#which is ostensibly what this blog is about
Text
I love that Elizabeth and Darcy are so ready to effectively tell each other they're full of shit. This happens a bunch of times, but I was re-reading their conversation at the Netherfield Ball and they're both kind of refreshingly Done.
[Darcy:] “Do you talk by rule, then, while you are dancing?”
[Elizabeth:] “Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look odd to be entirely silent for half an hour together; and yet, for the advantage of some, conversation ought to be so arranged as that they may have the trouble of saying as little as possible.”
[Darcy:] “Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine?”
“Both,” replied Elizabeth archly; “for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb.”
“This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,” said he.
It's also pretty funny, because I suspect Darcy is thinking of this sort of thing in a later conversation at Rosings:
“You mean to frighten me, Mr Darcy, by coming in all this state to hear me. But I will not be alarmed, though your sister does play so well. There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.”
“I shall not say that you are mistaken,” he replied, “because you could not really believe me to entertain any design of alarming you; and I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know, that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which, in fact, are not your own.”
#i love elizabeth cloaking what is obviously a specific personal insult in ostensible solidarity that is in fact the opposite of solidarity#but also that darcy completely sees through it and just says so (then and implicitly later on)#and later in the netherfield ball conversation#darcy actively warns her that she shouldn't form her opinion on him bc at the moment it won't reflect well on either of them#which he is completely correct about—yet he doesn't connect this w/ his assumptions about her encouraging him at all#then or later!#also i appreciate that no matter how many times they challenge each other through social mechanisms#it just never breaks through their mutual arrogance lmao#but it builds until they reach the point where they just drop the bullshit altogether and say exactly what they think and believe#and doing /that/ with each other is what catapults the other one onto their respective character arcs#(w/ the hunsford scene and darcy's letter)#anghraine babbles#long post#austen blogging#fitzwilliam darcy#elizabeth bennet#otp of otps#pride and prejudice#jane austen
292 notes
·
View notes
Text
It’s very strange because so many tumblr usernames are incomprehensible gibberish yet somehow I can instinctively tell bot gibberish from person gibberish the human brains ability to recognize patterns can sometimes be detrimental but it’s often surprisingly useful
#also these bots have stupid naming systems#I don’t actually think these bots were meant for tumblr#they seem programmed to conquer algorithm based websites#which we are NOT#if the tags are becoming hostile territory#then I’m gonna find fandom posts through other blogs#ultimate curated experience#actually#now I think about it#that’s kinda what I do now#I forget a lot that tumblrs tag feature#is ostensibly meant to serve a purpose
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
pre-recession, post-taste
Hello, everyone. I hope this blog can bring some well-needed laughs in really trying times. That's why I've gone back into the archives of that precipitous year 2007, a year where the McMansion was sleepwalking into being a symbol of the financial calamity to follow. We return to the Chicago suburbs once more because they remain the highest concentration of houses in their original conditions. Thanks to our flipping predilection, these houses become rarer and rarer and I have to admit even I have developed a fondness for them as a result.
Our present house is ostensibly "French Provincial" in style, which is McMansion for "Chateaux designed by Carmela Soprano". It boasts 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and comes in at a completely reasonable 15,000 square feet. It can be yours for an equally reasonable $1.5 million.
Every 2007 McMansion needed two things: a plethora of sitting rooms and those dark wood floors. This house actually has around five or six sitting rooms (depending if you count the tiled sunroom) but for brevity's sake, I'll only provide two of them.
With regards to the second sitting room, I'm really not one to talk statuary here because beside me there is a bust of Dante where the sculptor made him look simultaneously sickly and lowkey hot.
Technically, if we are devising a dichotomy between sitting and not sitting (yes, I know about the song), the dining room also counts as a sitting room. The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year.
Here's the thing about nostalgia: the world as we knew it then is never coming back. In some ways this is sad (kitchens are entirely white now and marble countertops will look terrible in about 3 years) but in other ways this is very good (guys in manhattan have switched to private equity instead of betting the farm on credit default swaps made from junk mortgages proffered to America's most vulnerable and exploited populations.) Progress!
Okay I really don't understand the 50 bed pillows thing. Every night my parents tossed their gazillion decorative pillows on the floor just to put them back on the bed the next morning. Like, for WHAT? Who was going in there? The Pope?
Here's a fun one for your liminal spaces moodboards. (Speaking for myself.)
Yes, I know about skibidi toilet. And sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler. I wish I didn't. I wish I couldn't read. Literacy is like a mirror in which I only see the aging contours of my face.
When your kids move out every room becomes a guest room.
Anyway, let's see what the rear of this house has to offer.
The migratory birds will not forgive them for their crimes. But also seriously, not even a garden?
Anyway, that does it for this round of McMansion Hell. Happy Halloween!
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.
Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!
#architecture#design#mcmansion#mcmansions#ugly houses#interior design#bad architecture#2000s design#illinois
5K notes
·
View notes
Text
I don't think there's enough discussion of the transmisogynistic voyeurism that's extremely widespread in online spaces. it's definitely a problem offline too but it's become significantly more pervasive and inescapable online.
transmisogynistic voyeurism is an obsession with trans women's internal lives. while traditionally it's usually been focused on our bodies, hormones, sexualities, transitions, and other such aspects that portray us as exotic, artificial, hypersexual mimics of "real" women (this is still largely the case among conservatives), it's taken on a new form in the past several years as society's understanding of transness has slowly improved.
in more recent years, the fascination with trans women and transfemininity, particularly in purportedly progressive spaces, has shifted to focus on the "artificiality" of our womanhood from a sociocultural perspective, rather than from a biological and sexual perspective.
it's become common to see screenshots from 4chan and other similar communities of trans women or transfem eggs posting about their unusual kinks, often with racist or antisemitic undertones. screenshots of ostensibly closeted trans women being transphobic to openly trans people have become commonplace. whenever a trans woman is revealed to be racist or a sexual predator, she becomes the new topic du jour, where everyone has to weigh in and publicly disavow her actions.
you might be thinking, what's the problem with this? after all, shouldn't we be holding racists, antisemites, transphobes, and sexual predators accountable? and while the answer to that question is an unambiguous, resounding "yes!", the problem here is the unusual focus on trans women in particular, and the fact that what's happening doesn't even remotely resemble accountability.
bigotry is not a uniquely transfeminine trait. anyone can be a bigot. however, by and large, even supposed trans allies, people who put "trans women are women" and "terfs dni" in their bio, still secretly see trans women as fundamentally male, due to having been "male socialized" (a notion which very strongly contradicts our own lived experiences). thus, when they see post after post after post of trans women being bigoted, it reifies tme people's beliefs that we are all holders of male privilege who have never had to face oppression before coming out as trans.
this idea is problematic for a number of reasons. first, it denies the experiences of trans women who have been oppressed by other systems before coming out as trans. for example, multiple times in just the past few weeks, I've seen trans women of color accused of being racist, even against people of their own race; as if having to face racism all their lives wasn't bad enough, now they're assumed to be perpetrators of it. however, this idea also ignores the very real effect that transmisogyny has had in shaping our lives, even when we didn't know we were trans ourselves.
when we attempt to talk about this topic - the perception that tme people have of trans women being uniquely bigoted, we are by and large brushed off as seeking to "excuse the actions" of bigoted trans women so that we can be bigoted ourselves. this abject refusal to actually engage with what we are saying to instead paint us as the very people we're constantly made to publicly disavow lest we face social ostracization (even if we have no idea who said people even are) further reifies the stereotype of us as privileged men.
I want you to imagine for a moment if trans men were subjected to this kind of voyeurism instead. on an average day scrolling through tumblr, you'd see a post of a trans man's nsfw blog where he shares posts about how rape should be legal, right alongside his bloodplay and cannibalism kink posts, accusing trans men of normalizing rape and murder. another post would show a screenshot of the trans guy who proclaimed to have been hitler in a past life, accompanied by comments demanding trans men take responsibility by purging their community of people like him. you'd scroll down a little further and see a screenshot of a terf blog with "dysphoric female" in bio where they complain about how a trans man they know has been brainwashed by "gender ideology" with all of the comments hoping they figure out their gender identity but still vehemently disavowing them and asserting they would feel unsafe around such a person even after coming out.
the reason that doesn't happen is because biological essentialism runs rampant even in queer spaces. trans men, who were afab, are often presumed to be incapable of harm due to having been "female socialized". trans men don't have their kinks publicly shared to paint them as dangerous because they're generally assumed to be victims of sexual violence, not perpetrators. trans men aren't collectively held accountable for the actions of one trans man they don't even know because a trans man doing harm is believed to be an anomaly, and thus can be dealt with on an individual basis. that last example is especially laughable, because trans men who were formerly terfs are often lauded as heroes for sharing their stories and offered condolences for having been victims of "cult brainwashing".
the fact that this kind of voyeurism does happen to trans women is because, having been amab, we are presumed to be the perpetrators of harm rather than victims. that's not to say that trans women can't be bigoted or dangerous; clearly they can, or else this kind of voyeurism couldn't exist in the first place.
trans women can be racist, trans women can be antisemitic, trans women can be transphobic, trans women can be sexual predators, and so on. these things are all true. however, they are not more likely to be true of trans women than of other demographics. that's the point I'm trying to make here.
stop and consider for a moment, what accountability actually means. are racist, antisemitic trans women being held accountable when you share screenshots of the bigotry they post anonymously on 4chan? does that screenshot you reblogged of an assumed transfem egg being transphobic to an out trans person hold them responsible for their transphobia? is that racist trans woman who's a convicted sexual predator sentenced to prison being held accountable when you share detailed documentaries about her crimes? are they facing consequences for their actions because of you raising awareness about them?
in the vast majority of cases, the answer is no. what's really happening is that you're raising outrage about trans women, and demanding that all of us publicly disavow and distance ourselves from them, even when we have no idea who they are, so that you won't come after us next. you're upholding the idea that trans women hold a "male privilege debt" that we can never fully repay but must endlessly strive to repay regardless. this obsession with our perceived socially male traits has got to stop.
#txt#transmisogyny#my writing#sorry this is so long I know people are gonna take this in the worst faith possible and I had to debunk all their counterpoints in advance#1k
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
A Very Ask A Manager Thanksgiving
So I love advice blogs (I maintain that comment sections on advice blogs are the best free tool for writers to explore different viewpoints, which really enriches your characterization), and for a few years now, I have had this idea that I want to do a do an Ask A Manager themed dinner, purely to delight myself. Meant to do it as a cookout this summer, but timing never worked out, so I broached the idea of doing it for Thanksgiving. My partner, who is also a nerd and therefore very supportive of my advice blog love even though it is not one of their interests, was down, with their only condition being that I should still make my cider bread with maple butter.
The menu:
Appetizers
Chips with:
Guacamole in honor of Guacamole Bob, of "ordering extra guacamole is wasteful of member dues” fame. (This being on the menu may also have been a factor in Partner being willing to have our holiday take on an Ask A Manager theme, as I once took a community education course on grilling that taught me nothing about its ostensible subject matter but did teach me to make a bomb-ass guacamole. The secret is that your first step should be to pulverize an entire head of garlic into a paste in your mocajete.)
Three store bought salsas, where the trick is to "fold" the salsa to get the best flavor
A bottle of hot sauce so we can get fired after a coworker steals our spicy food
Main Course
"Duck club" sandwiches in honor of the secret office sex club where you get points for sex in different locations, and quacking is involved. (These were very decadent and if anyone's interested in a great duck recipe, I used the Duck with Lemon recipe from A Feast of Ice and Fire.)
Sides
Cheap-ass rolls that I definitely deliberately brought to upstage you, yes you, the person who signed up to bring Hawaiian rolls! It's definitely not an overreaction on your part to declare that "they can all take Santa and stick it up their ass!" You're definitely not getting fired for being wildly hostile! (These are actually homemade rolls, but I weighed "buy actually cheap rolls and be done" or "spend a couple hours adapting a corgi butt roll recipe to a human butt roll," and chose in favor of the pun.)
Dessert
Bribery cupcakes, from that time a letter writer brought some cupcakes over to chat with her neighbor, the son of the Chief of Police, about a disruptive noise issue in her workplace and some commenters decided this constituted bribing a public servant. (The recipe is in the comments on that link; I made the carrot cake version. However, I realized halfway through that I was somehow low on vanilla despite obsessively buying fancy vanilla extract every time I am in a spice shop, along with a bunch of other things I don't need because buying cool spices makes me feel like a wizard. Anyway, half of these had vanilla in the filling/icing, and the other half had cardamom extract.)
A birthday cake that somehow crosses boundaries by...being too fancy? Being paid for a staff person? Not involving the wife in the planning? Anyway, the real answer to the letter writer's question is, "Eh, I don't think it's a big deal" because different offices have different norms around birthdays and it's whatever, but sometimes a low-stakes office norms question hits just right and you get 630 comments of people debating The One True Way to Do Office Birthdays, and whether or not buying a cake means you're angling for an affair. (Okay, not all the comments are about that particular letter. Anyway, I picked up this fancy-ass cake at Marc Heu Patisserie, and appropriately enough, the guy ahead of me in line was picking up a cake for his boss.)
And of course, what Ask A Manager column would be complete without chocolate teapots?
Beverages
Mudslides, because "girls love chocolate." And magic tricks. And being played "You're So Vain" on the piano with a mournful stare. Partner and I are both notorious lightweights but I had been snacking all day as I cooked so I was mostly immune. Partner took one sip of this drink and immediately began loudly telling me how their one colleague doesn't sing enough to his Pre-K students, and "this classroom will do anything if you sing to them!" After dinner, they lay down on the floor and sang the Slippery Fish song.
The full spread:
320 notes
·
View notes
Text
one thing that's been percolating in my mind about mina and her relationship to women's history this time through is that like... it can be tempting (for me too!) from a contemporary perspective to kind of think as "traditional" and "progressive" as opposite sides of a spectrum upon which women can be linearly placed in terms of their beliefs. but it's a little more complicated than that, obviously. mina i think can be a little jarring to the modern reader because she is as a person obviously so independent, bright, curious, and hard-working, but her vocational ambitions as expressed in the text are limited to supporting her future husband, and i think there can be a tendency to sort of slot her as like, "ok, well, she's a little bit progressive, but not that far along," or whatever, and there's, again, a lot we can do to unpack that, but for me there are two things that have been coming up for me revisiting the topic on my second time through (disclaimer: i'm an idiot with a blog who doesn't know anything about anything & if any actual experts want to weigh in please do! also if anyone has any accessible readings on the new woman please do @ me because that phrase is it turns out fucking ungoogleable):
(1) i think it's important to remember that for all human beings on earth ever, there's not a simple unidirectional relationship between internal beliefs and external action/reality, nor do beliefs come out of nowhere or out of some ether from which we pluck ideas out of pure abstraction. a lot of looking at women's history is looking at how women chose to navigate the options available to them, which both inform ideology and also make it frankly sometimes just not that important. a book that really powerfully shaped the way i think about this stuff is kathy peiss's cheap amusements: working women and leisure in turn of the century new york. the way she explores her source material for that space and time really brought home to me that it's very difficult as a woman who came of age (for example) in the US after second wave feminism to really understand just how beside the point the question of "what do i as an individual believe about women's role in society" was for (as just one example) many women in that location, class, and period. it just doesn't matter compared to things like being able to pay your rent, or being able to afford a night out once in a while - which might mean letting a guy pay your way not because you think it's "the man's job" but because you don't make enough to go out with your own money ever - so maybe you do think it's the man's job but it's not because of some like disembodied attachment to traditional gender roles, it's because the men are the ones with the fucking money!
anyway. different place, different class position, slightly later period, but the general principles from that book have really stayed with me and have been echoing thinking about mina. like: how much does an assistant schoolmistress in 1890s london make? i'm not an expert but willing to bet it's not a lot? she's an orphan, actively aware that she and jonathan have only what they can cobble together. if she remains in the professional world after her marriage, who does the labor of running a two-person household - something we here on tumblr complain in 2023 is difficult if everyone has a full-time job, and which was much more difficult with more than a century's progress in domestic technology still to go (and this isn't getting into childrearing). would their combined incomes be enough to afford a domestic servant? idk shit about the economic position of late victorian women so these are not questions i am presenting as having ostensibly "obvious" answers - i really don't know. but i think these are things that are worth considering when we think about mina, her ambitions, & her relationship to shifting cultural currents (which were really shifting quite quickly - the "new woman" was such a recent coinage at the book's publication that if you assume, for example, that the epilogue is meant to take place in its publication year, the events of the novel precede its first appearance in print), and i think it's just never really quite as simple as "well this is what she Believed." our world makes our beliefs at least as much as the other way around.
(2) the other thing that's been in my head is that in a more contemporary framework of how gender operates, it is easy to assume the dichotomy of technology/science/jobs/boy stuff vs. domesticity/home/housewife/girl stuff extends backwards throughout time forever. but, first off, domestic labor is labor and mina is still very much looking ahead at a life of working full time - just not at getting paid. but secondly, homemaking was one of many things getting brought under the umbrella of "science" in the late 19th century (along with, to name examples from the book, psychology and criminology). like a lot of things in my brain the "scientific housewife" is something i vaguely remember hearing about in some college class or book but don't have any ready cites for, but while googling last night i found this very cool recent article [linked below because the app will not fucking let me make a text link] that looks at the evolution of instruction in science, housework, and domestic science at two english day schools for girls in the late victorian/early edwardian (the kind of school i think mina may have attended and taught at, as i don't believe we're ever given much detail about her place of work), and which provides some background info on the idea of the "scientific housewife":
Scholars have since recognised that the middle-class home was “the locus of back-breaking toil” Domestic servants were not as prevalent as once thought, and in some cases it was common for mistresses to work alongside them. The average middle-class woman would likely have been at least partially a housewife, or, in other words, she would have undertaken some domestic labour herself. In contemporary culture, a link was also being forged between housework and science; historians have charted the ideology of “scientific housewifery” or “scientific motherhood”, which encouraged women to embrace science, medicine, and technology in the nineteenth century, to enhance domestic life and make it more efficient, more enjoyable, easier, and healthier for the family. Work by Judy Giles and Joanne Hollows has suggested that ideals of a modern, scientific housewife emerged in the first half of the twentieth century with the decline of domestic service. Given that many middle-class women would have been undertaking housework themselves in the nineteenth century, this article asserts that the cultural construction of the scientific housewife existed before the decline of domestic service. This article builds on the work of Nakagomi by considering the place of domestic subjects and science in schools as a window into a broader societal conceptualisation of housework and the housewife.
one interesting thing in this article is that the two schools profiled actually had strong differences in how they conceptualized and approached their domestic programming, which reminds us that big-picture ideals are always being navigated, redefined, and contested in practice. it also emphasizes that for at least some teachers and schools for girls, the teaching of science was considered an important part of the intellectual development of the students - a position, fascinatingly, NOT taken by comparable boys' schools of the period, which tended to marginalized science education in favor of the classics, which was a wonderful little reminder for me about just how incredibly fake gender is. but also i think this article (which identifies some shifts happenings in the 1890s, like really this novel came out at The fulcrum point of the culture) helps us consider that the seriousness with which mina takes her future home-making as a vocation can be read as part and parcel of the novel's fascination with modernity, technology, science, and progress - and indeed given the moral panic about lazy mothering the article mentions as arising in the press a few years later it even lets us consider that mina's status as a female victorian ideal and her temperament of someone deeply pro-science may not have appeared to be in as much tension as we might assume.
142 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Goncharov
Why the hell is an MST3K blog rising from the dead to review a forgotten Martin Scorcese film? I'd never heard of this movie until it suddenly became a meme, but I had a day off work and I figured I might as well see what all the fuss was about. Now I want to talk about what I saw, and this is the only movie blog I have, so I'm doing it here.
Ivan Goncharov is the biggest, baddest motherfucker east of the iron curtain, richer than a tsar and colder than a Siberian winter. He's got a beef with Neapolitan mafioso Mario Giglioli, so he heads to sunny Italy to confront him in person. His closest confidante, Andrey, thinks it's suicide to do this on Giglioli's home turf but accompanies Goncharov anyway out of loyalty. What follows is a two-hour dick-measuring contest as Goncharov and Giglioli try to out-intimidate each other, culminating in an orgy of gunfire where only one will be left standing... and this is the kind of movie where you can't take it for granted that it'll be the guy whose name is the title.
That's the ostensible plot, anyway. What makes Goncharov a far more interesting film than such an outline might imply is that the argument between the mobsters is just a backdrop. Having set up Goncharov's hard as steel, cold as ice reputation in the first act, the movie then sets about deconstructing it. Goncharov goes from a terrifying figure devoid of all morality to a tragic antihero, a man who has come to believe his own hype so completely that he can no longer let himself be human.
This is demonstrated mainly by watching the breakdown of his relationships over the course of the tense three days in Naples. The most important person in Goncharov's life is Andrey, the only one he comes near being vulnerable with. Their relationship is depicted as very touchy-feely in a literal sort of way, with Andrey helping Goncharov with his coat and shoes, lighting cigarettes for him, and touching his shoulder or arm as Goncharov confides in him. The framing emphasizes these touches in a very homoerotic way, and I don't think I've got my tumblr goggles on here. These guys have fucked.
As Goncharov becomes more and more obsessed with being tougher and more ruthless than Giglioli, whom he sees as an effeminate softie, Andrey tries to persuade him that the other man is not worth this sort of obsession. Whatever Giglioli did to insult Goncharov (we never find out), Andrey is of the opinion that they should just leave a dead horse in the asshole's bed and move on. Goncharov's pride will not allow him to do that, and the less subtle Andrey is in his attempts to dissuade him, the more Goncharov pushes him away, finally abandoning him entirely. The tragedy of the ending comes from the fact that Andrey refuses to abandon Goncharov in turn.
We also see Goncharov with his wife Katya. He is frequently cruel to her, and she tolerates it because he gives her expensive gifts and because she is seeking a vicarious mending of her relationship with her abusive father - she was never able to earn his love, but perhaps she can earn Goncharov's. This is doomed to failure, as much because of Goncharov as because Katya doesn't actually want it to succeed. Nursing a black eye, Katya pours her heart out to a bartender, Sofia, who tries to help her escape... but this cannot work out, either. As Katya herself says, she doesn't know who she is without her issues.
I am pleased to note, by the way, that every single major character in the movie is named and I can remember them all, which is a bit of a treat for me (I need to watch good movies more often). The only exception is Goncharov himself. The end credits list him as Ivan, but nobody ever calls him that, not even Andrey or Katya. In a flashback scene with his parents, neither calls him by name. This flashback, fascinatingly, is filmed in the first person, looking through Goncharov's own eyes. We are not allowed to see him as a younger, softer man. He refuses to show that side of himself even in the privacy of his memories.
These quieter moments contrast with scenes of ever-escalating brutality, as the Russians and Italians try to force each other to back down by the murder of underlings. The fact that it is literally a contest, and that Goncharov is aware of this and describes it as such, makes the worsening violence ever more meaningless. The death of Giglioli's confessor is particularly awful, and the way Goncharov's goons treat the chapel has to be ten times worse if you're Catholic (fun fact: this scene is apparently removed from the Italian version on Netflix, which must make what Andrey says while waiting for the train into a hell of a non sequitur).
At the climax, the two really can't do anything but kill each other, because it's the only place left to go. Giglioli's priest and mistress are dead. Goncharov's men are almost all dead or out of action, and Goncharov believes Andrey to be dead. The initial insult, whatever it was, is no longer relevant. They have pushed each other to a place where reconciliation is unthinkable. Whoever blinks first loses, but both have already lost so much that victory means nothing. Worse, each recognizes that the other is in the same position, and neither can acknowledge it.
This means Goncharov can also moonlight as an examination of violence in media. Why do movies showcase violence, and why do we watch it? The initial posturing serves a purpose - Goncharov wants Giglioli to know he's here to personally demand an apology, and Giglioli wants Goncharov to know he's outnumbered and should quit while he still can. But once it becomes an exercise in one-up-manship, the 'messages’ vanish and the men are now killing for the sake of killing. Violence in movies can often be gore for gore's sake, pulling out more and more stops in the effort to shock an audience that has been desensitized by years and years of this. That is what Goncharov and Giglioli are doing to each other. Truly distressing moments like the fate of the priest, or what Giuseppe "Icepick Joe" Cozzolino (dressed as a maid!) does to Sofia when he assumes she's Katya because she was in Katya's hotel room, make us wonder why we're watching this - and the mobsters wonder why they're doing it.
In the end, it's all just a blood-soaked version of the sunk cost fallacy. Goncharov had come too far in his vendetta to stop now. Andrey has followed him too far to turn back. Katya has been married to him too long to leave. Of course, any of them could quit at any time and escape from this terrible spiral, but they are unwilling to entertain the possibility. Like Goncharov himself, Andrey and Katya are prisoners of the identities they have built for themselves, and because their identities are so tied to him, they have to go down with him.
One thing I haven't seen a lot of discussion of on tumblr is the way the film uses the contrast in climate. Goncharov in Moscow is in his element. When you see his breath in the wintry air it's as if he's breathing smoke like a dragon. While other people huddle in the cold he stands up straight and tall. In Naples, on the other hand, he is out of place. He wears lighter clothing, but continues to choose long coats and upturned collars, while Giglioli goes around with his shirt unbuttoned. This should serve to emphasize Giglioli's home field advantage and yet, as we see through Goncharov's eyes, they just make Giglioli look soft. His apparent weakness makes Goncharov want to appear even stronger.
On a related note, it is interesting to me how sunlight is treated as something very unfriendly. In Russia, it glitters on ice crystals in the air and lights up condensation, harsh and white and giving no warmth whatsoever. In Italy it bakes and shimmers on stone and asphalt, casting harsh, black-edged shadows and emphasizing creased brows and frowning mouths. Outdoor scenes are, as far as I can tell, always hostile interactions. Even indoor scenes in natural light: the priest dies with harsh sunlight streaming in through the broken chapel window. When characters are softer with each other, it is always under artificial illumination. Sunlight is too bright, too revealing. People like this need some shadows to hide in.
Did I like this movie? That's a tough question. It's not really the type of movie you 'like'. It's definitely powerful and well-constructed, thoroughly absorbing and all that. There's a taste of Greek tragedy in the inevitability of the ending and the way Goncharov is eaten alive by hubris. But I wouldn't say I liked it. The characters are all terrible people whose arcs involve them getting worse, and the whole thing feels deeply claustrophobic, as if I, too, am trapped in Goncharov's downward spiral. When characters realize their mistakes, it is only when it's too late to correct them - but only in their own minds. It's a very pessimistic story, about human beings who are overcome by the very worst parts of themselves.
Is Goncharov deserving of all those glowing reviews? Yes. Was it unfairly snubbed at the Oscars because the academy was turned off by the violence? Probably. Will I ever watch it again? Fuck, no.
Excuse me, I have to go watch some Pixar movies if I ever want to smile again.
#mst3k#reviews#episodes that never were#goncharov#70's#there are horses in this movie#unreality#in case you've been on twitter or something all day#this movie doesn't exist.#i read six text posts and pulled this out of my ass at one in the morning
443 notes
·
View notes
Text
ELBERT GREETIA MAIN ROUTE....
CHAPTER THREE.
translations are not 100% accurate. expect mistakes.
minors and ageless blogs dni.
"The girl involved in the incident at the inn was alive."——
The good news came a few days after I went shopping with Lord Elbert.
Kate: I'm really, really glad….!
Elbert:…I agree.
I wait in front of the hospital room until my meeting with her is ready.
Today, we ostensibly were supposed to be the “police”.
The objective is to get information about the Bernard Merchants from her, a survivor of the attack on the inn.
(I have to draw the line and talk to her so she doesn't suspect anything.)
(But it's hard to change my feelings when…I'm happy.)
As I struggled to control my emotions, a sudden gust of wind ruffled my hair.
Elbert:…
A small breeze gently sways Lord Elbert’s golden hair.
I felt that his beauty, which I still adore, was imbued with a sadness that was deeper than usual.
(Oh, you were just having a long conversation with the doctor earlier….)
(Did he say something about that time?)
Elbert: Do you….remember what she was like?
Kate: I think it was a young girl with red hair...and a few freckles.
Elbert:…Even though it was night, you managed to memorize her.
Kate:…I have perfect memory. Besides….
Kate:…I think it burned into my heart that I couldn't help her from that place.
Elbert: I see…
Elbert: I wonder why you can't forget the sad things.
For a few seconds, a gentle silence descends, as if sharing the pain in one's heart.
Kate:….That’s because I am very happy today. Knowing that the girl is safe.
Elbert:….
Elbert:….Kate.
Kate: Yes…?
Elbert: You are in the hospital room——
Nurse: Thank you for your patience. She’s ready to meet you.
Kate: Ah, yes! Let's go, Lord Elbert.
Elbert:….
Elbert:…All right.
Is she concerned about us as the "police"?
The nurse let us through to the hospital room and gently excused herself.
Girl:…Are you the police?
Elbert: That’s right. ….I'm sorry for coming here so suddenly.
Girl: Hmph, I don't mind.
Lying on the bed was a girl who looked like she was only in her teens, and seemed to be a bit brave.
Her name was Daisy, and she was so calm and collected that it was hard to believe that she had been in a life-and-death situation.
Daisy: I knew the owner was doing business with bad guys. He said he had a lot of debt and started as a middleman for stolen goods.
Daisy: But the owner liked the "sea painting" that was painted by a famous Russian artist.
Daisy: I tried to make it my own, but the bad guys found out and came to get rid of me that night.
The owner's body was never found.
Daisy told me that she failed to bring up the painting….but it must have been hidden somewhere.
Elbert: May I ask how you ended up being hurt as well?
Daisy: We were told that we should keep our mouths shut or something. ….Some of the kids didn't even know about the painting.
Elbert:…Really, now.
It was painful to hear Daisy answer our questions in an orderly manner, even though we had made her talk about her painful experiences.
Kate: Thank you for telling us.
Daisy: Whatever, don’t mention it. We’re done here, right? Thank you for your hard work.
Daisy lies down on the bed as if to forcefully end the conversation.
Then, when the spring creaked, something at the bedside fluttered down to my feet. **
(Ah…!)
Elbert:…What's this handkerchief…?
Lord Elbert picks up a familiar handkerchief.
Daisy: Oh, that's right. I was told that it was mine.
Daisy: I’m not sure, but somehow I can't throw it away. I know it sounds crazy, but is it more like a good luck charm?
Daisy: This was by my side, so I guess it caught my attention.
Kate:….! Is that so….
(I’m really…really glad.)
I want to hug Daisy right now and tell her how happy I am that she is alive.
But I can't do that, so I give her a soft smile.
(I don't want to be a bother….so maybe I should get going soon.)
I glanced over to check on Lord Elbert next to me——
(….?)
Elbert:….
For some reason, his porcelain profile looked as if he was about to cry.
Thinking back, even outside the hospital room, Lord Elbert had the same melancholy that he has now.
(You were about to say something before we went into the hospital room….)
Somehow, I have a strange feeling in my chest.
Elbert:…How are you feeling?
Daisy: Eh…?
Lord Elbert's voice was careful and gentle, as if touching a wound.
Daisy: A..Ahaha. What are you, a doctor?
Daisy: I don't know. I have an infection? It seems to be a disease. It wouldn't be strange for me to suddenly change and die at any moment.
Kate: What….
At Daisy's confession, I couldn't help but voice out.
Daisy: But I have no relatives, all my colleagues are dead…and there’s no one who can mourn for me.
Kate:….
I almost tell her I'd visit her, but I hold my tongue.
(We are under surveillance. I can't just do whatever I want.)
(I can't believe how frustrating that is.)
It was as painful as the horrific scenes I witnessed.
Elbert:….
Elbert:…"I couldn't interview you properly because of your condition."
Daisy: What…?
Elbert:….Tomorrow, We’ll visit you.
Kate:….!
I look up at Lord Elbert with a smile at this unexpected suggestion.
(I heard what I needed to hear. I don't think Daisy knows any more about the Bernard Merchants.)
(I’m sure Lord Elbert knows that...and yet...)
Elbert:…Is it a no?
Daisy: Of course not….!
Daisy showed us a beaming smile for the first time today.
Kate: Lord Elbert, are you sure…?
Elbert:…Hm, about what…?
Kate: Umm, considering our position…is it okay to visit her, Lord Elbert?
Victor has told us that the interview is only scheduled for today.
If we stay too long, there is a danger that our identities will be revealed.
(But even so….)
Kate: Why did you say we would come back tomorrow…?
Elbert:….
Elbert: Because being alone when you're sad...is not good.
Kate:….Lord Elbert…
(I've been thinking about it ever since that night when I couldn't save Daisy.)
(Lord Elbert is…very sensitive to people's grief and pain.)
It is neither healing nor denying, but it is close to him.
I felt as if I had been touched by the warmth of Lord Elbert, and my heart was thumping.
Kate:…Thank you very much.
Elbert: I haven’t done anything to thank me for. // There’s no need to thank me.
Kate: Because I feel the same way as you do, Lord Elbert.
Kate: I didn't want Daisy to be alone.
Elbert:…I could tell you felt the same way in the hospital room.
Elbert: You…don't seem to be very good at acting.
A fleeting smile like a thin cloud appeared on Lord Elbert’s lips,
Through my heated chest, there was a faint sweet tingle.
The next day and the day after that, we lied to Victor and went to visit Daisy.
Daisy: I'm really lucky to have such a beautiful brother who comes to visit me every day.
Daisy: Well, it comes with an extra.
Elbert:…"Extra"?
Kate: I brought some delicious snacks for you today, but I don't think you want any of the "extras"…..
Daisy: Wow, no way.
Kate: Fufu, I'm just kidding.
Daisy: Jeez, Kate!
As usual, we spend our time in Daisy's room, exchanging pleasantries.
The first day we met, we had only one interview, and from the next day on, all we did was make small talk.
(I know I'm digressing from my mission…but I want to fill Daisy's loneliness for as long as I can.)
Daisy: Hey, these cookies are so delicious!
Elbert:…That’s good. She made it.
Daisy: Fufu...thank you, really.
However, Daisy's complexion worsened as she became more comfortable with us.
Every time I notice this, my wish for her to stay alive tomorrow becomes stronger.
(I want you to smile more. I don't want you to look sad…..)
(It's so frustrating that all I can do is come visit you….)
Daisy:…I don't think I've ever had anyone care about me like this before.
Daisy: Hey, you two, can I be selfish while I'm at it?
Kate: W…What? Tell me anything!
Daisy: Next time you come to visit me, bring me some blue poppies. I love them.
("Next time you come."….)
Kate: Yes, I understand. I'll definitely bring it!
I nodded my head strongly, happy to know that she has hope for tomorrow.
(Poppies are a common variety, and I should be able to get them at any florist.)
Daisy: Fufu, as you should…
Elbert:….
I always feel uneasy about whether I will see her again tomorrow, and the corridor at dusk feels more lonely than usual.
Kate: Lord Elbert, is it okay…if I stop at any flower shop?
Elbert: That's fine, but...
Lord Elbert stopped with a somewhat solemn look on his face.
Kate: Is something wrong?
Elbert: Blue poppies...I believe they are a rare variety that blooms from alpine regions of the Himalayas.
Kate: What?
(Himalayas….!?)
Alfons: That's quite….a bargain you've made.
Mr. Alfons, who returned to the castle in the morning and woke up just now,
He listened to our story with his chin resting languidly and laughed merrily.
Kate: Lord Elbert told me that Mr. Alfons has been playing around London all night long.
Kate: I asked him if he knew of a shop that sells rare flowers…..
Alfons: Don't talk about people as if they are playboys, Elbert.
Elbert:…? You’re different?
Alfons: Correct. But even I, a playboy who quenches my boredom with rumors everywhere….
Alfons: I've never heard of a store selling Himalayan flowers.
Kate: Is that so…
(What if we put other colors of the poppies? ….But,)
(I want to do everything I can to help Daisy remember her hopes from tomorrow onwards.)
(Are there any other suggestions….)
Elbert: Al, can I borrow your ability?
Kate:…Mr. Alfons’ ability?
Elbert: Al can make you see an illusion of whatever he says while touching the nape of your neck.
(An illusion….)
Kate: Does this mean that you can make poppies of a different color appear blue?
Alfons: Yes, think of it as a convenient hallucinogen, whether it's blue or shocking pink.
(Surely that would grant Daisy's wish.)
(But….if possible, I wanted to find the real one.)
Alfons: Although it is tempting to use my ability to deceive an innocent girl and fabricate a temporary salvation….
Alfons: Blue poppies, perhaps it can be found in El’s room?
Kate: Eh?
Alfons: I think I saw a pressed flower frame before. If I am not mistaken.
Alfons: Why don't you look for that junk tomorrow?
(In Lord Elbert’s room…?)
A confidential letter was received before Daisy's visit.
I thought of bringing a souvenir to Daisy's visit today, but I'll pick up the cookies you mentioned yesterday on the way. She seems to have a sweet tooth, so I'm sure she'll enjoy it….just like you said.
I'm sorry for making you lie to Victor.
If you have anything to say, please tell me. You have nothing to blame yourself for. — Elbert Greetia.
▸ [ previous / next ]
76 notes
·
View notes
Note
Hi! Been loving your blog and writing!
I really like your characterization and opinions of A.ang. It’s nice to read fan fic and blogs that just gets it. Down the road and back again was just *chef’s kiss*. (Also uncharted waters I’m loving! I never know what to expect and each chapter is so good)
Anyways I was wondering if you have any head cannon’s of what a K.ataang marriage would look like? For me I imagine it being it being extremely passive aggressive, also A.ang is really selfish so that definitely would hurt their marriage. It’s kind of like the opposite side of the toxic coin with M.aiko being a screaming match and in your face constantly breaking up, K.ataang would be toxic but it’s quite and they would try to save face in public. I don’t know What do you think?
I kind of touched on it in Choices and Consequences, but I picture it being a lot of Katara swallowing her feelings and being a single mother to four children. I don't believe she was ever actually in love with Aang. She may have tried to tell herself she was, but I think the only reason she ended up with Aang is because she felt like she owed him. Kataang was unhealthy on both their parts, and while I do tend to focus on Aang (because he's awful, and I will not ever stop pointing that out), I think Katara was guilty of putting him on a pedestal. She knew the Avatar would save the world, and I think that's why she ignored Aang's flaws. Everyone wanted to end the war, but for her, it was a deeply intense and personal desire, and the Avatar would be the one to deliver that. It's a lot of pressure to put on a 12 year old who grew up slow in a world without war, and she knew that. On some level, Katara was aware of how much pressure Aang was under, which is why I think she was so insistent on everyone being gentle with him, even though they didn't have that kind of time. Then when he actually did end the war (he didn't, at least not alone, but the show refused to give credit where it was due) Katara felt some sort of obligation towards him and called it love.
Katara is a smart, passionate girl, and she would've wanted a partner who would appreciate that and respect her thoughts, feelings and opinions. The glimpses of her relationship with Aang in the early comics show me that she didn't have that with him. Aang didn't respect her feelings over those of his fangirls. He ignored her discomfort, and even thanked her for understanding why he needed to connect with those girls who were being horribly disrespectful because "sharing his culture"🤮. It wasn't their treatment of her that upset him. It was them doing something that offended him personally.
Meanwhile, Katara had to swallow her own feelings and smile through it all. That's how I see their relationship going. I think Katara might have convinced herself that he respected her thoughts and opinions because he relied on her as a caregiver and he took her everywhere, but I think as he grew into his own, he would've expected her to step back and be contented to be a homemaker/broodmare while he did the important Avatar work, which is why I think Katara wasn't present in that scene in LoK where bloodbending was banned, even though she was ostensibly the only other bloodbender in the world, but Aang was front and center. It's also my theory on why when Aang was about to go all in on pushing for anti-miscegenation, instead of her telling him that it would be a bad idea because of the effects it would have on the families and communities Aang would be separating, she appealed to how it would affect him.
I don't think their marriage would be passive aggressive. I think Katara would just make herself as small as possible and do her best to keep the Avatar happy and on track because that's what she owed him. She'd have moments of acknowledging her deep unhappiness and regret, but she wouldn't dwell on it. And she would convince herself she was content to be a devoted wife and mother, and nothing else.
#atla#anti aang#anti kataang#honestly the comics and lok make me feel so depressed for katara#she really gave that jerk her entire life#just for him to be as bad a father as he was a husband#and a horrid avatar#it's like bryke WANTS me to hate their pet ship#THE YEAR OF CONTENT!!!!
59 notes
·
View notes
Note
The problem is I feel like people on tumblr would misuse it even harder than they do queerbaiting for shit like LoK that was genuinely trying to get around censors because its so contextual.
LoK was not trying to get around censors. That is 100% not what happened, and it is galling to me that Bryke get so much credit for LoK tripping on its face so creators who actually gave a shit about queer rep and trying to make it clear in their work could walk and then run, because they... didn't actually do a single goddamn thing.
And they admitted as much!
Korrasami was not why LoK was getting jerked around by Nickolodeon. By the time Bryke even thought about asking if they could make K/A 'endgame', Book 4 was almost completed and they quite literally had nothing left to lose. (This was admitted in the infamous 'Korrasami is Canon' post, where they said they hadn't even considered the possibility that they'd be allowed until the show was nearly finished.) They did nothing to develop the relationship or even their friendship throughout Books 3 and 4--allegedly the time in which they'd decided to make it canon, if you actually believe them about that and I sincerely do not--and it's especially grating in Book 4 where there was ample opportunity to at least make it clear that this relationship was important, whatever form it might take, to the people creating the show.
(People still make fun of the 'popping the biggest bottles' poster to this day, but it was Mako's relationship with Korra that formed the emotional pillar of the final season, particularly as it related to Korra's own character arc, so of course it would have been the natural conclusion to draw that this was where their story was heading. The only reason it seems so ridiculous in hindsight is because Bryke gambled on the fact that making K/A canon would distract from all the very valid criticisms their show had been getting to that point--and they were right. The fandom has bent over backwards ever since to make it seem like this was some groundbreaking moment in animation history that Bryke had to fight Nickolodeon to get on the air.)
There's no evidence (not even their own attempts at ass-covering) that Bryke tried for anything more than the five second shot of hand-holding at the very end of the season. They had nothing left to lose, and still all they bothered to do was ask--and by Bryan's own words in the blog post he wrote, the studio was supportive, but 'there was a limit to how far [they] could go with it'. Nothing about trying to push that limit or argue for a more unambiguous ending. They should not be put up on a pedestal as if they fought to put queer rep in their show when they evidently couldn't even be bothered to write halfway decent friendships, despite ostensibly having quite a bit of experience from working on the original show.
And I refuse to forgive them for the terrible writing that spanned the entire show, just because they decided to make a half-assed effort and queer rep in the very last seconds of the very last season.
--
61 notes
·
View notes
Text
Kurt Bloch: An Awesome Guy Who Awesome People Like
Rocking with the Fastbacks and recording all your favorite bands since 1979
Fastbacks, 1988; Kurt Bloch far left, Gumby t-shirt
“There truly is something about inspiration and enthusiasm that really is inspiring and enthusiastic!” - Kurt Bloch
--------------------------------------
By: Eric Davidson
I’ve been thinking a lot about joy of late. Like pure, eyes-to-the-sky, skipping down the street joy. There is a paucity of it around right now.
We could follow a zillion trails to and from how we got here, but this is ostensibly a music blog, so I’m going to make a quick stab at the roots of this unenviably joyless position we’re sitting in, rock-wise.
The Fastbacks were joyful. Starting out in 1979 in the dawning days of Seattle’s punk scene, they became a local fave on the basis of action-packed shows stuffed with careening pop hooks, irked energy, and a friendly, guffaw around onstage demeanor that didn’t exactly scream “pre-hardcore era.”
Fastbacks retreated for a few years, circa 1988, and when kicked back into gear a couple years later, found themselves being a preferred opener for a load of grumpy grunge bands who I’m guessing hoped to absorb some of the Fastbacks positive energy to counteract their mope – which the Fastbacks were more than ready to supply.
A mélange of metal volume, fleeting bouts of prog whimsy, Ramones tempos, and BubbleYum stickiness, the Fastbacks created a singular sound. Like most great bands, they never fit into any particular zeitgeist – too raggedy for the pop punk contingent, too peppy for the grunge trend, they nonetheless retained a respected status among bands who appreciated their consistently grabby tunes and fun live show.
Despite any remaining expectations of what “success” was supposed to be, by the turn of the millennium the Fastbacks became that precious thing – one of those awesome bands that awesome bands like.
It should be noted that, while grunge soon gained a definition as a downer genre (that has taken root since), Bloch and company palled around with that Seattle scene from the get-go, and knew many of them as fun rocker kids just trying their best to get through seven months of rain by rocking.
The Fastbacks kept careening forward right through the ‘Alternative Rock” era that ignored all the fun underground garage punk and instead painted rock as increasingly dreary and grievance-based. The early 2000s came, and the Fastbacks took their leave.
They’ve recently gotten back together for occasional reunion shows. Always holding them together throughout their stop/start whirlwind of a career was ace guitarist/producer and philosophical center of the band, Kurt Bloch.
Bloch, who began his career as a recording studio whizz with Fastbacks, never stopped twiddling the knobs for lots of your favorite bands and/or underrated acts. We checked in with him on his ongoing mission to bring fun to the fringes despite the mainstream consistently choosing incorrectly.
-------------------------------
Kurt Bloch, rockin', 1990 (Fuck the NRA. I will assume Kurt's t-shirt here was de rigueur '90s irony.)
-------------------------------------
What was the first album you loved; and what was the first album you loved because of its production?
Good question, hard to answer. I think it was 45s and AM radio that got me going on recording qualities, how loud some of the great hits of the early-’70s sounded. How some records sounded like they were a band playing inside your head. I think I was aware of EQ and compression sounds early on, how the drum fills would sort of obliterate everything behind it on some songs. How the guitar would be so loud in the breaks. How, if the record didn’t have enough treble, it would be unexciting; if there was too much then it’d sound wimpy.
Then getting into albums, and FM radio, you’d listen to Larks’ Tongues In Aspic or Dark Side Of The Moon, and they had this spacious quality that was rad; the Scorpions’ Fly To The Rainbow was right in your face, really up-front and close. Then, going to see bands live, we’d see the coliseum style shows – that was so cool, but then getting to see bands in smaller spaces where you could hear the amps on stage, and feel the sound pressure in the room –now that was a mind-opener. You could feel the Marshalls and the actual sound coming off of the stage.
Then when punk bands started playing, that’s when it started getting interesting. You know, like I just saw this killer band that sounded so great at the show, and their record sounds like a bowlful of shit. Why?! That leads to one-track, two-track, four-track tape recorders, and each time you record something, you have a whole book of revelations of what to do and what not to do. So many great recordings from that early punk era without a bunch of reverb. It was another revelation. A lot of those early digital reverbs that everyone had, I just hated that fake trebly, scritchy sound. Rather just not use any reverb than that icky sound.
How did the Fastbacks form?
Kim and Lulu were high school friends of ours, The Cheaters was our neighborhood band; only lasted a couple years but they were good ones! When that band disintegrated on-stage, there was still band gear in my parents’ basement. Kim (Warnick, bass/vocals) had been in a band, The Radios, and Lulu (Gargiulo) wanted to play guitar and sing. Somehow my parents didn’t put a stop to it all, so we started playing a couple times a week. Not saying we got good, but we got better.
youtube
How long before you felt you had locked into the Fastbacks’ sound?
I reckon whatever “sound” we had was pretty well established early on; it was just whatever we wanted to do. Of course we loved the punk bands of the era first and foremost, but also the ’60s and ’70s pop music we grew up with; and the hard rock bands of the ’70s too! And I always was a fan of the wonderful arrangements and sound of the ’70s prog bands, once I started writing most of the songs, these things would creep in.
youtube
Live, 1986
I have this romantic vision of Kim Warnick as a long-haired rocker teen crashing parties and such. Is that correct?
Ha ha ha!! We were all pretty good (bad?) at crashing parties, some of the shit we did makes me wince thinking of it all. But it was 1977, ‘78; things were different back then, a different kind of boredom ran rampant through kids’ minds back then. There was a real disdain for society, maybe not to the degree of the UK bands at the time, but still there nonetheless. Often there was nothing to do other than the proverbial let’s go fuck shit up. And the music was such a part of all that.
So you got a story about something back then that would make you wince now?
Back when we were teenagers in The Cheaters, we would go to pretty desperate lengths to create excitement. The Cheaters singer, Scott Dittman, was maybe the funniest person I’ve ever known, and often in our search for something to do, he would drive a car full of us down to the frats at the University Of Washington. We’d go crash frat parties, rarely did we fit in unnoticed. You’d grab some keg cups and try to hang out, usually immediately, “Would you please leave.” And that didn’t often sit well with Scott. If we were going to “please leave” then we would not leave without exacting some sort of a toll. I guess we could run pretty fast, or we would’ve got our asses kicked pretty well back then. Somehow a few weeks later we’d go back to the same frat house that had a bookcase upended or a row of bikes knocked over, and lo and behold, the same thing would happen again. Of course we were never hired to play any frat parties.
Scott also loved to fight. He took boxing lessons and was always trying to teach us how to fight too. You knew when the gloves came out it was time to find something else to do. “Come on, you just gotta keep your guard up.” (smash smash smash) “You said you weren’t gonna hit us in the face.” Yeah right.
The Cheaters and The Accident (another erstwhile punk outfit) set up a show at a non-punk bar, somewhere down by Olympia. This would’ve been 1979 maybe. There were no roadmaps for like-minded or “friendly” places to play, outside of the major cities. But we were trying to do something, anything, and our double bill got the booking. This bar had a dance floor that also was used for bar fighting. There must have been some sort of organization to the fights, but it was sanctioned bar fighting. No-one was on the dance floor or anywhere near it when we started, so Scott tried to solicit a fight or two during our set. This was unfriendly territory, we were all, “Stop this nonsense!” But once you told Scott not to do something, well he was going to double down of course. Fortunately no one took him up on his offers, and we got out unscathed, but the bar owner took me into his office at the end of the night and gave me a rundown on what we needed to do to become successful in the music business, and the first thing was to get rid of that singer.
1978
First Fastbacks show, February, 1980 – any memories of it?
Oh, totally! The first Fastbacks show, it was at a rec center in a quiet neighborhood, it was three bands: The Vains, Psychopop, and The Fastbacks. We were all friends, and it was all three bands’ first shows. Very ramshackle, but we cobbled together a sound system, someone had a few lights, everyone brought what they had, and the show went on. A little rough around the edges, but the power didn’t go out, no cops were called, nothing was ruined – an early triumph for sure.
Was the power pop zeitgeist of that time a thing for Fastbacks? Did you feel a part of it?
No! For sure the New Wave was hitting strong at that point, but we were certainly not embraced by the new wavers at all. I suppose for that first year, we were pretty terrible, but we had some friends and people who wanted to give us a chance. Getting Duff (McKagan – yes, that one from Guns ‘N Roses) to play drums was the first step into making the band more listenable, but we were still a long ways off of what the general public would consider valuable music. We got kicked off of a show after our first set (of two). “That’s okay, you guys don’t have to play another set.” And I was all, “What do you mean we don’t have to?!” Oh, I get it.
Then when the hardcore bands cropped up, we were pals with some of them, but we weren’t furious enough for them really. I recall some sort of fury at a DOA/The Fartz/Fastbacks show. It required some foresight, which many didn’t possess, to support any kind of music that wasn’t 100% punk. Conversely, the proper power pop bands, well, we were a little too power and not enough pop, I reckon. We wanted to be that, but it’d take a bit still to hone those chops.
Had Duff McKagen played in any band before that?
Duff was the bass player in The Vains, who played that Laurelhurst Rec Center show. That was his first show. He must’ve been 15, barely 16?
Did he exhibit behaviors that would later align with Guns ‘N Roses’ infamous lifestyle?
We were still pretty reeled-in at that point, no one really even got plastered, no one started doing drugs yet. Might’ve been some Budweisers around, but nothing stronger yet.
Guns 'N Roses 2nd show, 1985
Got any Vains stories, recollections of a show, or the general scene from whence they came/played? Was there a good raw, original punk scene in Seattle in late '70s? I'm aware of Soldier and some other bands, but I wanna get it from the horse’s mouth.
The Vains only played three, maybe four shows total. In the late ’70s into early ’80s it was pretty hard to keep something going if you were any sort of impatient. Most bands never got the chance to play enough to iron out any difficulties, or taste any sort of real success. Lots of arguing over what direction to take, stick to your punk rock guns, and play to a rental hall of your friends; or try to get “jobs” in the bars, which would mean being stricken with the “cover band” tag, which was NOT punk.
youtube
1978
The Enemy worked the hardest, yet still couldn’t crack the code in 1979. The Telepaths, The Blackouts, The Lewd – everyone broke up, or moved away and then broke up. The Fartz made a pretty good go of it, but even they sorta morphed into Ten Minute Warning, and then morphed into an art band… The Silly Killers stayed pretty punk. The Living ripped it up for their short lifespan. But they were all in that 1982 dilemma, you can almost see a line in the sand, drawn in the summer of 1982. Not a lot of bands made it across that line that summer.
youtube
The Enemy live, 1980
If I remember it was some sort of divine intervention that The Fastbacks reconvened in 1983 to fire it up again, it was nearly the end of the line. But it was also clearly a new beginning, a new lease on life, a new crop of kids started bands in those Metropolis years; the Metropolis was a new all-ages venue that I would consider the petri dish of the next bundle of bands.
As the ‘80s took hold and punk rock hall shows were sort of the only stage for many of our bands, after a couple years of not getting to any sort of next level, it was clear that there needed to be a re-grouping of some sort. We’d see our friends’ bands get actual paying gigs in bars – if they were non-punk sounding. Of course many of the punk bands went to the dark side of ’80s metal. Everyone was looking to do something that could “go somewhere.”
Somewhere right in that 1982 corridor, drugs started flourishing, stupidity set in. Duff came with us Fastbacks as a “roadie” in 1984 down to L.A., and when we came back I reckon he moved to L.A. to escape that whole rigamarole. No one was getting anywhere here anyway. A bold move at that time, at the advanced age of 20!
youtube
1987
Word is Fastbacks have had between 12 and 20 drummers. Short of naming every single drummer, are there a few you’d like to point to as having had a particularly interesting stint; or who went on to other bands?
Gosh, all the Fastbacks drummers had something great about them. There were a few who only did one show. I publicly apologize to those who didn’t last. Those were strange times. I don’t think there are any unsolved mysteries in the Fastbacks drummer world, Dan Peters, who recorded a couple songs with us but no shows, Tad Hutchison, and Tom Hendrikson, who each did one show…. Some convoluted moments for sure, and all killer drummers!
Do you think if you would have remained drummer for Fastbacks that you would have still gotten into production?
Yeah, I think the fascination with recording was parallel to the live playing side of things, it was always there in my constitution. Wanting to learn, wanting to figure out how to make records that captured how killer bands sounded. It was such a tall order back then. Seemed like the old guard [engineers] didn’t “get it,” or were prohibitively expensive; and so many of the others didn’t sound kickass like we wanted. Of course this comes from the actual band, first and foremost; that is learned the hard way! But if the band blazes at their show, it seemed that their records should sound blazing too, but that wasn’t often the case.
1988
youtube
1989
From what I remember, the Fastbacks rep was that of the favorite local band of all the Seattle bands, and hence got on as openers for bands who would soon get huge during that whole grunge thing…
Pretty hard to say from the inside view. We had the unfortunate hurdle of being broken up from late-1988 till mid-1990. A lot of opportunity probably squandered during those times. But, unlike anyone else I can think of, we did get a second chance via Sub Pop, and another decade of rock. I know we were quite lucky in that department. We never did gigs large or small with Nirvana, Soundgarden, sort of the class of ’89. We did share a slightly miserable practice space with Green River and later Mother Love Bone. Always pals with those cats, so we did do opening stints with Pearl Jam in 1996, all around the world.
What was miserableness about it?
Oh man, that place… It was in a basement in Pioneer Square, the old, original downtown Seattle. The Great Seattle Fire devastated downtown in like 1889, and they rebuilt the city on top of the old city, one floor higher. So our basement was on the level with the old, original city; some rooting around could be done. There was no bathroom or running water down there, so you had to go to the bar a block away to use the facilities, but often you just couldn’t be bothered. In the space next to ours, it was a smashed up, decrepit old room that we moved all the garbage from our side into. No lighting of any sort, so it was all flashlights if you had them, and filling up bottles of pee and putting them where ever we could find room.
But of course we raged supreme down there, some epic parties, bands playing, and whatnot; of course no water or facilities, but grand times in the ’80s. Somehow, I ended up being in charge of paying rent, not the best job for me to take on. It meant tracking down Andrew Wood once a month and trying to get him to pay his share of their rent. First it was Malfunkshun, and Green River was there too. We might’ve blown up before Mother Love Bone started? I think I remember Green River blowing up too, after their California trek; it would’ve been not too long after that that The Fastbacks unceremoniously imploded. But for a while it was definitely a rager.
-------------------------------------
Nifty, random link I stumbled on with some cool early Fastbacks fliers, stories, and live stuff.
-------------------------------------
youtube
1992
While you didn't play with the "biggies" of the scene as much as I thought, got any early Nirvana or Soundgarden tale of any sort you'd like to share?
Our fabled practice basement was just a couple blocks from The Central, a venue that was sort of home base for a lot of stuff. The Vogue as well, it was on the north end of downtown, we were on the south end. Many people had keys to the place, so it was not surprising to duck in between sets at The Central, to have cheap beers or whatnot. I first saw Soundgarden at The Central, and they were certainly mind-blowing. Would’ve been ’87? Quickly became a favorite Seattle band, and when their first 7” came out, my roommates hated me. I had a tendency to play those 45’s over and over and over again. But they played The Central a lot, and just got better and better, heavier and heavier. I remember the first time they played “Beyond The Wheel”, it was at the Vogue. I was standing next to Mark Arm and we looked at each other and just said FUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHH…
The first Nirvana show I saw was also at the Vogue, it was maybe not the greatest Nirvana show, but man I thought that singer was amazing. Shortly after, Jon Poneman (Sub Pop co-founder) was at the bar there and said, “If you buy me a coffee now, I’ll give you a 45 tomorrow that will change your life.” An easy proposition. Sub Pop HQ was half a block away, he gave me a “Love Buzz” 45, and once again, the roommates had a reason to hate. I must’ve played that record 100 times in a row. Might’ve taken them a bit to find their pummeling style, but man they sure did. Then after Bleach had been out a while, all the rumors of major label this and major label that… So exciting and weird.
Who is a favorite Seattle “grunge era” band you really dug and maybe didn’t get the recognition you think it deserved? Mine are the Derelicts and Zipgun.
Of course! Pure Joy, Flop, H-Hour, the Meices – wait they were actually from SF… Huge Spacebird, Once For Kicks…. Have you got an hour or so?!
I know you are no doubt tired of this question, but do you have a late ‘80s/early ‘90s story or show that happened where you thought, “Damn, this Seattle scene thing is getting some real attention? This is fucking weird.”
After the Fastbacks blew up in 1988, I started playing with the Young Fresh Fellows, and we were off and running pretty hard right away. Certainly a parallel path from the Seattle Grunge Explosion, but a decent path it was! I was pals with Jon and Bruce (Pavitt) at Sub Pop when they started, so I’d go hang out at their early HQ/distributor place downtown. It was amazing to see some of these bands blow up when they did.
Young Fresh Fellows, 1989; Kurt Bloch far right
I suppose the thing that sealed it for me was listening to the advance cassette of Nevermind on a Young Fresh Fellows trip. Scott McCaughey had been assigned to review it for local music rag, The Rocket, and I nabbed it from him on a trip out East. It totally blew my doors wide open. Already having been a superfan since that “Love Buzz” 45, and seeing a couple of the shows they did here before going out to record that album, then hearing it for the first time on headphones; then as our tour progressed, seeing the record just going ballistic at every record store, it was just crazy. It never stopped getting bigger and bigger. This is so fucking weird!
Strange feeling of seeing a local band you saw shlubbing around town or peeing next to them at a dive, to hearing them play in a grocery store in Nevada, or whatever....
Soundgarden was the first one I remember blowing up. They went from Sub Pop to SST to A&M – they sorta seemed to have their shit together pretty well. Alice In Chains were kinda off our radar, they were only on the Rock radio stations; it wasn’t until their second album that I noticed that they actually were killer. But Nirvana, they were crazy cool from the get-go, not in the FM Rock station sort of way, but the punk underground sort of way. Plus I didn’t really know them at the beginning, so there was way more mystery about them. A couple legendary Seattle club shows before they went off to start Nevermind; the OK Hotel first playing of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” we were just transfixed – What the fuck is this?! Then the Off Ramp show, they went on really late, and got cut off right before 2am. Somehow the club picked up the empties and let the band play on into the night, and what a show it was. Then… nothing.
Didn’t really hear anything from Nirvana ‘til the advance cassette of Nevermind went out, and of course thinking, if I like this so much, it’s probably never gonna go anywhere. Wrong. It was like a slow ball of fire, radio then record stores, like every record store playing it, every magazine… It would’ve made you hate a lesser band, but it really was great so there was a sense of pride attached to it all. Finally something we loved is big. But then how big? There seemed to be no end to it. It was everywhere. And so weird to think that kids dug something that was blazing and amazing.
Were you defacto producer of Fastbacks from the get-go of recording?
Oh for sure. Not by strong-arming anyone, but just because there was no money, and no one else could be bothered! Our first 45 was with Neil Hubbard and Jack Weaver, as we were doing a song for a Seattle comp LP, and as per the usual, just recorded some extra songs in our allotted time. The first EP was Peter Barnes, drummer for The Enemy, killer Seattle band and very much an inspiration to all the bands in the late-’70s in Seattle. Then after that, it was trial by fire.
Can you tell me more about The Enemy, and their local import?
The Enemy pretty much initiated the punk “scene” in Seattle. There were a few bands, but they started a club, it was all ages, March, 1978. Otherwise it would’ve been hall shows, but The Bird brought everyone together. Originally only open for a few months, but there were shows there every Friday and Saturday, it really did give us something to do.
My first band, The Cheaters, might not have actually played anywhere if not for them. We could have languished in my parents’ basement forever if not for being stopped by The Enemy members at a Ramones show: “Hey! Are you guys in a band? Would you want to play at our club we’re opening up in a few months?” Of course we said yes, we didn’t tell them that we were just barely a band, we’d never actually played a show, nor would we maybe ever had if not for their offer. We were just teenagers, my brother Al was still in High School. But they took us in and let us play shows. The drummer, Peter Barnes, filled in for a night our real drummer couldn’t play.
Everyone knew each other, when it was time to record what was to be The Fastbacks’ first EP, Peter volunteered to be our producer. He figured out how to get cool, kickass sounds and make things happen. No one had any money or experience so it had to be on a budget, but he made it happen. The record turned out great. “In America” was on the commercial new wave station, we thought we had it made!
I thought I knew what to do, to various degrees of success. Conrad Uno at Egg Studio did much of our first album. He was wise beyond words and also a great teacher. After that LP was finished he was all, “You can do all this, I think, I’ll be back at the end of the night to close up!” Then it seemed like the right avenue. So many producers seemed like they just wanted to add stuff in order to have their presence be felt. I always felt, like – what is the least amount of stuff we can have on here to make it happen? Less stuff, but louder. Certainly not against adding things, but also happy to leave things out as much as possible. Always loved the one-guitar bands that didn’t double everything all the time. Makes you think a little harder about what you’re doing.
youtube
1994
Okay, I will name a band, and you give me the first thing that comes to mind when you think of your production gigs with them:
Presidents of the U.S.A.
We’d do several takes of any given song, as the band was learning them, Chris (Ballew, singer) would play his two-string bass flawlessly every take, and sing a scratch vocal that could’ve been used as the keeper. Never a mistake, never less than killer every time.
Robyn Hitchcock
Also just an amazing music machine. Put him in an iso booth with a mic for vocal and one for acoustic guitar. He’d show the band a new song and go into the booth, sometimes it would just be one take and they’d nail it, with the lead vocal included. Never a lyric sheet in sight. A brain that truly works overtime. Peter Buck playing his 12-string on a song that he had just heard, and plays flawlessly the first time. Great Peter quote: “I like to get things right.” Indeed!
Fastbacks
Ha!! Some of the recording we’ve done astounds me to this day. It’s like any idea we had, we’d just do it. I swear, no one ever said, “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Listening back to the early ’90s recordings, there truly is something about inspiration and enthusiasm that really is inspiring and enthusiastic! Some of that music is pretty weird, even some songs that I wrote, I can’t imagine where they came from. I know we did them and all, but what was the impetus, where did they come from?!
Nashville Pussy
Another tale of just trying not to ruin a band that sounded killer. Amazing to think that they all fit in the tiny live room at Egg for that first album. The sheer volume of air pressure in there was unbelievable. A perfect example of what we’d set out to do, just try to not let the recording process get in the way of the recording. And nominated for a Grammy! I went with them to the Awards show – limo, booze, and afterparties. We were scheming all the horrible things that we’d say when we won the award, who we were gonna thank, who we were gonna blame. Of course there’s no way we’d win, they barely could say the name of the band when reading off the nominees! But what an experience. So many laughs.
Mudhoney
Five Dollar Bob’s Mock Cooter Stew (Reprise, 1993) doesn’t get enough props. I think it’s a great record. I really tried to make each song sound different and killer in its own way. Dan Peters (drummer) is always dishing out the quality.
Young Fresh Fellows
It’s easy to work quickly with a band you’re in. You kind of already know what’s going to happen, you know how to set up since you’ve already seen what works and what doesn’t over the last decade or two. We had intended to record maybe four or five songs for Tiempo De Lujo. Somehow we’d crammed all four of us in the basement here; after the two days we’d recorded twelve band tracks – so an album it was! Toxic Youth as well. We’d gone over to Jim Sangster’s living room to learn a few songs before starting recording the next day, and once we got going, they just kept coming and coming. When inspiration strikes, keep the tape rolling!
Can you describe Conrad Uno's Egg Studios; the kind of size or situation you were dealing with? Was there like a famous recording board there you worked with?
Egg Studio, where I and others honed their chops, was a welcome alternative to the “normal” studios of the time. It was truly a basement studio, the performance room was smaller than an ordinary living room. Many bands’ rehearsal spaces were larger than this. But it really did have a relaxed feel to it, and loud bands could all set up in the room and play live and get a good sound. Mudhoney, Nashville Pussy, Supersnazz, Devil Dogs, Supersuckers, Zeke – it was home base for so many great albums.
Conrad Uno moved into the house in maybe 1987, I reckon we finished Fastbacks …And His Orchestra there; and by early 1988, we began Very Very Powerful Motor, then the Sub Pop 7” and Zücker sessions. It began as an 8-track studio. Conrad brought in the Spectrasonics console that was formerly at Stax/Volt studio – rumored to once be owned by Paul McCartney, under whose purview a varispeed knob was installed. The knob remains, it’s Paul’s Knob. The console is now at Crackle And Pop studio here in Seattle, and is working better than ever.
Before Mudhoney began their third album, Piece of Cake, their second at Egg, they bought a 16-track machine for the studio, and that was the classic setup for so many records there in the ‘90s.
youtube
1996
I personally would love to hear about making the classic Devil Dogs album, Saturday Night Fever (Crypt/Sympathy for the Record Industry, 1994). Whose idea was it to make it kind of like a party, with friends and fans whopping it up in the studio between songs?
It was their idea from the beginning to make it a party album, “You have been invited… to a party!” Another band that didn’t need any fancy fussing about, they already sounded like a house on fire. Just tried to record them and not get in the way, make sure that the playback sounded like it did in the room with them.
Definitely the last night of the session, they invited all their Seattle friends over for a party, and we played the songs from the album through twice, if I remember, and just had a mic in the room while they were going. All the bottles clinking and all the blabbering was totally what happened. There was so little time to get everything done while we were there. They had booked two gigs on recording days – one out of town in Bellingham! Basically it was like wrangling the Three Stooges to record and mix a full album and an EP in like five days. Let’s just say that the morning hours were not particularly productive. But fortunately, when they were on, they were unstoppable. And so fuckin’ funny! What a fucking great record!
Oh yeah, definitely the most hilarious band to tour with too! We did a month with them once in Europe, traveling in the same packed little van. And even the bad hungover mornings in the van drives would lead to so much cracking up. Singer Andy G. sometimes stood up and imitated Tom Jones live. Anyway, can you recall who all was in the “crowd” on that record?
Honestly, I don’t! The studio was in a neighborhood, so all sessions had to be finished by 10pm. I loved the idea of recording a loud listening party and then mixing that in with the album, but it was so precarious to cram a bunch of drunks in the tiny studio and try to not let any gear get ruined, while still egging on loud misbehavior. Then getting all the cats out of there by 10 and not annoying Conrad or his neighbors in the process.
You must have some fun Andy G. stories too.
All three of those guys had their moments! Andy, Steve, Mighty Joe. Someone should’ve given them their own TV series. It might not have lasted very long, but what a show it would’ve been. I’ve never seen a group rile each other up the way they did. Should’ve had a room mic going constantly while they tried to make a group decision. There was way more work than we had time for. Somehow we got it all done, but just barely.
-------------------------------------
Crypt Records, 1993
-----------------------------------
And here’s where I decided to check in with Devil Dogs drummer, Mighty Joe Vincent, to get some more details on their Bloch party:
"So, in the friends crowd [on the Saturday Night Fever album] was Eddie and Dan Bolton from the Supersuckers, James Burdyshaw and the rest of the Sinister Six, and a bunch of really cool women whose names have escaped my memory banks.
We def recorded on the Stax board. I remember because we had hopes that there was some soul residue left in the cables that might coat our tracks.
We totally loved Kurt. What’s not to love? I do remember that it was a Crypt budget recording so we had to make every minute count, so we were mixing until we were all so tired we were delirious. I’m pretty sure we went ‘til 2a.m. or something like that, but that was mixing. We did that in the middle of a tour, so we did about two weeks of gigs from NYC across this great nation of ours as well as that other great nation to our north, then out to Seattle. While we were doing it , we had a gig up in Bellingham, so we took a day off to drive up there.
I remember Scott Mccaughy was working there at Egg. I was talking to him one day and he told me his days of playing out on the road were over as his wife just had a kid and he had to be a good dad and provide a steady paycheck. I really felt bad for him. And then of course, a short time after that, Pete Buck asked him to come on the road with R.E.M. and said he would pay him a million dollars. Like an actual million dollars. That always made me happy to hear."
youtube
-------------------------------------------
And now, back to Kurt Bloch!
Who were bands you liked to tour with? And/or, a classic Fastbacks tour story?
We had some great west coast tours with DOA in the early-to-mid ’80s, they were definitely an early inspiration to go head-on and charge through best you can. They certainly blazed a trail for the rest of us to follow, doing everything themselves, like Black Flag did from Southern California. The ’80s were a rocky road for the Fastbacks. We played a lot of shows in Vancouver, BC, as well as Seattle, but it was a lot of problems and fighting, ha, and it wasn’t until the ’90s that we actually went out for any length of time – certainly getting into occasional serious trouble with The Meices, Motocaster, Gaunt, and even the New Bomb Turks!
Pearl Jam asked you to do some stadium shows in 1995, arguably the peak grunge year. How did you relate to the whole fame/stadium situation surrounding those shows?
It was January ’95, Pearl Jam asked us to play a radio show from their rehearsal space. I kinda didn’t know what they were talking about, and maybe sort of blew it off. I was trying to finish a Sicko record that night, couldn’t be bothered. I did like their Vitalogy record, “Not For You,” “Spin The Black Circle.” The rest of the Fastbacks were all, “C’mon, we’re doing this!” And I grudgingly told Sicko I was going to have to leave early. I didn’t even bring a guitar, I knew that Stone had a cool ‘50s Gold Top, maybe I could use that.
Then of course we get there and it’s really fun, just a big party scene, tons of buddies and band cats. We played three songs on the Pearl Jam gear setup, maybe Kim talked on the radio, drank some beers, great time! That was cool enough, but then they asked us to open a few shows at the end of the year, Salt Lake City and San Jose I think, and we’re all like, “Hell yeah!” And everything went well, then, “Would you want to go do a U.S. tour, oh and maybe a Europe tour following that…?” And we were all, “Hellz yeah!” And that all went great, clearly we would be the next big thing, the world is gonna love us, nothing holding us back now! We had a great record out, New Mansions In Sound (Sub Pop, 1996). Man, that was it – lots and lots of fun, great shows. We invented an auxiliary opening band for some of the shows, The What. We played Who tunes with Eddie Vedder incognito with a wrestling mask. We drag Mike McCready out for jams, Stone Gossard to sing one of his PJ songs, Eddie did “Leaving Here” with us a couple times, just great rock times in the giant venues. Somehow it didn’t lead to us being the Next Big Thing, but it was fun to pretend for a few months.
1994
Any good backstage shenanigans stories?
There weren’t a whole lot of super shenanigans. They had an espresso machine onstage every night, so we’d all slug down coffees, blast through our tunes, and then get drunk and watch Pearl Jam. Sometimes we would annoy their wonderful crew by being loud and boisterous aside of the stage, spilling bottles of wine or whatnot, but not much more than that. Everyone got along really well, and it was well-protected against after show bullies or negativity. We’d just keep on our course, often ‘til the huge sports arena closed down and they’d kick us out after everything had been loaded out – and we’d still be back there cranking tunes and running around.
It was totally like an arena-sized version of a living room party most every night. Their crew moved all the gear, we barely had to do anything except play every night.
I know you knew some of their members from earlier in the scene, but did you know Eddie Vedder before he got asked to join Pearl Jam?
I might not have met Eddie until the live radio show we did? He came up from San Diego. Didn’t know him before then at all, but we were fast friends. We would spend hours talking about the Who and riding around on the catering carts and smashing into the walls of the arenas. Come to think of it, we were probably very annoying. But no one, like, smashed up their hotel rooms or anything. It was probably comparatively tame.
Might sound weird, but while playing in the Seattle scene -- which is generally described as kind of serious, or dark, or junkies, or you know, “grungy” – did you and the Fastbacks feel kind of out-of-place; or are those kind of definitions of grunge and that town/time not correct?
The Seattle “thing” certainly was a dark, serious sound. That isn’t to say that every musician was dark and serious, but that darkness prevailed. To say The Fastbacks felt a little out of place at that point would be correct; but I always thought we were here first. It’s not like we didn’t dig lots of the bands, but it also wasn’t like we would try to take them on at their own game. It just wouldn’t’ve happened. We did do a version of “Swallow My Pride” – Green River’s, not The Ramones – on Sub Pop 200 [compilation], after a Soundgarden version too; but it ended up being menacing only in a Blue Öyster Cult sort of way, rather than ala either previous version. Slow and heavy just wasn’t in our DNA.
Columbus, OH, 1993 (Courtesy of Bela Koe-Krompecher)
I remember when Fastbacks stayed with New Bomb Turks while on tour in 1993, you guys, well I think specifically Lulu, made an amazing Thai meal for us. Did you always cook for bands you crashed with, or just for us ‘cuz we’re so awesome and nice?
Ha. I think the wonderful cooking was a bit of a rarity. We weren’t much of a crash on people’s floor kind of band by the ’90s, but sometimes it was great to have a day off and some good ideas! Remember that Metallica VHS box set had just come out, and we watched it ‘til the end because Lulu and I both worked on the film crew for the shows they filmed in Seattle, and we wanted to see if we, several years after the actual shows, got any credits at the end… and sure enough we did. Reason to celebrate!
Columbus seemed to love you. What were some other fave towns you played?
Always a great time in Columbus. Not necessarily Cleveland though. We weren’t the hard-touring road warriors that a lot of the other (more successful) bands were. It was whatever city we had friends in that were the best. Vancouver BC, San Francisco, L.A., NYC, maybe Albany, Columbus, Istanbul…
Contract and ticket for 1993 Columbus, OH show. (Courtesy of Bela Koe-Krompecher)
Highly technical and professional stage diagram implorations, Columbus, OH, 1993 show (Courtesy of Bela Koe-Krompecher)
I could be wrong, but you didn’t go over to Europe a lot, did you? Were you able to procure any production work from Euro bands you met whilst on tour there?
Oddly, not a lot of Euro tours… Seems like we should’ve done more, but there was always something. Young Fresh Fellows did some great trips, especially in Spain. Fastbacks Spanish tour was a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Not because of the people in Spain, no sir. We certainly lit it up in Japan once, though!
I did a couple albums for Les Thugs, the French band. One of them in Seattle and one in Angers. May have been bookended with some music travel. It’s amazing to look back at the old calendars and see that between tours with the Fastbacks and Young Fresh Fellows, recording with those two bands and recording other bands. Man, there were times when there was nary a day off, those ‘90s months were packed! Gotta consider myself pretty lucky. And so many killer records I got to be part of.
As a producer, do you feel you are mainly bringing an “ear” to finding the sounds the band wants, or do you try to gently impose a certain style and sensibility over the whole production?
Always try to keep the kickass factor high. I would never try to impose anything other than to try to keep everyone happy so they could do their best work, and not do the same bit over and over and over. Work hard and play hard, but not to overanalyze every little thing. Not under-analyze either, but if it’s killer, it doesn’t matter if everything “lines up” perfectly, or if the choruses speed up a little bit. Try to capture what is great about a band live in concert, and not dilute that if you can help it. Don’t add a bunch of crap just to put your mark on a project.
It's interesting how you professed a love for prog, but you had an innate sense of not always overdubbing too much – note your comment about loving bands that only had one guitar, etc.
The true exciting prog bands started coming out around 1968 and ’69, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Van Der Graaf Generator; Pink Floyd and Moody Blues had already been around but maybe weren’t quite included. Recording technique at the time was still fairly straightforward for the most part, there was of course room for overdubbing on an eight-track machine, but most of the first-wave prog bands’ recordings were not overloaded with overdubs. The magic was what they did with their four or five musicians, the arrangements you hear on the record were the same instrumentation as they played live. Some of the songs would have been concocted in a studio, but it wasn’t until later that walls of overdubs became commonplace.
That’s where the greatness of the original bands lies – cool vocal arranging and melding several songs’ worth of ideas into one track. Not a lot of room for squirminess either, it wasn’t so easy punching in on a giant eight-track tape machine in 1968. You made one mistake on that verse? You do the whole thing again!
Okay, gotta ask, with as much exposition as you’d like – what was your favorite recording session(s); and worst recording session(s)?
Pretty much always subverted the disasters. A time or two I told a band, after seeing a live show, that they weren’t quite ready to record yet; play a few more shows and practice a lot, record your practices and actually listen to them constructively. Studio time is expensive, practice time is (or at least was) cheap. You don’t have to have every bit of every song nailed down exactly, but do have most everything pretty well figured out, and be ready for criticism during the recording. If the rhythm isn’t working, be prepared to fine-tune your part so it is; if your harmony vocal is a half-step off, go ahead and adjust!
Some of the great sessions are those where I feel that I learned things, a new piece of gear, a new way of looking at things. Overwhelming Colorfast, Supersuckers, Les Thugs in France, The Meices in Florida… Or the records that just slammed out of nowhere. Devil Dogs, Flop, Supersnazz, Nashville Pussy. So many first albums by bands where they have been playing the songs at shows for a year or two, the tempos are up, the blood is pumping, get rid of the headphones and make it like you’re playing a gig. Play the song three times without stopping. Play three different songs in a row without stopping.
1999 (Courtesy of your's truly)
You’re still actively producing. What have you worked on recently you’d like to highlight? And what’s coming up?
There’s always some great Seattle band records going on – Bürien, 38 Coffin, Once For Kicks, Insect Man, The Drolls, Zack Static. These days, some records take a while to finish, I suppose it’s the nature of the business now. Trying now to clean the slate and get these out the door before starting new ones!
And there’s maybe a new Fastbacks coming, no?
There was no plan of any sort. We were having lunch as we sometimes do, and started talking about a couple songs it would be fun to learn and maybe record. Our pal Joe “Meice” Reineke had recently finished an ambitious and fantastic recording building in his back yard; wouldn’t it be fun to check that out….? Well let’s call him and see what his schedule is. Oh! he’s got a day open, whaddayasay, let’s take it. Well there’s a few other songs we could learn, let’s make it two days… I guess we’d better practice… What if we did enough songs for an album? Maybe we did! Got some band tracks, everyone played their butts off! Now we gotta make more magic. No target completion date nor avenue to release, but everyone is excited to finish it!
------------------------------------
Post Script: This article sprung from an editor at a national mag asking if I wanted to do a story on Kurt Bloch, which of course I said yes to cuz Kurt's a great guy and I've been a Fastbacks fan for a goodly spell. But some months passed and plans changed, and so here it is! Also, I would've put more videos in this piece because the Fastbacks have a ton of great songs, but I guess I just learned there is a 10-video limit for a tumblr post. Who knew?
All images courtesy of Kurt Bloch, except where noted.
#punk#fastbacks#Seattle rock#seattle scene#grunge#1990s punk#1990s rock#1990s#sub pop#nirvana#soundgarden#Kurt Bloch#garage punk#devil dogs#Mighty Joe Vincent#crypt records#Seattle punk#Conrad Uno#Egg Studio#mudhoney#nashville pussy#Presidents of the United States of America#robyn hitchcock#guns n roses#new bomb turks#gaunt#columbus ohio#Youtube
16 notes
·
View notes
Text
you know for ostensibly a delirium fan blog, i end up talking disproportionally about dream and desire, so lets even those scales a little, because there's plenty interesting to talk about with my girl
and one thing that i think is really important to delirium's characterisation is that she is not a child
she's impulsive, yes. she can be absent minded, she enjoys playing, and has little care about being perceived as weird. she struggles to communicate her thoughts in a 'normal' way, all things common amongst various neurodivergences. but she's extremely aware of her surroundings, and her realm is home to every fucked up thought anyone's ever had, she's in no way naive (like look at how many of her ramblings involve sex or death or other things that would be censored in kids media)
the very first time we meet delirium in the comics, we get this bit of narration, which has stuck in my head since i read it
because that battle between who delirium is and who people see her as is fascinating to me
she's older than every being that's ever lived, mortal or not, bar 8 (her siblings and her parents)
and celestial bodies are also people in this universe, they're all younger than her too, she's watched the stars grow up
she is the 9th oldest being ever
but we see so much of this story through the eyes of the other endless, and they don't think of her as the 9th eldest being in existence. they think of her as their baby sister
some more than others. i think destruction was one of the people most willing to see her as she actually is. and while i'm not sure if dream is always on the list of good siblings here (he has a tendency to be condescending), someone commented on my post about a dream and delirium scene that despite delirium making no sense, dream doesn't talk down to her
he may not see her as on his level (he does, after all, agree to go with delirium at first because he assumes it's something she'll get bored of and forget about eventually, he doesn't expect her to be right), but dream at least has an abstract enough domain that he sees through her words to the meaning behind them, and he respects her way of communicating
but with most of her siblings, it's a fight to be taken seriously, and we do see a few moments where she's angry enough to remind them she's their equal
and i love her so much as neurodivergent representation, because how many of us have had to deal with the whole adult physically child mentally thing? oh they're mentally a 5 year old, no, they're mentally an adult, they just think differently to you. and i love del for the fact that she doesn't let certain things being 'childish' stop her from doing them if they feel right, she doesn't let anyone else make her hide things about herself. but also she stands up for herself and reminds her siblings that she knows more than any of them.
and she does, she's the only endless who's been through a change like that. she sees so much more than they do, and just because she can't always communicate it doesn't mean she doesn't understand
her realm is described as the easiest for people to reach, the closest to humanity (but one of the hardest to leave). death gets all the credit for spending the most time with humanity, not distancing herself from that like the other endless, but neither does delirium. del was perhaps the first to figure out what it was the endless were missing. just because her mind is in pieces doesn't mean she isn't whole
(the best characterisations of del in fics will always be the ones that remember her dialogue isn't just random rambling, the rambling has to come hand in hand with extremely perceptive observations of the people around her)
(she's the one of the few people who can make dream speechless in her analysis of his issues)
and yes, her physical presentation is younger than that of her siblings. but she doesn't present as a child, she hasn't since she was delight, she presents as a teenager
because what other physical form perfectly represents that frustration to be seen as the adult you know you are in your head when everyone in your life can only see you as a child?
233 notes
·
View notes
Text
i find it easier to talk about aroace themes in doctor who than in good omens, because i know there was quite a fraught anti-aroace read of the characters that at best ignored the fanbase that was aroace and generally treated it as non-queer in concept -- heck, I wasn't and I'm not even really in in the fanbase (except as extension of doctor who and david tennant and generally enjoying it) and I had to unfollow a heck of a lot of blogs because of a sentiment that was very dismissive of ideas around non-(cis)gendered-allosexual-amatonormative reads of the characters, because it was considered "copping out" of Real Queer Reads of the text, and only really accepted it as Really Queer once The Kiss happened -- so I can only imagine how much it must have sucked for aroace fans of the show who were actively engaging with the fandom and felt that alienation x 1000
and it's interesting because The Kiss does not in fact make the characters less able to be read from a non-(cis)gendered aroace perspective, it's just that kisses are one of the acceptable shorthands for alloromantic allosexual textual reads, so The Kiss in fact makes people less likely to engage with complicated reads of the text (I say like that was happening in the first place), not because it doesn't work, but because amatonormativity accepts only certain semiotics of relationships as "real" or "valuable" while other relationships that don't fulfill these criteria are "merely good friends" and good friends... is ostensibly a non-queer thing to be (does not tangent about relationship anarchy and religious themes, slaps wrist)
all that being said, crowley and aziraphale absolutely do exist within an asexual aromantic agender (aspec) framework, and amatonormativity especially does shut down a lot of the interesting ways one can engage with these characters and the text that they interact with because of their non-normative place within any of the three worlds that are depicted in the story (heaven, hell, earth) -- they do not perform roles that are easily definable, or even acceptable, in these spaces. they get read as queer multiple times in both s1 and s2, but in ways that are simplistic to who they are and what their relationship has been up until that point. that boxing in is one of the reasons they struggle to find words during the last fifteen minutes of s2, because there are only so many "correct" "allowed" ways to relate to one another, and none of them fit, beyond the fun little word "us." which was who they were from s1 already, when they ostensibly weren't queering the text enough -- all of this is ironic because it's how they're treated in the text and by audience
unsure yet if I will talk about it more, because I think... it is still fraught. but I am thinking more about how I read from the framework of aspec experiences and the ways people have blind spots about their own especially amatonormativity, but also allosexual and cisnormative reads that play into how queerness is allowed to exist onscreen only if fulfilling specific semiotic criteria, and not as something that's actually deep and interesting, like theme or story structure or character arc
26 notes
·
View notes
Note
Got a bit inspired by the WotR CRPG's Lich path, but what changes, if any, would you make to the Lich template to fit an Archlich, from DnD's older editions (Forgotten Realms wiki indicates they were first mentioned back in 2e, and last in 4e, not very common though)?
It may not entirely fit Golarion's cosmology of Undead = Bad, but I find the idea of a spellcaster going into Lichdom for altruistic reasons (like, say, needing an emotionless, painless, nigh-inexhaustible army to stem the tides of the Abyss) fascinating. If nothing else, it might get the Church of Pharasma more interested in a particular cause to get this Lich to up and die peacefully and willingly.
And I mention 'changes' since apparently the process of becoming an Archlich was both more difficult, but could yield greater power. Although I can't really find anything to support this claim otherwise, can't find any pages on stats on the topic and searching up 'Archlich' just makes Vecna show up.
-----
Oh wow that's bizarre, I had no idea there was a Good-aligned Lich equivalent in older editions! I'm a little baffled by the fact they didn't think to name themselves anything more creative than just "Better Lich," but the implications of their existence and their creation process sort of does make them Better Liches. If what I'm reading here is correct, the primary difference between becoming an Archlich and a normal Lich is that a normal Lich takes shortcuts in their paths to power, forcing other creatures to bear the brunt of the trauma of their transformation, draining life and soul from others away to sustain themselves. Meanwhile, the Archlich must undergo a quest to discover a 'secret spell' and must learn every single spell required in the ritual; they cannot skimp on any detail, their ascension cannot be done another way, and carries a very real and very intimidatingly large chance that all their preparations are rendered meaningless and the ritual fails by pure bad luck.
Interesting! There's something to be said about the rewards that come from rejecting the path of least resistance.
Also, I wouldn't say Undead are always Bad And Evil, but as we've discussed at length on this blog, in the Pathfinder universe it's very difficult to be an undead that's Good-aligned and especially difficult to STAY good once the transformation is finished. Becoming undead for altruistic and good reasons doesn't change the fact that your soul will now itch to cause destruction and entropy. The urge can certainly be steered in acceptable directions, and in fact in the very video game you've mentioned it's one of the more powerful and useful Mythic paths for doing exactly that in the way you've suggested... but in-game it doesn't stop Pharasma from leering at you, and to complete your transformation into a full-power Lich in WotR you do in fact have to purge Good from your soul. Even your mentor, Zacharius, became a lich for an ostensibly good reason, only for undeath to slowly warp him into something ruthless and pragmatic.
... anyway, that wasn't your question. You asked what I would do to make the Archlich! The good news is that I do happen to have the book their stats appear in (Monsters of Faerun), stats I apparently never read or never found interesting enough to retain, but the bad news is that they're not especially different from a regular Lich, with a few notable exceptions:
--Archliches cannot be Turned by Good-aligned Clerics and are immune to channeled positive energy.
--Archliches have a constant Water Walk effect on themselves.
--The Paralyzing Touch of an Archlich sets the victim in a death-like state of suspended animation, during which the creature does not need to eat, breathe, or drink.
--Archliches can send their spirit outwards from themselves 3/day in a manner akin to, but not quite, Astral Projection.
There's apparently some more details in even earlier books, such as the ability for an Archlich to destroy any Undead being they create with a touch (presumably to end their service), immunity to the attacks and spells of any creature with 6 or less Hit Dice, and perhaps most impressively the ability to passively regenerate spell slots, but I do not have access to that particular book (Lost Ships) at this time to confirm for certain.
20 notes
·
View notes
Note
What exactly classifies as a gimmick blog?
-@the-agency-archives
This is actually quite a contentious question nowadays. For those that want to read a unjustifiably complicated typology for gimmick blogs, here you are:
After thinking over it for a while, this is the best definition I can come up with for the prototypical gimmick blog.
Gimmick blog /'gɪmɪk blɑg/ n. A blog on the social media site Tumblr dedicated towards posting or responding in a specific and defined way, often repetitive, with little to no indication it is run anthropogenically. (Alternatively, Eugimmick blog)
The more attentive of you will notice that many blogs I've classified do not satisfy this definition. In fact, neither do I.
Therefore, I have a number of other terms in mind, two of which I currently classify and one which I do not. (not going to do the fancy definitions for these)
Quasi-gimmick blog - A blog on the social media site Tumblr dedicated towards posting and responding in a specific way, often creating content for this purpose, and ostensively run anthropogenically.
Ex: @gimmickblog-taxonomist
Paragimmmick blog - A blog on the social media site Tumblr resembling a gimmick blog on surface appearance, but serve a different function, usually a roleplay blog. Often descended from a Eugimmick or Quasi-gimmick blog.
Ex: @status-updates (Previously a Eugimmick blog)
Pseudogimmick blog - A blog on the social media site Tumblr looking to be a gimmick blog, but often is a conventional user educated/passionate about a certain subject, usually a product or government organization. Varying amounts of posts concern the subject, and many resemble a prototypical Tumblr post.
Ex: @amtrak-official, @mozilla-firefox
The only one I will not be classifying is the Pseudogimmick blog. And, keep in mind, Gimmick blog will be used as an umbrella term for most, if not all, terms on this list. If it must be distinguished from the other, I will use "Eugimmick blog".
#much too scientific for goddamn tumblr blogs. but i find the juxtaposition funny.#yes i will be adding this to gimikapedia when i get around to coding that#taxonomist talks#long post
23 notes
·
View notes
Note
ok so what is the general premise of captive prince? all I know is that it's popularly associated with bdsm, and the title implies that a guy gets dominated, and I'm into that and want to know more
OH SHIT HI i don't actually use this blog but i totally did respond to that just normally huh!! WELL.
The premise of Captive Prince is that a standin country (primarily) for Rome is taken over by the main character (Damon)'s half-brother, in a surprise assassination/coup. His half-brother sends him as a slave to Standin Western European Country, where the crown prince of THAT country (Laurent) takes him as his personal slave. The novel is....... like it's OSTENSIBLY a romance novel, in that Damon and Laurent have an absolutely incredible dynamic -- Laurent is clearly a better person than Damon thought, and Damon is SUCH a big golden retriever personality. But it's honestly primarily a POLITICAL NOVEL, driven by Laurent's need to take back the throne from his uncle the King Regent and Damon's need to escape slavery and return to his country to take back his throne from his half-brother. The two of them DON'T EVEN KISS UNTIL THE SECOND BOOK.
honestly the biggest disappointment for me about the books is that Laurent DOESN'T top, because he SHOULD and I'm RIGHT. i get it, Damon is the more physically imposing one, but like tiny doms deserve respect and love too!!
As for trigger warnings, Laurent's uncle, the King Regent, is a pedophile, and Laurent and another child are both implied to have been groomed. Additionally, Damon is... I believe only almost sexually assaulted by one of the Regent's guards in the first book, because he's protecting another slave from being assaulted instead.
Again, the two princes don't even kiss until the second book - which isn't to imply that they're up to other activities. It's a legitimate slowburn. And there's not really any bdsm! It's quite tame!!
Genuinely an incredible read, though. Compelling and funny and well-written and brilliantly developed. And you get at least one homoerotic sword fight!!
#captive prince#capri#captive prince trilogy#after you've read the books it's actually Really Obvious that the antis who get Really Mad about them haven't actually even opened them#because the things they say just..... don't exist
18 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
twistedwonderships
❛Twisted Wonderland—ships❜
brucelinas
what was she cooking
tf2artstuff
Meem
bji-melody-astro-natal-horary
Melody Astro-Natal-Horary
miscellaneousmisfortunes
The Spirit In The Bottle