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majestyrising · 6 years

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Cantio

Notes: Just a normal night in the the Magnanimous Magpie.

Pings: @hellkite-fr, @fusefr, @kattafr, @archaic-fr, @mask-fr, @griminal-rising, @wearetherot, @jadedragons, @palewastelandking, @lumoselm, @webwingalpha, @slighteyewing, @deadwapiti-fr, @shardclan, @fr-blackiebelle, @airris-fr, @frxemriss, @fitzfr, @nochnyr, @jaggeddragonbones

The smooth croon is a shock to everyone in the bar. It’s pretty busy tonight, the sun having set a couple of hours prior with all the mercs filing in after work. The cold radiating from the metal surfaces counteracts the swell of body heat of surprisingly calm occupants; chatter ebbs and flows; it’s been good for business without being aggressive and Oksana’s unfaltering smile shows that off.

But the croon, the crooning voice is a surprise.

Alcibiades tilts his head back with the slightest shit-eating smirk on his face. He knows damn well who that is, and although he is as shocked as everyone else for a very different reason, he doesn’t let on. His fingers gracefully shift the song he was playing from it’s soft relaxing rhythm to something darker, deeper, and altogether more sultry.

She plants one hand on the piano, long hair as deep as the abyss sliding from behind a frilled ear to cover part of her face as she sings.

Too bad she’s batshit. And not a man. Maybe he’ll ask after any brothers.

The duet turns the bar silent for a good couple of minutes before it ends. Everyone hesitates. Should they clap?

“Aren’t you going to thank us both?” Alcibiades purrs into the awkward silence. There’s a chorus of ‘no’ and ‘fuck you’ and then the chatter returns. He swivels on his seat, coattails sliding across the plush leather, and props his long dainty fingers underneath his chin.

Aisha lights a cigarette.

“What,” she says, flatly. Her purple eyes don’t reflect any of the light, but the crescent moon tattooed along her face glows slightly. She’s looking right past him; she’s actually looking at Gabriel, who silently raises a glass.

“I didn’t expect that from you tonight,” Alcibiades says, looking up at her through his eyelashes. She rolls her eyes before meeting his gaze. “Oh, ice cold.”

She shrugs noncommittally, inhaling deeply and then exhaling the smoke, thankfully away from his face.

“Aren’t you going to offer me one?” he asks, licking his bottom lip, “It’s a courtesy.”

“No,” she replies, brushing her hair back with her other hand. A single ruby ring shines on her fingers. “You’re a good pianist and nothing more. You are not my-“

Her lip curls in disgust.

“Friend,” she spits, framing the word with air quotes. This time, she does blow the smoke into his face. He doesn’t blink, even when his eyes water and twin trails of tears drip down his face. Nor does his little smirk falter.

“You wound me so deep, beautiful,” he says, sweetly.

“No,” she says, mildly.

“You have such a lovely singing voice,” he continues, casting his gaze to the heavens as he tilts his head back, “Such a siren.”

“I change my mind. Your playing is adequate at best. Stop talking to me.”

“And yet you’re still standing in front of me,” he notes, looking back at her, “You want something extra, cutie?”

Before he can react, she’s grabbed a knife from her hair- she was keeping that in her hair?- and holds it flush to his Adam’s apple.

“Hot,” he purrs, no fear in his eyes whatsoever.

“Ugh,” she mutters. Without the fear, it’s no fun.

He wonders for a moment if she’s going to stub the cigarette on his face, but she doesn’t. She lets go of him and saunters off; his eyes follow the swing of her hips before he looks up to find Oksana staring down at him.

She wipes his eyes with a handkerchief. It comes away with salt water, eyeliner, and a significant amount of pink glitter.

“Oksana,” Alcibiades complains, drawing out the last vowel, “Aisha was mean to me.”

“You know how she is,” Oksana says, patiently. “I don’t know why you talk to her. She’s an assassin. You know their type.”

“You told me to talk to more people-“

“I said, you should make some friends,” she interrupts, waggling a finger, “I didn’t mean try to bond with her. Why don’t you talk to someone else.”

“I do!” he complains. Dramatically he snatches her hand by the wrist and stands up. His outfit is perfectly tailored and hugs his slim body, the picture of grace. Some heads turn in surprise, but most ignore him. He turns around, heeled shoes clicking. “Gustav!”

Gustav turns around from his booth, blinking. Alcibiades gestures with one hand and Gustav gets up, slinking through the crowd to the grand piano. He brings his drink with him. It has an umbrella in it, but they both know it’s nothing but fruit juice.

“Yes Alci?” Gustav says, his soft wavy hair perfectly tousled around his perfect baby face.

“You like me, don’t you?” Alcibiades asks, his tone imbued with a heavy sense of drama.

Gustav mulls this over, looking up at the ceiling. He studies the crystal chandeliers for ten entirely silent seconds.

“You’re alright,” he decides on, before sipping his drink.

“See!” Alcibiades exclaims, turning back to Oksana.

She shakes her head and pats him on the shoulder before returning to the bar. Alcibiades sits back down with a huff, placing both hands on his knees.

“Why were you talking to that psycho?” Gustav asks plainly, looking at Aisha where she’s now leaning on the bar provocatively. She rotates her wrist as she talks to Gabriel, who nods slightly.

“She can sing,” Alcibiades says, his voice light.

“I’m aware of that now,” Gustav says, with the air of someone only slightly annoyed by that statement, “And that doesn’t answer my question.”

“It doesn’t? It should. I look for musicians, darling. I don’t care about their personalities,” Alcibiades explains, ghosting his fingers over the keys of his beloved piano. He slides his index finger up and down before going back to improvising a slow, relaxing song. “All I need is for her to sing.”

“I’m not a musician,” Gustav points out.

“No,” Alcibiades says, thoughtfully, “Not in music. But you’re a musician on stage, no? You dance. You can charm a thousand men with that smile. And you’re cute.”

Gustav giggles, thick serpentine tail swaying around his legs.

“It’s nice for someone to notice,” he says, basking in the glow of his own ego for a handful of seconds before he adds, “But you know you won’t get anywhere.”

“With you, or in life?” Alcibiades says, squinting one eye shut.

“With me,” Gustav says.

“Ah, yes,” Alcibiades murmurs, quieter, “You’re in mourning. Ah, no, don’t bristle. No, you haven’t said anything. I don’t know what you’re mourning, my sweet little peacock, but I do hope it was an angel.”

Gustav pauses. He watches Alcibiades play for a moment, the song a little sadder than before. Slower. Or maybe he’s imagining that. His electric blue eyes turn to look out the window. The night sky is black. In it, he sees a bouquet of roses, formed of the dark space between stars. He swallows thickly.

“Yes,” he answers.

“Mm,” Alcibiades muses, “We all have our lost angels. Not to worry. I won’t say anything to cause anyone enough ire to harm me. But for music, we must take risks. For our craft. You understand, don’t you?”

“I don’t know if I do,” Gustav says. “You step on everyone’s toes on purpose, Alci. I know you do.”

“Do you?” he says. “Do you know me at all?”

“No,” Gustav answers, easily, “You don’t know me either.”

Alcibiades smiles.

“Would you like a song, Gus?”

Gustav finishes his drink and tip toes to perch on the opposite end of the piano bench.

"Play for me.”

#flight rising #fr lore #clan lore #my lore #thanatos syndicate #alcibiades #aisha al sheikha #oksana #gustav tantastrom #thank you for making me write alci airris #i always love writing him 8')

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madstars-festival · 5 years

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MEET KUMUDA RAO, INDIA’S CREATIVE MAGPIE

At AD STARS 2019, Leo Burnett India group ECD talked to Little Black Book’s Laura Swinton about the insatiable curiosity that drives her and the importance of feeding your creativity beyond the ad industry. This article is republished courtesy of Little Black Book.

"Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people."

As far as creative curiosity goes, few people embody that famous Leo Burnett quote as fully as Kumuda Rao does. She’s been a lawyer, a furniture upcycler, a director, an actor, a stagehand, a hotelier, a mum, a tech entrepreneur – and she’s got her eye on farming. And, appropriately enough, she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Burnetter, working as a group executive creative director, based in Mumbai.

It’s this compulsive inquisitiveness and willing to throw herself into new experiences, picking up a Swiss Army Knife of skills along the way, that led one college friend to predict that the young law student would end up not in the courtroom but in adland. While still at university, Kumuda ended up helping her friend from the college magazine with his new agency – setting her off on her career.

Kumuda’s first ‘proper’ agency job was at Mudra – now DDB Mudra – where she was one of only two women at the agency. It was the early ‘90s and the management had decided – shockingly – not to hire any women because they ‘might get pregnant’. Kumuda managed to slip in on the merit of her ‘wild and all over the place CV’ and the fact that the agency had just won a sanitary towel account and the men at the agency felt so out of their depth they could barely bring themselves to whisper, let alone say, the word ‘sanitary towel’.

“I thought it was odd because I come from a family where being a female never mattered,” recalls Kumuda. “My mum and grandmother were hardcore feminists. I never had that thing. You go there and you work.”

From there Kumuda went onto Ogilvy, which was like a ‘school’ for advertising. And in 1999, she ended up in Leo Burnett, an agency she describes as her ‘home’ and where she’s worked ever since aside from a short ‘glitch’ where she went to Y&R (an experience she describes as ‘totally traumatic’ as it coincided with her move from her native Bangalore to Mumbai and family illness) and a career break she took when she gave birth to her twins.

This being Kumuda, though, her maternity break also saw her try her hand at commercial directing and also launching and running a beach hut business in Goa with her actor husband. The directing was a callback to her love of the theatre. In Bangalore, where the commute was substantially less time-consuming than it is now in Mumbai, Kumuda had thrown herself into the local theatre scene, where she acted, worked as a stagehand and directed. Back then she found herself drawing on high school French for her acting roles – proof that there’s no such thing as useless education. As a commercial director, her childhood piano lessons came unexpectedly flooding back.

“I was seven months pregnant, with twins. The producer was like… please don’t deliver now! It was too funny. But all my theatre experience came back. When I was sitting with the music supervisor, all my music experience came back,” she recalls. “And I used to bring in all my theatre technique, I’d bring my talent down and talk to them how I would talk to my actors and plot the movements out. It was really good.”

As she started to go back to work with Leo Burnett, she faced a dilemma. To progress any more as a commercial director, she’d have to commit to it full time – in the end her magpie creative mind drew her back to agency life.

At Leo Burnett in Mumbai, Kumuda has worked on huge P&G accounts at a regional level, including ‘Whisper’ (the brand name for Always in Asia and Australia), where she has been striving to break down the same taboos that existed at the very beginning of her career.

“All these myths and misconceptions are very much there - India in some ways is a weird country. Tampons exist as well as all these other methods. Whisper is doing an excellent job trying to bust some of these myths,” says Kumuda. Times, though, are changing. Kumuda’s daughter will speak easily about periods with her dad, and her twin brother will comfortably involve himself in the conversation too.

It’s an account that has focused Kumuda’s mind on the ‘brand purpose’ debate. She’s no fan of disconnected ‘cause-vertising’ that sees a brand tack some cause or other onto its communication in a way that benefits neither the brand nor the purpose. However, India is home to some standout examples of brands zeroing in on difficult social issues that absolutely fit. BBDO’s work for Ariel, ‘Share the Load’, is one such exemplar Kumuda highlights, as well as the social harmony messaging that tea brand Red Label has been running with. At Whisper, the brand has been – ironically – pushing for girls to become more confident and empowered, with 2017’s ‘Sit Improper’ campaign a rallying cry against prim, restrictive expectations (see below).

The agency has also been working on a more proactive basis with its closest clients, leaning into innovation. In 2017 they created ‘Roads That Honk’ for HP Lubricant, a road safety solution. And there are some potentially exciting developments currently in development stage with P&G around changing the makeup of certain products in order to fight malaria. Kumuda talks enthusiastically about Leo Burnett’s Apollo 11 unit, comprising engineers and designers, tasked to come up with non-traditional solutions.

These new and constantly-changing challenges are mana for someone as open to new experiences and adventures as Kumuda. Even though her tapestry of expertise hasn’t been planned, she finds that her past detours still crop up and provide her with useful insights in the most unexpected ways. And she’s still learning. Recently, she started helping a friend of her husband with his tech start up, getting hands-on with the challenges of building a small business in the social age.

Her kids want her to help them start a YouTube channel, though she’s (understandably) somewhat warier about starting down that path with a pair of aspiring influencers. She’s also just bought a piece of land about 160km from Mumbai where she hopes to start an organic farm and fulfil her long-held desire to get involved in architecture. She plans to build a house in the style of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa and expose her urbanite children to the sort of rural, tree-clambering childhood she experienced in southern India.

Whatever Kumuda turns her hands and mind to next, it’s all fuel for her creativity. Driven by genuine curiosity and passion rather than cold-eyed calculation, she can’t quite predict how those experiences will help her down the line, but she knows that they will. “I think there’s always a reason that you go through whatever you do,” she muses. “All the pieces just fall into place much later.”

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• Read the original article here via Little Black Book

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tipsoctopus · 4 years

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"Strength, character and class" - Glowing endorsements for "powerful" CF linked with Newcastle

The Zimbabwe international, Macauley Bonne, has slowly but surely risen through the ranks of English football.

The 24-year-old forward is currently plying his trade down in the Championship, defending the colours of Charlton Athletic. Still, if the new reports coming from talkSPORT are true, he may be making a step up to the top flight in the near future.

According to the same source, Newcastle are currently leading the race for his signature as the Magpies would be able to offer the young forward some first-team football, which is what he needs and wants at the moment.

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Looking at his resume, he seems to be a player to keep an eye on.

So far, he has already bagged eight goals and two assists in the domestic league, with his most recent display at home to Bristol City representing something of an individual masterclass.

But who exactly is he and what can he do for Newcastle?

To answer those questions, we sought the opinions of those who know him best…

Justin Edinburgh, Bonne’s former manager

Before he moved to Charlton just last summer, the 24-year-old centre-forward was playing for Leyton Orient, led by the late Edinburgh himself.

And during their extremely narrow 1-0 victory over AFC Telford United in the first leg of their FA Trophy semi-final, which came courtesy of Bonne himself as he was the one to score the winning goal, the gaffer was full of praise.

Here’s what he said, as quoted by East London & West Essex Guardian:

“I think that shows the strength, character and class of the player because other people might have hidden away from that but I think that just shows what he’s about.

“He keeps getting himself in those positions and that’s what good strikers do and I’m pleased that he got the winning goal today.”

Lee Bowyer, current Charlton manager

Another man who knows Bonne and the extent of his talent is his current coach Lee Bowyer.

When Bonne was given his debut a couple of months back, not only did he impress his new boss but he also managed to secure the victory for his new team, scoring yet another winning goal.

Bowyer didn’t hide his excitement afterwards, as quoted by London News Online:

“I thought he was very good.

“I said to him before the game just go and enjoy it. Do the things we’ve been working on with him. He’s improving all the time. We all know that he’s not the finished article at the moment but he’s improving every day. Today, I thought he was outstanding.

“His work rate. I said work hard and everything will fall into place. His work rate was unreal. He came off with cramp. I thought he competed for every ball. His hold up play was very good.

“As a striker’s performance, I thought he did himself proud for his debut, taking into account where he was last season. Against the best side in the league. I thought he was outstanding and should be proud of his performance.”

Joe Dunne, former Colchester United manager

Dunne had the privilege of working with this talented young forward back when they were both at Colchester United.

Even though that was years ago and Bonne was still very young and developing at that time, his gaffer already knew that he is a player with a lot of promise and potential.

Speaking after a game, Dunne said, as quoted by Leicestershire Live:

“He’s showed great promise in the youth team and he leads the line exceptionally well. He’s powerful and he gets in behind defences.

“He has a good future if he gets his head down and he keeps working hard.”

Verdict

By all means, Newcastle would be wise to scoop Bonne if they truly get the chance to do so.

All of his former coaches and his current one believe he’s a top talent who could go on to do rather well in the future. The Magpies better pounce on their man.

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