Lovers. THEY WERE FRIENDS AND NOW THEY ARE… LOVERS!
33) Can you remember the first fic you read? What was it about?
Not a clue – but will assume it’s Backstreet Boys-related!
34) If you could write only angst, fluff or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why?
Smut will get you the hits but fluff is forever.
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Meet D.R. Beitzel, Creator of “The Bagheads”
DR Beitzel is a cartoonist, creative producer, and Pennsylvania fellow living a NYC dream. His day job is playing video games in a Times Square skyscraper; his evenings are occupied writing funnies and drawing comics for the likes of MAD Magazine, McSweeneys, and his own Phatypus Comics. And like several of his idols before him - Matt Groening, anyone? - he’s now making the petite leap from comics to cartoons. His GO! Cartoon “The Bagheads” is a historically accurate depiction of trash take-out travails with former roommates and his competitive clashes with his older brother. He maintains that the Goat (”Goooat”) is its sole foray into the cartoonish make-believe. He studied politics, so you know that he has 0 capacity to - dare I even suggest it!? - fib.
Sooo, where’d you study animation?
I didn’t! I first went to a community college in central Pennsylvania. It was full of a bunch of cool people - unfortunately not Donald Glover or Alison Brie, but fortunately also not Chevy Chase. Then I went to University of Pittsburgh and studied communications and political science.
Poli- what now?
Yeah... it was the Obama era. I thought “It’s all uphill from here! We’re just riding this political train into the Promised Land!” Reality hit hard. Back then, Jon Favreau was writing Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ speeches, and I was all riled up. I wanted to be a speechwriter.
At one point a local city councilman asked me to write some remarks for him to use on Martin Luther King Day. I was idealistic and had a head full of steam, so I wrote this fiery, passionate stemwinder that drew on self-sacrifice and righteousness. I even referenced "Letter from Birmingham Jail”. The thing was, it was for a pancake breakfast at a rural Pennsylvania fire hall. So, I'm pretty sure he went out and said something like, "Thanks for coming. Go Eagles”. I was young and naive, and didn't realize that every speech didn't have to be "Ask not what your country can do for you ..."
When did you decide to NOT work in politics?
When I met a real life politician. (I laugh) No, really! He was a hometown representative - I’m from the Pennsylvania boonies. And he was a Republican, which was fine; I was just looking for a foot in the door. But when he found out I wasn’t, he asked me if I was a double agent. Like he actually suspected me of being in cahoots with the Dems to get dirt on him! So weird. And then finally, it came down to either an unpaid internship with a politician or a paid gig without a politician, so I chose to get paid.
Chasing that dollar. What was the paid gig?
I started out as a freelance editor for fashion and fitness blogs. The biggest perk - and irony - was that I was working in sweatpants from my couch. I got jobs at some TV and radio stations. At the end of college, I did do one unpaid internship, which was the best free work I ever did. It was at WQED, the PBS affiliate in Pittsburgh where Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was filmed back in the day. They still had a bunch of the sets just hanging around the hallways - and I even got to meet Mr. McFeely, who was exactly as nice as you’d hope. Eventually, I decided to leave Pennsylvania and move to New York, probably for the cheap rent. And I’ve been here ever since, working with mobile games. I even got to visit the old MAD Magazine office when I did a comic with them. It was covered in original art from some of the all-time greats.
What kinda stuff have you done for MAD Mag and others?
For MAD, I did a comic parody called “Captain Red America”. He’s like Captain America but only represents conservative states, so a lot of his enemies are things he doesn’t actually believe in. So, when he fights the super villain Climate Change, Cap can’t fight back because he doesn’t believe in climate change, so it just beats him up. I also did some writing for McSweeneys. They have some of the funniest stuff published anywhere, and I always wanted to write for them. I love doing comics, too, because if I have an idea, I can just put it out there—there aren’t really stakeholders involved. Recently, I just finished a Valentines comic for Bushwick Daily, a local Brooklyn blog, about the types of people you meet on Tinder.
How was transplanting to NYC - did you always want to move there?
Ehhh… I’m one of those unwilling New Yorkers who loves to hate it. The city has its upsides; it’s the best comedy scene. When I first arrived I joined UCB, which I think is mandatory when you move to New York - they just issue you a membership with your MetroCard. I always brag that I got to see Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson perform their Broad City stage show before it became a TV show. I love that community, and part of me wishes I’d have stuck with it longer, but I was getting pulled in a bunch of different directions, including a new job.
Oh yeah? Where at?
At Nickelodeon! I got the opportunity very randomly, about a month after I arrived. My (soon-to-be) boss called two people in for interviews, and I guess all that theatrical training from UCB paid off, because I was able to fake being a functional person long enough for her to hire me. It’s a really fun place to work: talented artists, toys everywhere, and sometimes wide-eyed kids are touring the office or testing games for us and you remember what we’re all doing there. The downside is that we’re in Times Square, so when I venture into the street I’m guaranteed to get a face-full of armpit. But playing video games is part of my job - I produce apps and games related to Nick shows.
That is the Dream. What’s your favorite game you’ve worked on?
Probably TMNT: Legends. We had a tremendous team of real fans, and the game looks great. Plus, I got to go visit Montreal where the team is based. I highly recommend that everyone spend years developing a game with a blockbuster studio, so you can visit, too.
Did you choose the cartoon life, or did the cartoon life choose you?
Wow, I really need to get “Cartoon Life” tattooed across my stomach. It was mutual selection. As a kid, I’d go to my grandma’s house and draw through all the paper she had. I looked up to Sergio Aragones of MAD. I was always drawing in the margins of the handouts at church - that’s the only way I’d sit still. But in high school, I stopped drawing for a bit - I guess I was partying too much, or maybe I just lost all my pencils in one of my oversized neon Tommy Hilfiger jackets. Then, I got back into it in college, drawing editorial comics at my school newspapers. I get inspired by people like Matt Groening. He was grinding out “Life in Hell” for like 40 years - well after he became a TV tycoon with The Simpsons and Futurama - just for the love of it.
How did you come to pitch for GO! Cartoons?
Just a random Google search, looking for places to send some stuff. I only barely met the deadline. I put together a thumbnail pitch and sent it on in.
Did “The Bagheads” change much from pitch through production?
The core story was always a brother and sister arguing over trash take-out. But it fluctuated in length quite a bit. There were a lot parts I added and then we condensed or cut out. There were intros, flashbacks - at some point, probably dragons and ice zombies - a lot did have to be trimmed down. Which was tough, because as you can probably tell, I’m a pretty big blowhard.
Who inspired the Bagheads, and were they always, you know… bag headed?
The Bagheads were always bagheads. As a little kid, I used to doodle baghead people with my brother, who inspired me to start drawing at all. We’d draw the guys from Guns ‘N Roses, but with bags over their heads—I have no idea why, but probably because I was kid who was crappy at drawing and couldn’t draw faces. Anyway, it became a running gag between us, we called them Guns ‘N Baggies. And over the years since, I’d draw those types every now and then -- a muscle baggie, an old baggie, whatever. So when I was getting ready to submit to Frederator, I knew the character’s personalities, but I didn’t know their appearances. So I reached into my childhood and pulled out the Bagheads.
What do you enjoy the most about Elbow and Artemis?
Well, what I enjoyed most about the short in general was working with so many talented people to bring it to life. I gotta give a big shout out to Eric, Kelsey, Michelle, JoJo, Sylvia, Paul, Bill, Kevin, Stephen, our cast and everyone else at Frederator and Salami Studios who made this happen. I did not do this alone - nowhere near it.
As for Artemis and Elbow, I’ve always liked duos with friendly antagonism, like Ren and Stimpy, Bugs and Daffy. Those good-natured conflicts where you’re kinda buddies, but you’re also kinda at each other’s throat. I like that Artemis and Elbow’s personalities create conflict: she’s hyper-competitive, he’s lazy. And then there’s their poor clueless dad, who’s working too much and constantly worried about the safety of his kids but doesn’t realize the biggest danger to them is each other. Those relationships can serve up a lot of fun, simple stories.
What inspired Nuke Man Jones, who’s still pulling off the eternal dunk as we speak?
Harlem Globe Trotters, for sure. They basically have superpowers. I was really looking for things that Elbow might see at a high altitude and I wanted something silly. Nuke Man is stuck up there in Earth’s orbit now, cursed to never complete that dunk like some Sisyphean baller fate.
The billion dollar question: do the Bagheads have bags for heads, or are they wearing bags over regular people heads?
Ya know, I’m gonna opt not to answer that one. The question of the bags can remain an unanswered mystery if it gets a series. It’ll be like The Leftovers for kids.
How about some favorite cartoons?
I mean, my Top 10 would just be The Simpsons, Seasons 1 through 10: that’s my all-time favorite TV, right there. South Park can’t get enough love—those guys have turned out classic after classic, and they’re the smartest gross-out humor in history. Looney Tunes, Ren & Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead - Mike Judge is a genius. Jim Henson and The Muppets, even though it’s not a cartoon; puppets count, right? MAD Magazine stuff like Sergio Aragones features or “Spy vs. Spy,” which was an inspiration for this Bagheads short.
I’m also really inspired by old school newspaper comics. It breaks my heart that they’re disappearing. Calvin and Hobbes is gorgeous and the most inspiring thing to me. I just read the entire series again, and it’s as good as ever. I appreciate that Bill Watterson refused all the licensing and merch deals people wanted to make for it. I read once that he left something like $400 million on the table.
That’s amazing.
Yeah. Once, I made a parody album cover for a local comic shop’s art show, and I made one based off of Notorious BIG’s “Ready to Die” cover: Notorious HOB’s “Ready to Live”. People wanted prints so I started selling them, and then it dawned on me that I was breaking the spirit of Watterson’s anti-commercial stance. So I stopped selling them, and just told people, “Sorry, they’re gone!”
What do you like to do outside of your work*? (*everybody else’s play)
I like to connect with my inner hillbilly - errr, inner hippie - whatever it is. I go to the beach and state parks pretty often. And I love stand-up: I just saw Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, Jeff Ross and Kevin Hart at Radio City Music Hall. It was insane.
What are you working on now?
At the moment, I’m investing all my resources in trying to score “Black Panther” tickets. Otherwise, I'm working on a musical animated series idea with two musician friends, Jeff and Matt. It's really cool and is somewhere between Hamilton and Freaks & Geeks. I'm also working on a comic strip about animals in a post-human world. It's really cartoony, except the president is a photo-realistic opossum whose speeches are just incoherent, ear-piercing screeches. I'm not sure where that falls on the fiction/non-fiction spectrum. So much for giving up politics!
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Great talking with you D.R., thanks for the interview! Looking forward to all of your future endeavors. And I’ll be sure to vote for you if you ever return to politics / being a spy for those wily Pennsylvania Dems.
Everybody: keep up with Phatypus Comics on Facebook and Instagram, @phatypus! And here on Tumblr: @phatypuscomics
- Cooper
#The Frederator Interview#frederator#frederator studios#go! cartoons#interview#cartoon#comic#animation#comics#cartoons#new cartoon#The Bagheads#phatypus#phatypus comics#DR Beitzel
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Matthew J. Franck: In one of your essays in The Mind Has Mountains, you observe “the power of cultural fashions to lead psychiatric thought and practice off in false, even disastrous, directions.” Two such fashions that captivated psychology and psychiatry in recent decades were “multiple personality disorder,” also known as “dissociative identity disorder,” and the idea of “repressed sexual memories” from childhood that adults can “recover” under therapy. What accounts for such therapeutic fevers gripping the mental health professions?
Paul McHugh: That’s a very good question. I’m not sure I understand why we’re so vulnerable to this. It may well be in part that we are a discipline that cannot often use bodily material, like an autopsy or something, to prove ourselves right or wrong. We have to use the power of persuasion to persuade patients and others to thinking the way we want them to think. And although that’s the fundamental principle of psychotherapy—psychotherapy is a persuasive enterprise, after all, that’s what it is, it’s nothing else but persuasion—persuasion, not only in psychiatry but maybe even in a democracy, its great vulnerability, as Tocqueville said, is the tyranny of popular sentiments. The tyranny of popular opinion can hold in thrall a whole population, after all, for a while. I think psychiatry is vulnerable to that because it works with phenomena of mental life and problems of mental behavior, and therefore is liable, without another kind of tradition or another source of knowledge, to be carried away. It happens about every ten or fifteen years.
MF: I recall your saying as well in that book that psychiatrists don’t have the sort of grounded reality of specializing in the skin or the eye or something about which there cannot be endless arguments once the evidence comes in.
PM: That’s right. The material evidence of the physical body has a great salutary effect on people who have strong opinions about things, as William Osler said long ago. He said, you know the great thing about the consultant is, he comes in and does the rectal that you forgot to do. The great thing about doctoring is that it’s a fundamental business; you stand on the bottom of life, and it’s one of the joys of it. Why, though, psychiatry gets swept by these fantasies is still a further question. In part, I used to just think it was the Freudian commitment to suspicion of other people and of society and everything—it was one of the schools of suspicion—
MF: Sure, that there’s a dark id everywhere you look.
PM: That’s right, that somehow or other we’re always under the control of somebody else. Nietzsche and Marx and Freud were all of the same kind of caliber. I used to think that. I also think there’s a love on the part of psychiatrists for being men of the secret and having their own magical secret. If somebody comes along and tells you “Here’s a wonderful magical secret that will open to you the nature of the world and the nature of humankind,” it’s usually silly in the long run. That’s usually picked up by people who have no traditional background of their own. After all, it’s a kind of golden calf; you come down from the mountain and really try to bring them something, and what do you find them doing? Dancing around the golden calf.
MF: The appeal is to make some idol of a solution to some big problem.
PM: That’s right. And although Moses thought it was only his people, his people were—are, of course—all of us.
MF: In 2016, you and Dr. Lawrence Mayer published a 143-page monograph in the pages of The New Atlantis titled “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences.” This publication generated a good deal of controversy, coming not long after the Supreme Court’s creation of a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry, and just as the issue of “transgenderism” was beginning to heat up. What prompted you and Dr. Mayer to undertake this project, and what should we take away from it?
PM: I was prompted by the idea that I ought to at least say something in this matter, because so many ideas were floating around, and if I couldn’t speak, who could? And when I looked at the scientific evidence of these things, the very idea that these things were immutable, and discrete, and people were “born that way,” it didn’t work from the science point of view, and they might, in our society, not be such good ideas, not good things for people to believe. So I thought, “Well, if I can’t speak at my stage and my development, nobody can speak, and I’ll see what happens.” So, it was very interesting. I found it extremely interesting.
It caused a ruckus, and that didn’t surprise me. But what did surprise me was how many people would say, well, you know, “This is just wrong,” but would never show me any evidence. Dean Hamer, whom I have admired and thought of as a very coherent geneticist and student of homosexuality down in NIH, said “This has all just been disproven, it’s bad science,” but he never pointed out anything or said, “Here’s the article that proves it.” He was saying, “Look, this is the way we read the science today,” and he spent a lot of time talking about how this wasn’t a peer-reviewed article. Of course it wasn’t a peer-reviewed article. It wasn’t intended to be put out into the science literature. It was to try to evaluate what we thought the science literature taught to the ordinary public, like somebody would write in the New Yorker. And the useful way to refute such a thing is not to say “Those guys are stinkers!” or something. They should say “He’s overlooked something, and here’s the thing that he’s overlooked.”
It turned out that afterwards—long afterwards—people would say, “Well, you know, he’s right, but he shouldn’t have said it.” What it came down to was “He should have kept his mouth shut.” The reason they keep saying it is the usual explanation for not wanting to get all the truth out—that somehow it’ll encourage people to abuse other folks. Of course, we didn’t want that, and we don’t think that the truth is going to lead to anything other than further truth, as things go on.
MF: And better treatment of people. It’s interesting to me that you brought up that critique of peer review, because I had a follow-up on that front. I heard that a lot too when that long piece came out, that The New Atlantis is not a peer-reviewed journal, or that the work you and Dr. Mayer did was not peer-reviewed. And my first thought on hearing that was, well, of course not, what you and he did was the peer review. That is, you two, very knowledgeable in your field, did a comprehensive survey of studies in the field that had been peer reviewed in order to draw conclusions for a wider public about what we know and don’t know about sexual orientation and gender identity.
PM: It seemed to me they just didn’t want the conversation to go on. This way of calling it not peer-reviewed was to say that I was saying something that was supposed to be a new discovery. I wasn’t saying anything new, I was saying “This is how I read the literature.”
MF: People who dispute the way you and Dr. Mayer read the literature should not just say, “Well, that’s bunk.” After all, you were not reporting your own research but that of many, many others. They should point to these and those studies that you draw conclusions from and either show why they’re wrong or why you’re drawing the wrong conclusions from them.
PM: That’s right, and that’s what we said at the end of our article. We knew it was going to cause a fuss. Okay, go at it, and tell us what’s wrong.
MF: The bottom line of the monograph, it seemed to me, was that we still don’t know a great deal about the provenance of homosexuality and transgender or gender dysphoria. We have no particular reason to believe that either phenomenon is innate or biologically based or immutable.
PM: That right. Especially not immutable. That’s the most important thing.
MF: In a later piece in The New Atlantis, in 2017, you and Dr. Mayer were joined by Dr. Paul Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist, in cautioning medical professionals against using puberty-suppressing drugs with children who present with gender dysphoria. Given the increasing incidence of patients presenting such psychological symptoms since that time, especially adolescent girls who wish to transition to “being” boys, as Abigail Shrier has written, this looks like it was a very timely intervention on your part. What is the concern, exactly, with these puberty-suppressing drugs?
PM: They come at a time when the person, the child, is not prepared to think about what their life would be like. Remember, puberty occurs between nine and fourteen when you’re a girl, and between eleven and fourteen when you’re a boy. These are children.
Anyone who’s had a ten-year-old girl or boy around knows that he or she is under your protective wing, in the sense not only of making sure he or she eats and is not abused today, but that he or she doesn’t make a mistake in their own decisions that will reverberate forever for them. We don’t let them get tattooed, we don’t—I wouldn’t let my daughter have her ears pierced until she turned sixteen. So these are very young children.
Secondly, this is a very complex process, puberty. Puberty is one of the great transforming neuro-endocrine events in anybody’s life. And we know only some parts of it; we do not know, for example, what triggers puberty. Back in 2005, the journal Science published its, I think, 125th anniversary issue, and they said here are 125 big problems that remain for science. One of them was “What triggers puberty?” It’s a big mystery. But one of the things we do know is that the human being is very different from the ordinary animal. With the animal, if they successfully go through puberty—and they go through it rather young—at the end of that, fundamentally, they are the complete being that they’re going to be. With human beings, some of the most interesting individuating characteristics of themselves occur only after puberty, probably with a combination of the intellectual powers and the energy that sexual development brings.
So I don’t think any child—and any parent, for that matter—can make an informed consent to permit the blocking of puberty and the transmission of another sex. That’s the first thing: you don’t have an idea what you’re doing. So how can you have an informed consent about it? Because nobody knows.
As important, and a reason for thinking that judgment is affected, is that children, young people, who believe that they belong in the opposite sex, if permitted to go through puberty normally, 85 to 95 percent of them will at the end of that time say “No, I am who I am.” But if you give them the puberty blockers at age nine or ten, only 5 or 10 percent at the end of that time will say “I don’t want to go on further.” They always want to go on further. Something has changed in them. One of the things that change must be the way their brain is shaped when this triggering comes along for puberty. It gets thwarted. And the idea that it’s all reversible, that’s still very debatable.
Finally, the most important point is that scientists have one great vulnerability. They can be dealing with the most complex issue and try to oversimplify it and make it seem like a simple issue. In this case, we want to make a boy look like a girl—okay, so we’re going to do it with these hormones. Wait a minute: you don’t know this is a complex issue of the brain, neuro-endocrine relationships, hormones and—things that Paul Hruz knows even better than I. This very, very complex thing is being over-simplified...
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Bottom Ten Lowlights a Start for Andrew Cuomo
The toughest part of summarizing Andrew Cuomo's rather active lockdown legacy is only choosing 10 appalling screwups. The least worthy egomaniac ever should have to face more charges than that at The Hague. Until justice is served, those who observed or endured his bloodthirsty spree can list his crimes in the War on COVID.
Anyone even slightly divorced from partisan hero worship could and did tell those treating the worst Cuomo since Chris as the pandemic messiah that he wouldn't have to do anything differently to please Satan. Those residing in reality can consider a double-digit list of economy- and human-killers to start:
10) Forcing bar patrons to order food with drink summarized preposterous micromanagement from the pushiest ruler. The most thoroughly mocked of all shutdown rules remains emblematic of how Cuomo operates. See, you won't spread plague by walking around if you dine while sipping your ale, which means ordering fries prevents your murder. Many asylum patients think similarly.
The aspiring tyrant in question decided he has both the right and duty to control lives. The only way he could make his unimaginable ego trip worse is by sucking at it. A bossy twit's analysis and ensuing control of human activity surely saved lives apart from it actually happening.
9) Shut down any tavern who notes inherent silliness. Those daring to question orders that only seem fatuous to the observant face our hero's righteous wrath. The audacity involved in mocking the deity saving us all must be countered with damnation in the form of not getting to operate.
You're not allowed to laugh at a routine too surreal for Monty Python. Blasphemy that leads to losing a liquor license is the best argument against how New York works, or rather doesn't. Cuomo is a petty tyrant with a mafia mentality. The actual mob can turn a profit.
8) The casual nature of overbearing orders is common to those with supernatural delusions. Deciding which basic human interaction would be devastated that day was reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson choosing bombing targets. Industries waited to be leveled like North Vietnam.
General Cuomo claims to be on the side of businesses. But the astounding pomposity of saving them by destroying them is natural to someone who thinks he was born to tell others what to do despite a preponderance of contrary evidence. The difference between Andrew Cuomo and Jesus is Jesus doesn't think he's Andrew Cuomo.
7) Commemorate the worst of times with the pandemic poster that made impoverished New Yorkers feel good about not spending $14.50. The layout's prototypical hideousness suits the lies contained within. To be fair, the graphic design is as impressive as Cuomo's performance. Some images are inadvertently apt.
6) A leader who's so efficient that he has time to write a book about it sounds like a nice story. Unfortunately for the author governor, people noticed he was full of it. Detailing how the biggest failure was the best achievement would be quite an achievement as fiction. That's what he wrote, although lacking a compelling plot and with all the words churned out by underlings. James Frey was comparatively honest.
Cuomo's horrid tome was a success in the same sense he keeps winning elections despite being criminally atrocious. The untalented hack’s unfathomably large advance was as deserved as his Emmy. He got paid infinity dollars per reader. Millions to write as poorly as he rules is actually not that much if split amongst the families of his many victims.
5) Incessant press conferences are unwise if your state's streets are clogged with victims of your policies. Cuomo's confidence that he singlehandedly saved humanity was a fatal flaw, at least for thousands of his state's residents. Advertising what a putz he was only killed his reputation, which made him one of the lucky ones.
The oafish fiend might never have been caught without showing off to the sort of sick fans who propose to prisoners. An arrogant maniac boasting about his record of ending life is so hackneyed that whatever Law & Order is still on the air wouldn't use it. The Zodiac Killer could've taught him how to taunt without being caught.
4) Waiting forever is what true leaders do. Make sure others go first for heightened bravery. Cuomo magically decided masks were unnecessary right after the CDC flipped the reveal switch. Science's timing is uncanny.
The horrifying death rate would have been even worse without strict breathing restrictions, claim the same pyramid scheme salespeople who think federal spending keeps the economy from getting even worse. Unjustified optimists would like to believe Cuomo realized his fruitless war was a lost cause. In reality, he didn't want to lose even more congressional seats to states who liberated breathing holes months ago. Follow the science like moving trucks crossing state lines.
3) The regent appointed by divinity is also blessed with a royal family. And who better to issue blessings than the chosen one himself? Any Empire State serf should've felt honored to skip a virus test so the king's relatives could feel secure about knowing. Commoners better not possess the insolence to wonder why those blessed to be related to the monarch deserve special timing. Cuomo is as much Ceausescu and Eva Peron's descendant as he is Mario's.
2) New York came so close to being number one. Unfortunately, it's at virus deaths. The second-worst death rate per capita of any state isn't quite equivalent to a Super Bowl loss.
As usual, New Jersey was the only thing keeping another state from being the nation's worst. Not failing as badly as the Turnpike State is no accomplishment, especially when it comes to dead residents.
1) The War on Grandparents is a victory to sickos. An alleged slave to evidence was remarkably unscientific as he forced nursing homes to take the infected, which sounds diabolical even without knowing results. No matter how ghastly the toll is, it somehow keeps getting worse.
The one obvious thing anyone paying the slightest bit of attention should have grasped is that the most vulnerable didn't need patients as roommates. The best case for a diseased reaction is that a panicky governor didn't want to make the mean president look helpful by using hospital ships Washington sent. Whatever the reason, Cuomo is a bigger Democratic killer than Jim Jones and John Wayne Gacy combined.
Symptoms have long been evident. Cuomo performed horrifically years before the New York Virus spread. His lethally bumbling interdictions merely accelerated fleeing. Guiding the economy by taxing any bit of success worked as well as his pandemic forays. Wallets are as empty as morgues are full.
Killing what he touches is the Grim Reaper's signature, as seen back when to ruined the global economy pimping subprime mortgages as Housing and Urban Development secretary. But at least he's a serial predator.
Classifying an entitled undeserving brat as a psychopath is not an exaggeration. He's incapable of empathy yet able to fake it to particularly deluded partisans who still wear masks while driving alone. The fad has passed. It's tougher to find someone to admit they fell for his shtick than it is to get him to admit he might have made a questionable decision.
Unblinking certainty while failing absolutely is the chief family trait. Cuomo is either the most inept politician possible or a remarkably efficient serial killer.
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Why Is *THAT* A Musical?
If I had a nickel for every time I was asked this question, or even asked this question myself, I would have a very large number of relatively heavy and annoying coins.
But I do wonder - How often do people hear about a new musical or see a marquee and think this question to themselves? I mean, what makes a story ripe for adaptation into a musical? Why do some musicals seem like no-brainers, while others make us scratch our heads and think, “Huh. Really? That one?”
The Lehman Engel BMI Musical Theatre Writing Workshop answer to the question of what type of stories should be adapted into musicals is a relatively simple and subjective one: If you think there’s more within the story that should be told, and that music will enhance that storytelling, then it is likely adaptable into a musical. But if the story feels complete in its current form, and it doesn’t seem like music will enhance the piece and its purpose, it should probably be left alone.
Despite the subjective nature of this statement, I do think there’s truth to it. If you look at the types of stories that have been most successfully adapted into musicals (and most musicals are adaptations), the use of music in the storytelling has heightened the plots and characters, and filled in some invisible hole that helps the audience interact with the material.
This is the reason, I think, that certain stories see multiple attempts at musical adaptation. For a couple of examples, we have 2 adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, 2 musicals of The Wild Party, and countless musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays (most of which have not worked well). Some stories feel as though they could be told well, or better, in musical theatre form and therefore multiple adaptations appear. Some are good, and some aren’t. Some use the original author’s intents, and some leave them behind.
Successful adaptation is a tricky process - and I know this from adapting one of the most-adapted stories in musical theatre, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Approximately 5-6 musical versions of this story exist, but none of them has had great mainstream or commercial success. Yet. But why? What goes into this process?
“Adapt or Perish”
Thanks H.G. Wells! In the natural world, I totally agree. But in the theatrical world, I would probably alter it to say: “Adapt well or perish.”
Adapting a story for the stage is difficult, especially when it’s well-known. Adapting a story into a musical specifically adds many additional layers of difficulty.
But Michael, wouldn’t coming up with an entirely original story be harder?
Why yes, sole reader of this blog! In many ways an original musical is much harder, since the entire burden of plot and character rests on the writers. There’s nothing to build from.
So then, what’s the issue?
Excellent question!
There are 3 main issues I see when it comes to making a musical adaptation:
Audiences enter with ideas about the story and characters already formulated.
The original author’s intent and basic structures may or may not still be present.
Music is meant to enhance, but what exactly are you enhancing for your version?
Audience Expectation
When adapting a well-known story, book, movie, play, etc., your audience will come into the performances with preconceived notions.
Now, perhaps they’ve never actually encountered the original material, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be an image, idea, feeling, emotion, or otherwise already planted, which will color their expectations. So how does this alter your approach?
In all honesty, I wouldn’t give it too much thought.
What?! But if your audience isn’t on board, then you’re sunk!
True. But the best way to get the audience on board with what you’re writing is simply to write well. The only real decision you have to make is whether you’re going to take the story in a direction that will feed into audience expectation, or break from it (and to what degree). But, if you successfully create and introduce your world and characters to the audience and set them up for the journey you’re going to take them on, then they will follow.
Application: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
One of the most interesting things my composer and I have encountered in adapting The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has been the complete and utter variance in the levels of familiarity with this story.
I can say that title to anyone and some sort of preconceived notion will suddenly appear, but it is vastly different depending on the person. Some people have only ever seen the Disney short film. Others the Tim Burton film. Others had a watered down version read to them as a child, but don’t remember anything about it. Some people have no idea what you’re talking about until you say the words “Headless Horseman.” New Yorkers read this story in school, but basically no one else in the country does. And almost no one has read the story recently or has a particularly accurate idea of what takes place in its small number of pages.
Quite the range, eh?
So what did we learn from this?
We could never in a million years satisfy everyone’s expectations, so we shouldn’t try.
The name of the story is evocative in and of itself.
General feelings about the story seem more pervasive than the actual characters and plot.
Only certain images are universally retained, namely that of the Headless Horseman.
Author’s Intent
What is this story about? Why was it originally told? Why should it continue to be told? What did the original author want their audiences to take away? What do you want your audiences to take away? Are they the same?
Far too often I see musical adaptations that have abandoned the original intents and message of the story. Suddenly, an entire plot point will disappear, or a character will make a decision that’s inconsistent with the plot. Is it okay to do this? Certainly! However, the most successful adaptations that make these changes tend to abandon the brand of the original story, treat the original more like a guideline, and come into their own as an individual piece of musical theatre.
Small example: we all know that West Side Story is essentially Romeo and Juliet, but it also isn’t. The basic plot is still there, but characters are added and subtracted as needed. Tony and Romeo are not very alike if you compare them side by side. The purposeful movement of the time and setting add and subtract layers from the story. And the biggest change: the entire ending sequence. Romeo and Juliet is famous for its graveyard scene, whereas in West Side Story the sequence of events has been altered and Maria is left to live with the results. But has Shakespeare’s message been lost? I personally do not think so.
Now, I’m not saying that to keep a title or a brand you must strictly adhere to the original author’s structure, plot, and character creation. You have chosen this piece to enhance it, which will require changes. But if a piece was written to highlight social injustice and you alter it so much that this message becomes completely lost, then you may need to rethink your adaptation. Or if a character is famous for being one way because that drives the story, but you subvert that, then the piece just might crumble.
Application: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
This was a tricky one. We spent a great deal of time trying to determine what Washington Irving’s purpose was in telling this story.
Was it a commentary on social constructs and collective thinking? Was it about superstition and its effects on a community? Was it a cautionary tale about individual gullibility? A comment on small-town American life? A slight aimed at Dutch settlers and their descendants? A celebration of the haunted nature of the beautiful American landscape? A questioning of what is real? Or was it just a silly little tale?
The key for us was when we remembered that this story, which has only a handful of spoken lines, was not actually being told by Washington Irving. In the collection of tales, there is a narrator who provides us with the context for the story of Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones, Katrina Van Tassel, and the Headless Horseman, and then he gives us the story itself. It was a story within a story.
So why was the narrator telling us this story?
The answer to that question ultimately did not matter, for we had found our way in. Stories are told with purpose, whether or not their contents are true. And this was the common thread throughout The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Storytelling cropped up throughout the piece, in the form of ghost stories, minor tales of the countryside, re-tellings of American Revolution battles, and lots of town gossip. All of this while being narrated by a character who has his own reasons, but who is also being written by Washington Irving. And this was the point of the piece: Why do we tell stories, and how do they help us get what we desire?
Music and Story Enhancement
Music is evocative. Music is language. Music is math. Music is emotion. Music is ethereal. Music is nebulous. Music can have an immeasurable impact.
So why a musical? How is music going to help you tell this story? Why is music the thing that was lacking from the original story, and how will you utilize it to strengthen the piece? Why are they singing?
There are a million-and-one ways to answer these questions, but here’s the key: You had better have an answer and it better be a good one. And additionally, the audience better be able to pick up on your reasoning, consciously or unconsciously.
Some people self-proclaim that they hate musicals, and the reason they give is generally the same: Why are they bursting out into song? It doesn’t make sense. People don’t do that.
***Side Note: Anyone who says this clearly doesn’t spend enough time around musical theatre folk.
The incorporation of music has to be earned. The circumstances or emotion must be so great, so heightened, that music not only feels natural at that moment, but necessary.
This is so incredibly important, and I cannot stress it enough.
Application: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Once we realized that the story, and therefore the entire musical, was about telling stories in order to manipulate and acquire, the music was a natural addition. Add on top that superstition, ghost stories, and the other-worldly lend themselves to musicality as well, and having moments of song became absolutely integral to the storytelling.
All of our main characters needed strong desires. The original story gave very little, particularly to the almost non-existent Katrina Van Tassel, the two-dimensional Brom Bones, and amorphous Baltus Van Tassel, so we provided the extra layers. We came up with what exactly each character desires most and what makes them tick. From there, the question became how exactly would they go about attempting to manipulate their situations and the people around them in order to get their desires. And this is where music came in.
Surprisingly, we discovered that since almost every line and moment of interaction had to do with manipulation, storytelling, and/or the supernatural, moments without music felt extremely odd. Not that we think the show should be sung-through, but underscore became as necessary and enhancing as the song moments. It was a wonderful discovery. The music helps complete this story in the same way that the verbosely descriptive language aided Irving’s original story.
I’m No Expert
I will very readily admit that I am no expert on the topic of musical theatre adaptation, and I am certainly continuing to learn as I go through the process myself. But these are my observations thus far in my career, and I do think they have merit and factual evidence to support them.
Adaptation is hard. But it’s very doable. Without it, most of the musical theatre canon would not exist.
***Another Note: If you’re interested in learning more about my adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow with composer Sean Havrilla, click on the Musicals page or feel free to contact me!
Otherwise, thank you for reading and happy adapting, my friends!
#michael radi#glamorous life#glamorous life blog#musical theatre#musicals#music#theatre#theater#theatre artist#The Legend of Sleepy Hollow#Sleepy Hollow#Ichabod Crane#Headless Horseman#musical adaptation#adaptation#artist#composer#lyricist#librettist#script#audience#author#intent#vision
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Paradisiac Publishing currently has some books on roster (the proper publishing industry term, of course)!
Get this: one/some/PREFERABLY ALL could be in your/a loved one’s library. What are you even doing right now? Playing outside in the snow (awesome)? Baking the most delicious Midwestern food imaginable (you’re amazing)? Looking outside at a barren winter hell (it’s going to be OK)? Well, just take a quick seat and check out these books you can order to read by the fireplace with cocoa later!
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These books are a steal. It is true that Barnes & Noble has a coffee shop inside, but you can buy our titles without even having to worry about putting on pants so I mean I think we can all agree which option is better.
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All titles. $15-$40 per book. That is actually an effing steal considering you are dealing with a 100% independent, LOCAL publishing company. Does it even necessarily know what it is doing at all times?
No it does not! It’s women run so...
I AM KIDDING!
It’s WOMAN-RUN, so you know these books will actually get to you when expected, sent with tender-loving care.
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So, what are the books available that you could buy?
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But wait, there’s more:
Last (but in no possible way least because it gets its own highlight), our newest title:
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Oh! And:
Holy. Shit.
So many books!
What are they even about though?
Good question! Check it!
Prose and Kahns by Zack Kahn
Los Angeles actor and screenwriter Zack Kahn trusted Paradisiac Publishing to bring his first book to life. The book is a collection of Zack’s comedic one-liners collected over time on the scraps on which they were originally created. Tons of LOLZERS and check the Amazon reviews/Facebook page for a tip on how to use the book as a drinking game. Holiday. Fun.
Becoming BGD by Matthew Essex
With great power comes great fashion sense. This saga about a gay, Midwestern superhero is a must-read. Written by Quad Citizen Matthew Essex.
Montreal on October by Ryan Buynak
Ryan is the owner operator of Coyote Blood, Paradisiac Publishing’s sister company. WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?! It means whatever you want it to mean! Basically, Ryan writes the fuck out of poetry (and writing in general) and this collection is his take on his favorite city up north. Ryan has been a partner to Paradisiac from the start and someday we will take over the world, possibly, if we get around to it.
We’re the Drug by Justin Everett Foyil
In this Coyote Blood book, Justin (a singer/songwriter) channels his radical mindset into a unique breed of poetry.
Something’s Missing by Lauren Alexis Wood
Lauren wrote a children’s book as a baby shower gift for her new niece (fall 2017), because if that was an option of something you could do, why wouldn’t you do that? #extraAF She asked illustrator Johnnie Cluney (Daytrotter, Bent River Brewery) to bring the story to life and he couldn’t have done a better job. She also calls her younger brother stupid within its pages. If you love sibling rivalry or you’re just looking for an adorable book to give to an expecting couple, this is your title.
Future Underwater Tomahawk by Ryan Buynak
A Coyote Blood title, this title astounds as a collection of random acts of poetry.
A is for Artisanal by Matthew Goldenberg
Illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Benjamin Schwartz this modern alphabet book playfully highlights popular, new-age and hipster baby names and it is goddamn adorable.
Hellbound Angel by Nikki Avila
This breathtaking look at an apocalyptic future touches on personal growth, relationships, and finding your way home. The first novel by poet Nikki Avila is a page-turner that sheds light on the beautiful poet she has grown into.
Ghost of the Wooden Squid by Ryan Buynak
This was the first title of Ryan’s (and I think his third published collection?) Paradisiac had the pleasure of publishing. It was love at first read in this exciting showcase of everyone’s favorite anti-poet at the time.
Help me! I’m Fat! by Lauren Alexis Wood
Paradisiac founder/owner lost a pretty astounding amount of weight by getting really into CrossFit so she wrote a book sarcastically about it (aren’t you supposed to, like, just automatically get on Good Morning America if you lose more than 100 pounds?!). Although ridiculous, the book contains blank journal pages with silly motivational shouts should you or someone on your Christmas list have health on their mind heading into the new year. She actually kept the weight off so there just *might* be something to the very brief, yet impactful tips on health within the first few pages. The book also links to her fitness blog where she documented the entire 5-year journey.
100 Series Presents: Shades ($40 special price due to printing costs)
Quad City Lifestyle brand expert and reigning local positivity spokesperson Jaawan Arrington of the 100 Series shares the photos and stories of 100 incredible Quad Citizens who each shared an object of importance in these colorful pages. If you’d like a wonderfully eclectic look at what makes the Quad City area so special (hint: it’s the people), this is a fantastic investment/gift.
Angels & Inner Demons by Nikki Avila
In Nikki’s follow-up to Hellbound Angel, and first collection of beautiful poetry, this title touches on the light and the dark elements of the human experience.
Sleeping: I’m Just Not Good At It by Ryan Buynak
A Coyote Blood title, what does a poet do when he can’t sleep? He makes lists. Lots of them. This collection is a culmination of a restless man’s collection of things he must never forget.
Magnet by Ryan Drag
In this Coyote Blood title the lead singer of Heavy Birds holds nothing back in a complex collection of lyrical verse dedicated to the exploration of one’s subconscious mind.
Half Dollar Rebel by James R. Parkinson
In this gritty yet hilarious collection of heartfelt essays, a young man struggling to make his way in New York City begrudgingly makes his way to adulthood.
Misfit Tales by Nikki Avila
In this cerebral collection Nikki touches on growth, love, emotion, and finding your one, true self.
Writer Bartender Skateboarder by Ryan Buynak
A Coyote Blood Title ten years in the making, this fucking amazing collection is Ryan’s latest contribution to Rock & Roll Poetry.
The Necessaries by Misty Urban
In Paradisiac’s latest title, midieval literary scholar Misty Urban takes a step back from academia and a step into our hearts with a collection of riveting stories and character portraits with life lessons you won’t soon forget.
Scary Stories To Laugh At In The Dark by Lauren Alexis Wood
This title is an homage to Alvin Schwartz’s classic ‘Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark’... except with a humorous twist. Because the dark is scary! Also... some people might be familiar with laughing in the dark for another reason so this is just adding to the laughs!
Happy Cloud’s Fly Along by the Intro. to Children’s Literature Course (ENG 240) at Black Hawk College in Moline, IL (Fall 2018)
The perfect children’s book to read to your little snowflake at bedtime.
Being the President: An Outline by Lauren Alexis Wood
This is a children’s book for any young leader out there with big dreams on the importance of being nice and embracing teamwork. Also, it’s a children’s book specifically written for our current President, Donald Trump, and is a very easy-to-understand quick guide giving him some specific guidance on how to do his job. If someone needed to womansplain the presidency to Donald Trump for some reason, I imagine this could be looked at as an effective option in which to accomplish that feat. Something the whole family can enjoy!
Um, excuse me. Those all sound amazing and this is actually kind of impressive AF.
THANK. YOU.
If you are interested in a title, please shoot an email to [email protected] with the title(s) you are interested in and your mailing address. You will get an invoice sent your way ASAP. Pay the invoice and your books will be on their way.
❤️❤️❤️
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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/a-returning-steve-carell-helms-a-sluggish-saturday-night-live/
A returning Steve Carell helms a sluggish Saturday Night Live
Steve CarellScreenshot: Saturday Night Live
“Our lives are short and love is rare, now we do the turkey dance.”
“I’m not an actor, I’m a [comedy, drama, now comedy again?] star!”
The big news that all the kids will be buzzing about is that rumored reboot of The Office that some people apparently really want and tonight’s host Steve Carell says wouldn’t work anyway, for some reasons having to do with “today’s climate.” In his opening monologue, Carell got the old “unexpected questions from the audience” treatment, as former The Office-mates Ellie Kemper, Ed Helms, and Jenna Fischer all stood up to urge their former TV boss to sign on so they can get paid, already. (Kenan wants it, too, responding to Carell asking if he’s Kenan or a “fake audience member” by telling Carell, “If I was acting, you would know.”) That was pretty much the only laugh in the bit, as Carell played straight man to the same-y jokes about how he’s being a dick (Fischer’s words), and how his actual wife and kids don’t really need him around as much as he thinks. He did tease the audience by inviting his Office pals up on stage to guarantee . . . that it would be a great show. (It wasn’t.)
The other joke hammered all week has been how Steve Carell is a big drama guy now, something the show didn’t so much refute as remind viewers of how funny Steve Carell would have been if he were given any decent sketches to act in. Woof, this was a congested wheeze of an episode, packed with sketch after sketch of unimaginative premises, indifferently executed. And that goes for Carell, too, frankly, who seemed listless and uncommitted most of the time. A couple of musical sketches offered him the chance to really belt out some silly material with the confident abandon he’s justifiably renowned for, but, in each, he matched the dullness of the writing in performance. In his third time hosting, Carell and SNL both seemed to be just running out the clock in what was the most deeply disappointing episode of a very uneven season so far.
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Saturday Night LiveSeason 44
Weekend Update update
After last week’s news-grabbing, feel-good official apology for a nothing joke (to a newly elected congressman with some seriously questionable views himself), it’s like SNL decided to play defense this week. Or maybe play dead, hoping for the national, not-at-all-manufactured outrage cycle to die down through the upcoming off week. Che and Jost sped past some fairly innocuous political material (Che’s references to the brazen spree of criminal Republican voter suppression tactics aside) in favor of some lame Amazaon jokes. Jost mocking New Yorkers’ complaints about the new Queens Amazon HQ for bringing “25,000 jobs” takes the laziest laugh line from what is a complicated issue, something SNL has long been prone to, but that Jost and Che have occasionally risen above. This, coupled with the other big Amazon piece tonight (see below) smacks of the sort of corporate coziness that just makes SNL look bad, especially with the big news story of Amazon’s move taking place in the show’s backyard, and the attendant controversies.
Tossing to the big post-election satirical landscape, SNL scanned the trees and brought back—Bigfoot porn. The fact that newly elected Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman apparently is way into Bigfoot-themed erotica has predictably dominated media coverage of his campaign. And, sure, that’s some funny stuff right there. But he’s also been allegedly associated with some avowed white supremacists, which is both less funny and more relevant, satirically speaking. So trotting out Mikey Day to portray Riggleman nearly talking himself off to his own Sasquatch porn with some relatively graphic supposed excerpts and even more disturbing grunting noises is picking the lowest-hanging fruit of a satirical target and heavy-breathing on it. Again, if SNL is going to choose to do politics, then it’s going to be judged (by me, at least) on the choices it makes in how to approach the jokes. There are a myriad premises to be plucked from the recent midterm elections. That this was the best they got this week is embarrassing.
Kenan came on again as overbearing and hyperbolic NBA dad LaVar Ball, which is always pleasantly silly. Here, Kenan’s Ball maintained his self-promoting, reality-averse egomania, even as he slipped in the fact that Lakers star LeBron James supposedly has a restraining order against him (They have brunch, “always a respectable 500 feet away” from each other), and bragging about his younger sons’ dad-financed Latvian b-ball careers. (They feast on “the briniest cabbage this side of Bucharest!”) I love Kenan, and this is the sort of thing he’s wonderful at.
Best/worst sketch of the night
On a night like tonight, it’s a matter of picking out kernels (or “cornels”) of ideas or performances than whole decent sketches, of which none were in evidence. In what was a mostly disastrous ten-to-one (but one) sketch, astronauts having space Thanksgiving with their alien hosts ate screaming purple corn (or “kern”) on the cob. Complete with dropped props, a failed chroma key effect, Pete Davidson’s sped-up corn screams, flubbed lines, and either unwritten or abandoned ending, the debacle played like something infamously intransigent SNL legend Michael O’Donoghue might have written during his ill-fated 1981 head writing stint under Lorne Michaels’ replacement producer Dick Ebersol, when the show was alternately a vehicle for the notoriously uncompromising Mr. Mike’s bizarro visions or his legitimate attempt to turn the floundering post-Lorne enterprise into “a Viking death ship.”
There was a similarly dark, throwback vibe to the space station sketch, too, with Carell’s mission commander attempting to tell stilted astronaut jokes and fun facts to Skyped-in school kids, only for a malfunction to flood the camera feed with dead, frozen monkeys, a cat with its face sucked inside out, and, finally, Kate McKinnon’s very deceased cosmonaut floating rigidly outside the ISS’ bubble window. It didn’t all work—again, Carell never seemed filly into his third hosting gig. But there was some real effort in the physical acting of the bit—apart from the dead McKinnon, Carell, Leslie Jones, and Mikey Day did some fine fake floating, and SNL has room for some darkness in it. After we hear about the unfortunate fate of the poor station kitty, there’s a moment where the beast floats into view with its back to us before it—very slowly—rotates to show just what the vacuum of space can do to a cat-face. That, plus some rictus-frozen, space-suited monkey puppets felt energizingly transgressive, in a way that SNL could stand to risk more often.
The “Beauty School Drop Out” parody musical number had a scrap of a funny idea in that Carell’s apparently heavenly, permed guardian angel is actually teenager Aidy Bryant’s dad, interrupting her 1950s sleepover to croon to her high school dropout friend. The concept that Carell’s dad has been touring the country for six weeks with a carful of sexy backup singer-dancers busting into teenage girls bedrooms has a nice, loony energy to it, and Aidy’s horrified reactions are good. (“God, what a small man you are.”) Throughout the episode, there was a refreshing attempt at doing some self-contained, conceptual sketches, but this one just didn’t ever lift off.
The Thanksgiving song sketch should have worked better. It, too, took an odd little idea—dinner guests Carell and Cecily Strong maintain there’s a famous Thanksgiving rock song which they proceed to sing in all its specifically inappropriate, boner-shrinking glory—that has the potential to soar along with the musical conceit. But then it, too, just didn’t, as Carell’s seeming diffidence sapped the momentum. It’s not a total loss—the turn that no one actually knows Strong’s character goes from Carell’s conviction that she was some sort of spirit to the revelation that she’s stolen everyone’s car keys and stabbed Beck Bennett’s host is more ambitiously weird than expected. But this one should have been a show-stopper, with everyone eventually remembering the song’s lyrics about a pair of lovers, a shy penis, and a cameo-ing squirrel and joining in the song, so its just-okay aftertaste is a bummer.
Chris Redd and Pete Davidson’s pro-Ruth Bader Ginsburg rap is the sort of thing they (especially Redd) have done better before, with the paean to the ailing but hopefully indestructible Supreme Court justice never expanding appreciably past its premise. It gave Kate McKinnon a chance to wheel out her RBG for some of her signature gyrating as “the one lady holding the whole damn thing together,” but it’s unlikely to garner another musical SNL Emmy for Redd and company.
The RV sketch, in which Heidi Gardner’s wife unsuccessfully hides how miserable she is since husband Carell cashed out to make her live out his cross-country camper fantasy worked to the extent that it did because Gardner, once more, showed what a fine actress she is on SNL. The sketch had slack pacing, no ending, another blah turn by Carell as the clueless husband, and a very nervous-looking great dane. But it also had Gardner’s peerless squeaking, eyes-averted denial to power it, with her secretly stewing wife not complaining about having to ride in the back (the dog gets carsick), sleep sitting up at the camper’s cramped table, and being in charge of emptying the vehicle’s septic tank before she finally explodes.
By dint of it being the first sketch after the monologue, I’m disinclined to cut the clueless dad sketch much slack. Of all its worst instincts, Saturday Night Live’s need to over-explain a premise is more damaging than musical monologues, game- and talk show sketches, and recurring characters combined. Here, dad Carell’s 5 a.m. announcement that he’s taking his four kids to Disney World sees his progeny immediately asking “Oh my god, does he not know?,” “Oh no, is our dad dumb?,” and “How can we know all this and our dad has no idea?” to let us know that Carell’s dad character is dumb and doesn’t know stuff. (Namely that their mom/his wife is sleeping with his boss, has left and moved to Arizona, and two of the kids aren’t his.) Carell, coming out for his first character work of the night, tentatively sets up the sketch-deadening explanatory lines, which leave viewers asking exactly how slow SNL thinks we are.
“What do you call that act?” “The Californians!”—Recurring sketch report
LaVar Ball, Ingraham Angle. Speaking of . . .
“It was my understanding there would be no math”—Political comedy report
We got another Ingraham Angle cold open tonight, with Kate McKinnon mugging it up as Fox News’ smirking white supremacist and, as she translates from Telemundo’s nickname for her, “La madre del diablo,” Laura Ingraham. McKinnon’s impression is more about pitch-perfect sneering contempt than vocal verisimilitude, but it’s still a decent vehicle to mock Ingraham’s ongoing campaign against facts, actual reporting, and anything darker than eggshell. Still, this showed the writing already letting the air out of the Alec Baldwin-replacing opening bit, as Ingraham’s breathless report on nonexistent Democratic voter fraud made eye-rolling jabs at Tyler Perry and Eddie Murphy showing up as Madea and the entire Klump family, respectively, to vote multiple times. The joke about Ingraham still scrambling for advertisers willing to sponsor someone who mocked school shooting survivors and, well, lots of other stuff is the sharpest weapon SNL wielded here, with Ingraham happily shilling for the likes of a bejeweled catheter (“Ouch.”), teeny, tiny turkeys (because you’ve alienated your entire family in time for Thanksgiving), and Volkswagen (“You know why.”) Cecily Strong made a welcome reappearance as Fox News legal shouter Jeanine Pirro. (“I hate them Laura!” “Who?” “Sorry, that’s my vocal warmup.”) And Alex Moffat continued the show’s questionable choice to portray Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg as being somewhere on the autism spectrum as the whole joke, although him finally blurting, “When I do bad things, I get money” at least addressed the most(?) recent Facebook disinformation scandal obliquely. It wasn’t outstanding, but if it keeps Baldwin’s dull and obvious Trump offscreen for another week, I’ll allow it.
Carell’s biggest showcase was in the filmed Amazon piece, where his bald-capped Jeff Bezos smugly outlined all the ways the online behemoth’s new ventures are in no way intended to merely troll Donald Trump. You know, even with drones topped with bad wigs (instead of shaving their heads “like a real man would”), new headquarters in Trump’s home town and Washington-area residence (and Florida resort vicinity), and the Bezos-owned Washington Post featuring stories like “Immigration Lawyers Suing for Apprentice tapes of Trump using the N-Word.” Carell digs in to the part more than anywhere else on the episode, serenely jabbing at Trump being approximately 100 times less wealthy than he is, or how Trump’s book is so heavy to ship because “it has four Chapter 11s.” (As the commercial chirpily concludes, “This has been a sick burn by Jeff Bezos.”) Fair enough stuff. But, as with Jost’s Update material, there’s a simplistic sameness to the joke here as—while Carell’s Bezos glides over the fact that his new HQs are pleasing everyone “except for the people who live there, and the people who live in all the places we didn’t choose”—the pandering Trump-burning here ignores the parallel dynamic of two rich assholes screwing with people’s lives for petty reasons. If people are going to clap at the idea of Bezos using the Post to attack Trump, it undermines the Post’s actual journalism as just the grimy sniping of one said asshole at another. The crowd erupted in groans at the joke that Amazon’s Arlington National Cemetery-adjacent HQ will allow the company to pay tribute to the nation’s war dead “even when it’s raining,” but, well, Trump made such jokes fair game recently. It’s just that satire works better (or at all) if it isn’t deliberately or through laziness ignoring the whole picture.
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I am hip to the musics of today
Ella Mai has a pretty vibrato and some serviceable slow jams. Plus, she got to use the stage fog left over from Carell’s sleepover sketch for her second number.
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Most/Least Valuable (Not Ready For Prime Time) Player
Seemingly not content to continue keeping Ego Nwodim on the bench, the episode actually reduced her in size, as she was one of the students in the ISS sketch, asking her question from a tiny box in the corner of the screen.
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Nobody rose above this listless episode enough to warrant the top spot. Tough, but fair.
“What the hell is that thing?”—The Ten-To-Oneland Report
After the space corn fiasco (which, for or because of its faults, should have been the last sketch), the “GP Yass” commercial that actually ended the show fizzled out badly. The joke that you can set your default GPS voice to “drag entertainer” sort-of enchants car passengers Steve Carell and Heidi Gardner, who express enjoyment of the “sassy” directions and traffic warnings with a square deadpan that aims for . . . something? Honestly, it feels like a cut-for-time piece that was only plugged in because the actual ten-to-one sketch crapped out so badly. Directionless is as good a place to get off of this review as any.
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Stray observations
In addition to being Mrs. Steve Carell/monologue prop (along with their kids), Nancy Carell (née Walls) was a cast member on SNL from 1995-1996. (Something her husband was not.) Kind of strange the show wouldn’t make mention/comedic use of that.
“You can’t dismiss that idea simply because it isn’t true and sounds insane.”
Gardner’s dog-hating mom, feigning love for the huge new pet crowding her out of the RV: “Did you know that a dog can punch you?”
Che, suspiciously eyeing the picture of a handful of smiling black men standing with Trump as he announces some suspiciously not-racist-seeming prison reform legislation, states that, whenever he sees such a gathering, he thinks, “Oh lord, how much they sell us for?”
We’re off next week, gang. See you back on December 1 for host Claire Foy, with musical guest and copy editor’s nightmare Anderson .Paak.
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Source: https://tv.avclub.com/a-returning-steve-carell-helms-a-sluggish-saturday-nigh-1830519351
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This piece appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 16, Art
To receive the LARB Quarterly Journal, become a member or donate here.
Images by Robert Flynt
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A fire alarm went off in the dark room. I was in a hotel room in San Francisco, and I had just taken off the last of my clothes; Robert was photographing me, shining flashlights across my body, painting on me with light over a long exposure. The alarm wasn’t well timed. I was posing for Robert for the first time, having finally gotten up my nerve. We had started off with portrait shots to make me comfortable, but the plan for the shoot was clearly to photograph me nude. We waited for a minute for the alarm to stop, and it didn’t; we laughed it off, I got dressed, and we went down to the lobby. When it finally stopped, we went back upstairs. Somehow the break had actually done me good, and I disrobed again, feeling far less self-conscious, even eager.
I was 26, a grad student in art history, and it was my first time really being part of an artist’s process. I felt totally alive, inhabiting my body in a way I hadn’t before, aware that I was being looked at by an artist whose work fascinated me, as well as by a man that made me nervous and excited. I didn’t know quite what I’d gotten myself into, and was lost in the moment.
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As an art historian, I’ve encountered plenty of writing on the interpersonal or erotic aspects of collaboration between artists. Whether in the context of married couples (Kahlo/Rivera, Pollock/Krasner, O’Keeffe/Stieglitz, Currin/Feinstein) or torrid affairs (Man Ray/Miller, Carrington/Ernst, Michelangelo/Cavalieri) the erotics of collaboration have become an accepted, if still delicate, part of studying the production of meaning in these artists’ works. Sometimes the artists themselves lead the way in the interpretation, talking directly about their personal life, while other times they remain reticent, leaving it to art historians and critics to speculate about how it informs their process. What is missing within all of this, however, is an acknowledgment of the erotic interest of the scholar-critic who writes about it all, or even, dare we suggest it, participates directly in the exchange. In academia, personal identities are recognized grounds, though largely undiscussed, for why one might study particular works (why feminist scholars often study women artists, or gay scholars study homoerotic art), but there is rarely any further discussion of this interest beyond basic identity categories. Would we ask a scholar of medieval or Renaissance art with a research focus on images of violent martyrdom if she is into S&M? The question seems silly when put so directly. Yet the unexpressed motivations for what people write and study about have always fascinated me.
This essay is part of my own attempt to come to grips with a very personal collaboration of my own, with the contemporary artist Robert Flynt, in the matrix of my personal, professional, and intellectual lives. It is part memoir, part reflection on making the transition from subject to object, critic to model, and part rumination on why we keep the personal lives of scholars and critics so firmly out of view. The lives of artists, actors, and musicians — the most visible producers of culture — are mined for personal information, by both the public and by academics, yet the personal identities and interests of cultural critics and scholars are kept hidden, in the interest of maintaining a (perhaps necessary) fiction of distance and objectivity (and, of course, because critics and academics are not celebrities — no one particularly cares, perhaps, about our personal lives). It’s not that I think this objectivity isn’t useful, and we obviously can’t completely leave it behind. But it’s become increasingly apparent that in my own scholarly practice, the question of real attraction to certain artworks, artists, and subjects constitutes a vital part of my engagement with what I do and how I write and teach.
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I met Robert in Rome in May 2007. I was 24, a grad student working for a month in Rome on my dissertation research on medieval manuscripts in the Vatican Library; Robert was around 50, a visitor at the American Academy, where he was working on a series of photographs called Memorials, which featured found family photographs (particularly 19th-century ones inserted into gravestones) juxtaposed against or over male figure studies and faces that he had photographed. We met over dinner at the American Academy, where I had come to see another acquaintance. There was instant electricity between us; I could tell that he was wryly amused by me — I like to think that something about my naïveté, enthusiasm, and nervousness was charming in a way that he liked. For my part, he was everything that fascinated me — someone who made art while I only studied it, who was part of a community of gay creative New Yorkers (easy to fetishize from the outside), and who had a cultural capital that I didn’t think I could or would ever possess but aspired to fervently. We also had similar interests — in portraits and memorials, in maps and diagrams, and above all in the depiction of the male body in Western art, in all its strangeness and contradiction. But did these shared interests really even matter? Or were they just a pretext for a chemistry that was obviously present? We spent a long evening talking (flirting?) and a few nights later he invited me to his apartment on the Janiculum Hill where the conversation continued. That night he asked me if I’d ever be interested in posing nude for his photographs.
It’s only now that I can really understand all of the intertwined reasons why I said no — why I wasn’t ready yet for that kind of collaboration. Certainly, I wasn’t ready personally — I was navigating the early years of a relationship with my now-husband, and I assumed that there could be no collaboration of this kind without sex (this was through no demand or insinuation of Robert’s — it was just my own assumption). I didn’t trust myself to behave if I took off my clothes to be photographed. But I also wasn’t ready professionally. As a graduate student, everything I was doing was grounded in the idea of becoming a “scholar”; not only did I have no real awareness of what it would entail to be part of his art, but on some level I didn’t think it was appropriate for a scholar to take that role — that even if Robert and I talked about his work, and even if one day I wanted to write about it as an academic, I couldn’t be a part of making it. But even as I said no to being his model, and we just spend a few hours talking, I left his apartment buzzing with energy — intellectual, sexual, who knows — as I walked back down the hill at midnight to my hotel room near the Vatican. Clearly he had touched a nerve, both through who he was, and through the possibility of this intimate collaborative space. I think I was listening to my iPod and singing along out loud as I walked down the empty streets, though I can’t remember anymore what I was listening to.
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For my younger self, and even in some ways now, the kind of relationship that I fantasized about having with Robert seemed like a relic of a past time. Each individual facet of any potential relationship was recognizable to me — an academic mentorship between an older and younger man, a sexual or romantic relationship of the same nature, or the straightforward use of a younger model by an established artist. It was the possible combination of them that felt antiquated — it felt like the erotic pedagogy of Classical Greece, where erotic acts or feelings were a legitimate part of a relationship that was also about the transfer of knowledge and experience. At 24, I was still caught somewhere between being a prude and a libertine, and the erotic friendship or mentorship that I thought was on offer would have collapsed these poles together and, I think, overwhelmed me. It also seemed against my politics — this formation of intimate male space seemed to exclude women, and in the past had always had a tone of uncomfortable class-based exclusiveness. One famous example is the story of a young French nobleman named Jacques d’Aldelswärd Fersen, who in the first years of the 20th century escaped from the moral censure of Paris to a new villa at Capri, which he filled with erotic classical sculptures and young male friends/lovers, creating an all-male space of erotic and artistic exchange (one of the images here shows Jacques’s boyfriend Nino Cesarini photographed recreating scenes from classical myth). I didn’t want (or did I?) to reinvent myself, even in some small way, as a part of that history. All Robert had asked me to do was pose for a photograph, but in the request I imagined some whole mysterious homosocial world that I wasn’t a part of. Such behavior, I thought, was incompatible with the life of a contemporary gay academic — even just a taste of it. My erotic self had to be kept separate.
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After Rome, the next time I saw Robert was in 2009, when he came to California for work and visited us. Somehow a lot had changed in those two years, and I was ready to move forward. My partner met Robert and came to adore him; he was fine with my posing for him, and so I did. One night when he was in town from New York, I went from my apartment in Oakland to his tiny hotel room near Union Square in San Francisco. We had dinner at a sushi place around the corner, but I can’t remember a single thing we said at dinner, besides him making me try sea urchin, which I hated. Then we went back to his hotel room. Robert usually photographs in the dark; he uses long exposures and creates patterns and strings of light with flashlights and laser pointers. Essentially, he paints on your body with light over the long exposure, only occasionally letting the light fall on himself as he moves catlike around your posed body. The resulting images are eerie, for lack of a better term, and really acquire their meaning for him when juxtaposed or superimposed with other images.
The small room was crowded with furniture, and I had no idea what to do or how to act. I signed model release forms (too eagerly?) and we cleared a space around the foot of the bed, near the door. Robert turned off the lights and we began. The fire alarm intervened but eventually everything came together.
How to describe the thrill of being in front of Robert’s camera? Being an artist’s model was such a simple thing, and something that so many others before me have experienced, but I was unprepared for how changed I felt by it — how validated on so many levels. I imagined that I was finally someone’s muse, even for a couple of hours — finally involved in mysteries of creation that I had so long felt excluded from, having little talent as an artist myself despite small efforts in that direction. Not only had I felt excluded from these creation mysteries in a practical sense, but in my academic training in the social history of art, I had almost come not to believe in them at all — for me, art had become the product of a time and place, of structures of power and gender and politics — not the intimate workings of an artist and model. It felt so good to be looked at in a way that could feel simultaneously safe and exciting — removed from an expectation of sexual action, but far from neutral or neutered. I had long had little or no sense of my own physical desirability, if indeed I possessed any, but Robert’s interest in my body (as an artist or a man — I didn’t care) felt overwhelming and new. It’s not that my previous sexual experiences hadn’t deeply influenced my sense of self; what was new was the sense that Robert had also accessed the sexuality of my academic or intellectual self (for lack of a better phrase) in a way that others hadn’t or couldn’t. I’m sure this was largely one-sided; he has photographed hundreds of models, and become friends with many of them. Maybe he was intrigued by photographing someone who thought about art in ways that made sense to him, and with whom he shared so many interests, but it seems unlikely that the experience had meant to him something analogous to what it had meant to me. Perhaps it was the delight that he could see me taking in it that kept him interested; the merest glance at his other photographs reveals the far more perfect bodies and faces that had been available to his camera. He tells me that almost every model he shoots makes that same comment, but that didn’t make it any less true for me — I felt like there was something special about me, some reason he wanted to photograph me, since I didn’t look like I thought a model should. Regardless, my intellectual and personal desires seemed intertwined in a way they never had before.
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How often has an art historian become part of an artist’s practice? It’s a question that I don’t know how to answer. The most famous examples that I can think of seem, on the surface, much less interpersonally complicated. The art historian Meyer Schapiro advised his student Robert Motherwell to ditch art history for painting, and mentored him for years (along with other artists including Willem de Kooning). Benjamin Buchloh has had long-running professional friendships with the artists Gerhard Richter and Michael Asher (and was married to the artist Louise Lawler); he has written about them, interviewed them for academic and popular articles, and even sat with Richter for a portrait. Art historians and critics have often been connected romantically with artists, such as Clement Greenberg’s five-year relationship with Helen Frankenthaler. And certainly many art critics, museum curators, and gallery owners have become friends and champions of contemporary artists they admire; yet how often have the interpersonal aspects of these relationships been examined? Do they need to be? Robert and I have long joked about me writing about him; he says confidently that I’ll write his monograph one day, and perhaps I will. I find his work endlessly fascinating, though at this point it feels impossible for me to know what I’d think of it if I hadn’t experienced firsthand how it is created.
Robert’s photographs are about the intersection of vision, desire, and knowledge. His images don’t make arguments about the relationship of the body to broader networks and environments — they simply pose questions, invite speculation, and place things in dialogue. He printed a photograph he took of me and my partner in 2012 on a vintage map of Ohio, and the resulting image was surprisingly uncomfortable for me to see. We had recently moved to Ohio for my first teaching job, and it was strange to see my body inscribed on this place that didn’t yet feel like home. In the resulting image Ohio’s counties and highways stretched across my limbs, connecting them with our own bodies’ movement — again, not arguing a connection, but asking if one might exist. Nearly all of his recent works are photographic monoprints like this: photos printed on sheets of paper from old books on medicine, anatomy, history, or design.
Robert’s techniques produce bodies both familiar and estranged, intimate and distanced. The introduction of uncertainty and accident that emerges through his process — through taking photographs in the dark or underwater — reveals something of the fragility of the body, but when seen in multiples, his work reasserts the body’s vital presence and sexual potency within all the networks of meaning and matter that we’ve created around it, and which threaten to fragment it at every turn. The photographs connect in so many ways with the objects that I study in my own work: medieval images where bodies and worlds are overlapped, or images where the interior medical spaces of the body are abstracted into diagrams. They speak to linkages across time between people who were interested in how the viewed and inhabited body becomes part of the mental organization of knowledge — the body as an unstable but constant reference point for everything we think, do and believe.
I don’t know exactly how, but I am sure that posing for Robert’s photographs has affected both what I write about in my academic work, and the arguments that work puts forth. For one thing, it forces me to see my premodern images as part of a larger whole — to remove them from their immediate historical contexts where I can get bogged down in details. But the change in my work as a result of posing for Robert goes beyond just the way I write about images; it’s changed what subjects I choose and especially how I teach students about them. Over time I’ve become less guarded, less cautious in explaining things to my students about my own life and beliefs. Academic objectivity is useful of course, but it can also be something teachers hide behind — a way to avoid sharing ourselves with students in a way that can be vulnerable, but which students seem hungry for. I’m less afraid now to teach the paintings or photographs that turn me on; even if I don’t talk about them in precisely those terms, I’m less afraid that students might make those connections themselves. It’s not that I’m “out” to more of my students now — I’ve always made a conscious choice to be out in the classroom. Rather, it’s that I’m not hiding anymore the fact that being gay isn’t just about one’s identity, but also about desire — something that is impossible to exclude when talking about our responses to visual images. When talking about art and beauty, desire is nearly always in play.
Somehow I’ve become more comfortable with this collapse of public and private, with the idea of queer people creating spaces apart, and this feeling only increases with every passing year. In Columbus, Ohio, I’m in the midst of a thriving cultural and academic center, but I have also seen firsthand what happens to a gay community, good and bad, when it takes assimilation rather than difference as its goal. In a place where the pride parade consists of well-meaning church groups and corporate pandering, an ever-greater part of me longs for the spaces apart or outside, in which I can exist differently, simultaneously inhabiting all parts of myself, even if this space is only (re)created within the context of a single friendship or collaboration. My politics tell me that the conscious integration into the mainstream that is so evident in Columbus is exactly what has lead to such huge leaps forward for gay rights; my gut tells me that something else is being lost, and that my relationship with Robert is part of finding my way back to it.
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I posed for Robert again in 2012, 2015, and 2016, each time with my partner. In 2012, after a long summer dinner in the backyard, we moved aside our dining-room table, pulled the curtains, and photographed in the dark. It was a thrill to watch my partner experience something similar to what I had felt years before, though from talking to him later the experience meant entirely different things to him than it had to me. During another visit in 2015 we photographed in the third-floor attic of our new house, posing together after our infant daughter had gone to sleep downstairs, the hum of the baby monitor overlapping with the clicks of Robert’s new camera.
Being in front of Robert’s camera feels different now that I am more invested in the collaboration. When I first posed for him in 2009, I was caught up in what I thought it meant to “model” for someone, wondering if I was doing it right. Over time, and especially from talking to Robert about how he envisions the way he works with me and his other subjects, it feels much less like there are two distinct positions in the relationship and much more like each session, even each photograph, is a kind of performance. For one, Robert is often on both sides of the camera. At times, in the dark, I forget where the camera is, as I watch Robert moving around me or feel him brush against me, following his flashlights to try to see where he is but also trying to stay still. Fantasy enters the picture, but even while he’s photographing, the fantasy is as much about imagining looking at the pictures of myself later, wondering how they will turn out and how he will change them as they become artworks, as it is about my bodily experience in the moment, and where the next click might take us. Whatever the fantasy, it feels fantastic and strange to have this experience where I am fully involved, but can give up control over the final work; where I can leave the scholar or writer in me behind and let someone else make the meaning for me.
Have any of these photography sessions ever crossed a particular line — have Robert and I actually had sex? I’ve been avoiding the question. It used to infuriate me when scholars very explicitly dodged this question about the premodern artists they studied, reminding us that we don’t know that these clearly queer people actually shared physical intimacy. “Of course they did,” I always thought; I didn’t care whether we had historical evidence for it or not — it seemed obvious. Yet now I don’t want to answer the question myself; it doesn’t seem to matter. I will say, though, that for Robert and many of his models, making this art together acts as a kind of surrogate or substitute for sexual relationships that they might desire. It’s just people, in the dark, in a room; the photographs themselves are the only details that come out of it, and even though part of me wants to tell everything about those experiences, I think it would ruin them to talk about exactly what goes on. Part of the images’ magic as final works is their incompleteness as documentation of the performance.
Sometimes in my life now, and especially when I think about this collaboration with Robert, I have the sense that I’ve figured everything out — that I’ve finally realized now that I can have all of these things rather than just some of them; that I can play all the roles I’ve been describing — writer, teacher, father, husband, model, friend — without it feeling like I’m an imposter in each as I switch between them. So much about being an academic is about this imposter syndrome; when everything you produce is judged as a measure of your intelligence or creativity, insecurity is always just around the corner. Relinquishing control over the final product with Robert lets me out of this cycle. What’s missing, though, is any acknowledgment, outside of our relationship, that it is happening at all — if it’s all a performance, as Robert says, then for whom? When I’ve tried to explain it to a few friends, I usually fail to do so in a way that explains what I’ve written about here — how deep the sense of fulfillment is that I get from this seemingly simple situation, and how many different parts of me it touches. I struggle with whether I want to keep it private, just for us, or whether knowing that others have seen the photographs and heard about their creation is precisely the final step I need to fully feel and embody the rhyme between what I perceive as these different selves. The question bubbled up again when I tried to choose photographs to include in this essay. The safe part of me wanted nothing too daring; after all, what if my students see this? Another part wanted to include the most explicit ones. I know I want people to see the photographs, but how much of my body do I want them to find? Some amount, I don’t know; here they are.
[See image gallery at lareviewofbooks.org]
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Karl Whittington teaches art history at The Ohio State University. He writes about European medieval art and architecture, the history of science, and gender and sexuality.
Robert Flynt is a visual artist based in New York. His work has appeared in galleries internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and L.A. County Museum. www.robertflynt.com
The post Collaboration in the Dark appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2kTkKuK
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Who Lies More Democrats Or Republicans
New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/who-lies-more-democrats-or-republicans/
Who Lies More Democrats Or Republicans
But When You Watch The Republican In The Media Being Attacked The Majority Tend To Handle It With More Grace Then The Majority Of The Democrats
I dont think its because the Republicans have more money because the Democrats tend to be the wealthier group. The majority of the richest people in the world are Democrats or Liberals. Yet, they sure dont look like a happy group of folks . I think a lot of people who are rich were their happiest when they were working hard coming up through the ranks and earning their money. I also think sometimes the social issues they get caught up in when they become wealthy can be frustrating causing many people to lose their tolerance over time.
The Lies The Gop Told Me About Democrats
I have been a Democrat for nearly one year. A GOP friend of mine asked me about the differences between the parties. He is thinking of leaving the GOP as well. Many have followed me out and read my column loyally knowing I will let them know if the Democrats are as bad as the Republicans have told us.
A political party should attract and maintain members based on the inherent good of the partys ideals. The Republican Party has derailed regarding goodness these days. I am ashamed to say it, but I had a hand in the derailing of the party in the late 1970s through the 2012 Presidential Election. I helped perpetuate the myths, a polite way of saying spread the lies, the GOP had to tell to keep the rank-and-file in line.
I spent forty-two years as a member of the Grand Old Party, and thirty-eight years in that period as a propagandist and party sycophant. I made a good living serving my Washington, DC, masters. When one pretends they are working for the greater good, it makes serving ones self at the expense of society as a whole easier to swallow, if one has even a sliver of a conscience.
I witnessed men and women who had sworn to protect and defend The Consitution of the United States sit and hatch plans to strip Muslims of their rights under the law, and call it patriotic.
What are the stories the Republicans tell that are not true about the Democrats?
Of course, if two sides will not compromise, then we get the mess we have today.
The Flawed Statistically Silly New Study That Calls The Republican Party More Dishonest
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A new study out today proclaims that the Republican Party is much more dishonest than the Democratic Party. To which I say, meh.
The report, from George Mason Universitys Center for Media and Public Affairs, captured lots of headlines, and the group did a lot to make the conclusions sizzle, by using phrases like Republicans lie more and Republicans are less trustworthy than Democrats in the press statement announcing the study.
Beneath all the hype, though, this report struck me as one of the silliest statistical analyses Ive seen in a long time. While I do think that the truthfulness of the G.O.P. has sunk terribly in the era of Tea Party delusions, studies like this one detract from the real job of trying to keep politicians honest.
Heres whats wrong with the study. Well, almost everything is wrong with the study.
To make its assessment, C.M.P.A. relied on a fact-checking group known as PolitiFact, which examines political statements for their accuracy. The center then selected a periodJanuary 20 through May 22 of this yearand reviewed 100 political claims examined by Politifact during that time. That included 46 statements by Democrats and 54 by Republicans. Then it toted up the number of statements deemed by PolitiFact to be false.
In other words, meh.
Wow: Radical Leftists Are Mainly Supported Bywhite Radical Leftists
Michael Barone of The New York Post writes,
The split among Democrats is clear. Left-wing policies may be supported by hipster whites with adolescent enthusiasm, but gentry liberals increasingly have abstract questions about them, and they are rejected roundly by people of color blacks, Latinos, Chinese out of concrete concerns.
Barone continues, There the cry to defund the police is not an abstract matter, as it is still to affluent Manhattanites, or an adolescent rallying cry, as it is to the cash-strapped hipsters in gentrifying Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods just across the East River from Manhattan.
Black and Latino homeowners with families and jobs know their neighborhoods can be destroyed and their lives ended by violent criminals. They want more, rather than less, policing in their neighborhoods.
Instead, the hardcore leftists threw in heavily behind Maya Wiley the former DiBlasio staffer, Civil Rights Activist, and MSNBC Analyst turned Mayoral Candidate. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Wiley, a candidate who can center people, racial justice, and economic justice.
Adams seizing on the opportunity lit her up in a scathing statement saying that leftists like Wiley and AOC want to slash the police budgets at a time when Black and brown babies are being shot in our streets, hate crimes are terrorizing Asian and Jewish communities, and innocent New Yorkers are being stabbed and shot.
Modeling The Universe’s Biggest Monsters
A video clip showing the model in action at different scales allowing the viewer to see how gas makes its way towards the accretion disk surrounding the black hole.
Older models that tried to show how supermassive black holes interacted with their galaxies ran into a couple of problems.
Large-scale simulations are very good at handling what is going on across an entire galaxy, but they become problematic at smaller scales. When one tries to look too closely at a black hole using such models, uncertainty abounds. On the other hand, “zoom-in” simulation models can provide a great idea of what is going on next to a black hole, but they fail to describe what is going on in the rest of the galaxy.
Combining the benefits of the two into a single model is vital, as the interplay between the processes at the larger and smaller scales is key to understanding the co-evolution of supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies and that of the galaxies themselves. The new model aims to bridge the gap between these older models by starting from the Feedback in Realistic Environments project and adding in details from the large-scale simulations to produce a model that can zoom in as far as a tenth of a parsec as well as model other occurrences at a galactic scale.
Study: Politifact Says Republicans Lie More
05/29/2013 08:01 AM EDT
The fact-checking organization PolitiFact has found Republicans to be less trustworthy than Democrats, according to a new study.
Fifty-two percent of Republican claims reviewed by the Tampa Bay Times fact-checking operation were rated “mostly false,” false or pants on fire, versus just 24 percent of Democratic statements, according to George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs. By the same token, 54 percent of Democratic statements were rated as “mostly true” or “true,” compared to just 18 percent of Republican statements.
The CMPA looked at 100 statements — 46 by Democrats, 54 by Republicans — that were fact-checked by PolitiFact between January 20 and May 22. The study’s findings are similar to a previous CMPA study, which found that PolitiFact gave more negative ratings to the Romney campaign than the Obama campaign in 2012.
See their complete findings here.
PolitiFact rates the factual accuracy of specific claims; we do not seek to measure which party tells more falsehoods.
The authors of this press release seem to have counted up a small number of our Truth-O-Meter ratings over a few months, and then drew their own conclusions.
We’ve rated more than 7,000 statements since we started in 2007. We are journalists, not social scientists. We select statements to fact-check based on our news judgment — whether a statement is timely, provocative, whether it’s been repeated and whether readers would wonder if it is true.
Democrats Or Republicans: Who Has The Higher Income
In the end, many people assume Republicans are richer based on these figures. Although, this is only a look at the richest families and politicians in America though. In everyday American households, it seems that Democrats have a higher mean salary. Its true that many of the wealthiest families in the country are contributing to Republican campaigns. On the contrary, families registered as , statistically speaking.
These findings still have some loopholes in them, of course. For instance, the data was collected over the last 40 years or so. Moreover, it is only based on the most recently collected information. As you know, demographics are constantly changing. These figures may have been affected as well. There is also a margin of error with every type of data collection like this. So, what do you think? Who is richer? Democrats or Republicans?
Why Democrats Lose On Social Media While Republicans Lie And Win Big
If youre baffled that nearly half of the United States could look at the past four years and say, I want more of that, you arent alone. But thats also not quite what happened.
What did happen is that much of the US electorate lives in a social media echo chamber saturated by disinformation, with climate change and the Green New Deal prime examples. Conservatives have turned the term Green New Deal into an emotional weaponpart of their overall narrative of Democrats as extremist, elitist socialists. It isnt fact-based, but as Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in behavioral economics, explained, No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.
The irony is that there is a compelling, positive story to tell about the Green New Deal that should appeal to a broad base of voters. At a time when the pandemic has thrown millions of people out of work and spawned miles-long food lines, a Green New Deal would create millions of jobs that cant be outsourced overseas. Americans would be put to work installing solar panels, building wind turbines, replacing leaky windows and outmoded appliances with energy-efficient alternatives, restoring farms and forests to store carbon, and undertaking a thousand other climate-friendly activities. With government investment priming the pump, a Green New Deal would boost revenues for business as well, paying for itself through the resulting increased tax revenues.
Why is that?
The Gops New Orthodoxy: Big Lie Or Bust
Rep. Liz Cheney is no closet Democrat or even a political moderate. The 54-year-old Wyoming Republican, the elder daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is an arch conservative who has in the past accused environmental groups like the Sierra Club of supporting U.S. adversaries and defended the birther movement that wrongly insisted Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Her views would seem well suited for the 21st century GOP except for one thing: She could not stomach Donald Trumps claim that the 2020 election was rigged and that he was the rightful winner or, as its is commonly known, the Big Lie. And for this unforgivable sin, the congresswoman is poised to lose her place in party leadership Wednesday as House Republican Conference chair, the third highest position in the caucus.
Its telling that Ms. Cheneys replacement is likely to be Rep. Elise Stefanik, an ideologically flexible New Yorker formerly associated with the partys centrists who has recast herself as a Trump loyalist. And in recent interviews, she has signaled that whatever the message of Republicans in the House, that will be her message, too. That may be how one gets ahead in that increasingly dysfunctional political party but its not in the interests of a nation in desperate need of integrity and reason from that side of the aisle.
The Party Thats Actually Best For The Economy
Many analyses look at which party is best for the economy. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Democratic presidents since World War II have performed much better than Republicans. On average, Democratic presidents grew the economy 4.4% each year versus 2.5% for Republicans.
A study by Princeton University economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found that the economy performs better when the president is a Democrat. They report that by many measures, the performance gap is startlingly large. Between Truman and Obama, growth was 1.8% higher under Democrats than Republicans.
A Hudson Institute study found that the six years with the best growth were evenly split between Republican and Democrat presidents.
Most of these evaluations measure growth during the presidents term in office. But no president has control over the growth added during his first year. The budget for that fiscal year was already set by the previous president, so you should compare the gross domestic product at the end of the presidents last budget to the end of his predecessors last budget.
For Obama, that would be the fiscal year from October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2018. Thats FY 2010 through FY 2017. During that time, GDP increased from $15.6 trillion to $17.7 trillion, or by 14%. Thats 1.7% a year.
The chart below ranks the presidents since 1929 on the average annual increase in GDP.
President
1.4%
A president would have better growth if he had no recession.
The Big List Of Alleged Malefactors
Each person identified as indicted, from 56 years of Executive branch investigations, is listed in Figure 4. Figure 5 provides the numbers, thus far, for the Trump administration. Two years into his term, President Trump has already proved greater than all but one of the previous 10 Presidents in number of indictments the Administration has scored. Congratulations Mr. Trump, you are the Greatest! Of course, the information in Figure 5 that is accurate in the morning may be out of date by the afternoon.
The Final Reports of the 28 Special Prosecution, Special Prosecutor, and Independent Counsel investigations between 1973 and 1999 are the go-to source for who was indicted for what. Before an investigation closes down it will be clear if the indictment itself survives legal challenge; cases will go to trial; there will be decisions. But the independent investigation may well close down before appeals are heard and decided. Therefore, the final reports are not, in some cases, the last word on total convictions and jail time. That still required further research of court records, news stories, and obituaries.
It is not necessary to read the many hundreds of pages of most of these documents for the raw numbers. There are, though, many engrossing distractions in the tales of greed for power or money, ambition, obstruction, arrogance, loyalty, ideological zealotry, duplicity, error and incompetence the reports lay out in generally careful legal language.
Lies And The Lying Liars Who Get Away
More recently, and more pertinent to this election: Hillary Clinton has lied about her e-mail scandal on a breadth unprecedented even within the Democratic Party. In many ways her lies about her e-mail server are more troubling and more consequential than Trumps scattershot dishonesty. You get the sense that Trump lies about things because hes not too bright and cant think very quickly. Clinton, on the other hand, lies about her e-mail server because she has most likely compromised American national security, endangered American lives, and wants to avoid going to jail.
She claimed to have turned over all of her work-related e-mails. That was a lie. She claimed she hadnt transmitted any classified information. That was a lie. She claimed she hadnt transmitted any information marked classified. That was a lie. She claimed that she had never been subpoenaed in regards to her e-mail. That, too, was a lie. She claimed the FBI had considered her account truthful. Another lie.
Oh, also: President Obama originally denied having any knowledge about Clintons private e-mail server. That was a big-time lie. Clintons e-mail scandal has been one gigantic lie from start to finish.
These are just a few examples of liberal dishonesty; plenty more could easily be produced. While it is true that newspapers and other media outlets have fact-checked many of these lies, it is impossible to argue that the responses from the media have been the same.
Yes Dictators Sometimes Cloak Themselves In Socialism But Tyranny Here And Elsewhere Is Always Right
Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump
The meaning today of the Big Lie almost always refers to the false claim by Donald Trump and his right-wing cronies that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen by the left and Joe Biden, with the help of foreign agents.
Not only is this claim false, it is absurdly false.
This is hardly the first Big Lie from the right. Not even close. The right has been promulgating Big Lies for decades.
In fact, lying is the only way the right wing can win elections. After all, its policies are profoundly unpopular with ordinary people because the right-wing favors the 1% rich over the 99% working and middle classes.
How in the world could 1% of the population ever win elections over the 99%? Simple. The 1% bamboozles the 99%. To win elections, the right must conceal its true intentions from the voters and instead engage in manipulative tactics, like lying and fearmongering.
The lies are not just little lies.They are whoppers. They are the complete opposite of the truth. They are 180 degrees from the truth. They are the polar opposite of the truth, like from the North Pole all the way to the South Pole. Hence the term Big Lie.
Yet, shockingly, many of these egregious lies actually work. They take hold. They create a false impression in the mind of the public.
Once again, this is the exact opposite of the truth. Dictatorships and fascism are right-wing, not left-wing.
Shockingly, this nonsense actually works.
How Increasing Ideological Uniformity And Partisan Antipathy Affect Politics Compromise And Everyday Life
Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive than at any point in the last two decades. These trends manifest themselves in myriad ways, both in politics and in everyday life. And a new survey of 10,000 adults nationwide finds that these divisions are greatest among those who are the most engaged and active in the political process.
The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%. And ideological thinking is now much more closely aligned with partisanship than in the past. As a result, ideological overlap between the two parties has diminished: Today, 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.
Today 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican
Partisan animosity has increased substantially over the same period. In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994. Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing partys policies are so misguided that they threaten the nations well-being.
Many of those in the center remain on the edges of the political playing field while the most ideologically oriented and politically rancorous Americans make their voices heard
Republicans Lie More Than Democrats
In the current post-fact, hyper-partisan era of politics, its hard to separate accusations of dishonesty from political sparring. If the liberal mainstream media accuses a conservative politician of lying, the conservatives fight back by alleging that theres a bias, and vice versa.
Luckily, several fact-checking sites have attempted to rise above the fray, including PolitiFact.com and the Washington Posts Fact Checker. And while theyre nonpartisan in approach, a recent study of PolitiFact.coms results by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University reveals something that will please one party more than another: Republicans lie more than Democrats, as much as three times as often during Obamas second term. While this may not come as a surprise from a party that denies certain scientific basics , the study puts the two parties relationships with honesty into distinct relief:
While these stats are pretty damning, in the multi-channel era of media consumption, it may be harder than it should to get this information to the people who need to hear it: conservative or conservative-leaning voters.
About the author
Zak Stone is a Los Angeles-based writer and a contributing editor of Playboy Digital.His writing has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, NYMag.com, Los Angeles, The Utne Reader, GOOD, and elsewhere. Visit his personal website here.
Quiz: Let Us Predict Whether Youre A Democrat Or A Republican
Tell us a few details about you and well guess which political party you belong to. It shouldnt be that simple, right? Were all complex people with a multiplicity of identities and values. But the reality is that in America today, how you answer a handful of questions is very likely to determine how you vote.
This quiz, based on recent surveys with more than 140,000 responses, presents a series of yes-or-no questions to predict whether someone is more likely to identify as a Democrat or a Republican. It captures divisions that should make you worried about the future of American democracy.
We wont collect your answers.
The first question is the most important: Its about race. Asking whether someone is black, Hispanic or Asian cleaves the electorate into two groups. Those who answer yes lean Democratic; the others are split roughly evenly between the parties. Among those who are not black, Hispanic or Asian , the second most important question is whether the person considers religion important. If they answer yes, they are probably Republican.
Its not just race and religion, though. Party allegiances are now also tied to education, gender and age. Americans have sorted themselves more completely and rigidly than any time in recent history.
How demographics predict party affiliation
The group most likely to be Democrats are black women older than about 30.
Meeting in the Middle
Reliable Republicans
It Is Astonishing That Blacks Vote For Democrats At All
For the 100 years prior to Lincoln the democrats were historically the party that supported slavery in the south. In 1860 when Lincoln was elected the democrats elected a person who debated Lincoln and argued why the idea of freeing the slaves was stupid.
Lincoln won even though most of the nation knew that we were on the verge of the most horrible conflict in history. Lincoln wanted to avoid this war but the democrats wouldnt concede even the smallest point.
Lincoln drew a line in the sand. He wouldnt go to war and kill 6 million Americans to free the slaves as long as the democrat states would agree to not let slavery spread to any new states.
The democrats wouldnt accept that. Like todays democrats they were absolutely convinced and not very negotiating. They wanted their slavery and they believed in it.
They felt slavery would be imperiled if it wasnt allowed to grow. They wanted more slave owners to get more slave promoting voters like illegal immigrants today.
Lincoln went to war and adjusted for population 6 million Americans died. Even if you dont adjust for population the number who died in the war is more than the sum of all American deaths in all wars since.
The devastation was horrendous. One of the generals in the north practiced a burn it to the ground policy that denuded whole cities. The south was crushed.
To Get To The Truth About Jan 6 Democrats Need To Ignore Most Of The Republicans
Sometimes seeing is not believing. Or, so it seems as Republicans in Congress go about rewriting history by claiming that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was really a normal tourist visit by peaceful patriots. Millions of Americans saw the live broadcast, as insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, marauded through the House and Senate chambers, and chanted Hang Mike PenceMichael Richard PenceThe Memo: Will DeSantis’s star fall as Florida COVID numbers rise?Man charged in Jan. 6 assault of news photographerCan SpaceX’s Elon Musk help NASA get back to the moon by 2024 after all?MORE.
Yet now the Republican party leadership says that none of that really happened and theyre asking people to believe a series of lies about that days events.
This week, as the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol holds its first hearings, it is time for Democrats in Congress to say good riddance to Republican colleagues who engage in such denialism.
Over the course of the last several months, Republicans have attacked anyone in their party for example, Liz Cheney
First, Senate Republicans defeated efforts to create a bipartisan commission modeled after the one that investigated the 9/11 terror attacks. They did so despite the fact that Democratic leaders in Congress acceded to Republican demands about the commissions composition, powers, and the deadline for its work.
That is exactly the Republican goal.
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To the surprise of precisely no one, Sen. Bernie Sanders has been announced as the winner of TIME magazines TIME 100 reader poll.
The online poll has become an annual target for activists, trolling pranksters, and fans of Korean R&B. While the digitally active base of Sanders propelled the septuagenarian politician to the top of the poll this year, previous winners include Indian anti-corruptionist Arvind Kejriwal, 4chan founder Christopher moot Poole, and K-pop sensation Rain. On at least two occasionsonce in 2009 and again in 2012hackers have manipulated the results so the first name of each candidate spells out an obscene message or inside joke.
The struggles of the TIME 100 poll are emblematic of these sorts of online polls. Typically meant as a form of reader engagement more than any scientific measurement, news outlets are often shockedshocked, I tell youto find out their survey is easily brigaded or, in the case of the TIME 100, straight up manipulated. Overall, they have become a silly, embarrassing practice in self-congratulation and data collection for both the media entities who offer them and the users who enjoy them.
The struggles of the TIME 100 poll are emblematic of these sorts of online polls.
More than simply a nuisance, however, they represent a deeper problem in measuring peoples opinions and behavior in a way that is both representative and useful.
The easiest example of this might be the post-debate polls offered by websites and news outlets to allow people to vote for which presidential candidate they feel won the debate. The Drudge Report, for example, has held such a survey of its largely conservative readers after each of the 12 GOP debates. Thus far, Donald Trump has walked away cleanly with 10 out of 11 victories (Trump did not attend the Jan. 28 debate held by Fox News) in the Drudge poll. His victory is touted proudly by Drudges fellow pro-Trump outlets like Breitbart, Infowars, and even Trump himself as true a measure of public opinion as an actual poll.
One might consider The Drudge Report as a representative sample of conservativesthe site, managed solely by journalist Matt Drudge, has quietly remained one of the most influential news publications and one that regularly sways the national conversation. Despite its stoic design philosophy and abject bias, The Drudge Report collects nearly 18 million unique monthly visitors. If any media outletespecially a digitally based onestands a chance of accurately tracking online opinions of Republicans, its likely Drudge.
Except, as in the Time 100 poll, Drudges polls are too easily bombarded by people whose ideological interest is unlike that of his GOP rivals, a portion of Trumps base is as youthful and tech-savvy as the same troops that show up to support Sanders. A poll done by Harvard Universitys Kennedy Schoolan actual polling outlet with representative samples and weights against biasfinds Trump winning among millennials against his rivals by similar margins Sanders has topped Clinton.
Hence why Sanders and Trump have handily won most debate polls held by any outlet. And more than the people voting in them take their result seriously. According to Matt Drudge himself, one supporter of Sen. Ted Cruz (or at least one opponent to Donald Trump) might have created a voting bot to manipulate the results of the poll in favor of Cruz. Trump has seriously offered his performance in these polls as true measures of his support in response to perceived slights or bias.
Even though every poll, Time, Drudge etc., has me winning the debate by a lot, @FoxNews only puts negative people on. Biased - a total joke!
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2016
All polls have me winning debate big- Drudge, TIME, etc. Dopey Charles Krauthammer still nasty. He has zero cred- totally dishonest!
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2016
Loved doing the debate...won Drudge and all on-line polls! Amazing evening, moderators did an outstanding job.
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2015
Every poll, Time, Drudge, Slate and others, said I won both debates - but heard Megyn Kelly had her two puppets say bad stuff. I don't watch
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2015
As an actual measure of data, these polls are absolutely 100 percent meaningless. They dont accurately measure opinions of voters. They dont even accurately measure opinions of the visitors to the sites hosting them. All they can tell anyone is how people voted in them. Polls, to be considered even close to accurate, must include a litany of measures to prevent the kind of bias seen in the Drudge poll or the flooding and hacking seen in the TIME poll. The National Council on Public Polls offers no less than 20 considerations for journalists and consumers when reading polls, from who funded the poll and the sample population size down to the sampling errors and order of the questions asked. Online polls fulfill almost zero of these obligations.
Their ineffectiveness and vulnerability is one reason they are a poor option for actual pollsters in an age when the public opinion poll could very well be dying. According to historian Jill Lepores damning New Yorker piece about the state of modern polling, pollsters are struggling to get an increasingly-mobile world to respond to polls (mostly performed on landline phones). The promise of this work is that the sample is exquisitely representative, writes Lepore. But the lower the response rate the harder and more expensive it becomes to realize that promise, which requires both calling many more people and trying to correct for non-response bias by giving greater weight to the answers of people from demographic groups that are less likely to respond.
Nate Silver, perhaps the worlds first and only celebrity pollster, agrees. It's quite challenging to conduct a poll now when most people are not picking up a random stranger's telephone call answering a survey, he said. Online polls might solve the sample size problemhundreds of thousands of people vote in each Drudge pollbut they lack the randomness to serve as an accurate representation of any meaningful population. Online polls don't use probability, which means there's no wayunless you're the NSAof randomly picking someone online," Silver says.
So why do them? Why would media outlets continue a practice that is functionally meaningless? The first and most obvious is trafficgiving supporters of candidates a chance to actually support their candidate in a way that makes them feel useful and heard can be a huge draw, much more than simply an article about that candidate could do. Another purpose, however, is the sheer amount of specified data such surveys allow outlets and other companies to collect. After all, marketers and data analysts use surveys all the time to gather measures of how certain populations might respond to a particular product or ad campaign.
Perhaps more than any other media outlet, Buzzfeed has this down to a science. Each of those quizzes promising to reveal which Harry Potter character you are or what kind of grandparent youll be is harnessed by Buzzfeeds impressive data analytics arm to give a micromanaged view of its audience to marketers. They dont just make data collection easythey make it fun.
Theres little reason to suspect polls like that of the TIME 100 arent used for similar purposes. So not only do such surveys attract hordes of activated users, they encourage those users to hand over information about their positions or stances a news site might otherwise struggle to glean.
Online polls are useless when projecting onto any other kind of audience, no matter the overlap. But as measures of activation and devotion for a candidate, position, or even a pop star, they might just tell marketers all they need to hear.
Gillian Branstetter is a social commentator with a focus on the intersection of technology, security, and politics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Business Insider, Salon, the Week, and xoJane. She attended Pennsylvania State University. Follow her on Twitter @GillBranstetter.
L.A. Foodie / Flickr (CC by 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman
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Hyperallergic: Required Reading
MVRDV has designed South Korea’s version of New York’s High Line. It is a 983-metre-long park (~3,225 feet) on a 1970s highway destined for demolition. (via Dezeen, which has more images)
Christopher Knight reviews the new Marciano Art Foundation museum in LA. He writes:
The selection is highly personal. The mission statement is freewheeling (“Through exhibiting a diverse and compelling collection … MAF aims to encourage curiosity and contemplation of art.”) The professional staff is limited, as are public hours (Thursday through Saturday and only with reservations, which are free but already booked through June).
A walk through the galleries has something of the feel of an art fair, where random juxtapositions meet a few more organized combinations. More than 90% of the art in the debut presentation was made in just the last 10 years. The art is too new to have settled yet into historical frameworks and culturally revealing patterns. The galleries are at once jumbled and tame.
This entertaining review of the Venice Biennale from the Sydney Morning Herald is worth a read:
“The first reviews of this excruciating, pretentious non-spectacle made it sound like a life-changing experience. This testifies to another psychological phenomenon: expose a group of arty people to something boring and incomprehensible and they’ll swear it was magnificent.”
“Despite its upbeat subtitle – Viva Arte Viva – the 57th Biennale will go down in history as a lump of mediocrity suspended between poles of earnestness and silliness. This year’s curator was Christine Macel, of the Centre Pompidou, and her grand scheme was to make a Biennale “designed with artists, by artists and for artists”. This sounded like a better plan than making a Biennale with plumbers or parking meter attendants or dentists, but it seemed to disguise the fact that Madame Macel was the one doing the choosing.”
Chika Okeke-Agulu thinks African art is being gentrified:
During the colonial era, bands of looters — missionaries, scholars, security forces and fortune hunters — fanned out across the continent and, by force or guile, carted away vast quantities of Africa’s artistic heritage. Many of these masterpieces of ancient and traditional African sculpture now reside in major private and public collections in the West, with little chance of ever returning to Africa.
… Recently, my 72-year-old mother was looking at a glossy catalog of Igbo sculptures from major European collections, most of which were acquired during the Nigerian-Biafran War of the late 1960s. She told me that the disappearance of similar sculptures from our hometown shrines in southeastern Nigeria, and the end of the associated festivals, was one of her most painful memories of that war.
… African collectors and those based in Africa must participate in this market, for it is more likely that their collections will stay on the continent. Fortunately, this has already started. As Africa overcomes years of dictatorships and civil wars, its fledgling democracies have seen the rise of a wealthy, cosmopolitan class interested in supporting art and culture. A few collectors and art patrons have emerged as major players in these new auctions and fairs.
Is the “cultural elite” that Trump rails against out of touch? Writing for the Financial Times, Simon Kuper has some clear thoughts:
This is where the cultural elite’s self-image diverges from the view held by its critics. Trump voters see a class that talks equality while living privilege and exuding contempt. Here are Greenpeace members who are always on planes, proclaiming their goodness instead of improving the world. Maybe if everyone shopped at Whole Foods (the upscale grocery chain nicknamed “Whole Paycheck”) the world would improve, suggests Currid-Halkett. But there’s a counterargument: if everyone shopped at Whole Foods, it would lose its status, and the cultural elite would have to shop elsewhere. These people live in places and ways that hardly anyone else can afford. The only poor people they know are their nannies. Their New Yorker subscriptions might cost just $90, but are usually premised on expensive educations.
A funny story about the time airport security discovered a scientist���s 3D printed mouse penis:
Cohn, who’s based at the University of Florida, studies genitals and urinary tracts, and how they develop in embryos. Around 1 in 250 people are born with birth defects affecting these organs, and although such changes are becoming more common, their causes are largely unclear. By studying how genitals normally develop, Cohn’s hoping to understand what happens when they take a different path. And like many scientists, he is working with mice. He recently analysed a mouse’s genitals with a high-resolution medical scanner. To show his colleagues how incredibly detailed the scans can be, he used them to print a scaled-up model, which he took with him to the conference in DC. And because the conference was just a two-day affair, Cohn didn’t bring any checked luggage. Hence: the penis in his carry-on.
Carey Dunne talked to chemtrail conspiracy theorists in California and discovered some interesting things:
In early January, Tammi felt cautiously optimistic about how the Trump administration would affect organic farmers. Born in Canada, Tammi isn’t a US citizen, but given the option to vote – despite thinking Trump is “a prick” – she “probably would’ve picked him”. Given her environmentalism and hippie-dippy aesthetic, this shocked me.
While teaching me how to candy grapefruit peels, Tammi explained her optimism: Todd, her dairy farmer neighbor, claimed that “Trump promised to end chemtrails”.
Curious where Todd might’ve found this information, I Googled “Trump chemtrails”. It turned up a dubious news report from 16 January, which featured what looked like a screenshot of a tweet by Donald Trump: “My very first executive order will END the chemtrailing across America. #MAGA,” it read.
At first I couldn’t tell if the site was satirical, or whether the tweet was really authored by Trump – it wouldn’t have been the most outrageous missive from the man who once supported the “birther” theory.
Another Google search clarified that the tweet was impersonated. But if I’d encountered it as a middle-aged farmer worried about toxic clouds and untrained in spotting fake news, I probably would’ve told my friends that the president-elect had promised to end chemtrailing.
Photographer Erik Johansson’s surreal “Full Moon Service” is pretty captivating, and PetaPixel has some info about how it was made:
(via Petapixel)
This Baltimore demolish crew tore down the wrong building (story at Gizmodo):
RELATED? Jared Kushner has a questionable real estate business in Baltimore.
This is just funny:
Trump: Why do you keep saying "the power of Christ compels you" and hitting me with water?
Pope: Testing a theory. http://pic.twitter.com/V0jnONuFsP
— Crutnacker (@Crutnacker) May 24, 2017
FiveThirtyEight calculates the odds of Trump being impeached:
All that work … and I’m still not going to give you a precise number for how likely Trump is to lose his job. That’s because this is a thought experiment and not a mathematical model. I do think I owe you a range, however. I’m pretty sure I’d sell Trump-leaves-office-early stock (whether because of removal from office or other reasons) at even money (50 percent), and I’m pretty sure I’d buy it at 3-to-1 against (25 percent). I could be convinced by almost any number within that range.
We have reached peak latte:
Lattes Inside Avocados Are Now A Real Thing For Some Godforsaken Reason https://t.co/7xHT1glQRb http://pic.twitter.com/xNYoVaZvvl
— BuzzFeed Food (@BuzzFeedFood) May 19, 2017
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.
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