#Car keys Melville

[flaresanimedump]

I am obsessed with finding out which characters in Bungo Stray Dogs can drive. It all started when I noticed that out of all the characters 14 year old Kyoka is shown behind the wheel almost every time the ADA is going anywhere in a hurry. Atsushi who is 18 has been in the passenger seat beside her multiple times with no mention of the fact that she is 14 and probably struggling to see over the dash and touch the pedals at the same time. How is Kyoka the driver. So.

Confirmed can drive:

Kunikida. He's shown driving multiple times as well. He probably has his license and everything. He still takes the train and taxies so I'm guessing he doesn't own a car.

Kyoka. She does not have her license but she's who they put behind the wheel when Kunikida is down or not around.

Ranpo. Of all people. Shown to be able to drive rather well in chapter 79. I'm becoming convinced this is why he doesn't know how to take the train - he drives literally everywhere.

Higuchi. Shown driving home. Probably the character who drives the most if it's part of her usual commute.

Haruno. Seen driving, is explicitly handed the keys in fact.

Ango: Seen driving (poor thing).

Teruko: Seen driving. Probably has a license since they're not big on breaking laws. (But then they weren't on a public road).

Steinbeck: Can drive in places other than Japan. Rammed his truck directly into a very obvious poll in Japan.

Mori? This is unclear. He gets into what would be the passenger side of the car that explodes, but it might have been an American car. Pretty sure it was supposed to be an American car actually. There's no logo but it doesn't seem like there was a chauffeur and he moves like he's reaching for the wheel. Also it's really old and square in the manga.

Chuuya: Flies for the most part but drives a motorcycle in Dead Apple. Not sure if I feel this is canon or not.

Tachihara. Seen driving a scooter. I guess I'll allow it.

Can drive but shouldn't:

Dazai. Apparently this is brought up in a light novel. He drives with Kunikida, implying he has a license, but apparently launched the car into something. He's called a 'bad driver' but I suspect he just needed the thing he flew the car into dead right then. May actually be a very good driver and just lazy.

Driving status unknown:

Tanizaki: Shown at the controls of a helicopter but never a car? Those aren't the same thing so I don't want to say he can drive but apparently he can fly.

Poe: Also can almost definitely drive. Can change out engines. I'm convinced he was driving the truck the agency members were hiding in during the cannibalism arc but I have no proof. Has not been seen behind a wheel.

Fitzgerald: I can't imagine him not knowing how to drive just for sports cars reasons but I also can't imagine him driving when he actually needs to go anywhere.

Fyodor: Travels pretty far a lot, seems to walk though?? It's unquestionable that he could drive a car if asked, but would he? Is he legally allowed to? We may never know.

Kajii: Driving a train like a maniac doesn't count.

Hirotsu: Travels pretty far pretty often. Could be taking trains.

Katai: Doesn't go anywhere

Natsume: Cats around

Akutagawa: Also flies. Shown walking when Higuchi was driving. Probably can't drive.

Gin: Also shown walking.

Jouno: Probably can't drive legally but could maybe drive in a pinch. Jury is still out.

Fukuzawa: Because both Haruno and Ranpo seem to be regular drivers and Fukuzawa is only ever shown walking even when it's logistically improbable I'm becoming increasingly convinced he can't drive.

Kenji, Yosano, Oda, Kouyou, Q, Hawthorn, Margret, Louisa, Melville, Lucy, Mark Twain, Fukuchi, Tecchou, Sigma, Gogol: can't say one way or another.

Can't drive won't drive:

Atsushi will literally let Kyoka drive rather than take the wheel himself.

Naomi hands Haruno the keys to their getaway car and I feel like she'd drive if she could so she goes here.

Oguri: I think he'd have a heart attack if he had to drive for more than 3 minutes. I could be wrong. Shown having a chauffeur though.

Lovecraft.

#bungo stray dogs #bungo stray drivers #inquiring minds need to know #this is all to my memory #if someone else remembers one of these people driving please share #most of the time it's more likely they got a ride from a random mook #I DISCOVERED A NOTE ON THE WIKI THAT DAZAI IS BAD AT DRIVING #driving #bsd driving post

[byneddiedingo]

Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) Cast: Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Isaach De Bankolé, Camille Winbush, Cliff Gorman, Henry Silva, Tricia Vessey. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography: Robby Müller The gangster-as-samurai trope has perhaps been a little overworked ever since Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, to which Jim Jarmusch pays homage at the end of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. It takes a filmmaker of special sensibilities like Jarmusch (or for that matter Melville) to make it work, to simultaneously explore and send up the notion that the hit man in service of a mobster is somehow the modern equivalent of the warrior in liege to a feudal lord. One reason Jarmusch's film works as well as it does is that he started with the actor, Forest Whitaker, around whom he wanted to build a film. Discovering Whitaker's interest in martial arts and reading the 18th-century Hagakure, a book on the warrior code, enabled Jarmusch to put things together. The result is a smart, funny, improbable but moving fantasia on old-fashioned themes like duty and honor. Big and bearlike -- bear references are key in the film -- but surprisingly graceful, Whitaker moves through the film with the kind of focus and centeredness you expect of a samurai. He's a master of nature -- his flock of pigeons -- and of technology -- his device that enables him to unlock doors, disable alarms, and start cars. He has a second sense with people -- his ability to communicate with Raymond (Isaach De Bankolé), the Haitian who speaks no English while Ghost Dog (we never learn his given name) speaks no French. He has a rapport with children, especially Pearline (Camille Winbush), the bookish little girl who inherits his copy of the Hagakure and seems destined to follow his path. Once again, Jarmusch has taken a familiar milieu, the New Jersey mob land known to us from The Sopranos, and transformed it, the way he reimagined Cleveland and Florida in Stranger Than Paradise (1984), New Orleans in Down by Law (1986), and Memphis in Mystery Train (1989). It's not New Jersey, of course, though the film was shot there, but The Industrial State, which seems to be next door to The Highway State, as the license plates on cars tell us. Ghost Dog floats just outside of the real world, which makes it all the more real.

#Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai #Forest Whitaker

[keywestlou]

MOBY-DICK

MOBY-DICK - https://keywestlou.com/moby-dick/"Call me Ishmael." Opening line to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. One of the most famous opening lines in literary history. Melville published Moby-Dick this day in 1851. A failure. Turned few on. Melville died in 1891. Moby-Dick still an economic flop. It took to the 1920's for Moby-Dick to become a literary success. It was "discovered." Actually, Herman Melville the author was discovered. At the same time in the 1920's, his first novel Billy Budd became a popular best seller. I envy Steve Thompson that he came to Key West in the 1970's and became a part of the island. At the same time that he discovered Key West, he likewise discovered the Chart Room. A winning combination! Steve became friends with Phil Tenney. Phil was a Chart Room regular in the '70s. One of the nicest people I met in the Keys. He shared his 19 foot Mako with all of us and showed me how cool catching lobsters was. His dad was a diplomat overseas for a while. His mom drove a Porsche and I sure liked her style. They talked about living overseas and strange places. All the ancient cities and mysterious faces. Phil had a woodshop on Caroline Street. The door was always open and it was really neat. He had all the best stuff from band saws to jointers. His index finger was shaped like a spiral pointer. He said he looked up when a car honked his horn. He was on the drill press and he saw the bandages torn. He had a wire in his finger from a previous repair. He said it reminds him to pay attention when working there. Phil now owns probably the best restaurant in the Keys. Everyone knows it by its first name, Louie's. Louie's Backyard. Phil and his wife Pat bought Louie's in 1983. Today, Phil and his son Jed run the place. I experienced a bit of a calamity a few days ago. I live on the golf course. Two blocks in from the 18th fairway. There is a whole block of houses across the street from me that are directly on the golf course. All homes are 2 stories. In the five years I have rented here, my home has been hit by errant golf balls 5-6 times a week. A loud noise. Never any damage. Till last week. My bedroom on the second floor. A golf ball hit and broke a bedroom window. Glass all over the floor, a dresser, TV set and my bed sheets. Called the realtor who manages the property. He said your house too far in to be hit by golf balls. Just what I needed. Bullshit! Anyhow, the manager is now trying to determine who is responsible for replacing the window. The homeowners association or my landlord. Yesterday, a carpenter showed up. To fix the window? No. To cover the entire window with a piece of plywood. The board was drilled into the house. Nothing is simple in Key West. Probably take months to resolve the issue. I got my cleaning lady Sylvia and her husband Jose over to clean up the mess, change the sheets, etc. Harpoon Harry's own a boat that was in the Powerboat Races. Big stuff! Boats expensive to purchase. Expensive also to maintain and operate. Not kid stuff. The Harpoon Harry boat won the friday races. A big deal! Congratulations in order. Donald Trump has advised he will be announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President in 2024 tomorrow. Woe is we! He can't win. He's lucky he won the first time. If he loses a primary, he will run independently to be a spoiler. If he wins a primary, I cannot believe the people will elect him again. The odds actually are he will lose a primary and run independently. Even a good and talented person like Theodore Roosevelt could not win as an independent. What Trump will succeed in doing is helping to elect the Democratic candidate. Enjoy your day!

[prettylovecharlie]

On-going list of things that I lové

I lové making my friends feel inspired to do what they love and find what they love

I lové learning about myself

I lové thé contrast of happy things in my life because they show me what I really want and like

I lové orgasms 

I lové being in love

I lové when my phone puts a French accent on every é in “love”

I lové dressing up

I lové thé feeling of putting on an outfit that matches my mood exactly for the day 

I lové driving 

I lové dancing

I lové performing on a stage with a blinding light so I can’t even see the crowd

I lové money 

I lové how devoted I am to finding joy in my life 

I lové being intentional and I love how much meaning I give every single thing

I lové the moon

I lové thé océan

I lové skinny dipping 

I lové sunbathing

I lové my parents

I lové my friends 

I lové my dog

I lové brandy Melville

I love when it rains in New York especially when it’s warm and humid like a summer storm because it reminds me of maryland

I lové to romanticize everything even the sad things (because I love the contrast)

I lové thé way my hair dries after I’ve been in the ocean 

I lové my perfumes: Fracas because it’s so clean and feminine and was my great grandmas favorite, Rio because it smells like mature baby powder and my aunt designed it for my baby cousin, and tobacco vanilla because it was the first big girl perfume I ever had to myself. (And it reminds me of my mom)

I lové art 

I lové music

I lové taylor swift and lorde and lady Gaga and the way buzzcut season makes me feel so euphoric when I drive home from dance on the 405 late at night

I lové feeling my hand swim through the wind when I drive with windows down

I lové that i can appreciate LA traffic because it gives me time to “tune in”

I lové thé movie garden state

I lové waking up in my childhood bedroom to a warm cup of coffee my mom made for me 

I lové being taken care of

I lové getting my nails done

I love my collection of shoes

I lové my first boyfriend because of the way I loved him so purely and so whole 

I lové thé way i lové

I lové my six flight walk up

I lové Trader Joe’s vegan carmel onion dip

I lové that i live à block away from my best friends and that my best friends are kind and funny and passionate

I lové artists

I love walking

I love that i can walk all of downtown manhattan in my beat up Manolo blahniks and not complain once

I lové knowing that everything is working out for me unconditionally

I lové thé curiosity in knowing that there is so much more to love that I haven’t even discovered yet

I lové thé intensity of feelings that come with a break up 

I lové thé album Evermore

I lové key lime tea cookies from Trader Joe’s 

I lové noticing abundance 

I lové when i think of something I want and the next day it arrives at my doorstep

I love my cousin ryder and his ex girlfriend iris. I hope they get married. 

I love sitting in my car in the dark before I go inside so I can listen to the whole song

I lové plants and animals and orchids

I lové writing

I lové writers

I love when my friends drop me off at home but we stay in the car for an hour extra because there’s so much to talk about 

I lové second moms

I love comfortable silence

I lové intimacy

I lové being held 

I lové feeling clean

I lové stars 

I lové thé walk down abot kinney

I lové thé movie la la land 

I lové being intentional

I lové making people laugh 

I lové when people make me laugh

I lové weddings

I lové clear skin 

I lové reading poetry that makes me feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach

I lové psychics 

I lové being intuitive

I lové houses that are painted white with a bright colored trim

I lové warm light 

I lové candles

I lové lemongrass scent 

I lové learning 

I lové walking into a friends house and the aromatherapy feels like they’re giving you a hug 

I lové hot tubs and warm baths

I lové long showers

I lové when wearing sweatpants to brunch when it’s cloudy 

I love being a woman 

I lové tan lines

I lové feeling beautiful 

I lové being organized

I lové vintage designer

I lové being inspired

I lové watching my friends succeed

I lové meeting new people

I lové thé feeling of clean teeth 

I lové wearing my retainer to bed every night 

I lové sleeping with a million pillows

I lové big cozy hats 

I lové slip dresses and silk

I lové feeling présent

I lové being in touch with my likes and dislikes

I lové noticing growth 

I lové knowing that when I’m in the moment it won’t feel as big as it really is because I won’t learn the lesson until after 

I lové thé expérience of learning 

I lové being alone 

I lové brunch

I lové palos verdes

I lové my childhood bedroom 

I lové mazzy star

I lové my room decor in my childhood bedroom

I lové framed pictures

I lové thé color of unpainted wood at golden hour

I lové when ceilings are slanted because the house is triangle shaped 

I lové taking care of my clothes 

I lové my great grandmas floral painted lamps and dish-ware

I lové incense 

I lové lemongrass body scrub

I lové weed

I lové my D&G halter top 

I lové Debbie Harry’s style 

I lové waking up only to go back to sleep because I want to finish my dream

I lové that im able to lucid dream 

I lové that even scary dreams can be fun because they’re just like watching a movie 

I lové feeling good in my body 

I lové my bangs 

I lové french bob hair cuts 

I lové lavender 

I lové thé Colors orange and blue together

I lové listening to music that makes me see the color blue 

I lové feeling gratitude 

I lové fresh white sheets 

I lové knowing what I want

I lové side swept bangs in a shaggy bob

I lové thé color black

I lové when bean licks my whole face up my nostrils and in my ears

I lové big mirrors with delicate detailed framing 

I lové when my mom does my laundry

I lové feeling my creative flow

I lové introspection 

I lové Diane von furstenburg 

I lové fantasizing about other people’s perceptions of myself

I lové my health 

I lové that when i want something gently it appears in my life in thin air. Today I thought how nice it would be to have bandaids to wear with my new flats and right now I’m staring at a box of bandaids on my dresser. Yesterday I wanted new ballet flats and iris gave them to me in the exact desired shape and color. 

I lové that when I want things gently they get sucked right out of the vortex and into my reality. 

I lové that my imagination is a vacuum 

for my desires. 

I lové knowing my power

I lové tattoos 

I lové sunflowers 

I lové Los Angeles 

I lové fresh pedicures

I lové long nails

I lové noticing shifts

I lové having it all

I lové watching my mom dance 

I lové text book by lana del Rey and conflictingly 

I lové platinum blonde girls 

I lové cowboy boots

I lové glowing skin

I lové Green tile in bathrooms

I lové clean hair 

I really love my dog

I lové my hometown or at least im starting to again

I lové romance

I lové being a romantic 

I lové poetry 

I lové connecting with people who seem unusual to my age group (no pedos!)

I lové exchanging wisdom

I lové when my friends know me so well they tell me things about myself that I never knew (I want to be like that but I’m scared if I share I’ll be too critical)

I lové thé intensity of heartbreaks 

I lové timothée chalamet

I lové thé movie ladybird 

I lové analyzing 

I lové knowing 

I lové 1930s slip dresses 

I lové making healthy meals for myself 

I lové travelling

I lové transportation because I can sit there and just be. There’s nothing else I have to do. 

I lové silver nail polish 

I lové emma chamberlains podcasts 

I lové freeways with no traffic 

I lové airplane waffle cookies 

I lové black coffee

I lové hanging out with my mom

I lové intense black waterline eyeliner and a red lip 

I lové my train conductor taylor swift hat 

I lové not having tik tok

I love The shape of smoke

I love Being in love

I love going on train rides

I love being in nature

I love cold plunging or at least the feeling that comes immediately after cold plunging

I love breathing

I love soap

I love that I am a person who keeps a list of what she loves so when im sad I can go back and find some joy

I love being held by boys I have crushes on

I love touching peoples hands

I love opening the freezer to a full tray of ice

I love that my brother feels comfortable to talk to me

I love when my plant grows new leaves right after I water her

I love collecting vintage dresses

I really really love my closet

I love that I found a Valentino archive gown for $75

I love Angelas 

I love journaling 

I love that I feel inspired in school now

I lové beatnik culture and I’m not sorry about it!

I lové leather and tobacco candles 

I lové feeling sore after dancing 

I lové walking in the middle of the street on my way home from class 

I love creating 

I lové my Valentino collectible gown 

I lové coffee and croissants

I lové boys hands 

I lové sleeping in

I lové waking up to a really intense rainstorm especially when my leather candle is lit 

I lové having a clean home 

I love my aunt Goldie

[elitelockservice]

Elite Lock Services gives High - class car keys administration. Here you will get numerous administrations of vehicle keys Applecross, Vehicle key cutting, New vehicle key, Distant key, and so on For more information visit our site today.

#Car keys Melville

[goliftingnowwwwww]

Guys, these tips are all awesome. I’m a lifter in HK and here are some benefits and differences with American and British stores!

1. Door buzzers are VERY rare. Usually only in designer shops in high end malls. It is quite common to have hidden ceiling censors sometimes to be careful with that. Take the tag off if you feel insure

2 we RARELY have those bulky magnet thingies, usually just the old paper tags. They do have barcodes so be careful!

3. We don’t have dollar tree, Walmart, target etc, so it’s a lot harder to find a place to lift. My recommended places include cotton on, brandy Melville, sasa, decathlon (depends which one), any supermarket etc. Dangerous places you should never go to lift include any electronic store, Nike, MLB, Micheal kors, 6ixty8ight. Most of these shops will have employees follow you EVERYWHERE and will review footage/ create posters with your face. BEWARE

4. SEPHORA IS THE BIGGEST DANGER ZONE.

If you go to Sephora to lift, or as we say here, bonk, do it in a BIG GROUP or when there’s a lot of people. I’m America it’s may be easier with less people but here the more the merrier. Employees are everywhere so it would help a lot to get them all distracted. Instead of going to Sephora go to Sasa. No buzzers, less cameras, more blind spots and frankly more choices.

5. Be VERY careful. I’m America you might have getaway cars or places to Stacie your hauls, here it’s quite rare to have a private car as public transport is KEY. I would recommend always knowing locations of public bathrooms nearby and having a friend with an identical bag on standby just in case. Not that common to get chased here but they will print out the camera footage and post it in the window of the shop.

I will make a post about lifting from brandy Melville soon! Happy lifting <3

#lifting tips #shoplifting

[cherryonigiri]

the retrospective: alice’s 1k special || lover masterlist

matchup requests: CLOSED

@1800xibal​ asked: congrats on 1k! your works are so amazing and i can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. can i please get a matchup 🥺? my mbti type is esfp (the performer) and my hogwarts house is slytherin (but sometimes it comes out as hufflepuff). five words to describe my personality would be extroverted, kind, kinda naturally flirty??, cute (my friends say that i act cute a lot but idk lmao), and outgoing. my hobbies are singing, dancing, and playing valorant. my style is pretty y2k and soft girl (tank tops, crop tops, argyle sweaters, oversized jumpers, tennis skirts, slip dresses, etc.) i usually shop from brandy melville, princess polly, pacsun, urban outfitters, and yesstyle! my favorite beverage is honey milk tea with boba or sweet tea! once again congrats on 1k and tysm for doing these matchups!

A/n: ajfoiaewjfpoaw omg thank u I’m glad you like what i’m posting chae!!!! And yes ofc u can have a matchup, thank you so much for ur request! 🥺🥺🥺 -alice

Your matchup is: Oikawa Tooru

How you met: through mutual friends at a party! You’re pretty good friends with Makki and Mattsun (you meet them in university), and they invite you to a little get together they’re hosting. Oikawa also shows up (for the sake of the matchup can we pretend he stays in Japan). The two of you are both bubbly social butterflies and hit it off right away. He’s definitely flirting with you, confident in telling you that you’re the most stunning person in the room and you flirt back accidentally and/or intentionally. Definitely leave that night with his number - Oikawa is smooth (or at least thinks he is)

Your first date: texts you a few days after you meet, asking if you want to go on a date with him! Since you two are both very fashionable/stylish, you decide to go shopping together. You meet downtown, where there’s a nice mix of bigger brands like Urban Outfitters, but also some thrift stores and vintage stores as well - for those quirky sweaters and accessories. You guys take turns choosing your own outfits or choosing/suggesting outfits for the other. Oikawa definitely has a similar style or understands your aesthetic really well because he keeps finding quirky pieces that you really like! Maybe a nice late lunch at a local restaurant once you’ve bought what you wanted.

Your first kiss: is very touchy to begin with - definitely will casually wrap an arm around your waist or shoulder or hold your hand nonchalantly. However, it actually takes him a while to kiss you! He’s pretty spontaneous though - you’re probably just grabbing dinner with him at a comfort food place when he thinks that he should maybe kiss you. He’s pretty confident/flirty, so he teasingly asks you “Can I kiss you~” When you enthusiastically nod he leans down, smiling as the taste of your chapstick seeps into the kiss. 

Anniversary: Goes all out for this. Will take the day off work and take you on a day trip or plan a whole day out. I feel like he’ll plan your outfits or insist on wearing matching/complimenting outfits that day. You wake up in the morning with your clothes already hanging on the closet door. Oikawa is bouncing around the apartment, hurrying you along because there is so much he has in store. The day starts with brunch at your favorite cafe and then you go window shopping downtown. If there is an observation deck/tower you’ll spend part of the afternoon there or stroll through the nearby botanical gardens. Rushes you home to change into something more fancy (outfits also already planned/picked) so the two of you can make your fancy dinner reservation at one of the fanciest restaurants in the city. 

How they propose: Gets all of your friends and family involved! He plans a surprise event in the park. One afternoon he shows up at your apartment claiming he has a surprise for you. He drags you to his car and drives you to the park. When you arrive he insists on you covering your eyes/wearing a blindfold. He leads you down a path towards a secluded clearing/meadow where everyone is waiting. When you open your eyes you see flower petals strewn across the grass, with them holding posters that read “Tooru has something to ask you.” When you turn around he’s kneeling, teary-eyed, with the ring held up to you. 

What your wedding looks like: big wedding, because the two of you both love the entertain/share moments with friends and family. I have a feeling that Iwa, Mattsun and Makki all end up in the wedding party. Also Takeru is the ring bearer! Definitely goes all out with the ceremony - I feel like you’d get married in Sendai since it’s close to his hometown but still a big enough city so that it’s worth it for your guests to travel. Definitely very well coordinated/aesthetic decorations - you guys theme the things around some of your matching outfits/styles - each table has a slightly different color scheme + settings based on a certain pair of outfits.

Newlywed/domestic hc: When you move in together, you guys decide to spend an entire weekend organizing your closet - you guys have a large walk-in closet. You have a very sleek aesthetic - there is a small metal rack in your bedroom to hang a few jackets/key pieces on. Marie Kondo style you organize by color/material/type for the entire day, investing in clear tubs and metal framed hangers so that everything looks uniform and you can see your options. You guys have a special section for your matching/couples outfits - it’s a special rack with extra shelving where you put polaroids you’ve taken of the two of you in those matching clothes! (basically imagine a Muji display except that’s your wardrobe space)

#haikyuu matchups #haikyuu x reader #oikawa x reader #oikawa tooru x reader #oikawa toru x reader #oikawa tooru #oikawa toru #haikyuu imagines #haikyuu #seijoh #aoba johsai #the retrospective #alice's 1k special

[the-original-b]

Archangel: For the Good of the Public, Part 1

Format: Prose / Fiction, multi-entry

Part in Series: 1 of 3

Word Count: 3,400

Premise: She’s an assassin--one of the finest in the world--which gives her the right to ask for vast sums of money to do what she does so well. But every so often there comes a job she’s happy to do for free.

Warning(s): brief violence

[A/N: this was supposed to go up a L O T sooner, but life events made it difficult to actually get the story onto digital paper. I think I’ve adjusted though, so I should get these out fairly quickly, Lord willing. Hope you enjoy!]

Seza slid the key into the lock of her safehouse door, then twisted it open to let herself in. She crossed the threshold and nudged the door shut behind her with her heel before pausing at the framed photo hung by the door—in her lover’s embrace, sharing a kiss before the setting sun by the water, dated 2009.

She didn’t cry over him anymore but his absence in her life was still palpable, most notably when she was on assignment. She’d consider what he would do if he were in her position, and what guidance he would offer her. She still missed him; daily she would wonder what obscure corner of the world he was in, and on occasion she would wish she could go back two or three years to take back what she said to him the last time they spoke.

She turned away from the photo hanging on the wall and headed deeper in to the apartment to undress and prepare for bed.

Seza began the following morning with a dozen pull-ups, fifty push-ups, one hundred crunches, and a two-minute wall sit. She took five minutes to stretch before heading to her shower and preparing her breakfast.

On her way out of her building, her attention was taken by a flyer posted on the glass pane of the front door. She made her way outside to inspect the sheet of paper and immediately found it called for the return of a missing person.

She removed the flyer from the door to scrutinize it further—the missing person was a girl named Samantha Calloway, age 15, missing since last Friday. Brown hair, green eyes, five-foot-three, 110 pounds, last seen at the Walt Whitman Shopping Center in South Huntington. Seza studied the image on the poster, found the youth and innocence in the girl’s smile and eyes, and retrieved her cell phone from her coat pocket.

“Horace,” Seza said as soon the other person answered. She mimicked the accent of a native New Yorker. “It’s Shelli. I won’t be able to make it tonight, a family emergency just came up… I’ll let you know about the rest of the week. Thanks.” Seza ended the call and took the poster back inside the building to her apartment.

~~~~ 

Seza arrived at a luxurious home in Westchester later that afternoon. She parked her sedan at the foot of the driveway and made her way up to the house. She heard the German shepherd long before she rang the doorbell, and waited patiently for somebody to answer.

The woman that did cracked the door open and peeked through at her, her other hand on the dog’s collar. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days.

“Mrs. Calloway?” Seza put forth. She spoke in her native accent.

“You have the wrong address,” the woman said.

“I don’t think I do,” Seza noted. “It may not be close to where Samantha was taken last Friday, but this is the residence of the people who own the Melville property to which the phone number on this flyer belongs,” she explained, holding up the sheet of paper she plucked from her apartment building door this morning. “And while I don’t yet understand how or why she was so far away from home when she was taken, that doesn’t make a difference at the end of the day.”

There was a moment of quiet before a third person joined them at the door. “Who are you?” he said. Like his wife, his exhaustion was visible.

“My name is Seza,” she replied. “As I was about to explain to your wife, I’m a tracker and private investigator. I’m here to help you find your daughter.”

Mr. Calloway shot his wife a look, then faced Seza again. “Come inside,” he said, motioning her in with a nod and opening the door wider for her.

Seza nodded respectfully and crossed the doorway, offering her hand to the dog to investigate. When he was satisfied, he pushed his snout between her thumb and fingers, and Seza responded by rubbing the back of his head, behind his ears.

“Ace doesn’t usually warm up to people that fast,” Mr. Calloway said. “And most visitors are intimidated by him.”

“I grew up with dogs,” Seza said, a smile tugging at her lip as Ace greeted her.

“Well, he seems to trust you. You’re alright, then. Can I offer you something? Tea, maybe?”

“I’d love that,” Seza said, smiling warmly at him. “Thank you.”

 ~~~~

“My sister is staying at the house in Melville,” Mrs. Calloway explained as her husband brought the tea to the table. He laid a saucer and demitasse in front of Seza before placing a setting in front of his wife and then himself. Seza thanked him with a nod and filled her cup three quarters of the way, then stirred in half a teaspoon of raw sugar. “We thought it best to let her finish high school with her friends from childhood.”

Seza took from her cup, savored it, and swallowed. “When did you last see her?”

“The weekend before last. She comes home Friday nights and leaves Sunday Afternoon.”

“That’s when we knew something was wrong,” Mr. Calloway added. “She didn’t come home last weekend.”

Seza nodded, the tea cup resting in both her hands. “Has she mentioned anything about your sister, Mrs. Calloway?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Relatives are most often the perpetrators of abductions. I have to know what the situation was like where she stayed.”

“No, no, she loves my sister!” Mrs. Calloway stammered. “There was nothing wrong between them..!”

“Are you saying our daughter was kidnapped?” Mr. Calloway said, fear and disbelief building in his voice.

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Calloway,” Seza confirmed.

“By who?” He shot a look over to his wife. “Who else knows we’re here?” he added, barely audibly. Who we are?”

Seza arched her brow. “Something I should know?”

Mrs. Calloway sighed. “Calloway isn’t our name,” she admitted. “We thought we’d be safe if we hid the family name and sent our daughter to school far from home.” She shrugged. “For all the good that did.”

“Have you shared this information with anybody else since moving here?”

“No,” she said. “Nobody but my sister knows who we are.”

“Our real name,” Mr. Calloway began, “is—”

“Not important to me,” Seza interposed. She thought to herself for a while, and took from her tea some more as she considered the new information. Whoever it was that took Samantha did so assuming she was just some average teenage girl, which further reinforced the idea that Mrs. Calloway’s sister wasn’t the one who did.

Then she recalled a conversation she overheard working behind the bar in Downtown Jersey City, about how a girl was just delivered from somewhere in central Long Island. It was about the time Samantha went missing, the day before the warehouse fire.

Seza had an idea who was responsible for Samantha’s disappearance. “The good news,” she began, “is that whoever has your daughter hasn’t figured out who she is. If they had, they would have made some kind of ultimatum by now. However,” she took a breath before continuing, wondering how to tell what she thinking to a distraught mother and father. “If the parties I suspect are in fact the ones responsible for your daughter’s abduction, then the bad news…” she paused. “The bad news is we may not have much time before traffickers try to make her disappear.”

Mrs. Calloway stifled a sob as she looked away from Seza, cupping her hands over her mouth as her eyes reddened and began to tear.

Mr. Calloway’s fists tightened as he let his head hang and shut his eyes tight. He opened them to see Ace looking up at him from his spot between his feet and Seza’s. “How much?”

“Days,” Seza suggested. “A week if we’re lucky.”

“How much do you want?” he clarified, looking back at her. “What will it cost for you to get her home before that happens?”

Seza blinked. “First I find your daughter,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me who you are, I won’t accept a dime from you before I deliver her to you. We can have that discussion when we know she’s safe.” Seza stood up and reclaimed her coat from behind her chair. “Thank you for the tea.” Then she turned on her heel and headed for the exit.

 ~~~~

Seza parked her sedan on the shoulder of Pehle Avenue a quarter mile from the building when she arrived in Saddle Brook that evening. She stepped out of the car and scanned the road around her, then locked her car and rested her hands in her coat pockets as she proceeded toward the office.

She stepped right through the front doors when she arrived and scanned the ceilings for surveillance equipment. When she found none she stepped up to a directory a few yards from the entrance and, finding the name she was looking for, confirmed she was in the right place. She approached the front desk and got the attendant’s attention.

“Excuse me,” she said in her American accent. “I’d like to see Mr. Teller.”

The attendant looked up at her from behind his glasses.

“I don’t have an appointment,” she continued.

He took his glasses off. “What is this concerning?”

“I’d like a job.”

“Mr. Teller has another appointment in five,” the attendant said referring to his monitor. “Although…” he examined her face, her features, the form she took under her coat, and the way she filled her jeans. He was certain there would be a place for her someplace in the organization. “I’m sure he can take a moment to interview you.” He stood up from his desk and gestured toward the elevator. “But I can’t promise anything—he’s been in a, mood, these past few days.”

“I’ll make note of that,” Seza said. “Thank you.”

Seza let the attendant escort her to the elevator. He stepped in with her and hit the top floor button. They rode it together in silence.

The attendant held the door for her to step off the elevator first then followed her out when they arrived at the top floor. He led Seza to the conference room door, behind which she could already hear enraged shouting.

“Sorry in advance,” the attendant said. He turned the knob on the door downward and pushed it open to allow Seza to step through. He stepped inside after her and quietly closed the door behind him.

She took a few slow steps deeper into the room and took it in. In the room with them were five other men, against the far wall was a butler bar with a few half-finished bottles and dry glasses, and directly across from her was a desk and coat rack. The sixth man standing on the other side of the desk held a phone to his ear; she identified him immediately. Christopher Teller—local crime syndicate boss—was a large broad-shouldered fair-skinned man well over six feet tall who took the form of a power lifter under his well-tailored suit. His brown hair was buzzed a few millimeters from bald.

“It’s been a fucking week, you pillock!” He spoke with a Cockney accent to the person on the other end of the line. “Call me with something useful, or start writing your own epitaph..!” He slammed the receiver onto the cradle before the other person could respond. Then after muttering profanities he looked up at Seza. “The fuck do you want?”

Seza, briefly taken aback, reclaimed her posture and answered, “I’m here to apply for a job.” She maintained her false accent.

“Morrow Building on Park Avenue in Hoboken,” Teller shot back, finding his seat. “Ask for Geoff, he’ll evaluate you.” Even now his voice retained its rasp—an almost rage-filled growl. “Now sod off.”

Seza was aware of what was at the Morrow Building. Politely, she raised her hand to about shoulder-level. “You mistake me—I’m not looking to work at a club, I’d like to offer my services as security for you.”

“And I’d like to take piss off of the Empire one day.” He gestured one of the men in the room with them. “Get her out of here.”

Respectfully, audibly, the man approached Seza from her right side. “You heard the boss,” he said, resting his hand on her wrist to escort her out of the room.

In an instant Seza seized his wrist with her free to break his grip, then smashed the inside of his forearm with the outer edge of hers. Then she shot her left fist into his ribs and fired her right palm into his mouth and nose, breaking both jaws and throwing his head backward to land him on the floor unconscious.

Peripherally, she noted the desk attendant toward the back of the room start to reach for the holster on his waist; before he could even draw the gun she was on him. Seza fired an elbow into his ribs to stun him, then extended her reach around his chest as she straightened her posture so the inside of her right wrist was against his neck while her left hand took hold of his elbow. She placed the back of her knee against his and shot her leg backward as she threw her arm forward, simultaneously tripping and clotheslining him to throw him to the ground.

The moment his back hit the floor Seza was on top of him, her right knee sinking into his shoulder and her left foot on his wrist; she reached between her legs to un-holster his handgun, then raised it and pointed it at the other men in the room with them, as the attendant struggled beneath her. There they remained for seven seconds.

The tension was broken by a gravelly, masculine baritone through the intercom on Teller’s desk. “So should I let myself up?” it proposed, “or…?”

Teller looked down away from Seza at the intercom, then back to her while he depressed the talk button to answer the man on the other end. “I’ll send somebody down,” he said. He released the button and gestured one of the other men left standing in the room to head downstairs and collect their new visitor. “Well, Jane Wick, I had you figured all wrong,” he admitted. “And since one of my guys’ll have his jaw wired shut for the next two months I’ll need to replace him. You’re in,” he said as she lowered the gun. “At least until he can eat solid food again.”

“Thank you, Mr. Teller,” Seza said. She stood up to release the attendant beneath her, ejected the magazine from the handgun, cleared the chamber, turned it around and handed it back to him.

The attendant reluctantly took the gun back and returned it to its holster.

Their new guest arrived a few short moments after the transaction—a dark-haired fair skinned fellow with hazel eyes and a ten-day salt-and-pepper beard. He wore a pale gray overcoat and black quarter-zip sweater over dark slacks and Chelsea boots. He spread his arms and flashed a wry smile. “Christopher!” he cajoled, taking a few exaggerated steps toward the desk as he placed his hands back into his pockets. “It’s not like you to be late to your own meeting.”

“Personnel issues,” Teller commented, taking a seat behind the desk again.

“Is that right..?” The newcomer raised his brow and scanned the room for a quick head count. He spotted the man on the floor, the other man braced against the wall nursing his wrist, and Seza standing between them.

“Well, hello there,” he charmed. He took a few slow steps toward her as his lips cracked another mischievous grin. “I don’t recall seeing you here before.” They were barely a foot apart now.

“I just started,” Seza deadpanned. She didn’t take her eyes from his, despite his proximity.

“Did you..?” He briefly scanned her up and down. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your new hire, Chris?” he said loud enough for the other man to hear.

Teller quietly sighed and rolled his eyes. “Called her Jane Wick... she didn’t say anything.”

“Jane Wick,” the newcomer echoed. He noted the man on the floor leaking blood from his mouth and nostrils next to her and surmised that was her handiwork. He chuckled to himself at the origin of the nickname as he took a step back and offered her his hand. “Peter Cross,” he introduced himself. “Pleased to meet you. Remind me never to do to you whatever he did to deserve that.”

Seza shook his hand after a brief pause. “Shouldn’t be a problem, Peter Cross,” she said.

Cross kept her gaze a few more seconds before turning away back toward Teller. “How’ve you been, Chris?” he asked. He made his way to the butler bar on his way to the desk to pour a finger’s depth of scotch from the decanter into one of the glasses. “How’s business?”

Teller decided to ignore the fact that Cross made himself at home without permission and answered the question. “We’ve had some setbacks over the last few days.”

“So I’ve heard,” Cross noted as he made his way toward him. “A state senator raised some concerns about incriminating documents that may or may not have leaked.” He took a seat as he continued. “Not long after, he says it’s a false alarm and one of your warehouses catches fire.” He took from his glass and paused, savoring it. “I’d ask if you have any leads, but we’re both smart enough to put the picture together.”

“Yeah,” Teller said, the faintest snarl at the back of this throat. “We are.”

“Do you know why I had my friend trash the evidence on the good senator and torch your warehouse? Because I need you to understand the why, so we don’t have to have this conversation again in a week.”

There was only silence in the room for a while.

“Speak when you’re spoken to, Chris.”

Seza watched the two men interact—Cross lounging in the chair opposite Teller, Teller’s fingers steadily digging deeper into the backs of his hands. He wanted to reach across the table and strangle the man, it was obvious to her.

“Yeah,” Teller croaked with a slow nod.

“What we have only works if you play by the rules,” Cross continued. “And you have a nasty habit of shitting all over those rules. I can’t have that, so I had to take something from you as punishment... nothing important, not like that fancy club of yours in Hoboken. It could have been, but I know how you feel about the place…” He finished his scotch and placed the empty glass on the desk top. "So the next time you feel like going off the reservation, I want you to think about what could've happened the day your warehouse burned down. I want you to think about what happened... and I want you to think about what can still happen… are we clear?”

 “Crystal.”

  “Good..!” Cross flashed a smile and stood back up. “Now that that’s out of the way,” he extolled, “it’s time to go to work. Get your best coat on, shine your shoes, and try to look respectable. These Sen Guren boys are old school.” He strode back toward the exit.

“So I’ve heard,” Teller said. He stood to retrieve his coat from the rack in the corner of the room, then motioned Seza and three other men in the room to follow him.

She allowed herself to be escorted from the conference room into a garage and toward a late-model Escalade. One of Teller’s men entered through the driver-side door, and Teller himself sat up front next to him. Seza entered through the rear door and found herself between two of Teller’s men as the vehicle engine started.

Of course they wouldn’t trust her alone with any of them, she thought, not after what she did to the other two upstairs. Seza knew she would have to keep playing along if she was going to come any closer to finding Samantha Calloway, so she sat still and did her best to look relaxed among the others as they headed toward their destination.

(Masterlist | Part 2)

#fiction #original work #original content #original fiction #prose #short story #creative writing #drama #thriller #crime story

[letterboxd]

How I Letterboxd #5: Will Slater.

Talking mullets and other manes with the man behind the internet’s definitive ‘exploding helicopters in movies’ catalog.

“Man cannot live on helicopter explosions alone. Even I need some occasional intellectual nourishment.”

A London-based PR man by day, by night Will Slater has a thing (and a podcast, blog and Twitter account) for movies that feature exploding helicopters. According to his Letterboxd bio, it’s “the world’s only podcast and blog dedicated to celebrating the art of exploding helicopters in films… as well as shaming those directors who dishonor the helicopter explosion genre”. As Will tells Jack Moulton, he also loves film noir, Wakaliwood, masala movies and much more. Just don’t get him started on the one action movie cliché that never fails to disappoint.

Sylvester Stallone takes aim in ‘Rambo III’ (1988).

First things first, have you ever had a ride in a helicopter? Will Slater: What, do you think I’m mad? Of course I’ve never flown in a helicopter! If I’ve learned anything from watching hundreds of films where helicopters spectacularly explode, it’s that they are a singularly dangerous form of transport. You never know when Sylvester Stallone is going to pop up with an explosive-tipped arrow and blow you out of the sky.

I’m going to say the words ‘the definitive action hero/heroine’. Who pops into your head first? No runners-up. Go. Snake Plissken, no question, for a number of good reasons. First, there’s the look: that eye-patch, the beaten-to-hell leather jacket and Kurt Russell’s lustrous mane of hair. Second, there’s the attitude: his contempt for authority, the drawled sarcasm and all-round bad-assery. And I also like that he doesn’t have any special abilities. Action heroes generally tend to be either musclebound slabs of beef—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stallone—or martial arts specialists—Jean-Claude van Damme, Jackie Chan—Plissken is just a pissed-off, angry dude who’s trying to stay alive. He’s very relatable. Plus, I’d argue he pretty much invented the whole anti-hero formula that rules our screens today.

Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’ (1981).

When did you start your podcast and which film got you into looking deeper into the topic? It was while watching the cheesily bad Cyborg Cop that I first had an epiphany about the weird and wonderful ways in which helicopters seemed to continually explode in movies. But the film that convinced me to start documenting the phenomenon was Stone Cold. If you’re not familiar with the film, it was an attempt to turn former gridiron star and mullet-king Brian Bosworth into the next big action star. It goes without saying that Stone Cold did not transform ‘The Boz’ into the next Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the film wasn’t a total failure as it features a helicopter explosion that is as brilliant as it is gloriously stupid.

And that was the prompt to start the Exploding Helicopter. I launched the website in 2009, and the podcast followed 2015. Since we started, our aim has been a simple one: to celebrate the strange and inventive ways that helicopters explode in films.

Motorcycle crashes into helicopter in mid-air, ‘Stone Cold’ (1991).

When did you join Letterboxd? What are your favorite features here? I’ve been around since 2013. As for the features, the stats are very cool. When you dig into your viewing history, you can learn some very revealing things about yourself. For example, I generally like to think I have a commendably broad taste in film, and watch only the most important and influential works from every decade, genre and country. But then you look at the data and find you’ve watched Thunderball nine times in the last five years, so maybe you’re not as cool as you thought.

We noticed that your profile faves are low-key and explosion-free, given your theme of choice. Why these four and not Die Hard four times? Man cannot live on helicopter explosions alone. Even I need some occasional intellectual nourishment, between watching whirlybird conflagrations. There’s a little bit of nostalgia tied up in The Ipcress File. I first saw it as a kid, and it made a big impression on me. It’s very stylishly directed, has a great John Barry score and a star-making turn from Michael Caine. I’m a big film noir fan and Sweet Smell Of Success is a beautifully sour tale of cynicism and manipulation. To borrow the words of Burt Lancaster in the film, it’s a “cookie full of arsenic”.

Jean-Pierre Melville is my favorite director and Le Samouraï was the first of his films that I saw. What Melville does so masterfully in this, and his other crime films, is distil the elements of film noir. Basically, he takes the genre’s iconography—the gun, the trenchcoat, the fedora—and familiar plot tropes—the betrayed assassin, the heist gone wrong, the criminal doing one last job—then elevates them above cliché into something almost mythic. And what do I really need to say about Taxi Driver, other than it’s a masterpiece?

Now you say you shame directors who dishonor the art of helicopter explosions? Which directors did you dirty? Well, one of the biggest names in our hall of shame is Tony Scott. For a man who specialized in hyper-stylized, pyrotechnic-filled action movies, he flunked every helicopter explosion he filmed. In our eyes, one of the most egregious offences you can commit is failing to show the helicopter explosion. And in both Spy Game and Domino, old Tony cheats the viewer by having the chopper fly out of sight before it explodes. Now, I can accept such visual chicanery in a low-budget film, where they presumably don’t have the money to stage the scene, but what’s Tony’s excuse? If you look at his filmography, at one time or another he’s wrecked trains, planes and automobiles in spectacular fashion. But for some reason, he repeatedly couldn’t be bothered to give us a satisfying chopper conflagration. At a certain point, it starts to feel like a personal slight. Tony, what did I ever do to you?

In your immortal words, “a film is always improved by a helicopter explosion.” When has this been especially true? When you see lists of worst-ever directors, Uwe Boll is a name that always seems to turn up. And, according to the internet, one of his worst-ever films is the video game adaptation, Far Cry. Now, I’m not going to try [to] convince you that the film is a neglected classic, but it does have a very imaginatively staged exploding helicopter scene. It’s too convoluted to explain here, but take my word that it wouldn’t be out of place in a Fast and Furious movie.

What about the unsung heroes; the stunt artists, the pilots, the pyrotechnicians, the VFX wizards who have worked on numerous iconic action moments, all of whom deserve a shoutout? Personally, I don’t understand why the Academy doesn’t have a stunts category. But if they did, I’d be lobbying hard for Spiro Razatos to get the first award. These days, he works as a stunt coordinator on the Fast and Furious and Marvel films, but I’d like to draw people’s attention to some of his early work. Back in the nineties, he did a lot of work with PM Entertainment films, an independent company that made low-budget action films for the home video market.

They might not have had much money, but they put every cent on the screen with glorious, raucously inventive set pieces that were often more spectacular than big-budget Hollywood offerings. And remember: this was in pre-CGI times, so every death-defying detail was absolutely ‘real’. Go back and watch films like The Sweeper or Rage, and you’ll can see why Super Spiro has now graduated to these more prestigious gigs.

Narrow this list down for us: which is the ultimate most spine-tingly epic “we got company” movie moment? As you may have gathered, I do like an action movie cliché. When you encounter one in a film, it’s like meeting an old friend. And one of my favorites is when someone uses this classic line of dialog to signal that a car chase or a gun battle is about to start. I’ve heard people deliver the line in all sorts of ways–funny, scared, angrily and often just badly. But if you want spine-tingly, then you can’t beat Harrison Ford in Star Wars. He drops the line during the detention-block scene after failing to bluff an imperial officer. As soon as he says it, John Williams’ iconic score kicks in. It gives you the ‘feels’ every time.

“Boring conversation anyway.” Han Solo and Chewbacca in ‘Star Wars’ (1977).

And which action movie cliché can you simply not stand? Stop it: my hackles are raising just thinking about it. For me, the trope that never fails to disappoint is the ‘reluctant’ hero being convinced to take up arms and join the fight. You know the scene. Invariably, the hero has hung up their spurs and is living a bucolic existence ‘off the grid’, when a gruff buddy shows up asking them to risk almost certain death by taking on ‘one last job’. Now, dialog is rarely an action film’s greatest strength, and these beefcake actors generally are not cast for their dramatic chops. Which means we get subjected to the same perfunctory and uninteresting scene over and over again: “I told you, I’m out the game”, “Goddamnit, we need you”, “OK, I’ll do it”. These scenes just never work and are never less than painful to watch.

Which up-and-coming action director are you most excited about? In terms of up-and-coming action talent, I’d pick the director Stefano Sollima. I first noticed his work on a couple of TV series: the fantastic Italian crime dramas, Romanzo Criminale and Gomorrah. The way he composed shots really stood out, and it was clear he had a very cinematic eye. He rather reminds me of Michael Mann. He’s now on Hollywood’s radar and got to direct Sicario: Day of the Soldado the other year. And he’s lined up to make a Tom Clancy adaptation with Michael B. Jordan. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

Have you witnessed the glory that is Wakaliwood—Ugandan DIY action filmmaking—three of which make Letterboxd’s official top ten films by black directors? Which international films do you feel out-match Hollywood? I love the Wakaliwood films I’ve seen. It’s fascinating to watch action films from around the world and see their different styles and flavors. Recently, I’ve been trying to investigate Indian cinema and, in particular, what are known as ‘masala movies’. These mix action, comedy, drama, romance and dance numbers into one big, crazy, entertaining mess. They’re a unique experience. If you want to check one out, I’d suggest Dhoom 2. It’s bananas.

Can you believe there are only two female directors represented in your exploding helicopter list? Do you believe that’s due to systemic or thematic reasons? You have to say it’s systemic. Men have dominated filmmaking for more than a century. Until women have the same opportunities to direct and make films as men, it’s impossible to know what their interest may or may not be in blowing up helicopters. [Will has previously written about the search for “true gender equality in the world of exploding helicopters”.]

To address the elephant in the room, how has Kobe Bryant’s unfortunate death earlier this year changed the way you look at these scenes? Obviously, I appreciate that Kobe Bryant’s death was very shocking and a tragedy for his family and fans. But basketball really is not a thing on these grim shores, so it didn’t register with us unenlightened Brits other than [as] a sad headline about a US sports star.

What was your most anticipated movie event of 2020 before Covid-19 pushed every tentpole back? That’s easy: No Time To Die. I’m a huge Bond fan and as soon as tickets were available, I booked myself in to see it on opening day at an IMAX. But if the Daniel Craig era is synonymous with anything, it’s lengthy delays between films.

Freerunner Sébastien Foucan in the opening scene from ‘Casino Royale’ (2006).

What’s a fond memory you have in theaters related to the Bond franchise? I remember going to see Casino Royale. I was excited, but also nervous to see it. The Brosnan era had ended with the risible Die Another Day: invisible cars, kitesurfing and, worst of all, John Cleese’s awful Q. Since that had come out, we’d had Mission: Impossible, Bourne and the Triple X films, so it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Bond might be finished. Then the first ten minutes of Casino Royale happened. And while that outstanding parkour-inspired chase was terrifically exciting, it also hit me like cinematic Valium. I suddenly realised I could sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that 007 was going to be just fine.

Are you planning on returning to theaters as soon as you can? When would you feel comfortable? I’m taking a wait-and-see approach. I’d love to see films back on the big screen again, but I want to know more about how cinemas are going to maintain social distancing inside.

Finally, what three Letterboxd accounts should we all be following? Why not give Todd Gaines, Jayson Kennedy or Fred Andersson a follow? If you’re interested in genre films that are a little off the beaten trail, they’ll likely all steer you towards some hidden gems.

#letterboxd #how i letterboxd #letterboxd member #letterboxd community #cine #film lover #exploding helicopter #chopper fireball #action films

[helshades]

Tip of the Nose : You Be For Men, My Scent

Does perfume really have a gender? Not remotely likely, says the purist, and don’t come telling me that virility smells like those pine-shaped car deodorant thingies. Everybody knows that real men smell of lavender.

This article is actually a rewrite of my response to this post, which my dying aging computer ate right before I thought about saving three hours worth of work. I’m not entirely sure what burning frustration and bitter regret are supposed to smell like, but if someone wishes to bottle it, they may as well name it Parfum de Hel.

On a side note, one of the participants to the earlier conversation had me blocked for some previous reason—probably unrelated to perfume discourse—so I could not reblog the initial post; nor am I willing, out of politeness, to simply caption the discussion. Therefore, here is the original post, and following is the segment I will more precisely address:

@thatiswhy:

Also, maybe I hate the mainstream cotton candy uwu line for women but don’t want to smell like a fucking frat house trying to deo away the smell of vomit on the carpet. You know what I want to smell like? White musk, and leather, and cedar, and sandalwood, and old parchment, and vetiver, and various teas, and juniper, and citrus, and cypress, and cashmere wood, and maybe in the summer like orange blossom and jasmine or fresia. These notes, while mostly present in women’s perfumes, usually are combined with overbearing fruity or flowery tones that make it smell like an aging late 17th century courtesan’s drawers, or “oriental” scents that make the whole thing reek like a 1920’s opium den. (Seriously, I have walked into a perfume shop, asked to be shown something fresh, woodsy and clean, and had Gabrielle shoved under my nose, which smells like rosewater-flavoured Turkish delight.)

Let women smell of non-jellybean scents, you cowards.

That being said, I have found all but two scents for men (to date) that don’t smell absolutely abrasive. (I’m suspecting the cheap synthetic ambergris.) 99.9% of the stuff directed at men smell as if I had one of those scrubbing metal wire thingies shoved up my throat. So no, I don’t want to shop at the men’s section, I want to be given the opportunity to find a scent that doesn’t say 80’s cartoon for girls and/or I read palms for a living.

There are many things to address in this fertile, if angry, intervention, and like often I’m starting by the end and by making a remark that has little to do with the subject at hand: I don’t think, my darling Tatty, that the ‘abrasive’ harbinger of olfactory doom you perceive in most ‘masculine’ fragrances would be synthetic ambergris, cheap or other. All ambergris today is synthetic, to begin with—well, not all, but natural ambergris is so terrifyingly expensive that we’ve got to forgive perfumers for furnishing us with only an approximation. Ambergris is extremely rare a substance; think around €10,000 per kilogram, in the lower estimation. Back in 2016, a nearly two-kilo block found by a man who was walking his dog on a Lancashire beach sold for £50,000… People have become millionaires over ambergris, although most of the time one only finds small quantities of it at once.

   Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for gray amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odourless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine-merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavour it.

  Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is.

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1922), chapter XCII, ‘Ambergris’.

In perfumery, ambergris is distilled into an alcohol-based solution known as ‘pure amber’ which, when exposed to air and sunlight, can be separated into several derivatives, notably terpenes and steroids. In fact, ambergris is mainly constituted from ambrein (25–45%) and epicoprosterol (30–40%). Ambrein is progressively degraded by sea water, sunlight and air into several compounds which are chiefly responsible for its smell, notably ambroxide and ambrinol. Modern perfumery uses ambroxide as a substitute for natural ambergris, which is easily synthesised from… a type of sage plant! To be exact, from sclareol, a fragrant chemical compound found in clary sage (Salvia sclarea). Sclareol kills cancer (yes.), and also it smells really good, with a sweet, balsamic scent very reminiscent indeed of the most important notes of natural ambergris.

Ambergris is essentially mucus naturally produced by certain sperm whales (it is believed that less than 5% of the species produces ambergris, possibly the largest of them, which prey on bigger animals) to protect their intestinal tract from lesions caused by the passing of sharp objects, chiefly undigested squid beaks: eventually, the whale excretes this soft, blackish, pungent concretion which is going to drift for a long while before landing on the shore, where it’ll spend maybe years drying out and hardening under the sun and the air. The colour lightens to a golden grey, and the smell gradually sweetens to a salty musk with whiffs of honey, tobacco and leather—depending on the block, the notes will vary in proportions and in potency.

Almost needless to say, then, that the number of perfumes using authentic ambergris isn’t especially high. Conversely, synthetic ambroxide is a beloved template of the modern perfumer’s palette, one of the reasons being that it helps stabilise scents very well. So popular, in fact, that specialists speak of 40% of the perfumes created in the last thirty years using it! Ambroxide was first synthesised in 1950, by Max Stoll for Geneva-based Firmenich SA. That means that Aimé Guerlain had to use natural ambergris when he created the masterpiece Jicky in 1889 (the oldest perfume in the world to be sold without interruption since its creation), even though Jicky was amongst the very first perfumes to use synthetic ingredients! Most notably, Jicky pioneered a great use of several synthetic molecules, chief of which vanillin, the synthetic vanilla which had been discovered in 1874 by German chemist Ferdinand Tiemann. (The first perfume using synthetic ingredient was Houbigant’s Fougère Royale in 1882, using coumarin, one of the key molecules of tonka beans.)

According to the legend of Jicky, it was composed by Aimé Guerlain (one of founder Pierre Guerlain’s two sons, and the second generation’s in-house perfumer, whilst Gabriel was the manager; then came Gabriel’s own sons, master perfumer Jacques and manager Pierre. The last family perfumer was Jacques’ grandson Jean-Paul, who retired heirless in 1994, after which the company was sold to soulless, tentacular multinational LVMH, much to the dismay of Guerlain aficionados all over the world) ... in memory of a broken heart he suffered in his youth as he came back to France after studying in England without his lady love, the lovely ‘Jicky’. Though mostly advertised to a female clientèle, Jicky shocked many a respectable woman of the time by its daring use of sensual animal musks (ambergris, musk, castoreum, and the devilishly sexual civet) at the heart of its balms, spices and aromatic flowers, most especially lavender, luxurious iris, sultry sandalwood and hot leather... Until the 1910s, when women’s press began recommending it, Jicky was quite the sensation amongst... English dandies... and Marcel Proust, of course. (In 1925, for the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Jacques Guerlain presented a twist on Jicky, in which he had removed lavender and woods but added bergamot and, especially, a massive dose of ethylvanillin [three times more potent than vanillin!]: Shalimar was born.)

Men and women used to wear the very same perfumes. Until the 19th century, really, the market wasn’t segmented and there was no such thing as a masculine scent. When the European courts started bathing again and heady perfumes fell out of fashion to the benefit of lighter, tarter, fresher fragrances modelled after the famous Eau de Cologne (1708), women wore them too. The French Jean-Marie Farina who became with his own Eau de Cologne (1809) the official perfumer of the imperial court furnished Empress Joséphine as well. It was for Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, that Pierre Guerlain created his 1853 Eau de Cologne impériale in the famous ‘bee bottle’ (with his 69 bees symbolising the Empire), which earned Guerlain the envied title of ‘Patented Perfumer of Her Majesty’.

The real difference in perfume usage that occurred during the 19th century was actually a matter of social marking via the use of perfumes of varied qualities, complexities and prestige: if perfume remained an element of luxury, now the aristocracy wasn’t alone in this privilege; moreover, clothes weren’t so elaborate and expensive anymore, and social differences were expressed in subtler ways than before the Revolution. In Paris, House Guerlain furnished a more aristocratic clientèle, whereas the upper-middle class went to Roger & Gallet (successors to Jean-Marie Farina), Lubin or L.T. Piver; meanwhile, middle-middle and lower-middle classes patroned Bourjois and Gellé Frères. The lower-middle class also went to ‘perfume bazaars’ that proposed the same products on sale, plus low-quality products.

The first respectable (only) concurrent to French perfumery was actually England, thanks to the well-earned reputation of its barbers, who created their own fragrances, at once discreet, elegant yet tenacious. Those were scents designed to be applied on the skin as tonics in the first place, after an expert shave, and as such they were based on aromatics, chiefly lavender, made from the essence of the delicate English variety: in the beginning 20th century, Frenchmen often wore Yardley’s 1873 English Lavender, precisely, and it was something of an ubiquitous odour in cosmetic products more specifically destined to men, such as soaps and creams.

It is no wonder, then, that when Ernest Daltroff created the first ever perfume only for men, judiciously titled Pour un homme, in 1934, for House Caron which he co-founded with his brother Raoul in 1904, the fragrance was based on lavender, tenderly joined in matrimony with sweet vanilla and lying on a respectable, tranquil base of an ambre accord (vanilla, benzoin, labdanum, the ‘oriental’ assembly created by genius François Coty in 1908 Ambre antique, the family namer of ambrés perfumes) sandalwood and musk. Legend has it that Ernest, who loved lavender, added the vanilla to please Ms. Félicie Wanpouille, Caron’s artistic counsellor, whom Ernest might have loved even more than lavender. She had joined Caron in 1906 and their collaboration produced some of the most beautiful perfumes of the time, and most original: in 1919, they created the first ever leather-scented perfume, Tabac Blond, in 1927, Ernest made En avion as a gift to Félicie’s friend the star aviatrix Hélène Boucher... They also invented the ‘loose powder’ technique in make-up.

Félicie never left, but Ernest did, along with Raoul, when the Nazis invaded France: the Daltroff brothers were the sons of Jewish Russian immigrants, after all. Since Caron exported a lot of products and had opened a shop on New York’s 5th Avenue, Ernest emigrated to the United States in 1939. He never came back, and died in Canada in 1941. But Félicie Wanpouille stayed, in spite of the Occupation, keeping Caron afloat; 1941 was also the year she got the genius idea, since she couldn’t pay the heavy taxes the Nazis imposed on Jewish-made goods, to rename Pour un homme into Pour une femme, a name which it kept until the war ended. To this day, Caron remains one of the very houses to be devoted entirely to perfume—and free of any multinational’s influence, for that matter. (They’ve not, alas! remained free from the clutch of Reformulation, but that is a story for another day.)

There are two very good reasons why Tabac Blond bears this name. The first was purely commercial: in 1919, women were beginning to smoke, but they smoked almost exclusively blond tobacco from Virginia, which was considered too feminine for men. The second was that blond tobacco exhales honeyed mossy notes which the perfume evoked tantalisingly alongside the darker leather, the cooler iris and the warmer amber, meaning that it was the perfect perfume to cover the smell of tobacco smoke. Two years later, Molinard released the wonderful Habanita, in a small bottle shaped like a cigarette lighter, as an oil to dab the tip of your cigarette so as to make women’s clouds suaver (it was released as a proper perfume in 1924, and long advertised as ‘the most tenacious perfume in the world!’, not without reason).

It wouldn’t be illogical to consider that if there are masculine scent in the first place, it’s probably because femininity went through some drastic changes from the late 19th century onwards, especially as a consequence of the two World Wars. The daring, tobacco-covering orientals which the flappers favoured were a direct reaction to the dreamy flower ideal of the previous decades, notably the artificial immobility of the Victorian woman and her continental equivalents, which the Roaring Twenties more or less exorcised with a call to adventure and independence. Women wore more perfume and more daring perfumes; it was only expected that men would start wearing perfume, real perfume again.

Something really odd happened in the 1980s, but maybe that, too, was to be expected: a kind of paradigm shift occurred in perfumery, as the laundry detergent companies which had become extremely rich and powerful thanks to the combined power of advertisement and mass consumption bought most of the perfume houses, perfume started imitating cosmetics more than the reverse. Once upon a time, the cosmetics industry would copy, or try to, the scents most popular in perfumery, like L’Oréal’s Elnett hairspray famously reprised Chanel’s  Nᵒ 5’ aldehyde overdose. Now, trendy perfume smells like shampoo or body spray.

It seems, nonetheless, like the ancestor of all terrible men’s perfumes that smell like body spray—the men’s version, the kind that makes you want to claw your own nose off—was the otherwise respectable Drakkar Noir by Guy Laroche (1982). So beloved by the public that every hygiene or cosmetic product targeted towards suddenly attempted to smell like it. Drakkar, however, was a good perfume, even if by today’s standards it would be perfectly unwearable for one’s entourage (in a vicinity of approximately 30 metres). ‘Powerhouse’ doesn’t begin to describe the type of scent that was popular in the late 80s and early 90s. And then they started using Calone™. Like, a lot of it. Have you ever smelled calone? Wait, you have. You’ve hated it. Calone in itself was a great chemical revolution: finally, the possibility for perfumers to imitate the very odour of water! Bring in the marine-like scents! Bring in the marine-like scents... I kinda want to throttle Calvin Klein for Escape (1991). Whatever you do, do not, I repeat, do not approach anything subtitled ‘Sport’. It’s worse. It’s way worse. (These days, calone is used to give a ‘watermelon’ aspect to everything, but chiefly summer flankers of denatured classic feminine perfumes. A hint: it smells like shampoo. Everything does.)

You can blame advertisement for convincing men to wear perfume on top of extremely pungent deodorant, too, but me personally, I strongly resent women who think classics are ‘too feminine’ and want to shop at the men’s section of their local perfume supermarket because it’s supposed to be ‘gender-defying’. It really isn’t. That’s not what equality is about, getting to smelling just as bad as the dudes, it isn’t. Even more importantly, perfume is not gendered; marketing is. Skin chemistry varies noticeably from person to person and our hormones do play some role in what we smell like, and therefore in what one perfume will smell like on different people, but apart from that, any sex-based olfactory discrimination is but a marketing ploy to exploit a segmented market so that the members of one household purchase and consume as many differentiated items as possible. Mainstream perfumery these days is mostly hopeless: the Thinking (wo)Man would be well inspired to turn to ‘niche’ perfumery, which isn’t always that confidential but presents the great advantage of being generally more creative and personal. Websites exist where people exchange ideas and samples and there is a whole alternative market for scents that allow people not to ruin themselves buying a full bottle of certain great fragrances. Overall, it is a nice way to get to wear something that feels like a personal choice.

#tip of the nose #aromaphilia #answers #thatiswhy #a work in progress as i've yet to address the lutens question #will do after sleep #but as it happens i must go to bed and get a few hours of sleep in #for tomorrow morning i'm bidding on several bottles of lutens perfume

[reallyawesomecostumes]

Dean Winchester in his Coffin

A comparison between Queequeg’s coffin in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Dean’s coffin in Supernatural

(screencap from Home of the Nutty)

In Supernatural 14x11 ‘Damaged Goods’, Dean Winchester builds his own coffin. 

It’s not really a coffin, it just looks like one. The box is a ma’lak box designed by Death herself to secure Dean and AU-Michael at the bottom of the Pacific for all eternity*. We as viewers of a long-running episodic television show are pretty sure the  Winchester boys will find a way out of this mess in the next couple episodes, but Dean built it, so we have to talk about it. 

There are closet metaphors inherent in this coffin-building (I recommend @drsilverfish here); there are show-internal parallels to Amara being locked away, Adam’s current fate in The Cage, the wall in Sam’s mind in season 6; the list goes on. I wanted to talk instead about how Dean’s coffin-building compares to some coffin-building in classic American literature: the story of Queequeg’s coffin in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.” 

Moby-Dick, published 1851, is a book that many of us were forced to read in high school or college. I escaped this fate but had to read “The Scarlet Letter” and “Bartleby the Scrivener” instead. I did watch the Patrick Stewart TV miniseries version as a teenager, of course. For some dumb reason** I became a Moby-Dick reader because I was a Queequeg/Ishmael shipper, so know that I have a fairly biased perspective on the book as a whole.

In Moby-Dick, our narrator Ishmael (a depressed unemployed Yankee) meets Queequeg, a cannibal

(Queequeg as a character is a jumble of noble savage tropes, the author’s own knowledge of Pacific Islanders met during his whaling experience, and ideas pulled from other contemporary books both fiction and non-fiction), when they become accidental bedfellows at Peter Coffin’s inn (Coffin is a prominent name among the whalers of Nantucket, in real life and in the world of the story). Ishmael wants to go whaling, and Queequeg’s a guy who is very good at whaling. They have similar life goals, if not similar life experiences . They’re textually married***. 

Queequeg catches a chill crawling around belowdecks on the Pequod moving barrels to find a leak (the hold is described as an ice-box). While he’s dying Queequeg says he doesn’t want his body to be wrapped up in his hammock before being thrown overboard like an ordinary sailor, but put in a canoe-style coffin like the harpooneers from Nantucket use. He convinces the ship’s carpenter to make one for him. Queequeg kits the coffin out with food and water and his (most precious possessions) harpoon and paddle, and puts earth from the hold at the foot of it . He lays in it, and Pip the cabin boy sings nonsense briefly (a la the Fool in King Lear). Ishmael sort-of suggests that watching this guy die would make him start a religion. But then Queequeg decides not to die. He throws off the fever with his own will, and recovers (for plot reasons, but also so Melville could add more Noble Savage tropes). He uses the coffin as a clothes-chest. He starts carving the lid with the pattern of the tattoos on his body (these tattoos are religious in nature, but are unknown and unknowable, ‘a complete theory of the heavens and the earth’), making it into a sort-of body double for him.

Some time passes. A guy falls from the rigging, and the stern life-buoy is thrown to him, and both the man and the old, rotting cask that serves as a buoy sink and drown. It is suggested that the nice new well-built no longer needed coffin can be made into a new life-buoy. This re-purposing is lampshaded in text:

“Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that.”

-Captain Ahab, in a theatrical aside, Chapter 127: The Deck.

After the whale drags Captain Ahab down and sinks the Pequod, the very well-made coffin/life-buoy shoots to the surface, and the only surviving crewmember (Ishmael, our narrator) clings to it until another ship picks him up. 

While Queequeg’s coffin is intended for mundane use (to preserve his body from sharks after death) and is eventually used for mundane purpose (Ishmael’s life preserver), Dean’s pseudo-coffin-building serves a more esoteric purpose - to lock himself and his angel double away from the world said angel wants to destroy (“for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned” - Fleece the cook, Moby-Dick). The ma’lak box is Dean and Michael’s “immortality-preserver”. We have two pairs of characters, and two death-coded vessels that serve to preserve them.

Remember that time Ishmael and Queequeg got married? Some authors have characterized this wedding as "the first portrait of same-sex marriage in American literature". That it causes some readers 'uneasiness'. The line 'our heart's honeymoon', describing the time post-marriage, was censored in the original publication. Other readers have taken the marriage esoterically, relating Ishmael and Queequeg's earthly marriage to the internal marriage of the self to the Jungian shadow-self.

Shadows**** follow the two protagonists of Moby-Dick, Ishmael and Ahab. Ishmael accepts and marries his shadow, Queequeg the cannibal, and learns the customs of the whaling-ship from him. He admires the unknowableness of the ocean and sky as well as Queequeg's unknowable tattoos. He frees himself from his initial depression, and is literally saved at the novel's conclusion by Queequeg's pseudo-body. Ahab, conversely, pushes away Pip the cabin boy (who serves as Lear's fool through the story, and speaks unknowably) and turns towards Fedallah the Parsee (described as Ahab's shadow in the book) who speaks concrete but awful truths. Ahab rejects reality and stays on a path of revenge even though warned multiple times that he will fail. He eventually dies, and brings most of his crew down with him. His lack of acceptance of his good shadow and of his true place in the world brings about destruction. Self-actualization results in being saved.

The (current) protagonists of Supernatural have shadow selves as well. Again @drsilverfish has an excellent post about this. Castiel's shadow is The Shadow/The Empty, which has appeared in his own form, and wishes only for sleep and nothingness. Dean's shadow, AU!Michael, only wants to destroy the world that Dean keeps sacrificing himself to protect. Sam's shadow, Nick, went through the same dark experiences Sam did, but unlike Sam wound up horribly twisted and murderous. We haven't seen Jack's shadow-self yet, but I suspect current sweet and kind graceless!Jack will have a foil in future uncaring soulless!Jack. The idea of marrying oneself to one's shadow, in Supernatural, is nearly unthinkable: they are destructive, inhuman entities. However, in 14x11 Sam managed to accept the reality of his shadow self and release himself from responsibility for Nick.

At this point Dean's plan is to death-wed himself to Michael for eternity, sharing one body and one coffin-bed at the bottom of the Pacific. We know from Jung and from Melville that the only way to survive the confrontation with the shadow is to accept it - to 'Know Thyself', without misconceptions about your place in the world. 'Gain[ing] the perspective on [your] soul and the universe that will make balance possible.' The coffin will become a life-buoy.

I suspect the ma'lak box will be used to trap something other than Dean or Michael (soulless!Jack, probably) at the end of this season. Even if it's current purpose is untenable, it is a tool that can be used in the future.

Comparison between Moby-Dick and Supernatural can occur on a number of different levels. Ishmael and Dean (and Castiel whose human vessel, Jimmy Novak, is of the line of Biblical Ishmael) are the heroes of the bildungsroman part of the story and are hangers on to Ahab/John/Sam's Shakespearean revenge quest. Each story is a very American depiction of a masculine world. Each mirror the world in a smaller vessel, a ship and a car. Jung's concept of the shadow self, however, holds as the key to this season through all of these eleven episodes, and the shadow self is one of many keys that promote understanding of Melville's Moby-Dick. Self-actualization saves the day.

* Note that geologists cry whenever people suggest indestructible things sent to the bottom of the ocean will stay there for all eternity.

** It was Yuletide, and I’d just binge-read the entire Aubrey-Maturin series.

*** I wrote about this last year when Yockey dropped Led Zeppelin’s Moby Dick into the story. Moby Dick, song, has nothing to do with Moby-Dick, book, except their mutual length, but Supernatural and Moby-Dick share quite a few themes. 

**** yes, Melville does make the shadows of his white protagonists literally dark-skinned

References:

@drsilverfish, “A Fridge-Locker, An Enochian Puzzle Box, a Ma’lak Box… and the Closet (14x11 Damaged Goods)”, http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/182296360214/a-fridge-locker-an-enochian-puzzle-box-a-malak 

@drsilverfish​, “The Shadow (14x08)”, http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/180906003584/the-shadow-14x08

Brashers, H.C., 1962, "Ishmael's Tattoos": The Sewanee Review, v.70, n.1, p.137-154, http://wwww.jstor.org/stable/27540756

Halverson, John, 1963, "The Shadow in Moby-Dick": American Quarterly, v.15, n.3, p.436-446, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2711373

Horton, Margy Thomas, 2012, "Melville's Unfolding Selves: Identity Formation in Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre": doctoral dissertation, Baylor University

Melville, Herman, “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale”, project Gutenberg ebook, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm

#spn 14x11 #spn meta #spn spoilers #my meta #moby dick #yep i actually wrote it #themes are for eighth grade book reports #and also for relating personal experiences to fictional experiences #as well as higher concepts #spn #supernatural

[chiseler]

Helen Walker

Helen Walker was a sad case, her offscreen life a discordant contrast to the amount of fun she produced in her Hollywood roles. Her career was short, and so was her life.

In brief: New Year’s Eve, 1946. Walker was driving a car borrowed from director Bruce “Lucky” Humberstone (I Wake Up Screaming) and stopped to pick up three hitch-hiking soldiers. The two who survived the ensuing accident, in which the car hit a divider and overturned, testified that Walker was drunk. Everyone was badly injured and Walker was kicked off the film she’d been shooting. Amazingly, her career wasn’t totally over, but the work that followed was intermittent and Walker’s health declined and she died aged forty-eight, having not made a film for thirteen years.

It should have been different. In 1942, Walker is bright and breezy in Lucky Jordan, opposite Alan Ladd in one of his roguish early roles before he succumbed to respectability. Her role mainly requires her to look good and be outraged at her co-star’s crooked ways. She’s damn good, and it’s impossible to square the sharp and sassy dame onscreen with the tragic and disorderly life.

Most of Walker’s early roles were lightweight, showcasing her gift for comedy. Murder, He Says stars Fred MacMurray and is directed by former Laurel & Hardy man George Marshall, whose handling of farce is strikingly pacey and cinematic here. MacMurray was liked by his leading ladies for not hogging the limelight – he saw himself more as a horn player who got lucky than an actual actor, though he was in fact very talented in that department (Jean-Pierre Melville credited him with inventing underplaying in Double Indemnity: “Even Humphrey Bogart was not underplaying before then.”) Walker is similarly low-key, and they compliment one another nicely.

Cluny Brown is one of the jewels in Walker’s crown: the last film completed by genius of comedy Ernst Lubitsch, it hasn’t acquired the reputation of his other later works, such as Heaven Can Wait or To Be Or Not To Be. Maybe that’s because it’s not for everybody. It’s quite a strange film, oddly structured: the opening scenes concern a man called Hilary Aimes and a party he’s to throw, then we get sidetracked into the subject of plumbing and Aimes never appears again. Jennifer Jones plays an unlikely young Englishwoman who doesn’t fit in (with that accent it’s hardly surprising), then the plot decamps to a Wodehousian country house, the leading man is Charles Boyer, cast as some kind of great political thinker who never discusses, or apparently thinks about, politics.

Walker plays the Honorable Betty Cream, subsidiary romantic interest to subsidiary lead Peter Lawford. We’re told that she “doesn’t go everywhere,” and she “sits a horse well,” (“Damn it,” adds Lawford) and this phrase then spreads like a disease through the cast, being applied to one character or another at random intervals, becoming obscurely hilarious through sheer nonsense overkill.

I’m not sure how well Betty sits a horse – Walker was too tiny to convince in the saddle – but the line is spoken after her only horseback appearance so it retroactively brainwashes us into believing it. And the rest of her performance is divine, catty, bitchy, superior, and so correct in her superiority that you don’t hate her for it. She’s the only one who can disarm the charming and unpredictable Charles Boyer. And then she gets a talking to from Lawford’s mum and turns into a little girl. Walker, with her moon face and big doll eyes always had that aspect about her, so the transformation seems logical.

The apotheosis of Walker’s cool is Nightmare Alley, a classic noir steeped in corruption. Carny Tyrone Power tries to rise through society from his sideshow mind-reader act and finds crookedness all the way up. Walker is a shrink, her line of business distinguished from Power’s only by a superficial veneer of respectability. She plays her scenes with him amused, perpetually astonished by the temerity of this jumped-up con artist, knowing the would-be slickster is nothing but a rube compared to her.

Power gets three romantic, or quasi-romantic interests in the film, with Walker the only femme fatale. It’s clear that she’s a predator like him, but a much more ruthless and effective one: rather than being a misogynist trope, her character illuminates his most unappealing qualities by taking them to the logical extreme, and the tough, smart guy’s more attractive aspect turns out to be his vulnerability – or gullibility. With only a subtle adjustment of the vixen quality she’d displayed in Cluny Brown, Walker slides the movie into her hip pocket and walks away with it.

A couple more vamp roles followed, as a murderous wife in Impact and a hard-bitten reform school governor in Problem Girls. Walker’s last role is painfully apt.

The Big Combo is remembered as a fine noir, with a daring and provocative relationship between gangster Richard Conte and his mistress Jean Wallace. But the plot turns on a quest to find Conte’s weakness via a figure from his past, who turns out to be Walker. Dazed, glassy-eyed and confused, Walker plays a broken woman with a fractured mind – surely, she must have been less damaged than this in order to play the part, but given that it’s her last role and her decline was in progress, it’s hard to know where the actor ends and the performance begins, which makes this an unusually disturbing characterization. Especially since one of Walker’s signature qualities had been that sense of her being too smart and too good for her surroundings, even when cast in a superb film. Stripped of her air of sexy superiority, playing essentially an injured child, she’s heartbreaking in a way that feels like the intrusion of something from outside the movie even if in fact it may be only the artistic construct of her laser-sharp talent.

by David Cairns

#David Cairns #The Chiseler #Helen Walker #noir #The Big Combo #Nightmare Alley

[secretcinema3]

Ten Thoughts Inspired By: A Bout de Souffle

1. Before I ever saw the film I saw this poster. As soon as I laid eyes on it I knew I had to see the film. It radiated cool energy. And that title. At once a declaration of the film’s style and the viewer’s response to it. A promise and a boast. Stylish. Sexy. Breathless. But its original title, A Bout de Souffle, translates as Out Of Breath. That’s a B-movie title, slang for death, like Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Consider if they’d used that as the English title instead. Would the film have attained such a cool reputation? Just imagine it on the poster. Stylish. Sexy. Out Of Breath. Suddenly it’s not so much an intimation of awed wonder as middle-aged decline. My younger self probably wouldn’t have been so impressed, but so what? Does it matter? A title’s just a title, after all, a way of identifying one film from another. Sure, mostly, but it’s not always that simple. Consider these titles for example: Stranger Than Paradise. Some Like It Hot. White Heat. Touch of Evil. Now each of these could, at a push, describe what happens in their respective films, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on when we read them. They’re not merely labels, they’re suggestive, free-floating, haikus of compressed mood. Yes, a good title can define a film, capture its essence, but it can also add to it, deepen it, complicate it. It’s a chemical reaction. Just think of the mysterious, symbiotic relationship we have with names and they have with us. Do they shape us, do we grow into them? If you don’t believe this then consider these possible alternative titles for the films above; Losers. TransAmerica. Mother Love. The Mexican. Does it make a difference? It’s hard to say, but this much is clear, the anonymous translator tasked with finding an English version for A Bout de Souffle clearly thought so.

2. The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. – Francois Truffaut

The famous dedication is to Monogram Pictures. Monogram were a poverty row studio specialising in cheap genre flicks, serials and westerns. So what was the attraction for serious French cinephiles like Truffaut and Godard? Well, for starters, because they were largely ignored they were an undiscovered continent, ripe for reappraisal. They often relied on genre conventions, offering rich ground for theorising, for detecting encoded meanings, hidden ideas, themes build up across a body of work. Also because they had less to lose they could show the seemier side of existence more freely than bigger studio productions, the kind of exploitation subjects considered beneath proper art. Some French critics saw passed all that bourgeois respectability, understood that the life of a petty thief could be as worthy of great art as the noblest king, that an absence of craft or style might represent a film’s psychological meaning, its hard indifference to the lies of romance. They understood serious artists could exist outside the mainstream, might find the fertile confines of genre more to their liking, might prefer playful indifference to highbrow pretension. But even the worst of these films taught them about innocent enjoyment, the pleasure of transformation, how much easier it was to bring the moves, clothes and dialogue into your life when they were ritualised, repeated, how cliches spoke to the yearnings inside ordinary people. By dedicating his film to Monogram Godard was sticking two fingers up at the industry, rejecting its middlebrow concerns with craft and rules, aligning himself with the outsiders, the dreamers, with those great American values of outrage, adventure and play. This is a game, he’s telling us. We’re playing here. So can you.

3. The famous opening line is: I’m an asshole, a provocation from the start, followed by a close up of a scantily clad girl on the front of a newspaper, lowered to reveal our hero, Michel, hat over his eyes, puffing on an enormous cigarette. He’s cool, but posing too, a kid playing dress-up. Then he runs the side of his thumb across his lips. It’s a signal. To us. Thumb across lips. That’s all it takes. Your Bogie. Your life is a movie. It’s hard to appreciate now the impact of this message. A Bout de Souffle was one of the first films to acknowledge people’s desire for movie grace in their lives, wanting their everyday existence transfigured by it, blessed with purpose and shape, ordinary personas imbued with unified glamour. You don’t need to be famous, a star. The magic isn’t out there somewhere, owned by producers, studios, agents, fans. It’s in you now, once you’ve seen the film, it’s yours, a gift, not a privilege. This is what cinema is, the democratisation of play. It’s an evolutionary tool, teaching poor regional kids moves and gestures to help them escape impoverished lives, to face the twin terrors of adolescence and neighbourhood streets. After all, when you live in a non-verbal environment knowing how to stand on corners with cool indifference is a vital art. This is another thing the film is already telling us. The street is a movie set too.

4. We first see Patricia ambling down the Champ-Elysees in her flat shoes, sweetly calling ‘New York Herald Tribune!‘ She’s played by Jean Seberg, proof that nationality is a notional concept at best. She’s supposed to be the American chick but comes across, in her clothes, her manner, her cropped hair, as ineffably French. It’s hard to imagine any other contemporary American actress playing the part, actually American but spiritually in tune with the Frenchness of the whole enterprise. (The film too is at once American in its conventions and French in its style and ideas.) It was that way from the start. Her screen debut was as Saint Joan (1957), hand-picked from 18,000 hopefuls by Otto Preminger. It was Preminger again who brought her to France the following year to play the spoiled Celine in Bonjour Tristesse. The same year she married film director Francois Moreuil. By the time of A Bout de Souffle they were divorced and she’d taken up with French author Romain Gary, marrying him in 1962. Was it fate or inclination that drew her to the French and them to her? Or was it the hair? The gamine prettiness? Whatever it was, it went on, until her tragic, mysterious death in 1979, found dead in her car on the same Parisienne streets she’d watched Belmondo play dead on all those years before, back when they were all young enough to think of death as a romantic game, something to be bargained with.

5. Leaving Patricia behind Michel passes a poster for a film called Ten Seconds To Hell (1959), its tagline proclaiming ‘Live dangerously till the end!’ It’s a lovely moment, not just for the renegade cheek of using the poster without permission, but for the serendipity of it being there in the first place, articulating the film’s key theme – defying death. (You know you’re in the zone when the world starts to speak to you like this, send you secret messages, when you see connections everywhere, when you start to believe there’s no such thing as a coincidence, that luck, in fact, is just fate in disguise).

6. Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. – Ernest Hemingway, ‘Death in the Afternoon’

‘It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained,’ Hegel wrote, somehow defining the essence of A Bout de Souffle over a century before it was made. The spirit of the film may be its exhilarating sense of freedom, it’s jazzy liberation from social, artistic and cinematic conventions, but it’s also obsessed with death, from its title to its conclusion. Or rather, with invoking it in order to feel more alive. If the taking of life could, as Hemingway suggests, ward off your own death, than so could acting it out. In this sense, the film is as ritualistic as a bullfight, a bloodless rebellion against death. Just as ancient Greek rites evolved into formalised drama, the death of a tragic hero offered to the gods rather than the sacrifice of a goat, so too with cinema. It may be a game, Godard suggests, but it isn’t frivolous. It’s as serious as any religion, as vital to our happiness as freedom itself. It was a message that hit the new decade like a Molotov cocktail, starting a creative blaze that lasted twenty years and engulfed the old Hollywood studio system in its wake.

7. ‘What is your greatest ambition?’ Patricia asks the novelist (played by director Jean-Pierre Melville) at the kind of pretentious press conference only the French would have. ‘To become immortal‘, he replies, looking straight into the camera, ‘and then to die‘. It’s a joke, a contradiction. He might as well have said his ambition was ‘to wake and then to dream’. It’s an impossibility, mutually exclusive states, waking/dreaming, immortality/death. Except, of course, there is one place where the impossible can happen. When we watch a film, especially in the dark of a cinema, what else are we doing but dreaming while still awake? And when we watch the great stars of the silver screen like James Cagney, Bette Davis or Steve McQueen, what else are we doing but watching the dead walk again, forever alive in their films, made immortal by them?

8. Which is what Bogart represents in the film, not just a role model but an icon of immortality. Dead only three years when A Bout de Souffle was made, already he’s becoming a cult, his moves, clothes and dialogue remembered, repeated and fetishised. But why Bogie? What was it about him that so obsessed the French? Maybe he was, in some way, more French than other Hollywood stars, more ironic, fatalistic, ugly? Maybe the characters he played, men with secrets, with shadowy pasts, were more in keeping with a nation haunted by defeat, collaboration and existential dread? Whatever it was it went deep, just think of the hats and coats in Melville’s own films like Le Samourai.

Of course, the Bogart of The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The Big Sleep was also the coolest man on the planet, a dream of tough grace under pressure. He crystallised the essence of cool long before Brando and Dean turned up, a man’s cool, not a grumpy adolescent’s, someone who’s lived, seen things, been betrayed by events, by his own heart, hides his honour like a dirty secret. But we know it’s there, we know he does care, does know which side is right, he just won’t be played for a sap any more. Being a man, he seems to say, is a moral act. If you don’t know how to read people, if you don’t know when to keep quiet, if you don’t understand that sometimes cynicism is just the truth no one wants to hear, then you deserve what you get, you leave yourself wide open, cannon fodder for con men, Nazis and certain kinds of women.

9. Then there’s the lovely extended scene in Patricia’s apartment. She arrives home to find Michel in her bed. What follows is spontaneity, calculation and natural light, cultural allusions everywhere. She poses before a poster of Renoir’s Mlle Irene Cahen d’Anvers and asks who’s the prettier. He caresses her bum and asks can he piss in her sink. She washes her feet and tell him she’s pregnant. He sits beneath a Picasso figure wearing a mask. She quotes from The Wild Palms by William Faulkner: ‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.’ Michel says he’d choose nothing. ‘Grief‘, he adds, ‘is a compromise‘. They talk, flirt, test each other and eventually make love, fumbling under the covers like kids, not sure what their parents really do under there. The claim that capturing Seberg’s beauty on film matches Renoir’s achievement on canvass is hardly worth noting now. But it’s a reminder of a time before the triumph of popular culture when film was considered an upstart medium, devoid of true craft, a nickelodeon distraction for immigrant hordes and over-excited housewives, not something to be taken seriously as high art. This was the fight Godard, Truffaut and the rest of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics were waging in the late 50s, rescuing great artists like Hitchcock and Hawks from the neglect this pompous snobbery had consigned them to.

And what about Michel’s claim that grief is a compromise? Is it an existential statement, like Beckett’s ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness‘, or is he just trying to sound cool. Is he suggesting that emotions are a refuge, a refusal to accept the truth? It’s an interesting idea in an age when personal grief has become everyday currency. Would Bogie give in to grief, cry and wail, take to his bed, sell his story to the tabloids? No, he wouldn’t. He’d take it inside him, order a drink, light a cigarette, another lesson learned, another test passed. The cigarette is vital of course. Just consider how important they were in all this. Michel smokes non-stop throughout the film. Even his dying breath is a puff of smoke. Can you imagine a time when smoking was this cool? When things weren’t ghosted by consequences, by health warnings, when people drank at work and smoked in cinemas, weren’t constantly fretting about their health, short-changing their youth for a few extra years at the end? When looking cool now was more important than being alive then? It’s all about how you look, y’see, masks, uniforms, encoded signs, the transformative power of objects and faces. ‘The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible,’ as Oscar Wilde rightly pointed out. Open your eyes (and dream). We’re being movie stars here. They’re immortal. They never die of cancer or liver failure.

10. ‘The film of tomorrow will be an act of love...’ – Truffaut

Above all it’s a film about love, love of cinema, love of life through cinema. There really was no difference to these young men. Cinema was life. Watching a beautiful woman and capturing her on film was the same thing to them. It was very chauvinistic, of course, but very romantic too (essentially the same thing). Romance has no time for feminist aspirations. It wants to be taken out of this crappy world, wants to idealise, heighten, improve. It’s foolish, a youthful folly, but where would we be without it? For a few brief years, as the world woke up from it’s post-war slumber, a handful of young men believed that cinema was the new language of happiness and truth. A Bout de Souffle bottled that moment. It’s a time machine. The spirit and energy of that moment can be revisited every time you watch it. You could even say it’s immortal. Or to put it another way: Devil in the Flesh. Rififi. And God Created Woman. Scarface. A Bout de Souffle. The best film around.

#A Bout De Souffle #breathless #jean-luc godard #1960s #essays #10 thoughts inspired by #Nouvelle Vague

[reportwire]

Doomed to fail? How carmakers' climate vows fall short

Doomed to fail? How carmakers’ climate vows fall short

© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A man runs past a BP (British Petroleum) EV (Electric Vehicle) charge point in London, Britain, January 30, 2021. REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo By Victoria Waldersee BERLIN (Reuters) – Car and truck makers from Volkswagen (DE:) to Nissan (OTC:) and Ford have embraced the narrative that reducing carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement should be a key tenet of…

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[fictionfromafar]

Just Thieves by Gregory Galloway

Just Thieves

By Gregory Galloway

Melville House

Publication Dates: 12 October 2021 (Kindle), 4 November (Hardcover)

Set in an unnamed American Town, Just Thieves tells the story of two house burglars who steal on order. Told in past tense from the perspective of Rick, the story follows their accomplished partnership as they complete successive jobs on request of their handler Froehmer, while also chartering through his own family background, his struggles with addiction and his eventual encounter with fellow addict Frank.

Never knowing whether the items they were stealing where for Froehmer's own use or then passed on to another party, Rick relays some of the scrapes he initially found himself in before bringing in the meticulous planning Frank to the operation. The latter would successfully create multiple identities for the thieves and consider potential unfolding scenarios, leaving almost nothing to chance. The narrative expansively articulates how they they would start to complement each other professionally and also personally in a very understated manner.

When they are charged to do a rare out of town job, Rick and Frank plan ahead to reduce the risks of working in an unfamiliar location, including renting a car and hotel room. They have been asked to thieve an apparently worthless trophy. The task appears straight forward yet there is a foreboding incident at the hotel before they begin their job; then they are required to separate immediately afterwards due to a minor car accident. Shortly afterwards Rick is then unable to contact Frank and has to investigate his presence and the reason for his disappearance.

This sets up the second part of the story where Rick has to dig back into his own history, losing his parents, the breakdown regular access to his daughter and reestablishing contact with one of his late father's associates, the mysterious Froehmer. A midpaced and slow burning story with a key theme of loss, Rick begins to get to know more of Frank's back story as he tries to fill the void his absence has left. You are drawn to the lead character as his losses are touching even though some of the actions he carries out would not normally evoke sympathy in the reader. Galloway has crafted a deep and sensitive chronical which at times is sparse enough to leave some degree of interpretation. It is a very effective slice of American noir where double crossing and surprises are far more central than action scenes and dramatic landscapes. Its well worthy of your attention.

About the author

Gregory Galloway is the author of the novels The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand and the Alex Award-winning As Simple As Snow. His short stories have appeared in the Rush Hour and Taking Aim anthologies. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently resides in NW Connecticut.

Many thanks to Tom Clayton and Melville House for inclusion on the blog tour for Just Thieves. Please check out the other reviews of this book on the tour as shown below

#Crime fiction #American Noir