#the eras tour would make the black family go broke | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

simp-for-mha-men · 4 years

Text

𝕚 𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕥 𝕪𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕓𝕒𝕕 𝕣𝕠𝕞𝕒𝕟𝕔𝕖 (𝕜𝕒𝕥𝕤𝕦𝕜𝕚 𝕓𝕒𝕜𝕦𝕘𝕠𝕦 𝕩 𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕕𝕖𝕣)

Request by @loxbbg: Drummer Bakugo x Lead singer Reader (ngl saw a TikTok and couldn’t help it) and they have a really lowkey relationship and the reader is singing bad romance and she goes up to Bakugo and is basically like singing to him he like drops his sticks mid play and kisses her sending the crowd crzy and there other band mates (the rest of bakusquard) are like called it

A/N: If anybody asks, this isn’t one of my biggest fantasies. Also, no, I didn’t listen to Bad Romance a couple times before this to try and nail the ‘ole Tik Tok high note. Anywho, I love this idea! Enjoy this trainwreck of a concert!

Genre: female reader, musician/band au, swearing cause it’s Bakugou, established relationship, pg-13 due to some vulgar-ish things and a suggestive ending, the fans losing their minds over you and Bakugou 💥❤️

Word count: 2.8k

♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥*♥

“You are such an asshole,” you groaned, pushing your boyfriend on the couch.

“You are such a bitch,” he growled, pulling you onto to his lap to engage in a messy make-out session.

It was the U.A. International Music Festival, and your group, known as The Chaos Crew, was headlining the event. Today was the first performance, ushering in the exclusive guests who paid extra for V.I.P. status. To say the least, Katsuki Bakugou, your boyfriend and drummer, was a lot more annoying than usual. Some examples were how the kisses you shared were rougher, the hand holding was almost painful with how tight he squeezed, and the mic checks were filled with intense staring. However, the band didn’t know you two were together, making the situation much worse.

Somehow, your other friends turned bandmates Eijirou Kirishima, Denki Kaminari, Hanta Sero, and Mina Ashido agreed to pursue the dream with you when you first offered up the idea. Bakugou took more convincing. He thought you were the most idiotic person on the planet. His superiority complex only became worse when you asked him if he could be the drummer for your new group. He agreed after hearing you beg for a couple weeks straight, which began the slippery slope of flirtatious tension.

Despite you two being together all the time, the flirting wasn’t obvious. Bakugou would notice your skirts when they were just a bit shorter, and you would notice when his shirts when they got just a bit tighter. Neither of you ever let the other one know, though. Both of you despised each other so much that it would be the death of either of you for your secrets to get out.

One day, this changed during a photoshoot for your first magazine article. A rival band, known as The Pros, was at the shoot, and their lead singer, Deku, was asking you questions whenever you weren’t working. You didn’t mind it. You actually found it flattering how interested he was in your vocal range. However, after watching Deku “flirt” with you, Bakugou dragged you to the green room.

Slamming the door, he turned around and asked, “Are you fucking blind, (y/n)?”

“Excuse me?” you scoffed.

“You heard me. He’s flirting with you for fuck’s sake! Tell him to just leave before I knock it into him.”

His overprotectiveness shocked you. You were more than confused. You weren’t that pretty, so Deku couldn’t be flirting with you. Your hair was well put together, your makeup was done nicely, and you were dressed with just a tad bit of sexiness, but you still looked average. It didn’t add up.

“Deku is not flirting with me,” you replied, rolling your eyes. “He’s just assessing the competition.”

“He’s staring at your tits and waiting for your little skirt to flip up,” Bakugou replied, clenching his fist.

“Ugh, stop being so vulgar!”

“I’m being honest, princess.”

Marching over to him, you met his gaze. Waiting for him to continue with another statement, you stood in front of him and didn’t cower under his stare. Instead of getting an earful, you felt pressure on your lips. He kissed you, and you loved it. You loved it too much. He was like a drug, and your first hit left you wanting more.

You ended up spending the next 30 minutes in the green room making out and telling each other how much you hated it. It was true love, and after this experience, you began dating each other in private. Your family knew and so did his, but your bandmates didn’t. At least, you both were in agreement about that.

As time went on, The Chaos Crew began rising in the charts. After releasing 3 number one singles, you started touring and gaining a much bigger fan base. The Chaos Children, or what your fanbase called themselves, began doing every celebrity’s nightmare in a matter of weeks: shipping. The most popular ship within your band was, you guessed it, you and Bakugou. This was a running joke between Denki and Sero, but little did they know it was already a sailing ship. This only made you keep your relationship even more private.

Now, back to the U.A. International Music Festival. The feverish kiss ended, leaving you and your hot-headed boyfriend panting messes. Leaning into him, you nuzzled your face in his neck. You pressed a kiss to his collarbone before stopping to just inhale his scent.

“Since when are you so needy?” Bakugou joked, mocking you.

“Since when did you start acting like a child?” you snapped back.

You yelped, realizing Bakugou had slapped your exposed thigh. Whenever you both were performing, he felt the need to have his hands on you at all times. The band and fanbase, however, couldn’t know about you two. It would be too detrimental to your career.

“When am I gonna see you in my room?” Bakugou asked, rubbing where a red mark was forming due to his slap.

“Tonight,” you coyly replied.

“Oh really? Will you be wearing my favorite little outfit?”

“Of course, I will.”

Suddenly, a loud knock interrupted your rendezvous. Brushing yourself off, you leaped off of Bakugou’s lap and stood up as formally as possible. Of course, you two had snuck off together. You couldn’t just tell everyone you were going somewhere with Bakugou alone. However, you were relieved to hear a familiar voice on the other side.

“Bakugou? (y/n)?” Mina called, waiting for either of you to reply.

“Come on in, babe,” you replied, saying it a little too quickly.

Mina opened the door and smirked when she saw you two. She had her suspicions about the two of you, but they were never confirmed nor denied. She knew she might never get her ship to sail, but she would never tell either of you that.

“What do you want, Bug Eyes?” Bakugou grumbled.

“Not much,” Mina shrugged, “but I have news. We have a schedule change.”

At this, Bakugou exchanged a look with you. A schedule change during the U.A. Festival was like waiting outside of a store for days for a limited-edition item then leaving and never buying it. Someone dropped their act for later that night. There was no other possibility.

“Sero got an update from Shinsou,” Mina stated, “and it looks like Deku broke his ankle from a stunt during their last show. They can’t perform tonight.”

Bakugou smirked, and you punched him in the arm. Ever since the photoshoot, he despised Deku. It was as if they were born to be rivals, which made you laugh a little.

“What’s the plan?” you questioned, knowing that Shinsou, one of the event directors, had already made one.

“We’re taking half of their slot,” Mina smiled, shoving a set list into Bakugou’s hands. “The other half is going to Itsuka Kendo, the new solo artist. She’s going first, and then we’re up.”

“We planning on singing from a particular era?” Bakugou asked, focusing more on the set list rather than the conversation.

“They don’t want us singing our songs,” Mina replied, causing both you and Bakugou to choke on air. “They want us to cover popular music.”

“We have no idea why, though. It’s kind of stupid, if you ask me,” Denki complained, walking in with Kirishima and Sero hot on his tail.

Upon their entrance, the boys came over to give you a hug and congratulate you on the earlier show. It went off without a hitch, and they insisted they give you credit since it was due. However, when a question about you and Bakugou running off came up, Bakugou immediately stepped in and said he wanted to jot down some lyric ideas. A game of playful banter began and went on for about 5 minutes before Shinsou entered the room.

“Well, it’s good to see that our fill-ins are ready for tonight,” he chuckled, walking over to place a hand on Denki’s shoulder. “You guys ready?”

“Obviously,” Bakugou grinned. “How bad can it be? We’re just performing covers. It’ll be just like the old days.”

Immediately, your first performances and venues came to mind. Run-down bars and covers were normal for a few months before getting signed on by Shouta Aizawa, president of 1-A Records. After that, you were able to write your own music and live your dream.

“Yeah,” you chimed in, moving closer to Bakugou, “we can perform the last cover set we did before we got signed.”

“Hell yeah!” Kirishima yelled, pumping his fist in the air. “The Bad Romance Set was always my favorite.”

Everyone was in agreement. Shinsou trusted you all enough to bid you farewell for a few hours before you were called back on stage. The Bad Romance Set was, simply, the best cover set The Chaos Crew ever played. It was a tribute to Lady Gaga, and it celebrated her amazing career. Mina was the Beyoncé to your Gaga on Telephone. Kirishima was the killer guitarist during Shallow. Bakugou was the best drummer on the planet during Bad Romance, the huge finale piece of the set. It was the perfect set to get the crowd hyped and into the show.

Soon enough, the show was about to start. Itsuka was on her last song, a personal tribute to her ex-boyfriend. You were gussied up in all black, sporting a short mini skirt, a low-cut shirt, and a leather jacket. It was perfect. You looked like you could kill anyone that crossed your path, and you probably could. It only attracted your boyfriend even more to the prospect of getting handsy before the show.

“Come on, sexy,” he growled, kissing under you ear. “Let’s do it. We’ve got a few minutes.”

“No,” you responded, pushing him away. “We have to stay focused. You know our ground rules.”

Rolling his eyes, he kept trying and trying and trying. After denying him multiple times, he smacked your ass before sulking away to sit at his drum set on the dark stage. Once he did that, the rest of your bandmates followed his lead and walked on stage. The lights went up, causing the crowd to lose their minds over your presence. Glancing back at your boyfriend, you nodded your head to signal him to start the first song.

The act went wonderful. When you sang to the audience, you could tell the hardcore Gaga fans from the fakes. However, no one seemed disappointed in the set. Everyone thought it was fun and easy to dance to. It was very clear, though, that everyone was waiting on one song: Bad Romance. After 25 minutes of Gaga hits, you glanced back at Bakugou and nodded your head again.

Once the drums began for the final song, the rest of the band chimed in to start the melody. Immediately, the crowd recognized it and sang the opening verse with you. Mina chimed in with her amazing voice to layer your vocals. Sero and Denki had the electric guitar and synth timed perfectly with one another, which only added to Kirishima’s bass. Bakugou, of course, played his drums with passion and never took his eyes off of you.

Once the first bridge of the song arrived, your bandmates began growing with excitement. Your singing ability was always incredible to them, but the first time you nailed the added high note in the final chorus of Bad Romance, they knew you would be their lead vocalist. The moment was fast approaching, and you took the mic from the stand.

Finishing up the second bridge, you walked around to personally serenade each of your bandmates. First, Mina and you made sure to twirl each other, causing her to chuckle just a bit. You sauntered over to Denki, jamming out on an air guitar to compliment his real one. Next, Sero was graced with your presence, and he added a riff to impress the crowd. Kirishima was surprised, and you both exchanged flirtatious winks at one another. However, these actions annoyed Bakugou to no end. His blood was boiling, and his jealousy was rising. He needed to show these extras exactly who you belonged to.

The final chorus began, and you arrived at Bakugou’s drum set. To tease the fans just a bit, you decided you were going to belt the high note right next to your boyfriend. Besides, this entire song was about him and you. This song was the most important one in the whole set because of that. You knew it would give the audience the best reaction and moment to capture on film.

I want your love, and all your lover's revenge You and me could write a bad romance Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh Caught in a bad romance

The crowd went wild. A constant chant of “(y/n)” was repeated over and over again and filled the venue. The end of the song was close, and Bakugou’s patience was running thin. You didn’t move, stuck next to his drum set. Whether you were trying to prove a point or your affection for him made his brain hurt. All he knew was that he couldn’t keep it a secret anymore.

“Want your bad romance,” you sang, finishing off the song as dramatically as possible.

Leaping out of his seat, Bakugou threw down his sticks and bounded over to you before wrapping his arms around you. He pressed his lips to yours, claiming you in front of everyone watching. You fumbled with the mic before successfully flicking the off switch and let it fall to the ground. You wrapped your arms around his neck, melting into him. He tapped your hip, signaling you to jump. You happily obliged, basking in the way his calloused hands gripped your thighs.

Screams filled the venue. Fangirls cried about the way Bakugou held you while others cried because he was holding you and not them. Paparazzi snapped as many photos as possible, hoping to capture the best photo that could be put up on TMZ. Parents tried to cover their children’s eyes because they thought the scene was so vulgar. Oh yeah, you guys were definitely going to be trending on Twitter.

In a flash, the lights went dark across the entire venue. The screams didn’t cease, even when an announcement came over the loudspeakers. It wasn’t heard the first time, probably since you and Bakugou broke everyone there. However, speaker volume could be raised, and the announcement could be heard through the crowd on the second try.

“Attention festival guests,” the lovely voice began, “tonight’s performances are over. Thank you for attending the V.I.P. exclusive day. We hope to see you all tomorrow for the first official day. Have a wonderful night and stay rockin’!”

Before groans of protest could be heard, your band was escorted off stage and immediately into your limousine. Your were able to successfully avoid paparazzi, but that didn’t mean you and Bakugou were safe. You had your friends, and they were all nosy in their own ways.

“It was the photoshoot,” Kirishima began.

“Yeah! Come on, you wouldn’t stop glaring at Deku, Bakugou!” Mina grinned.

“We knew you both were together,” Sero smirked.

“Yeah, come on! You think we didn’t notice when you guys would run off to lock lips and do who knows what else?” Denki added on.

Bakugou was more than pissed off. After the onslaught of statements brought to the table, Bakugou effectively shut them up by yelling, “If any of you touch my girl, I’ll your kick your asses. Got it?”

“Whatever you say,” Kirishima replied, flashing a grin and a thumbs-up.

“Just use protection!” Mina reminded, forcing some questionable hand gestures and noises from Denki and Sero.

After 15 minutes of torture, the limo arrived at the five-star hotel. In a matter of seconds, Bakugou had opened the door and picked you up bridal style so he could carry you up to the room. You had all booked the penthouse, since the U.A. Festival was such a big deal. You each had your own room, but you figured you two might have free reign of the whole place for while due to Mina’s previous innuendo.

Once you arrived in Bakugou’s room, he plopped you down on the bed. Smirking at you, he removed his shirt and went to get something a bit more comfortable out of his suitcase. You couldn’t help but look at the beautiful muscles that adorned his body. It made you feel hot and a little flustered.

“Go change,” he commanded, turning around to face you again.

You chuckled and replied, “Oh, come on. You know me.”

You slipped off your leather jacket, bending forward just a bit to let him gaze at your cleavage. He licked his lips and threw down the extra shirt he had grabbed. Walking over to you, he roughly grabbed your hips and pulled your body into his.

Leaning forward, you smirked and whispered in his ear, “I already have the set on. Wanna help me get out of it?”

387 notes · View notes

maylovexhs · 3 years

Text

everytime - SONGBIRD(Chp. 41)

Author’s Note: Damn right I used a FleetwoodMac song in the title. You know it’ serious when they in the chapter lol. First of all, there’s less than five chapters left until I’m completely done. I just want to thank everyone who read even one chapter and has been on this ride with me. It’s the end of an era. Just - thank you. Hope you enjoy.

Catch up on everytime here

December 8th, 2019. London. 9 AM.

“And now playing: Adore You by Harry Styles”

I looked to the vintage red radio that sat on my bedside table.

Walk in your rainbow paradise

I slipped on my black Mary Janes shoes. I stood up from my bed, walking over to my dresser.

Strawberry lipstick state of mind

I grabbed my red lipstick. I walked over to my mirror, smearing the red lipstick on my lips.

I get so lost inside your eyes

I capped the lipstick. I smiled at myself in the mirror. I waved my ponytail back. I looked exceptionally cute today wearing my pink vintage dress.

Would you believe it?

I walked out of my bedroom, passing the many paintings that hanged in the hallway. I walked downstairs, stepping into a ballroom.

You don't have to say you love me

I looked up at the ceiling. It was painted, looking eerily similar to the creation of Adam. Was I in the Sistine Chapel?

You don't have to say nothing

I looked down. Wait, when did I change into a white ball gown? I touched the top of my head. I had a crown on.

You don't have to say you're mine

I looked around the room for someone. There was no one in sight. What the hell was happening?

“Honey” I heard Harry say.

I turned around, seeing him. He was dressed in a black suit. By the embroidered jacket, I was pretty sure it was the same suit he wore at his last show on tour.

“I'd walk through fire for you” Harry sang, smiling as he took my hand. “Just let me adore you”

Harry pulled me close to him. He held our hands up together while his other hand rested on my hip.

“Oh, honey” Harry said.

I began to follow Harry as he started to dance around the ballroom.

“I'd walk through fire for you” Harry sang to me, looking into my eyes. “Just let me adore you like it's the only thing I'll ever do”

Harry spun me and then dipped us.

“H,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Like it's the only thing I'll ever do” Harry sang back at me, not answering my question.

I looked around the room again but this time my eyes landed on Ashton.

“Ashton?” I asked.

Without any warning, I felt Harry drop me to the floor. I shut my eyes, feeling scared to hit the floor. But I didn’t. I didn’t fall on the floor.

I slowly opened my eyes, seeing I was not in the ballroom again. I looked around where I was, noticing I was in a bedroom. A familiar bedroom.

I looked at one of the photos on the wall. It was Rita at an awards show. I squinted at the photo.

I was by Rita. I must have slept over in one of her guest rooms. Why would I though?

I slowly sat up in bed. I immediately noticed the white bandage around my wrist. The memory of last night flashed in my head. Harry and I talking. Me running after Harry’s car. Me tripping and falling on the floor. The rush of pain in my hand. Being in an hospital room.

I sprained my wrist. I sprained it when I fell. I remember I did. I remember it all.

I remember choosing Harry. I ran after his car to tell him I loved him. I didn’t get the chance to but . . . I finally knew it was Harry I wanted. I just hoped I would get another chance to tell him before it was too late.

I stood up from the bed. I walked out the room, going down the hall. I heard Rita and Ali talking as I walked into the kitchen. Ali and Rita sat at the kitchen table. They looked to me as I stepped in.

“Oh, you’re finally awake” Ali said to me.

“I am” I said.

“I made pancakes” Rita said. “Have some”

Rita pointed to the tray of pancakes on the kitchen counter.

“I’ll have some later” I said, sitting down next to Ali and Rita.

Rita and Ali looked to each other. Did they become best friends while I slept?

“How’s your hand?” Ali asked me.

“It hurts” I said. “But it will get better”

I looked to Rita.

“Did you take me to the hospital?” I asked her.

“Yeah” Rita said. “You scraped your hand bad. Thought you broke a bone too.”

I looked down at my wrapped hand.

Rita changed. After years of not being able to trust her with my secrets, she wasn’t judging me. She took care of me when I was hurt. She really did change.

“Thanks” I said.

Rita nodded.

“We didn’t call Harry yet if you were going ask” She said. “I wanted too but . . .”

“He should clearly hear the news from you” Ali said.

I looked up to Ali.

“I’m planning to” I said. “But I need to call Ashton first. What time it is?”

“Nine” Rita said.

It’s two in the afternoon in New York. Did Ashton have work today?

“I’ll call him in a few hours” I said. “Don’t know if he’s at work”

“You should still call” Ali said. “You and I both know it’s best to get it over with as soon as possible”

“I know” I said. “It’s just-“

“Y/N” Ali cut me off.

I looked at her.

“Call him” She said.

I stared at Ali, a little scared. I wanted to call Ashton. It was the right thing to call him and break the news than have him left waiting. It was right but I felt so wrong for wanting to. Ashton has been so kind to me and I never wanted to hurt him. But calling him and telling him that we were over . . . that would hurt him. How can I tell him if I feel so guilty?

“Just rip the bandage off” Rita said. “That’s what you said to me”

I stood up from the table.

Rip the bandage off. I could tell Ashton. Ashton said so himself he would be happy if Harry and I got together. He said that. He wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t mean it.

“Okay” I said. “I’ll call him”

I turned away from the table. Rita wished me good luck as I headed upstairs to Rita’s guest bedroom. I found my phone sitting on the bedside table. I grabbed it off the table and unlocked it. I went to my contacts and pressed on Ashton. I sat down on the bed, holding my phone to my ear. It started to ring.

I had to tell Ashton the truth eventually. It was going to come out at one point. It was better that I told him now than have him see photos of Harry and I together. I had to tell him. It was right to tell him as soon as possible.

The phone stopped ringing. Ashton picked up.

“Hi” I heard Ashton say.

“Hi” I said in a shaky voice. “I thought you would be at work”

“Oh, no. I’m off today” Ashton said. ”Are you back in New York and wanted to visit me?”

“No, no” I shook my head. “I’m still in London. I don’t think I’ll be back home any soon”

“You won’t?” Ashton asked me. “Not even for the holidays?”

“Oh, I will be” I said. “I always spend the holidays with my friends”

But not him. I won’t spend the holidays with Ashton. I won’t get to spend another day with him.

“Well, at least you won’t be alone” Ashton said. “That’s all that matters”

I bit my lip, feeling them start to tremble.

Ashton will be alone. I was leaving him on his own. How could I? After everything, he didn’t deserve to be on his own.

“Yeah . . .” I said. “You won’t be, right?”

“No, no” Ashton said. “My family always spend it together”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s good”

“Yeah” Ashton said. “It is . . .”

I didn’t speak. I stayed silent for a moment. I was pretty sure Ashton knew something was wrong. He always knew when something was wrong.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Ashton asked me. “You chose him”

I felt a tear roll down my cheek.

“I’m sorry” I said. “I wanted it to be you so bad and-“

“It’s okay” Ashton said. “I’m happy for you. I told you I would be if you picked him”

“But I know you’re not” I said, my voice cracking. “I picked him over you. You were so nice to me, the nicest anyone have ever been to me. I feel so guilty for not choosing you. How aren’t you mad? I hurt you”

Ashton stayed silent for a moment before speaking again.

“You’re right” Ashton said. “I’m mad. But I’ll get over it. I’ll be happy again. I know I will be. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll find someone again.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked him.

“Well, for one . . . I dated you” Ashton said.

I let out a little laugh. God, Ashton knew how to make me laugh even when I was sad.

“And that’s life, Y/N” Ashton said. “We fall in love and fall out love with people. It hurts now but it gets better”

I forced myself to smile.

“I hope you find someone who loves you like I couldn’t” I told him. “I mean it. You deserve someone who really loves you”

“I will” Ashton said. “I hope he loves you like I couldn’t”

I smiled to myself.

“Thank you, Ashton” I said. “For everything”

“You don’t have to thank me” Ashton said. “I was your boyfriend. I was supposed to love you”

I wiped my tears off of my face.

“I’ll miss you” I told him. “I’ll tell Billie, okay?”

“Tell her after Christmas” Ashton said.

“You know I can’t do that” I said. “Gotta rip the bandage off as soon as possible”

“Well, good luck” Ashton said. “I’ll see you around, hopefully”

Hopefully. Like at show rehearsals.

“Yeah” I said. “I’ll see you around. Goodbye Ashton”

“Goodbye, Y/N” Ashton said.

I smiled, hanging up on Ashton. I stared at my phone. I scrolled through my contacts, searching for Harry. I found his name, pressing on his contact. I held my phone to my ear again.

We fall in love and fall out of love with people. That’s life. I fell out of love with Ashton and fell in love with Harry. That’s my life.

“Hey” I said into my phone. “Are you on your flight to LA?”

#hs au #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fanfiction #hs fanfic #hs fanfiction #hs imagines #harry styles one shot #hs one shot #harry styles imagines #harry styles imagine #everytime chapters #everytime HS

19 notes · View notes

jadelotusflower · 3 years

Text

November Roundup

Some writing success this month - I finished and posted a new chapter for Against the Dying of the Light, and made progress on The Lady of the Lake and Turn Your Face to the Sun. I didn’t work much on my novel, but I did do some editing on the first third so that’s progress.

Words written this month: 6647

Total this year: 67,514

November books

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo - joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize (with The Testaments by Margaret Atwood) this was an engrossing and interesting read. Stylistically unusual formatting and scant use of punctuation that is a bit jarring at first, but you quickly adapt as you read. There’s no plot as such - instead the story is formed by vignettes of twelve black women and their disparate yet interconnected lives. We have mothers and daughters, close friends, teachers and students, although the connections aren’t always obvious at first - we can be exposed to a character briefly in the story of another with no idea that she will be a focus later on. It’s very skillfully done, to the point whereupon finishing I wanted immediately to re-read (but alas, it was already overdue back to the library). There is so much ground covered that we are really only given a glimpse into the characters lives, but there is a diversity of intergenerational perspectives of the African diaspora in the UK, and I highly recommend.

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett - after finishing The Pillars of the Earth I had intended to read the sequel, but this was available on the library shelf and I had to place a hold on World Without End, so the prequel came first. Set sixty years before the Conquest (150 before Pillars) it primarily addresses the growth of the hamlet of Dreng’s Ferry into the town of Kingsbridge, through the lives of a monk with a strong moral code, a clever and beautiful noblewoman, and a skilled builder, working against the machinations of an evil bishop. Sound familiar? This is Follet’s most recent work, and I do wonder if he’s running out of ideas as this covers very similar thematic ground.

Ragna is a compelling female character, but once again the romance-that-cannot-be with Edgar is tepid, Aldred is a very watered down version of Prior Philip, and there’s no grand framing device such as building the cathedral to really tie to all together (although things do Get Built, and it’s interesting but not on the level of Pillars). This is the tail end of the Dark Ages and it shows - Viking raids, slavery, infanticide - and while it seems Follett’s style is to put his characters through much tragedy and tribulation before their happy ending, I wish writers would stop going to the rape well so readily. But at least the sexual violence isn’t as...lasciviously written as in Pillars? Scant praise, I know. But Follett’s strength in drawing the reader into the world and time period is on display, made even more interesting in this era about which we know very little.

Women and Leadership by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala - I have a great deal of respect for Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister who was treated utterly shamefully during her tenure and never got the credit she deserved, perhaps excepting the reaction to her iconic “misogny speech” whichyou can enjoy in full here:

undefined

youtube

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was the first woman to be Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs in Nigeria, was also the former Managing Director of the World Bank, and currently a candidate for Director-General of the WTO.

This is an interesting examination of women in leadership roles, comparing and contrasting the lives and experiences of a select few including (those I found the most interesting) Ellen Sirleaf, the first female President of Liberia, Joyce Banda, the first female President of Malawi, New Zealand’s current Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and of course, Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala themselves.

November shows/movies

The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult - I’ve been following the NXIVM case for a while now, when the news broke in 2017 I was surprised and intrigued that it involved actresses from some of my fandom interests - Alison Mack (Smallville), Grace Park and Nikki Clyne (Battlestar Galactica), and Bonnie Piasse (Star Wars). Uncovered: Escaping NXIVM is an excellent podcast from that point in time that’s well worth a listen. There’s been a lot of discussion comparing these two documentaries and which one is better, but I feel they’re both worthwhile.

The Vow gives a primer of NXIVM as a predatory “self improvement” pyramid scheme/cult run by human garbage Keith Reniere, from the perspective of former members turned whistleblowers Bonnie Piasse, who first suspected things were wrong, her husband Mark Vicente who was high up in the organisation, and Sarah Edmondson who was a member of DOS, the secret group within NXIVM that involved branding and sex trafficking. Seduced gives more insight into the depravity and criminality of DOS from the pov of India Oxenburg, just 19 when she joined the group and who became Alison Mack’s “slave” in DOS - she was required to give monthly “collateral” in the form of explicit photographs or incriminating information about herself or her family, had to ask Mack’s permission before eating anything (only 500 calories allowed per day), was ordered to have sex with Reniere, and other horrific treatment - Mack herself was slave to Reniere (as was Nikki Clyne) and there were even more horrific crimes including rape and imprisonments of underage girls.

Of course each show has an interest in portraying its subjects as less culpable than perhaps they were (there were people above and below them all in the pyramid after all) - Vicente and Edmondson in The Vow and Oxenburg in Seduced, but what I did appreciate about Seduced was the multiple experts to explain how and why people were indoctrinated into this cult, and why it was so difficult to break free from it. This is a story of victims who were also victimisers and all the complications that come along with that, although I’m not sure any of these people are in the place yet to really reckon with what happened and all need a lot of therapy.

Focusing on individual journeys also narrows the scope - there are other NXIVM members interviewed I would have liked to have heard a lot more from. There is also a lot of jumping back and forth in time in both docos so the timeline is never quite clear unless you do further research. I would actually like to see another documentary one day a bit further removed from events dealing with the whole thing from start to finish from a neutral perspective. The good news is that Reniere was recently sentenced to 120 years in prison so he can rot.

I saw value in both, but you’re only going to watch one of these, I would say go for Seduced - if you’re interested in as much information as possible, watch The Vow first to get a primer on all the main players and then Seduced for the full(er) story.

The Crown (season 4) - While I love absolutely everything Olivia Coleman does, I thought it took a while for her to settle in as the Queen last season and it’s almost sad that she really nailed it this season, just in time for the next cast changeover (but I also love everything Imelda Staunton does so...) This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t completely sold on Gillian Anderson as Thatcher - yes I know she sounded somewhat Like That, but for me the performance was a little too...affected? (and someone get her a cough drop, please!)

It is also an almost sympathetic portrayal of Thatcher - even though it does demonstrate her classism and internalised misogyny, it doesn’t really explore the full impact of Thatcherism, why she was such a polarising figure to the extent that some would react like this to her death:

undefined

youtube

But I suppose it’s called The Crown, not The PM.

Emma Corrin is wonderful as Diana, and boy do they take no prisoners with Charles (or the other male spawn). I was actually surprised at how terrible they made Charles seem rather than both sidesing it as I had expected (but perhaps that’s being saved for season 5). It does hammer home just how young Diana was when they were married (19 to Charles’ 32), how incompatible they were and the toxicity of their marriage (standard disclaimer yes it’s all fictionalised blah blah). The performances are exceptional across the board - Tobias Menzies and Josh O’Conner were also standouts and it’s a shame to see them go.

I was however disappointed to see that the episode covering Charles and Di’s tour of Australia was not only called “Terra Nullius” but the term was used as a very tone deaf metephor that modern Australia was no longer “nobody’s land/country”. For those who aren’t aware, terra nullius was the disgraceful legal justification for British invasion/colonisation of Australia despite the fact that the Indigenous people had inhabited the continent for 50,000 years or more. While the tour was pre-Mabo (the decision that overturned the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged native title), there was no need to use this to make the point, especially when there was no mention at all of the true meaning/implication of the term.

The Spanish Princess (season 2, episodes 4-8)- Sigh. I guess I’m more annoyed at the squandered potential of this show, since the purpose ostensibly was to focus on the time before The Great Matter and give Katherine “her due” - and instead they went and made her the most unsympathetic, unlikeable character in the whole damn show. (Spoilers) She literally rips Bessie Blount’s baby from her body and, heedless to a mother’s pleas to hold her child, runs off to Henry so she can present him with “a son”. I mean, what the actual fuck?

I’m not a stickler for historical accuracy so long as it’s accurate to the spirit of history (The Tudors had its flaws, but it threaded this needle most of the time), but this Katherine isn’t even a shadow of her historical figure - she’s not a troubled heroine, she’s cruel and vindictive, Margaret Pole is a sanctimonious prig, and Margaret Tudor does little but sneer and shout - the only one who comes out unscathed is Mary Tudor (the elder), and it’s only because she’s barely in it at all. It’s a shame because I like all of these actresses (especially Georgie Henley and Laura Carmichael) but they are just given dreck to work with.

This is not an issue with flawed characters, it’s the bizarre presentation of these characters that seems to want to be girl power rah rah, and yet at the same time feels utterly misogynistic by pitting the women against each other or making them spiteful, stupid, or crazy for The Drama. I realise this is based on Gregory so par for the course, but it feels particularly egregious here. (Spoilers) At one point Margaret Pole is banished from court by Henry, and because Katherine won’t help her (because she cant!) she decides to spill the beans about Katherine’s non-virginity. Yes, her revenge against the hated Tudors is...to give Henry exactly what he wants? Even though it will result in young Mary, who she loves and cares for, being disinherited? Girlboss!

This season also missed the opportunity to build on its predecessors The White Queen/Princess and show why it was so important to Henry to have a male heir - the Tudor reign wasn’t built on the firmest foundations and so needed uncontested transfer of power, at the time there was historic precedent that passing the throne to a daughter led to Anarchy, and wars of succession were very recent in everyone’s memory. At least no one was bleating about The Curse this time, which is actually kind of surprising, because the point of the stupid curse is the Tudor dynasty drama.

But it’s not all terrible. Lina and Oviedo are the best part of the show, and (spoilers) thankfully make it out alive. Both are a delight to watch and I wish the show had been just about them.

Oh well. One day maybe we’ll get the Katherine of Aragon show we deserve - at least I can say that the costumes were pretty, small consolation though it is.

#november roundup #long post

7 notes · View notes

headoverhiddles · 5 years

Text

Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn - Marilyn Manson x Reader [Smut]

Synopsis: You, your boyfriend Brian, and his best friend Jeordie are forced by lack of finances to share a hotel room one night while Brian's band performs in Miami Beach. You two have to be quiet not to wake Jeordie...

Notes: Set during Spooky Kids era!! Partially inspired by this video. **Twiggy wasn't a part of the band at this point in time, but fuck it. I wanted to include him.

July 17, 1992.

"I've got... thirteen dollars."

Everyone (aka you, Brian and Jeordie) is sitting around in a circle on Jeordie's messy living room floor.

You and your boyfriend look over to the bassist.

"Thirteen?" Brian sputters, "You stupid fucker, you had 500 dollars last night. Where the hell'd all that go, up your ass?"

Jeordie picks at a hangnail. "Hookers and blow." He begins to pat his leg, drumming a beat. "We should make that a song..."

"We have better things to sing about than hookers and blow," Brian snaps.

"I don't know, I think it'd go with your whole theme," you tease, resting your head on his shoulder. Brian glances down, gaze softening fondly as his fingers thread with yours.

"Yeah, says the girl who probably encouraged him to burn our valuable hotel money on dumb shit last night."

You giggle. "I promise, I had nothing to do with it. Besides, I was with you last night, remember?" Brian smirks, recalling the record you two set.

"Yeah. I remember making you come a bunch of times. What was the challenge again?"

"I dared you to make me come more times than my vibrator could in one night."

"Mmm, and did I pass?"

"With flying colours."

Jeordie whistles, then tries to flip one of the coins from the pooling pile on the floor. It pings off something then disappears into the pit that is his studio apartment.

"Twelve seventy five," Jeordie corrects, staring sadly behind him at the lost quarter. Brian shakes his head, scratching through his hair.

"Jesus Christ, what are we gonna do?! This is a huge stop on the tour. Daisy, Pogo, and Sarah are already there, and the Spooky Kids can't afford to cancel this show because we're... fuckin broke hobos!"

"I'm not a hobo..." Jeordie whispers, watching an ant crawl across his toe. Brian scrapes up some bills to count again, painted fingernails a blur as he shells them out. You count your own too, nodding.

"Okay. I've got 210. Together with your 600... we should have enough for airfare and hotel room, for one night."

Jeordie gives a punched out snort-laugh, staring at the ceiling like it's about to cave in. "Yeah, for one shared room between the three of us."

You and Brian look at each other, shrugging. Jeordie hesitates, then looks at you two in distress.

"Awww."

So, the next day, after successfully making it to the next stop on the Spooky Kids' tour by way of crappy budget airline, you get to the hotel to check in before the show. It's not awful-- it's a pretty good motel, at least.

"I can't wait til we can afford a tour bus," Brian growls miserably, flopping down on one of the double beds. It shoots his lanky body up four feet off the bed as the overly-loaded springs catapult him, and you double over with laughter. Though he looks ready to murder, your laugh is infectious, and Brian starts to chuckle too.

"What the fuck is this?" He goes on, picking up a towel folded into a swan. He turns it around, and pretends to stick his dick into it, humping it as he waddles around the room.

"It's a swan," Jeordie smiles, face smushed into his own bed opposite yours, "I requested the towels be made into pretty swans for us."

"Yeah?" Brian discards the towel in a heap. " Did you also request little chocolates be left on our pillow every night, princess?"

"Dammit. I knew I forgot something."

"Why did we let Jeordie book this?" you groan. "We all know I'm the responsible mom here."

"I beg to differ," Brian says, crawling over top of you and securing his stringbean limbs around you like a giant spider. "I'm more of a mom than you." You giggle.

"Says the man who just pretended to fuck a towel swan."

"What do you mean pretended? That slutty motherfucker's got my jizz all over him, he was begging for it." Brian grins, collapsing on top of you, and you shriek as he attacks you with kisses.

"Go put your makeup on, or you'll be late getting on stage! Then nobody'll ever know who the Spooky Kids are, and your career will never take off, all because you wanted to fuck your girlfriend. Again."

"I'll just tell the bouncers we were busy with hookers and blow, like proper rockstars," Brian murmurs, sucking a hicky into your neck. "They'll buy anything people like us feed em."

"Hookers and blow?" Jeordie perks up, turning to you two.

"No," you and your boyfriend both say at the same time.

Brian does his makeup with a little help from you, and Jeordie does as well. Brian's lower face is covered in red lipstick, and he’s got his striped pink and black leggings on, with an unbuttoned vest and a cat in the hat top hat on his head, long hair brushed out and down to his waist. Jeordie's got one of his green ragdoll dresses on, dreads done up in pigtails.

You three meet up with the other band members, all dressed and ready for the show as well, and you can immediately tell Brian is slipping into his stage persona when he tells the bouncer to go fuck himself on a butcher knife after being asked for ID. (You display the IDs you've got in your purse with many apologies after your boyfriend and his delinquent band waltz in like they own the place, despite the fact that they're only the opening act.)

You stand in the front row of the make-do mosh pit of the dive bar, all big smiles and support. Despite what your family warns you, you have the utmost faith in Brian and his aspirations, and even though he's got an absolute clusterfuck of personalities making up the band behind him, it's a wild wonder of a musical act, and you just know the five of them are gonna go places someday.

"Good evening, all you crazy motherfuckers here in Miami Beach," Brian points out to the crowd, "Let's fuck shit up!" Their opener, Thrift, leads to Lucy In The Sky With Demons, then eventually to everyone's apparent favourite, if the cheering is any guage-- Lunchbox. You like that song too, bouncing around and screaming for it like one of the fans for the night. Brian keeps looking at you, and halfway through the song, he pulls you up on stage, obscenely groping his hands all over your breasts and sucking on them through your bra. You don't mind-- you make a show of moaning, squeezing them together, until you eventually slap him off, wag your finger, and slip back into the crowd, to the laughter and heckles from the crowd.

The show goes later than expected due to the enthusiasm of the crowd. After the show, everyone hung around the bar for a bit too, drinking a couple beers and doing a few lines of coke to mingle with any ego-stroking fans or labels that may have been scouting.

The guys are still all riding the high of the adrenaline and drugs, but it's 3 in the morning now, and since you three have not only one shared suitcase and one shared hotel room but one shared brain cell as well, you all decided it would be a good idea to book a 7 am flight home.

Well. Blame it on it being the most affordable return time.

Once you get back to the room, some Judas Priest is cranked on the tinny room radio because "fuck the other hotel guests, I'm Marilyn Manson", and the air guitars are broken out.

Brian inspects himself in the mirror, making Herculean poses and sticking his tongue out grotesquely, checking for warts or something. He pinches his nipples, scratching down his pale torso.

"I need more tattoos."

"The ones you have now are rad," you mention, kicking off your shoes, "But a few more would make you look even more badass."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, I already wouldn't want to fuck with you. More tattoos? I'd be terrified."

"I thought you were already terrified. You scream every time you see my cock."

"That's cause it's so big..." You playfully lick your lips.

"Yeah? You wanna suck it?" Brian unzips his pants. "Wanna suck on it, baby?"

"I wanna get into bed, is what I want to do," you yawn, peeling your top off and tossing it at Jeordie. Jeordie catches it and dutifully slingshots it into your great big shared suitcase. The neighboring hotel room tenants bang on the wall, mumbling something bitterly incoherent about turning the music down.

"I will kick down your door and skullfuck you, you entitled asshole!" Brian shouts back. The pounding stops abruptly, and you question how you haven't been arrested yet.

"Seriously, I think it's time for bed though," Jeordie mumbles, crawling under his covers like an elderly cat. He jumps and frowns at something on the wall, something you're glad you can't see.

"Fine, grandpa," Brian rolls his eyes, and kills the volume on the rock station.

Five minutes later, you come out of the bathroom in one of Brian's oversized Black Sabbath T-shirts, and run a hand through your hair, walking over to get into bed with Brian. He's still scrubbing some of the eyeliner at the sink, and you beckon him.

"Come here. I wanna cuddle."

Brian grunts, and rubs his face once more, walking over to the door naked save for his boxer briefs to make doubly sure it's locked.

"Only space for three psychos in this room," he says, then does a barrel roll into bed, sweeping the covers over you both. The light is turned out, and Brian snuggles into you from behind, wrapping his arms around your middle.

"Bri," you whisper. He hums into your hair.

"Yeah."

You flip around to face him, your noses touching. He blinks, and you bite your lip, reaching under the covers. He bites back a moan, and you lean in to whisper.

"I'm wet for you."

Brian immediately looks over, and tosses a pillow at his best friend's head. "Hey Jeordie, fuck off for the night."

"What? No! I'm... trying to sleep..."

"The one night he decides not to get shitfaced and wander the streets," Brian sighs.

"It's no fun to do that yourself," Jeordie mopes. "Actually, that's not true. I'm just tired."

"Fuck," Brian mutters. You two let a few seconds go by.

"Is he asleep?" you whisper.

"I think so," Brian mumbles back, then gasps as you cup him again through his underwear, reaching in with the other hand to wrap around his half-hard dick.

"(y/n), I gotta be in you," he hisses, "Fast."

"Just... shhh..." you giggle, and he bites his lower lip, rolling on top of you under the covers. His long raven hair curtains around you, and he reaches down to pull his dick out. You wiggle your hips excitedly, holding onto his forearms, and he takes a condom off the bedside table, rolling it on. He winces at the contact, the touch of his own hand to get the rubber on enough to make him harden even more. He moans, finally pushing into you.

"O-oh..." you try to keep your voice down to a squeak. "Bri... Bri, Bri, Brian, fuck... I love your cock..."

"Call me Marilyn," he whispers.

"Hmm?"

"Call me Marilyn, I wanna hear you say it," he grunts, rocking his hips in again. He holds your wrists together above your head as his thrusts get deeper.

"God, please... fuck me harder, Marilyn," you breathe softly. His pace increases, both of you still attempting to be quiet so as not to wake your partner.

"Yeah... yeah, yeah," he whispers, "Fuck yeah, baby. You're so good for me. God, oh..."

Your eyes roll back as you smile in bliss, feeling your hands down your boyfriend's back as he does his best to make you come not in record quantity tonight, but record time.

"That feel good?"

"Uh huh..."

"Your pussy feel good now? Nice and full?"

"Yeah, oh my god. Mar... Marilyn..." You feel your orgasm coming, so you hook your feet just above his ass and smirk, thinking of something you know will do the trick. It may be dumb, but it's bound to work.

"It feels so fucking amazing getting fucked by the antichrist."

He buries his face beside your shoulder as his hips stutter, and you can feel him finish inside the condom, thrusting his hips erratically and quickly as he milks it. Each thrust is taking you closer, and you two breathe and pant together as Brian holds you, making you come with wave after wave of a gorgeous climax.

"Ah, fuck that was good," you breathe. Brian rolls off of you, depositing the condom and tucking it under his pillow. You wrinkle your nose. “Ew, man.”

"It'll make housekeeping smile. She can sell it on eBay, make more than we earn in a tour. Or she can jam it up inside her and call us for child support."

You giggle, and slap his chest lightly. He kisses you, and settles comfortably down beside you again, slipping his arms underneath yours.

"Do you think Jeordie's still asleep?" you whisper, stifling a laugh. Suddenly, a clear voice rings out.

"If you two loud assholes think I slept through that, then you must think I'm fucking deaf," Jeordie blurts. "Assholes."

Brian starts laughing, even as his friend keeps calling him an asshole. "You're next," Brian teases, and Jeordie sighs.

"Leave me alone and let me sleep."

"Get the lube, (y/n), it's Jeordie's turn to be violated by the dirty man who broke into this hotel room, aka me."

"Fuck off!"

"Fine, fuck you, more dick for (y/n)," Brian grins, and you smile, holding him to you.

You listen to the white noise of the deteriorating air conditioner. The rhythmic rising and falling of his chest tells you he's passed out behind you, dreaming and adorable with his face pressed into the back of your neck.

You glance behind you. "Jeord, babe? Sorry for keeping you up. Really."

Jeordie just smiles. "Honestly, I was listening the whole time to see what his secret is. How do you make someone come that much? It's insane."

You giggle into the pillow, and Brian wakes up long enough to croak: "Cause I am the God of Fuck."

265 notes · View notes

slouchyslouch · 4 years

Text

My 2010s in Records.

10. My Bloody Valentine — mbv

Wrote about mbv on a separate piece.

9. Earl Sweatshirt — Some Rap Songs

Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs is a record of mending and therapy. At the beginning of the decade, rap fans saw the 16 year old prodigy create the most technical and distinctive raps unheard of at that time. Yes, a lot of it was jarring and immature, but the potential was there. While debut mixtape EARL was a teaser and an introduction to his greatness, Doris was his reclamation to the rap game after a period of silence in Samoa. I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside in turn spoke for itself. Its morose disposition then made its way onto Some Rap Songs; not quite his masterpiece, but an accomplished period piece nonetheless. As one of the most highly acclaimed rappers in the world today, Earl spills his guts out on this diaristic tape about his relationship with his father and the emotional exhaustion coming from trying to amend it. On “Red Water,” he repeats the same 8 bars on loop as if caught in a recurring dream. “Papa called me chief / gotta keep it brief / locked and loaded I can see you lyin’ through your teeth” he raps in a fugue state, as if coming to the realization that his father was only there for those momentary times of convenience. It’s always difficult to write something that includes family and loved ones. There’s a sense of vulnerability you have to divulge in as well as a catharsis that fulfills one’s desire to let go of one’s agony. The beats on Some Rap Songs run on loose kaleidoscopic loops, production that Earl has mastered rapping over as his idiosyncrasies in his bars do best when complementing them. Thanks to the influence of his buddies Mike and Medhane, he’s learned to channel his eccentric flows onto those beats. “Riot” closes the record with the sentimental instrumental sampling jazz legend, and uncle, Hugh Masekela. It’s feels like a proper ending to Earl’s chronicle, but the events that have transpired will always be apart of his life. At the end of it all, Some Rap Songs will remain forever a tombstone of his anguish.

8. The Spirit of the Beehive — Hypnic Jerks

There’s no other dream pop record this decade that could top this almost-perfect album. The hushed vocalizations of Zach Schwartz and Rivka Ravede offer a quiet intimacy in the dreamscape that is Hypnic Jerks. The title in itself lends to the idea of being half asleep and half awake — to be in an altered state where the real and surreal are just two sides of the same coin. Tracks like “poly swim” and “it’s gonna find you” entrance you into that state of unconscious, while tracks like “can i receive the contact?” and “hypnic jerks” make an effort to wake you up from the sublime. Field recordings filter in and out between tracks, as if you were hallucinating the whole time. It’s when “nail i couldn’t bite” and “(without you) in my pocket” play out that you realize it doesn’t matter what state you lie in. Their lucid pop constructions reward repeated listens to the point of obsession in a somnambulant state. The record’s lack of acclaim only makes it feel like you’re in on a hidden secret. To this day, I am completely spellbound to its sorcery and have yet to unlock its mysteries.

7. Iceage — New Brigade

Back in elementary school, I listened to a lot of pop punk; the kind that was rapturously melodic yet cheesily done and overproduced (Think Blink 182 or All Time Low). Until I listened to New Brigade, I didn’t even realize what true punk music actually sounded like. Iceage was just fucking cool to me. Sure, they had the aesthetic, depicting bloody mosh pits and macabre rune art, but it was truly the music that broke into my spirit, shattering what I thought punk sounded like back in the day. I’d read pieces about their notorious live shows where they would play rapid 15-minute sets in the sunless recesses of Denmark, which only added to the band’s mystique. Upon listening to their debut, I felt musically fulfilled like never before. No more of the whiny, drawn out vocals from pop punk bands. Frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt had the kind of angsty drawl similar to Nick Cave’s when he played with The Birthday Party which offered a kind of obscene yet confident instability to his performance. Johan Surrballe Wieth and Jakob Tvilling Pless’s guitars have just the right amount of filth in them — an abrasive attack on your soul while Dan Kjær Nielsen’s drums are played propulsively in classic hardcore fashion — never meant decelerate. The record didn’t offer the tightest instrumental, but that was the point. Iceage have gone on to release tighter and more spectacular punk records consistently over the decade but their debut broke the ceiling of what to me punk could, and should, sound like. From the cathartic breakdown of “White Rune” to the triumphant “You’re Blessed,” New Brigade was the record that gave me that spark, the one that carried me to rotting heights.

6. Frank Ocean — Channel Orange

Channel Orange will always be a classic to my generation. From Grammy-nominated “Thinking’ Bout You” to the sweet and charming “Forrest Gump,” we surf through Frank’s psyche in smooth and effortless RnB. Frank Ocean’s vivid universe is one of vibrant summers and distant getaways. Its colourful motifs paint a pretty picture for us — pink skies, monks in moshpits, peaches and mangos, roofs of mansions, palm trees and pools, Majin Buu. Most people I know around my age know the lyrics to most of its tracks. They’re as infectious as any classic from the past decade. I still remember listening to “Sweet Life” by the beach with a friend before attending his concert on his first tour. Everything felt right in the world when he sang “so why see the world when you got the beach” as the waves crashed over the sand and the summer heat glistened over the ocean. During its release, he opened up to the world to reveal his love for another man in an affectionate Tumblr post. It gave us an appreciation into an artist’s vulnerable identity while breaking the door open for other artists to come out in their own way. Frank later released his masterpiece in Blonde/Endless and a plethora of brilliant singles from his radio show, but the stories and music from Channel Orange will remain forever timeless.

5. Solange — A Seat at the Table

“Fall in your ways / so you can crumble / fall in your ways / so you can wake up and rise” sings Solange, on the introduction to her restorative album A Seat at the Table. They’re words I try to tell myself in times of darkness. Solange just has that ability to let anybody express themselves through her music, to meditate on life’s injustices and pitfalls. It’s okay to be mad; it’s okay to rest and take care of yourself as much as you need to. We just have to rely on each other to get back into the fight. It feels like a lot of my favourite records from the past decade are imbued with themes of darkness and isolation. Fortunately, I still have Solange to let myself vent out those frustrations. Whether it’s the strings on the beginning of “Cranes in the Sky” that remind me to slow down or the horns projected behind Master P’s stoic orations that fuel my determination to keep afloat, A Seat at the Table plays like an instruction manual for self-care, black empowerment, and righteous activism. It’s consoling to know that I’m not alone in distracting myself from everything that’s wrong with the world today. 2016 was such an appropriate time for this record to be released. Solange gave us hope, grace, stoicism, and the ability to heal and recharge. A Seat at the Table may be a personal record to Solange, but as she sings on “F.U.B.U.,” this shit is for us.

4. Chance the Rapper — Acid Rap

It’s odd to say that my favourite rap record of the decade comes in the form of pop rap album Acid Rap. In making this list, I thought about the obvious greats in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. In the end, Chance’s second mixtape brought me more joy than any of those records did. It gave me the cringiest but most pleasurable musical moments with the homies singing along to tracks like “Cocoa Butter Kisses” and “Pusha Man.” Releasing it independently and as a free download, Chance’s spoken-word idiosyncrasies reveal themselves as classic pop rap gems by the end of the decade. Chance’s whole thing was just about pure positivity and having fun. The era of albums I could compare to it was during the release of Kanye’s College Dropout and Late Registration, a time when Kanye (sort of) envisioned the anti-stereotype in rappers, countering the machismo and toxic masculinity found in a lot of hip-hop now and back then (RIP old Kanye). Chance didn’t care about getting bitches or getting money. He just wanted to do drugs with his friends — to trip out on acid and go on a spiritual journey with all of us. Hidden beneath the positivity, Chance still creeps in a dash of realism and humanity on tracks like “Paranoia,” illustrating the life of gang-banging in his hometown of Chicago. It’s the earnestness in his raps that always pulls me back, the flourishes of piano when he raps “I lean back then spark my shit / I turn up I talk my shit / hope you love all my shit / I hope you love all my shit / IGH.” It turns out, as he declares on the outro, Everything’s Good.

3. Alex G — DSU

On DSU, time stops. The cult of Alex G is now cemented in indie rock lore at the end of the decade with eight albums full of hooks, dreams, and shattered spirits. DSU was the first record I listened to by Alex G, and remains my favourite by his despite him going on to release better conceptual records in Rocket and House of Sugar. No track can be skipped or listened to passively. With most of them springing under the 2–3 minute mark, ideas flow in and out without direction but coalesce into an impressionistic and breathtaking work of art. Hints of Elliott Smith and Isaac Brock echo in the duality of harsh guitar distortion and melodious pop hooks. Guitar feedback never felt so comforting as it colours the magnificence of Alex G’s composition. There’s a kind of deep melancholy in each track despite the ambiguous surrealism lyrics, a perfect winter record to listen to alone in your room or walk through the piles of snow in the night. Its murky yet lush production somehow reaches out to you, helps you drown in its depths and remain there for its 37 minutes. Whether it’s “Skipper” fully attuning you to its hushed presence, or the entrancing opener of “After Ur Gone,” I just feel like I want to close my eyes and immerse myself in there for as long as it allows me to.

2. Frank Ocean — Blonde

Frank Ocean’s Blonde arrived as a gift from the heavens. For five years, my friends and I have joked and memed about when the new Frank was coming out — whether it was even ever going to come out. Years after its release, it has evolved into the masterpiece that I’ve always wanted him to create. When Endless came out, I felt somewhat disappointed at the material — although later served as the perfect complement to Blonde — because of its lack of sensual pieces similar to those on Channel Orange’s effortless RnB and the latter record’s penchant for easy sing-alongs. Blonde in turn revealed a similar mood: the spacious vapour that fogged up behind Ocean’s intimate croon, the volatility in his voice that permeated your soul — it felt like an emotional load that was difficult to bare, yet something necessary that had to be experienced. I was just getting into my first intimate relationship when Blonde came out, and it’s made me realize how much I wanted to make that person happy, and that I couldn’t take any relationship I had for granted. I felt heavy after listening to this record. The sadboi hours memes ring true to its emotional weight. I would flutter to the arpeggios of “Ivy” as Frank sings “I thought that I was dreamin’ when you said you love me,” bop to the duality of “Nights,” and shed a tear to the wistfulness of “Godspeed.” I wonder how much shit Frank had to go through to even get any of these songs on tape. It’s okay. I like to think think that by the end of it all, Blonde was the catharsis he needed to spill his heart out.

1. Tame Impala — Lonerism

At the end of the decade, seeing Kevin Parker as one of the most highly-touted producers and songwriters in pop music would be an observation if you had asked me a decade ago, when Tame Impala’s first record Innerspeaker — an expansive work of art that recalled 60’s guitar psychedelia — first came out. On Lonerism, Parker’s music evolved into something even more seismic and innovative in scope. As the name suggests, Lonerism is a product of disaffection, self-defeat, and isolation. I’d imagine it was as fulfilling to other music fans of a type to detach from the world and just get lost in another’s. There’s a part on “Keep on Lying” where an endless guitar solo is played in the midst of a dinner party being played out; that feeling of getting dragged to a party when you were just a kid but just wanted to pop your headphones on and refuse to interact with anybody. According to Parker, he put in the sample to make the listener feel even more alienated. It’s a powerful feeling that lets anyone listening to the record in on that vulnerable sensation. In spite of that, tracks like “Apocalypse Dreams” and “Elephant” still give us astonishing psych rock bangers while pop gems “Music to Walk Home By” and “Feels like We Only Go Backwards” demonstrate Parker’s guitar pedal gymnastics over vibrant hooks. Although Currents has skyrocketed him into the fame and acclaim that he undoubtedly deserves, this record will always be his opus in my heart. I’ve daydreamed enough times to the music where its world has settled into my subconscious. It’s a world that comes from genius, but it’s also a world that invites you in to escape from the idea of Lonerism itself, to have something shared with you in solitude.

#top 10 albums #tame impala #frank ocean #alex g #chance the rapper #solange #iceage #the spirit of the beehive #My Bloody Valentine #album review #lists #earl sweatshirt

11 notes · View notes

ringobean · 5 years

Text

Part 9 and End... Hope that you like it.

I took one last look at my friends as a sign of approval, then I took Ringo in my arms kissing him,

"of course I'm coming with you, I don't know what's waiting for me in the 60's, but I'd love to share your life."

He was overjoyed. He hugged me so hard, lifting me from the ground, that I thought he was going to grind my bones.

"I love you so much (Y / N)"

"I love you too Richie, how could I live without you?"

I hugged Luna and Michelle tightly.

"I will miss you girls."

"We will miss you too, I hope everything will happen as you wish" said Michelle

"Everything will be the way she wants, enjoy your life darling, and we'll see each other again in 2019 when you'll be an old grandmother" laughing Luna.

Ringo took my hand and we entered the cabin, we were all 5 pretty scared about whether it was going to work or not, and especially if the scientist wasn't going to make another mistake by sending us anywhere.

I finally waved a last goodbye to my friends.

Then the scientist informed us that he was going to start the machine, he counted backwards. The doors closed, the cabin shook, and went black.

I opened my eyes, I was lying on a bed, I recognized my room that had changed a lot, no doubt we were in the 60s. I turned my head and I saw Ringo who still held my hand, who awoke gently in turn, I couldn't believe that I had changed times, and especially that he was officially my man.

He hugged me, and said, "you took care of us when we were lost in 2019, now it's my turn to take care of you, I'll always be there for you (y/n) I love you."

Afterwards, he introduced me to his mother Elsie, and his father-in-law, who welcomed me as a daughter, we lived at their home at first, then we got married discreetly because Brian thought it was better for sales, and I also thought it was better not to be too exposed to the media.

I also spent a lot of time with John's wife Cynthia, who was also a hidden woman. Later, as I got along rather well with everyone and especially Brian, he proposed me to become his assistant and help him to manage the various tours, which allowed me to stay close to my husband, without being always stuck to him.

knowing in advance that they would stop touring in 1966, I waited for that moment to finally start a family, I preferred that Ringo be more present to enjoy the children and not have to raise them alone, we had 2 children, a boy and a girl, when the band broke up, it was a little bit difficult, Ringo feeling a little useless, began to drink more and more regularly, it was the period of his life that I dreaded the most, but finally as we was a rather stable couple, and with lot of love he picked himself up, we approached the 80s, one day he received the scenario of "caveman" I had confidence in him, but also a little bit scared of his meeting with Barbara, I knew she was a very beautiful woman, but finally the script didn't interest him, whew!

Came the terrible day of December 8, 80, I phoned John to make sure he hadn't forgotten the date, finally he went through the back door to go to the studio while asking for security, searched the man I had described to him, who had a weapon on him! John was safe, thank you God.

His marriage with Yoko was no longer working, he divorced some time later, realizing then that he still loved Cynthia, he returned with her for the greatest pleasure of all, the boys reconciled themselves definitively, they had the project of getting back together and making new albums and tours, which was done in addition to their solo career, George had long since stopped smoking, he was taking care of his health, Paul had the same life as my first era, my Ringo, who wasn't athletic at all and who loved good bloody steaks, became a gym addict and a vegetarian. He also stopped his 60 cigarettes a day. The first time he started using Tweeter made me laugh, he wanted me to show him how to do emojis, as I had taught him in my previous era.

"See, I told you that one day you'll stop the cigarettes and start tweeting broccoli"

We are finally in 2019, I am a granny of 76 years, who tries despite everything to appear as young and as hot as his magnificent husband who seems 50 when he is almost 80, I can't believe that we are already 57 years of wedding, and still be as much in love as the first day, despite my apprehensions, he has always been a wonderful loving husband, and a very good father.

The Beatles, well... They're going very well, they're all 4 hot grandpas who have just celebrated together the 50 years of their most legendary album "Abbey Road" to the greatest joy of their fans of all ages. I can't thank enough the destiny and the error of this scientist for all this, and for this wonderful life that I lived alongside the man I love who was my idol formerly.

#ringo smut #thebeatles #ringo starr #john #brian epstein #ringo starr x reader #paul #60s #the beatles x reader #the beatles fanfiction #the beatles #george #george harrison #paul smut #paul mccartney #john lennon

11 notes · View notes

ridingbensolooooo · 5 years

Text

Thanks for the tag @discordiavonsin it’s just what I needed to forget about stats for a little bit :)

Put your music on shuffle and answer the questions about each artist.

Name of Artist: Panic! At The Disco

What genre are they ? um honestly who actually knows at this point.

How long have they been active ? since 2004 I believe

Have you ever heard them on the radio ? yeah high hopes still gets played every now and then around here

Have they released any new music within the last year or two ? Yeah, Pray for the Wicked! Love that album to death, I’ve decided “Hey look ma I made it” is going to be my graduation song when I finish uni at the end of the year!!

Do they have a male or female vocalist ? Male - Brendon Urie aka Beebop

Name of Artist: BTS

Would you recommend them ? Fuck yeah they’re my favourite band kids

What is your favourite lyric of theirs ? “The dawn right before the sun rises is darkest” I’m gonna get it tattooed when I save up enough money. I’ve wanted that as a tattoo for nearly 5 years now so I’m sure of my decision lmao just need money.

What are their album artworks like ? Pretty but never over the top which is nice. The last few album sets have made a pattern if you buy all 4 versions and line them up which I have to saw I am a big fan of.

If they stopped making music, would you be sad ? I would be absolutely devastated. They’re my favourite band! They said in an awards acceptance speech not too long ago that they were considering disbanding at the start of last year and I honest to god burst into tears right then and there. I’d be crushed.

If you didn’t know what they look like, based off their music, what you guess they looked like ? I’d just have a stereotypical picture of pretty idol boys in mind. Which isn’t far off tbh but they’re so much more than that too.

Name of Artist: Twenty One Pilots

How popular are they ? Depends on who you ask. They’ve had some very popular songs but people seem to forget about them when they’re not releasing new stuff?

Have you ever seen them perform live ? I’ve seen them twice actually! Which is surprising, because I live in Australia and not a lot of bands make the trip here very often, so I’m very glad I’ve got to see them as many times as I have. They have an incredible energy when live, Tyler commands the space and Josh is fucking awesome on drums irl too.

How did you find out about them ? I heard about them ages before I actually got into them, back in 2013 when my friend showed me this cover he was super obsessed with, and it was top’s cover of Can’t Help Falling in Love.

What is their sexuality, if known ? They’re both in relationships with women so I’ll say straight but who knows really.

Is their music easy to dance to ? Most of it is! They’ve got some really good beats in most of their songs, but also some of them are very slow and you just want to feel the music, not really dance.

Name of Artist: GOT7

What instrument is the most prominent in their music ? Umm they’re a kpop band so computer?? Idk how pop music is made.

Does your family listen to them ? Not at all, I’m the only one in my family who listens to kpop. They only listen when I make them lmao.

Are they still making music today ? Yes! They’re coming to Australia to promote their new album which is fucking awesome because kpop bands barely EVER come here. Like I thought American and British artists didn’t come here often, but it seems like they’re here every 2 weeks compared to kpop artists TT.TT

Would you want to meet them ? I would love to! I’ve been learning korean but I’m not very good, but they have 3 members who speak fluent english so I’m sure we could manage a chat

How represented is this artist in your saved music / collection ? All of their albums are spread over like 4 or 5 playlists lmao

Name of Artist: My Chemical Romance

When did you discover them ? I was very young, my mum is super into them and she used to play the black parade album all the time when I was a kid. I literally can’t remember when I heard them for the first time lmao.

How many albums do they have ? 4 :(

Which member of the band is closest to your ‘type’ / do you find the most attractive ? Frank Iero could punch me in the face and I’d thank him and tell him his tattoos look really nice that close.

Have they gone through any line-up changes ? Um, fuck Bob. Enough said.

Is their music more fun or serious ? The first 3 albums of theirs were very angsty and serious and like rock opera-y but Danger Days has very different vibes. More like, let’s make fun of how shit the world can be instead of wallowing in a pit of despair.

Name of Artist: Fall Out Boy

Is the type of music / genre they play something you would typically enjoy or is their sound different for you ? Yeah man, I’ve never left my emo phase and I love their sound even as it continues to evolve.

Based off of their sound, what would a human version of their music look like ? Hmm, depends which era you’re talking about. Early fob is emo Pete Wentz at his peak, but now their sound sort of reminds me of this instagram model I like, Vanja Jagnic.

Could you see yourself getting along with the members personally ? I feel like I would get along with them all very easily! I have it on good authority I’m a nice person, so hopefully that would carry through.

Did somebody recommend this band to you ? Does my mum count? She likes fall out boy too and used to play them when I was younger as well, so I guess she recommended them to me in a way.

Name of Artist: BLACKPINK

How many people are in this band/group ? 4

When did they start making music ? 2016, I didn’t realise it’s been so long already!

Do they have any well known songs, if so, which one(s) ? Umm not sure in western countries, maybe Jennie’s solo song? They’re pretty popular in Korea though.

Do you listen to this artist regularly ? My housemate is obsessed with them so yeah I do listen quite a bit.

How would you describe their music ? Pretty typical of kpop, they’re way more “edgy” than most girl groups though which I like. I’m not a fan of the cute/sexy/infant vibe that a lot of other girl groups have going on.

Name of Artist: Seventeen

If they use a stage name, what is their real name(s) ? Wow this is really the wrong band for this. Okay so, S.Coups is Seungcheol, Jeonghan goes by Jeonghan, Joshua has a korean name but Joshua is his birth name so idk if it counts (it’s Jisoo though), Jun is Junhwi, Hoshi is Soonyoung, Wonwoo is Wonwoo so that’s easy, Woozi is Jihoon, DK is Seokmin, Mingyu is just Mingyu, The8 is Minghao, Seungkwan is Seungkwan although people do call him MC Boo (not sure that counts as a stage name), Vernon also has a korean name but Vernon is his birth name (Hansol is the korean name though) and Dino is Chan. Phew.

Do they regularly make pop charts ? They do in korea! They’re mid range popular, but they’re steadily getting more popular each year.

Have you ever met them ? No, I wish lmao.

If they toured in your city, would you go see them ? I would! They did come to Australia, but I’m broke and couldn’t afford to go all the way to Melbourne to see them.

Name of Artist: Red Velvet

Are they known for anything else besides music? Not really sure, maybe being from one of the big 3 companies in Korea?

What is their nationality ? Korean!

Are they a guilty pleasure ? A bit yeah lmao, I don’t listen to all of their stuff because a lot of it is not my taste at all, but the songs of theirs I do listen to fall into the category of annoyingly catchy.

Which age group is this artist most popular with? My age and a bit younger I would say.

Has this artist ever toured in your country/state/city? Nah, SM artists don’t come here.

Name of Artist: Falling in Reverse

Do you think it’s necessary or important to know about their personal life to ‘understand’ their music ? I feel like some of their songs are directly related to things that have happened in Ronnie’s life, so yeah to a certain extent, but a lot of the time you can get it from the vibe of the song.

Have they ever gone on hiatus and did they return ? I’m not sure actually, I don’t follow them that closely.

What instruments do they use ? Guitar, drums, bass, vocals, synth/keys.

What city are they from ? Las Vegas

What are your experiences with fans of this artist? I don’t really know anyone who has them as their favourite band so I’m not really sure what die hard fans are like, but everyone I know who is a causal fan seems super chill.

I don’t really have that many people to tag lmao so I’ll just tag people in my activity recently @samanddean-winchesthair @unfade @blue-roses-and-red-rubbies @classylaughs have fun if y’all decide to do this!

3 notes · View notes

fridaynightbordercrossing · 5 years

Text

An interview with Mercado Negro

Mercado Negro, the duo integrated by brothers Martín (guitarist) and Jesús Hernández (drummer/singer), is one of the important groups in the rebirth of the 80's music scene, as well as pioneers in playing punk rock on the border. In this interview, they talk about these issues, as well as their present and several of their projects, here is the interview.

THE ROOTS...

"Martín and Jesús come from a family of musicians. Our grandfather was a troubadour for the decades of the forties and fifties, promoter also because he promoted the trio in which he participated with Pedro Vargas (later, one of the most important Mexican artists of all time) and the first artistic caravans that came to Tijuana. From there, came another legacy, we are nephews of the legendary guitarist Lupillo Barajas, who was part of Manolo y sus Cuatro Latinos and later formed part of a very successful group, Los Tijuana Five, which was very important not only in the region but at the national level. They came out in magazines and had shows in hotels and concerts like any artist of international stature, that heritage we have. We were fortunate to grow in a 100 percent rock and roll environment. As children, we came to this building, on the second floor, where our uncles had their rehearsals"

"We had seen all the start in the Fiestas Patrias, saw everything how was done in the culture of the sixties. We were about 6 or 7 years old, we saw all that, the image of musicians with long hair and beards, but also understanding their art. We also saw this in the ballroom that my grandmother had, which was La Cueva, an artistic concept, not just a ballroom, it had paintings on the walls, so then, who was not going impact that contact with the musicians?...we watched the rehearsals, the instruments. Since I was a child I played here in this studio, there was a piano in a corner, so there was contact with musicians and painters ".

1977: THE END OF A ROCKERA ERA

"There are four aspects that determined the death of the generation of the golden era in Tijuana, I am marking it very objectively in a research work I am doing. The first aspect is that the city grew because there was a national call for people from all over Mexico to come to work, since in the seventies it was the boom of the maquiladora industry, so people came from the most remote states, as well as the closest. These people came for the offer of government, so they came to live and work with everything and their families, people who came from Chiapas, Yucatan, Veracruz, and Jalisco. They came from towns and cities that brought their well-rooted culture, so there was a multiethnic mix of all cultures, They started looking for music and entertainment that they were used to in their city, that was a factor. We began to see more Tijuana residents who had their taste for mariachi, cumbia, merengue, bolero and romantic, we began to see a demand for that music. Let's emphasize that in the sixties, Tijuana was a rock city".

"The other aspect was that San Diego began to be profitable because it was the time of superstars and super concerts. The sixties were of the "rockstars", but in the seventies, change to the "superstars", emerging the great phenomena of music like Kiss, who made great concerts in stadiums and arenas, when formerly they were in clubs, bars and places of medium capacity. The Tijuanenses began to go to concerts for the first time in 1977. That was a very important year because Led Zeppelin came, Black Sabbath with Van Halen opening, Rolling Stones, Yes, and Tomita, then it was a boom, including that there was not so much difficulty crossing the line and the economy was different, Hell, a ticket could be paid for 10 dollars and up to 45 dollars, then it was a new modality for Tijuana residents to go to San Diego".

"Another factor was that artists who had a well-known national reputation in the city, popular artists like Vicente Fernandez, Rigo Tovar, El Mariachi Vargas, and Banda El Recodo, became superstars and idols thanks to that migration, which was people who sought their identity. Finally, another determining factor was the disco music, because Avenida Revolución, which was the most prominent place for the musicians to develop, change their ways, since for clubs it was more profitable to buy a jukebox and have a DJ with their turntables, than to pay some musicians, since it was the salary of two bands. There was live music 24 hours a day, seven days a week as in the case of Mike's. When the generation of DJs was born, they earned more than a whole group, so, from 1977, live rock and Tijuana's generation of musicians came to an end, only very few of them survived, among them, La Cruz".

THE ROCK PUNK ARRIVES

"By 1977, we were already skating and, through skateboarding, we began to see the magazines, it was something new and fresh in Tijuana, it had to do with an attitude in rebellion. It was not the same to go skateboarding or to play basketball in the skating centers that were in fashion, that made us identify with punk since rock had become hard rock and fashion, it did not fit with the youth of Tijuana. Skateboarding and surfing practically led us to decide as young people to go along that path. There was a kind of disenchantment, a divorce or distancing between the public and the superstars, it became a division in which it was impossible to have access to rock music".

"People who wanted to be a musician wanted to maintain the spirit or nostalgia of the rebellious movements of the late fifties, when the countercultural movement or the rock and roll with Elvis Presley emerged, which was something with more contact. Now, that was something impossible. Kiss was Kiss, all the superstars were inaccessible things, there was now a generation that did not care about all that, and started with "I want to be a musician and I do not care about looking like Queen or like Elton John, I want to manifest myself ", and that, was linked well with our way of living and with our reality. Apart from that, for us, it was an absurd thing watching six-minute instrumental solos, high heels and painted musicians. That was not accessible to a tijuanense and as a youth, we grew watching hippies, psychedelia and peace and love".

"We saw a radical and countercultural wave that fought for Vietnam, we did not understand it, but we saw that generation, our uncles were there and we came to see that transformation. At this point, watching the platform shoes and pants below the waist, for us without being punks, it was like watching clowns, with 10 minutes of drum solo and 20 of keyboard solo and opera voices, we felt that as decadent, I could not be liking that. We had from San Diego two stations, KGB that was rock music and KCBQ that was country and ballads, both started to like in Tijuana and we did not like it, that did not satisfy us. When we started listening to punk rock, we got excited, we said: "we are for this". It was the simplicity of being able to reach and be able to identify with a skateboard, you identified with a group, and it was accessible".

"This is how we were fully identified with this new refreshing musical movement, since with it comes the birth of groups like Ramones and The Sex Pistols, in addition to the ones that emerged afterward like The Stranglers and Dead Kennedys, which emerge with a very primitive and basic musical proposal, as in its beginning was rock, as in the sixties it was with The Who, Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Once again, in the late seventies, a new proposal was emerging that returned to its roots, with that rebelliousness, but at the same time, with a more energetic freshness. It was a movement antagonistic to everything that made us decadent and that was gradually evolving both in the intellectual and ideological concept. In the musical concept, it is very important to get across the point that The Clash releases the Sandinista album, a triple album that had a lot of roots of what would later evolve into a lot of influences of the Rock En Tu Idioma movement".

"That musical evolution was also very good because that's where new wave also came from. At the time, there were the super keyboardists of Yes and all that movement, apart from the techno, that made us not like the keyboards, but all the technology was developed to an impressive level and the synthesizer guitar, keyboards, and sequencers began to be used. The look of the bands broke with what was established, a whole Hollywood movement is made with punk hairstyles, taking into account that some said that this was going to be dead, it was predicted for a lifespan of four years. In addition, by way of mockery, it was said thatanybody could do a group on a snap"

PIONEERING

"From 1977 to 1981 there was an absence of live music here in the city, an almost total absence because the only survivors were (hard rockers) La Cruz and a progressive rock band called Camaleón. By 77, La Cruz began to tour to Sonora, to Baja California Sur, even to Sinaloa, they began to open their own circuit. In Camaleón, the Muzquiz Brothers participated (later, integrating punk rock band Los Negativos), they did it for love of the music more than for having a constancy, their concerts were very sporadic, and since they were wealthy people, they did it out of love for art. For 1981, as lovers of rock music and live concerts, we decided to make our own music, very motivated because hardcore music was having a boom in California, since the first and the best groups arose there, like Dead Kennedys, TSOL, White China, Black Flag, and Circle Jerks, we had all that influence and we went to the concerts in Fairmont Hall. Suddenly, we could not go for the interracial fights. We decided that if we could no longer see the groups, then someone has to play, we have fever and hunger and so it was that to cover a basic need. Without projecting it, we fostered a new musical movement that had a very singular thing, that was that the first punk rock or rock groups from Tijuana had the very specific peculiarity of composing and interpreting their songs in Spanish. Let it be well marked and in capital letters, that Rock En Tu Idioma reached 1987 to Tijuana, but since 1981, six years before, we were already doing it".

"Since 1979 we tried to make a group, but we were very young and the older guys did not want to do it. In 1980, I made an event that has a lot to do with this, it was in the ETI 24 Alba Roja, from this school the first show comes out in 1980 with pure new wave and punk music, being the first high school to do something like that and that's where everything was turned on. Around 1981 we had already made several attempts to do something, but besides that we were very young, we did not have the resources, in fact, the youngest was the one who got the instruments to make the band, those who worked they did not make the effort, then, the youngest ones were who put everything together ".

"The peculiarity of the eighties, was that we segregated our own movement, we did our parties and we danced the pogo dance, which was popularized by the Ramones, it was a less violent dance with less physical contact. We were several, we were not limited, we were numerous, the gangs got together and that's how it grew. At a certain moment, the scene was very generous, we were lucky that the venues were open to us. We made events, hiring the salons, making the contracts, the formats from three months before to get the Seguro Social Theater. Booking the Calafornix Theater was a very simple thing, because apart, we were students, then, there was no difficulty to play in a CBTIS, Prepa Federal. That was in institutions and schools, not to mention the public places, and very different than now, they asked us if we wanted to play and even, offered to pay us".

"What was part of the punk rock attitude was to take for us the cultural institutions. In those days it was Mercado Negro in the Theater of the IMSS, the UABC or the Casa De La Cultura, it was because we took them, we went and they put a thousand and one obstacles, they made you sign a 90-day contract, you were responsible for this and the other, sign a series of ridiculous conditions. Actually, it was our dream to play there, to take those spaces as punk rockers. Now they have another vision, we respect them, but people say, "well, they have the government logo", but then we say that those institutions are really ours, they are public spaces for everyone".

ANTAGONISM

"You have to consider for that antagonism, that punk rock was not only music that the police wanted to repress, but also has an ideology that is countercultural and the cultural and artistic instances consider all cultural manifesto as part of art. It was also a whole concept involved, it was a counterpart where they said, "you dress in that way", yes, but it was a manifestation of art that has a philosophical and ideological content that deserves to be considered to participate in this type of instances, in this type of forums, they are obligated to have you for something, they could not avoid it, they could not take it from you away at all. We were part of those who fight for it, Luis Guereña was one who fought to open the UABC Theater not only for us, for the Tijuana residents beyond the punk rock movement. It was not only forbidden to play punk rock, but it was forbidden to play rock in those places, being punk rock the most radical, because the police and the system did not want us".

"They took the press so that the newspapers would cover the events. For example, there were two sides of the press, one, which covers the scandal of some police officers that seize a punk kid that got beat up and raped, they banish him and he has to go to Los Angeles, that's the journalistic note with a sensationalistic side on the hardcore side. For the punk rock, the artistic one is done with stuff like the concert began ten seconds later, that there was a small crowd and that there was a yawn. You begin to be judged from the media, especially Zeta, in that way for being a local punk rock artist, a style was made with a review of that type, and that was applied to us. We come to "innovate" for that journalism that was made at the national level, that was most used for judging the big musicians. The punks arrived to innovate the culture of Tijuana at the journalistic level and equal to the level of police repression because they had no work. Before they used to beat up the cholos, then, the punks arrived and they changed their targets. The cholos breathed, but paradoxically the cholos ceased and the punks still are around. Now it is not like before, now you can walk all tattooed with piercings and purple hair, maybe they make fun of you. Now, if you walk in normal clothes they could target you because they see the possibility of taking out your money. There are now kindergartners bringing their mohawks and it is accepted in schools, they even look beautiful".

THE FIRST RECORD

"For the first album, we took off a year with several implications that would have been different if we had released it out on time. A single year at the artistic level is like about ten years. The musical careers of the young artists are very short, at least in the music industry, the companies sign you for five years and the representation companies give you short contracts. Losing a year artistically is losing a lot of ground, however, the expectation that was generated with respect to the presentation of the album it opened many doors, and motivated other Tijuana groups to look for the same. It remains a highmark for a whole generation".

THE SCENE

"By 1987, after a resurgence of the scene that had already begun in form, all the groups of Tijuana, without exception, began to visualize the music as an art, as a way to stand out and not only in the community but in a larger scale. There was a very serious attitude toward music, the musicians started to evolve because they began to act like professionals. All the groups charged money to promoters, but, with the offer, they were giving back their best effort. When you saw bands like Armagedón, you knew that you would go to see a very professional image and above all, enjoy a good musical performance with a nice sound and stage, it had the same level of quality as the shows in San Diego. You went and watched Elena Coker with very great musicians or a group like Mercado Negro and you got something really good to enjoy, because that was the ideology, a very serious and professional attitude towards music, to such a degree that the groups took possession of the cultural instances such as the CECUT and La Casa De La Cultura. The press and the media, when they looked at the bands, considered them very serious. That enriched the cultural scene and the new generations wanted to be like the bands on stage".

THE CONQUEST OF ROCK EN TU IDIOMA

"The decade of the eighties culminates with a conquest. Rock En Tu Idioma arrived, it began to infiltrate radio stations. The cultural and artistic promoters began to realize that there was a new movement that had implications with the new youth, so they were mixing it with the popular music of the adolescents. Around 1989, there are three big concerts, Soda Stereo in the Auditorium with the Doble Vida tour, Caifanes with the El Diablito tour and with La Negra Tomasa song and the Coca Cola tour with Mana, Fobia and Rostros Ocultos. These three concerts were a determining factor in what would follow, it shook the local scene, because the new generations of musicians who emerged in the late eighties and early nineties, had an identity crisis. The movement that was well enriched in Tijuana, but suddenly it had a mirage. They began to follow the rock proposed by the new record companies. They made you change the concept, breaking with all the identity of Tijuana. Many people went and started doing well, giving up their principles by grabbing something quick".

"That was a preamble to what would come in the nineties, which was a struggle of definitions and trends. On the one hand, there was the new musical current of grunge and all the ideology that was completely opposed to the ideology of do-it-yourself and imposes apathy, disinterest. On the other hand, Rock In Tu Idioma becomes too castrated, to say, without strength, without a message to the conscience. All that was a shock to the Tijuana movement and I imagine that happened in other border cities. By then Mercado Negro began to join the group of artists that we met and began to have links with painters, actors, poets, and musicians of other genres. We formed a community of propositive Tijuana artists and we began to do events together and it was a kind of coexistence with very interesting things that came up, suddenly you saw Mercado Negro on a theatrical performance. "

REJECTION

"In the eighties, we played a lot, once a week and we wore out. We started to play differently and to musicalize plays, movies, poems, to do electronic music. We played with some pads and synthesizers, we did other things. We left the circle of playing punk rock and hardcore, tired of the fights, the same concerts, the same crowd, and the same music. On the one hand, there was some kind of rejection, but on the other hand no. It's like the brothers, because here there were two very strong movements, It's like the big families, the two brothers are always fighting, always envious, always putting obstacles and competing, then the brother says, "You know, I'm leaving the house, because I can not stand it anymore and I'm always fighting with you, because You're my brother and I do not want to get to hate you, I'm leaving the house". You take the decision to leave the house and suddenly the brother who repudiated you and who competes so much, goes and cries and says "no, don't leave us". Something similar happened to us, when we took the path of expanding our horizons and fortify our link with other ramifications of art, we began to feel that kind of situation that you mention to us".

"Curious, a door was closed, but many more were opened. The rejection was always understandable, more like envy than a competition. The competition had ended because they were two different genres, very opposed, where the journalistic note was inclined to that, to that type of stuff, but we were proposing another level that you did not find in the other movement. To some extent it was like envy because you can not take as rejection being selected to the National Theater Showcase in Monterrey, hanging out with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin or playing at the CECUT Theater. I do not see it as rejection, but nevertheless, among the people, there was a certain admiration and recognition that they are there and we are here and we can not get there".

THE NINETIES: THE DECADE OF DARKNESS

"In the nineties, we stopped participating with the group of artists, as we began to expand and to experiment with jazz. We came to fall with my uncle Lupillo in a project called Pillos Trío, which subsequently, evolved to Guadalupe Barajas Jazz Quartet or the Jazz Quartet with some prestigious guests. With this quartet we had very good presentations, helped us to musically progress and evolve. Our contribution to rock music ceased to be fundamental since in that decade we were displaced, not just us, also Armagedón and La Cruz were in that sense, there was a blackout".

"A new stream of tijuanenses musicians emerged, they got involved in the system and it was time for bands like Tijuana NO! and Julieta Venegas who were successful and were prominent rock stars. It was a decade of darkness for the local bands, they imposed the system and took out the groups of the eighties that had experience. There were displaced by that rock "españolero" that was within the system. We did not want to fall into that and got involved in jazz and other things. We did not stop playing, but they were sporadic presentations, for example, we went to Mexico City with the concept of jazz and we also played punk rock, and the extra was that Lupillo Barajas played rock and roll with Mercado Negro, we made a big impression there, but it was only once, we should have done it more".

"Unfortunately the globalization of art, culture and politics and everything, caused that those who had a proposal became a product. In the decade of the nineties that change was created, it was a chemical soup that affected everything, the propositive artists became musical products, and just as the commercial food products have an expiration date, the musical products had their validity. The record companies started making contracts for five years and things like that. So, then, the only alternative to being able to survive was to continue playing, to continue expanding our horizons and it was that we fully entered jazz to be able to give it some validity. We made sporadic presentations of the Mercado Negro, maybe, once a year or twice. That's how we managed to survive that dark decade. We had good presentations, we were supported by jazz musicians and we presented something unattainable, that also counts a lot so that they do not take you seriously. While the others were very simple, we were proposing very radical things, so then, we did not enter there with them. It was good the idea to overcome you musically, but at the same time, you did not enter into the taste of the people either".

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

"In 1999 it was a year that put things in perspective, because everybody was with the idea that the world was going to end, and even Nostradamus becomes famous. The means of production become accessible and we set up this studio for recording and production. We produced groups and then, we decided to make our first CD entitled Sobreviviendo with four songs. We joined musicians of the nineties such as Alejandro Perales, Miguel Arce, and Jesús Laborin, we started to give continuity to the band, since we had the hope that the industry perspective would take a turn, we allowed ourselves to give another try. Later, some people came from Los Angeles with a project called Mexamerica, where musicians from the old school of Latin and Chicano rock like Willy Herron and Los Illegals, Jesús Martínez and others invited us to record. We make this record, where also other musicians from Tijuana were involved. It was presented in the city of Los Angeles and with a lot of good vibe, we continue to play live".

"In 2002, two very important things happened. Luis Guereña, who was the promoter of the punk rock scene and who subsequently formed part of Chantaje and now played with Tijuana NO!, leaves this band for ideological reasons. In that same year, Joe Strummer, leader of The Clash dies. We think of doing homage in remembrance with musicians of Tijuana NO! who were with the project vacated, since Cecilia Bastida and Luis Guereña were the protagonists of that project. Alejandro Zúñiga and Jorge Jiménez were in recess, we have an approach and together, we decided to do the Joe Strummer tribute project. We started to make a series of presentations and amalgamate, there is chemistry. Then, I proposed to do a project where it has nothing to do with any of the two bands, and in fact, we did it, musicians from La Borrasca like Cesar Ortega and Miguel Arce joined us. It was a project of six musicians, unfortunately, when we were about to record and do things more seriously, the project imploded".

"For 2003, we were just Alejandro, Martín, Jesús and Jorge, it's the time when the proposal to tour Europe for Tijuana NO! came out, but Alejandro mentioned that the group was dismembered. Then he proposed that Mercado Negro should be part of this project that could be a collective of different players. We played music from Tijuana NO!, from Mercado Negro and from the tribute to Joe Strummer, that's how the European tour comes about, wherein a moment, musicians from Tijuana NO! play music from Mercado Negro and vice versa, it was a very interesting project. Returning, the rest of the invited musicians return to their own projects and we continue with the idea of a tribute to The Clash".

"Beginning in 2004, Luis Guereña dies too and the remainder of Tijuana NO! is reunited to make a posthumous tribute and we also participate in these events. By 2005, Tijuana NO! does a mini tour of Germany and we go our own way again. Mercado Negro continues rehearsing and suddenly, Jorge Jiménez visits us and starts playing music of the project he had with Luis Guereña, we accompany him jamming and he tells us, "let's make a project" and we tell him to let us present to the public the music of Luis Guereña, a totally new thing with the concept that he had of Tixuanarkia, that for questions of legal implications, we modified it to Agresores. Since it was a very own concept of Luis Guereña, we did not want to get involved in that kind of situations, that's why we named it Agresores, having a lifespan of almost four years, from 2004 to 2007. After Jorge Jiménez left the project, we still gave it some continuity to cover a series of commitments that we had already agreed upon. The project had a great impact, very professional, competitive at an international level. The musical evolution of Jorge Jiménez in this particular genre, with the support we gave him, could have been a very symbolic thing internationally, unfortunately, the project was lost ".

CONTINUING

"Since we are vocation musicians and since we have little more than thirty years playing, we have returned from 2008 to the present to continue with our project that is Black Market / Mercado Negro for the simple fact that we are what we are. We do not have the idea of wanting to go on MTV or something like that. Perhaps the age, sooner rather than later, will prevents us from giving continuity to the project, because when you get older, it's already a little out of context, but the music of Mercado Negro seeks to be focused on the conscience of the human being, we are not at a certain age for a certain genre or audience, we have always made timeless music, it is music that has no expiration".

XXX ANNIVERSARY

"The Tijuana Cultural Center and the Municipal Institute of Art and Culture sheltered the XXX Anniversary project, whose culmination will be a chronicle book that has the support of the Institute of Culture of Baja California. the book is called Cronicas Tixuarockeras and there is already a prototype. It is a project that is sponsored by a grant from the PEDCA Program and is the chronicle of the last forty years. This book is the chronicle from 1960 to 1999, where my brother Martin has a part very important, is the co-star".

"These same cultural instances sponsored some presentations in a project called Remembranzas Alternativas, with music that we heard from the late seventies to the eighties, combined with our music that has had very good acceptance. We have in mind to open a circuit where we also do some presentations where the perspective is bringing Black Market music to the city delegations, as we did in our origins, to the popular colonies, because it was something very particular that we did at the beginning. We also had a short tour in Mexico City called Producto Defectuoso, short, but very productive, there we made good contacts and had the opportunity to play with great legends of punk rock in Mexico City and the State of Mexico ".

(Interview conducted at MN Studios in May 2012)

UPDATE

Since the interview, Mercado Negro has gone back to their early punk rock roots, bringing back old band members that have been playing with them on many of their recent shows and jams. They restored La Cueva ballroom to do sessions with special guest bands, even, with a reunited Agresores, just for the pleasure of play music. In 2017, finally, Jesus released Cronicas Tixuarockeras, a book with a lot of awesome pictures from all their best moments performing and featuring a lot of cool stories from the start of the punk rock scene in Tijuana.

youtube

#interview #Tijuana #Punk Rock #Music #culture

2 notes · View notes

makistar2018 · 5 years

Link

10 Years Later, Taylor Swift’s ‘Fearless’ Still Slaps

When it was released in 2008, Swift’s sophomore album launched a thousand takes. Today, it’s best remembered as a simple time capsule

By LAUREN M. JACKSON November 12, 2018

Taylor Swift during the "Fearless" tour at Madison Square Garden on August 27, 2009 in New York City.

Theo Wargo/WireImage for New York Post

Like Propel water, The Scarlet Letter and mechanical pencils, Taylor Swift’s Fearless pairs well with the sporadic squeak of team-issued sneakers, overpriced hot lunches and the kind of angst that defines comfortably suburb-bound teenage years. Sliding open the album on Spotify with my iPhone 8, I can still feel my limbs stretched in all directions, hear the snap-crackle-pop of a dozen adolescent girls’ joints going through the motions of yet another warm-up to what would become the soundtrack of my high school varsity dance team’s inner and outer lives, as well as leave poptimism forever changed.

I am 27 now, still anxious but inflexible, no longer clinging (as) tightly to singular albums to tell the emotional landscape of my life — but back then, Fearless was god. Swift was barely into legal teenagedom when compiling her sophomore album’s original 13 tracks, but more than the happenstance near-synonymy of our ages (I’m younger by 1 year, 6 months, 27 days), the four-walled, high school claustrophobia induced by the album is a matter of skilled musical mood setting. From the first downbeat of the inaugural title track to the last flippantly rebellious “hallelujah” on “Change,” Swift traps us in the mind of an ungainly teen as she was once trapped, as I was, as so many others wading the ambiguity between comportment and desire that doesn’t quite end when gowns come on and caps fly up.

Like so many notebook pages on the golden screen, Fearless is filled with boys. Stans and haters have their theories, but I like to think of each song as an archetype, less true stories of relationships gone sour than a young woman’s true to life hetero-ethnography. There are the boys who do good — the “Fearless,” “Love Story,” “Hey Stephen,” “The Best Day” boys (the last a tribute to Dad) — the boys who nurture and love intensely. They do all the usual country boy things, all the usual cinematic things: driving slow, kissing in the rain, flouting archaic inter-familial squabbles. They honor their promises and, most of all, leave the narrator better changed for her affection.

These boys who do good are short-lived. By Track 2, “Fifteen,” we’re already checking in to Heartbreak Hotel for the upteenth time with an account of that age generic enough to warrant a fan-made montage of clips from Degrassi: The Next Generation. The song tells an allegedly universal story of freshman year woes, complete with riding in cars with senior boys who also play football (because of course). It’s saccharine, sung in the vernacular of normative coupling that would become Swift’s enemy in the gossip pages. But the limited lexicon is not necessarily untruthful. “Fifteen” has aged about as well as anyone would expect, but some of those refrains make me yearn for arms long enough to slap all the powers that be responsible for belittling the whims of young girls. And according to the greater duration of Fearless — tracks like “White Horse,” “Breathe,” “Tell Me Why,” “You’re Not Sorry,” “The Way I Loved You,” and “Forever & Always” — the greatest threat to the happiness of teen girls are boys.

November 2008 looks rosy from here. America had just elected its first black president, the man who promised too much hope and change to possibly be true, but faith felt good back then. Men had committed just five mass shootings over the past year with one more on the way in December (2018 has 307 mass shootings to its name so far). The nation boasted just under 150 recognized active white supremacist groups (that number would climb to over 1,000 during Obama’s presidency). Global finance was in crisis but cable networks were still winning Emmys. Amy Winehouse was alive. Kanye still made sense and a bright-eyed, hair-tousled new country darling was exclusively concerned with dating, rather than local politics.

Like any celebrity who is also a woman, but also in a lane quite her own, Swift’s relation to mainstream feminism wanes and waxes with the season. A female artist beloved by the girls for whom her songs are written, Swift and her music are therefore more scrutinized, more rigorously excavated for signs of harmful messaging than her male singer-songwriter peers. Fearless frayed Swift’s reputation in a way that wouldn’t let up for years, if ever, largely because of its critical success. Swift took home four Grammys at the 2010 awards, including Album of the Year, beating the Dave Matthews Band’s Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, The Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D., Beyoncé’s I Am… Sasha Fierceand, most egregiously, Lady Gaga’s debut studio album, The Fame. The perceived slight invited robust inquiry into this supposed album of the year, and the aesthetic discrepancy between the two quickly turned to politics.

Autostraddle’s Riese called Swift “a feminist’s nightmare,” the enemy of “brave, creative, inventive, envelope-pushing little monsters” everywhere. An accompanying infographic, “a symbolic analysis” of Swift’s works to date, cataloged her most damning motifs, including “virginal” imagery, “the stars,” “crying,” and the 2AM hour. At Jezebel, Dodai Stewart agreed that Gaga was the rightful winner, speculating that in a race between “Gaga the liberal versus Taylor the conservative,” the latter “makes the Academy feel more comfortable.” One joy of pop culture is the revelation of how melodramatically things can change. Last month, Swift announced her endorsement of Tennessee Democrats Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper for the midterm elections; meanwhile, Lady Gaga hews the path of glamorous respectability on her lengthy A Star Is Born Oscar campaign.

Feminist readings of Fearless weren’t wrong, exactly. Allies on the album come in strictly male form, while other girls are competition for Swift’s persecuted first person. Even the red-headed bestie Abigail becomes a lesson in chastity, losing her virginity — “everything”! —to the boy who broke her heart (the foil to Swift’s main character, whose dreams of living in a big ole city protect her from such a fate). The charting single “You Belong With Me” is a bouncy jaunt through the valley of me versus those other girls. The video that won Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards over Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” — to seismic effect — stars Swift as both the frizzy blonde, bespectacled weirdo in band and the sleek brunette cheerleader with the man (Lucas Till who now plays MacGyver on CBS). In true romantic comedy fashion, Good Swift, clothed in white, ends up with the guy in the end, defeating Bad Swift, whose only crimes it seems are great taste in footwear and not appreciating her high school boyfriend’s likely moronic sense of humor. Both the song and video became emblematic of a kind of Swiftian all-for-one girl power. Her 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do” resurrects and buries all sorts of Swiftisms, including the iconography of the uncool girl who features so heavily in the Fearless-era of her oeuvre.

Pop music exists not to elevate our souls or our politics, but to safely wade in the muck of our pettiest appetites, whether they come with trap drums or in serenades. Pop music deserves interrogation, but it will never exceed us. Fearless was a diary, sounding like the selfishness that bubbles up regardless of one’s intellectual or political guards against it. The debate it ignited wouldn’t happen were it released today, amidst all this. It’s a relic of a time when determining exactly what an album meant, culturally and aesthetically, was a crucial discussion to have in public, when nuance had stakes. Compared to the basic moral tenets we now expend so much of our energy defending, such communal acts of criticism feel small and regretfully scarce. Fearless was a moment, now relegated to a time capsule, no longer a prompt.

Rolling Stone

#taylor swift #fearless #rolling stone #2018.11.12

3 notes · View notes

chiseler · 6 years

Text

VAUDEVILLE & BROADWAY THE HARD WAY

Like a lot of poor kids on the Lower East Side around the start of the twentieth century. the brothers Cliff and Max Gordon turned to show business as a way up and out. Cliff, who was older, made it big in vaudeville, and in effect it killed him. Max became one of the most successful producers in Broadway history, and survived to write a memoir about it.

They were born Morris and Mechel Saltpeter in 1880 and '92, two of eight kids. Their parents had grown up and married in a village in Poland. They were strict Orthodox Jews who spoke Yiddish, never learning English or participating much in American life. Dad, bearded and pious as a rabbi, pressed pants in a Montgomery Street sweatshop for eleven dollars a week. Mom kept house. Old-school Orthodox tradition condemned theater and movies as time-wasting frivolities. In his memoir Max Gordon Presents Max says his mother never saw a movie and came to only one of the many shows he mounted. At first the family squeezed into three rooms in a tenement on Goerck Street (now Baruch Place), and shared an outhouse behind the building with the other tenants. Later they moved a short distance to a four-room tenement apartment with a bathroom at the end of the hall on Lewis Street.

Cliff left school at the age of twelve to contribute to the family's income. In his teens he started hanging out at the variety theaters on the Bowery with a pal of his, Will Fox. Born Wilhelm Fried in Hungary in 1879, Will was brought to the Lower East Side when he was nine months old. Impressed with the "Dutch" (German) antics of the comedy duo Weber & Fields, who were Lower East Side guys themselves, the teens simply copied them. Cliff played the Fields part, Will did Weber. They got small bookings in and around the city, making five or ten bucks a night. Cliff's parents were not happy, but they couldn't stop him.

According to Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, an as-told-to biography, one night after a gig in Bayonne Cliff and Will found that the booker had absconded with their pay. Penniless, they walked from Bayonne to Jersey City, where Will found a bit of cardboard and a pencil and made a sign, BLIND. He hung it on Will and stood him next to the ferry entrance with his hand out as the morning commuters headed across the river for Manhattan. They not only earned their two-cent fares but reached New York with four cents extra. Another time they did their schtick in Arlington Hall on St. Mark's Place as part of a benefit for the former welterweight prizefighter Spike Hennessey, who was then battling consumption. The audience booed and hissed them; Spike was so angry at them for ruining the evening that he refused to pay them, and socked Cliff in the eye as well. "When Cliff arrived home with one eye and no money, and told his father what had happened, his father punched the other eye and blacked that," Sinclair writes.

Fox gave up performing, but went on to a big career in movies, building the empire that became Twentieth Century Fox. Cliff stuck with performing and soon got a slot as the Dutch comic with Al Reeve's Big Beauty Show. Born in 1864, Reeves had grown up Catholic in the Five Points, a policeman's son. By fourteen was performing on the Bowery as a banjo-plucking blackface minstrel. Through the 1880s he toured the early vaudeville and burlesque circuits. He billed himself as The World's Greatest Banjoist and Comedian, and although by contemporary reports he was neither, he was an impressive, bigger-than-life presence on stage and off. As he got famous he sported a lot of diamonds and other jewels on his person, and got himself a diamond-encrusted banjo.

By the early 1890s he was producing and emceeing his own burlesque revues, which were considered among the finest of the era. Burlesque wasn't yet equated with striptease; it was more like a minstrel show or vaudeville with a leg show as the centerpiece. "Dirty" burlesque and stripping came along in the next century. The Big Beauty Show featured up to forty girls. Al claimed to have invented the tableau vivant, in which they posed as "living statues" in classical, mythological or just fanciful scenarios, any excuse for them to appear without a lot of clothes on. They couldn't move a muscle, or cops might stop the show for lewd behavior. Comics, musical acts and Reeves himself rounded out the bill. A young Al Jolson got work touring with Reeves. In The Jazz Singer, when Jolson does the fingers-in-the-mouth bird-whistling break in "Toot, Toot Tootsie," he's showing off a trick he learned from Reeves. Jolson's whole peppier-than-thou approach to blackface performance showed a lot of Reeves' influence.

Max was nine when Cliff took him to a matinee of the Reeves revue at Miner's Bowery Theatre. It was Max's first time in a theater. He remembered that though the chorus girls were big and fleshy they were also "gay, spritely, buoyant, full of grace and delight." He was agog at Reeves, "the grandest man I had ever seen," and all his jewels. Cliff, in baggy trousers and long frock coat, with a loopy bow tie under a fly-away collar (think Professor Irwin Corey), was then perfecting his signature routine, "the German Senator." It was a combination of a Dutch act and a minstrel show stump speech, a comic monologue on political and social topics of the day. "Friendts and Vellor Voters," Cliff would begin, "I am gladt to address such a massage of beoples, and vill distress you mit all der elephance dot is in me." He'd go on in that vein to crack jokes about whoever was president at the time, the newfangled automobile, trade unions, women's suffrage, whatever was in the headlines. Max was entranced and began haunting the variety and vaudeville houses on the Bowery and around Union Square.

Max was a ten-year-old participant when a riot broke out at the funeral procession for Rabbi Jacob Joseph on July 30, 1902. Several of the small Orthodox synagogues on the Lower East Side had chipped in to bring Joseph from Poland in 1888 to be their first (and as it turned out last) chief rabbi. From the start he ran into opposition from other Orthodox and Hasidic congregations, who elected their own chief rabbis in protest, and from the Reform German Jews in the city, and from the Lower East Side's large contingent of radical and Communist Jewish intellectuals. He struggled largely in vein to bring some order to the graft-ridden kosher butchery trade. Demoralized by all the controversy and reduced to dire poverty in his own tenement flat, he suffered a series of paralyzing strokes and died on July 27 1902 at the age of only fifty-four.

Despite all the acrimony during his life, the entire Orthodox population of the Lower East Side went into mourning. On July 30 much of the neighborhood shut down for the funeral procession that carried his plain pine coffin from his home on Henry Street over to the Grand Street ferry, bound for a cemetery in Brooklyn. A crowd estimated at fifty to one hundred thousand mourners thronged the streets. As the cortege approached the waterfront it passed the giant R. Hoe & Company factory on Grand Street, where printing presses were made. The more than two thousand workers there, many of them Irish, were infamously anti-Semitic. When the horse-drawn hearse went by, accompanied by two hundred black-creped carriages and the immense crowd on foot, workers on the factory's upper floors jeered, shouted obscenities out the windows and hurled whatever they could get their hands on -- nuts, bolts, blocks of wood, buckets of water. The crowd flew into a rage and charged the building. Max was among those who ran over to Delancey Street, where the Manhattan end of the Williamsburg Bridge was under construction, and carried back loose bricks to be thrown through the factory's lower windows. A delegation of Jewish leaders who got into Robert Hoe's office to try to end the situation claimed Hoe chased them out with a pistol. (In the publishing world Hoe is remembered as a collector of rare books and a founder of the Grolier Club.) A riot squad of some two hundred police showed up. Also mostly Irish, the cops enforced calm by wading into the Jews with clubs swinging. Hundreds of Jews were injured and scores went to jail, while only one factory worker was detained. Ironically, in 1929 the factory would be torn down and replaced by the wonderful Amalgamated Dwellings apartment building, cornerstone of the largely Jewish Co-Op Village.

By the time of the riot Cliff was touring the country with the Imperial Burlesque Show and making a princely seventy-five dollars a week -- enough that he could soon move his whole family off the Lower East Side, first to 106th Street near Central Park, later to Jewish Harlem. His father retired, though he continued to press his kids' clothes, including Cliff's tuxedos.

Max expanded his theater-going to Broadway -- legit dramas, George M. Cohan's musicals. He supported the habit by selling score cards and peanuts at the Polo Grounds when the Giants were in town. Despite Cliff's urgings, he dropped out of Townsend Harris Hall -- in effect the prep school for City College, where Yip Harburg, Ira Gershwin and Paul Muni also went -- to take a job as an advance man for a touring burlesque show. He'd go into a town ahead of the show to put up posters and do p.r. At seventeen he was traveling around the country in the company of chorus girls, low comics and cigar-sucking impresarios, getting a type of education he never would have gotten at home.

Cliff's star meanwhile continued to rise. He was never the headliner, but he got near. On big-time vaudeville circuits he filled the toughest spot on the program: he was a "closer," the last act of the show, who came on right behind the headlining star. Closers were also known as chasers, because the audience, having just enjoyed the big star, often started walking out on them. Vaudevillians called it playing to the haircuts. It's said that Cliff's monologues were so funny and timely that audiences stayed and roared -- until one day in 1913, when he took on the daunting burden of closing for the grande dame of divas, Sarah Bernhardt.

Bernhardt had been coming to America since 1880, was approaching seventy, and though some critics had ceased to be kind to her a decade earlier, her fans still adored her. Martin Beck of the Chicago-based Orpheum vaudeville circuit startled all of show biz when he convinced her to stoop from legit theater for the first time. Rumor was he agreed to pay her $500 -- in gold coins -- after each performance. (She'd learned a few things in a lifetime in show business.) Touring his Midwest vaudeville houses in preparation for a three-week stand at the new Palace in Times Square, she slayed audiences with excerpts from her tear-jerking greatest hits -- Tosca, Camille, Racine's Phedre.

Cliff was booked to close for her at the Majestic in Chicago that April. He told Max he wasn't sure he could make a crowd laugh right after La Bernhardt had them all sobbing and weeping, but he'd give it his best shot.

Even for a successful performer vaudeville was a precarious life and an exhausting two-show-a-day grind. Cliff had been suffering migraines. At the April 21 matinee, Bernhardt got the whole house bawling with her Tosca. Cliff, his head pounding, walked out to a cold and distracted reception. After struggling to get a chuckle out of them for five minutes he left the stage to no applause. He hadn't laid such an egg since the early days with Will Fox. Legend has it he moaned to the Majestic's manager backstage, "Any comedian who tries to follow Bernhardt is bound to die." He went back to his hotel room to gear up for the evening performance. Apparently he drew a hot bath and took some of his migraine medicine. When he didn't appear for the evening show, they broke down the door to his room and found him on the floor. A doctor on the scene called it a heart attack. He was thirty-two.

Desolate, Max soldiered on. He formed a partnership with Al Lewis. Another son of Polish Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side, Al had also done a Dutch act. After some rough sledding at first, their Lewis & Gordon booking and producing agency earned a reputation for developing classy one-act plays to insert into vaudeville programs. One of the early ones was Eugene O'Neill's In the Zone, which had premiered in Greenwich Village.

Max was one of the few people in show business who became friends with the imperious Edward Albee, the playwright's adoptive grandfather, who ran the Keith-Albee circuit and was generally considered one of the meanest sonsabitches in vaudeville. In 1927 Max engineered a late-career comeback for one of everybody's favorite old troupers, Eddie Foy, Sr., who'd been on the boards clowning and hoofing since the days of minstrelsy (Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday had caught his act out West) and raised seven children in the theater. Bob Hope plays him in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys. Foy even died on stage, of a heart attack, at the Orpheum in Kansas City in 1928.

By then vaudeville itself was dying. Everybody in it struggled to adapt to the big changes motion pictures were making to the entertainment industry. Lewis and Gordon broke up the partnership. Lewis went to Hollywood to work for Cliff's old partner, William Fox. Gordon watched in dismay as the upstart Joseph Kennedy took over Albee's empire, which became RKO. Fox invited Max out to Hollywood too. Max would later dabble in film, unhappily, at the urging of his friends the Marx Brothers, and produce a little television as well, with equally muted results. But for now he went in another direction: to Broadway.

Max and Al had previously put on a few shows there, including one hit. In 1925 they produced a play close to both their hearts: Samson Raphaelson's The Jazz Singer, set on the Lower East Side where they and Raphaelson had grown up. They did it at the small Fulton Theatre on W. 46th Street, formerly the Folies-Bergere (and much later renamed the Helen Hayes Theatre, which it remained until it was torn down with its neighbors in the 1980s to make way for a giant Marriott). George Jessel, who'd been doing vaudeville since he was a kid, starred as Jakie Rabinowitz. The newspaper critics found it too schmaltzy, but it was a big hit with audiences. When Warner Brothers bought the rights to film it they decided it should be a musical -- the stage version was a play with some incidental music -- using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system. They clashed with Jessel over money -- he demanded more to do sound -- and over the simple fact that he couldn't sing. The studio went with Jolson, who had inspired Raphaelson in the first place, and had already done a popular Vitaphone short, A Plantation Act.

Now it was the 1930s, and the Depression was laying waste to Broadway. Yet Gordon thrived there. His very first production was a hit. Three's a Crowd was a little musical revue with a lot of talent participating: Clifton Webb, Libby Holman (whom Webb nicknamed the Statue of Libby), Fred Allen and Fred MacMurray on stage, with songs for Holman like "Body and Soul" and "Something to Remember You By," and Max's pal Groucho contributing some gag material. It ran from October 1930 into the summer of '31. He followed it directly with more hits -- the revue The Band Wagon, starring Fred and Estelle Astaire, which featured "Dancing in the Dark"; a Jerome Kern musical, The Cat and the Fiddle, with Eddie Foy Jr. in the cast; Noel Coward's racy Design for Living, starring Coward, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who all co-produced it with Max.

In the 1933-'34 season he had four hits running simultaneously, a pretty stunning feat. The next season Gordon achieved what everyone said was impossible, convincing the Rockefellers to back his idea for a lavish operetta about the Strausses, The Great Waltz, to be performed in the large Rockefeller Center Theatre (the companion to Radio City Music Hall, torn down in the 1950s). At three dollars a ticket in the depths of the Depression it filled the 3500-seat hall with families and tourists, ran for more than 250 performances and made tons of money. Max's friend Cole Porter doffed his cap in lines from "Anything Goes," "When Rockefeller still can hoard/ Enough money to let Max Gordon/ Produce his shows,/ Anything goes."

On the street they called Max a miracle worker. But it didn't all come easy. Over twenty years producing on Broadway he'd have his huge successes and his miserable flops. The flops could send him into bleak depression. When things weren't rolling his way he might go to the top of a stairway or a window ledge and threaten suicide. Remembering the peculiar way his brother had died, people took him seriously. More than once he would seek professional psychiatric help.

Through it all his broad interests and tastes showed in the range of comedies, dramas and musicals he put on the stage. They included George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's flag-waving spectacle The American Way, starring Fredric March; the historical costumer The Farmer Takes a Wife, starring the young Henry Fonda, who'd soon head to Hollywood to get his screen debut in the Fox film adaptation; Othello with Walter Huston (another vaudeville vet) in the lead and Brian Aherne as Iago, a flop; Huston in the much more successful Dodsworth, from the Sinclair Lewis novel, later made into a film; Clare Boothe's satire The Women, another big hit adapted for film; Ethan Frome, with Ruth Gordon, Tom Ewell and Raymond Massey; Kern's musical Roberta, which yielded the standard "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and helped make Bob Hope a star; Cole Porter and Hart's musical Jubilee, soon forgotten except for "Begin the Beguine," a giant hit for Artie Shaw a few years later; the massive hit My Sister Eileen, which ran from 1940 into 1943 with Shirley Booth in the role Rosalind Russell plays in the movie; and Born Yesterday, the Judy Holliday vehicle she reprised on film. His last production was the hit The Solid Gold Cadillac, with the great Josephine Hull (Aunt Abby in Arsenic and Old Lace), which ran from 1953 into 1955. Holliday stars in the 1956 film adaptation.

Through a long retirement Max couldn't resist kibitzing and threatening to come back and do one more play, but he never did. He died in 1978.

by John Strausbaugh

(photo: Cliff Gordon)

4 notes · View notes

pattie-remembers · 6 years

Text

Famous muse Pattie Boyd says she neglected herself in her rock star marriages

10 April 2018 — 10:21am

If you remember the '60s, you weren't there: so it is said of that explosive decade of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll when girls sashayed down the Kings Road in tiny skirts and Biba boots, boys wore ruffled shirts over tight velvet trousers and London was the epicentre of cool.

Oblivion came with the territory: Eric Clapton was supposed to have slept with more than 1000 women but as he told me in an interview for Fairfax Media, "I wouldn't know, I was in a blackout for quite a few of them".

George Harrison and wife Pattie Boyd.

Photo: Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo

Pattie Boyd was both muse and wife to Clapton, to George Harrison before him and no stranger to drug and booze-fuelled partying. But there was little danger of failing memory for her. She kept a record of the wild years – portraits and reportage style snaps taken with a Polaroid and, later, on a Hasselblad.

As fans and paparazzi clamoured at the door, Boyd had the inside track, hanging out with The Beatles and friends, at home with George, on tour with Eric. "I took endless photos," she says. "It was something to do, otherwise you could feel a bit spare."

Pattie Boyd and her then husband George Harrison in England in 1968.

Photo: Pattie Boyd

We are talking in her Kensington flat ahead of an exhibition of her photographs and a series of speaking engagements in Australia in May. I'd spent several minutes on the rather grand doorstep, repeatedly ringing the bell and wondering if I'd got the wrong address. Perhaps she'd been having a nap; she is 74 after all and it is that snoozy, post-lunch time of day when I often feel like one myself. She does seem quite dreamy, half-heartedly remonstrating with a friendly Irish terrier called Freddie who inspects me thoroughly before jumping onto a large pouffe, not quite as pristine white as the matching sofas. "He's allowed on that one," she says.

Boyd is wearing skinny jeans on her long, slim legs and a deep blue mohair jumper; a fall of blonde hair frames what is still recognisably the face that launched, not a thousand ships, but three of the greatest love songs of the 20th century.

George Harrison wrote Something in the first flush of his youthful marriage to Boyd; the soaring guitar chords of Layla expressed Clapton's yearning obsession with his friend's wife. Then, when he had won her, he wrote Wonderful Tonight – and who hasn't danced dreamily to that, wrapped in a lover's arms?

There is a photograph of a 19-year-old Boyd in the flat: blonde fringe, huge blue mascara'd eyes and a tiny Union Jack stuck on the end of her nose. It is from a weighty coffee table book, Birds of Britain, containing portraits of London's posh totty – society girls who roamed the bars and vintage clothes stalls of Chelsea. Boyd's face is on the cover.

George Harrison, 1968

Photo: Pattie Boyd

She was a model then, on the run from her dysfunctional family, broke and living on Birds Eye chicken pies in a shared flat. "You had to go round the photographers persuading them to use you for shoots," she says. "Norman Parkinson said, 'Come back when you've learned to do your hair.' It was all DIY hair and make up back then."

Did photographers hit on her? "Well some might try it on but you didn't submit and say, 'Oh must I?' You'd get out of there and warn the others." So it wasn't a #MeToo scene? "No! I don't know why these women don't just say, 'F--k off, I'm not having a meeting with you in your dressing gown with nothing on underneath.'" Is she a feminist? "Well not in the old 'hate men' way, but I don't like women being treated badly. I think the young generation – what are they called, snowflakes? – don't take responsibility for themselves."

George Harrison and Eric Clapton in England in 1976.

Photo: Pattie Boyd

She met George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day's Night – she played a schoolgirl – and they married when she was 21. They moved into Friar Park, a gothic pile in Hampshire where the Beatles came to record, friends drove from London to stay and she threw herself into decorating, cooking and entertaining. She was, she says, blissfully in love but often lonely: wives and girlfriends were not allowed on tour and Harrison was frequently absent. After the Beatles had discovered the Maharishi Yogi and they all went to India to learn meditation, Harrison returned gripped by eastern mysticism. "He chanted a lot," she recalls, "it's difficult to talk to someone who's chanting."

He had also discovered that he was attractive to women: "He was famous, good-looking, had tonnes of money and flash cars – what a combo. Girls were offering themselves everywhere and he loved it. To come home to old wifey must have been a bit dull."

I took endless photos. It was something to do, otherwise you could feel a bit spare.

Does she think all men would be like that if they could? "Yes I do," she says firmly. What constrains them? She shrugs: "Society, women, family?"

Eric Clapton had been a frequent visitor to Friar Park, laying siege to Boyd and, famously, playing a guitar "duel" with Harrison in the kitchen: she was the putative prize. "It was John Hurt [the actor] who described it as a duel," she says, "and he was so on the button. I sensed it but I hadn't formulated it."

She was attracted to Clapton, by then a rock deity – the legend "Clapton is God" was spray-painted on city walls – but determined to stay in her marriage. Her parents had split up when she was 10, her stepfather was a cruel and unusual man who tyrannised the family and left her mother for another woman: "As a child I always thought I would do anything to avoid divorce."

By the time she left Harrison – "He didn't want us to be together, it was a life of rejection" – Clapton had made good on his threat to take heroin if he couldn't have her. It would be four years before they got together.

Propped on an easel beside the window of Boyd's flat is a rather beautiful black and white photograph of John Lennon. Did she take it? "No, I bought it." Wasn't he the most interesting of the four? "He was, yes, he was. He was quite volatile, you never knew what he would say next. He was a pretty sexy guy actually." Did they have a fling? "No!" she exclaims. I explain I'd seen it suggested somewhere in a newspaper article. "How cheeky," she says comfortably. Later, reading her autobiography published in 2007, I find another reference to the rumoured liaison. True or not, I don't think she minds the idea.

Boyd and Clapton married in 1979: "I was madly passionate about him," she says. "We lived at Hurtwood Edge [Clapton's home for the past 50 years], I was in my 30s and ready to have babies; I used to wander round the house thinking, this will be the baby's room, the nanny can sleep here." But it was not to be: despite visits to a series of doctors and several rounds of IVF, the longed-for baby never arrived.

Clapton, meanwhile, had replaced heroin with alcohol and was drinking heroically. Boyd joined him on tour where he and the band would have girls to their rooms after the show. Cruellest of all, two of his extra-marital relationships produced babies: a daughter Ruth and two years later a son, Conor, who would die, aged four, in a fall from the window of his mother's New York apartment. Boyd and Clapton divorced in 1988.

Asked once who was the great love of her life, Boyd nominated Harrison: "I think he always loved me … Eric loves himself. She admits now: "In both my marriages I had neglected myself, and got lost in a big cloud of fame, I got lost in their lives."

When the music stopped Boyd found herself with a legacy – cardboard boxes full of photographs which she exhibits and sells as prints from her online gallery. They are the archive of an era: here is an angelic George lying in bed in an Indian ashram, Eric in a woodshed leaning on an axe and looking Lawrentian in corduroy trousers, Paul and Linda McCartney at Boyd's wedding to Eric, Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull at the Brixton Academy. They are candid and intimate: did anyone ever object? "No, not at all," she says, surprised, "I would never show a photo where someone's not looking good."

The collection has been a useful earner for the girl who left school with three O levels and had no need to work while married to rich men. She has continued to take photographs – portraits of actors for their books and pictures from her travels. Does the contemporary work sell? "No one's really interested," she says without rancour.

Freddie needs a walk so we put on coats and set off for Holland Park where the trees are still leafless but there are daffodils and a hint of spring. Boyd has been with her partner, property developer Rod Weston, for 20 years – "we are old friends" – and they wed in 2015. They share the Kensington flat and a cottage in Sussex bought for her by Clapton. Why did they decide to marry? "We have lots of nieces and nephews between us," she says, "we wanted to put everything in order so there wouldn't be any tears." We walk on a few paces: "It's funny," she says, "Rod has been much nicer since we married and I am happier and less selfish. I didn't anticipate that."

She remained friends with Harrison until his death from cancer in 2001 and has stayed in touch with Clapton, many years sober and married with three more children. Last year she accompanied him to the launch of a documentary about him, A Life in 12 Bars, in which she features, naturally. "He rang me and said, 'It's a bit raw Pattie, I hope you'll be OK.' I said, 'I'll be fine Eric. I'm a grown-up now."

George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me: An Evening with Pattie Boyd will be held at Sydney's Four Seasons Hotel on May 15. Boyd's work will be shown at the Blender Gallery in Paddington from May 5 to June 2 as part of the Head On Photo Festival.

Morning & Afternoon Newsletter

Delivered Mon–Fri.

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/famous-muse-pattie-boyd-says-she-neglected-herself-in-her-rock-star-marriage-20180409-h0yi6e.html

#pattie boyd #pattie remembers

27 notes · View notes

wqrfwasf · 3 years

Text

the stump bound up in leather

One day I will be like him. Then I made my way to the far corner of the convention floor to mingle with the Idaho delegation. A crank would serve me better.” Though, if truth be told, he did not want a crossbow. When faced with a severely injured person who has lost a lot of blood, at the scene of an accident or violent attack perhaps, is it better to resuscitate them with blood, or some other form of fluid like a saline drip?. Easy as falling off a pig … though falling off this particular pig was harder than it looked. She steadfastly refused to get her driver's license and would always Uber everywhere she went. The sound from the stock Zalman fan was was noticeably running when standing 5 feet from the system. Runaway about the 15th ghete de schi of August last, Joe, a yellow man; small, about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches high, and about 20 years of age. Whether they were shouting encouragement or mocking him he could not have said for certain, though he had a fair notion. Their armor was silver plate polished to a mirror sheen, but underneath, she knew, every man of them wore a hair shirt. His other hand was missing, severed at the wrist, the stump bound up in leather. She enjoys the work because it is about "bringing new life into the world." She hopes to "meet a good man and have five retros kabátok children with him." (AP Photo/Wong Maye E). They mean to shave me. That left only Trant, the feeble Boros Blount, and Qyburn’s mute monster Robert Strong to protect the young king and royal family... Close your eyes, she told herself. She died, and the prince crossed himself for joy. Now, take a look at this giant space squid or whatever it is that the Guardians are fighting. There was a saying Jon had heard from the older men at Castle Black: the Wall has more moods than Mad King Aerys, they’d say, or sometimes, the Wall has more moods than a woman. “A wiser prince would have known that you cannot send an ape to do a man’s work.” The queen’s men laughed, and several grinned at Davos. Common in the stage 2 build is the addition of a new CAM. Because they going to have, like, one (WBC) workout, exhibition games and play. "Before they [Tower] do another concert, we're certainly going to have to be looking at them for better planning, certainly not on a Friday during rush hour."Only a handful of minor injuries were reported, police at the concert said."One guy got dropped on his head and one guy walked into the side of the tour bus," said Montgomery County Police Lt. Ledford and Erik Baskin assisted on Boje's blast from the high slot. Barth had been a blacksmith’s son who rose to be King’s Hand during the reign of Jaehaerys the Conciliator. Just six of Florida's 67 counties account for more than half of the state's 89 executions. Europe also will experience a decline in the birth rate over the next four decades. So I keep on dancing. (NOT PLAYER BASED.)Finally the local weatherman had a correct forecast, it stayed dry throughout the game and for the tailgate hallelujah! TL was correct there was time in the first half it looked twin set cardigan outlet like it was going to be a competitive game and the poof it was 9 5 at the half. He says that in the new year, enrollment will double, adding six hundred new artists, designers and freelancers to its membership. .”. Hizdahr at least knew how to smile... Early Mowden pressure broke through to Yarm's try line but they were fortunately pushed into touch. There must be a whole grove of weirwoods growing up above us.. On the production front, production designer Gary Freeman along mickey egeres babakocsiwith costume designer Joanna Johnston, replicate the era to perfection and this is precisely captured by cinematographer Don Burgess's lens. Only a short drive away from the clamour of Venice in one direction and LA airport in the

calça kickboxing

other, it would be blissfully tranquil here if not for a loud, honking noise that at times makes it hard to hear what Mycoskie is saying as we settle on the deck. "The Thin Man" series of movies was to the 1930s as "Moonlighting" was to the 1980s. They have almost invariably two residences, and spend less than half the year on their estates. The more respectable citizens in vain try to compose them; it is quite as hopeful to reason with a pack of hounds, and the only way is to smuggle the suspected person out of the state retros kabátok as quickly as possible. Manager Alan Eaton suggested trying Ripper, a Shiraz wine from the Hope Estate disco duro externo pita in Western Australia that has a taste of tobacco, chocolate and vanilla. My first clue I was Santa was at the Beal Air Force Base range one fall day. “No crow. Economic shopping with Flipkart couponsIf you think you can't avail a discount on your online shopping, think again!!! We, one of the leading website, have got biciclete pret the widest assortment of Flipkart coupons along with other retailers' coupons. Additionally, because the children have zapatillas guess mujer corte ingles been removed from their families, clothing with family centric wording or images is not distributed.. You know, it was a lot of water and it was a lot of mud, but it didn't have the force as this storm.". In the span of a year, Garcia lost a 6 foot 10 North Carolina signee (John Henson) but gained newfound admiration from bay area peers. My mother and Colin came upstairs. Here, I fear, your worth is somewhat less. The first five songs went awry with half hearted vocals and distracted glances. In 1922, Clark agreed to sponsor a series of outdoor concerts. Want to join now or donate to SBH? (6600 Kalanianaole Hwy, 212, Honolulu, HI 96825). That was Theon Turncloak’s work, remember? How many of our grudging friends do you imagine we’d retain if the truth were known? Only Lady Barbrey, whom you would turn into a pair of boots … inferior boots. So, has the Kuga got what it takes to beat the king of the urban jungle?When it comes to kerbside appeal, the sharp lines of the Ford certainly look good enough take the crown. Only her maid, a very charming French girl, was initiated into all her secrets, but one could rely on that girl absolutely. "Of course you take advantage of it. About the time that Smylie’s pamphlet came out, the Presbyterian Church was convulsed with the trial of the galeb spodnjice Rev. The captain-general wriggled his blistered toes in his footbath. Maybe they'll relay the data back like a Voltron daisy chain.. The great hall was dim and smoky. “Beautiful and peaceful,” the prince said. "But Henry was a machinist, not a horse shoer he invented steel puddling and the machines that made railroad spikes, that's the one that made him all the money. When he was buttonholed on the issue, Bettman flashed a cold smile and allowed that the airline had every right to direct its sponsorship dollars local agreements with the Canadian franchises plus $1.5 million a year for the naming rights to the home of the Maple Leafs anywhere it wished. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images).. But they're in a tight spot right now and it looks to just be getting tighter for the future. I had two. When he looked over at me, he said. Hamlet is besieged with the will to avenge, yet can't bring himself to act..

0 notes

rinnnyxr · 3 years

Text

I LOVE…

Books. The outdoors. Clothes shopping. Finding good deals. Bike riding. Animals, especially cats. Exploring new places. Antiquing. Thrift shopping. Film photography. When someone takes me someplace new. Stargazing. Spending hours reading a book. Learning new languages, or just hearing them spoken. The Victorian era. Hot-tubbing. Trading music with friends. Going on hikes. Swimming in rivers/creeks/lakes/the ocean as opposed to swimming pools.

I DISLIKE… Hot and very humid weather. Driving in heavy, slow traffic. People who don’t realize how their actions affect others. Selfishness. When pets have “accidents” in the house. Bumper stickers like “Country Girl” or “Silly boys, trucks are for girls!” Politics in general. Feeling like I’m not in control of anything. People who treat everything I say as a joke. People who claim to be my friend and treat me badly. Twitter fights. Warm beer. Doing the dishes. Thistles. Feeling hopeless. That panic moment when I have no idea what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. How people still text and drive. Being broke. Not having a job.

SHOWS I LOVE… Doctor Who Breaking Bad Supernatural Pretty Little Liars True Blood Game of Thrones Top Gear UK Parks & Recreation The Office The Walking Dead

I WOULD LOVE TO VISIT… Iceland England Italy Montreal Marseilles The Alps Yellowstone National Park Machu Picchu Greece Ireland and Scotland

THINGS I’M NOT GOOD AT… Making big decisions. Making myself motivated. Exercising/working out. Dealing with hot weather. Controlling my temper in traffic. Keeping a regular “schedule” for chores. Not worrying about silly things. Tolerating other peoples’ irritating behaviors. Having a positive outlook on things that might turn out badly. Keeping friends. Sleeping in. Training pets to mind me. Managing my time. Mathematics. Makeup or other “beauty” related skills. Dealing with other peoples’ children. Being “politically correct.” Ignoring insults and not letting stupid things get to me. Being content.

GOALS THIS NEXT YEAR… Become physically fit. Get better grades in school. Find a better job. Start saving money again. Travel somewhere completely new. Make more/new friends. Spend less time with technology and more time outdoors/doing something productive. Start drawing/painting regularly again. Pick up a new hobby.

Bold all the things you've done: 1) You've gone skydiving. 2) You've kissed someone. 3) You've gone on a road trip. 4) You've gone streaking. 5) You've stayed up all night to watch the sun rise. 6) You've been on a roller-coaster. 7) You've been snorkeling. 8) You've been scuba-diving. 9) You've learned to play an instrument. 10) You've learned to speak another language. 11) You've fallen in love. 12) You've done something charitable. 13) You've purchased a physical CD and/or record. 14) You've been to Disneyland and/or Disney World. 15) You've been to a different country. 16) You've had a pet. 17) You've seen your favorite band/artist perform live. 18) You've done something crazy to your hair. 19) You've slept on a beach. 20) You've seen the Northern Lights.

21) You've wished upon a shooting star. 22) You've observed a solar eclipse. 23) You've learned something crazy and/or awesome about your family's history. 24) You've ordered everything on the menu at an amazing restaurant. 25) You've eaten at the best restaurant in the world. 26) You've met your idol. 27) You've made the news. 28) You've run a marathon. 29) You've learned how to ride a bike. 30) You've learned how to water-ski. 31) You've climbed a mountain. 32) You've thrown an amazing party. 33) You've gone skinny-dipping. 34) You've been to a protest/rally. 35) You've voted. 36) You've lived on your own. 37) You've assembled IKEA furniture on your own successfully. 38) You've been to prom. 39) You've been on a safari. 40) You've been to the Grand Canyon.

41) You've been camping. 42) You've cooked an entire meal, including dessert. 43) You've achieved closure with an ex. 44) You've spent a paycheck on something frivolous for yourself. 45) You've stayed at a fancy hotel. 46) You've been to a fancy spa. 47) You've spent all day in bed, just because. 48) You've scored your dream job. 49) You've ridden a horse. 50) You've played hooky from work and/or school.

51) You've been to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 52) You've seen an opera. 53) You've seen a ballet. 54) You've been to a Broadway show. 55) You've learned how to drive a car. 56) You've tried sushi. 57) You've swam in the ocean. 58) You've driven across the country. 59) You've traveled solo. 60) You've traveled with friends. 61) You've learned how to play a sport well. 62) You've learned how to dance. 63) You've been to all 50 states. 64) You've been to the Eiffel Tower. 65) You've been to the Great Wall of China. 66) You've tried a really fancy wine. 67) You've written a book. 68) You've written a screenplay. 69) You've been to a religious ceremony not of your faith. 70) You've crashed a party.

71) You've been in a wedding. 72) You've attended a black-tie affair. 73) You've been in a band. 74) You've visited the white house. 75) You've read a book in one sitting. 76) You've set a Guinness World Record. 77) You've communicated with someone who doesn't speak the same language as you. 78) You've been to North America. 79) You've been to South America. 80) You've been to Asia.

81) You've been to Australia. 82) You've been to Africa. 83) You've been to Europe. 84) You've been to Antarctica. 85) You've won a contest. 86) You've run for some sort of leadership position. 87) You've been on TV. 88) You've been skiing. 89) You've been surfing. 90) You've been ice skating. 91) You've had a surprise party. 92) You've cultivated a hobby. 93) You've made a best friend. 94) You've had your 15 minutes of fame. 95) You've climbed a tree. 96) You've been in a hot air balloon. 97) You've won an award. 98) You've given a speech. 99) You've learned to swim. 100) You've been rollerskating. 101) You've gotten a tattoo. 102) You've tried a food you were nervous to eat. 103) You've told someone you love them. 104) You've gotten lost somewhere on purpose. 105) You've been on a game show. 106) You've hooked up with someone "famous". 107) You've been mistaken for a celebrity. 108) You've gambled in Las Vegas. 109) You've made a religious pilgrimage. 110) You've hooked up with someone outside your age range.

111) You've gotten drunk. 112) You've gotten high. 113) You've made a bucket list. 114) You've felt alive. 115) You've lived your life to the fullest.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a geek. The last video game I played was Guitar Hero.

Something has been bothering me a lot lately.

A lot of thoughts occupy my mind at the same time. i don’t know if I’ll ever be satisfied with my body. Seth Rogen movies really aren’t as funny as people say they are.

I LOVE homemade pizza.

I’m currently looking for some people to start a band with.

My relationship with my dad is very strained.

I don’t understand why people have such a problem with kids. I’ve stood next to a famous landmark. I wish my bedroom had more space in it. A friend of mine has a job. I have never owned a Cabbage Patch Kids doll. I’ve used the library to read newspapers from very long ago.

I can remember when my family moved into this house. My mother’s favorite flower is pretty typical.

I enjoy watching rain falling on a lake.

Someone I know is wearing green today. English accents really aren’t that attractive to me. I love listening to music boxes.

My dog is inside right now.

I’ve taken a college/university course before.

When there’s nothing on, I’ll watch re-runs of Happy Days.

It’s difficult for me to really get into a book. I love to eat lemons.

I prefer small venues for concerts opposed to large ones. Warped Tour isn’t as good as it used to be back in the ’90s. Yesterday was a good day. I would buy CDs all the time if I could afford it. Guitar Hero is overrated.

I’ve been grocery shopping recently.

All Time Low’s new stuff sounds much more New Found Glory than Blink 182.

I usually see the Harry Potter films within the first week of their release.

I’m going to a birthday party sometime in the next month. I prefer sans-serif fonts (Arial, Tahoma) to serif fonts (Times New Roman, Georgia). I don’t think peer pressure affects people as much as they say it does.

I still have a collection of VHS tapes. I would love to own a grand piano.

We use the back door of the house more often than the front door.

I absolutely love the insanity incorporated in some of Poe’s work.

Outer Space fascinates me.

I usually look for meaning in songs. I haven’t charged my cellphone today. My street name is also the name of a city.

Someone I know has done a choreographed dance to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”.

Video games can keep me occupied for quite a while. I like to say “FAIL!” whenever someone screws up.

I don’t like to change my layout that often. I can’t remember the last time I played with a frisbee.

Our fridge doesn’t have a freezer.

Someone new followed my blog today.

My plans are never written in stone; they always change. I love creative cake makers. Summer passes way too quickly. I’ve watched a gay film before.

I really don’t like Xanga that much.

Facebook is stupid. I enjoy making graphics.

Elvis Costello is amazing.

FUCK WMG!

I don’t like waiting until fall for TV shows to start up again.

People are very annoying.

The band I’m listening to right now starts with an S.

I know what déjà vu actually means in French.

My favourite bath towel has a picture of something on it.

I think I’d make a pretty good actor, if I wanted to pursue that area. For as long as I’ve been living, my family has never been without a pet.

I vote for award shows.

I love going to furniture stores. The 90s was my favourite decade for non-mainstream music. My favorite book is pretty popular. I know how to read a map.

I don’t like boring cereal.

Yes, I approve of gay marriage. A friend of mine hasn’t lost his/her virginity yet. I actually wouldn’t like to be royalty.

Most good things in life are either illegal, immoral or fattening.

The idea of living out of a van appeals to me.

When someone has to say “honestly” at the start of their sentence, they’re probably not being honest.

I’ve created my own username for Facebook.

I don’t like waiting for videos to load. Little kids can always make me happy. I can’t stand it when people say “FML” over stupid things. It really sucks when I want to go to the theater but nothing good is playing. Americans suck at remaking Japanese horror films.

Lolcats are stupid, but they do make me laugh.

I get by with a little help from my friends. I often feel like I have to prove myself. I don’t think there should be “age limits” on kids things. I have a lyric painted on my wall.

0 notes