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wherearemyglassesbro · 3 years

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Hi, law student anon here! (And no lmao I'm not british but I do live in England) I was wondering, do you have any headcanons for how the characters survived law school? Like what their uni was, their favourite modules, their experience, random trivia, anything really 😂

Hello arse anon!! I can try!! 😅😅

I won’t be mentioning real universities or businesses cause this is an ace attorney au at heart so...nothing is real lmao :) and I also don’t know what is taught at law school so sorry if this is vague...I am just a newbie college student...Wanting to go into secondary education *dies*

Francis: Francis started out college in an arts program! He was going to major in painting and interior design. He also planned on flipping houses with Jeanne. But when she was murdered during his sophomore year in college, he dropped out to grieve and regain his composure. Jeanne’s case made a huge impact on his life and he changed his career course to become a prosecutor. While he did party a little and was social, he was focused on his education. Jeanne’s parents and his own supported him all the way!! There were times where he struggled because of his Art Brain getting distracted but he pushed through!! As hard as he could!!! He did not enjoy learning about banking law or anything having to do with math. Poor Fran nearly flunked math lmao

Arthur: Arthur wanted to be a lawyer in order to break the cycle of dirtbag criminals in his family. But in the beginning, he intended on going into elder law. He made friends with multiple professors who told him he’d do great working with old people and Art really loved the idea of representing old people when they didn’t have anyone else on their side. As he worked through the law program, he decided on being a defense attorney instead! He wasn’t very social in college and seeing him in full punk attire for law lectures was truly a sight to see lmao. He did very well!! He was in the top 7 of his class! When he graduated, only Griffin came to see him. His parents didn’t enjoy the idea of him being a lawyer cause...they’re criminals lmaoooo

Alfred: Alfred switched majors like three times. He originally wanted to be a sports team manager!! He fell out of love with that very fast. Then he wanted to be a mechanic! He also ended up hating that. He’s always wanted to help people though as when he saw Arthur in court, he was like ‘wowie I could do that!!!’ So he did! He played football and basketball, juggled a frat life and law school all at once. It’s kinda impressive now he managed such a broad social life as well as his schooling. He struggled with writing because he tended to just barf words on a page. He knew what laws were and all the info he needed in order to win a fake case but he needed help learning to speak and write eloquently. Arthur tutored him :) and Matt picked on him “You can’t say ‘bro’ in court, Al” “Shut up!!!! >:(“

Yao: Back in his day, being a lawyer wasnt glorfied the way it is now. With the 3 day trial system being brand new, he had a lot to adjust to. He did his best and met his wife in college!! Yao was not only a teachers pet, he quickly worked his way up to be the head of the tennis team lol. His college experience wasn’t anything spectacular but once he graduated, he shadowed a bunch of defense attorneys who now have their own reality tv show lmao. Working in LA was hard and he came close to quitting many times but he got a big break when he got to work a murder case!! He won (even though the client was guilty oops) and people flocked to him! Without taking on that case, he would have totally quit working with the law and worked in real estate with his wife (now ex wife)

Roderich: Roddy went to a super expensive law school on the East coast before moving to California. His family is rich so they just threw money at him and let him do whatever he wanted. His childhood was great cause he got whatever he wanted but he didn’t have like...the opportunity to help others cause it wasn’t something rich people did. So as he grew up he wanted to help others and seeing prosecutors on tv or reading about them in books??? He decided that he wanted to do that. He did not make any friends in college. He went to class, grinded through work and slept when he could. He was on a constant grind, going out of his way to prove himself as the best and I mean...He was. Roderich ended up being in the top 3 of his class. He was scooped uo almost immediately by the city prosecutors office when he made it to LA and has been working with them ever since! He really wants to be the chief prosecutor but he isn’t gonna push his luck

Eliza: Eliza is a first generation college goer in her family! She busted her ASS to get scholarships for academics and soccer and took out a sizable loan in order to get herself through school. Literally a self made woman and she’s just awesome for it. She knew she wanted to be a lawyer from the start so figuring out a career path wasn’t very hard. She and her college soccer team were super close, they went out a lot and had grouo study sessions all the time. She still keeps in contact with a couple of them!! She sucked up a lot to her professors to get on their good sides so they’d curve her grade at the end of the semester and hey! She got most of them to do that so good for her

Ivan: Ivan was pushed into going to a school that he didn’t want to go to poor guy. His mother paid for everything but he wasn’t allowed to participate in clubs cause it would ‘distract him’. He managed to convince her to let him join the damn chess club during his second year of college but she made him quit when he started getting close to his teammates. He graduated early because he took so many credit hours but his college experience was shit overall. He made like two friends but spent almost all of his time studying or shadowing his mom’s friends in court or just sitting in on trials, writing reports on them as he watched. Then he’d hand them in to his mother later. She was stricter with him than she was with Natalya but still just...awful lol. He went to the lawschool his mother went to so they recognized his name and would be like “Oh! Hey we got a Braginsky here! How’s you’s mom?” He hated how everyone talked about her. Sometimes he thought that those professors would just pass him cause he was a Braginsky...ugh...

Natalya: Her mother put her through the same law school as Ivan. She worked herself to the bone to graduate early in order to catch up to him. She wants to be the best. She wants their mother to be proud of her. She shadowed multiple prosecutors who used to work with her mom and attended as many public trials as possible in order to take notes. Throughout her college years she has super dark eye bags cause she just....Didnt sleep. Ivan would take her in and make her rest at his place where it was quiet. She was allowed to be in the choir and her mom would actually come to their concerts which was something she would usually say no to. Nat was also allowed to have more friends than Ivan which kinda made her feel bad cause her brother is so isolated all the time. Oh well. She’s still his friend :’)

Kiku: Kiku survived law school through spite alone. His mom insisted that he was not cut out to be a lawyer and every time she said that, he wanted to be a lawyer even more!! He took out loans and got himself through school. He had a lot of professors that he ended up liking and bonded with his ‘criminal psychology’ professor!! He didn’t have many friends but he felt comfortable going to that professor for advice. Kiku was very interested In bankruptcy law from the beginning but he thought that being a defense attorney would be more rewarding as well as more impressive to his family

#lawyer au :)#long post #not tagging he:talia anymore cause I don’t wanna flood the tags :0

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aph-imagines · 4 years

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Hello! If you’re okay to, may I please have a scenario where human APH England brings home his s/o for the first time for dinner to meet his family? (Including Scotland, Ireland and Wales if you can) thank you!!

I love writing about the UK bro’s so I really enjoyed writing this! To avoid there being too many people in the scenario, I’ve just included Scotland, Wales and Ireland since you requested them (Sealand and N. Ireland are the two other brothers mentioned). Since you haven’t requested any names, I’ve used Allistor, Dyllan and Patrick!

(There’s British/Irish slang slotted in here. I haven’t left a ‘definitions’ section, but most of them are either explained either in definition or by subsequent reaction. Also, some swearing).

“So, I’m meeting three of your brothers tonight, right?”

Arthur grunted in affirmation, “As you know, I’ve got five brothers but you’ll just be meeting the three of them tonight. Not that my parents don’t want to meet you, of course, they’ve said they’d love to meet you soon. As the twats were so keen to meet you, mum and dad said they’d arrange another date to get to know you, and have taken my two youngest brothers out with them for the evening.”

“Twats?”

Arthur’s hands momentarily went white against the car wheel, “You’ll see what I mean, S/O.”

“You don’t mention them too much apart from insults, what’re they like?”

After a sigh, he answered, “Allistor is quite gruff regardless of how much he’s had to drink, although I imagine he’ll be more tempered with you. We spat a lot. Patrick’s a little chirpier although just as much of a taunt. Dyllan is the quietest of the bunch and quite well-tempered in comparison to the rest of us stubborn gits. Unless his name gets pronounced wrong, that is.”

“How’s it pronounced?” S/O questioned, “I didn’t take much notice when you said it the first time.”

“With the Welsh double l sound. He’ll probably let you off the hook until he’s taught you, but I can never get my mouth around it. He’s the one that hates me the least out of the three of them, but he still holds a grudge over that.”

Arthur turned his indicators on, turning into a housing estate, “Just a couple more minutes. Luckily there’s no rugby on tonight, so they shouldn’t be so rowdy.”

S/O didn’t know how relieved to be. Arthur wasn’t exactly selling his brothers.

Once they pulled into a driveway, the front door of the fairly modest house opened, a brunet figure standing in the doorway. Upon Arthur and S/O opening their car doors, he spoke, “Evening, both.”

“S/O, Dyllan. Dyllan, S/O.”

Dyllan huffed softly, “It’s Dyllan, ignore him.”

Dyllan stuck his hand out for S/O to shake, who attempted to pronounce his name upon taking it, “Not quite, but at least you’re having a go, unlike someone.”

Arthur huffed, much louder than his brother, “I’m guessing that if you’re starting on me, then those two are going to be much worse.”

“They wanna see who you’ve brought home. Personally, I think they’re tidy, but you know how ruthless they can be.”

“Tidy?” Arthur had said casual clothing was fine, so S/O hadn’t exactly dressed up.

“S’another way of saying nice, don’t worry yourself about it,” Dyllan smiled, “Al, Pat, get here!”

A few moments later, two redheads appear at the top of the stairway, “Arthur, ya dobber, who you brought home with ya?”

“Hello to you too, Allistor,” Arthur grumbled, “This is S/O.”

“Well, you scrub up nicely unlike the minger you’re dating. If it’s the eyebrows you fancy, then us three are much better candidates.”

“If you’ve got nothing nice to say, say nothing at all Allistor. Piss off.”

“Alrigh’, I'm doing dinner and need to go check on the meat anyway. Feel free to come chat in a bit, S/O, just don’t bring grumpy knickers with you.”

As soon as Allistor left for the kitchen, Patrick introduced himself, “Stop pouting Art, he’s just codding ya. Why act like the perfect fam now only for S/O to be surprised about the fact we’re a bunch of knobs. Anyway, S/O, I’m looking forward to getting to know ya!”

Patrick and Dyllan joined Allistor in the kitchen-diner, leaving Arthur and S/O in the hallway.

“Hey, they seem fun to me,” S/O reassured their pouting boyfriend, “I love how quirky humour from the British Isles is, so I want to hear you all banter.”

“Banter?” Arthur remarked, perking up a little, “I don’t think I’ve ever said that word in front of you.”

“I’ve watched some British TV here and there. It’s pretty good.”

Arthur recomposed himself, “I’m going to go upstairs for a few minutes as I need to use the bathroom, but feel free to join them.”

S/O headed into the kitchen-diner. Patrick was lounging back on a dining room chair with a drink next to him while the two other brothers were at the kitchen counter, cutting vegetables.

“What’re you making?” S/O asked.

“It’s Saturday night, but we’re making Sunday roast,” Dyllan explained, “I hope you’re hungry, Allistor has cut up way too many vegetables.”

“We’re all growing lads, and I don’t know what S/O’s appetite is like.”

“We’re all in our twenties,” Dyllan countered, “Anyway, feel free to join Patrick at the table, S/O, we’ve got this all sorted.”

As S/O sat, Patrick slid his glass over to them, “Wanna sip?”

“No thanks, I’m good.”

“Do you want anything to drink?”

“Just water is fine.”

“You can drink alcohol if you want, but if that’s the case- Oi, Al! Get S/O a glass of water!”

Arthur appeared a few minutes later, with Allistor greeting him with a, “Art, what’s the similarity between you and this?”

“You make this stupid joke every time we have a roast. Stop calling me a Yorkshire pudding, you twerp.”

“Ahm only joking with ya, Art,” Allistor responded, “Everything’s almost done, set the table up.”

The meal itself was far from the best, and was rather bland. But the company was far from boring. With the brother’s sardonic quips and creative but sarcastic jibes, there wasn’t any silence other than a few brief moments. And, oh boy, when Dyllan suggested they get Cluedo or Monopoly out, their ‘tough love’ went even further down the drain.

But S/O wasn’t the target of any of the insults unless they walked into it and the brothers were pleasant with them. That didn’t mean they were left out.

“Alright,” Arthur said after a while, “I should get S/O home, it’s getting late.”

“What a coincidence that you’re saying that as soon as you’ve had to mortgage some of your properties.” Dyllan smirked.

“He’s a sore loser. As sore as his backside’ll be if he doesn’t admit he’d be in last place anyway.”

“Stuff off, the pair of you.”

Patrick watched his brothers before contributing, “He’s still sulking that he went first because we use the ‘youngest player rolls first’ rule.”

Arthur flicked a hotel at him, “’Stuff off’ extends to you too, you know.”

“Oi, that was ma hotel!” Allistor yelled, “You’d better get S/O home now otherwise they’re gonna see us rugby tackle ya!”

That was enough for Arthur to shoot off and get his shoes on.

“We taunt the hell out of him because he’s so easy to wind up, but you’re a good’un in our books.” Allistor said, clearly referring to S/O although his eyes were still in the direction Arthur left.

“Thank you.” S/O was slightly confused, but in the few hours they’d known the brothers, they’d already figured out that this was what they were normally like.

“No problem!” Patrick said, “You’re more than welcome back!”

Dyllan nodded, “And you make our brother happy. Even though we pretend we hate him, he’s alright. But he seems more pleasant since you two met, especially since you started dating. Thank you.”

“C’mon Dyllan, we can drink to that.”

Dyllan passed S/O a glass, “Cheers.”

The four clinked glasses, although the mood was broken by Patrick shouting, “For fecks’ sake, Allistor, you’ve spilt whisky on me!”

#aph imagines #aph england #aph ireland #aph scotland #aph wales #mod door

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brightening-glance · 4 years

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So I was inspired by @kiragecko to create a floor plan of Wayne Manor. I started out trying to be accurate to the comics, but eventually gave up because it changed so many times that was impossible. This is more like the manor shown in recent comics, specifically from when Dick and Damian were Batman and Robin, but I also pulled references from a bunch of different comics and from different timelines and the Gotham tv show. At this point this is the floor plan for the mashed up canon that exists in my head. Aside from @kiragecko’s own floor plan, other references included Biltmore, Filoli, Casa Loma, The Breakers, Rosecliff, Marble House, and Darlington/Crocker Mansion. I tried to make it mostly to scale, although I hand drew this and then cleaned it up digitally, so it’s probably a little off in some places. Blue text is what the current Wayne/Batfamily use the rooms for, green is what the historical use was, and black is what they’d likely be listed as on a real estate listing. Green doors are hidden or jib doors, basically doors that aren’t obvious but don’t require a pass code to get through or lead to the Batcave. Purple “doors” are the secret passages like the one hidden behind the grandfather clock that even an observant bystander shouldn’t be able to find and involve much more security. More explanations under the cut.

So the comics are unclear on how the Waynes got Wayne Manor. They say that Nathan van Derm designed it for Darius Wayne, but then also that Darius’s grandsons, Solomon and Joshua, purchased it after Jerome van Derm died. At some point after Joshua died (in 1860), the manor was abandoned and Solomon’s son Alan (Bruce’s great-great-grandfather) rebuilt it.

In my head, the east and west wings of the W would have been later editions. The first version of the manor, up to at least when Alan Wayne rebuilt it, would have probably just been the central portion, out to the 2 towers. Original kitchen would have been in the basement, as well as additional servants quarters. It’s not shown on the plans, but in this version the basement has been renovated to include a gym, movie room, and game area (leaving aside the much cooler basement underneath.) Also not pictured is the third floor/attic, which includes servants quarters and a third floor sitting room above Thomas Wayne’s den that looks out over the front lawn.

With the east and west wings, you can see the very clear divisions in purpose. The west wing was a guest wing, probably added when serious entertaining became a thing, with a dedicated ballroom and guest bedrooms. The east wing downstairs was the servants’ wing - kitchen, staff dining room, butler’s pantry, bedrooms for upper household staff. East wing upstairs was the children’s/nursery wing.

In the center of the house you can see a male/female divide that went with the historical idea of some rooms (billiard room/smoking room/study/library) being “men’s spaces” and some (drawing room/morning room) being “women’s spaces. The bedrooms for the permanent residents of the manor in the 1860s (Solomon and his wife, Joshua, Celestine) follow this divide as well, though unlike other “great houses” Wayne manor didn’t go so far as to have a separate bachelor’s wing.

Regarding the jib doors vs secret passageways - secret passageways are basically entrances to the batcave, although they would’ve also been used by Solomon and Joshua as part of the underground railroad. Off the servery you can see the entrance to the wine cellar where Joshua’s body was eventually found. The jib doors (in green) would have been used by servants or family members to pass between rooms without going into the main hallways. Great for sneaking up on people!

Ok, going into some more specifics - headcanon time! Basically everything beyond this is just in my head, and the Batfam stuff is set at some point in the future. (It’s a really shame they stopped writing Batman Comics right after Bruce came back from they dead. Ric? Ric who? don’t know what you’re talking about).

First, Celestine Wayne. Celestine Wayne is not a comic character. She was loosely inspired by the history of the Waynes from Gotham the tv show, and by loosely I mean her name and the fact that she lived during the Civil War era. There is a C.L. Wayne from that time period who founded the Gotham Botanical Garden in the comics, and in my head they are definitely the same person. In the Wayne family tree in my head her father was Caleb Wayne, and she was Solomon and Joshua’s cousin who became their ward for.......reasons undecided yet. Her father was leading wagon trains and so never home. Something else happened. You pick! She never married (imagine whatever reason you want here, I tend to stay away from the tv show explanation and go with she just wasn’t interested, but any reason works) and so when she became an adult and was still living at the manor but not the “lady of the house” the floor plan was slightly modified to give her her own suite of rooms. Joshua Wayne has something similar in the sense of having his own private study next to his room, although his were only connected by secret passage. Sometime between Dick moving out and Tim moving in permanently, Dick moved from his childhood room into these rooms (leaving Tim free to move into his old bedroom, a thing that actually happened in the comics). Maybe this happened when he was adopted? Maybe when he and Bruce kinda reconciled after Bruce got his back broken? Who knows! There was definitely a period where to Dick the Manor was Not His Home Anymore, and so in his mind he probably didn’t have a permanent room there (and tried to avoid staying there). Think of the moving to the “grown up full suite” as a really old fashioned way of Bruce or Alfred or both saying “I recognize you’re an adult with your own life and autonomy and I cannot treat you like a child, but also this is your home and you will always have a permanent place here.”

Other rooms of note - most mansions I referenced did not have a dedicated armoury, but it’s Batman! Of course there’s an armoury. For historical artifacts, a lot of these weapons sure seem functional......

The tea room was not originally a tea room but somewhere along the way at least one of the Wayne matriarchs was very fond of afternoon tea. With Alfred in the manor it is definitely a Space for Afternoon Tea, although it also gets used for other meals occasionally and Alfred will do a lot of his meal planning/any other paperwork there, even though he technically has an office.

When Thomas and Martha were alive, there were actually full time staff living at the manor beyond Alfred and the staff quarters got used, and the “servant’s hall” actually got used as a staff dining room, but now this is where the family members tend to gather if there’s too many of them to just eat in the kitchen. (In my head, Wayne Manor during Thomas and Martha’s life is basically the Wayne Manor described by @unpretty who has written some of my favorite Batman fics ever.)

When Bruce was growing up, Thomas Wayne’s den was the “casual family living room” that every other sitting room in the manor was not, and after he died Bruce couldn’t bear to touch anything in it and avoided it unless he was doing some hardcore brooding. When he moved back/took in Dick, he converted one of the bedrooms to a tv room because he wanted a space that was casual and none of the other spaces felt like a tv belonged in them, but he still couldn’t go in his father’s den. As things have gotten better, and also as Tim and Damian’s relationship improved and Tim started coming around more, Bruce was finally ready to let this go and this became basically Tim’s workspace for whenever he’s at the manor. Bruce will work on stuff in there if Tim is in there, but he still doesn’t spend a lot of time in there on his own. (Ok, this was a little bit inspired by a Rebirth comic, don’t know which one, not gonna find it, I’m sure the rest of it was silly). Bruce tends to use the study downstairs if he’s working on W.E. work or other stuff like that. Jason and Dick’s go to places for any type of homework (when they were living at the manor) or any other work they might have to sit down and do are one of the libraries or wherever Bruce or Alfred are, depending on their mood and what they’re working on, and how long they’ve been living at the manor.

I’m pretty sure Martha Wayne painting/drawing is canon, but I don’t remember the comic it was referenced in. Anyway, she turned what was being used as a sunroom into her art studio because it had the best light. With Damian in the manor it’s slowly being reclaimed by art supplies.

There are definitely rolling mirrors and freestanding barres in the ballroom that Cass uses for dance practice.

Not pictured: the massive garage, stables, tennis courts, basketball courts, gardens, pond, and basically everything on the grounds.

If anyone is curious about what comic panels I referenced (or ignored), or what real world rooms/houses inspired specific parts, shoot me a message! Also, feel free to use this in art/fics/whatever if you want a reference!

#wayne manor #floor plan #dc #batfam #mine #long post #wayne family #i did not intend for this to be this long but then i started writing and this happened #this might change in the future but this is how i picture it in my head now

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scratchybeardsweetmouth · 4 years

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TV: How child survivors of Nazis rebuilt their lives in Britain

Tim McInnerny and Iain Glen star in The Windermere Children - a dramatisation of a remarkable true story about hope in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Photo by Thomas Kretschmann BBC January 24, 2020 | By Gemma Dunn Article (everything under read more because of length):

Silence falls as the credits to The Windermere Children roll - actors and audience moved in equal measure. From screenwriter Simon Block and director Michael Samuels, the BBC Two drama tells the remarkable - and often unknown - true story of a group of young Holocaust survivors who were brought to the Calgarth Estate by Lake Windermere for a new life in the UK. With only the clothes on their back and carrying a few meagre possessions, the children bear the scars of all they have suffered at the hands of the Nazis, a regime that devastated Europe's Jewish population. And today's praise is more pertinent than ever due to the fact the crowd is dotted with the now-elderly survivors whose very stories inspired this tale. “The film was very well made and very realistic - it made me weep from time to time,” says Arek Hersh, MBE, the first survivor to stand up. “It was true story. This actually happened. You made a very good thing.” “On behalf of the survivors, I want to thank each and every one who has been involved in this project,” mirrors Ike Alterman, who, like Hersh, was one of 300 children taken by coach to the Lake District in August 1945. Commissioned by the BBC, the moving epic makes up a range of content put on to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 - and crucially the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. “Precisely how many more times will this group of people [survivors] come together in a public venue and speak together?” muses Strangers actor Tim McInnerny, 63, in a chat afterwards. “I was thinking this while we were sitting on the stage and they were in the audience, which by the way seemed like the wrong way around. It was odd.” He follows: “Listening to the survivors talk is overwhelming. I just feel very grateful; it's one of those jobs that you just feel is important and I'm glad to be a part of it in some small way.” “Not all the work that we do - if we're all honest - is as valuable, so you really appreciate when you're given the chance to do something like this,” echoes his co-star, Iain Glen, 58. “If the (survivors) are saying, which they seem to be, that they really approve of what the filmmakers made, well what more could you possibly ask for as an actor, as a director?” asks the Game of Thrones actor. “If they think it's OK, well nothing else really matters. It's a privilege.” Based on powerful first-person testimony, the one-off film follows the children as they learn English, play football, ride bikes and forge friendships. All the while haunted by nightmares and yearning for news of their loved ones. The roles of the children themselves are played by young European actors selected from Polish communities in Germany, London, Manchester and Belfast, as well as from Warsaw. While charged with looking after the youngsters is child psychologist Oscar Friedmann (Thomas Kretschmann); along with art therapist Marie Paneth (Romola Garai), philanthropist Leonard Montefiore (McInnerny) and sports coach Jock Lawrence (Glen), who have just four months to help them reclaim their lives. “Jock Lawrence was a real character - he was a retired PE teacher who was in the locale and offered to come and help when they were looking for sports therapy,” explains Glen. “Just being outside, being active in beautiful surroundings was really vital to a lot of their recovery and speeded it,” he insists. “The testimony was that he was well loved.” As for Leonard: “He went over right at the end of the war to see these children because it wasn't just the awful conditions under which they'd lived, but there was nowhere for them to go”, McInnerny says. “Something had to be done and Leonard is the kind of guy who fights until those things happen,” he recalls. “It's humbling to play somebody like that who fights so hard on behalf of others and dedicates their life to it.” Could they put themselves in the shoes of their characters - or the survivors? “It sounds almost slightly cynical, but in a way you have to forget about that,” claims McInnerny. “You have to forget that it's real in a way, because otherwise it's just too much to bear; it becomes about responsibility and that emotional weight becomes very hard to carry.” “That's right,” agrees Glen. “The problem with the holocaust, generally, is it has an incomprehensibility about it for those who had no direct contact with the future generations. It's documentary footage, of which there is a lot, but how do you find a new way of telling it?” “It's easy to get lost in despair and it would have been very tempting to go into archive footage, but they found a story and they told it in a very effective way.” As for the trauma: “We're never going to understand - that's what's so moving about hearing (the survivors),” Glen notes. “They're alive and they went on to do such extraordinary things. And they're incredibly grateful to the UK for providing a safe haven for them.” He follows: “Without getting too political, for me it resonates.” “We seem to be at a time, globally, where those that have, have a sense of keeping those that have not away, because there's a sense that their nationality, their strength is going to be weakened.” “It's a reminder of the transformative effect it can have, if you welcome people who are suffering and give them love, give them opportunity and give them hope,” he attests. “I hope this helps readdress any balance there may be (as to) whether we shouldn't be accepting refugees into this country anymore,” concurs McInnerny. “Because that's what's built this country, absolutely!” And unlike many shows that tackle the subject, it's ultimately redemptive. “This is about people who survived, as opposed to a reminder of all of those that didn't,” Glen reasons. “And I think that's what enticed (the production company) Wall to Wall and the filmmakers to take this on.” “I won't forget it,” confides McInnerny. “You hope that as an actor you do something that resonates, that makes a difference, but being there and seeing people who have been through the most awful experience, and for you to have to depict that and for them to have given you the thumbs up...” “Well it's an extraordinary experience,” he finishes. “I don't see how you could possibly forget it.” The Windermere Children, BBC Two, 9pm, Monday. (x)

#iain glen #tim mcinnerny #the windermere children #iain glen interview #interview #herald scott #the herald #i need queue by my side

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beingallelite · 5 years

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Hoffman Estates, Illinois — All Elite Wrestling returned to familiar ground in the suburbs of Chicago on Saturday, trying to recreate the magic that launched the brand's leading stars into the wrestling stratosphere at last year's All In.

Mission accomplished.

All Out was a five-hour extravaganza, mixing diverse wrestling styles to create a show unlike anything fans had ever seen from a mainstream promotion. From the old-school southern shenanigans of Cody Rhodes and Shawn Spears to the state-of-the-art stunt spectacular performed by the Young Bucks and Lucha Brothers, it was a wrestling show that had something remarkable for every fan in the building.

The energy was electric—and contagious. The live crowd couldn't get enough, and the building was full to bursting with fans who felt invested, not just in individual wrestlers or storylines, but in the entire enterprise.

Something special is brewing in the wrestling industry, and AEW is at the heart of it.

Last week, Off the Top Rope's Jonathan Snowden talked to one of the event's architects, All Elite Wrestling executive Brandi Rhodes, about the launch of a new wrestling promotion, her savvy use of social media and her role in building a women's division from the ground up.

This week, we continue that conversation with a discussion of one of the most multifaceted talent rosters in professional wrestling history.

Jonathan Snowden: I'm assuming you're often the only woman in the room when a lot of important decisions are being made. Is it kind of your duty to keep an eye out for the other women on the roster and help make sure they aren't pushed in directions creatively that a man might not realize could make them uncomfortable?

Brandi Rhodes: That's the goal. I haven't had any situations like that yet, but we're about to start weekly TV. So we'll see some of the ideas. But there have been for myself at times in wrestling, times when I had to say, 'Hey, wait a minute, I'm not really comfortable with that' or, 'That doesn't work for me.'

It's interesting to see how a lot of people don't see the other side of the coin. Since they haven't been there. Someone might suggest your character say something that they'd never say. It doesn't occur to them that there are people who think differently about something, from another perspective.

I think it probably will be helpful to have me there. I'm also someone who is always looking at things from different angles. There's always two answers. Cody and I run a lot of things by each other. We're able to help each other see things differently than we would singularly.

JS: What's an example of a time you remember when you were asked to do something you didn't feel right about doing? Is there a moment that stands out?

Rhodes: Ideas that made it seem like I wasn't particularly faithful to my husband. That's an area I don't like to go. It's just not for me.

And the fans, they know us. They know Cody and I, and they like our relationship. So, I would never want to kind of scoff in their faces and make it seem like it's something that it's not.

JS: You guys have a slogan, "AEW is for everyone." I know just how real that is, and I wanted to personally thank you for your commitment to sensory inclusion. We have two kids on the autism spectrum, and going to an event like yours can be kind of terrifying. But we came out to Double or Nothing, and the sensory room you put together with KultureCity made a huge difference. Why was this so important to you? Because I was told you championed the cause.

Rhodes: Thank you for sharing that with me. I love hearing from people who had wonderful experiences with the sensory room. It really makes me so happy.

KultureCity actually reached out to me. I didn't know anything about them or their mission, because it was really vague to me what they represented. I met with [CEO] Julian Maha, and he told me that when we said "AEW is for everyone," it might not be true. He said: 'You're missing a big part of the market. You're missing people with invisible illnesses.' I said, 'Wow." Because we 100 percent were, and we hadn't thought about it.

It's just one of those things people don't think about unless it personally affects them. It can easily slip your mind unless you're confronted with it. But I've been to countless wrestling shows over the last seven or eight years. I've been a part of many meet-and-greets where someone had a need like this and no one knew what to do. Personally, it was embarrassing when we didn't know how to help people and they would just have to leave.

So, when Julian brought this up, I was all for it. If I can keep those moments from happening for any family, I'm all for whatever it takes to make that happen. We are fully in with KultureCity and doing everything we can to get them to as many events as possible.

JS: Inclusion seems to be important generally to this company. From Nyla Rose to Sonny Kiss to the Chinese superstars from OWE, you've been finding talent where most mainstream wrestling companies don't even think to look for it. Are there barriers you're intentionally breaking down, or is it just a matter of being open to talented performers, whatever their background might be?

Rhodes: It's not something we set out to do. We never said, 'We need to check these boxes.' That's not a good way to find the best talent, in my opinion. As long as you keep in mind that what you're looking for is the best person, regardless of anything else, you're going to find the best of the best. And I think that's what we've got here.

In our case, we were very, very lucky. A lot of talent just kind of fell in our lap, which is wonderful when you don't have to search very hard for such talented people.

Our agenda was always to have an open mind about everything. When you have someone like Sonny Kiss, who is very much on the surface who he is, there is no way we're going to say, 'Maybe he should be different, do different moves or act a different way.' He is who he is, and who he is is perfect. He's very talented, and we absolutely love having Sonny as part of the roster.

JS: You guys have made great use of social media. Before I was familiar with the wrestling work of many of your young performers, I met them on your YouTube shows Being The Elite and The Road to All Out series. Both those shows are great at making you really care about the people who make up this company.

But is that possible with some of the foreign talents? I think Riho and [Hikaru] Shida had a really compelling match at All Out—how do you present them on a YouTube show the same way with the language and cultural barriers that might be there?

Rhodes: That's always a challenge, as many people have seen in wrestling over the years with characters when English isn't their first language. However, there have also been plenty of examples where it hasn't been a factor at all because they've been able to express themselves in other ways.

There are things we have in mind to let people know more about some of these wrestlers and how they came to be, what their background is and who they are in the ring. It's something you'll have to see as we roll it out, but there are definitely plans.

JS: AEW launches on TNT on Oct. 2, just a few weeks after WWE takes their NXT brand into the mainstream on the USA Network. Old-school wrestling fans have seen a version of this before, but for new fans, this may be the first time they've been asked to make a choice. So, with WWE just a click away, why should fans choose to take a leap of faith with AEW?

Rhodes: We've been at the cusp of something amazing in wrestling, something we're calling a revolution. This is the first time in almost 20 years that there has been another brand that is this strong and on prime time.

The fanbase has expressed that they've wanted this and needed this for so long. It's been proven with the sellouts we've been having at multiple arenas throughout the country that people really, really do want this alternative.

We vow to bring that alternative in many, many ways. We've talked about it across many mediums, and we'll stay true to our belief that bell-to-bell wrestling is the most important thing.

Our roster is so diverse, and I think our show will be different than anything people have seen. We just hope to continue this movement, and fans will come with us and tune in every week so we can keep doing what we're doing. That's what makes this possible: the fans. As long as the fans keep rallying behind us and stick with us, we're going to do really, really well.

Brandi Rhodes is the chief brand officer for All Elite Wrestling and a standout performer. You can follow her on Twitter and YouTube for further glimpses into a life well-lived.

Match of the Week

Young Bucks vs. Lucha Brothers (AEW All Out, Aug. 31): These teams have been squaring off for months, to the point where their combined excellence has become almost routine. A ladder match successfully upped the ante, ramping up the danger, level of difficulty and excitement in ways that would have been unimaginable just two decades ago when Edge, Christian and the Hardy Boyz set the standard for all to follow.

With all due respect to WWE's legends of the form, this match surpassed even their best efforts. It was consistently innovative, daring and almost too much for several people in my section at Sears Centre, who hid their faces in their hands and literally begged for someone to stop the match before someone died in the ring.

No one did, but only because the performers executed some of the most bonkers highspots imaginable and almost never missed a beat.

'Hard Times' Promo of the Week

Chris Jericho was on top of the world as he cruised Tallahassee, Florida, in a limousine on his way to a local LongHorn Steakhouse. Jericho was the new AEW world champion, and to the victor go the spoils.

Afterward, however, there was a bit of a problem: he couldn't find the belt. As the internet mocked him savagely, Jericho leaned into the storm and made the moment his own.

Here's a taste of his genius, delivered in a hot tub with a scarf on, because it's Chris Jericho and he can:

"Now, as I sit here in my palatial estate, in my beautiful mansion, getting ready to have a little bit of the bubbly, I'm just imagining what I would do to that son of a b---h if he was here right now.

"And as a result, I am launching a worldwide investigation, using the top private investigators in the world today, to find out who committed this crime. And trust me, as the AEW champion ... I promise to regain and restore and find—and reclaim!—the AEW championship and once again give you another reason to finally give me the 'thank you' that I deserve.

"You're welcome."

Update: He got it back!

#all elite wrestling #aew #all out #brandi rhodes #the young bucks #chris jericho #matt jackson #nick jackson #lucha brothers #pentagon jr #fenix #article #posted on: 9.5.19 #bleacher report

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almaasi · 6 years

Photo

Thank you SO MUCH to the 2,000 people subscribed to me on AO3 (and my 10,000 followers on tumblr)!!!

Thank you for your endless kindness, and every comment ever sent my way. Thank you for getting excited about what I make. You’re all wonderful.

In celebration, here’s some art, which is based on a dream I had the other day. Plus!! Under the read-more: A fic rec of people’s favourite 15 stories, which you guys voted for in my recent survey. ♥

★ A list of the many ways YOU can support my writing and art !!

★ All my Destiel fics on AO3

★ Subscribe on THIS PAGE to get an email when I post a few fic~

Top Voted Destiel fics (written by @almaasi)

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Try-Something Tuesday · 48k · NC-17

Human AU. Dean Winchester teaches a third-grade class. He’s new to this whole ‘bisexual’ thing - but by pure happenstance, he meets Castiel: a particularly dapper male librarian who moonlights as a substitute teacher. Dean’s curious and Castiel is willing, so why the hell not? Except, fate never intended it to be one-time-only…

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Of Shampoo and Fruit Flies · 17.6k · M

Dean’s roommate is not what anyone would call ordinary. Cas is asexual, and autistic, and he frustrates other people with his unrelentingly ‘childish’ ways – but it’s different with Dean: they have an exceptional bond, something truly profound. Dean figures Cas wouldn’t respond to the idea of a crush the way most people would, so he has no intention of telling him he’s been harbouring non-platonic feelings for him for years. Then one night everything falls to pieces: Cas overhears something he wasn’t meant to hear. Things were never normal between the two of them, but now they might never be comfortable again.

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Note to Self: Cas Loves You · 3.4k · T

Dean is not just drunk – he is VERY drunk. Castiel ushers him back to their motel room, completely aware that by the time Dean wakes up tomorrow, he won’t remember anything about tonight. What better time for Castiel to confess his love?

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Sam Accidentally Sees the Whole Picture · 10.4k · NC-17

Sam’s been through a lot lately, what with tonight’s hunt rendering his skin an aching shade of purple and all. He can deal with Dean being overly concerned about Cas’ broken finger, and - God help him - he puts up with the sound of their preposterously soppy love confessions and first kisses on the adjacent bed. But he cannot be expected to remain silent and feign sleep throughout the entire duration of their first-ever lovemaking session. He just can’t. Especially not, because it seems apparent that Cas is more intent on deflowering himself than letting Dean do it.

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A Postcard for Castiel · 4.7k · G

The teacher assigns a buddy to all the children in her first-grade class. Everyone writes their buddy a postcard, giving them a compliment. Dean is supposed to write something for Castiel, the mysterious autistic kid in the corner – but he doesn’t hand anything in. Does he have nothing to say? Or does he have too much to say?

p.S. will you Be my Boyfrend ?

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Dean’s List · 3.3k · T

Dean writes out a list of men he would go gay for. Sam has a suggestion to make.

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Understanding Your Body in Ten Easy Steps · 12.2k · NC-17

All Dean has to do is track down a decent porno for Cas to watch, help him find his sensitive spots, then hang back and let him do his thing. Easy-peasy. No homo. …Absolutely no homo at all.

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Welcome All Winchesters · 60.2k · NC-17

When Dean’s engagement breaks off three days before Christmas, he’s left with nobody to accompany him on a road trip to his family’s mountain log cabin. His best friend Castiel happens to be available, and is willing to help him through a tough time. But when Dean’s mother and brother arrive, expecting to meet the person Dean plans to marry, they understandably assume Castiel is Dean’s fiancé. After a weekend of comfortable domesticity, sharing clothes, intimate conversations, and definitely-one-time-only therapy sex, it feels almost too easy for Dean and Cas to fake a loving, romantic relationship. The hard part is going back to being friends afterwards. They can’t keep their hands off each other, and they’ve discovered some fun things to do together which they’d never tell another soul about. And, oh boy, feelings. Now being ‘just friends’ is so impossible, it seems as if fate had another plan for them all along…

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Snow Place Like Home (But My Home Is With You) · 47.8k · NC-17

It’s Christmas Eve, and Dean, Sam and Castiel are snowed into a small town with a big festive spirit. They splurge on a fancy room in a B&B – hey, they deserve a treat. There’s a tiny plastic tree and a working TV, so they could perhaps overlook the lack of hot water and Dean having to bunk with Sam. Sleeping arrangements soon reach a happier equilibrium: Dean’s just cuddling Cas to keep him warm, he swears – the tingly feeling means nothing! Christmas Day arrives, and Cas still doesn’t have a gift for Dean. Dean doesn’t know what to give Cas, either. Sam has a few ideas, but will the other two truly understand what he means?

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Love Him in His Sleep (Love Him Always) · 32.7k · NC-17

After Cas banishes Dean’s nightmares, Dean starts to have wet dreams… about being cuddled. When he wakes, he’s sticky and aroused - and he loves it. Oh, he loves it a lot. Castiel, meanwhile, is struggling with his own descent into the murky waters of human morality. How is he supposed to explore all these new lustful feelings if Dean insists on keeping him at arm’s length?

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Cowboys and Real Estate Angels · 36.8k · NC-17

Castiel crosses paths with the ever-charming Dean Winchester at a rodeo show in Texas, of all places. Dean’s singing days are long bygone, but his crowd-pleasing skills haven’t waned one iota. Unexpectedly, Castiel finds himself in Dean’s bedroom; they take and they give, and discover that sometimes strangers can find love like this, too. (And if a man’s faith can’t be put in God, it needs to go somewhere…)

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Nine Times We Met (And One Christmas We Parted · 58.4k · NC-17

On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, Mr. Castiel Quinn discovers that one of his young students has smuggled male pornography into the classroom. Upon being told that the photos belong to the boy’s uncle, Castiel vows to himself that he will keep the other man’s preferences a secret. It’s 1947; a man experiencing attraction to another man or fantasising about his sexual touch are transgressive faults, which could potentially result in imprisonment - or worse. But then the uncle walks in. The photos are of him: Dean Winchester, a rogue with an empty pocket and a child to feed. Castiel doesn’t know it yet, but his life is never going to be the same again. Years pass between chance meetings, but even though they live their lives apart, Dean and Castiel’s story is proof that absence truly does make the heart grow fonder.

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Angelhawke · 407k · NC-17

A Dean/Cas Fantasy-Drama AU, set in a medieval world where two men are separated by a curse: every sunrise and sunset, both are eternally bound to transform into animals. Every night when darkness falls, Dean Winchester becomes a wolf, and his human mind is lost until the dawn. As the sun rises, his lover Castiel becomes a hawk. Their story has been the same for five years - until the day that a young thief named Sam stumbles into their twisted lives. Without even realising it, he becomes a part of their destiny, their paths entwined in prophecy and fate. Together with a few old friends, they set off on a journey to break the curse, but it won’t be easy. To pass the time, Dean and Castiel take turns to recount their past to Sam, narrating the tale of how they met, how they formed their profound bond, and how they found themselves wanting what no man should ever want: the touch of another man.

‘Angelhawke’ is a saga of forbidden love, friendship, and magic - but above all, family. Partially based on the 1985 movie ‘Ladyhawke’.

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Sharing the Rain Dog · 19.8k · M

When some asshole hits a dog with his car and drives off, the first two people on the scene are Dean and Castiel. Castiel’s an FBI agent with a plane to catch, and he doesn’t have time to take the dog to the vet. Dean’s a musician, and he doesn’t have the money. An agreement is reached: Dean goes, Castiel pays, and they’ll exchange details and meet again to work things out. But who gets the dog? Sooner or later they’re going to realise that having shared custody of one pitbull isn’t ideal. She needs one home, not two. One stable, loving home…

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Our Garden Home · 36.3k · G

Flower fairy Dean has caught a thief in his trap. As it turns out, it wasn’t a mouse stealing his food. It was Castiel: a hissy, bitey bat sprite with one wing and a forlorn, lonely heart. Dean offers a warm space in his nest, where Castiel can stay until Springtime comes around again. However, Castiel becomes more than just a guest. With a little effort, he helps make Dean’s nest a home.

☆

275 notes · View notes

nomettesbizzareadventure · 6 years

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JotaKak Week Day 1: Art

After the end, after Egypt, after Dio, after all the hotel beds and bruised knuckles and all the times Jotaro and Kakyoin stayed up late into the night talking because neither of them could sleep, Jotaro goes home. Kakyoin doesn’t. Kakyoin goes into an ambulance, and then to the hospital. It doesn’t occur to Jotaro to ask after him for the first week, tired and weary of everything as he is, but after the second he starts to wonder. It’s weird being back in Japan. Part of him expects to find another stand user in his backyard or look around the corner and see that Abdul and Polnareff are there, but it’s just him and Holly and the big empty estate, the same as always. The first time he turns on the TV, part of him wants to turn to Kakyoin and say hey, sumo’s on, wanna come watch? But no one’s there.

Jotaro thinks about calling his grandfather, about calling the hospital, but what good would it do? He’s not a healer. Whether the news is good or bad, he can’t do anything but wait. Thinking about it puts a little knot of anxiety in his stomach, so he puts the thought down and wanders through the house, lost. Star Platinum follows at his back. The two of them end up in front of a mirror in Jotaro’s room, and he peers at his reflection. His bruises still haven’t fully healed. His shoulders are still stiff where Dio’s knives carved a gash through his muscles, and all he wants to do is sleep.

The next morning, Kakyoin calls for the first time. Holly brings the phone to Jotaro, telling him that it’s a friend, and Jotaro hurries over to the wire and picks up, half-afraid that it’ll be some idiot from his school. But it’s not.

“Jojo?” Kakyoin asks, and Jotaro’s voice sticks in his throat. Unbidden, the memory of how Kakyoin looked when he was being loaded into the ambulance comes to him, and he has to take a deep breath before he can speak.

“Yeah,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve got too many operations in my future, and they won’t let me out of bed, but yeah- I’m okay,” Kakyoin says.

“Good,” Jotaro manages.

“How are you?” Kakyoin asks. Jotaro’s first instinct is to grunt that he’s fine, but then he remembers that it’s Kakyoin on the line. They’ve never needed to lie to each other about their opinions.

“I’m bored, I’m still bruised, I keep thinking an enemy stand is going to attack, and Mom’s using every single bit of her newfound energy to hassle me night and day,” Jotaro says. Kakyoin laughs even though Jotaro didn’t mean it to be funny, but he doesn’t mind.

“I’ll trade you,” Kakyoin says. “The Speedwagon Foundation told my parents I was kidnapped in order to sell my organs and then didn’t tell me about it, so I found out about my tragic kidnapping when my Mom and Dad busted in the room and started interrogating me about it.”

Jotaro laughs. It’s a short sound, almost a bark, and it surprises him. He doesn’t think he’s laughed since they left Cairo.

“Dio, organ trafficker,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s stupid,” Kakyoin says. “People keep telling me I’m so brave for enduring all of that and I just keep thinking about the time I got turned into a puppet after losing at a video game or the time Polnareff fell asleep and we took turns seeing how many pens we could fit in his hair.” It takes Jotaro a moment to realize that he’s smiling. The motion feels unfamiliar, like his face isn’t used to it.

“You are brave,” Jotaro says, and immediately regrets it. There’s a moment of silence, and then Kakyoin chuckles.

“You’re pulling your hat down over your face right now, aren’t you?” Kakyoin asks. Jotaro is, and the fact that Kakyoin knows it makes him scowl. He doesn’t reply.

“For a delinquent, you’re a big nerd,” Kakyoin tells him. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. How are the sumo prelims going? I don’t have a TV in my room.”

“They’re going fine,” Jotaro mutters. “There’s a new rookie that’s pretty good.”

“Yeah? How is Chionofuji doing?” This, Jotaro can talk about.

“They’re saying he’s going to retire after this year.” After sumo, they move to talking about school, about the hospital, about their stands, about things they’d like to eat and about Kakyoin’s plans for when he moves back to Japan. Apparently he lives nearby, close enough that he’ll be able to walk to Jotaro’s house. His parents are engineers. They’ve been to some of the same restaurants and seen the same sights, though it seems like Kakyoin’s memories of his time under the fleshbud are a little blurry.

“When you come back, we’ll go to that restaurant together,” Jotaro finds himself saying.

“Good,” Kakyoin says, and then he laughs. “It’s one am here.” They’ve been talking for almost three hours. “I should probably go to sleep.” Jotaro hesitates, the silence stretching between them, and then Kakyoin speaks.

“When are you free?” he asks.

“Any time,” Jotaro replies. “I don’t really leave the house.”

“Jojo…” Kakyoin says, and nothing else. “I’ll call you soon, then.” Jotaro doesn’t know what else to say, so he hangs up. After the trip, it felt like a relief to return to the silence of his house, but now it feels too quiet. There’s nothing to do in the house. He thinks about what it would be like to sit in a hospital room day after day with nothing but his own stand for company, and he thinks about the way Kakyoin sounded when Jotaro spoke to him over the phone. That night, he leaves the Kujo estate for the first time since he got back from Egypt and walks to his favorite ramen place. It’s as good as he remembers. He thinks Kakyoin will like it.

Kakyoin calls again two days later, and the miracle of the three hour phone call is repeated. Jotaro didn’t think he had that much to say, but it doesn’t matter. Half of the call is just companionable silence, Kakyoin sketching while Jotaro watches TV, the two of them occasionally speaking when they remember something else that they’ve got to say.

“I’ll tell the old man to get you a TV in your room,” Jotaro says, “and then we can watch stuff at the same time.”

“Rich kid, aren’t you?” Kakyoin says, and Jotaro doesn’t deign to answer. Three days later, Kakyoin calls again with news that the TV has been installed, and after that it becomes tradition for them to watch sumo together when it’s on. Kakyoin’s calls become a marker for Jotaro to measure time by, and then one day Kakyoin closes the call by announcing that he’s got a big operation the next day and won’t be calling for some time. Jotaro doesn’t mean to count the days, but it’s hard not to. One, two, three, four. On the fifth day, he gets a postcard. Kakyoin must have sent it weeks before, when the phone calls started. There’s a little Star Platinum posing with Hierophant Green drawn on the back. Jotaro pins it up in his room. On the sixth day, he gets a postcard from the store and takes it back to the study, and without meaning to, he calls on Star Platinum. And then he draws.

It gets to be a routine. Every day that Jotaro doesn’t get a call from Kakyoin, he buys a postcard and has Star Platinum inscribe a memory on it. He draws Cairo. He draws Joseph. He draws Polnareff. He draws the way the mist hung over the valley of Enyaba’s graveyard and the heat shimmers over the Saudi Arabian desert. But mostly, he draws Kakyoin.

Eleven days after the last call, the phone rings.

“Jojo?” Kakyoin sounds tired, but he’s alive.

“Kakyoin,” Jotaro says. “What’s your address?”

He only sends one of the postcards. But the next day, when Kakyoin doesn’t call- and he never calls two days in a row- Jotaro goes to the store and buys a sketchbook. It’s been a long time. Sometime, in his sketches, Kakyoin’s face is blurred, and there are some things he’d like to forget, but there are also things he’d like to remember.

It’s April when Kakyoin comes back to Japan. Jotaro goes with Holly to the airport expecting his grandfather to be there, but when the plane lands and the people start to come down the escalators it’s not Joseph standing there. It’s Kakyoin. Jotaro’s run up to him before his body knows what it’s doing, and then he stops short, unsure what to say.

“Jojo,” Kakyoin says, smiling, and then he hands Jotaro a postcard. “I thought I’d deliver it myself.” Holly sweeps down on the two of them and sweeps Kakyoin into a hug, and in the excitement Jotaro sweeps the postcard into his pocket and doesn’t think about it. They go out to an Izakaya together, and Kakyoin is polite and cheerful and quietly mean in the way that only he can manage. He tells jokes to Jotaro quietly while Holly is talking to the waiter and makes both of them laugh. Jotaro hadn’t realized how much he’d missed seeing him face to face.

After dinner, Holly drives them all back to the Kujo estate. It’s not until they’re pulling into the driveway that Jotaro remembers the drawings piled up in his room. The idea of Kakyoin seeing them alarms him enough that Star Platinum flickers into existence, and he has to distract Kakyoin by asking him about his parents. Once they’re inside, he manages to steer Kakyoin away from his room and into the study, but there’s a drawing there too, a picture of Kakyoin as Jotaro remembers him from all their nights together in impersonal hotel rooms. Jotaro spent a long time on this one, trying to render the way Kakyoin’s hair curled across the pillow and the way his body tapered into his tiny waist, the way he smiled. Jotaro sketched this the day after Kakyoin’s major operation, and he remembers losing himself in the repetitive cross-hatching and the lines. He remembers flinching when the phone rang and praying to himself that it wouldn’t be bad news. It’s not a good picture. Jotaro’s not an artist, not like Kakyoin, but he’d wanted to make something. He’d wanted to prove to himself that he still remembered Kakyoin’s face.

Kakyoin looks at the picture a long time.

“Look at the postcard in your pocket,” he says at last, and Jotaro fishes it out. The front is the image of some random place in Cairo. The back is a picture of him and Kakyoin. In it, the two of them are seated at a ramen bar, clearly in the middle of talking to each other. Kakyoin is gesturing with one hand, and Jotaro is listening intently. Under the table, their hands are interlinked, Jotaro’s palm shielding Kakyoin’s in the sort of soft, casual gesture Jotaro’s seen between couples a hundred times. The lines there are dark and repeated, as if the artist put particular care into drawing that motion.

Jotaro looks up and finds that the real Kakyoin is watching him, his face flushed, his stand winding around him in the way it does when Kakyoin is nervous.

“It looks good,” Jotaro manages. A single step puts him face to face with Kakyoin, close enough that’s it’s more effort not to touch than to touch. Kakyoin’s face is flushed, but he’s not looking away from Jotaro. He looks a little scared, and a little hopeful, but he doesn’t back away. Jotaro takes his hand.

“I wanted to give you something in person too,” Jotaro says. Kakyoin is so close. He tips his chin upwards and the postcard flutters to the floor, forgotten, as Jotaro and Kakyoin share their first kiss.

Written for Jotakak Day 1, for the prompt of ART!

#jotakak #jotakak week #Jotaro Kujo #Noriaki Kakyoin #kakyoin is more the artist #but i've always wanted to see Jotaro do something with Star Plat's ability to just print images directly from Jotaro's brain #also first kisses!!!#im gonna try and do every day of jotakak week wish me luck #a nomette writes

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enz-fan · 5 years

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Juke magazine - 3 May 1980 front cover and article, by Christie Eliezer

TIM FINN well remembers Split Enz’s first ever Melbourne performance - they were soundly booed off stage.

It was in 1975, and Reckless Red Symons, having seen them at Sydney’s Oceanic Hotel and inevitably falling in love with their sense of theatre and originality, suggested to Skyhooks manager/record label boss Michael Gudinski that Enz play at the next major ‘Hooks gig...

“It was some time in late April (Anzac Day actually - ed) and it was at the Festival Hall, The Skyhooks were causing untold hysteria then. Gudinski, who’s only heard about our outrageous stage costumes and makeup was telling everybody that we were the second Skyhooks,” Finn said.

“We had to get up at six in the morning that day, and by the time we got into Melbourne, we only had an hour’s sleep before making our way to the hall. Consequently by the time we came on, we were very tired and irritable.

“It was such a bad introduction to Melbourne. The audience there was so into the Skyhooks that all through the show they were pulling faces, and throwing cans and cigarette butts at us.”

Finn leans back with the confidence of one who’s left his yesterdays far enough behind to be able to chuckle over them. “It was weird... no it wasn’t, it was disgusting, that’s the only way you can describe it. And we lost a lot of support from the media on that one. They saw us totally out of context, and it was a long time before a lot of them would bother about Split Enz again.”

Still, five years later and it’s over under sideways down. While the Skyhooks last single gasped for airplay. “I Got You” and True Colours are simultaneously seated at the top of the Australian charts. It’s been some years since such a double whammy has happened for an Australian band. Two weeks ago, when this interview took place, the single had sold 13,000 copied in the first three days of the week. By the time you read this “I Got You” should have sailed over the platinum mark - and you know how hard platinum singles are to get, particularly for Oz-made discs.

And the younger sisters of those dedicated Skyhooks fans who’d been so hostile to the Enz, are these days shrieking at Enz concerts, standing outside Mushroom Records’ offices hoping for a glimpse of them or pasting up pinup pictures of the country’s most recent - and unlikeliest - teen idol, Neil Finn.

Split Enz themselves have since then been drifting through different universes anyway. Only Finn, Noel Crombie and Eddie Rayner remain from that bunch of ill-dressed weird freak-outs who created a large cult following through their mixture of self indulgence, witty ideas, and acid casualty detachment. It’s true that once they managed to establish their unique concept of theatre and sense of adventure in their musical presentation, instead of having to live up to Gudinski’s absurd preconeptions, they won acclaim. But in the few times I got dragged off to one of their early concerts, kicking and shrieking all the way, they always left me stone cold bored.

“In a lot of ways, we hid behind our images,” admits Finn, who now accepts that a lot of their music in those days was self-indulgent and aimless. “It was a way we could keep our distance from the audience. I think, like most New Zealanders we’re all shy in varying degrees. But nowadays I’ve become much more confident as a performer. I can reach out to them more, to the point of sometimes actually touching them to gain a response.”

Gone too is Finn’s onstage patter, speaking in arty-farty first year university English Lit couplets. Still, there is a strong dose of bemused cynicism in his onstage yakkings, and I’m pretty sure a lot of it goes over the heads of their newer, younger audiences.

“Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all done for reaction. You can’t get too basic or else you become patronising.”

You can take the man out of theatre, but you can’t take the theatre out of the man?

I looked at my watch, and it was a quarter to two...

What are rock’n’roll weirdos like Split Enz doing in the lush stately grounds of the Ripponlea estate, a symbol of a bygone aristocratic/traditional era in Melbourne and now a National Trust and tourist attraction?

Making a film clip for their next single, Tim Finn’s tender ballad, “I Thought I Never”, a standout in their show.

As you crunch up the shaded, sandy driveway which curves through luxuriant flower beds, with the mansion in the distance, you’re overwhelmed by a strong sense of history, you half expect to be met by a white-helmeted pukka sahib complete with monacle and starched handlebar moustache, seated in a horse drawn buggy. What you do find is an assortment of dusty trucks and station wagons with camera crews and roadies lugging equipment out to the main ballroom - polished floors, chandeliers, gold plated mirrors and sin-soaked memories - where the main clip will be shot.

We’re told by Mushroom to turn up at 1 pm sharp to watch Enz filming and chat to the band in between breaks. Photographer Drew and myself wander in at 1:30 to find only two Enzers in sight, in a makeshift dressing room, littered with Ballroom costumes. Tim Finn is sipping champagne as he gets his face made up. Noel Crombie is busy ironing some more costumes. Tim Finn is sipping champagne as he gets his face made up. Noel Crombie is busy ironing some more costumes, typically unsmiling. Neil Finn strolls in casually thirty minutes later, followed by Eddie Rayner.

Representatives from other magazines are there as well. The Enz keep to themselves, none of this hail-felllow-well-met chummy routine. So the men of the media wander back into the sunshine and sit in an outside stone balcony, gossiping and watching the tame peacocks strut past gardeners toiling over the flower beds in the hot Indian summer afternoon.

“One of the things that makes the Enz one of the most creative bands in this country is that they’re very rarely of their image,” says TV Week’s affable Greg Noakes (he’s the one who took the stunning photograph of Cold Chisel on their Breakfast At Sweethearts cover). “At least 70% to 80% of the acts that I take pictures of don’t have a clue what they want out of the session, or how they want themselves projected.

“I’m not going to name names but there’s one top group which I did recently that just could not give a damn. Enz of course have streamlined their outrage since but that accent on the visuals is still as strong. They’ll tell you how they want to come across, and that’s the way it should be.”

While the two Finn boys are the most visual in Enz, others have their roles in the machinery. Noel Crombie for instance might be low profile and almost dispensable onstage (he plays the spoons and assorted percussive instruments) but he’s definitely Enz’s creative genius. His tremendous shyness and eccentricity manifests itself in the flamboyance of their costumes and the sheer vision of their film clips.

Even now, while it’s acknolwedged that the series of film clips coming in from overseas are the most creative in rock by far, most of them are actually covering grounds that Enz blazed in this country at least five years ago.

While Eddie Rayner has an amazing technical mind (his girlfriend Raelyn works the lights for the band), bassist Nigel Griggs is the more practical and businessminded. Drummer Malcolm Green is the most “normal” and “extrovert” as Enz get.

I looked at my watch and it was a quarter to four...

As the evening shadows inch over the stone forecourt, Tim Finn emerges from the makeup room in full costume - black tuxedo, while silk scarf, orange socks - and wanders over to where the media persons are chatting with manager Nathan Brenner, the latter dressed in a blazing yellow’n’red frilled jumpsuit... for film clip purposes, you understand.

“Did you say they’d start soon... ten minutes? Good.” Finn settles himself in a chair and botts a cigarette off somebody. “It’s different filming in a studio because you can create the atmosphere Here, in a place like this, it’s harder to control it.”

We start chatting about True Colours, it’s success, and how it’s the album Enz always wanted to make. I say it worked so well because they weren’t so consciously trying to Create Art, just damn good pop-rock music.

Finn doesn’t bat an eye. “It was a case of strealining it back to the basics really. I still like listening to this album while some of the earlier stuff was a bit... er, self indulgent. There are a lot of good radio hit tracks on it. I love listening to ‘I Got You’ when it comes on the radio, and God knows, I’ve heard it so many times already.”

One Sydney DJ suggested that after being so ahead of their time, tastes had changed enough for people to finally catch up to the Enz? What did he think of that?

“I don’t know... I hesitate to say that, because it sounds so arrogant. But having said that, in a lot of ways we were ahead of our time. For instance, the haircuts we had in ‘74 and’75 are now in vogue, although somewhat modified.”

Offstage Finn is a regular Dr. Jekyll to the energetic Mr Hyde he portrays under the spotlight. A quiet and private person, he is dedicated to the band. He hates doing interviews, but does them because they’re a necessary evil. Brenner informs him that one of the magazine wants to photograph him with New Zealand cabaret singer Tina Cross. Finn scowls because he can’t see how a photograph is going to help Enz, and he’s not not crazy about her music either. He eventually relents, but his curt demeanor as he does it makes it clear to everyone, including Ms Cross, that he’s done it under protest.

It takes Tim thirsty minutes to wind down after a performance and push the adrenalin flow back to normal. He’s not a violent person at all, but during the recent tour he angrily slammed the door in the face of a Brisbane photographer who ignored the “no one in Enz’s dressing room thirty minutes before and after the show.”

Very reflective, determined and cynical, it’s what you’d expect from someone who’s the original surviving member of the band that got together in New Zealand eight years ago, almost touched the pot of gold at the end of the huge rainbow, but had it whisked away by the hand of fate.

Remember how everything looked so rosy for the Enz in the mid-Seventies. Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, who was touring here at the time, dug them so much that he insisted on producing their second album Second Thoughts.

They went to England where the English rock press wet its pants over them. Melody Maker declared “they are one of the few bands of any originality to have emerged over the last 12 months, they may even prove to be the most intriguing combo to join the rock and roll circus since Roxy Music.” Their U.K. label Chrysalis were so determined that they’d be the next big thing that they spent a fortune publicising the band. Nibbles into America proved favourable. A Frenz of the Enz cult following developed in England and Europe.

The dream soured just as quickly. Such an intense creative band had to have its intense personality clashes, of course, and they went through four changes in 19 months.

But if there’s eomthing about Split Enz, it’s been their strong determination and the sense of challenge they feel in seeking out the unknown.

One was going back to working the pubs and developing a grass roots following. The music became streamlined. They tried working with a virtually unknown English engineer/produced called David Tickle. Their first collaboration, ‘I See Red’ saw the Enz get their first National Top 10 single. Pleased with this, they decided to use Tickle in work on their next album. The rest, as they sayin the soap operas, is history.

“We were both looking for each other,” Finn says. “We needed a producer like him, and he was looking for a band like us.”

In a recent interview, Finn confessed that Tickle had provided a “psychological climate” for the band. What did he mean by that?

“Well, it wasn’t just a business relationship, David became a very good friend of the band’s. Obviously when you’re recording, you’re not as good in all aspects of it. Like possibly your vocal harmonies might not be up to scratch. It then takes someone who can bolster up your confidence at that point of time. I know it sounds corny, but you need someone you can depend on.”

Neil Finn wanders over, dressed in a white and pink jacket. The younger Finn had been Enz’s biggest gamble, when they replaced the prolific and adventurous Judd with someone as inexperienced as he. It worked. Onstage his confidence has escalated, although he’s still wary of people he doesn’t know. Every time he answered a question, he’d always glance at his older brother as if needing his assurance.

More than any of the others, he handles the new responsibilities as Enz now also appeals to a younger, screaming audience. He’s forever willing to make in-store appearances and do interviews because the band’s status warrants it. He’s warmed to his new role as a pinup boy.

“It’s a strange situation to be in,” he laughs. “Because, after all, none of us in this band are what you’d call pretty.”

Would you have believed five years ago that some day young females would be screaming at Split Enz and mooning over them as idols. The mind certainly boggles.

At this stage, Split Enz are carefully taking the new found adulation in stride. Rather than cash in by rushing out and playing all the big pubs again and making a lot of money (Brimmer claims he could get $4,000 a night from a one night stint at the Bondi Lifesaver in Sydney) they intend to stay off the road for a few more weeks and then do some work around Perth.

“It’s so easy to get over-exposed in a country like this.” They’re all very keen that their credibility doesn’t get blown with sudden success. Over the next week, too, they’ll start to rehearse the material for their next album, due out in October.

And, surely, Split Enz are dying to get back to have another crack at the English market. After all, considering the way they’ve stuck together through the bad period, this is obviously the strongest Enz lineup to date.

“There have been some nibbles... obviously we’d like to get back there and try it again. But at the same time we’d still like to work to consolidate ourselves in this country, get better acquainted with our new audience. I think the time is just right for us in England, their Top 40 is the most adventurous in the world.

“‘I See Red’ was released there recently. It sold well enough to prove there are still people out there who can remember us, but didn’t get airplay. It’s funny you know, but there are still fans there who hunt us down and write us letters. But this time when we go back there we’ll be more prepared. We’re so aware of the need for a publicist, someone who knows the right people and can get to them.”

“Not much different here.” mutters someone who shall remain nameless.

‘I looked at my watch and it was a quarter to five...

And they’re finally ready to start shooting, kept waiting a further half an hour by an extra. The film clip depicts the band in the aftermath of a wild ball, streamers and balloons everywhere. Last minute adjustments to the sound levels, the tension is unbearable. Tim Finn kicks a balloon around the floor. Eddie Rayner and Nigel Griggs jam on a fast blues and the record finally booms over the microphone.

I fall apart when you’re around, When you’re here, I’m nowhere, I can’t pretend that I’m not down, I show it, I know it...”

Finn steps down from the stage to the dance floor, still miming:

I’ve been a fool more than once, more than twice. I’m gonna move

“Cut!”

It’s a mistake and has to be re-shot. Split Enz are so perfectionist, so unflinching they try again.

“Take two.”

The record booms over the P.A. again. Thirty minutes of that and “Cut!” Yes, it’s a take. Now for the next scene.

And so they piece it together through the whole night, trying out different ideas, always willing to score a better take. For a scene where T. Finn has to waltz alone in the garden, they use floodlights and keep on going. Finally as the eastern clouds streak a tinge of pink and yellow, exhausted bodies yawningly carry the equipment back to the station wagons and head off.

The clock in the main mallroom read 6.10 as the last of the trucks roars off through the steel gates in a cloud of dust.

And when the day breaks in our stately home we'll sit Remembering those nights before our hearts were set Hoping is not enough to live upon With such a far far cry I can't go wrong

- Judd-Finn, “Maybe” from Mental Notes, 1975

And all we’ll see on our TV screens will be a little over three minutes of it.

#splitenz #1980 #favourite

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darlingnisi · 6 years

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Celebration Day 2 : VIP Edition

Part 1 Here!

Concert Screening

Part 2 of Show 2 Piano and a Microphone Gala (Shout out to that one time when he looked directly into the camera as he sang something and caused me to slide down in my chair a bit...Professor geeez!)

Iconography Panel Steve Parke Nancy Bundt Terry Gydesen

Nancy Bundt

She did the above photo

Was once offered a job to be art director for Jimmy Hendrix but turned it down because she was in college

First time shooting P was the 1984 birthday concert

There was a FABULOUS picture of Prince in a wide brimmed hat, shirtless, wearing a Pfunk flag around his neck. One arm had a net stocking and the other ripped nylon stocking. This look but a different view of just him with his arms up

Also shout out to the shirtless one that just showed the muscles in his back. Not my era visually, but I can appreciate art.

Terry Gydesen

Terry Gydsen did the pictures in the Sacrifice of Victor Book

Wasn’t a Prince fan before she worked for him

He won her over when he sat at a piano and played a classical sounding piece

Worked as Jesse Jackson’s photographer during his Presidential campaign in 1988

Got the traditional “can you come out and do a shoot tonight” call...she did not live in Minneapolis

Spent a month on the Act II tour in Europe

Was requested to take a picture of him in the mirror. She talked to herself while doing this and Prince thought it was funny

This was to be the original cover of the Sacrifice of Victor book

Steve Parke

This was shot in the NPG Music club

P made people delete pics of him at first when working on digitial, next day would say “can we get that one back?”

Changed his editing to just select ones he liked rather than one he didn’t like.

He asked Steve if he wanted to get in the water for these pics....Steve declined

Their general cadence was “meet down stairs, Prince is bored let’s get some shots.”

On the arboretum pics, they were taking some and heard some rustling in a nearby bush. Prince was ready to take off but Steve said “that guy doesn’t even know who you are! He’s here for the arboretum!”

Below is artwork before it was edited to be art for graffiti bridge. Prince saw and liked it, asked it to be edited to include characters from the movie. The GB version has Ingrid and Morris added, and the girl at the bottom’s face was edited to be Jill Jones. He had to sand out those areas and repaint them.

Q : How did you maintain your personal life while working with P?

Nancy - Took her husband with her on tour for 5 months. He was her assistant (ie held her legs while standing on chairs and other such things.) Back then they had time to be tourists in the cities they were in. Was not allowed to shoot aftershows.

Terry - There wasn’t a personal life. Mostly always on call for P. Was allowed to shoot aftershows. Told story of being by the stage taking pictures and P leaned over to tell her something she couldn’t hear. Eventually understood he was telling her to move around so she did...and got amazing pictures by doing things like climbing on railroad cars.

Steve - Was around all times of the day. Hans (a sound engineer) and him would try to leave and got called back...once they left and saw him driving toward Paisley in his Yellow BMW. Tried to lay low in their car to not be seen. Steve would get phone calls in the middle of the night while he was at home in Baltimore that were to the effect of “So that one line in the credits of that album, can we take this name out and put someone else in?” Generally would be woken out of a deep sleep and would have to call someone back to ask what he wanted again

After the panel was over, we took pictures with Wally.

Dance Panel

Maya Mclean 2005+ Nandy Mclean 2005+ Tomisina Tate (Geneva) 2000-2003

The whole panel was Q&A

Q : Did you have a part in choreography? Tomasina : He asked if she did her own choreography. She generally worked with choreographers and did not come up with her own. He told her “you’ll get broke off...” (meaning he’d pay her more). She learned how to do choreography, lol.

Maya and Nandy : Fatima did some of their early stuff, but they took over from there. They’d show Prince their routines, and he’d make changes as needed after.

Q : What have you done since working with Prince Nandy : Film/TV behind the scenes. Executive produced Breakfast Can Wait with Maya. Did Photography she took this picture among others :

Worked on TV shows (Westworld), working on an Etta James movie (script in progress), is a life coach.

Tomisina : Danced for others. Noted that he really brought her out of her shell. She didn’t sing much and he had her sing background on you got the look one day unexpectedly. Was in different singing groups later and danced for J Lo. Had a baby with her husband (Larenz Tate). Often baked treats for him and later his fellow cast members. Now runs an online bakery.

Maya : Released an album (with Nandy) also in film/tv (production assistant, second AD), also a life coach

Q : How did you meet Prince? Maya/Nandy : Fatima audition. THEIR FIRST PROJECT FOR HIM WAS FILMING A VIDEO FOR INCENSE AND CANDLES!!!! ALERT ESTATE ALERT!!! TROT THAT OUT IMMEDIATELY!!!!

Tomisina : Recieved a phone call to audition for Celebration in 2000. She was the only one there to audition when she arrived. Spent several days just hanging out, playing basketball, etc. She kept asking when she’d audition, he’d say “soon”. One day an hour before one of his Friday parties he said “U ready?” she had to dance for a jam session. Was nervous because she usually needs time to know what songs the schedule, etc. Wasn’t chosen to do the Celebration run but she did the Hitnrun tour.

Q : What did you take away from your time with Prince that you apply to your life?

Maya : Got a 2AM call from P “Hi. Whatever you say is true”. His voice sounded different so she didn’t recognize it. It sounded higher to her and he was out of breath. He said “I’ve been dancing in my mirror.” The message though was that whatever you say manifests so be careful with the words and energy you put out.

Nandy : When they were about to hit the stage for a show he said “I want you to be present”. Message there that thinking too far ahead or thinking about the past causes anxiety that makes you miss out on what you’re experiencing in the moment.

Tomisina : It was a turning point in his life so he was learning a lot. When leaning, he wanted to teach. She was easy going and didn’t like to be told what to do and was like “yeah yeah I get it” or “oh God I can’t take it anymore” Once she got older, a lot of what he’d said started to click. Also nobody called him Prince, just “dude” “dude is coming” “dude is back”. Overall though, she learned that there are NO excuses..and he brings something out of you that you didn’t know you had. (She idolized Cat and Mayte and wondered why he chose her.) He also taught her how to hear and appreciate music differently. (She teared up during this).

Q: Superbowl halftime show...which twin was it? Maya.

Q : What was his touch like?

Maya : She never had a sexual attraction to him except one time when they were in the NPG music club room and he was covering Elvis’s Teddy Bear on piano.

Tomisina : “Ya’ll assume a lot.” She’d just met her future husband when she started working with Prince and was totally infatuated with him. P and Tomisina had a brother/sister relationship and she seemed annoyed about this question. “ I was there for DANCE” eyeroll

They all commented that he had beautiful hands though.

Q : What is the second most joyful memory you have of Prince?

Nandy : His laugh “HAAAAAAAAA” Tomisina : Practical Jokes Maya : “If you and your sisters were dogs, you’d be scottish terriers. If I was a dog, what would I be? AND DON’T SAY CHIHUAHUA!”

Prince on the Big Screen

So have seen this concept a few times now and the first few times were jarring to be honest. (Slightly traumatic the first time October 2016, tbh) but this was really REALLY well done! You know how you’re at a concert but you can’t see well so you look at the screen instead sometimes? It was like that so it was very strange to look at the stage and not see him, as present as his voice sounded. The live band part really added to the experience...to watch a Prince concert without that accompaniment would have seemed incorrect since he was so much about “real music by real musicians”....a point they were sure to call out with him saying this during the intro. They also had a clip of him talking about a certain day he would celebrate...you know the one....

Important news about this though? They will tour it 2019. 10 for 10 would go again, and take anyone who did not get to go to a Prince concert for the shared experience. It’s the closest you’re going to get! For a taste, the concert was said to be a shortened version of a North Carolina show. We’ve seen parts of it like this :

youtube

And here’s the finale of Purple Rain (out of order with the actual setlist)

vimeo

The entire concert was Prince being an absolute professional. He was cool/sexy/smooth and less of his goofy side to me. Had me on my toes like “Yes Professor” obeying every direction he gave us! Lol...

Part 3 here!

#Prince #Prince Celebration 2018 #Purple Homecoming 2018

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markrushtongallery · 2 years

Photo

This isn’t me. This is a painting that was for sale at Hobby Lobby this past weekend. I was there getting some acrylic ink. It’s a perfectly fine print on canvas. Likely made in China. I will never be negative or disparaging over this kind of art, although I wish customers knew better about what was available to them from local artists. Over the decades, I’ve heard too many artists get all snobby about people who buy “WalMart art”. At least they’re buying something. I’ve looked at real estate listing shows on TV in the 90s and 00s, and routinely look at listings today via the web, and it’s still a miracle if anybody has any original art, much less a “cheap print” on their walls. Most people don’t even put up photos. And I’m talking higher-end homes, where you’d think they’d have something. Most of the time, it’s the local college football team’s logo or a picture of the coach. Or taxidermy. It’s taken me a long time, but I now realize that it’s up to artists to fix this for their benefit. Being a snob isn’t going to help. That’s why I make videos and talk about things. That’s why I’ll eventually do pop-up art shows in public. Printing technology democratizes art with lower price points and an easier entry point. And while I can’t compete with WalMart and HobbyLobby, I can get close. My art isn’t going to sell itself. Most people don’t know how cool a metal print or acrylic print is until they hold it in their hands or see it on a wall. We have to educate the public, our potential customers. Most people can’t afford a $3000 original. But if we can get some people into “buying local”, even via prints and merch, then that’s a small victory. My gallery is at markrushtongallery.com https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb7y9XhO9vT/?utm_medium=tumblr

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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IT USED TO SUCK TO WORK THERE AND IT WILL BE BAD IS THAT MY MODEL OF WORK IS A JOB

Yahoo should buy Google, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. You can be a great startup founder but hopeless at thinking of names for your company.1 The super-angels were looking for companies that will get bought. It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were surprised both by the degree of risk deeply imprinted on it, or by the number of startups is that we see trends early. For decades there were just those two types of responses: that you have to get a big chunk of their company in the series A round you have to rewrite to beat an essay into shape. The source of the problem may be a variant of the Bradley Effect. Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions. I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them. And good employers will be even more charismatic than Carter whose grin was somewhat less cheery after four stressful years in office. They at least were in Boston. So in effect what's happened is that a hundred years.

Some of your classmates are probably going to be. Which means the ambitious can now do arbitrage on them. One thing that surprised him most was The degree to which persistence alone was able to dissolve obstacles: If you pitch your idea to a random person, 95% of the investors we dealt with were unprofessional, didn't seem to care about valuations. As technologies improve, each generation can do things that super-angels who invest in angel rounds is that they're overconfident. The traditions and financial models of the VC business. When they were in school they knew a lot of time on the startups they like are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be awkward to describe as regular expressions can be described in terms like that. Such lies seem to be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. Four years later, startups are ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. Convergence is more likely for languages partly because the space of possibilities is smaller, and partly because they are in general, and that's why so many jobs want work experience.

Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the lies they told you during your education. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. Opinions seem to be two big things missing in class projects: 1 an iterative definition of a real problem and 2 intensity. Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems likely to run up against some kind of secretary, especially early on, because it suits the way they talk about them is useless.2 At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code. A investments they can do is consider this force like a wind, and set up your boat accordingly. Morale is key in design. Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. In existing open-source projects rather than research, but toward languages being developed as open-source languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby.

When you design something for an unsophisticated user. The Age of the Essay probably the second or third day, with text that ultimately survived in red and text that later got deleted in gray. But here's a related suggestion that goes with the grain instead of against it: that universities establish a writing major. Investors were excited about the Internet. The earlier you pick startups, the more it has to cost. Few dissertations are read with pleasure, especially by their authors. Really we're more of a small, furry steam catapult. You'd think that would be of the slightest use to those producing it. Immigration seem to work themselves out.

As more of them go ahead and start startups, why not modern texts? So one way to find interesting work is to volunteer as a research assistant. It applies way less than most people realize. The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn't waste money.3 You can't watch people when everyone is watching you. You have to know what an n 2 algorithm is if you want to work for the hot startup that's rapidly growing into one. Raising an angel round.4 That was why they'd positioned themselves as a media company. Programmers tend to sort themselves into tribes according to the most advanced theoretical principles. Probably not, for two reasons. Good VCs are smart money, but they're still money.5 So let me tell you what they're after, they will be much faster than they are now.

It hadn't occurred to me till then that those horrible things we had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't. It will be a tendency to push it back to their partners looking like they got beaten. It's only a year old, but already everyone in the Valley is watching them. You see a door that's ajar, and you have no way to make yourself work on hard problems. Co-founders really should be people you already know. They're all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own, so they did. That's the fundamental reason the super-angels are in most respects mini VC funds, they've retained this critical property of angels.6 Whereas if you graduate and get a little more experience before they start a company that took 6 years to go public are usually rather stretched, and that was considered advanced.7 Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most basic question: will the future be better or worse informed about literature than art, despite the fact that real startups tend to discover the problem they're solving by a process of evolution. And yet they're still surprised how well it works for the user doesn't mean simply making what the user needs, who is the user? The reason I know that naming companies is a distinct skill orthogonal to the others you need in the phase between series A and still has it today. While some VCs have technical backgrounds, I don't mean to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and part of the confusion is grammatical.

You meet a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. The designer is human too.8 Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to launch them before raising their next round of funding.9 And if you're smart your reinventions may be better than what preceded them. And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way. Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. Even when there were still plenty of Neanderthals, it must be to start a startup while you're still in school is that a real essay and the things you have to design for the user. Like it or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.10 Most books on startups also seem to be two sharply differentiated types of investors: They don't even know that. Working on hard problems is not, by itself, enough.11

Notes

If we had, we'd have understood users a lot online.

Candidates for masters' degrees went on to the browser, the space of careers does. Your mileage may vary.

To be fair, curators are in a company if the founders realized. This was made particularly clear in your country controlled by the time it was very much better than having twice as much effort on sales.

4%, and as we walked in, say, real estate development, you won't be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because they can't afford to.

When that happens, it will probably frighten you more than most people will give you 11% more income, or the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written it? Corollary: Avoid starting a company grew at 1. For most of the best VCs tend to be self-imposed.

Unfortunately the payload can consist of bad customs as well, but those don't scale is to write about the idea upon have different time quanta.

Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been a time machine to the rich paid high taxes? If you extrapolate another 20 years. But should you even be symbiotic, because people would treat you like the one hand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive and often useful discussion on the dollar.

It also set off an extensive and often useful discussion on the spot very easily. Well, almost. Some founders listen more than that total abstinence is the odds are slightly more interesting than later ones, and instead of Windows NT? Some VCs will try to establish a protocol for web-based applications.

The CRM114 Discriminator. Applets seemed to someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be to say, recursion, and not incompatible answers: a It did not help, the local area, and this tends to be extra skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like the outdoors? A higher growth rate has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's software that was killed partly by its overdone launch. There is archaeological evidence for large companies.

Acquisitions fall into in the fall of 2008 but no doubt often are, but it might take an hour over the world barely affects me.

Wisdom is useful in solving problems too, e. This is one you take out your anti-immigration people to work in a journal, and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to change. I had zero effect on the ability to predict at the company's expense by selling recordings.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Dan Giffin, Fred Wilson, and Aaron Swartz for putting up with me.

0 notes

unsettlingshortstories · 4 years

Text

The Other Place

Mary Gaitskill (2011)

My son, Douglas, loves to play with toy guns. He is thirteen. He loves video games in which people get killed. He loves violence on TV, especially if it’s funny. How did this happen? The way everything does, of course. One thing follows another, naturally.

Naturally, he looks like me: shorter than average, with a fine build, hazel eyes, and light-brown hair. Like me, he has a speech impediment and a condition called “essential tremor” that causes involuntary hand movements, which make him look more fragile than he is. He hates reading, but he is bright. He is interested in crows because he heard on a nature show that they are one of the only species that are more intelligent than they need to be to survive. He does beautiful, precise drawings of crows.

Mostly, though, he draws pictures of men holding guns. Or men hanging from nooses. Or men cutting up other men with chainsaws—in these pictures there are no faces, just figures holding chainsaws and figures being cut in two, with blood spraying out.

My wife, Marla, says that this is fine, as long as we balance it out with other things—family dinners, discussions of current events, sports, exposure to art and nature. But I don’t know. Douglas and I were sitting together in the living room last week, half watching the TV and checking e-mail, when an advertisement for a movie flashed across the screen: it was called “Captivity” and the ad showed a terrified blond girl in a cage, a tear running down her face. Doug didn’t speak or move. But I could feel his fascination, the suddenly deepening quality of it. And I don’t doubt that he could feel mine. We sat there and felt it together.

And then she was there, the woman in the car. In the room with my son, her black hair, her hard laugh, the wrinkled skin under her hard eyes, the sudden blood filling the white of her blue eye. There was excited music on the TV and then the ad ended. My son’s attention went elsewhere; she lingered.

When I was a kid, I liked walking through neighborhoods alone, looking at houses, seeing what people did to make them homes: the gardens, the statuary, the potted plants, the wind chimes. Late at night, if I couldn’t sleep, I would sometimes slip out my bedroom window and just spend an hour or so walking around. I loved it, especially in late spring, when it was starting to be warm and there were night sounds—crickets, birds, the whirring of bats, the occasional whooshing car, some lonely person’s TV. I loved the mysterious darkness of the trees, the way they moved against the sky if there was wind—big and heavy movements, but delicate, too, in all the subtle, reactive leaves. In that soft, blurry weather, people slept with their windows open; it was a small town and they weren’t afraid. Some houses—I’m thinking of two in particular, where the Legges and the Myers lived—had yards that I would actually hang around in at night. Once, when I was sitting on the Legges’ front porch, thinking about stealing a piece of their garden statuary, their cat came and sat with me. I petted him and when I got up and went for the statuary he followed me with his tail up. The Legges’ statues were elves, not corny, cute elves but sinister, wicked-looking elves, and I thought that one would look good in my room. But they were too heavy, so I just moved them around the yard.

I did things like that, dumb pranks that could only irritate those who noticed them: rearranging statuary, leaving weird stuff in mailboxes, looking into windows to see where people had dinner or left their personal things—or, in the case of the Legges, where their daughter, Jenna, slept. She was on the ground floor, her bed so close to the window that I could watch her chest rise and fall the way I watched the grass on their lawn stirring in the wind. The worst thing I did, probably, was put a giant marble in the Myers’ gas tank, which could’ve really caused a problem if it had rolled over the gas hole while one of the Myers was driving on the highway, but I guess it never did.

Mostly, though, I wasn’t interested in causing that kind of problem. I just wanted to sit and watch, to touch other people’s things, to drink in their lives. I suspect that it’s some version of these impulses that makes me the most successful real-estate agent in the Hudson Valley now: the ability to know what physical objects and surroundings will most please a person’s sense of identity and make him feel at home.

I wish that Doug had this sensitivity to the physical world, and the ability to drink from it. I’ve tried different things with him: I used to throw the ball with him out in the yard, but he got tired of that; he hates hiking and likes biking only if he has to get someplace. What’s working now a little bit is fishing, fly-fishing hip deep in the Hudson. An ideal picture of normal childhood.

I believe I had a normal childhood. But you have to go pretty far afield to find something people would call abnormal these days. My parents were divorced, and then my mother had boyfriends—but this was true of about half the kids I knew. She and my father fought, in the house, when they were together, and they went on fighting, on the phone, after they separated—loud, screaming fights sometimes. I didn’t love it, but I understood it; people fight. I was never afraid that my father was going to hurt her, or me. I had nightmares occasionally, in which he turned into a murderer and came after me, chasing me, getting closer, until I fell down, unable to make my legs move right. But I’ve read that this is one of those primitive fears which everybody secretly has; it bears little relation to what actually happens.

What actually happened: he forced me to play golf with him for hours when I visited on Saturdays, even though it seemed only to make him miserable. He’d curse himself if he missed a shot and then that would make him miss another one and he’d curse himself more. He’d whisper, “Oh, God,” and wipe his face if anything went wrong, or even if it didn’t, as if just being there were an ordeal, and then I had to feel sorry for him. He’d make these noises sometimes, painful grunts when he picked up the sack of clubs, and it put me on edge and even disgusted me.

Now, of course, I see it differently. I remembered those Saturdays when I was first teaching Doug how to cast, out in the back yard. I wasn’t much good myself yet, and I got tangled up in the bushes a couple of times. I could feel the boy’s flashing impatience; I felt my age, too. Then we went to work disentangling and he came closer to help me. We linked in concentration, and it occurred to me that the delicacy of the line and the fine movements needed to free it appealed to him the way drawing appealed to him, because of their beauty and precision.

Besides, he was a natural. When it was his turn to try, he kept his wrist stiff and gave the air a perfect little punch and zip—great cast. The next time, he got tangled up, but he was speedy about getting unstuck so that he could do it again. Even when the tremor acted up. Even when I lectured him on the laws of physics. It was a good day.

There is one not-normal thing you could point to in my childhood, which is that my mother, earlier in her life, before I was born, had occasionally worked as a prostitute. But I don’t think that counts, because I didn’t know about it as a child. I didn’t learn about it until six years ago, when I was thirty-eight and my mother was sick with a strain of flu that had killed a lot of people, most of them around her age. She was in the hospital and she was feverish and thought she was dying. She held my hand as she told me, her eyes sad half-moons, her lips still full and provocative. She said that she wanted me to know because she thought it might help me to understand some of the terrible things I’d heard my father say to her—things I mostly hadn’t even listened to. “It wasn’t anything really bad,” she said. “I just needed the money sometimes, between jobs. It’s not like I was a drug addict—it was just hard to make it in Manhattan. I only worked for good escort places. I never had a pimp or went out on the street. I never did anything perverted—I didn’t have to. I was beautiful. They’d pay just to be with me.”

Later, when she didn’t die, she was embarrassed that she’d told me. She laughed that raucous laugh of hers and said, “Way to go, Marcy! On your deathbed, tell your son you’re a whore and then don’t die!”

“It’s O.K.,” I said.

And it was. It frankly was not really even much of a surprise. It was her vanity that disgusted me, the way she undercut the confession with a preening, maudlin joke. I could not respect that even then.

I don’t think that my mom’s confession, or whatever it may have implied, had anything to do with what I think of as “it.” When I was growing up, there was, after all, no evidence of her past, nothing that could have affected me. But suddenly, when I was about fourteen, I started getting excited by the thought of girls being hurt. Or killed. A horror movie would be on TV, a girl in shorts would be running and screaming with some guy chasing her, and to me it was like porn. Even a scene where a sexy girl was getting her legs torn off by a shark—bingo. It was like pushing a button. My mom would be in the kitchen making dinner and talking on the phone, stirring and striding around with the phone tucked between her shoulder and her chin. Outside, cars would go by, or a dog would run across the lawn. My homework would be slowly getting done in my lap while this sexy girl was screaming “God help me!” and having her legs torn off. And I would go invisibly into an invisible world that I called “the other place.” Where I sometimes passively watched a killer and other times became one.

It’s true that I started drinking and drugging right about then. All my friends did. My mom tried to lay down the law, but I found ways around her. We’d go into the woods, me and usually Chet Wotazak and Jim Bonham, and we’d smoke weed we’d got from Chet’s brother, a local dealer named Dan, and drink cheap wine. We could sometimes get Chet’s dad to lend us a gun—in my memory he had an AK-47, though I don’t know how that’s possible—and we’d go out to a local junk yard and take turns shooting up toilets, the long tubes of fluorescent lights, whatever was there. Then we’d go to Chet’s house, up to his room, where we’d play loud music and tell dumb jokes and watch music videos in which disgusting things happened: snakes crawled over a little boy’s sleeping face and he woke up being chased by a psychopath in a huge truck; a girl was turned into a pig and then a cake and then the lead singer bit off her head.

You might think that the videos and the guns were part of it, that they encouraged my violent thoughts. But Chet and Jim were watching and doing the same things and they were not like me. They said mean things about girls, and they were disrespectful sometimes, but they didn’t want to hurt them, not really. They wanted to touch them and be touched by them; they wanted that more than anything. You could hear it in their voices and see it in their eyes, no matter what they said.

So I would sit with them and yet be completely apart from them, talking and laughing about normal things in a dark mash of music and snakes and children running from psychos and girls being eaten—images that took me someplace my friends couldn’t see, although it was right there in the room with us.

It was the same at home. My mother made dinner, talked on the phone, fought with my dad, had guys over. Our cat licked itself and ate from its dish. Around us, people cared about one another. Jenna Legge slept peacefully. But in the other place sexy girls—and sometimes ugly girls or older women—ran and screamed for help as an unstoppable, all-powerful killer came closer and closer. There was no school or sports or mom or dad or caring, and it was great.

I’ve told my wife about most of this, the drinking, the drugs, the murder fantasies. She understands, because she has her past, too: extreme sex, vandalizing cars, talking vulnerable girls into getting more drunk than they should on behalf of some guy. There’s a picture of her and another girl in bathing suits, the other girl chugging a beer that is being held by a guy so that it goes straight down her throat as her head is tipped way back. Another guy is watching, and my smiling wife is holding the girl’s hand. It’s a picture that foreshadows some kind of cruelty or misery, or maybe just a funny story to tell about throwing up in the bathroom later. Privately, I see no similarity between it and my death obsession. For my wife, the connection is drugs and alcohol; she believes that we were that way because we were both addicts expressing our pain and anger through violent fantasies and blind actions. The first time I took Doug out to fish, it was me on the hot golf course all over again. As we walked to the lake in our heavy boots and clothes, I could feel his irritation at the bugs and the brightness, the squalor of nature in his fastidious eyes. I told him that fly-fishing was like driving a sports car, as opposed to the Subaru of rod and reel. I went on about how anything beautiful had to be conquered. He just turned down his mouth.

He got interested, though, in tying on the fly; the simple elegance of the knot (the “fish-killer”) intrigued him. He laid it down the first time, too, placing the backcast perfectly in a space between trees. He gazed at the brown, light-wrinkled water with satisfaction. But when I put my hand on his shoulder I could feel him inwardly pull away.

As I got older, my night walks be came rarer, with a different, sadder feeling to them. I would go out when I was not drunk or high but in a quiet mood, wanting to be somewhere that was neither the normal social world nor the other place. A world where I could sit and feel the power of nature come up through my feet, and be near other people without them being near me. Where I could believe in and for a moment possess the goodness of their lives. Jenna Legge still slept on the ground floor and sometimes I would look in her window and watch her breathe, and, if I was lucky, see one of her developing breasts swell out of her nightgown.

I never thought of killing Jenna. I didn’t think about killing anyone I actually knew—not the girls I didn’t like at school or the few I had sex with. The first times I had sex, I was so caught up in the feeling of it that I didn’t even think about killing—I didn’t think about anything at all. But I didn’t have sex much. I was small, awkward, too quiet; I had that tremor. My expression must’ve been strange as I sat in class, feeling hidden in my other place, but outwardly visible to whoever looked—not that many did.

Then one day I was with Chet’s brother, Dan, on a drug drop; he happened to be giving me a ride because his drop, at the local college, was on the way to wherever I was going. It was a guy buying, but, when we arrived, a girl opened the door. She was pretty and she knew it, but whatever confidence that knowledge gave her was superficial. We stayed for a while and smoked the product with her and her boyfriend. The girl sat very erect and talked too much, as if she were smart, but there was a question at the end of everything she said. When we left, Dan said, “That’s the kind of lady I’d like to slap in the face.” I asked, “Why?” But I knew. I don’t remember what he said, because it didn’t matter. I already knew. And later, instead of making up a girl, I thought of that one.

I forgot to mention: one night when I was outside Jenna’s window, she opened her eyes and looked right at me. I was stunned, so stunned that I couldn’t move. There was nothing between us but a screen with a hole in it. She looked at me and blinked. I said, “Hi.” I held my breath; I had not spoken to her since third grade. But she just sighed, rolled over, and lay still. I stood there trembling for a long moment. And then, slowly and carefully, I walked through the yard and onto the sidewalk, back to my house.

I cut school the next day and the next, because I was scared that Jenna had told everybody and that I would be mocked. But eventually it became clear that nobody was saying anything, so I went back. In class, I looked at Jenna cautiously, then gratefully. But she did not return my look. At first, this moved me, made me consider her powerful. I tried insistently to catch her eye, to let her know what I felt. Finally our eyes met, and I realized that she didn’t understand why I was looking at her. I realized that although her eyes had been open that night, she had still been asleep. She had looked right at me, but she had not seen me at all.

And so one night, or early morning, really, I got out of bed, into my mother’s car, and drove to the campus to look for her—the college girl.

The campus was in a heavily wooded area bordering a nature preserve. The dorms were widely scattered, though some, resembling midsized family homes, were clustered together. The girl lived in one of those, but while I remembered the general location I couldn’t be sure which one it was. I couldn’t see into any of the windows, because even the open ones had blinds pulled down. While I was standing indecisively on a paved path between dorms, I saw two guys coming toward me. Quickly, I walked off into a section of trees and underbrush. I moved carefully through the thicket, coming to a wide field that led toward the nature preserve. The darkness deepened as I got farther from the dorms. I could feel things coming up from the ground—teeth and claws, eyes, crawling legs, and brainless eating mouths. A song played in my head, an enormously popular, romantic song about love and death that had supposedly made a bunch of teen-agers kill themselves.

Kids still listen to that song. I once heard it coming from the computer in our family room. When I went in and looked over Doug’s hunched shoulder, I realized that the song was being used as the soundtrack for a graphic video about a little boy in a mask murdering people. It was spellbinding, the yearning, eerie harmony of the song juxtaposed with terrified screaming; I told Doug to turn it off. He looked pissed, but he did it and went slumping out the door. I found it and watched it by myself later.

I went back to the campus many times. I went to avoid my mother as much as anything. Her new boyfriend was an asshole, and she whined when he was around. When he wasn’t around, she whined about him on the phone. Sometimes she called two people in a row to whine about exactly the same things that he’d said or done. Even when I played music loud so I couldn’t hear her, I could feel her. When that happened, I’d leave my music on so that she’d think I was still in my room and I’d go to the campus. I’d follow lone female students as closely as I could, and I’d feel the other place running against the membrane of the world, almost touching it. Why does it make sense to put romantic music together with a story about a little boy murdering people? Because it does make sense—only I don’t know how. It seems dimly to have to do with justice, with some wrong being avenged, but what? The hurts of childhood? The stupidity of life? The kid doesn’t seem to be having fun. Random murder just seems like a job he has to do. But why? Soon enough I realized that the college campus was the wrong place to think about making it real. It wasn’t an environment I could control; there were too many variables. I needed to get the girl someplace private. I needed to have certain things there. I needed to have a gun. I could find a place; there were deserted places. I could get a gun from Chet’s house; I knew where his father kept his. But the girl?

Then, while I was in the car with my mom one day, we saw a guy hitchhiking. He was middle-aged and fucked-up-looking, and my mom—we were stopped at a light—remarked that nobody in their right mind would pick him up. Two seconds later, somebody pulled over for him. My mom laughed.

I started hitchhiking. Most of the people who picked me up were men, but there were women, too. No one was scared of me. I was almost eighteen by then, but I was still small and quiet-looking. Women picked me up because they were concerned about me.

I didn’t really plan to do it. I just wanted to feel the gun in my pocket and look at the woman and know that I could do it. There was this one—a thirtyish blonde with breasts that I could see through her open coat. But then she said that she was pregnant and I started thinking about what if I was killing the baby?

Doug had a lot of nightmares when he was a baby, by which I mean between the ages of two and four. When he cried out in his sleep, it was usually Marla who went to him. But one night she was sick and I told her to stay in bed while I went to comfort the boy. He was still crying “Mommy!” when I sat on the bed, and I felt his anxiety at seeing me instead of his mother, felt the moment of hesitation in his body before he came into my arms, vibrating rather than trembling, sweating and fragrant with emotion. He had dreamed that he was home alone and it was dark, and he was calling for his mother, but she wasn’t there. “Daddy, Daddy,” he wept, “there was a sick lady with red eyes and Mommy wouldn’t come. Where is Mommy?”

That may’ve been the first time I truly remembered her, the woman in the car. It was so intense a moment that in a bizarre intersection of impossible feelings I got an erection with my crying child in my arms. But it lasted only a moment. I picked Doug up and carried him into our bedroom so that he could see his mother and nestle against her. I stayed awake nearly all night watching them.

The day it happened was a bright day, but windy and cold, and my mom would not shut up. I just wanted to watch a movie, but even with the TV turned up loud—I guess that’s why she kept talking; she didn’t think I could hear her—I couldn’t blot out the sound of her yakking about how ashamed this asshole made her feel. I whispered, “If you’re so ashamed, why do you talk about it?” She said, “It all goes back to being fucking molested.” She lowered her voice; the only words I caught were “fucking corny.” I went out into the hallway to listen. “The worst of it was that he wouldn’t look at me,” she said. I could almost hear her pacing around, the phone tucked against her shoulder. “That’s why I fall for these passive-aggressive types who turn me on and then make me feel ashamed.” Whoever she was talking to must have said something funny then, because she laughed. I left the TV on and walked out. I took the gun, but more for protection against perverts than the other thing.

I gave my boy that dream as surely as if I’d handed it to him. But I’ve given him a lot of other things, too. The first time he caught a fish he responded to my encouraging words with a bright glance that I will never forget. We let that one go, but only after he had held it in his hands, cold and quick, muscle with eyes and a heart, scales specked with yellow and red, and one tiny orange fin. Then the next one, bigger, leaping to break the rippling murk—I said, “Don’t point the rod at the fish. Keep the tip up, keep it up”—and he listened to me and he brought it in. There is a picture of it on the corkboard in his room, the fish in the net, the lure bristling in its crude mouth. I have another picture, too, of him smiling triumphantly, holding it in his hands, its shining, still living body fully extended.

She was older than I’d wanted, forty or so, but still good-looking. She had a voice that was strong and lifeless at the same time. She had black hair and she wore tight black pants. She did not have a wedding ring, which meant that maybe no one would miss her. She picked me up on a lightly travelled forty-five-mile-an-hour road. She was listening to a talk show on the radio and she asked if I wanted to hear music instead. I said no, I liked talk shows.

“Yeah?” she said. “Why?”

“Because I’m interested in current events.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I just listen to this shit because the voices relax me. I don’t really care what they’re talking about.”

They were talking about a war somewhere. Bombs were exploding in markets where people bought vegetables; somebody’s legs had been blown off. We turned onto a road with a few cars, but none close to us.

“You don’t care?”

“No, why should I? Oh, about this?” She paused. There was something about a little boy being rushed to an overcrowded hospital. “Yeah, that’s bad. But it’s not like we can do anything about it.” On the radio, foreign people cried.

I took the gun out of my pocket.

I said, “Do you have kids?”

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“Take me to Old Post Road. I’m going to the abandoned house there.”

“I’m not going by there, but I can get you pretty close. So why do you care about current events? I didn’t give a shit at your age.”

“Take me there or I’ll kill you.”

She cocked her head and wrinkled her brow, as if she were trying to be sure she’d heard right. Then she looked down at the gun, and cut her eyes up at me; quickly, she looked back at the road. The car picked up speed.

“Take the next right or you’ll die.” My voice at that moment came not from me but from the other place. My whole body felt like an erection. She hit the right-turn signal. There was a long moment as we approached the crucial road. The voices on the radio roared ecstatically.

She pulled over to the shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

She put the car in park.

“Turn right or you die!”

She unbuckled her seat belt and turned to face me. “I’m ready,” she said. She leaned back and gripped the steering wheel with one hand, as if to steady herself. With her free hand, she tapped herself between the eyes—bright, hot blue, rimmed with red. “Put it here,” she said. “Go for it.”

A car went by. Somebody in the passenger seat glanced at us blankly. “I don’t want to do it here. There’s witnesses. You need to take me to the place.”

“What witnesses? That car’s not stopping—nobody’s going to stop unless the emergency lights are on and they’re not, look.”

“But if I shoot you in the head the blood will spray on the window and somebody could see.” It was my own voice again: the power was gone. The people on the radio kept talking. Suddenly I felt my heart beating.

“O.K., then do it here.” She opened her jacket to show me her chest. “Nobody’ll hear. When you’re done you can move me to the passenger seat and drive the car wherever.”

“Get into the passenger seat now and I’ll do it.”

She laughed, hard. Her eyes were crazy. They were crazy the way an animal can be crazy in a tiny cage. “Hell, no. I’m not going to your place with you. You do it here, motherfucker.”

I realized then that her hair was a wig, and a cheap one. For some reason, that made her seem even crazier. I held my gun hand against my body to hide the tremor.

“Come on, honey,” she said. “Go for it.”

Like a star, a red dot appeared in the white of her left eye. The normal place and the other place were turning into the same place, quick but slow, the way a car accident is quick but slow. I stared. The blood spread raggedly across her eye. She shifted her eyes from my face to a spot somewhere outside the car and fixed them there. I fought the urge to turn and see what she was looking at. She shifted her eyes again. She looked me deep in the face.

“Well?” she said. “Are you going to do it or not?”

Words appeared in my head, like a sign reading “I Don’t Want To.”

She leaned forward and turned on the emergency lights. “Get out of my car,” she said quietly. “You’re wasting my time.”

As soon as I got out, she hit the gas and burned rubber. I walked into the field next to the road, without an idea of where I might go. I realized after she was gone that she might call the police, but I felt in my gut that she would not—in the other place there are no police, and she was from the other place.

Still, as I walked I took the bullets out of the gun and scattered them, kicking snow over them and stamping it down. I walked a long time, shivering horribly. I came across a drainage pipe and threw the empty gun into it. I thought, I should’ve gut-shot her—that’s what I should’ve done. And then got her to the abandoned house. I should’ve gut-shot the bitch. But I knew why I hadn’t. She’d been shot already, from the inside. If she had been somebody different I might actually have done it. But somehow the wig-haired woman had changed the channel and I don’t even know if she’d meant to.

The fly bobbing on the brown, gentle water. The long grasses so green that they cast a fine, bright green on the brown water. The primitive fish mouth straining for water and finding it as my son releases it in the shallows. Its murky vanishing.

The blood bursting in her eye, poor woman, poor mother. My mother died of colon cancer just nine months ago. Shortly after that, it occurred to me that the woman had been wearing that awful wig because she was sick and undergoing chemo. Though of course I don’t know.

The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge. Before I grew up and stopped thinking about her, I thought about that woman a lot. About what would’ve happened if I’d got her there, to the abandoned house. I don’t remember anymore the details of these thoughts, only that they were distorted, swollen, blurred: broken face, broken voice, broken body left dying on the floor, watching me go with dimming, despairing eyes.

These pictures are faded now and far away. But they can still make me feel something.

The second time I put my hand on Doug’s shoulder, he didn’t move away inside; he was too busy tuning in to the line and the lure. Somewhere in him is the other place. It’s quiet now, but I know it’s there. I also know that he won’t be alone with it. He won’t know that I’m there with him, because we will never speak of it. But I will be there. He will not be alone with that.

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thekastlediaries · 7 years

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Jessica’s apartment building is old. A tenement from the turn of the century, Matt can smell the mortar between the bricks, microscopic dust particles making their way into his nostrils. It’s soon overpowered by the acrid stench of someone holding a lighter under a spoon, the stinging smoke rising from the rock resting gently in the metal curve. Jessica passes that door without comment, and not for the first time in Matt’s life does he wonder what it would be like if everyone could sense the things he does, if nothing was private.

Jessica leads him along, one of his hands tucked under her arm for the sake of appearances. The fluorescent lights in the hallway buzz inconsistently, probably on their last leg, their flickering an ominous addition no doubt appreciated by the woman in front of him. It’s possible Jessica picked this unsavory location for her office simply because she only wants the most desperate clients. He’s never met someone so hard to read. Nervous, excited, calm… She’s almost always jumpy, like she’s waiting for something… someone. He can’t get a baseline to start from. She seems to think he’s all-knowing, and it bothers her, so he makes an effort to not try and figure her out. It’s maddeningly difficult trying not to catalogue everything about her.

Her hand is on the doorknob when he tenses, his grip tightening on her arm.

She freezes, whispering curtly, “What is it?”

“There’s someone in your apartment.”

The person on the other side of the wall is moving around in a rather unconcerned manner. There’s a thump and a soft curse, followed by… singing? Matt can hear the tinny noise of music coming from earbuds, the soft shuffle of bare feet moving back and forth across the hardwood floor. He frowns. “Whoever it is seems really at ease…” Matt frowns, his brow wrinkling in concentration. He hears the sound of water cascading from a faucet, the sloshing of it against the sides of the sink. “I think he’s washing your dishes?”

Jessica sighs, shifting out of Matt’s grip easily. He forgets sometimes, about her strength, and then she nonchalantly reminds him. She shoves the door open, ignoring the way the door creaks against it’s jamb as she strides across the threshold. “Malcolm!”

The music stops, and Jessica’s visitor eagerly moves from the kitchen into her office. The place is small enough for Matt to make out the lines of his mouth. A relieved smile spreads across the young man’s face. “There you are. I was worried you’d gotten tangled up in something…” Malcolm trails off at the sight of Jessica, his pleasant expression falling. “Are you alright?”

The concern is genuine and surprising to Matt, who stands awkwardly to the side as Malcolm reaches forward to touch Jessica’s face. Matt wonders if there are still visible bruises on her skin, or if she just has dark circles under her eyes from exhaustion. Touching her like that is not a liberty he’s been afforded just yet, and so he quite literally remains in the dark. He’s struck by an unusual desire to know what she looks like, to know what color her hair is, and the tint of her lips. He was young when he lost his sight, but not young enough to forget that soft skin has a certain glow, that silky hair glints in the afternoon light, that eyes can sparkle like gemstones. Other than the vague outline of her face, he knows nothing about her looks, and for the first time in years this fact of life really bothers him.

Her breathing, always somewhat erratic, slows for half a second during the Malcolm’s contact. It’s only with a sharp intake of breath that she pulls away and resumes her prickliness. “I’m fine. You need to return my key.”

Matt assesses his surroundings, the faint coppery smell of blood hangs in the air but it is masked by various cleaning fluids, the same antiseptic smells that cling to Jessica’s unannounced house guest. Malcolm has been industriously cleaning, wiping away the sad end of Raymond’s life off Jessica’s walls. There aren’t that many people who would take on such an unsavory task, even for a friend.

Matt tucks away this surprising interaction into the little box of things he knows about Jessica, and moves past the taciturn woman to introduce himself to her friend. “Matt Murdock, nice to meet you.”

Malcolm moves to take his hand, one toe bumping into a full trash bag of empty liquor bottles. The alcohol vapors seep through the black plastic, an echo of the oak barrel infused whiskey that so often rides along Jessica’s breath. The way she shrinks away from the clinking makes the sound seem almost accusatory. Matt pretends not to notice, focusing instead on the man in front of him.

“Malcolm Ducasse, unpaid assistant, unsung hero.”

Jessica snorts at this and moves to her desk to power up her computer. She’s done with pleasantries. “You’ve raided my fridge plenty of times.”

This elicits a quiet chuckle from Malcolm, and he moves to collect his things. “Love you too, Jessica. Try not to get mixed up in any crazy shit this evening.”

“Too late.”

“I figured.”

Malcolm briefly squeezes Jessica’s shoulder before letting himself out of her apartment. Matt doesn’t comment on the fact that she didn’t get her key back.

Frustration coils in Matt’s muscles like tiny springs all over his body. He’s not in his element, and he feels more than a little helpless. There is no braille printer, and Jessica doesn’t have a text to speech program on her computer. He’s stuck sitting and listening to her click and scroll and sigh in irritation.

“They’ve vanished from social media.” Jessica says. “Not surprising.”

“Did you check DMV records?”

“Clearly this is your first rodeo, Perry Mason. Anti-stalking laws have made accessing stuff like that particularly difficult and I’m not exactly skilled in the art of hacking.”

The sun is setting outside. He can’t see it, but about half an hour ago she reached across her desk to turn on the lamp, shucking off her jacket. Time seems to be slipping through their fingers and it’s putting him on edge. “What about real estate records?”

Ten minutes later he’s still listening to her clack away at her keyboard, weird nonverbal noises emanating from the back of her throat until finally she blows out a long gust of air through her nose. “It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack, Murdock.”

He runs his hands through his hair in frustration. This was not what he had in mind when they’d set off to find answers. His tie feels like it’s about to strangle him. Loosening the silk noose turns into unthreading it completely and tossing it to the floor, his jacket following suit as he begins to pace in front of her desk. “There has to be something else, something we’re missing. What the hell are they doing at Midland Circle?”

He feels himself unravelling. The scent of Elektra in his apartment, his things not quite where he’d left them. The ache in his chest that won’t go away. If he could just piece together this damned puzzle, the weight pushing the air out of his lungs might let up. The only time he doesn’t feel like he’s about to fly apart is when Jessica is giving him shit.

“Hold on…” Jessica goes silent, fingers tapping gently at the keyboard. In spite of trying not to do it so often, Matt’s focus is drawn to her heartbeat. It’s steady and strong, thumping against her sternum, the sound is somewhat settling. Is this her baseline, or is this just what concentration sounds like?

“Matt…” Her heartbeat quickens, breath catching on the single syllable.

The sound of his name on her lips, not some epithet or nickname, makes him stop pacing. “What?”

“Lexi just… emailed me.”

“Raymond’s daughter?”

“Yeah, she wants to meet me at the park at dawn… talk about dramatic.”

Matt thumbs the open face of his watch, his gut churning as he reads the time. “I would say we have a good three hours before then.”

Jessica leans back in her chair, it’s legs scraping on the hardwood floor. She kicks her boots off one by one. “I’d suggest we get some shut-eye, since we’re probably about to walk straight into a shit storm with no end in sight.”

Before Matt can respond, she’s exiting her workspace, sock-clad feet shuffling into her bedroom. He follows her, one hand resting on the door facing. “And where exactly am I supposed to get some shut-eye. Your office doesn’t exactly have a sofa.”

She shrugs, clearly forgetting that he can’t see her. It doesn’t matter. The movement rustles the sheets she has drawn up to her chin. “The bed seems like a pretty sensible option, Matlock.”

One corner of his mouth twitches up, amusement breaking through the layers of anxiety that have been building around him all day. She’s ran out of ways to make fun of Daredevil, and she’s officially moved on to tv lawyers. “Whatever you say, Nancy Drew.”

The sheets are soft, and they smell freshly laundered. Malcolm’s doing, he imagines. It’s a lot easier to slip into unconsciousness than he ever would have guessed. It helps that Jessica snores like a lumberjack, blocking out almost all other ambient noise.

Please don't be shy about commenting on AO3 if you feel like it. It makes me so happy, you have no idea.

#daredevil #jessica jones #matt murdock #jessmatt #darejones #messica #the defenders #fanfiction

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jodybouchard9 · 4 years

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The Biggest Highlights in Real Estate Reality TV of 2019: Do You Recall Them All?

Getty Images; realtor.com

No doubt about it, 2019 has been a big year for real estate reality TV. Whether your favorite fix is watching Marie Kondo declutter or seeing Christina Anstead (formerly El Moussa) go solo in her own new show, there’s been no shortage of excitement on screen. And, now that 2019 is drawing to a close, we thought it might be fun to take a walk down reality lane and review this year’s TV highlights.

So whether you need a little nostalgia kick or want to know what you might have missed (hey, there’s always reruns for some holiday binge-watching), behold some of this year’s biggest real estate reality TV moments that made us tune in and talk in 2019.

January: Marie Kondo declutters Netflix

Marie Kondo asks clients what “sparks joy” for them.

Marie Kondo/Facebook

After her 2012 bestseller, “The Life-Changing Art of Tidying Up,” Kondo became an organization idol, sparking “joy” in anyone (and everyone) willing to spend a little time tidying up.

But in the new year, Kondo took it to the next level with “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” a new show that premiered on Netflix.

In the series, Kondo makes house calls to help families change their cluttered lifestyle. There’s lots of tears, lots of progress, and lots and lots of trash piles.

The show inspired many Netflix watchers to clean out their junk drawers, plus it taught us all a new way to fold socks. Overall, it was a very tidy way to kick off the new year.

March: ‘Hoarders’ returns, messier than ever

The Otters struggle to let go of their things.

A&E

After a “Hoarders” hiatus since January 2017, the show returned for Season 10—with a vengeance. The show is just as good (read: terrifying) as fans remember it, especially since this new season featured some particularly packed households.

In the season premiere, Andy and Becky Otter are tasked with cleaning their entire house in 30 days, or they might lose it entirely. To make things worse, the couple are adamantly opposed to changing their lifestyle. Becky even runs away at one point, and when Andy is asked to throw away a case of Mountain Dew that expired four years ago, he argues that the case has sentimental value. Yikes!

April: Chip and Joanna Gaines announce their new network

Chip and Joanna Gaines had a big year!

HGTV

After the finale of “Fixer Upper” aired in April 2018, Chip and Joanna Gaines fans were so sad to see them go. However, they eventually resurfaced with the tantalizing news that they were launching their own network with the Discovery Channel.

“Our intention with this network is to create and curate content that inspires, encourages, and helps to build bridges across our communities,” they said in a statement. “We want honest, authentic programming that brings families together.”

The new network is slated to debut in 2020.

May: The ‘Property Brothers’ stars debut yet another show, ‘Forever Home’

Jonathan and Drew Scott help Ren and Scott make their Las Vegas house into a forever home.

HGTV

Drew and Jonathan Scott have been HGTV staples since the premiere of “Property Brothers” in 2011. They’ve already had a few spinoffs over the years, including “Brother vs. Brother” and “Buying and Selling,” but these famous siblings were due for yet another series to showcase their home-flipping talents.

“Property Brothers: Forever Home” premiered in May, with a unique (for the Scotts) twist: Instead of finding a home for a family and fixing it up, they take a home a family already loves and fix it up so that the family can stay in the home for decades to come.

July: ‘Flip or Flop’ returns

Tarek El Moussa and Christina Anstead are still working together in Season 8!

HGTV

Amid the stars’ very public divorce, “Flip or Flop” halted filming. Fans thought they’d seen the last of this hit show when Season 7 ended in October 2018. Yet almost a year later, fans were shocked when the show came back for Season 8 featuring Tarek El Moussa and Christina Anstead, now a divorced couple, working together once again.

In May, Anstead also premiered her own show, “Christina on the Coast.” Meanwhile El Moussa is preparing to launch “Flipping 101 with Tarek El Moussa” in 2020.

These two may have had a rough 2018, but they came back strong for 2019.

September: ‘Brady Bunch’ house gets restored to its ’70s glory

The Brady “kids” are all grown-up! Here, they’re standing in front of the real “Brady Bunch” house, before renovations.

HGTV

HGTV’s latest (and grooviest) hit, “A Very Brady Renovation,” premiered in September, highlighting the restoration of the “Brady Bunch” house. And this task sure wasn’t easy, since the house we all know and love from the 1970s show was used only for exterior shots, while the home’s interior was in a studio elsewhere. It took a whole slew of HGTV renovation experts, as well as the original “Brady Bunch” actors, to make this epic renovation happen. Kudos to them for all of their hard work!

October: Leanne and Steve Ford publish a memoir

Leanne and Steve Ford of HGTV’s “Restored by the Fords” wrote a memoir!

HGTV

“Restored by the Fords” fans love the style that siblings Leanne and Steve Ford bring to HGTV. While Steve focuses on the construction aspect, Leanne brings her signature minimalist style to every home they renovate.

But these siblings upped their game when they came out with a memoir in October. Their book, titled “Work in Progress: Unconventional Thoughts on Designing an Extraordinary Life,” covers life, renovations, and their brother-sister bond. Leanne explained that their goal with this book was to “inspire people to relax and know that the creative life is full of mess-ups—but if you keep it loose, you’ll be fine.”

Not a bad lesson to carry into 2020, and beyond.

The post The Biggest Highlights in Real Estate Reality TV of 2019: Do You Recall Them All? appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

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