#but i had like five minutes to conjure this because of a) the convention and b) because I was the one cooking tonight AND we decided to

[becumsh]

détentewonderful @thiswaycomessomethingwicked  tagged me in the First Line game, which is going to be fun!

Rules are: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line.

Good thing I’m not a ficwriter, so I don’t have a lot of works lmao.

ultima ratio

The Carmelite convent of the Saint-Jacques faubourg was a quiet, sombre place. The daughters of Saint Teresa only opened their mouths to sing holy hymns, and all flesh there, except for the time of prayer, kept silence before the Lord. An uninterrupted life went by unhurriedly, unperturbed by disturbances of the outside world.

Here Be Sleeping Dragons

“During their last term fifth-year students will practice Vanishing Spells, that can be applied to small animals; and I think that the introduction of lectures dedicated to basic mathematical formulae of Conjuring Spells for those who are planning on taking Transfiguration in the sixth year—”

“Wait”, there was a sound of lazy voice somewhere to his right. “Don’t you think that writing out all these formulae is a little bit… Muggle-like approach to magic?”

‘Dear Merlin, do you really give a toss about it, you snake bastard?’ Treville thought.

being alive can be so lonely sometimes (but i'm glad to have met you)

Five minutes before the alarm rings.

He squeezes his eyes shut before pressing the balls of his hands against the eyelids, feeling the deep-seated exhaustion in his bones, and gives himself exactly sixty seconds before getting up.

the promise

“Maybe I should write to my brother,” the Queen said uncertainly.

Treville did not want to be there. He did not want to discuss Richelieu’s future with his almost victim.

He wanted the make-shift council, Richelieu’s reckless and ludicrous plot to murder the Queen, he wanted all of it not to happen.

if you listen hard you will hear my breath

They came to him the next day asking to come back to Court.

"Cardinal..." Anne hesitated.

Richelieu looked at the window. He could bargain anything from her. The Queen had never been so weak and defeated. Powerless.

our disembodied state

He wakes up heaving for breath, his throat dry and raw.

“Here,” someone presses a glass to his chapped lips, and he drinks gratefully. “Oh, my dear Uncle, you gave us such a scare!”

The voice breaks and Richelieu opens his eyes.

détente

The rumours of the Queen Mother’s rapidly rising favourite had spread like wildfire, but Anne’s first meeting with him was purely accidental – she was walking with her ladies-in-waiting down a corridor of the Louvre and Concini and this Bishop stood in their way. Concini merely gave Anne and her consort a careless nod and walked round, but the cleric stopped, and bowed with a trick that took most courtiers years of practice: being quite tall he managed to look up.

no peace to the sword

In the Ninth Circle of Hell lie the traitors who betrayed those they held the closest, frozen in a lake of ice known as Cocytus. The icy hell of betrayal is the final result of consent to sin, the stage of being incapable of repentance.

night vale au

He returns in the early morning. Even though he’s never been here before. The town greets him with breezy wind and a salty drizzle of water down the collar of his jacket.

I like the one from ultima ratio the most, but I think it’s mostly because this fic is literally a lifetime project for me and I think so much about every line I write.

I might be wrong (and if anyone’s even remotely interested in this post, lmao, let me know). But when I say when I’m not a ficwriter, I’m like... I mean it? My main output are fanvideos, so I work with visuals and audio. 

So I feel like my first lines are very visual, setting up a scene like a first frame of a movie or something? And I also care about how the sentences sound, so when you read them inside your head there’s still a cadence to them. But I might be completely bullshitting this, because I feel like it, but it’s not necessarily how my fics are perceived.

Also I’m incapable of writing short sentences or anything short in general, but I attribute that to Russian being my first language and me being traumatised by Leo Tolstoy in high school.

@hobfilm @heyholmesletsgo - yas let’s go (only if ya want) bc thiswaycomessomethingwicked tagged all my writer friends too! coz we are all friends!

I have followers & mutuals who may be writers and I’m unaware of it so if you want to do it please consider yourselves tagged!

[thecassadilla]

Bump in the Night

Pairing: Kristanna (+ a minor appearance by Elsamaren)

Word Count: 2,988/AO3

Summary: To kick off the start of “spooky season,” Anna plans a scary movie night with Kristoff, but things go awry later that night when their real life begins to imitate conventions of a horror film. 

Author’s Note: Happy October! While I absolutely hate Fall (cold weather + less daylight, yuck), Halloween is my favorite holiday. I planned to write a couple of fics this month to help me “embrace” this season and this is the first. Enjoy!!!

“Are you almost here?”

“I’m pulling up to your house now,” Kristoff chuckled, reversing into the empty spot behind her car.

“Oh, okay! I’ll open the front door!”

Suddenly the line went dead, and he couldn’t help but smile. He cut the engine, grabbed his overnight bag from where it rested on the front seat, and climbed out of the car.

“Hi, sweetie!” Anna called from the doorway.

“Hey, baby,” he called back with a grin.

When he finally made it into the house, she pulled him into a tight embrace before leaning up onto her toes and pressing a soft but brief kiss to his lips. “How are you? How was work?”

“It was crazy busy and I had to stay a little late,which is why I got here so late, but I’m doing a lot better now that I’m here. How about you?”

“Today was great, I’m great. Here, do you want me to bring your bag upstairs?”

“Nah, I’ll just bring it up later,” he answered, sliding the strap off of his shoulder and placing the bag on the bottom step of the staircase. “Just don’t trip over it.”

“I won’t,” she laughed, walking towards the kitchen. “I ordered us a pizza and it should be here any minute.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve picked it up on the way.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she said, turning around to make sure that he was following her. “Elsa is staying at Honeymaren’s this weekend.” 

Kristoff raised an eyebrow. “I see?”

“Do you...maybe wanna have a scary movie night?”

“Uh...sure,” he answered.

Her face fell. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he shrugged. “I just don’t understand the correlation between Elsa being away and us watching a scary movie.”

“Oh!” Anna giggled. “Well, we’ll have the living room to ourselves and we can put on whatever we want without Elsa butting in. I’ve never been able to watch anything scary because she hates horror.”

“I’m not too fond of it, myself,” Kristoff admitted.

“Ooh, is the big, tough guy afraid of scary movies?” she teased, poking her finger into his ribcage.

“No,” he huffed, swatting her hand away. “I’ve watched a whole bunch and to be honest, I think they’re stupid and predictable.”

She opened up one of the cabinets and pulled out two plates. “Well, it’s officially ‘spooky season’ and I think it would be fun.” 

“We can watch whatever you want,” he promised.

“Yay!” she squealed, bouncing up to press a kiss to his cheek. 

“Did you have a specific movie in mind?” “I found one called The Summoning. It’s basically about a young married couple that moves into a new house, only to find out that the house is haunted by a demon.”

“Sounds exactly like every other horror movie that came out in the last decade or so,” he remarked. 

“Is that a bad thing?” she asked, furrowing her eyebrows.

“No,” he shrugged. “Just an observation. A lot of old horror movies had masked murderers; Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Michael Myers from Halloween, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th. Now it’s all about the invisible villain; Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring, and now I guess The Summoning.”

“I’m impressed! You really know your stuff, huh?” she proclaimed enthusiastically, but before he could respond, the doorbell rang. “Ooh pizza’s here!”

“Do you want money?” he offered.

She thrust the plates in his direction and he accepted them. “Nope! It’s on me. The only thing I need you to do is sit your butt on the couch.”

He obeyed her command and made his way to the living room, setting the plates on the coffee table and plopping down in the corner of the couch. A few short moments later she joined him, placing the pizza box next to the plates.

“Help yourself. I’m going to put the movie on,” she stated, grabbing the remote.

He reached over and flipped the lid to the box open. “You want to eat and watch at the same time?” 

“Yeah, I figured we could multitask.”

He shrugged, and handed her a plate with a slice on it and then took one for himself before sitting back. 

“Thanks,” she smiled, leaning into his side and pressing the play button. “I hope it’s good.”

“We shall see.”

The movie opened up to upbeat music, and an attractive young couple moving boxes out of a moving truck and into their new, yet clearly antiquated house. Less than ten minutes in, the tone changed and elements of horror started creeping in.

While Anna was completely engrossed with what was happening, it was abundantly clear to Kristoff that the movie was the opposite of good; between the cheap jump scares, the poor acting, and the lack of any real action, it seemed more like a comedy than a horror movie. Though he tried to focus on what was happening in front of him in order to keep his promise to Anna, he was growing more bored by the second. Eventually it became close to unbearable.

“How about…” he started, pressing a slow, ardent kiss to her neck, “We turn this off and put something else on?”

“No, I want to watch,” she giggled, shying away from his touch. “You promised that we could watch whatever I wanted.”

“I know, but it’s so bad,” he whined.

“It’s half over and it’s not that bad.”

“It’s terrible.”

“Look!” she exclaimed, pointing at the television screen. “The demon just pushed her down the stairs.”

“Demons aren’t real.”

“Please watch it,” she begged.

“I’d rather kiss your neck.”

“You have all night to kiss my neck, and I’m going to hold you to that,” she teased, wiggling away from him. “But the only thing I’m paying attention to for the next forty-five minutes is this movie.”

“Fine,” he huffed, resting his chin on her shoulder. “What about Hocus Pocus? You love that movie.”

She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. “I will only turn this movie off if you admit that you’re scared.”

“I’m not scared,” he insisted. “I’d actually enjoy it more if it was scaring me.”

“Too bad.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“We should see a horror movie in a theater soon,” she remarked as they laid in bed later that night. “I wonder if there are any good ones coming out this year.”

“I don’t trust your judgment on what a ‘good’ horror movie is,” he chuckled.

“Well, we could always just sit in the back and make out like high schoolers if it’s really bad.”

“We could do that here, for free,” he noted.

“Yeah, but it’s about the thrill of the chase. It’s more exciting when you’re in a room full of people who aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing.”

“You are truly something else. And I love you for that.”

“Aww, I love you too,” she smiled, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “Did you really hate the movie?”

“No offense, Anna, but it was beyond bad.”

“Can I just say that I still can’t believe the guy in that movie let his wife become possessed like that?! Newly married, new house, seemingly perfect life and then bam! He chooses to save himself instead of fighting for her.”

“Good thing it’s just a movie,” he reminded her.

“I know, but it’s still so terrible,” she said, shaking her head. “Would you abandon me if a demon was trying to possess me?”

“No, because it literally would not happen.”

“But if it did happen?”

He sighed. “No, I wouldn’t abandon you.”

“Thank you. I wouldn’t abandon you, either.”

“Great, it’s all settled then. Do you think that can be incorporated into our wedding vows?”

She playful swatted his arm. “Can you stop mocking me please?”

“Only when you stop worrying about real people in fictional scenarios.”

She glared at him. “It was a hypothetical question.”

“That I answered honestly,” he added. “I’ll save you from all the bad guys - and if that includes demons or ghosts or werewolves, I still won’t abandon you.”

“Thank you, sweetie.”

“I’m gonna crash, so…” he leaned over to peck her on the lips. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

Within moments, he was asleep, while she found herself tossing and turning. As the clock ticked forward, she tried to convince herself that she wasn’t anxious; every thought that popped into her head was clouded with scariest scenes from the movie. Though her mind was racing, she tried to focus on Kristoff instead, watching as his chest rose and fell with each breath. 

Until she swore that she heard a noise and nearly jumped out of her skin. She could hear her heart beating in her ears, and though Kristoff looked completely at peace, she needed someone to ease her racing mind.

“Kristoff,” she whispered, gently shaking his shoulder. “Kristoff!”

“Huh?” he mumbled, his eyes slowly blinking open.

“I heard a noise,” she responded, her voice slightly louder. “What if someone is in the house?”

“A person or a demon?” he teased.

“Kristoff, I’m not kidding.”

“No one is in the house,” he assured her. “You probably just heard a car door close.”

“It didn’t sound like a car door,” she rebutted.

“I think that movie made you paranoid.”

She rolled her eyes. “Would you please make sure the front door is locked?”

He groaned in response, before scrubbing at his face with the palms of his hands a few times. He tossed the blankets aside and stood up, taking a moment to stretch before shuffling out of the room. 

Anna anxiously awaited his return, wringing her hands over and over again. After what felt like an eternity, he reappeared.

“All the doors are locked,” he announced as he collapsed back onto the bed. “Front door, back door, door to the garage.”

“I feel a lot better now,” Anna breathed. “Thank you for checking.”

He motioned for her to slide closer to him. She laid her head on his chest, and he placed a hand on her shoulder before pressing a kiss to her temple. “Anything to make you feel better. Try to get some sleep.”

She nodded against him, feeling safe in his arms, and after a few moments, she felt her eyelids start to grow heavy. Until a loud crash from downstairs snapped her out of it.

Her eyes widened and she tensed up. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” Kristoff answered hesitantly.

As if on cue, another crash sounded from beneath them. They both sprang into action, jumping out of the bed.

“What should we do?”

“Do you have any weapons?”

“No!” Anna exclaimed. “Only the kitchen knives.” “Tomorrow I’m buying you a bat,” Kristoff remarked before charging out of the room. Anna followed swiftly behind him.

“What exactly are you planning on doing?” she whispered as she chased him down the stairs, trying to stay as light on her feet as she could.

“I want to see where the noise came from.”

“And then…?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“Maybe we should call the police?” she suggested in a panicked whisper.

“And do what in the meantime? Get killed?”

For a moment, they stood quietly in the dark, and it quickly became apparent that the noises had come from the garage, though the sounds had morphed from crashes to voices. 

Kristoff and Anna slowly crept toward the kitchen. He pulled each knife out of the knife block until he determined which one would be the most effective. Anna, on the other hand, went for the cast iron skillet that was resting on the stovetop.

“What are you going to do with that?”

“Throw it?” she shrugged. 

They approached the door to the garage, and Kristoff held out his left arm in an attempt to keep Anna safely behind him. When they finally reached the door, Kristoff slowly reached out for the doorknob, before twisting it and forcefully pushing the door open, immediately resulting in two girlish shrieks from the perpetrators.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kristoff snorted.

“Elsa?!” Anna exclaimed, gently pushing Kristoff’s arm down. “What are you doing?”

It was quite the scene. Elsa and Honeymaren were crouched on the floor of the garage; Elsa was sweeping a pile of dirt into the garbage bag that Honey was holding open. Gardening tools and pieces of broken ceramic were scattered behind them, in addition to the plant that Elsa had mentioned buying the day before. 

Elsa cringed, clearly mortified. “It’s a long story.”

“It’s really not,” Honeymaren corrected, looking rather amused. “She forgot to take out the garbage and it was bothering her. I suggested that she text you, and ask you to take it out, but she wanted to handle it herself. You wanna tell the rest of the story, Elsa?”

Elsa hung her head in shame, understandably embarrassed by the entire situation. “I tripped and knocked over the bin of gardening tools. Then while I was trying to pick them up, I knocked over the plant and the pot shattered.”

“Which is why we’re crouched on the floor, cleaning up dirt,” Honey stated, reaching out to place a reassuring hand on Elsa’s shoulder. “It’s really not a big deal though.”

“Accidents happen,” Anna sympathized. “But you guys kind of scared the crap out of us. We thought someone was breaking in.” 

“So you decided to handle it yourselves?” Elsa asked incredulously, her eyes widening.

“The alternative was calling the police. You could’ve been arrested for breaking into your own house,” Kristoff pointed out.

Honey smirked. “I don’t know what would’ve been worse; going to jail or being stabbed,” she remarked, her eyes bouncing from Kristoff to Anna. “Or whatever you were planning to do with a frying pan.”

“Have you ever picked one of these up?” Anna asked, moving her arm up and down to demonstrate the heftiness of the skillet. “They weigh a ton. One swing of this pan could knock a person unconscious.”

“Good thing neither of you had to use your weapons of choice,” Elsa cringed. “I’m sorry that we scared you.”

“Next time, just let me know if you plan on coming home in the middle of the night to take out garbage,” Anna pleaded with her older sister. “Or, you know, just ask me to do it.”

“Or,” Kristoff interjected, draping his arm around Anna’s shoulders. “Ask me to do it, because someone is too paranoid from the scary movie we watched to go downstairs by herself.”

“Am not!” Anna rebuked, looking up at him. “You’re just...a lot bigger and more intimidating than I am.”

He smiled smugly. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.” 

She stuck her tongue out at him, before turning back to her sister. “Do you need our help cleaning up?”

Elsa shook her head. “No, I think we got it. You two should go back to sleep.”

“Okay, if you’re sure.”

The group exchanged goodnights, and Anna and Kristoff returned their weapons back to the kitchen before heading back upstairs. 

“That was, uh...interesting,” Kristoff commented when they finally made it back to the bedroom.

Anna closed the door behind them and climbed back into the bed. “I know, right?! It’s just garbage, it’s not a big deal!”

“Maybe she was worried that she was going to stink up the garage,” he suggested, laying down next to her.

“She could’ve just moved it outside when she got home tomorrow if she didn’t want to bother us,” she countered. “And I bet she’ll never spend another night away again after this. We may be spending weekends with Elsa and Honeymaren from now on unless we stay at your place.”

“I have no issues with that and honestly, I feel like you would do the same if the situation was reversed -  you know, to avoid inconveniencing her.”

“Oh, I totally would. But I’d at least give her a heads up first, so if I made a ton of noise in the middle of the night she wouldn’t think I was a murderer or a burglar. Maybe we should consider getting an alarm installed. Do you think Elsa will go for that?”

“Alarm or no alarm, I’m going to buy you a bat, just in case there’s a ‘next time.’”

“If there’s ever a ‘next time,’ we will call the cops and avoid running into the line of fire,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “Ahem.”

“I know it was risky and stupid, but at least your sister and Honeymaren didn’t get hauled away in handcuffs. And I promised I would protect you.”

“From fictional bad guys. And jerks, of course. If that had been a real murderer or robber, we could’ve been killed.”

“You were fine with sending me downstairs when you heard a noise,” he stated.

She scoffed. “That’s different.”

“How is that different?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“It just is.”

He hesitated for a moment, before reaching out and caressing her cheek. “Anna, did that movie scare you?”

“A little,” she confessed. “Obviously I know that it’s just a movie, but I lost control of my imagination. I really did hear a noise and before you say it - no, I didn’t think the noise was a demon.”

“Look, I’m sorry for teasing you,” he sighed. “It was wrong of me, and it probably seemed like I was less than thrilled to make sure the doors were locked but -”

She cut him off mid-sentence. “Kristoff, I woke you up out of a dead sleep because I heard a noise. Cut yourself a little slack here.”

“And I immediately accused you of being paranoid - the point is, I don’t want you to hesitate to wake me up if you hear a noise, okay?”

“Fine,” she agreed. “But as a compromise, I’ll probably be skipping horror movies from now on.”

He smirked. “I have no issues with that.”

“And if you want...we can watch Hocus Pocus tomorrow.”

#kristanna #kristanna fanfic #anna #kristoff bjorgman #elsamaren #elsa #honeymaren #frozen #frozen fic #my writing

[thefederalistfreestyle]

One key scene helped cement ‘Hamilton’ as a Broadway legend. The team that crafted it explains how. (WaPo):

[. . .]  When it was suggested that the interview focus on one galvanizing interlude of “Hamilton,” and how each played their part in making it happen, the reaction was immediate and electric. It was an opportunity for them to reflect on the profound psychic-income aspect of their group achievement and the ineffable bond that feeds artistic success.

“This speaks to a sense of trust that I think is evident, as you watch all of us kind of lean forward in our seats, getting a chance to talk about this one particular thing,” Kail, 40, says. “The difference between a show that might have an opportunity to be its full expression — when ideas are allowed to flow and be identified — and when they’re squelched, because it’s not your job or you shouldn’t be saying this or you don’t feel the comfort of being able to say it.”

“I’ve worked on other shows where you propose a change because the moment isn’t working, and all of a sudden, you feel the grins tightening, you just see the arms lock. With this group, that has never happened,” adds Lacamoire, 43. “There’s always been a thing about, ‘You know, this isn’t quite landing,’ and then we all think about, how can we make it better?”

[. .  .]

The vignette-filled “Satisfied,” which comes smack-dab in the middle of Act 1, proves to be a wonderful springboard for discussion, because it embodies so many of the musical’s irresistible attributes: its restless, energetic resourcefulness; its ability to paint a historical mural and apply a modern varnish of commentary at the same time; its perspective shifts, its wit, its rigor. It’s no wonder the song drew on and conjured for Miranda and company all manner of cultural references, including “West Side Story,” “A Chorus Line,” “The Matrix” and “Ratatouille.”

It’s a song that was the breakthrough indicator of how much story their deeply researched musical, based largely on Ron Chernow’s best-selling biography, could pack into a conventional two-act structure. Because before “Satisfied,” Angelica Schuyler did not exist in the show. “The question of whether Eliza’s sister would be a character was up for debate,” Miranda recalls. “I mean, she is a confidante of her sister, she had these letters with Hamilton, and it’s, ‘Do I have time to get into that?’ ”

Devising “Satisfied” for Angelica, a role originated in 2015 at off-Broadway’s Public Theater and on Broadway by Renee Elise Goldsberry, who would win a Tony for it, proved crucial to developing the emotional core of “Hamilton.” It took Miranda about a month to write it, and it sets in motion the show’s tragic element, how passion unfulfilled — in this case, Angelica’s for Alexander — eventually tears apart Hamilton and those around him. The song, which includes ingeniously rhymed rap to dramatize the dizzying sophistication of Angelica’s own intellect, begins as Angelica’s toast to the marriage of Hamilton to her sister, Eliza; Angelica has introduced her to Hamilton during the previous song, Eliza’s “Helpless.”

“I liked the idea of a wedding toast,” Miranda says. “I’ve been to enough wedding toasts where the wrong things tumble out.”

“To your union,” Angelica sings in the five-minute-plus number’s opening segment, “And the hope that you provide/May you always/Be satisfied.” What then follows is what the song identifies as a “rewind”: going back to the events of “Helpless,” but told now from Angelica’s anguished perspective, in a way that crystallizes a pivotal facet of her character. “I remember that night, I might regret that night for the rest of my days,” she sings, in the song’s defining line.

In returning to that moment, Kail says, “we realized that there was an opportunity for Lin to play with the timeline, and the way that we moved through time.” That concept would repeat itself at another climactic moment of “Hamilton,” in the freeze-frame rendering of the bullet that fatally strikes Hamilton in his duel with Aaron Burr. It was not an original idea, actually: The creative team was borrowing a cinematic technique, one of many they use in the show.

Kail says: “This is something I talk to the actors playing Angelica a lot — about ‘Ratatouille’ ” — the 2007 animated movie about the rat that becomes a Parisian chef.

“Totally ‘Ratatouille’ ” Blankenbuehler interjects. “We use it as a verb and an adjective.”

Kail explains that the freezing of time in “Hamilton” has its parallel in the moment in the film when the food critic, voiced by the late Peter O’Toole, has an epiphany as he savors a piece of food.

“When the critic takes the bite, and you go into the critic’s eye, that’s what we’re doing,” the director says. In other words, the instant in which the cartoon critic samples the food stops time; viewers are given a protracted, imagistic impression of what is happening in the critic’s mind. That same stopping of time occurs in “Satisfied.”

“I love that, sonically, it takes someplace we haven’t been to before,” adds Lacamoire, the music director and orchestrator. For Blankenbuehler, the choreographer, “Satisfied” was a feast of new possibility, too: “I think the first time I heard the song was at a reading,” he says. “And I just remember the right hand on the piano, and the tinkles, and I instantly saw women suspended, like on top of a cake, like on pointe, like how things rotate on a wedding cake.”

But perhaps the most complicated choreographic element of “Satisfied” is what happens in the interlude in which prerecorded voices take us into the “rewind” portion of the song. Because the dancing ensemble, assembled for the wedding, physically rewinds, too, to the movement of “Helpless.”

“All of ‘Helpless’ goes counterclockwise,” Blankenbuehler explains. “So when you rewind in ‘Satisfied,’ and for just a moment you go clockwise, you understand it. When they dance in ‘Helpless’ and ‘Satisfied,’ the same dance movement matches both lyrics.”

[. . .]

It feels as though these guys could talk about this one song all day. But they all have other places to be. So maybe Miranda captures the essence of collaboration best as he listens to his longtime colleagues talk about their approaches to “Satisfied,” and then says with a laugh:

“These are all the things I do not see when I write a song!”

#hamilton #lin manuel miranda #thomas kail #alex lacamoire #andy blankenbuehler #choreography #hamiltunes #the art of making art #staging #the cabinet #washington post #interview

[comicsbeat]

  Why can’t the world just be ruled by cabals of mighty librarian queens? Organizing to create policies, looking out for the marginalized, fighting censorship, advocating for the education and literacy of all – we’d be led into a golden age of knowledge and peace.

Or at least that’s the fantasy I conjured after attending my very first American Library Association annual conference this past weekend in New Orleans.

Okay, maybe it’s just the exceptional people who I hung out with – the librarians driving the growing acceptance of graphic novel collections around the world. Whip smart and passionate about their advocacy, I soon came to realize the thing that was most powerful about this group: not only do they love reading, they love it when YOU read, too, and they do everything they can to help more people enjoy reading.

https://twitter.com/librarylandia/status/1011285466560237568

This was undoubtedly a banner year for the graphic novel pavilion at ALA. Perhaps it was the lure of the exotic New Orleans setting – supposedly attendance geos up whenever the ALAAC is held in the Crescent City. But maybe it was destiny. Not only was it my own first ALA (something that shocked everyone I told) but the number of publishers attending for the first time or returning after a long absence was much remarked upon. Titan, Rebellion, Humanoids, the French Comics Association, Europe Comics, Zenescope and several other were set up for the first time. Fantagraphics and Boom were returning after long absences. And even DC, long represented by distributor Random House, had finally returned with a booth promoting their Ink, Zoom and Black Label lines.

The only publisher missing in action? Marvel Comics, a fact often noted that drew some tough talk from librarians. But that will be returned to.

It wasn’t just publishers – the people who were attending for the first time, besides me, Berger Books; Karen Berger, Black Crown’s Shelly Bond, Lion Forge’s Carol Burrell, Aftershocks Steve Rotterdam, Dynamite’s Alan Payne and many, many others were experiencing the library market first hand for the first time, joining such veterans as our own Torsten Adair, and Random House Graphics’ Gina Gagliano.

They all came together in NoLA’s voodoo tinged fever swamp perhaps to present an alternative to the twitter culture wars and comics shop vs Wal-Mart narrative that was keeping everyone else busy. And it was also the cusp of a milestone obscure outside the library world but momentous inside it; the establishment of a Graphic Novel Round Table. In the hierarchy of the ALA this classification allows for membership dues, budgets and greater resources for organizing projects. The drive was spearheaded by Tina Coleman, who’s  been organizing the graphic novel pavilion and the artist alley at ALA for several years, with a bold squadron of graphic novel library knights behind her as shown in this photo.

The effects of this new roundtable may not be seen directly outside the library world, but we’ll feel its influence in future endeavors. It also marks a momentous trek from the base camp that began back in 2002, when comics first invaded the ALA with a presentation by Neil Gaiman, Colleen Doran, Art Spiegelman and Jeff Smith, four swashbuckling creators whose talents and charisma could not help but win over the library world.

Anyhoo, I know I’m waxing rhapsodical over a conference. Maybe it’s just the effects of dehydration and overheating as I wandered the 97-degree swamp of Chartres St – maybe it’s destiny.

So let’s go back! I arrived in New Orleans back on Thursday. Looking around the gate at Newark airport, most of my fellow passengers were women reading books. It was a very ALA bound crowd.

The event kicked off with a reception for the French Comics Association at the French Consulate in New Orleans. That was as swell as you might imagine, a huge, gracious mansion opened for the evening to the library cabal plus a few publishers and the French comics contingent of  Barroux (Alpha), Cati Baur (Four Sisters), Aurélie Neyret (Cici’s Journal), Benjamin Reiss (Super Tokyoland), Julie Rocheleau (About Betty’s Boob), Eve Tharlet (The Wild Cat: Mr. Badger & Mrs. Fox) as well as French BD industry folks.

Flore Piacentino of the French Publishers Association gave a little talk and mentioned the influence of manga, bande desinee and “comics” coming together. I’ve often heard the three great branches of world graphic literature around the world categorized like this, and maybe it’s time for us in the US to accept the “comics” name with pride for our bombastic yet fantastic strain of storytelling. Standing in the hot backyard of the manse, with its mix of Haunted Mansion moldings and mid-century furniture, it was fun to hear of the panels and meetings to come.

  After the reception, I grabbed some dinner with Karen Berger, Eva Volin and Robyn Brenner, Berger Books and the library world exchanging information over some super tasty shrimp and grits. Not only was this to be a weekend of smart talk, but a food marathon of surviving crusty bread, butter drenched fish and the occasional vegetable.

The next morning the conference kicked off. Here it must be mentioned that a teeny little con war broke out, GraphiCon vs Library Con. The first is a forum organized by the ALA GN interest group – and this year focused on adult graphic novel collection, a frontier topic where best practices are still being developed. Library Con was held across the hall and in somewhat the same time period and is organized by Random House.  There was some grumbling about the timing, although both programs were arranged to fill up the time before Michele Obama’s keynote and the exhibit hall opening at 5:30. There were some great panels on both programs, and certainly a lot to do. Random House did stack the deck a bit by offering a free boxed lunch. I decided to eat half of an egg salad sandwich from Starbucks instead. This delicacy is no longer available in NYC – probably because it’s too fattening for diet conscious New Yorkers – but one half made a great breakfast and the second half made a good lunch!

Graphic Con kicked off with a panel on “Building and Justifying Adult Graphic Novel Collections in Public and Academic Libraries” with Andrew Woodrow Butcher, Amanda Melilli (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) Marcela Peres (Lewiston Public Library, ME), and creators Ezra Claytan Daniels and Eric Shanower.

The main point of all the programming is that just as kids and YA collections – now well established at most libraries – started out slow, adult collections need to build on the success of those other age groups. Shelving remains a problem though. A recurring villain was “741.5” the Dewey Decimal category where graphic novels are shoved into one big blob. How to organize within this number – by author or series or age rating – is an ongoing issue.

Also what to collect is hard to pin down since there are more lists and awards for juvenile categories. (The Beat was mentioned several times as a resource for more information on graphic novels, giving me a serious case of “must do more!”) Adult collections are still built on a case by case basis. “Going online to find titles is not the best approach. One size doesn’t fit all since libraries don’t all have the same users and needs,” said UNLV’s Mellili. “You want it to be a reflection of the rest of your collection.”

Peres had a few success stories. She said the adult collection at her library has grown from 300 check outs a year to 1300 over the last five years. She’s also used innovative marketing approaches, such as a GN reading group held at a local brewery.

Shanower noted that his Age of Bronze was still finding an audience in libraries. “I don’t think there’s resistance like there might have been in 20th century, but there is still education that needs to be made.” Asked about whether his book has ever been challenged he joked “I wish it would be!”

Subsequent panels delved more into the topic from the publisher and creator sides. Image has a robust library program, led by Chloe Ramos Peterson, a former librarian herself, and the importance of catalogs, lists, newsletter and other resources for librarians was repeatedly mentioned. For creators, sometimes it does become a content issue – one scene may push a title from a comfy home in the YA section to an uncertain future in the adult collection, and it’s a decision creators have to weigh.

Reader resistance was also mentioned a few times. “Some adults are just embarrassed to be seen checking out comics,” said one librarian (sorry my notes don’t say who.) Overcoming this resistance with events and education is a slow but necessary step.

After the library conferences wrapped up everyone but me went off to see Michelle Obama speak. People had been lined up since 9 am – a different kind of Hall H indeed – and I didn’t want to get caught in a long line.

The exhibit hall for ALA has a kind of mini preview night – very mini as it’s only 90 minutes long – and after the keynote, everyone filed in. A big topic when I was around – maybe because I kept bringing it up – was the announcement of DC’s Wal-Mart exclusive. I had a lively discussion of the topic over dinner with retailer Brian Hibbs who, like myself, had been brought to the show by Lion Forge to liaise with the library world.  (Brian promises he’ll have one of his epic columns about the experience next week.)

As lot of our discussion can be seen in the piece that I wrote the next morning. Brian feels strongly that exclusives that the DM can’t get are the wrong way to build a bigger audience for comics, but that’s his story to tell and I’ll leave him to state his own case.

  Saturday, for me, was more of the same, wandering the vast hall to find the comics folks, and chatting them up. The Ernest Morial Convention Center – a place I haven’t been since before Katrina – is very very long and narrow and the show floor had the GN stage and pavilion at one end, with long stretches of library tech in between, studded with pockets of publishers.

Despite all the excitement over books, many exhibits at ALA are given over to actual library tech. I don’t really know what all those scanners and conveyor belt sorters did, so I will leave librarians to explain what they were looking for. Fantagraphics had set up with Norton, D&Q with McMillan, Uncivilized and Iron Circus in Consortium, Dark Horse and DC set up side by side in the Random House aisle. Some publishers made the decision to be in the distro area, but many other stuck it out in the GN pavilion, notably IDW/Top Shelf, Boom and all of the manga publishers on hand, Viz, TokyoPop, Yen Press and Udon. While it was all the way at the end of the hall, the Graphic Novel Stage served as a focal point.

There were many creators on hand, including a host of the DC Zoom and DC Ink writers, and of course the whole artist alley, which was small but significant. Due to the size of the hall, crowds would tend to come in waves. Much like BEA there were often long lines for signings, and librarians love free stuff just like everyone else.

  I did attend the presentation DC Zoom and DC Ink lines led by VP Michele Wells and featuring writers  Mariko Tamaki, Danielle Paige, Shea Fontana, Ridley Pearson, Kami Garcia, Meg Cabot, and Lauren Myracle. Unlike the long ago Minx (which this is often compared to) these lines feature veteran YA and kids authors who bring their own followings to an initiative aimed firmly at bookstores. It’s funny how retailers aren’t worried about THESE comics, isn’t it?

The mood was very different from the usual superhero hype panel, which usually consists of something like the following. “Remember issue #327 of Amygdala Man, where he finds a pair of underpants on the beach? Well in issue #600 we’re going to find out who they belong to and how it fits in with what Sprawlmeister has been up to.”

Instead the plans all spoke to the aspirational and emotional state of the young superheroes, with their motivations and family issues being covered to show how they overcame – or didn’t – problems to be heroes. Basic stuff really. The giveaway booklets for both lines featured sizable previews of most titles, and the art is sharp on these! As mentioned on twitter, DC Superhero Girls is the real disruption in the superhero biz, with thousands and thousands of copies sold and a whole generation of girls coming to love these characters.

Saturday night saw a sort of comics social event of the ALA, the Will Eisner Library Grant Reception, led by Carl and Anne Gropper and John Shableski. Grants were presented to two libraries for their projects, and a few speeches were made. Jason Latour (above) delivered a key note, noting how styrange it was “for a kid who spent a lot of time in detention to be talking to a room full of librarians.” Olivier Jalabert of Glenát also delivered some very funny remarks.

The event was another one where the spirit of Will Eisner was conjured. In a display of unique clairvoyance, he foresaw the rise of the graphic novel. Perhaps New Orleans was the place for his ghost to appear and see that his works were good.

  Sunday was pretty much just more of all of this. I did the “Underrated and Overrated graphic Novels” panel, a terrifying chance to go on the record with some disses, but I won’t reveal what was said. My fellow panelist Gene Ha did repeatedly ding Chris Hart, whose “anatomy books” for artists are cheesy and full of mistakes, so I’ll go along with that: Christopher Hart isnogood!

  I also popped into a panel featuring Mark Siegel in a panel discussion with First Second star authors Vera Brosgol and Ngozi Ukazu. At one point in the free-flowing conversation, Vera and Ngozi were asked why their artwork connects with readers both inside and outside the comics ‘geekdom’. Vera answered with a tip for young artists: “make the eyes bigger.” And the conversation went on into why humans are hardwired to love baby features, and sometimes cartooning might just tap into that – the appeal of “neoteny” in current comics styles hasn’t been much explored, so here’s your cue!

Also the great Raina, so often mentioned, was in attendance, although just to hang out, and led to this epic photo.

https://twitter.com/goraina/status/1010976229065940992

Sunday afternoon was also the big day for the presentation to the ALA governing board about the Graphic Novel Round Table. The librarians presenting the proposal had been nervous about it all weekend. Honestly no one thought it wouldn’t be picked up. When a call for interested parties went out they hoped for 200 responses but got 1000.

And that’s really the bottom line about the ALA. Librarians love comics not because it’s a secret hobby they try to fob off on other people – graphic novels are highly circulated books in libraries. There is an avid readership and a growing need for more information about all of it. I think a lot of first time ALA attendees thought that their job would be trying to persuade librarians to give comics a try, but the reality is that curators are way ahead of that – they’re always looking for MORE information about the publishers and authors their patrons are interested in, and more information to justify their purchasing budgets. They are hungry for more books that people can read and enjoy.

Far from the roil of the DM, graphic novels were clearly on the upswing “Graphic novels are big and they’re just going to get bigger,” someone at the Disney booth, of all places, told me.

Creator Frank Cammuso had an even more blunt assessment. “I think libraries saved comics,” he told me. Looking back at how comics emerged from the wreck of the post speculation market into the manga-fueled era of bookstore comics, and the recovery following Borders going under, library sales have risen steadily, an invisible but integral part of the business for publishers smart enough to get in on it. The numbers don’t lie: There are an estimated 119,487 libraries in the US, including 16,000 public libraries and nearly 100,000 school libraries. A hit in this market dwarfs the direct sales market, and doesn’t even show up on Bookscan.

So yeah, it was a good time. Despite all the shit going on in the outside world, I couldn’t help but feel optimistic as I made one last stroll through the feels-like-105-degree sauna of New Orleans. Perhaps I was just infected with a swamp dream, maybe it was just the low-stress experience of spending a whole weekend surrounded by smart, literate people. Maybe I was just bathed in the smiles and fellowship of people talking about the thing they love. For me, the ALA in New Orleans was the time and place to be feel good about what we’ve accomplished and look forward to doing even more.

  https://twitter.com/marcelaphane/status/1011631881396391936

  ALA 2018: Graphic novels shine in a very different Hall H Why can’t the world just be ruled by cabals of mighty librarian queens? Organizing to create policies, …

#alaac 2018 #First Second #gnrt #Graphic Novels #hall h #librarians #new orleans #tina coleman

[coloringthegreyscale]

Hi, despite my body’s popular belief, I am in fact still living

So this counts as me surviving my first Pride, motherfuckers!

I’m eating pizza, listening to music, and contemplating life’s questions like “Why the fuck am I still awake?” but for those who want to hear about this, here it is:

So Friday, we got there at around 3. Doors didn’t open until 6, so that meant we could wander around the Short North for a few hours. There wasn’t much to do other than wander around the shops and make friends with the staff at Pressed Grill while we ate loaded cottage fries and waited for my phone to charge. Spoiler Alert: Phone didn’t actually charge and in fact the battery died while it was off and plugged in, so fuck everything for about five minutes until I decide that I’m not going to let my bitchy phone ruin my fucking night.

Then, it’s what every single person who ever purchased a ticket to an event with general admission - it’s the standing game.

Standing game that lasts 3 and a half fucking hours.

So we used this time wisely by making friends with the people around us. I, miraculously, without the aid of my phone, managed to run into @dottiethunderfuck​, but we couldn’t talk very well because we were about two rows of people away from each other. Thank you, Dottie for giving me more encouragement! I wish we could have talked more. You’re a gem of a human being.

So everything started an hour and a half later than it was actually supposed to. First it was the underwear fashion show put on by one of the local gay businesses, hosted by our very own  Virginia West and Crystal Something Something. (Nina West was billed to host with Virginia, but is out for five weeks due to an expensive foot surgery that keeps her off social media, and no one is buying this story, what the fuck guys?). They talked about the rally Virginia headed because Pence was in town that day, and this is pretty much an excuse for me to say I love our gay city and drag queens. Also, turns out my roommate was high school friends with one of the models. Surprise!

Then, after what I think it was probably 5 hours at this point, after the fashion show and the opening music act, The AAA Girls came on and they were all gorgeous. They performed four or five songs I think? The banter was hilarious, the uncoordinated choreography was great. I loved watching them.

After was a lightning round of a meet and greet, so if this story doesn’t seem very detailed, it’s because I literally had about a minute to meet three queens. Went like this.

So first off, I need to mentioned that the art that I made was small in scale, but because of the wood and the watercolor paper, and the fact that I knew it would probably get jostled around a lot, I had wrapped them in tissue paper.and wrote which belonged to who so I wouldn’t get them mixed up. I neglected to unwrap them before I handed them out and I probably should have, but you live and you learn. I still fucking gave them the thing when I almost forgot to bring them twice.

So Courtney was the first in the line, so I struggled with the art being like “hold on, I actually have gifts for you guys!” and I handed them off to each of them. I vaguely remember Courtney saying something like “Oh thank you” and then “Oh, it’s beautiful!” but I dunno. I could be making that up? I know she said something. Did I say this was fast and I was super nervous?

So Willam actually gestured me back and asked me my name and then introduced herself (thanks Willam, for speaking to me like we were just normal strangers who met for the first time and not like I’m a nervous idiot fan who can’t properly speak to people - that’s not sarcastic, that’s entirely serious). She asked me if I wanted a photo and then said something like “Come, settle into my sweaty armpit” and then wrapped her arm around me. Photo taken, she wished me a happy pride, thanked me for the gift, I’m pretty sure I got a hug at some point and then I was passed off to Alaska, who hugged me, thanked me for the art and said it was beautiful. Over, done. I’m shaking. But fuck it. Done.

Apparently the roughly 45 seconds I got with them was lucky because we found out the next day that about 40 people were turned away. There were a lot of rumors hopping around and people were admittedly incredibly upset and bitter, but guys - do not blame the queens. I am certain that if they’d known there were people still waiting, they would have stayed. The whole event seemed to have hit a huge hitch somewhere and it wasn’t very well laid out. So be mad and what not, just try to keep a level head if you can.

Anyway, we walked back to our car, went home, got about three hours of sleep, woke up at around 7 to get ready and head back down so we could get a decent place for the parade. Which was two hours long. I got hugs from my coworkers who were marching in the parade and then at some point ended up just sitting on the street with my new #lovewins flag that we need to figure out where to put it.

Another long walk down to the festival, passed out on the grass, wandered, and then caught a ride back up to Short North so we could eat proper food at Pressed Grill (if you guys are ever in the Short North in Columbus, this is one of those places you need to try. Food is decent price, staff is super friendly, and everything is delicious). Then cue another walk, back to the car, said goodbye to friends we met up with, and then back to Axis.

Sidebar: On our way back, we were going to cut through the convention center because it provides a bit of relief from the heat and also bathrooms. Origins was happening the same time, so there was a crowd of people. As we were passing, an older guy looked at me and said “You need to drink some water. You look bad.” My roommate commented that that was a rude thing to say, to which he adjusted his wording to say “Oh, I just meant she looked tired and probably should stay hydrated to stay healthy.”

Yes, hi. Not sure who died and made you my dad, but I’ve been walking for like twelve hours with minimal sleep. I’ve been drinking all day. So kindly go fuck yourself.

Anyway! Back at Axis, we keep getting conflicting stories on what is happening with Adore’s meet and greet. The irritating part about this, is that it’s before her performance and during the giant drag show that’s happening before it, and we keep getting different information. @dottiethunderfuck​ comes to the rescue again, finds me, and tells me that it’s definitely inside the club in the VIP lounge at 9 pm, but capacity for the lounge is only 50 people, so it’s best we get there early. So we book it to the upstairs because fuck taking chances at this point, and also fuck standing and double fuck being in the heat.

So we chill for the next hour, sitting, chatting, people watching, etc. Until we start to line up for the meet and greet that Adore DEFINITELY had, do not let any trolls on Instagram try to convince you otherwise.

So here’s the twist of the fucking story. Roomie is usually the bold and collected one of the two of us, while I’m the one riddled with social anxiety. I felt like I was actually doing a pretty good job at keeping my cool, up until Adore walks past and says hi to everyone and then I look over to realize that Roomie has completely lost all of her cool and is like “Holy fuck, I’m meeting Adore, what now?” and I’m standing there like “well if your going to panic, what the fuck am I going to do?”

This time I at least had the conscious thought to unwrap the gift before I give it to her. But here we go:

Roomie had me video her meeting Adore. While doing so, suddenly Adore is smiling and waving at me. Apparently, Roomie had told her that I was excited to see her but I’m very shy and nervous, so I might be very quiet. She steps off after getting her photo and second hug and now it’s my turn.

So I’m greeted with an instant hug. She didn’t even wait for me to get to her, she met me halfway, and I handed her the art saying I had a gift and she looked at it in disbelief, the conversation went a bit like this:

“Wait, this is for me? I can keep this?” “Yes.” “This is beautiful! What is it? Watercolor? I love it!” “Yes.” (it’s also got a bit of charcoal but I digress)

At this point, she was fiddling with it to try to stand it up on the table and she turns and looks at me and asks me if I’m alright. I tell her I’m fine, I’m just a very nervous person. But I’ve got her attention now so I conjure up every single bit of courage that I have to tell her what I kept forgetting to say to Bianca and Courtney and Willam and Alaska.

“I wanted to make you something to say thank you, because you made me smile when I really really needed to.”

It’s a very simplified statement on what kind of mindset I had been in about 10 months ago, but she hugged me again and said something to the effect of “That’s incredibly sweet. Thank you so much. You’re too sweet.”

She said something about how she couldn’t wait to show it to her cousin, that he’d love to see it because he’s an artist too. We got our photo together, she thanked me again and wished me a happy Pride, I told her to have a good night and we parted ways.

So yes, guys. For those who think that Adore didn’t have a meet and greet, she did. If you didn’t know about it, that’s the combined fault of yours and the coordinators who didn’t explain things to the staff. So that clusterfuck, again, is on them and not on the queens.

Anyway - back down to catch the second half of the giant ass drag show going on outside.

Yeah, hi. We’re Columbus, OH and our drag scene is fucking a-maze-ing. Hi. Motherfucker. Stage nearly broke down it was so shook by all that talent.

We also knew one of the queens and we were SO PROUD to be able to tip her on a stage with this kind of a crowd. She’s come so far. She fucking worked it.

I got my fingers sucked on by one of the queens taking my tip. So there was that.

I ended up next to @dottiethunderfuck​ again and we both kept shooting heart eyes at each queen and king that came up on that stage because hi, did I mention that Columbus has a fucking great drag scene because it definitely does. I love them.

Then Adore was announced, she got up on stage and did her set, which was very short, but she was absolutely hypnotic. When I could see her. Some asshole decided he was going to try to tip her and wouldn’t move. Roomie at one point tapped him on the shoulder and was like “She’s not going to take your tip. She’s not that kind of performer.” He tried to start a fight with her. It was stupid. She’s a presence, though.

Second she left the stage, we had to bounce because we were about to pass out.

AND THAT WAS MY FIRST PRIDE!

I don’t have pictures of the meet and greet yet, because those were taken by the club and are to be posted on Facebook later. Thank you everyone who helped me through my random breakdowns leading up to this. It was probably a good thing that I didn’t finish the Bianca costume, but I at least got to make some art that I was relatively proud of and managed to give it away (which is a problem for me, if you knew me).

I’m going to continue to lurk in my dark room now and cuddle my dogs because I have to work tomorrow and I definitely don’t want to.

#pride 2018 #sometimes I meet drag queens apparently #columbus pride 2018 #adore delano #alaska thunderfvck 5000 #courtney act #willam belli #long post is long

[lets-get-fictional]

Any tips on writing a reader insert/superhero au??

Hello there! And thanks so much for your question. The superhero genre is always a lot of fun to work with, so this is a very exciting question to answer!

Alright, so there are two parts of this question that I want to address both together and separately: writing a reader insert, and writing a superhero au.

Reader Insert

Writing a reader insert is tricky right off the bat, because part of the goal is to make it applicable to a wide audience. But at the same time, you as the writer have control over the readers actions/reactions in the actual story verse. So there’s a lot of room for the reader to feel that what you wrote is unrealistic/unrelatable/etc. So a big thing here? Know that you can’t please everyone. With every piece of writing you’re taking the chance that someone is going to hate what you wrote - what matters is that you are proud of what you wrote, and that you had fun doing it.

At the same time - when writing a reader insert, a big part of this is that you want it to be applicable to a wide range of readers. So, the reader ought to be as faceless as possible. You definitely have to take liberties with the dialogue and actions of the reader-insert, however in terms of describing them (unless you are writing for a specific person, or a scenario that calls for specific traits), they should essentially be a blank slate for the reader to impress themselves upon.

Another thing I want to address with this is writing the canon characters of the story. There’s often a lot of debate about fan interpretations of characters, versus canon portrayal of characters - and it’s very easy to let personal headcanons slip into your writings of them, even when writing reader inserts. In my opinion, working with these headcanons is a lot of fun, and it can be interesting to see your personal take on the characters. However, with a reader insert, the readers themselves are more likely to want the portrayal of the characters to be very close to canon, even if you are writing them in an AU.  Have fun and do put your own spin on the characters, but I would definitely recommend doing your research on the characters that you’re writing for, and being consistent with their characterization.

Final note on this? Let this be enjoyable for yourself. You are trying to appeal to an audience, but with writing reader-inserts, you are writing your readers a window into the world of a story that they love, and that ought to be a fun experience for everyone.

Superhero AUs

The first thing I want to say in regards to this? Play around with the genre. There are so many routes to take with this, and to me that’s part of what makes it so much fun to work with. There are a few conventions that seem to remain consistent across the board for superhero stories, but there are always those that manage to subvert even those. It all comes down to whatever suits your fancy, and whatever suits the story - whether you want it to have that classic superhero feel (secret identity, the super suit, the menacing arch nemesis), or if you want to take it in your own direction, making use of some tropes and discarding others.

Now, part of the question that I want you to ask here when you’re developing the story is: what makes it a superhero story? Is it just the fact that you call them superheroes? Or do they have to fit some kind of criteria?  You have superhero stories that seem to fit all the points, ie. Batman. But then you have others that, while they are about superheroes, don’t stick to the classic format. They play around with the genre in a way that makes it their own, ie. Big Hero 6, or My Hero Academia.

So, for this ask, I want to touch on some of the Big Points that we know and love, seen both in those classic stories, and the more subversive ones.

SUPERHUMAN POWERRRSSSSS

Alright, so one of the characters I mentioned previously was Batman, who arguably does not possess superhuman powers. HOWEVER, he does perform what could be considered some pretty superhuman feats, but I guess I’ll let my superiors debate about that one.

Moving on: superpowers. We’re going to ignore Superman because his power is EVERYTHING, and that’s yet another debate that I’m not about to get into. SUPERPOWERS.

Hot tip: give the characters powers that either stem from their personality traits/mesh well with their personality traits, OR are the complete opposite of their personality traits for some added character study, if you’re into that. That’s a really fun thing in superhero AUs, both for the writer and the reader - assigning the characters superpowers, and seeing how it plays with their character. I would recommend spending some time and really putting some thought into this? Just because it can do so much for the characters you’re writing for, and I think it adds so much to the story world that you’re building.

i.e. Bakugou Katsuki of My Hero Academia (both the anime and the manga). Within ten minutes of the show/five chapters of the manga, you can see that Bakugou has an explosive personality. He’s hot-headed, ambitious and proud, and this defining factor of his personality is clearly expressed in his superpower [Quirk] - which is conjuring explosions in his palms.

The SUPER SUIT

First off - the suit should play into the superpower (if there is a superpower).

This is also a super fun thing to play around with for the characters. Give it personality, play off their traits, ask yourself what these characters would wear if they were superheroes…just Have So Much Fun With It

i.e. Bringing back Big Hero 6, when you look at the super suits that Hiro designs for the team, even though the character dont have powers per-se, each suit plays to the strength of the characters, as well as their personalities. Honey Lemon is a brilliant chemist - thus, her suit gives her the ability to put her knowledge of chemical equations to use, allowing her to form substances on the spot that can be used as weapons against whatever villain they’re fighting. Wasabi is all about precision, and being straight to the point - thus his suit is representative of this, giving him lasers that allow him to make clean lines, and cut through materials as hard as steel

Also, I want to touch on this just because it’s important - super suits should have a certain amount of practicality to be believable? I am all about doing things for The Aesthetic, and The Aesthetic is half the fun, but also consider what would actually be conducive for hero work in the storyworld their you’re building, and what would make the most sense for your characters, their powers, etc.

THE VILLAIN

If you characters are gonna be superheroes - they’ve got to have a super villain to counter them.

Now - I know that a lot of this is going to come from the canon verse that you’re drawing the characters from, and who the villains are in that story. However, I do want to point out that it can be fun to switch things up in your own AUs. Maybe making the protagonist a villain, and seeing how that plays out, or putting the canon villain on the side of the heroes and see what comes of that as well. Superhero stories tend to be very black and white with their morality, and their views on good and evil, but I find that it’s always interesting to play on this, to blur those lines, and to push the characters to their limits and really get to the core of who they are.

But in any case, no matter who your chosen villain is in this AU - let your villains be villains. Let it get messy, let them drive the hero to the edges of who they are, and let them pull at least some of the strings in the conflict of the story. A two-dimensional, cartoony, “cackling in their grimy secret hideout” villain gets old fast. A reader can see right through them, and they know just what to expect - so let your villains be unexpected. Not necessarily in terms of what characters you choose for your villain, but in terms of what problems the villain poses for your hero. Let them have powerful motivations of their own. Let your villains be human - it makes them more dynamic, and will make your reader want to follow their every move. You want your reader to worry, to fear for the hero - and how can they do that if your villain isn’t even posing a real threat?

Alright, thank you so much for your question, and I hope this was helpful!! If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to shoot us an ask.

Happy writing!!

- Mod Daenerys

If you need advice on general writing or fanfiction, you should maybe ask us!

#writing #writeblr #writing blog #writing tips #writing advice #my post #ask #anon ask #mod daenerys #characters #superpowers #AUs #tropes #reader insert

[waltzofthewifi]

Kota Chapter 37: Setting the Stage

Table of Contents | Beginning

Ladybug and Chat Noir had commandeered a classroom for their meeting.

The night before, Ladybug had filled Chat Noir in on the idea, and they had agreed on this meeting. She had invited the currently active heroes, plus Rena Rouge and Viperion, for this stage of planning.

Kota, Viperion, and Chat Noir were all using desks as chairs - Chat Noir had completely claimed the teacher's desk as his spot. Rena Rouge sat in an actual chair, and had opened a screen on her flute to take notes with. Pegasus has grabbed a chair, forgoing the desks completely.

Ladybug cleared off the whiteboard and grabbed herself a marker.

"I bet you all are wondering why I gathered you here today."

"Top ten things I've always wanted to say," Rena Rouge replied.

Ladybug ignored her. "I have decided we need to take more decisive action against Hawkmoth." She wrote on the whiteboard, PLAN TO DEFEAT HAWKMOTH.

"Have you figured out who he is?" Rena Rouge asked.

"Well, no," Ladybug admitted. "I'm still working on that. But once we have that figured out, I have a plan. So, we have four threats when facing Hawkmoth: him, Mayura, an akuma, and an amok." Ladybug wrote those four things on the board.

"What If Hawkmoth pulls another mass akumatization?" Pegasus questioned.

"What happened on heroes day was planned," Ladybug answered. "Hawkmoth would have to specifically akumatize someone with the ability to power him up. Only then can he akumatize more than one person."

"If we catch him by surprise, he won't have a chance," Chat Noir noted.

"Even better," Ladybug said. "Because Hawkmoth skipped the natural progression of the miraculous-"

"Wait, what?" Rena Rouge interrupted.

"The miraculous were designed to gradually make their users more powerful," Ladybug explained. "That's why Fu gave the miraculous to someone our age - because we can grow and become more powerful. While Hawkmoth's age keeps him from having a five-minute timer, it also keeps him from gaining that growth - specifically, extra control and range."

"Like Startrain," Pegasus said. "She wasn't in Paris, and Hawkmoth couldn't control her - her only goal was getting to space, not fighting you."

"Exactly," Ladybug agreed. "Once an akuma is out of range, he can't even recall it."

"Wait so that means-" Viperion started.

"That if we get the akuma far enough away, he can't use it to protect himself!" Rena Rouge finished. "That's brilliant!"

"The only problem is, we also would need to do the same thing to Mayura and her amok," Pegasus said. "And I can only conjure one portal at a time."

"That's where Bunnyx comes in," Chat Noir said.

"Bunnyx can time travel," Ladybug said. "If we can get Mayura to use up her amok, she can send them to two different times. But Mayura's smart, and that could prove difficult. That's why I have another ace up my sleeve - a candidate for the ox miraculous."

"Which gives extra strength," Rena Rouge remembered.

"I'm hoping to recruit him and Souris Rose to help Bunnyx against Mayura," Ladybug said. "As well as Roi Singe."

Pegasus nodded. "If she realizes what's going on before she uses her amok, she could create a sentimonster that could bring her back. Roi Singe's powers would counteract that."

Ladybug wrote Roi Singe under Amok, and Bunnyx, Souris Rose and Ox under Mayura.

"I want Rena, Carapace, Viperion, and Ryuko with me to defeat Hawkmoth," Ladybug said, writing down those names in the Hawkmoth column. "That leaves Queen Bee, Pegasus, and Kota to handle the akuma."

"What about Ibex?" Kota questioned.

"For reasons I can't say, she won't be available," Ladybug replied. "Do you think you three can handle the akuma?"

"Yes," Kota replied confidently.

"Good," Ladybug said. "Now, all we need is a way of figuring out his identity."

.

Lacy had just managed to quiet Orikko when Chloe called her.

"Just got in an argument with my mom," Chloe said. "I - Sabrina and Adrien aren't picking up. I didn't know who else to call."

"Tell me what happened?"

Chloe sniffled and started explaining what happened. The entire time, Lacy felt herself getting angry and angrier.

"Your mom sucks," Lacy summarized.

Chloe blinked. "You're not going to defend her?"

"Uh, no. She sucks. She's a crap mom. And you have every right to be upset by her."

"And that's not all!" Chloe said. "The other day -"

.

Marinette tied her hair back into a single ponytail and slid the extra hair band onto her wrist.

Today was the self defense seminar, and she was excited. Not only was it a way to start preparing for Hawkmoth, but nearly her entire class plus Marc and Kagami had signed up with her.

She, Alya, and Nino all met up at the subway station, running into Rose and Juleka by accident. Mylene, Sabrina, Lacy, and Alix were already at the place - a convention room in a hotel with plenty of space - when they arrived. Nathaniel, Chloe, Marc, Kagami, and Kim all arrived shortly after.

"This will be fun," Kagami said as she stretched.

"Depends on how much exercise we actually have to do," Nathaniel muttered.

Alix rolled her eyes.

The instructor told everyone to pair up. Alya and Nino paired up instantly. Marinette didn't mind - Alya and her might be best friends, but Alya and Nino were superhero partners, and sometimes that won out. Marinette personally loved sparring with Chat Noir.

Mylene asked Alix to partner with her, and Kagami and Kim teamed up, so Lacy and Marinette paired up.

Marinette was surprised at how much Lacy already knew. When she brought it up, Lacy just shrugged.

"My sister made sure I knew how to defend myself," Lacy explained.

"I didn't know you had a sister," Marinette commented.

Lacy spluttered. "Oh, um, half-sister. On my mother's side."

"I didn't know you had family on that side," Marinette said.

"Actually, that side of my family is pretty big," Lacy said. "I have several half-siblings. Most of them live in America though."

"Do they live with your mom?" Marinette asked.

Lacy shook her head. "No. My mother isn't very involved."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

Lacy shrugged. "It's not a big deal."

That was probably a lie, but Marinette didn't push.

.

"That was fun," Marinette said, even as she collapsed onto her bed, exhausted. "I learned a lot."

"The instructor had some very good observations about akumas," Tikki added.

"And it was great to do it with so many friends," Marinette continued. "I can't wait to go back to help Alya with her blog post about it."

"It will definitely be an informative video," Tikki agreed.

"She's really been putting a lot of effort into making her blog more reliable, after what happened with Lila," Marinette noted. "I'm glad she's willing to learn from her mistakes."

"It'll help make her a great hero too!" Tikki said. "Those who can learn from their mistakes are some of the greatest allies you can have."

.

Lacy was about to fall asleep when her phone rang. She was exhausted after the self-defense seminar, in a good way, but answered it nonetheless.

She had been expecting Chloe, so she was caught off guard by the English and the British accent.

"You would never believe what happened."

"Sadie?" Lacy asked. "What happened?"

"I might be going to Paris," Sadie answered.

"What? Seriously?"

"Something came up with family," Sadie explained.

"Well, we'll have to meet up then," Lacy said. "I miss you so much!"

"Me too," Sadie agreed.

At first, it seemed too much like a coincidence. The again, Sadie was an Egyptian demigod - no, magician - and a powerful one at that. Maybe the Egyptian society or whatever she was involved with was investigating the magic in Paris.

"I'll text you the address of where I'll be staying," Sadie said. "Hopefully, they speak English there, but I bought a French English dictionary just in case."

"Don't worry, I can help translate," Lacy replied. "I'm pretty much completely fluent."

"Sweet," Sadie said.

Lacy's phone beeped, and she glanced at it to see an akuma alert.

"I have to go," Lacy said. "Talk to you soon?"

"Definitely."

.

Kota was the last one at the akuma, barely arriving in time to attempt to deflect a blast of color aimed at Ladybug.

Her kite did nothing, but the color blast didn't affect her.

Seeing where the blast came from - a scary dragon-looking creature with colorful scales - did have an impact.

Kota cursed. "What is that?"

"Sentimonster."

Kota turned to see Ladybug behind her, looking near tears.

"Are you okay?"

"It effects the emotions of others," Ladybug said.

That was a horrible power to fight, and Kota was glad that she seemed to be immune.

"The amok is on the akuma," Ladybug said. "Can you distract the sentimonster for us, since you seem to be immune?"

Taking on a dragon all by herself did not seem like fun, but she nodded anyways.

Kota took a running start and jumped on the sentimonster's back, grabbing the scales as hand grips. The dragon huffed, trying to twist around to bite her or shake her off, but her climbing experience gave her a strong grip and she stayed on.

The dragon flapped it's wings, launching into the sky, and did a barrel roll. Kota stayed on.

It was almost exhilarating, riding a dragon. The rush of air kept her awake and alert, and the city was pretty from the sky. Plus, her kite would keep her from falling to death. It felt like a magical rollercoaster.

Kota was completely distracting the sentimonster. It's entire focus was on her, and she felt like a powerfully annoying tick on the dragon's back. She wasn't even doing anything but holding on.

The dragon did a loop-de-loop, which was fun, and then disappeared completely, which was not fun.

Kota free fell for a moment, trying to figure out what just happened. Ladybug must have freed the amok, which of course cause the sentimonster to disappear. She twisted, extending her kite, and slowed her fall, hitting the pavement with a roll.

"Enjoy your ride?" Chat Noir asked.

"That was fun! Can I do it again?"

Chat Noir chuckled. Ladybug looked less amused.

.

Lacy was preparing for bed when Ladybug knocked on her window.

She wasn't surprised by the visit - after all, that latest akuma/sentimonster attack had been intense. And it once again brought up the fact that Lacy was immune to some magic.

"How exactly does that work?" Ladybug asked after Lacy forced her into accepting a hot chocolate.

Lacy shrugged. "I'm not sure, exactly. It's not exactly something that gets used a lot."

"Do you know why?"

"It's because of my mom," Lacy replied. She took a deep breath. "Which is something I probably should have told you about a long time ago."

Next Chapter

#kota #Percy jackson #miraculous ladybug

[piotrbezhukov-blog]

So I Wrote a Concert.

Hey everyone. This is a longer post, so fair warning.

I didn’t have a terribly productive summer, musically speaking; a lot of my time was taken up with other stuff (work, an internship, other personal obligations, a depressive episode I’m still not on the other side of, etc, etc). That’s not great, because usually the summer is when I compose most of my stuff (usually, in the sense that I have a composing schedule after only a couple years of composing--ha!). With  all that said, I did manage to write enough for a short concert of chamber music, centered around the solo piano and the piano trio! 

I’d never really written for the piano before-- the polyphonic nature of the instrument scared me, as someone who writes melodies by ear and has no real grasp of harmonies. However, I like to think that I have a good grasp of rhythm (that tap dancing background is good for something after all!) and that was my guide through the instrument. As for the piano trios: I love the cello, and can tolerate the violin. Why wouldn’t I write some trios. 

With all that said, I’ve included links in the title of each piece to rough MP3′s of each of the four pieces for the concert. Below each link are the program notes I’ve drafted for the concert program. I’d really appreciate it if y’all let me know what you think!

Grazie,

T.A.R.

PS-- As always, PDF’s of the scores are available upon request.

Link and Program Notes for the Piano & Piano Trio Concert

I remember the first time I read a Bernard Shaw script. It was his Saint Joan, and, like most of his scripts, contains a long essay about what he as the playwright wanted to accomplish by writing the play. The essay is nearly as long as the play itself. Since then, I’ve tried to keep two goals in mind: first, to use program notes to explain clearly at least one thing that might be of interest to the audience for each piece that I write, and second, to avoid Shavian long-windedness in my program notes. Success is, as ever, illusory. With those goals in mind, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to offer you a guide through the pieces you’ll be hearing tonight. These remarks follow no particular pattern, nor do they dwell on a consistent topic—the focus, broad as it may be, is merely to offer some context (whether personal, aesthetic, or what-have-you) fr each of the pieces in the way they’ll be presented tonight. None of the pieces are so complicated or obtuse to make this guide essential reading (or at least I hope they aren’t), but you might like something to do while you wait for the concert to start.

A Minor Catastrophe:

The first piece in this concert for piano trio is actually not a piano trio at all; instead, it’s a piece for solo piano. It wound up on the program tonight simply because I think it serves as both a warm-up (and then some) for our wonderful pianist [insert name here], and because for better or worse I think it does a good job explaining my particular musical ‘voice’ (how I hate that pretentious term) or idiom. The piece is titled A Minor Catastrophe, which sums up the structure of the piece well. There is relatively little thematic material holding it together—instead, the cohesion comes from a relentless rhythmic intensity, and constant tension between various rhythmic patterns. The title also contains a pun to the constantly recurring theme—a simple tracing out of the A minor chord, which underpins the entire piece in the manner of minimalist harmony (that is to say, the harmonic structure of the piece is relatively static and entirely tonal). This three-note theme creates a tension with the other material of the piece, which shifts between phrases in multiple different times—that is, a phrase ‘in three’ (with a one-two-three, one-two-three rhythmic pattern) with pull and push against a phrase in four (a one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four pattern). I’ve used this pull and push to create some of the rhythmic energy of the piece, and if nothing else it keeps it moving along briskly.

Entirely in one movement, the whole of the piece finishes within the nine minute mark. In that sense, and given what could generously be called a rhapsodic form (and less generously a rambling one), it’s probably best to call this a “piano prelude,” according to the formal conventions of ‘classical’ music. Those conventions aren’t a language I’m entirely comfortable using; I was raised on ‘popular music’ and never had any formal musical training or education until college, and what education I have is introductory at best. I’ve always composed entirely by ear and inspiration, which probably accounts for some of the structural ambiguity (or incoherence) in the first two pieces you’ll hear tonight.

However, despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of a rigid structure of this piece, I think it offers a good look into my mental process and the way I think about music, as both a composer and as someone who listens to music. In that sense, I thought it would be a useful way to start tonight’s concert. Unrestrained by outside conventions, this piece, I hope, will serve as a workable introduction to the kind of music you’ll hear tonight.

With that in mind, let’s look at the second piece.

Quick and Dirty:

Having established a sound world for this concert that is essentially without traditional conventions or forms, this second piano prelude takes us a little further down the path of modern music. By that, I mean that the harmonies are more jagged and dissonant, the rhythms less predictable and more unsteady, and the melodies completely fragmented.

I wrote this piece, like virtually all of my pieces, by ear. Usually, this process entails a stunningly bad first draft of a piece that I then slowly whittle down and shape into something that comports with my limited knowledge of traditional conventions (sonata form, tonal triadic harmonies, etc, etc). And usually I wind up reasonably content with the result—I say reasonably content because as an artist I’m never truly happy with my work. This process, however, does lead me down the path of neo-romanticism, or sometimes minimalism, or so on. In other words, I worry that it tends to make each piece sound derivative of someone else’s music. So I tired something different.

With this piece I tried to create something that was purposefully *ugly* in the way it sounded. Hence, the title “Quick and Dirty.” (It’s also a comparatively short five minutes, thus the first part of the title.) I intend for this ugliness to remove the impersonal polish to try and find a more distinct musical voice underneath all the convention. As always, however, that is a judgment that is ultimately up to you the audience.

I was interested in ugliness, specifically, for a few reasons. First, a lot of my effort usually goes into disguising the work that goes into a piece–that is, making each piece look effortless and sound, if not pretty in the stereotypical sense, at least polished to a sheen. The other reason is that I’ve never really used music as an outlet to explore my mental state; it’s never the way I think about it. My usual approach is to create a piece for someone or something else– that is to say, I write a piece for X instrument because a friend needs a new piece to pad out their recital, or because I want to see what I can do with an odd instrumentation (i.e. two clarinets and a viola). I thought I should probably look inward at some point, and this is a somewhat clumsy first result.

Triage:

Having used the first two pieces of tonight’s concert to show off the pianist, I thought it would only be fair to similarly showcase our excellent string players [insert names here]. This second piece, a short piano trio, was built around what are called ‘extended techniques’ for playing string instruments. In other words, there are instructions for the players to use their instruments in some odd ways, to produce sounds that are rather different from the normal lyricism and rich song-like lines of the violin and cello. The intended effect is to add an ethereal element to an already somewhat mournful piece. (Of course, you know what they say about artistic intentions.) It might be that mournfulness that led me to the title Triage, which to me conjures up an image of the dead and dying, but I honestly think it was the shared prefix with the word Trio. I’m very drawn to surface similarities as a way to connect seemingly disparate concepts. On top of that, I do like a good pun. Sadly, between the title of the first piece and the title of this one, apparently I have to make do with remarkably poor ones.  

The form of this piece is essentially undefined, floating between one idea and the next. There is an occasionally recurring metronome in the piano, and few moments when all the players elaborate on a syncopated scale. But aside from those occasional grasps of familiarity, the players glide from one gesture to the next, sometimes echoing or reflecting back to each other, but never stopping to relentlessly drive a musical idea into the ground. It’s a dreamlike and insubstantial conjuring of a particular tone, or mood.

It’s also resolutely tonal, with very conventional harmonies and so forth. While I would hardly call myself a neo-Romantic composer, I’m certainly more comfortable writing the sort of music you can hum on your way out of the theater than I am writing more avant-garde or conceptually intense music. That’s probably a function of my composing style—I like to hum up a melody before I ever sit down at a piano or computer to work out the harmonies, the instrumentation, or any other aspect of a piece. And sadly, I never learned to hum in set theory tones. (Any singer could tell you I never learned to hum in any kind of tone, but that’s another conversation.) All of which is to say that, while I’m a great fan of most of the quote-unquote “new music” composers and the pieces they’re putting out, and while I admire the artistic talent it takes to write that sort of music, it’s a talent that I either don’t have or haven’t cultivated. My sound world is entirely blue-haired.

Which brings us to the final piece of the evening.

Piano Trio No. 1, ‘Repartee’

I very rarely like any of the pieces I write. Part of that is just the standard-issue self-loathing of the artist, part of it is that I’m still a relatively immature composer and I can see the amateurism in what I write, and part of it is simply that by the time I’ve finished a piece I’ve heard the playback from my electronic score so frequently that the familiarity renders it loathsome. The larger part, however, is a kind of conceptual loathing—very rarely does my original idea for a piece survive contact with the actual process of writing it. However, with this piano trio, the original idea sails through in fine form. That’s probably why this piece is one of my personal favorites.

I had a very basic idea for this trio. I wanted to write something glittering, light, and adorably entertaining. Forget artistic pretensions, or rigorous theory to back up every choice of chord. This is a piece that I had fun composing, and that you’re going to have fun listening to. The informal title, Repartee, reflects that idea: a jaunty conversation where the verbal volleys banter back and forth and around the room as everyone laughs gaily and has a grand old time.

The first movement is a light allegro: open, airy, dashing along to leave you suspended in a pleasant haze. The second movement, though a slower adagio, maintains the airy feeling through the use of transparent orchestration and delicate quavers in the right hand of the pianist. Throughout the third movement, a faster tempo creates tension with a lethargic two-step time signature; this tension propels the piece into the fourth and final movement, an ecstatic release for both players and audience, with the notes rushing by on their way to a triumphant finale that seems to arrive altogether too soon. The structure is fairly straightforwardly linear and old-fashioned. Each movement follows the rough pattern of fast—slow—faster—now-really-fast structure of most classical pieces, to present a clear contrast between movements, and to make sure there’s enough variety to keep everyone (me included) interested. One note about the musical theory: the first movement sits in B major, and every subsequent movement sits one half-step above the previous movement (so the second movement is in the inescapable C major, the third in C sharp major, the final in D major). I like to think this gives us a sense of rising up through the progression of the piece, even as we slow down to look at the pretty scenery.

The key to this piece, I think, is the incredibly simply and open harmonic pattern. In a word, I eschew the chromaticism of the neo-Romantics, and avoid the atonality of the avant-garde in favor of something closer to three-chord rock & roll. By keeping each instrument confined to a particular distinctive timbre, and by avoiding cluttering up their respective lines with excessive and extravagant harmony, the interplay between each of the short melodies—not quite full melodic lines, but more substantial than quick motives and phrases—is highlighted. The forward motion comes from a bounding and delightful rhythmic energy and the changing interplay of these short melodies.

Don’t remove any part of this caption and don’t steal shit, y’all. 

#new music #music #classical music #piano #piano music #piano trio #my compositions #composition #composer #concert #modern music #art #new art

[textales]

“Fight for Your Right.”

“Who the fuck are you?” asked the leader of some band we hired to play that night.

Good lord, how could anyone have the audacity to be so disrespectful and rude?  He had to have known this was the office where the check would come from as he was being escorted by the guy who hired them.  

I stood there with my mouth gaping open, stunned like a deer in the headlights, then just like that he and his entourage moved on before I could scare up an answer. 

My work-study job was more fun than most.  While others were stocking shelves at the bookstore or washing dishes at the food service, I worked for ASUM Programming, the entertainment arm of “The Associated Students of the University of Montana.”  A New Yorker named Erik curated concerts. A grad student picked the lectures.  And there were three red-headed sisters – triplets no less – from a windswept town near some Indian reservation. One ran the performing arts program, one picked the movies, and one was the benevolent boss of all of us. 

Working for the student government was an honor and a responsibility that I took very seriously, and figured it would pay off when I had to get a real job after graduation.  Thirty years later I can say I was right – if not for me, at least for many of my co-workers who went on to become big deals.  One girl got a gig at some software company in Seattle and was so successful she retired in her 30s.  Our student body president became a senator.  And that New Yorker responsible for bringing concerts to our college made a fortune when he sold the newspaper he founded to a big media conglomerate. 

I did the advertising – a position that completely went to my head.  Looking back, I was a pain-in-the-ass prima donna, but my intentions were righteous (or at least I thought so).  Although we were in the sticks, I was insistent that our image be every bit as cool as those of giant schools like UCLA or Harvard.  It was my personal mission to showcase how we were so much better than our redneck peers at MSU in Bozeman who offered washed-up has-beens filling dates between county fairs.  As our community’s un-elected curators of cool, we presented performers on the cutting edge.  Oh sure, occasionally we had a show a little past its prime, but we knew how to position it as the best thing to happen since the advent of electricity, and we’d sell out the biggest venues on campus every time.  

I made ridiculous demands of our graphic artists and printers, maxed out every budget and milked my media partners for every last free commercial. I shamelessly coerced radio stations into selling us commercials for pennies on the dollar. I hired the most expensive television production house in the state and ground them down until they agreed to the pittance I was willing to pay.  On broadcast TV, The Cosby Show was the number one hit in prime time (years before any controversy) and I demanded our commercials on the local NBC affiliate play “first in set” when the most people were watching. At $75 bucks a pop, I got our money’s worth and then some.   I was making my mark, dammit, hell bent on proving this was no hokey small town operation!   

The office was situated in the student union building known as University Center. The glass walls were covered with posters from past performers – everyone from Alabama to Van Halen had been through that town. I was proud of the bands we presented during my tenure there, including 38 Special, Cheap Trick and Corey Hart.  On that cold winter day, a red and shiny silver poster hung on the front door to promote the music group who had just blessed our office with their presence.   

After cooling-off for a minute I conjured a response to that obnoxious “up and comer” who wanted to know my purpose in the overall scheme of things.  Given the chance, I would have shot back with something snarky like “I’m the reason you sold out your show here in the middle of nowhere, you stupid fuck.”  But by that point the ungrateful bastard and his band were halfway across the snow-covered campus.

“I like Dick’s.”

Once a year, our team would make a trek to Portland to go shopping.  We were looking for “the next big thing” and we’d find it at the convention of the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA) where aspiring music artists, comedians and speakers would present themselves for hire by colleges in the region looking for entertainment options for their respective campus constituencies.  The convention was held at the Jantzen Beach Red Lion, a big fancy hotel on the waterfront. Artists would do short performances for the crowd, then interested buyers would have an opportunity to meet with them and their agents at a conference room where deals were cut on the spot. At the conclusion of each three-day trip we’d come home with a pretty good idea of what the next year’s entertainment line-up would be. 

I was fascinated with Portland – it was a “real city” (at least compared to Missoula) and traveling at the expense of someone else was cool shit for this 21-year-old college kid who at that point could count on one hand the number of times I’d stayed in a hotel or eaten at a restaurant with cloth napkins. 

My first taste of fine dining happened on a NACA trip at a restaurant named the Couch Street Fish House.  Knowing it would cost a fortune I was reluctant, but caved to peer-pressure as I was reminded such opportunities for fancy were nonexistent where we came from.  Trying not to look like a total hick from the sticks I gawked at fish tanks in the lobby where you could pick a lobster or sea critter they’d kill and cook right then - ain’t never seen that before!  Dinner was presented in a coordinated reveal as servers lifted silver domes covering the entrees of all patrons at the table, in unison, at the direction of the lead waiter. There were so many different forks and knives I had to ask which to use for what, and I recall being given a hot towel at some point, along with grapefruit sorbet which was to, according to the sharp-looking waiter in a bow tie, “cleanse the palate between courses.”  Hardly an adventurous eater, I had a simple Sirloin Steak (AKA high-grade hamburger), but rest of the crowd went crazy with escargot, scallops and crab.

Split among us, my portion of the bill was $106.  To put things into perspective, I made $290 a month before taxes, so this was absurdly high for this poor college kid, consuming over half of my take-home for the month.  But I don’t regret it, and to this day that dinner over thirty years ago remains one of the fanciest of my life. 

We went night-clubbing on Front Street at The Satyricon.  This place was buzzing with sketch-looking guys with mohawks, tight leather pants, chain necklaces and tattoos.  And there were women in fishnet stockings looking all slutty with black lipstick and winged eyeliner. A few emo kids and some nerds rounded out the crowd, which contained more diversity than anywhere I’d ever been back home. Oh sure, I’d set foot in The Top Hat and AmVets in Missoula, but never a gritty place like this. I recall a wall of black and white TVs showing nothing but snowy static…a wall of TVs just for decoration?  This is nuts.  It was literally on the edge of railroad tracks, complete with an angry punk rock band, a bouncer with bad teeth and bulging biceps, a coat check hosted by a girl who looked remarkably homeless, and there was a ridiculously high cover charge.   The door person asking if my male co-worker and I were a couple.  Before I could answer, Kevin blurted “yes,” knowing we’d get a discount.  Still deep in the closet, I was mortified at the consequences of having my cover blown.

As college kids are known to do, we drank a lot of beer on those trips. In eco-conscious Oregon, with progressive recycling laws decades ahead of the rest of the country, empty bottles and cans could be redeemed for a refund of five cents each.  On the way out of town, we’d stop at Fred Meyer to return the cases of empties.  We were so proud of ourselves, having consumed so much beer over the weekend that the refund money was enough for beef jerky and bottled water for the nine hour drive back to Missoula.  

In Spokane we stopped for burgers and fries at a drive-in.  Without realizing how dumb it would sound, I proudly blurted “I like Dick’s,” as I stood there in acid-washed jeans and a pink polo shirt.

“He is so gay” the New Yorker exclaimed to the red-headed triplets.  And here I thought I had them all fooled.  

“Fight for Your Right”

Erik must have seen something promising when he hired the group of white rappers at the NACA conference that year.  Yes, we wanted to be “cutting edge” and all, but white rappers?  In Montana?!  I didn’t see it…but what did I know? I was a fan of the fluffy pop I played on the radio, like Exposé, Bananarama and Madonna, which Erik considered the musical equivalent of cotton candy.  

As it turned out, he proved to be a programming genius.  When he signed The Beastie Boys months prior in Portland they were nothing more than an unknown opening act for Run-D.M.C., dismissed by industry pros as three obnoxious white kids from New York trying to sound black. Then they blew up…and it was like ASUM Programming hit the jackpot.   The album “Licensed to Ill” was certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on February 2, 1987 – just five days after their appearance in Missoula.  This was an unofficial launch of the “License to Ill” tour, which started three weeks later.

Those Beastie Boys were obnoxious alright. And they were pissed, because just before coming to Missoula they were offered a show in Toronto and tried to cancel ours. Erik held their feet to the fire and threatened to file a lawsuit if they bailed on us, so they conceded and came to Montana in the dead of winter to do a gig for pennies of what they might have otherwise made in a bigger city. 

They were nice to Erik at first, but told him once the show was on they’d have to portray the image of the obnoxious rebels their managers were so carefully crafting.  They delivered on their promise to their management and then some. No wonder the lead guy was such a dick to me at the office. 

We suspected they might be rowdy and cause a ruckus early on. Their contract required multiple cases of beer and bottles of whisky, and they wanted their dressing room stocked with a “rainbow assortment” of condoms.  Such demands are not uncommon, and often ridiculous demands are written into the contracts just to make sure someone is actually paying attention to the small print. I’m not sure if we provided the condoms, but we definitely didn’t supply the beer and whiskey since University policy wouldn’t allow.  So they brought their own, and sprayed two cases of warm Budweiser on the crowd as part of their performance. They encouraged the crowd to rip-up the seating in the first few rows of the venue, and they trashed their dressing room, which I suspect got charged-back to the promoter.  

I recall not wanting to see the show….it was rap, after all, and I liked “the musical equivalent of cotton candy.”  But I was curious about what made this group so popular, so I found my way to the University Theatre for the last few minutes of their show that snowy January eve.

I don’t remember much, other than the crowd went absolutely wild and most were certainly fighting for their right to party.  I also recall fighting for my way to the bathroom, where dozens of drunk fellow college kids were using every available piece of porcelain all at once, including the urinal, toilet, sink, floor drain, and even the garbage can.  It was filthy, but efficient.

The Missouri Lounge is located a few blocks from my home in Berkeley, California. I discovered this place after moving into the neighborhood over a dozen years ago.  Sometimes referred to as “unassuming” or “low key,” truth is it’s a total dive.  The bar and apartments above it were built in 1961 by a serviceman who retired to the area after doing his time in the Navy on The USS Missouri.  I just learned the music video for Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” was filmed aboard that battleship.  Now I love even more this bar named after the boat.  

On the walls you’ll find pictures from the early days. Not unlike the black & white pictures I’ve seen of my grandmother playing pool at Reed’s Tavern in Great Falls, these framed photos are evidence of innocent local fun…people wearing paper hats and shooting confetti at a New Year’s party when 1962 rolled in… people not interested in going to the big celebrations across the bay in San Francisco…people looking for something comfortable and close to home.

The bar has seen many generations of customers and countless changes of ownership and décor. My first visit was in 2003, just a couple months after the then new owner had repainted in pretty pastels and neutral tones.  Concert posters from famous folk like Janice Joplin, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones adorned the walls.  And they had a brand new 48” flat screen TV hanging smack dab above the middle of the bar, presumably intended to lure sports fans hoping to see their favorite games in a venue more convenient than those in downtown Oakland or Berkeley.

After a few months the newly remodeled bar wasn’t doing so well, so a consultant was hired to “spruce things up” by “dumbing it down.”   As she told me a dozen years ago, the bar was essentially “too nice” for the neighborhood, so she decided to make it look more like a pool room in someone’s basement. Down came the framed posters from historic concerts at the Fillmore and Cow Palace.  Peach and pastels were covered over with battleship gray and brown paint.  A tired old couch was moved in, and so was an old Zenith console TV that for years doubled as the DJ stand.  The flat screen TV was moved into the corner, and they’d start showing classic horror movies with a Pulp Fiction feel.   Whatever magic she did seemed to work, and the place became a goldmine that it is today.  

Regulars at happy hour include Tim the glazier, Ian who works for the county, and Hans who owns a construction company.  Later at night, once the pool table is covered and moved to the corner, a totally different crowd of college kids and younger neighborhood professionals come in to drink and dance.   There’s a professional sound system and a proper DJ Booth, and the back patio which started out with a portable BBQ from someone’s back yard now features a commercial kitchen with permanent built-in stainless-steel sinks and a granite countertop.   But still, honestly, the place is a total dive, with picnic tables and chain link, where a shot and a beer are cheap, and the bathroom walls are covered in graffiti (even if that graffiti was put there on purpose in the first place). 

“I Played That Song When It Was New.”

One of the Disk Jockeys at the Missouri Lounge is a guy named Pat, who is around my age and plays lots of songs from the 80s. Whether it’s Thompson Twins, Prince or YES, he’s often spinning something that I can say I put on the air when I was a Top 40 DJ in Missoula. 

One random Friday night I noticed Pat wearing a hat from some bar in Whitefish, a small town in Montana, which spawned a conversation about my college days. I learned Pat’s wife is from Missoula, and my world continued to grow smaller as he cued-up “(You Gotta) Fight for your Right (to Party).”  

But as much as I was enjoying the conversation, I had to excuse myself (discount dive-bar beer like Olympia has a way of working its way through quite quickly) and headed toward the bathroom where I stood in line as polite millennial men took their turns one-at-a-time in a bathroom that has both a urinal and a toilet.  “Why can’t these kids be efficient like at that Beastie Boys concert where they were using the sink, the toilet, the floor drain and a garbage can?” I wondered without saying a word out loud. Okay, I understand not peeing in the sink or the floor drain or the garbage can, but they can use the urinal and the regular toilet and cut the time in line in half. “Hurry the fuck up. I gotta pee, besides, I have to get back to my conversation with Pat.”

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity in line, I returned to the DJ Booth where Pat told me the wife’s father founded “The Independent,” a newspaper in Missoula, and his business partner was a guy named Erik. 

Yes, THAT Erik, the same guy from New York who brought the Beastie Boys to Montana for their first concert out west. 

It’s a small world when the Missouri and Montana collide with the Beastie Boys.

#Missouri Lounge Beastie Boys Missoula

[notagarroter]

Nota, I have enjoyed your blog for a long time and respect your opinion, especially as a multi-shipper and respecter of many other opinions. What do you think Sherlock might have texted to Irene? I loved all of TLD but that one line. Sherlock casually texting someone? I struggle to think of what we are to suppose he writes to her since she can't pick up milk for the flat or meet him to get missile plans. Was Moffat off the rails here or is my imagination limited?

This is a delightful question, thank you!

I’ve thought about this quite a bit since TLD aired, and I haven’t come to any conclusiveheadcanon.  I don’t think I want to!  I don’t want a definitive answer,because it’s more fun to play around with the possibilities. 

But let’s look at what we know.

Whatever it was, I think we can be certain it wasn’t“casual”. Irene Adler is not someone one texts casually.  Did Sherlock occasionally try to make it*look* casual?  Haha, maybe.  I can just about see him spending 20 minutestrying to compose the perfect “off the cuff” text to her, one thatwill betray nothing of his feelings, one carefully calibrated to convey theimpression that he really couldn’t give a toss about her.  Isn’t that what everyone does?

Though maybe it’s hard to maintain an air of studied indifference onceyou’ve flown to Karachi to save someone’s life. ;)

Of course, maybe there’s nothing more to it than what we already know.  Sherlock says, “Even I text. Her, I mean, TheWoman.” But we knew this:

It’s possible that’s all he meant! Literally one text, telling her Happy New Year five years ago. In which case, what did it mean?  Looked at one way, it’s about as impersonal as you canget.  Anyone on earth could reasonablytext “Happy New Year” to anyone else and not mean anything inparticular by it except “It’s January 1st”

And yet…  The context is thatshe has sent him 57 texts that he has ignored, then convinced him she wasdead.  And then showed up again,texting him "I’m not dead, let’s havedinner.”

How does he respond to that?  Hecould have been angry, or dismissive, or hurt, or impressed.  But what he says is, “Happy NewYear.”  What’s that mean?  I imagine Irene tied herself in knots tryingto figure it out.  My best guess is itmeans: “I’m glad you’re alive.  I’mnot angry, but I don’t trust you, so I’mbeing extremely cautious and have no intention of revealing anything more ofmyself than I have to.  But consider thisan invitation to continue texting me.”

Frankly I think Sherlock was probably thrilled that New Year’s gave himan excuse to text her without having to come up with anything personal tosay.  Have you ever tried to text someoneyou’re sort of interested in but don’t know well?  It’s excruciating!  I’m sure many of us have defaulted toconventional scripts like “Happy New Year” that allow us to say“I’m thinking of you, and want you to be thinking of me,” but withoutactually *saying* any of that. 

So maybe that’s it.

But Sherlock does say in TLD, “you know, sometimes.” Plural.  So let’s assume there’s more than just thatone text.  What might these texts say?

Given that Irene is texting him on his birthday, I kind of like theidea that they have kept up this awkward, excessively formal and impersonalmode of texting-only-on-holidays-and-special-occasions because they’re both tooterrified to express any actual emotion without a buffer of plausibledeniability.  I can imagine that at somepoint in the past five years, Sherlock texted Irene on her birthday, and she wonderedhow he knew (I mean, she’s probably changed identities three times, so it mightnot be an easy thing to uncover.).  Ofcourse, he was showing off his detective skills, so she had to respond bymeeting his challenge and figuring out when hisbirthday was.  Maybe that’s the gamethey’re playing?  That could be fun.

But to me, the most intriguing part of Sherlock’s admission is that hesays, “Badidea; try not to."  Whyexactly is it a bad idea?  Why does hetry not to? 

I’ve sent a few "bad idea” texts myself, over the years, so Ithink I can conjure up some possibilities. ;)

– maybe it encourages her to text him more often, which distracts him fromhis work.

– maybe they’re sexting, which is enjoyable at the time but alwayskind of embarrassing in the light of day (especially if Sherlock is really badat it).  

– maybe he feeds her clues from cases and asks her opinion (since shelikes detective stories).  Maybe sheresponds to these overtures in a more frankly sexual way than he is comfortablewith, leading to blushing at crime scenes, etc.

– maybe texting her makes her expect more out of him than he’sprepared to give, and he then has to spend five months blowing her off so shedoesn’t think they’re “dating” or anything so commonplace.

– maybe his texting back freaks her out because she doesn’t wantanything more than a light flirtation, and he gets hurt when she backsoff.  

– I can totally imagine Irene as the kind of person who doesn’trespond to a text for months and months, until the sender has gone fromintrigued to annoyed to frantic to humiliated to despairing to blocking thenumber (just let her *try* to text me), then surreptitiously unblocking it(because that was juvenile, I’m bigger than that), to finally deciding she’snever going to text again and he doesn’t even care because it’s not like heliked her anyway.  And that’s the momentwhen she texts back and starts the whole cycle over again.  Talk about a power play!  I can imagine Sherlock would *really* hatethat, but not be able to resist it either.

– maybe Sherlock asks about work and she describes what she’s doing toher clients and that’s both interesting and alarming.  And distracting.

– maybe he occasionally asks for advice on personal matters (like, how can I suggest to my friend and his wife that I’d be up for a threesome?), and she responds with what might be good advice, but he’ll never know because he never takes it.

– maybe no matter what he texts, sheinvariably responds that he’s been a bad boy and could use a good thrashing,and he’s…  not at all sure if he shouldtake her up on that.  

– maybe they text each other the same kind of banal, idly flirtatiouschatter that we saw John exchange with Eurus, and it all simply drives him madwith frustration.

– maybe they reminisce about Moriarty, and what he meant to them both, and that dredges up uncomfortable feelings he’d rather not examine too closely.

– maybe they exchange n00ds.

– maybe they discuss philosophy and literature but it always devolvesinto an argument over some minor theoretical point, and neither of them is precisely surewhat the hell they’re fighting about but it gets vicious really quickly becausethey’re both hate backing down. (that one might be borrowed pretty directlyfrom my life, oops.)

– maybe he sent her a dick pic and she rated it against all herclients and well if that wasn’t humiliating! He will definitely not try that again.

Hmmmm I think that’s all I’ve got. Anyone else got any ideas?  

#adlock #ask #shipping meta #ish #meta #headcanon #pj-gingernuts

[firelord-frowny]

Part of a ~journal entry~ written from the perspective of Madison, who’s a character I made up when I was 15. It discusses suicide and deaths of family member, soooo trigger warning, if ya don’t wanna read about that!

My brother’s been dead for a year. 

Three hundred and sixty-five days (or is it sixty-six, ‘cause of the leap year or whatever?) and there are parts of my insides that still haven’t stopped reeling. He was so wrecked before he died. I dunno, I guess in some respects you could say he was gone from me months before he blew his own brains out and that makes it even more strange that he’s actually dead. 

I wonder about it all the time. About death, about him dying, about if he and our mom are together again, about whether or not there’s an afterlife…

Jonathan says it’s probably different for everyone. 

He’s a fucking weird kid. He knows a lot of people who have died and been revived minutes later. I dunno, maybe there’s a fucking convention for people who have been dead before that he met them at. He told me their stories - about how some of them saw lights and felt peace and maybe even met God or Jesus or whoever, and how some of them burned in profound agony and felt fear, and how some of them relived their entire lives in a single moment, or how they watched over their grieving families for the five minutes it took for EMTs to get their hearts beating again. But when it happened to him, Jonathan said, there wasn’t really anything. Like, nothing. He said the world got black and sensationless and he was completely alone with his consciousness. He said it was terrifying, and worse than any hell he could have ever conjured up. “I think,” he told me, “it’s because I didn’t believe in anything. I think people create their own afterlives. The human mind is one of the most powerful things there is. Maybe even powerful enough to influence what happens to our consciousnesses when we die. People who believe in heaven or hell go to heaven or hell. People who don’t…go nowhere. And that’s where I went." 

One of the last things Gregory said to me was that he didn’t believe in God anymore. And I don’t know what he thought he was escaping to when he stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I wish I did. I wish I had some clue where he might be right now, if he is anywhere at all. Maybe he’s nowhere, like Jonathan was. Just wasting away with his own thoughts, alone with himself and the memory of every life he took, everyone he ever loved or hated or hurt. 

I don’t feel like he’s watching over me. 

I’ve kind of gotten that feeling about our mom, but never about him.

When I think about mom I think about how I have to not fuck up anymore or she’ll be disappointed in me, and if I’m slouching I’ll sit up straight because she always got on me about my posture and sometimes I hear her voice in my head telling me the way she told me on her death bed, "It’s okay, Maddy.” Because I really am always wondering if things are okay and ever since she died those words have been echoing in my head.

I don’t get that from Gregory. 

I wonder if, after mom died, she was heartbroken to get to Heaven or wherever, and realize that her son wasn’t there to greet her. 

I wonder if Gregory knows mom is dead now, too.

Jonathan says that death doesn’t fit in a mold. It doesn’t work one way. It’s not a straight line - it’s zig-zags and intersections and curves and tangents and maybe you run into people when you die and maybe you don’t. He also says that he pulls most of this shit out of his ass, but it sounds good so he usually rolls with it.

Whether he pulls it out of his ass or not, it’s nice to at least try to make sense of this shit.

I miss Gregory.

[theconservativebrief]

When The Joshua Tree turned 30, U2 hit the road for a special anniversary tour and played the whole damn album 50 times start to finish.

There will never be such a revival for Zooropa.

July 5 is the 25th anniversary of the smallest album from the world’s biggest band. Maybe you’ve never heard of it; maybe you have and want to forget it. But you should listen to it. Because it’s every bit the masterpiece that The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby were, even if it sounds nothing like them: a weird but heartfelt meditation of humanity on the verge of the technological revolution that is still remaking our world today.

Zooropa also teaches us something about U2, a band that increasingly flirts with self-parody these days. It still strains to live up to that self-given moniker — “the best band in the world” — but its recent output fails to inspire. They’ve invaded our iPhones. Their latest record came and went without much fanfare. They’re still selling out concerts, but critical reception has become middling. Even for longtime fans like myself, U2 isn’t so much a source of wonder as it is a fact of life. They’re as novel as air.

That’s what makes Zooropa such a revelation in retrospect. U2 had hit its creative and commercial peak with 1987’s The Joshua Tree, faced the backlash from 1988’s Rattle and Hum (the archetype album of U2 being simply too much), and then regained its stride with 1991’s Achtung Baby. They had nowhere left to go and nothing left to prove.

So they made this strange little album with few pretenses and a modest agenda: what it’s like to be a person in this changing world. The band members themselves have called it an “interlude,” a sentiment that seems totally at odds with U2 as we think about them today. U2 doesn’t do small. They sell out football stadiums to play their 10-times platinum album from 30 years ago, reliving the glory years one more time.

But they did small once. That is Zooropa’s stroke of genius.

“I never thought of Zooropa as anything more than an interlude,” said U2 guitarist The Edge, who received his first production credit on the album, in Neil McCormick’s 2009 history U2 by U2. That seems to more or less sums up the band’s feelings toward their oddest production: it was an experiment, even a fun one, but “this is something we don’t necessarily care to do anymore,” the guitarist and co-band leader said.

Once in a while, the album receives some favorable retrospectives — here’s a semi-iconic piece by Rob Harvilla in Spin for its 20th anniversary, an occasion also commemorated by Stereogum — but it’s mostly an afterthought in the U2 pantheon. Boy was a promising first album, War made them stars, The Joshua Tree became one of the biggest records in history, and Achtung Baby wasn’t far behind it.

It was at that moment, during U2’s frenzied, glitzy, and overamped tour for Achtung Baby, that Zooropa was born. The story is that it started out as an EP, but the band eventually fleshed it out into a full 10-track, 50-minute album that they completed by flying back and forth from their shows to their studios in Dublin. The word “mad” gets used a lot by the band and its associates to describe this period.

Zooropa was released on July 5, 1993, and then it just sort of … disappeared. It sold merely 2 million copies — a steep fall from Achtung Baby’s 8 million or The Joshua Tree’s 10 — and its singles mostly failed to chart on mainstream radio.

But for a group that thinks of itself first and foremost as a live band, U2’s near-erasure of Zooropa from its set lists is the most telling indicator of the album’s legacy. The first single, “Numb,” hasn’t been played live since December 10, 1993, in Tokyo. “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” — the “one legit, fairly conventional all-time U2 classic” on the album, as Harvilla put it — is the only song to be played more than 100 times in concert. For context, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is the clubhouse leader with more than 1,000 plays, and five different songs from Pop, the band’s vastly inferior 1997 release, have gotten at least 100 turns over the years. (Hat tip to the meticulous u2gigs.com for this data.)

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Even on the band’s current Experience + Innocence tour — during which U2 has eliminated songs from The Joshua Tree from its set list, following the 2017 roadshow dedicated to that album, and thereby taken several mainstays out of the rotation — not a single Zooropa track has made an appearance yet. Not one snippet for its 25th birthday.

The myth of Achtung Baby was that U2 finally embraced alternative and electronic music after driving the American roots act straight into the ground on Rattle & Hum, an impressive reinvention propelled by radio-friendly hits like “One” and “Mysterious Ways.”

I came here not to besmirch Achtung Baby, but the truth is that album was still very identifiably U2. Maybe a little more jaded, maybe a little more adventurous, but there is a clear line from “With or Without You” to “One.” The guitar licks are clean, Bono is a little moodier but he’s still crooning, and every track still sounds like it was made to be played outdoors in front of 30,000 people.

But on Zooropa, U2 — the stadium-packing, diamond-selling, chart-topping band that had taken over the world — was nowhere to be found.

The album’s first two minutes — an indistinct fade-in of muffled radio voices, before a melancholy piano melody sets in with pulsing bass behind — pass before we hear anything that sounds even remotely like U2. Bono, famed war protester and AIDS activist, beams into the album from outer space with a few lines straight out of a second-rate Don Draper meeting: “What do you want? Be all that you can be. Fly the friendly skies. Eat to get slimmer.” Throughout the album, Bono sounds both alien and inescapably human.

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The next song is a love ballad to a woman on TV, powered by a toy piano that sounds exactly like that, and the tone is set. With the exception of the lovelorn and familiar “Stay,” there is really no comfort to be found.

On “Numb,” the Edge drones out a series of “Don’t” commands over a distorted guitar that conjures turning gears and we never hear Bono at all, except for his “Fat Lady” voice in the background. “I feel numb/too much is not enough,” he cries. It might as well be the band’s thesis statement on Zooropa, distorting the overwhelming and guileless emotion that had defined U2 up to that point in their careers into something more detached and postmodern.

In fact, the whole album is like a retcon of familiar U2 tropes. The wailing “Tomorrow” on 1981’s October was Bono’s anguished, affecting cry for the mother he lost so young. He returns to the same subject here on “Lemon,” and we instead are greeted by the Fat Lady again while The Edge and Brian Eno chant in a monotone through the chorus. “Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car” must be U2’s weirdest song about heroin, another of Bono’s favorite subjects, a tale of dependency played over upbeat industrial noise rock.

The album ends with Bono stepping offstage — and what could be less U2 than that — to give Johnny Cash the microphone for “The Wanderer.” That’s right: Johnny Cash closes the U2 record best classified as experimental electronica —not the gospel and roots-influenced Joshua Tree or Rattle & Hum — singing atomic apocalyptic imagery over a muffled bass that somehow still approximates a country twang.

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Finally, Zooropa appropriately ends on a joke or a warning or both: an alarm pulsates and cuts out abruptly.

But it all … works. There really isn’t a band better positioned to meditate on the excesses of the dawning internet age than U2, which turned earnest excess into an art form during its rise to fame.

“I feel that they are one of the few rock bands even attempting to hint at a world which will continue past the next great wall — the year 2000,” David Bowie said after Zooropa came out, according to U2 biographer Bill Flanagan. So in its own way, the album remains as resonant as anything they’ve ever produced.

U2 seems content to regress these days. Its last two albums have been characterized by a thematic return to the youth of the band’s members, and especially its lead singer. They haven’t totally lost sight of this period, though, even if Zooropa isn’t making it onto their set lists. U2’s latest tour marked the return of one of Bono’s most outrageous stage characters, a glam impersonation of the devil who first appeared on the early 1990s tour that birthed Zooropa,

There’s something identifiable in that character in our ridiculous times, and Zooropa is plump with thematic material that seems as relevant now as it did in 1993. They hit it all here: soulless capitalism, digital infatuation masquerading as true love, the hopeless apathy that feels so familiar in the era of Trump. “Some days you wake up in the army/And some days it’s the enemy,” Bono reminds us, about as far from the righteous anger that electrified War as he would ever get.

But it feels earned, in a world just escaping from the Cold War and only just beginning to understand the new age, the digital age, that it was entering. These guys saw it and they recognized it, even if they were as perplexed as anyone about what you were supposed to do about it. Their only real conclusion is to do the same thing you did before: You miss your mom, you get mad at your dad, you fall in love, you get high, sometimes you wonder what the point of all this really is. But you don’t give up. You keep living. It just sounds a little bit different.

That acceptance comes right near the end of the album. After the drone of “Numb,” the operatics of “Lemon,” and the detached sarcasm on “Some Days Are Better Than Others,” we find the serenity of “The First Time.”

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Over a gentle guitar — a spiritual sequel to “Running To Stand Still” in its sound — Bono finds peace in losing faith. The prodigal son comes home again, the father hands over the keys to his kingdom, and the son … throws them away. The song’s softly triumphant climax is the only real emotional catharsis, and it is beautifully understated.

Part of Zooropa’s appeal is its novelty: U2 making the least U2 album of their career. They overplayed this hand a few years later on Pop — got a little too self-aware, a little too confident that they could make any kind of sound work for them — and they would spend years overcompensating for it. They would retreat to safer spaces in the 2000s: sincerity and soaring riffs and shout-along choruses meant to be sung by thousands of fans. You no longer listen to a new U2 album hoping to be surprised. You just hope there’s a good hook or two.

U2 has never been more U2 than they are now, but, for a flitting moment, on Zooropa, they broke free from all the constraints that come with being themselves. This is a beautiful and discordant, sweet and angry piece of music, out of body and out of time. Spin magazine wrote that the album “freed U2 from itself.” But they didn’t know what to do with that freedom. They didn’t know where to go.

They are the wandering protagonist in the atomic wasteland that Bono wrote and Cash sang about on Zooropa’s final song. Even after the apocalypse, U2 still can’t find what it’s looking for.

Original Source -> The unexpected resonance of Zooropa, U2’s least-remembered album, 25 years later

via The Conservative Brief

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[how2to18]

COLOR OF REALITY, the six-minute short film written, directed, and co-choreographed by Jon Boogz and fellow movement artist Charles “Lil Buck” Riley, in collaboration with painter and installation artist Alexa Meade, was released on September 6, 2016, three years after the naissance of Black Lives Matter, an anti-racist movement created by radical black organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, initially in response to the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, by self-proclaimed vigilante George Zimmerman, who was later acquitted.

Sean Bell, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown, Ricky Boyd, Kenneth Chamberlain, Stephon Clark, John Crawford III, Patrick Dorismond, Shereese Francis, Eric Garner, Ramarley Graham, Freddie Gray, LaTanya Haggerty, Jason Harrison, Kendra James, Ronald Madison, Manuel Loggins Jr., Margaret LaVerne Mitchell, Jerame Reid, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Saheed Vassell: each a black man or woman who died at the hands of police, each representing hundreds of such cases since 1999, when 22-year-old Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man standing in a New York City doorway, was gunned down by four plain-clothed officers who fired 41 bullets, thinking he had a gun; the officers were charged with second-degree murder and later acquitted.

The year 2016 alone saw 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a father of five, die after being shot in the chest and back outside a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, convenience store, where he was selling compact discs, by officers investigating reports of a man with a gun; 33-year-old Philando Castile was shot in the car in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, by a cop who pulled him over because his “wide-set nose” fit the description of a robbery suspect; 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, a mother of two, was killed in her home, and her five-year-old son wounded, during a standoff with Baltimore County police attempting to serve her a warrant for failing to appear in court; 43-year-old and mentally impaired Keith Lamont Scott was shot in his SUV while waiting for his son in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a police officer in pursuit of another man; 40-year-old Terence Crutcher, unarmed, was shot by a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while standing near his vehicle in the middle of a street after his vehicle stalled on the side of the road; and 13-year-old Tyre King was shot multiple times in an alley in Columbus, Ohio, gunned down by police who, responding to reports of an armed robbery, claimed that King appeared to pull a handgun from his waistband when, in fact, he had a BB gun.

Black Lives Matter broadened the conversation around state violence, going beyond extrajudicial killings of black people by police and vigilantes to include other ways virulent anti-black racism has for centuries permeated American society, and became an explosive artistic call-to-arms. There have been myriad gut-wrenching responses, from anger and despair to fear and trepidation, by artists — Carlos Raul Dufflar’s poem “Amadou Diallo From Guinea to the Bronx Dead on Arrival”; Ellisha and Steven Flagg’s “I Can’t Breathe,” the protest anthem dedicated to their brother Eric Garner, who died on July 17, 2014, after being head-locked and choke-held, moaning, “I can’t breathe,” 11 times while lying face down on the sidewalk; the song “How Many” by Miguel, written in reaction to the police shootings of Sterling and Castile, channeling Marvin Gaye’s 1971 protest song “What’s Going On”; Jay-Z’s song titled “spiritual,” reflecting the rapper’s disillusionment with police brutality in modern times; the rapper Kendrick Lamar’s songs “Alright” and “The Blacker the Berry,” anthems in the wake of high-profile police shootings of minorities; and most recently, the rapper Childish Gambino’s music video “This Is America,” an explosive commentary on gun violence.

In performance, Between the World and Me, a stage adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s prize-winning 2015 book, premiered at New York’s Apollo Theater in 2018, conjuring the visceral anger and grief of the September 1, 2000, shooting of 25-year-old Prince Carmen Jones Jr. who, unarmed, was shot 16 times — of the six bullets in his body, five entered from his back — by a Prince George’s County, Maryland, police officer on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. In dance performance, Freedom, a 54-second black-and-white video choreographed by Sean Aaron Carmon for fellow members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to the music of Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, was created three days after the July 5, 2016, shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, two days after the Philando Castile shooting in Falcon Heights, and one day after the attack on police in Dallas, Texas. Bemoaning those same July 2016 tragedies, the jazz tap dancer Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, 20 minutes into the performance of And Still You Must Swing, a collaboration with her fellow tap stars Derick K. Grant and Jason Samuels Smith and guest artist Camille A. Brown, at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, stopped abruptly to address the audience. “It’s not easy when your people are getting killed in the street,” she muttered, holding back tears. “I can’t apologize because it’s real, y’all,” launching into a solo that was passionate and fierce.

Just six minutes long, and reportedly inspired by forlorn dismay of the police shootings of young black men, Color of Reality will be counted as one of the seminal anthems of the Black Lives Matter movement. Offering an articulate, empathetic, and encapsulating response to police brutality, the film has attracted (at last count) some 335,000 views on YouTube, and is mesmerizing, in large part, for the striking visual scenography of the painter Alexa Meade. In the opening scene, we could be looking at a colorful still life, a domestic scene — the interior of a living room painted, in the broad strokes of a Vincent Van Gogh painting, in calming shades of blue, cream, and purple, conjuring the image of a bright blue sky. In it, two men, sitting on a couch, watch a news broadcast from a television set, listening to a news anchor report on the murders of unarmed black men at the hands of police. A broadcaster describes the “graphic body cam and dash cam video of an officer-involved shooting, where an unarmed black teenager was killed by police.” It is not until the camera zooms in on this still life and into a close-up of the men — their brown skin and glazed eyes peering through the thick strokes of paint — that we discern how Meade is challenging our visual senses. Are we looking at a two-dimensional painting or a three-dimensional performance work?

¤

Meade’s color-soaked body-painting, a technique she calls “Reverse Trompe L’Oeil” — trompe l’oeil being a visual illusion that tricks the eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object — recalls the work of Carolee Schneemann, the visual artist/collagist who used her body to examine the role of female sensuality in connection to the possibilities of political and personal liberation from predominantly oppressive social and aesthetic conventions. As a painter, Schneemann extended the visual principles of the canvas in her inquiries about sexuality, simultaneously investigating taboo realms of corporeality and the liberating possibilities of the female body by using her body as the primary medium to exercise women’s agency. Schneemann’s 1963 Eye Body, for instance, was a series of 36 photographs of the artist in an environment she created with various objects — broken mirrors, dress mannequins, plastic tarps. To become a piece of the art herself, Schneemann covered her nude self in various materials, including grease, chalk, and plastic, creating 36 “transformative actions” in a setting in which she was photographed, with one action for each frame of film. She described the series as integrating the artist’s self as image and image-maker, melding the two through an improvisational collage in space and time.

Like Schneemann, Meade began her career as a painter and then turned to finding more unconventional painting surfaces — bodies and inanimate objects — and using them in a way that collapsed depth, making her models appear two-dimensional when photographed. “Your body is my canvas,” Meade explained in a Ted Talk about her work, Your Body Is My Canvas. “There is more to this painting than meets the eye,” she explained. “It is an acrylic painting, but I didn’t paint it on canvas, I painted it on top of the man. […] I skip the canvas altogether, and if I want to paint your portrait, I’m painting it on you — physically on you. That also means you are probably going to end up with an earful of paint,” since she is painting an ear on the ear. Everything “gets covered in a mask of paint that mimics what’s directly below it, and in this way, I’m able to take a three-dimensional scene and make it look like a two-dimensional painting.” Turning people into paintings, the “mask” of paint on body and objects reverts the portrait into a two-dimensional experience, flattening bodies into walls. “It was about shadows. I was fascinated with the absence of light and I wanted to find a way that I could give it materiality and pin it down before it changed.”

After experimenting with painting, or masking, corporeal subjects, Meade ventured further with the idea of creating “paintings” on more unusual surfaces. In The Milk Project, collaborating with the actress and performance artist Sheila Vand, Meade immersed Vand, whom she had body-painted, into a pool of milk. The erasure of the paint, due to the washing of the milk, ended up creating images that were, as Meade described, “far more elegant,” a lesson in what lay beneath the surface. “What will you make of me?” Vand asked, in the text of the installation work that premiered at Galerie Ivo Kamm in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2012. The symbolic metaphor of immersing a female body into the nourishing mammalian substance of milk is obvious — it is an erasure of the female into the primal substance of female nourishment, therefore yoking form and substance. “I am disappearing into that space between us, but the first step of transformation is to erase oneself. Identity is a disease, and today, I prefer to blend in with my canvas,” Meade wrote at the premiere of Milk. Unlike the erasure of identity that Vand succumbs to in the Milk series, Meade’s body-painting of Boogz and Lil Buck in Color of Reality is so materially oppressive as to challenge its living-and-breathing subjects to reclaim their corporeality. The power of the body, the black body, prevails over the suppressive acrylics that attempt to smother it.

The danced solos of Jon Boogz and Lil Buck add profound tragic depth: soliloquies on the pain of prejudice, injustice, and mass incarceration that are articulated through styles of street dancing derived from hip-hop culture. Still, Meade’s visuals, in coordination with the movement art, produce the initial arresting moments in Color of Reality that propel the film to its final tragic moment, compelling the viewer to yearn for the end of predatory policing. In the opening scene, under the yellow-painted title, Color of Reality, the camera frames a brightly painted interior of a living room and the figures of two men, seated on a couch, watching television. Above the escalating elegiac chords of an electronic score by DBR and WondaGurl, we hear sound bites — “Yes, it’s a graphic video … everything from shots to blood … an unarmed black teenager was killed by police … These people were involved in his murder.”

The camera zooms in on the men, panning the painted, blue-streaked wall, side table, lamp, stack of books, plastic snack wrappers, and a can of soda, settling on a paint — streaked brown-skinned hand, placed on the armrest of the coach; and cuts to the television screen where a black anchorman (CBS news correspondent Vladimir Duthiers) describes “a video showing the deadly officer involved in a shooting in Louisiana.” A reaction shot closes in on the attentive faces of the men, their slow and steady breathing barely perceptible, with a cut back to the television where a female anchorwoman reports “a graphic body cam and dash cam video of an officer-involved shooting where an unarmed black teenager was killed by police.” In a startling reaction shot, Boogz’s arm involuntarily shoots up from the armrest and, with remote in hand, flips off the set. The camera cuts to an extreme close-up of Lil Buck, breathing heavily. Behind the painted mask we see his glazed, large brown eyes peering through the thick yellow and green strokes of paint. In an infinitely small movement, he downcasts his eyes, signaling despondence, and sighs deeply, his head rotating from side to side. It is a riveting, heartbreaking moment that encapsulates a sobering state of being alive, thus breaking the two-dimensionality of the narrative. The camera cuts to a long shot of the men, seated side-by-side on the couch, estranged and isolated in thought. The score begins to pulsate as each man rises in turn from the couch to soliloquize upon their state of mind through their personal movement language.

¤

Popping, a late-1960s style of street dance originally from Fresno, California, is the movement style that Miami-born Jon Boogz honed as a performer on the streets of Venice Beach. The dance, based on the technique of suddenly contracting and relaxing muscles, produces a jerk in the dancer’s body, often called a pop or hit, and is done continuously to the rhythm of a song. Unlike locking in hip-hop movement, which contracts or tightens the body into certain shapes, popping forces the body parts to explode outward, the rupture followed by a contraction, leading to a relaxation of the muscles. The abrupt tensing and releasing of muscles creates the stop-motion illusion of animation; the movement is robotic — moving at a steady pace and suddenly coming to a clean halt without shaking or reverb — and creates a tenseness in the viewer, not knowing what body part will next explode.

Jooking, often referred to as Gangsta Walking, is a style of movement that began in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1990s, usually performed to crunk music — up-tempo, drum machine-based hip-hop music from the early 1990s. Jooking is recognized for the “bounce” in the beat and the corresponding movement dancers make to keep up with it. Gangsta Walking is said to have “originated” by the group G-Style and the release of the video “G-Style Gangsta,” in which performers Romeo, Wolf, and Hurricane rapped while performing movements consisting of heel-toe footwork, hopping, and sliding the foot along the floor with accentuated prompts in the upper body. The group landed a production deal with Dallas Austin, the producer behind the groups TLC, Boys to Men, and Another Bad Creation; their success opened doors and gave way for other dances in Memphis, such as jookin, buckin, tickin, and choppin. In 2007, the Memphis rapper-director-producer Young Jai released the DVD Memphis Jookin Vol 1, which featured several G-Style young bloods, among them the 19-year-old Charles “Lil Buck” Riley (born May 25, 1988). Gangsta Walking requires the dancer to take quick steps, stomps, and twists, throwing arms around while moving to a beat. The style evolved by taking pieces from other street dance styles, such as two-step locomotion and spinning or walking on the tips of the toes. Jooking took the classic G-Walk steps and combined them into a smoother look, caused by changes in music during the 1990s, and was most noted for its smooth, agile footwork and dancer’s creative variation in stepping and sliding.

Like break dancing, which originated during the mid-1970s in the Bronx, primarily among Puerto Rican and African-American adolescents, many of them former gang members, and Krumping, an aggressive style of street dance created in South Central Los Angeles around 2000 that uses such moves as arm swings, chest pops, and stomps, Popping and Jooking are forms of self-expression — relief from the hardships of living in the inner city and aimed to release anger and frustration positively and nonviolently. Rarely choreographed, these street dance styles are almost entirely freestyle, danced most frequently in battles or sessions, rather than on a stage. Though myriad moves in hip-hop have become codified and are meant to display the virtuosic prowess of the dancer, the movement vocabulary of Boogz and Lil Buck in Color of Reality demonstrates a highly evolved personal and idiosyncratic expression that addresses contemporary social-political ideologies of the Black Lives Matter movement.

¤

The onslaught of news about violence against and the murder of black men both pains Boogz and Lil Buck and awakens them to action. Boogz bounces from the couch to stand erect, his knees shimmying, arms flailing, shaking his body to attention. A burst of energy emanating from the base of the spine travels up through the torso, sending his arms into a windmill of deflections, and propelling his sneakered feet to nimbly heel-and-toe sideways. He sinks, wide-legged, into a deep and jagged kneebend that resembles the metatarsal of a tarantula, and then draws himself straight up into staunch verticality: alert, inviolable, and with a fixed jaw, he struts in slow and steady motion back to the couch, challenging Lil Buck to the floor.

Lil Buck rises from the couch to perch precariously on the tip of one sneaker. Extending the free leg to waver in the air, he dwells in a long moment of reflection. Teetering in balance, he cups both hands to his heart, as if extracting it from his chest, and tosses it into the air, setting his body into a slithering disarray of crisscrossing arms and legs.

Buck’s solo is all about how the body retains equilibrium after it has been thrown out of whack: an invisible jab to the chest causes the torso to fold over, only to be flipped into a backbend; an uppercut to the jaw causes the body to twist into a succession of turns. Arms undulating, Buck has his feet take on a furious dialogue, sliding, gliding, tip-toeing as if walking through a minefield. Turning on the tip of the toes, descending, as if being swallowed up in a well; sliding across the floor on one knee, falling backward and bouncing back: it is a narrative of fall and recovery, descent and resurrection that simulates a battle with invisible foes, in which he always recovers. Lil Buck’s recovery, the call to restitution, is so corporeally powerful as to again retrieve Boogz from the couch. Together, in slow motion, they walk single file toward the door.

The unpredictable explosions of energy; the alien forms of locomotion such as freezing body parts while carrying oneself around the floor; the intricate footwork — lifting the slide of the feet off the ground to create even higher glides (bucking); sliding with one foot while gliding with the other to give the illusion of ice skating (icing) — these elements in Boogz’s and Buck’s solos combine to narrate a personal landscape not only of pain and suffering, their bodies absorbing and deflecting the relentless cruelty bestowed upon black bodies, but also of an insistence on survival. This summoning of courage motivates the men to leave their paint-streaked sanctum for the world outside.

At the three-minute mark, the men walk out the door and onto the street with newfound consciousness and determination, dance fueling and expressing their activism. The visual clash between the dreamy quality of the painted set, faces, and clothes inside and the cold exterior of steel, brick, and concrete make the harshness of the outside world more vivid. The two make their way down the isolated street, stumbling over their feet, gazing up at the brick buildings with steel grates, and the few pedestrians — white and brown-skinned men and women — shove them, refuse their handshakes, pass them by, render them invisible. As isolated as they were in their paint-streaked room, they are more so on the cold, gray sidewalk. Suddenly, two gun shots ring out, making the men stop short in their tracks. A close-up on Boogz’s face, a cut to Lil Buck’s face, then back to Boogz, as the camera moves slowly down his chest to settle on a pool of red-soaked liquid (paint? blood?) gushing from his heart into his cupped hands. The men, cupping the blood that spills from their gut, crumble to the ground, their legs collapsing like a deck of cards. We are left with two brief close-ups on the faces of these stricken men, their large brown eyes wide open, gazing into fathomless space; the camera flies up and away, rendering the scene of men, sprawled on the street in a pool of blood, into a two-dimensional image that is abstract. The message is simple: senseless violence must come to an end.

¤

During my first viewings of Color of Reality, I had been mesmerized by the bold, attention-grabbing visual qualities of the film — the schizophrenic back-and-forth of two-to-three dimensionality; the brash brushstrokes on skin, furniture, and walls, and Meade’s claiming all of these as paintable surfaces; the final tableaux in the hauntingly predictable ending of the film, which restores the blood-and-gore “reality” of the murder into a more cooling abstract image.

After studying the work over time, I resisted the immediate visual gratification, trying to discern the elements of the work that motivate the deepest compassionate response to the fatal shootings of these “men of color.” Meade’s visual contribution to the film’s core emotional experience skims the surface — as, no doubt, it is meant to do, as the mask of paint, the thick brush strokes of color that suffocate the pores of Boogz’s and Buck’s black skin, acts as the oppressive element to which the men must succumb, or from which they must escape. The piece does its work by quite literally moving out from under its astounding surface.

Behind the acrylic mask, Boogz’s and Buck’s warm eyes and expressive faces propel us to see the whole body — the flesh and bone of the movement so filled with pranic energy that it bleeds through the confines of the cracked acrylic paint — and feel the powerful throb of life. Meade’s visual manipulation of two-and-three dimensionality materializes the dilemma that W. E. B. Du Bois so urgently articulated about black identity and double-consciousness. As long as Boogz and Lil Buck remain two-dimensional in the painted room, they do not bring danger to themselves and are relegated to invisibility; they are about as harmless as a picture postcard. As soon as they break out of artifice of two-dimensionality to the factuality of three-dimensional aliveness, they are in dire danger.

Ultimately, neither space offers solace or safety, which is the underlying reality of the film, as these men are either relegated to the intimate internal space of living color, where the deepest emotional utterances of pain and suffering can be articulated, or can be left to the insufferable fate of existing in a colorless, terrorizing urban landscape. Inside, imprisonment; outside, prey to be hunted in the urban jungle. What, then, is the color of reality? What are the means of survival for these young black men who breathe through the suffocating confines of the mask, embodying stealth and subversion — slipping, spinning, gliding, tip-toeing nimbly through a mine field; ready to explode unpredictably from behind a mask of cool?

Color of Reality is a eulogy for all black men who dare step into three-dimensionality: Amadou Diallo in a New York City doorway; Alton Sterling outside a Baton Rouge convenience store; Philando Castile off a highway in Falcon Heights; Keith Lamont Scott in his SUV in Charlotte; Terence Crutcher standing in the middle of the street next to his stalled vehicle in Tulsa; Tyre King in an alley in Columbus. However confident they are when they venture into the world, the sobering “reality” is that no one gives a damn or wants to hear from them. Meanwhile, their deaths confirm that nothing changes, or has changed, from the time of Amadou until now. The saddest reality is that it has always been this way for people of color since the beginning of America — that is the reality of color.

Where Color of Reality makes its most original and enduring contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement is that Jon Boogz and Charles “Lil Buck” Riley have created an artistic language of movement — poetic, elevated, enduring — to give expression to black struggle in the millennium.

¤

Constance Valis Hill is a dance historian and choreographer, and a Five College Professor of Dance (Hampshire College). She is the author of Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 2010), which won the de la Torre Bueno Prize for the best book in the of dance studies; and Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (Oxford University Press, 2000), winner of a 2001 ASCAP Deems-Taylor award. She has composed a chronology of tap dance for the Library of Congress in “Tap Dance in America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of Tap Performance on Stage, Film, and Media by Constance Valis Hill,” a 3,000 performance record database with 180 biographies of twentieth-century tap dancers.

The post “Color of Reality”: Jon Boogz, Lil Buck, and Black Lives in Livid Color appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[martinfzimmerman]

Money as incentive is enemy of creativity

Sit back. Comfortable? Close your eyes and conjure up an image of lush greenery. Behind you, majestic mountains. Ahead, the sea. The air is clean, the food is fresh.

No, really, do this. Sit comfortably and sink into the image. Breathe it in.

Imagine liberating your mind, primarily from money - from money as incentive at the very least.

Money. It slows you down. Makes you miss the answers. Saps away your intelligence.

This is what behavioural studies have found when people are enticed by money or a similar reward.

Want proof? Let me introduce you to the candle problem.

You get a box of thumbtacks, a candle, and a matches sitting on a table. The goal is to attach the lit candle to the wall without dripping wax onto the table.

People were timed figuring this out. It took five to 10 minutes for participants to realise that the thumbtack box is the key. Take the thumbtacks out and tack it to the wall, stand the candle in it, light it, and hey presto. Sorted.

Now imagine two groups. Group A is told they need to work as fast as possible, that their time will be used as the benchmark for other groups.

Group B get a financial reward if they are the quickest at solving the conundrum.

Convention tells us that money as an incentive equals better performance. Perhaps you have this system at work.

Wrong. Every time experiments that delve into this are carried out, the group promised monetary reward is the slowest, least capable, least able.

In the case of the candlestick problem, group B were, on average, 3.5 minutes slower than group A.

Give groups small, medium and large monetary incentives, and who performs the worst? You got it. The ones offered the most.

Yes incentive works - when tasks are mechanical and repetitive. And obvious. But introduce any, even elementary, cognitive requirement and money means disaster.

I bring this up because, as expats, the appeal is usually monetary. Does this mean you're hemming yourself in and missing the out-of-the-box element of your life?

Reward narrows our focus. If the tacks are taken out of the box and put on the table along with the candle, those with financial incentives do best. Because the solution is obvious.

So if money does not motivate us, what does? What we learn from this sort of thing is that three things are important to us: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

So what can you do about it?

Well, I think a big part of the solution lies in being still, really still.

What do I mean by this? I mean not getting into the car for something you don't need. Not giving in to the urge to fill time with some unnecessary activity outside your home.

We're scared of being - just being, with our self. Not filling time forces you to think of what to actually do with yourself. Funny thing is, it is what most people aspire to. Not having to do things, but still having things to do.

Let's imagine what that is for you.

Ready?

Imagine living in a village with nothing on offer - other than the basics: food, shelter, a smattering of neighbours, views.

What would you be doing - reading, making something, contemplating?

I bet you the sky is spectacular at night.

Now imagine what it would be like to live like this. At the core, imagine that you don't need to worry about money. That what you have is "enough".

This could be yours - if you move somewhere like the village that hit the news last week.

The mayor of Bormida, an increasingly deserted village in Italy, offered €2,000 (Dh8,145) to anyone who took up residency in there next year. That, along with rent ranging between €50 and €120 a month, sounds like it is too good to be true.

And it was.

The mayor got more than he bargained for, and has been swamped with requests taking him up on the offer. He now states that his attempt to revive the fortunes of his village - population 394 - is only open to fellow countrymen and was misreported.

Regardless of where it is, if you were to live somewhere like Bormida, imagine what you could free your mind up to think, take on, figure out, if you had no monetary incentive to hem you in, and ideally no money worries in terms of affording life.

You would have self-determination. Freedom even. You grant yourself autonomy.

You could develop mastery - in something.

You could use this for a purpose. Something that's about more than just you.

The desire to have purpose is the most mentioned thing when I talk to people who have liberated themselves from the shackles of daily money concerns and have arrived at their "enough".

While you contemplate what that is for you, I'll leave you with a smattering of comments from people who responded to the mayor of Bormida's offer.

The last one nails it for most:

• Sounds wonderful. Trouble is with townies, they wouldn't know what to do with themselves. I would paint, work on my art and live the country life. Would love it.

• Sounds interesting. Maybe I can grow some vegetables and herbs and lead a laid-back life, reading, writing and meditating.

• Where do I sign up? I could retire comfortably on that rent. Put my time towards something meaningful.

And here's what holds us back: "I'm afraid it would Bormida death."

Nima Abu Wardeh describes herself using three words: Person. Parent. Pupil. Each day she works out which one gets priority, sharing her journey on finding-nima.com

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[vrheadsets]

Me Vs. A Decade

Today’s VR vs. story isn’t really about virtual reality. It’s more a story about the writer, as today marks a very important day for me. Let’s begin 24 hours ago though.

It was Monday. My phone was ringing. It was ringing and it was over on the other side of the flat.

Bugger.

Groaning I drop the speaker I’m trying to repair with one hand and break away from the Twitter post I’m writing with the other, to sprint across the flat. Dodging the overly long and overly patched up internet cable, hurdling the two steps up to the, weirdly, slightly higher level which that side of the flat is at. Before pouncing on the phone lying on my bed before it rings off. I knew who it was of course, if they are still there on the other end. Or, more precisely I know what type of call it would be. Someone from Manchester, or Liverpool, or Dublin or Abergavenny – that was a recent one – who wanted to talk to me about either:

a) The amount of money I could claim from the car accident I had. Which I’m reasonably confident is £0.00 since I don’t drive.

b) Have I thought about pensions and life insurance? Answer: Yes, but do they think about me?

or c) Whether or not I had heard about Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) from mortgages or home-buying or something. How it had been mis-sold or misused and how I was due funds worth hundreds of pounds. Have I checked? To which the answer is I have never done anything financially that involved PPI. The last caller on that demanded to know how I would magically know this.They were told forcefully that I think I would remember such a transfer.  Also since I rent the likelihood of any of this is rather on the low side.

I was surprised as it was not actually any of these but a number I recognise from an employment agency. I picked up, and a somewhat more masculine voice than I expected wheezed “Hello it’s Derek from Kitten Whisperers!” The names have been changed to protect the guilty. “I was wondering if we could have a chat.”  Turned out Derek was after a catch-up on things since the CV they had from me was a bit out of date, and since you never know and its always good to have such companies thinking of you, I agreed.

I ‘hmm’-ed and we went through some run of the mill questions. “Are you doing okay?” “Are you still living here?” “Are you still working for VRFocus?” Yes. “What do they do?” Well…  Then Derek asked, “So, do you have much experience in Community Management?” And for a brief moment I was stumped. I mean, presumably he had my “kinda out of date” CV in front of him. What was he expecting? That I’d suddenly go ‘well actually I made it all up’ and fill him in with a completely different work history? ‘No, in truth from 2008-2009 I was a matchstick-seller and part-time snowboarding clown and from 2011-13 I lectured at Harvard in Esperanto.’

I pursed my lips together. “Actually it’s ten years on Tuesday.”

“Oh.” He said, a bit bored. I slumped because I was actually telling the truth .On the 28th of March 2007 I was bundled though into an office at SEGA Europe and quickly made to sign an NDA. It was all a bit hectic in the office and I wondered what was going on. I was then told that in about five minutes they were going to announce the fact that Mario and Sonic were going to be in a game together for the first time. and I was hurled into a chair and signed up to the official forum with full on mod powers.

“Track what they say.” Said my new line-boss as the press release for what was Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games rolled out to the press. “If they start getting worked up.” He paused and pursed his lips together. “Well we’ll come to that.” He shrugged and patted my shoulder.

Ten years ago…

After the call ended I thought for a while about that ten years. I’d accomplished quite a lot in that time, not that you’d know it. But the truth of it is most people don’t know what I do, what any of us do. But that’s my career. A ten year stretch during which I had several years at SEGA setting up and managing their social media and working hard to rebuild community trust from the ground up. Which is mighty impressive considering I’ve never had a day’s worth of proper training in any of it before then – or indeed, astoundingly, since. I co-created an world record owning international convention with that community. Wrote blogs every day. Was the first one in and the last one out, and did my damnedest to fix an impossible to fix situation (and took a lot of flack for caring enough to do so) before I left several years later with my head held high despite being left exhausted in every sense of the word by the whole thing.  Still, I’d left my mark.

Of course they then erased everything I ever wrote after I left because they were too lazy to keep the European branch’s blogs when they merged them. Which was nice of them.

Whilst I wasn’t well known by name, (I didn’t exactly promote myself as a ‘figure’ during that time) for those in the know I had gained a reputation for hard work (to the point of exhaustion), dedication and became known for my ability to conjure up miracles from essentially nothing. A social media MacGuyver able to put together content plans with nothing but half a screenshot and a second-hand paperclip. I was hired in the short term at Square Enix to essentially rescue a project after the previous Community Manager (CM) disappeared straight after it was announced. I ended up writing a bunch of game lore and cobbling together the foundation of something that could be built on. From there, after some disappointment, I ended up in Belgium where I led a tight-nit multinational team of newcomers to the role, as we dealt with all manner of projects. Instructing them as mentor/teacher.

I worked on multiple projects; I turned my hand to advertising campaigns having never previously been given a dime except for the convention and essentially doubled the revenue being made and halved the cost. In time one  project was announced to be wound up and, again with nothing, I took over the reigns to somehow get a social game people had spent money on to conclusion and salvage the situation for the creators.  I became de facto Producer and with nothing in my resources and a product announced to be closing I grew the English community by 50,000 in one and a half months. Sent session numbers through the roof and actually brought the game to a resolution which didn’t involve people screaming for blood. They had their money’s worth and they were happy. I still get messages asking if I can somehow bring it back.

After the Belgian firm turned heel on its own employees, I left and my team joined me as soon as they were able. Unemployment was better than staying at a time when there was a global recession going on. That says more than anything else I could. But that team was good, very good. Two have gone on to work with big companies within the games industry and I’m beyond proud of them.

Life took me back to the UK and I ended up working here at VRFocus. Did you know I’ve been here over two years now? It doesn’t feel it. But I have. I’m still a CM, albeit “Community Manager & Writer” now, I do what I can and that reputation I have is still very much in effect. Although the person behind it is rather more tired and worn looking than his 2007 equivalent.

True story: After Square I applied for a job at a major UK studio and during the interview was surprised to be asked if I wasn’t too old to be a Community Manager. I was then told, dumbfounded, in a phone call that I wouldn’t be progressing further and one of the reasons given was “we think you’re too old for the role”. I also didn’t have “the look we are going for”, apparently. Which made no real sense. Apart from the fact discriminating on the grounds of age (as well as apparently, my face) is illegal, I was 28. They made me sound like Methuselah. They’d probably have a coronary to discover I’m still one at 34! (Before anyone asks I was so shocked at what I was hearing it took some considerable time before I’d really realised what had been said, and by then it was too late to suddenly go “hey, hang on a minute!”.)

It all evolves. Much like VR – which we will come back to, I promise.

In fact this reminiscing is partly due to reading an excellent article on what the job entails by my opposite number (I… guess? Although she has a much better title than me – and she has a electronic fancy follower clock/counter that I desperately want to steal.) from Upload VR, Elizabeth Scott. Who got me thinking about what it is I do here and have done previously. But if you’re unsure what it is I do, I write this and Life in 360 and a number of other posts/features as required. Sort out most of the graphics, the moderation, and am the person you talk to on Twitter, or Facebook or Reddit if you see VRFocus being chatty there. I sort the social media in general when I’m in. I work with various partners and the guests writers we have to produce content, I work on the website itself – now with the new site’s designer. I’m HR, I run the time sheets. I edit videos when required. I run events when we run them but you’ll probably never see me at a main one. I search for stories and allocate them to the writers, with whom I work on their stories as I need. I’m, as my author description says, the unofficial Deputy Editor.

I fix.

I’m basically a cross between an online janitor and a hatstand.

But the core of the job is you help, and whilst I’m presently more on social than anything else. It’s kind of ironic that a guy who is heavy on the social anxiety made this his career. But hey, I never said I was smart. Ten years, four companies and a lot of projects have passed. The job has changed and evolved throughout those years and some point in the future it will change again – and it might be VR that changes it.

Community Management is part of that family of Customer Relations-type roles in business. It sort-of-kinda sits between everything. It’s marketing, it’s public relations, it’s creative and design, it’s finance and even legal (sometimes) and several of those are already being touched on and altered by other types of technology. The most obvious one being Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). In the same way will there come a time where a CM’s role will also be to respond to discussions on an article using such a system? Will a young wide-eyed fan be thrust into a virtual forum room to monitor reactions to Mario & Sonic At The Lunar 2028 Olympic Games? Appearing as a cartoony Avatar holding up the announcement trailer for you to then step into. All care of Oculus and Facebook’s Rooms system. Perhaps they’ll appear in your office or classroom as a virtual projection, displayed by Microsoft HoloLens to discuss a news story.

Will my career be supplanted by something else, all travel and interaction made virtual? I’m not sure I’d like that, if I’m honest.  But that’s a question to be answered by the future – and the future is coming fast. For now I’ll continue to evolve as best as I can. Will I be doing the same role in 10 years? Who is to say.

Here’s to a decade.

  from VRFocus http://ift.tt/2nvWqkp

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