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duhliriouss · 4 years

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A Pawn & A King Chapter Three

If you haven’t already, please read the previous chapters listed below before continuing:

Prologue * Chapter One * Chapter two

A/N: Hello everyone! It’s finally out! Yay! I also started to make my own gifs. The one you see above is the day Arthur meets Sophie. I am following the timeline of the movie to match my story. So this gif is the same day that goes with the beginning of this chapter. I will be doing this for all future chapters. I believe it will really set the mood for what’s going on! Enjoy ❣️

Story Summary: Y/N had lived her whole life in Gotham being unappreciated and disgaurded. With no family and an abusive roommate to rely on, Y/N doesn’t have much of a choice to resign anywhere else in the city. Yet she keeps on giving naively until her decent into madness and her meeting of the Joker.

Chapter Summary: Y/N finally escapes her apartment to go out for coffee with Arthur. They learn more about each other in a rather different approach.

Beta Reader: @pcrushinnerd , you did a great job on proof reading this. Thank you so much ❣️

Warnings: mentions of assault and self harm, Family Trauma, swearing, so much FLUFF but contains quite a bit of angst.

Word Count: 3,733

Chapter Three:

The air hung heavy with the thrill on your rash decision that transpired just seconds ago. Arthur had left right after your phone call to come get you so you didn’t have to walk alone to…well, wherever he was taking you….

Coffee

Though he never said where. The flashes of excitement that coiled throughout your body made you not mind so much. You put out your cigarette in the fake crystal ash tray on the nightstand and placed the phone back on the wall. You stood up, the sun sinking past the window with golden shades of yellow dancing across the bedroom, instantly making your way over to the rickety sliding doors of the closet to pick out what you were going to wear. You were still wearing your work pants and just a bra.

You desperately started to go through your cheap selection of clothes, moving the hangers frantically. Your eyes lingered hesitantly on a dark blue ruffled halter dress with long sleeves that exposed your upper chest and shoulders; It was cute, simple enough to save your innocence. You took it off the pole, tossing it on the bed before discarding what you had left on. You quickly got dressed then rushed to the bathroom to wash your face and touch up your hair. Your old makeup from the day now washed off, you looked back in the smashed mirror to take in the bruises that had darkened around your face. You could still hear the broken glass--but this time it was a melody of shards to the already formed scar on your damaged hand.

It was hard to shake off this feeling. It was hard to forget and pretend like this wasn’t hurting you so deeply within. You could handle bruises. You could handle scars. But you were beaten. Discarded… Forgotten. And you only answered by beating, discarding and forgetting yourself. You took a deep breath to release your disturbed thoughts, reaching out to your box of makeup. You covered everything you could. Still staying with the unusual dark purple eyeshadow to blend in with your bruised eye.

Knock knock knock

Blood rushed to your ears.

“Coming!”

He was finally here. And you were going to do this. You took one final approving look in the shards of your reflection before running to grab everything you could for your date.

Was it even considered a date? You weren’t sure if Arthur was even attracted to you.

Maybe he’s just wanting to get to know me and be friends because we run into each other so often?

Your insecurities were getting the best of you as you struggled to make sure you had everything you needed before leaving the apartment.

You shut off the radio that still played on the floor and grabbed your usual black coat and purse. You were getting nervous now by the second. You took a deep breath then opened the door…and there he was. His gaze went up to you as the door opened. He watched as you stood there frozen and out of breath for just a second with your hand still on the side of the frame. He was wearing his tan jacket with his hair slicked back again like it was when you saw him at your appointment. You noticed he was staring back at you without saying anything, which forced you to be the first to speak as you came back to your senses.

“Hi….” Your voice was barley a whisper.

“Hi…you um - you look wonderful, are you ready?”

You let out a nervous laugh

“Thank you…um…yes I am”

The building suddenly felt quieter. Only then could you hear the soft commotion throughout the building. People walking up the metal stairs far down the hall, a door opening probably on the floor below. You were both so nervous and it was incredibly obvious between the two of you. Blood rushed to your rosy cheeks; you were clearly unsure on what to do or say next. This oddly made Arthur more calm however.

You were thankful as Arthur took the lead, reaching out his bent arm, displaying a warm crooked smile. You hesitantly reached with your left arm, intertwining it with his own. You looked up with a timid smile, a slight nod of your head before turning and using your free hand to close and lock the door. Arthur led you down the hallway in silence as you pondered on what to say next.

“So…Arthur, where are you taking me tonight?” You looked up at him as you spoke, taking in his side profile as you both stopped at the elevator door. He looked down at you now with the same smile as you pressed the elevator button.

“I thought we agreed on coffee?”

A small giggle left your lips. “Well of course, I knew that! I meant like…where?”

“Oh, sorry.” His free hand dug into his silky brown locks along with a nervous laugh. “I was thinking we could go to this place called Jittery Joe’s. It’s right down the block. It’s actually right in the middle of both of our apartment buildings.”

“Oh yeah I walk by it a lot but I’ve never went in. Sounds nice.”

Sounds nice? Come on Y/N get it together….

“Yeah, it is nice actually. I think you will really like it.”

Your heart fluttered to his words as you watched his smile grow a tad more confident as he began to nod his head adorably in agreement. The elevator finally halted to the main floor. Your arms were still entangled as the each of you rhythmically stepped out of the elevator doors into the main lobby. You took this time to dig into your coat pockets with your free hand to grab your cigarettes. You couldn’t feel them as you let go of Arthur, excessively padding all over to see where they were.

“ Hold on! Shit, I think I forgot my cigarettes! “

All you could hear was Arthur’s giggles as you continued your search through your bag now. Digging past crippled up receipts, quarters, pens and chapsticks. You halted when you heard the sound of a lighter flicking. You turned to face Arthur who still giggled at your ditziness only to find him lighting his own cigarette, passing it over to you.

“Here. Take this one.”

“Thank you….”

You reached up gently to pinch the end of the cigarette, accidentally brushing his fingers before bringing it to your parted lips. You blushed to the slight contact as you took your inhale. You actually blushed even more when you noticed Arthur didn’t take his eyes off you while you took your drag. You looked back down at the cigarette as you pulled it away from your lips, fidgeting it in your fingers in attempt to try and hide the heat that you felt hit your cheeks.

“Winstons…my father used to smoke these.”

“Yeah? Did he quit?”

“Who knows….”

“Oh.”

You looked back up to find Arthur looking back down at you thoughtfully. His warm green oceans studied yours as his mind wandered to how else he could relate to you. The only thing he wanted to know in this short moment was how many other things there was that you both shared.

Is she more like me than I had first anticipated?

His beautiful smile made your breath catch in your throat. You could see that his mind was pondering about something as his eyes held a twinkled dew in them, looking in at your own. You were close enough again to see how the crows feet beside his eyes returned for you, yet you were still embarrassed by the fact you accidentally moved the conversation into something that was probably too soon to talk about. Besides, you still didn’t really know each other too well….

It was clearly not something you were comfortable yet speaking about so you quickly cleared your throat, looking back down at the cigarette in between your fingers as you shuffled your feet to try and change the subject. Arthur took the hint and entwined his arm with yours again to encourage the both of you to begin walking again. You accepted his respectful gesture gratefully. You needed fresh air at this point anyway.

You both walked again in comforting silence. It was almost dark now outside and the chilling breeze felt good on your skin at first, but it was still raining from the night before. You reached into your bag and pulled out a black umbrella that you had stolen from Harvie since you didn’t own one.

“Let me?” Arthur’s voice cracked as he used his free hand to place his cigarette between his lips to reach over for the umbrella.

“Sure, thank you.”

You smiled bashfully as you handed the umbrella over to him. Your smile then turned into giggles as you watched Arthur begin to struggle to find the button to pop it open.

“It’s right here….”

You placed your hand boldly over his then guided his fingers to where the button was. Arthur instantly moved his gaze from your hand, to you. You didn’t notice until you realized he wasn’t pressing the button even though it was placed in perfect position. You looked back up at him only to find him staring right at you. His smile grew almost into a smirk. You smiled back. Your eyes locked for what felt like minutes, letting the raindrops engulf the both of you.

Say something, anything. You haven’t spoke in so long why are you being so shy now!

Arthur watched as you struggled beneath his gaze. He watched as your little nose scrunched up and your eyebrows furrowed together tightly. He huffed out a laugh at your adorable timidness. It was strangely making him more and more confident and he loved it. It was so very new to him.

Why is he laughing at me?

“Why are laughing?” you asked quietly, clearly afraid that you have done something stupid.

“You don’t even have to say anything to be so…” irresistible, he thought “…fascinating.”

The flowery shade on your cheeks grew brighter and before you could say anything else, Arthur turned and clicked the button on the umbrella, making you jump slightly in response. You both giggled as he covered the both of you from the rain and continued your walk to the coffee shop.

You leaned in to each other tightly for the rest of the walk. Making small talk but mainly strolling quietly, listening to the sirens and dog barks from the other apartments you passed.

The door jingled as Arthur let you go In first. He flicked his cigarette to the ground and closed the umbrella before following behind you, keeping tabs on every detail of your body language.

Jittery Joe’s was a small restaurant; serving comfort food, baked goods and essentially coffee. From the outside you couldn’t tell, but It was designed almost like you were walking into a more opened up bus. Definitely car themed which was hard to tell with all the Thomas Wayne posters and newsletter fliers everywhere. Dark red stools which looked like they used to be bright and flashy at one point scattered in a line in front of the main counter.

Arthur half skipped to pull out a seat for you, opening his palms to take your coat and purse. You handed your items over to him and took a seat. Music played quietly in the background mixed with clattering mugs and plates.

Arthur took his seat next to you, raising his hand anxiously to get the attention of the waitress behind the counter. She came over with an annoyed sigh. Arthur turned to you in a polite manner to signal you to order first.

“Hi. Could I just get a regular coffee? A little cream and sugar, please,” you asked politely

“And you…Arthur?” The waitress asked impatiently.

“The usual, please.”

“I see a lot of people in my day, I don’t have time to remember your ‘usual,’” she almost spat. You instantly snapped your head up to the waitress in astonishment. You looked over to Arthur who didn’t really seem bothered by the absolute disrespect she was giving him.

He cleared his throat. “Sorry ma’am--black with lots of sugar.” He kept his eyes down as he spoke.

Without another word she turned around to go make your coffees. You watched in disgust until she was out of sight in the back kitchens.

“Wow, that was insanely rude,” you said gently to Arthur, twisting the stool to face him, your knees slightly touching his as he turned to face you as well. He still kept his gaze down.

“I’ve seen worse. I wouldn’t worry about it “

Your lips and eyebrows sunk downwards more. Was he treated this way a lot? You have heard some of his stories when you had group sessions in Arkham State Hospital years ago. So it made sense why he would feel this way at this point.

His attention was now focused on pulling his pack of cigarettes out of his tan coat pocket again. You subconsciously took this secret opportunity to stare at him. His hair wasn’t as slicked back anymore. You were both still wet from standing in the rain so little strands of his hair trickled down his face with little beads of water at the tips. Your (y/h/c) hair did the same but clung to your face a little.

He finally looked up at you with a slight, tilted smirk. He knew you were watching him with a rambling mind. It was obvious by the fact you never responded to him. You realized this as he reached his pack over to you with a Winston pulled slightly out for you to grab. You swallowed hard, feeling caught in the act as you reached over and grabbed the cigarette.

“Thank you…” you mumbled as you placed it between your lips.

Arthur reached over again to light it for you.

“You’re welcome,” he cooed.

-Background Music-

( Everybody Plays the Fool - The Main Ingredient )

It was silent except for the music that played in the background as the waitress finally came over with your coffees and placed them down. You didn’t bother to even look at her but watched as Arthur gave her an awkward smile with a whispered thanks. You smiled at that. You both sipped your coffees in sync, still silent besides the music that you tapped your foot to:

Falling in love is such an easy thing to do

Your eyes kept locked as you took your sips. Placing your mugs on the counter in unison. You didn’t know what was going on. But there was this electricity in the air that was about to bite any second. You both took another drag from your cigarettes.

How can you help it when the music starts to play

And your ability to reason is swept away

Arthur’s gaze went down to your tapping foot. He tapped the rim of his mug with his fingers to the beat. He looked like he was thinking deeply before he started to huff out a small laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. It’s probably stupid….”

You straightened yourself out, looking more deeply into his dilated pupils. “Say it.”

“Do you want to dance?”

“In a coffee shop?”

“Yeah, I know. It was stupid, forget I asked….”

You looked up over Arthur’s shoulder to take in your surroundings. You were the only two customers in the building. Your eyes flicked over to the waitress who was leaned against the counter, distracted with headphones on her head which were connected to a Walkman. You usually would be too embarrassed to do such a thing in public. You couldn’t tell what it was, but something was making you feel very audacious.

Was it Arthur’s energy? Your past few days causing you to lash out in an unusual way?

Your eyes flicked back to Arthur.

“I would love to.”

Arthur’s head snapped up to meet your gaze. His lips parted slightly in bewilderment, quickly turning into a wide smile. He tossed his cigarette into his coffee, letting out a few more excited laughs, nodding his head as he stood up straight, his arms stick straight. He got up so fast that the stool almost toppled over. He quickly grabbed it and fixed, pushing it in then turning back to you; who was still sitting. He was nervous. And so were you.

He shakily reached his arm out for you to grab. You couldn’t stop smiling as you took a deep breath and grabbed his hand. This was your first time dancing with somebody. And unbeknownst to you, his first time as well…other than with his Mother, of course.

He pulled you up swiftly and started to walk backwards, leading you to the middle of the restaurant. As you got into position, looking in each other in the eyes, the song ended.

You both looked down and began to laugh. Hands still clasped together. You looked up again at each other, both with tears in your eyes from laughing so hard.

“We’re not very good at this, clearly,” you said between your giggles.

“I have an idea,” Arthur quickly announced before turning around and walking over to the jukebox that sat in the far right corner of the small restaurant. He pulled out a few quarters and placed them in the machine. He replayed the same song. He turned around and shed his coat, tossing it on the counter. This caught the waitress’s attention finally. She watched as Arthur strolled gracefully over to you in just his gray vest and dark tan jeans, taking your hands again.

You looked over and watched as she rolled her eyes and took her leave to the back kitchens.

You focused back on each other now. You felt frozen. Your feet felt glued to the floor as you kept your eyes on Arthur’s. He sensed your insecurities.

“Just relax. I’m a good dancer you know.”

“Oh really?” you couldn’t stop giggling for the life of you. “Why the same song?”

“Dancing with you to this song is all I was thinking about. I wanna make sure it happens…” his voice sounded dead tone serious but his smile was still so giddy, matching your own.

There was space between the both of you, enough to fit another person. He gripped both of your hands steadily and began to move your arms in and out, bringing you into a rhythm, then moving side to side, dipping your bodies left to right. Your legs finally began to move to match his own. It was slow at first. He finally brought you in, your chests against each other. One arm bent together and the other stretched out with his to the side, dipping up and down. He twisted you then spun you, letting go of your left hand then bringing it back again. Your pace began to quicken. Your laughs grew louder.

He twisted and spun you again, creating a routine. But before you knew it you were dipped, letting your wet (y/h/c) brushing against the dirty floor. You both laughed even louder as he brought you up again and spun you around, bringing your back against his chest and swaying you back and forth.

It definitely wasn’t a graceful song to dance to. But that’s what made it so hilarious. He was still behind you as his hands moved to the backs of your arms, taking control of them and pulling them from side to side.

He used every quirky move he could just to hear the sweet sounds of your laughter filling this dreary restaurant. You’ve never seen Arthur act so goofy. You didn’t even know he had this side to him. You’ve never felt so alive. Nothing mattered right now. Your past, your future, your surroundings were completely irrelevant in this moment.

Your back still stayed against his chest. You leaned your head back against his shoulder, keeping your eyes closed as the music started to die out, letting both of your laughter die down as well. Arthur still swayed a little with you as he took this time to look down at you. He was so close to you and he couldn’t believe it. This was the closest he’s ever seen your delicate skin, every feature of your dimples, the little baby hairs on your cheeks.

He looked even deeper to the maroon lipstick on your lips. He dragged his eyes up slowly until they reached your closed eyelids. Your dark eyelashes were a blanket over your darkened bags, still fluttered shut as you hummed against his chest. He stared at the bags under your eyes even closer. It looked strange to him.. like makeup?

He studied all over your eyes now at the dark purple eye shadow. The rain must have washed a lot of the eye makeup off. His eyes flickered all over your face now as he began to realize they were bruises, lots of them. It was not just makeup.

His muscles tensed as he leaned forward more to look at your bare chest since you were wearing the halter dress. His eyes fell to the multiple other bruises that littered your collarbones.

How could I not have noticed? he thought

“Y/N,” his voice was stern

“Yes?” you answered gingerly, keeping your eyes closed. You were completely oblivious, still lost in the moment.

“Y/N, please stop and look at me.” You felt the air change immediately. The chill In his voice causing you to finally snap your eyes open. You brought your head back up and turned around to face him.

“Arthur... what’s wrong? Was it something I di—”

“Are you safe at home? “ he interrupted you

“What?”

“Just please.. answer me honestly, it’s okay. I promise. Now tell me…please, did somebody hurt you?”

“Yes….”

“Who was it?”

“...It was Harvie. And myself….”

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abelkia · 2 years

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La playlist de l'émission de ce jeudi matin sur Radio Campus Bruxelles entre 6h30 et 9h : Francis Bebey "Guinée" (Psychedelic Sanza 1982-1984/BORN BAD RECORDS/2014) Eric Chenaux "Hold the Line" (Say Laura/Constellation Records/2022) Grouper "Unclean Mind" (Shade/Kranky/2021) Michael Hurley "Love is the Closest Thing" (The Time of the Foxgloves/No Quarter/2021) Ivor Cutler Trio "I'm Going in a Field" (Ludo/RevOla Records/1967) Devendra Banhart "I Feel Just Like a Child" (Cripple Crow/XL Recordings/2005) Abner Jay "Shenandoah" (I Don't Have Time to Lie to You/Mississippi Records/2021) Myriam Gendron "C'est dans les vieux pays" (Ma délire - Songs of Love, Lost & Found/FEEDING TUBE RECORDS/Les Albums Claus/2021) Neneh Cherry & The Thing "Dirt" (The Cherry Thing/Smalltown Supersound/2012) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds "The Curse of Millhaven" (Murder Ballads/Mute Records/1996) Sourdure "Vespres dau Raibar" (De Mòrt Viva/Les Disques du Festival Permanent/2018) Space Afrika (feat. Kinsey Lloyd) "U" (Honest Labour/Dais Records/2021) Von Sudenfed "Family Feud" (Tromatic Reflexxions/Domino Recording Company/2007) Nacht Und Nebel "Movoco Synthaca" (7"/Laguna Records/1982) They Must Be Russians "Don't Try to Cure Yourself" (7"/Fresh Records/1980) Le Villejuif Underground "Le Villejuif Underground" (Heavy Black Matter EP/BORN BAD RECORDS/2016) The Limiñanas "Je ne suis pas très drogue" (The Limiñanas/Trouble In Mind Records/2010) West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band "Suppose They Give a War and No One Comes" (Creative Outlaws - US Underground 1962-1970/Trikont/1967) Aymeric de Tapol "J'ai dansé avec elle" (7"/Lexi Disques/2016) Kloot Per W "Sex Wars 2" (Sex Wars EP/EE Tapes/1980-2013) Bruit noir "L'Europe" (II / III/Ici d'ailleurs/2019) Lee Hazlewood "Our Little Blue Boy" (A House Safe for Tigers/Light In The Attic Records/1975-2012) Queens of the Stone Age (Feat. Mark Lanegan) "I Think I Lost My Headache" (R/Interscope Records/2000) https://www.instagram.com/p/CaXs8J6Njyq/?utm_medium=tumblr

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podcake · 7 years

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♥ it’s time to spread your podcast palette ♥

With a whole summer to spend collecting seashells and collecting new sounds from the likes of ambitious independent artists, we finally get a chance to cuddle up like a stray fly in a cobweb in the early weeks of October.

Grab your ham radio, dawn your best mask, and get infinite before Halloween comes because today PodCake has more than the average horror story to keep you cool and creepy.

Looking for something fresh to please that sudden thirst for audio storytelling? Look no further as PodCake has six more podcasts you’ll certainly love.

1. Station to Station

A sci-fi mystery/horror about a science project with dark secrets, a biochemist with melancholic tendencies, and the mysterious notes of a lost scientist, set on research cruise several hundred miles away from land. Also featuring: corporate espionage, loss, morality, and close encounters of the eldritch kind.

In what seems to be an ongoing trend of aquatic themed mystery shows, alongside the likes of The Bridge and Passage, comes Station to Station that has been lovingly provided by the Procyon Podcast Network who are pulling out all the stops in this surprisingly rich and psychological romp that isn’t afraid to kick start things in an impressive first episode.

Fans of methodically intelligent shows such Ars Paradoxica are bound to get wrapped up in Station to Station’s smart writing and unashamedly scientific approach to things. Wear your floaties for this one because it will hit you with a big splash.

2. The Earth Collective

A sci-fi audio drama delivered as a first hand account from the eyes of Joseph Crane, Humanity's 'last historian', as he attempts to chronicle their survival in rolling cities known as The Collective, fleeing from a malicious entity only found in the darkside of the planet.

Here we are with a sci-fi story that has been massively overlooked, even by yours truly. In The Earth Collective, we focus on a self described “Mankind’s Last Historian” who is collecting recordings on what few Ancestor Satellites remain. But a returning threat might just bring the planet of Oasus to disaster.

Richly unique with a keen focus on survival, rebuilding society, and, above all, a certain looming eldritch threat as an antagonist that gives this show a certain Lovecraftian edge,The Earth Collective is a show well worth getting invested in.

3. What’s The Frequency?

A psychedelic noir audio drama podcast set in 1940s Los Angeles. Recently radio broadcasts in the city have been reduced to static, leaving a popular radio serial as the only remaining show on the air. Even then the show finds itself continuously interrupted by a mysterious broadcast. A lone distorted voice reaching out for help. Follow Walter “Troubles” Mix and his partner Whitney as they search for a missing writer and navigate through a city quickly falling into madness. Could the mysterious voice be the culprit? Will anyone be able to stop the madness from spreading? And… What’s The Frequency?

A new show making the rounds and piquing the intrigue of quite a few audio drama fans is the noir series What’s The Frequency? which focuses on a duo of detectives seeking out the lost voice behind the last source of radio entertainment in an alternative Los Angeles. Insanity ensues.

What’s The Frequency? is the trippy mystery show we’ve all been waiting for. It’s Juno Steel on ecstasy, it’s fun and freaky, and the kind of experimentation and bold story that will likely be making the rounds for sometime.

4. The Blood Crow Stories

The Blood Crow Stories is an anthology series of horror stories. Our first season highlights the story of the S.S. Utopia, a cruise ship in the early 1900's. Modern-day college student, Max, begins to do his thesis on the audio diaries of the passengers on the ship. What he didn't know were the horrors that were waiting for him among the tapes, and why the ship sank so mysteriously almost 100 years ago.

Tighten your best corset and slip on your plague doctor mask because we’re gonna take a voyage to the past with The Blood Crow Stories, one of the newest contenders in horror anthology audio drama.

Something bloody and beautiful awaits for those seeking out something a little more...vintage to keep their October nights exciting. So pour yourself a cocktail and tune into this one by candlelight because The Blood Crow Stories is something for those looking for something both delectably classy and creepy.

5. The After Disaster Broadcast

Jo Prendergast broadcasts on ham radio after only surviving the Yellowstone volcano erruption with luck. Her post-apocalyptic transmissions follow her as she finds survivors and a reason to go on.

In this new apocalypse story for the average survivalist, Jo Prendergast acts as our narrator in a devastated landscape short on survivors and sense. Bad pizza and crippling loneliness await for those looking for something early in episode numbers and ripe in potential for a promising first season.

With a nice blend of horror and comedy and heart, The After Disaster Broadcast paves the way for a series that will hang around for you even in the fading moments of a well deserved existential crisis.

6. The Infinite

A limited series fiction podcast revolving around an astronaut traveling through deep space.

One man alone in space, searching...Here we have The Infinite, a short but impressive sci-fi show consisting of only five episodes to date. Sometimes less and more and The Infinite provides an eerie and emotional ride for curious drifters.

It’s a pleasant combination of the Wolf 359 framework with a SAYER psychological horror edge for flavor. The Infinite is simple yet sinister and easy to breeze through with its tense but entertaining storytelling. I assure you’ll feel right at home.

now, get to listening.♥

#station to station #the earth collective #what's the frequency #the blood crow stories #the after disaster broadcast #the infinite #podcast #podcast recommendations #audio drama #radio drama #radio play #podcast palette collection

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jazzraft · 6 years

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incinerate

Day #5 for @glaiveweek Rated Teen And Up for minor violence Words 659

Luche owes Crowe his life. For the Act of Loyalty theme.

Crowe saved Luche’s life once. She saved it a lot and he saved hers and Nyx’s and Libs’s and everyone’s, every day. There was an innumerable count of situations that could have ended in somebody being slaughtered if someone else hadn’t been there to intervene.

But there was one time in particular, once where Luche had felt the dread and panic of impending death at its most visceral, and Crowe had ripped it from his skeleton and buried it with the thing that nearly killed him.

When they were at war, when the wastelands beyond the Wall were aflame and the daemons swarmed across the scorched earth, life and death could happen so quickly that they had as much gravity as a breath. A sharp inhale just before tearing into the warp, and a heavy exhale in the dirt on the other side. Life was a blade in hand, death a bullet. Too much happened in the moment to feel either of them. To be grateful for one or despair at the other. Like normal people.

But this one moment that felt like every moment in eternity compounded into one long scream in his brain, he felt it. He felt the profound terror of finality. He had too much time, too many steps to take with steel against the back of his neck, to be terrified of what happened next. To wonder at how badly it was going to hurt when the operative twisted their wrist and slid the blade across the front of his throat.

He’d already done his fighting. He’d already tried and failed and considered every possible way to survive this encounter until his thoughts were emptied of anything but the inevitability of what was about to happen to him.

Nif spies were a common threat to the kingdom, assassins constantly repelled by the Glaive to ensure the safety of the royal family. Luche had been one amongst those honored for their bravery and excellence. But that was when the blades were pointed at the King. He’d never had them snuck up on himself before.

He’d never been the target himself. He’d never had anything of value that the Empire might threaten him for. He just had to be the one on archive duty this one night. He just had to be the one that knew where the personnel files were.

They wanted leverage, they told him in a disguised voice – some Magitek device that warbled their words like radio static. They wanted to try dismantling the King’s elite fighting force from the inside-out to cripple the kingdom’s defenses. He would take them to the files they demanded and then die for it, no matter how many promises the thief made that he would be fine if he just cooperated.

He was weaponless, powerless, the operative had come prepared to encounter a glaive. And with all of his strategies for escape seized under panic, Luche was just counting the last steps to the files and begging forgiveness to the Six for all of his life’s mistakes.

And then, like the penitent flames of the Infernian’s purgatory, he was damned. Damned to a lifetime of devotion to the burnt orange-browns of Crowe Altius’s glare. His soul had been forfeit to the icy steel of the Empire and its deception. She stole it for herself.

The would-be assassin’s arms wind-milled beneath the crackle of the fire, distorted voice a horrible, mechanical screech as the tech curdled and twisted beneath their mask. They stilled as a black, prone corpse on the ground, Crowe’s fingertips outstretched to the licks of flame and bidding them to her will.

“You owe me another drink, Lazarus,” she beamed when a sharp kick to the corpse’s leg confirmed for her that it was, in fact, a corpse.

Years later, when they tried to turn him, when he received the order to condemn her to the same death she spared him from… he owed her.

#glaiveweek #kingsglaive #crowe altius #luche lazarus #myfic

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elagainst-blog · 4 years

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🗣 Day 24 they tried to say Blacks don't Fight, Scared of Heights and definitely can't Fly, but these brothers band together and prove them wrong to help win the war... The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African American military aviators in the United States armed forces. During World War II, African Americans in many U.S. states still were subject to racist Jim Crow laws. The American military was racially segregated, as was much of the federal government. The Tuskegee Airmen were subject to racial discrimination, both within and outside the army. Despite these adversities, they trained and flew with distinction. Although the 477th Bombardment Group "worked up" on North American B-25 Mitchell bombers, they never served in combat; the Tuskegee 332nd Fighter Group was the only operational unit, first sent overseas as part of Operation Torch, then in action in Sicily and Italy, before being deployed as bomber escorts in Europe where they were particularly successful in their missions The Mustang pilot spotted the string of Bf-109's heading toward the crippled B-24. The pilot, a Lt. Weathers, dropped his wing tanks, and turned into the German formation. He gave the leader a burst with his .50 calibers and it nosed up, smoking, and soon went hurtling down to the ground. The pilot radioed the others in his flight and heard "I'm right behind you." But when Weathers looked back for himself, all he could see was the nose cannon of another Bf-109, pointing right at him. He dropped flaps and chopped throttle, instantly slowing his Mustang, and the Bf-109 overran him. A few bursts, and Lt. Weathers had his second kill of the day. Two more e/a were still in view and seemed like easy pickings, but the voice of the Group CO echoed in the pilot's mind, "Your job is to protect the bombers and not chase enemy aircraft for personal glory." Weathers returned to the bomber. Two things were unusual about this American fighter pilot. First, he had foregone a sure kill. Second, he was Black. He flew with the 332nd Fighter Group, "The Redtails," the famous all-Black outfit that fought both American prejudice and Nazi militarism. Under the leadership and iron discipline of Col. B (at Elagainst) https://www.instagram.com/p/B8-0MiuFncV/?igshid=1xsos9kjx118z

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a-deluded-banana · 4 years

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a shot in the dark

She had no place to be and no promises to keep. It was one of those lazy, Kool-Aid-sipping, porch-swinging August afternoons, the ones that feel as if time is just ambling along or maybe pausing for a nice long nap. There had been so many of those afternoons that summer. The freedom would be pleasant, she thought, if only there were something to do with it. There hadn’t been a speck of excitement in the town of Douglasville since Mr. Hobbes’ cow disappeared three months ago. Curious and adventure-hungry, she was a loaded spring.

“Maisie, what did I tell you? You’ll break your neck. And don’t let your skirt fall down like that.” Her mother’s voice cut into her thoughts. Reluctantly she swung down from the porch railing where she had been hanging by her knees and fixed her mother with a glare from across the yard.

But her sulkiness dissipated at the sound of familiar footsteps. “Maisie, Maisie, c’mon!” It was Thomas, one of the neighborhood kids, a red-headed, freckle-faced wisp of a boy. He was Maisie’s favorite—although she’d never admit it—because he had a rebellious streak and never missed an opportunity to stir up mischief at school. Everyone knew him by the way he walked, a distinct long-short rhythm, the mark of anyone crippled by polio. The other kids teased him for it. He was in the sixth grade, a year older than Maisie, but in the summer that didn’t matter.

“What?”

“I gotta show you somethin’. C’mon!” In his eyes danced the excitement Maisie had been waiting for.

“What is it?”

“You’ll see.” His lanky, sunburnt arm beckoned her to follow.

With a cautionary glance over her shoulder at her mother, who was hanging up a pair of underwear and humming busily to herself, Maisie fell into step beside the boy, the dirt road’s dusty exhales rising in their wake. When they had reached the corner before Thomas's house, he slackened his pace, a finger to his lips. Staying close to the side of the house, he led Maisie into the backyard.

They stood before Thomas's father’s toolshed. Rusty hinges creaked twice as the door opened and quickly closed again. Once they were out of sight, Thomas's eyes changed. “You gotta swear not to tell anyone, okay?”

“Why?”

“‘Cause if my dad finds out, I’m dead meat. Got it?”

Maisie nodded, her interest piqued.

“Pinky promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in--”

“Come over here then, and remember, be quiet.” The shifting of some crates, a box of white paint cans, and the broken frame of a washboard revealed as wooden chest, which Thomas opened.

Maisie had never seen a gun before—not in real life, at least. It lay on a neatly folded bed of blue velvet and looked like it would hurt her if she made it angry.

“I found the key under my dad’s bed.”

“Does it work?”

“Yep, she’s all loaded up and everythin’.” He lifted the gun out of its holding place as if it were a sleeping princess, and cradled it in his arms. “A big one, too.”

She let him swoon over it until curiosity got the better of her. “Can I hold it?”

“If you’re careful. Don’t drop it.” He held out the weapon, albeit reluctantly. “Well c’mon. It’s not gonna jump out and bite you.”

She hadn’t expected it to feel so heavy in her hands. Nor had she expected the thrill that travelled up her spine or the peculiar sense of boldness. Still, she tried not to let Thomas see her shaking hands.

“You’re holdin’ it like a girl,” he laughed.

“Well how do you know the right way to hold it?”

“Every guy knows how to hold a gun,” he replied, puffing out his chest slightly.

“Show me, then.”

He guided her fingers around the weapon. “You wrap your right hand over your left, and your pointer finger—no, not that one, your pointer—goes along here like this. And when you wanna shoot, you put it here.”

Her finger leapt off the trigger as soon as his guiding hands were gone. “You don’t plan to use it, do you?” She gingerly returned it.

“Naw, I wouldn’t actually use it. It could come in handy, though.”

But when she looked up at him to ask why, all she saw was the angry black eye of the thing, hovering inches from hers. “Put that down!” She backed up, skittish suddenly, nearly upsetting a small tower of boxes.

“Gee, I was only joking.” But Thomas pointed it at the window instead, cocked his head, and winked down the length of the gun, a John Wayne drawl coming from his licked lips. “Let’s go on an adventure.”

“What kind of adventure?”

“Remember that old crank Mr. Grimm?”

Of course she did. Everybody knew Mr. Grimm. The infamous town drunk lived at the outer edge of the village, in a droopy-eyed house that stood directly next to the dump; rumor had it the old man had been born and raised right in that very dump, and Maisie suspected he’d die there too.

“Yeah, what about him?”

“Well, he’s always sayin’ things about my leg on my way to school. I’m ‘bout to show him what I’m made of.”

Not a soul in Douglasville knew of an anger quite as bitter or as deep-rooted as Mr. Grimm's. Every morning at sunup, already scowling, he would hobble down the street, making sure to tromp on someone’s flower bed on the way, and take his usual place on the stoop of the corner post office, where he sat and commented on ladies’ dresses and grumbled about the state of politics and generally cursed everything under the sun—but his favorite pastime of all was tormenting schoolchildren. Especially Thomas, with his leg brace and funny walk.

“...What do you mean?”

“Oh, just tease ‘im a little, you know how he gets all worked up over things.” He had slipped the gun down his pant leg and now stood with a hand on the doorknob. “You coming?”

“You’re not… bringing that along, are you?”

“Only in case of an emergency. And to scare ‘im.” He shrugged as if people went out every day with guns hidden under their pants. “Aw c’mon, it’ll be funny!”

Maisie picked at a scab on her elbow. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t be such a sissy.”

He might as well have slapped her square in the face; there was nothing Maisie hated more than being called a sissy. “Okay,” she said, but only to nurse her wounded pride, and because she was left with no other option. And besides, Thomas had a point; it would be pretty funny. And so the adventure was on.

--------

Crows ruled the dump from atop heaping thrones of discarded things, pecking and perching and ruffling their dust-coated black feathers. To Maisie, as well as most of the kids of Douglasville, the dump was a land of endless possibility. What was tossed out when someone died or moved out could be salvaged and take on a new life for another. So Maisie had come to know her way around the dump like the back of her hand.

Now Thomas was shushing her. “He’ll be gettin’ home right about now.” As if in response, Mr. Grimm came staggering up the sidewalk, sending the two daredevils darting for cover behind the nearest mountain of junk. Mr. Grimm’s door slammed.

Thomas peered over a worn-out tire. “Looks like we can hide under the kitchen window. He won’t be able to see us down there. I say go, we make a run for it, got it?” Maisie got a little thrill and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Go!”

They made it to safety. Crouching in their hideout, Maisie looked above her head at a gnarled mass of vines, shriveled by the summer heat and clinging to the trellis. It whispered as if threatening to tell their secret.

“Go look in the window,” Thomas hissed in her ear, “and tell me what you see.”

“Why can’t you do it?” Maisie whined.

“‘Cause I gotta be on the lookout in case we need to get out of here in a hurry. Go on.” But his leg brace glinted the real reason as the sun beat down on his twisted frame and his eyes full of brewing storm.

Against her better judgement, but out of pity that Thomas couldn’t, Maisie trusted the trellis with her weight as she craned her neck to see over the windowsill. Even from outside, the air in the house felt stagnant and thick. Flies circled over a half-eaten loaf of stale-looking bread on the counter, and there was dust in the kitchen sink. Finally she noticed the man asleep in an armchair, one wrinkly arm dangling by his side as if he’d been dropped there by accident.

When she reported the news, Thomas visibly deflated. “We’ll just wait until he wakes up then.”

Their hiding place was smaller than it had looked from afar, and their clammy skin was pressed together in some places. In their pre-adolescence a shared self-consciousness descended upon them. Maisie busied herself by wrapping bits of dead vine around her finger. She’d never really thought of people in terms of boy or girl; were they really that different anyway? Why did she wear a skirt and not pants to church? What was it exactly that made a boy a boy and a girl a girl? She had extracted some vague clues from scraps of overheard grown-up conversation and a magazine she’d found in her dad’s coat pocket, but these were mismatched pieces of a puzzle she sensed you didn’t ask about anyway.

Above their heads, Mr. Grimm’s radio crackled out something about President Kennedy having made an appearance at a baseball game last Saturday. “My dad says President Kennedy is a blockhead Catholic,” Thomas whispered, wiping a trickle of sweat out of his eyes.

“You think we really will get a man on the moon someday?” Maisie pondered.

“Naw, I don’t think so.”

Maisie thought about it. “I do.”

“My dad says it’s a load of nonsense.”

Silence settled in. Beside Mr. Grimm’s house stood a quite healthy-looking apple tree Maisie hadn’t noticed before. She found a rotten apple and rolled it around with her toe. The fruit was small and green with a light dusting of pale red like a baby’s cheek. She wondered why death had come so early in its lifetime; perhaps a squirrel had accidentally knocked it off its branch. In any case, here it sat in Mr. Grimm’s dirt, decayed and full of worms.

Over time a lurking black shape became visible in Maisie’s peripheral vision like a shadow. As soon as she realized what it was, her heart leapt into her throat and she whisper-shrieked, “Put that thing down! Put it down!” The gun had been so close she had practically felt its breath on her temple—just like in the toolshed, only this time she didn’t know how long it had been there. By instinct, she had shrunk back against the trellis.

“Why do you do that?” she demanded.

“Shh! Stop being so loud.” He was polishing the weapon with the hem of his shirt.

“Why do you point it at me like that?”

“For practice.”

“Practice for what?”

“C’mon, you know I’m not gonna hurt you.”

"I know," Maisie said, "I just... I just hate it bein’ so close.”

“I’m gonna scare ‘im good,” Thomas was saying. “He’ll think he’s under attack, and when ‘e comes over to see what’s goin’ on, we’ll hide. Then, just when he’s startin’ to settle down again, I’ll shoot his hat right off, or somethin’. That’ll scare ‘im good.” Thomas's ginger hair flamed in the sun.

Maisie could hardly blame him for wanting to torment the old man; Mr. Grimm was a good-for-nothing bully, that part she knew—but the boy's eyes had a strange light, she thought.

But a noise in the house left the thought suspended in midair. Both children froze like deer in headlights as Thomas's eyes locked with Maisie’s.

As soon as Maisie could haul both of them up without causing a racket, the children were peeping over the windowsill by the stale bread and still-blabbering radio, the gun poised between their heads. Mr. Grimm stirred in his armchair. A tendril of dead vine crunched under Maisie's foot on the trellis and both children held their breath.

For the first time Maisie wondered what had happened to Mr. Grimm to make him so bitter. Perhaps the man had never been anything except angry in his life. A bony, blue-veined hand clutched drunkenly at a half-empty bottle arm’s length away on the table, knocking it to the floor. He swore at the broken fragments, then fell silent again.

“Well,” Maisie hissed, eager for the gun to be back in its cabinet, “wanna call it a day?”

But Thomas made no reply. A vein in his forehead was pulsing like the pounding of Maisie’s heart.

Maisie’s trembling grip on the trellis slackened with sweat. Through the window on the opposite wall of the house the sun was hanging heavy in the sky, and Maisie longed to be swinging on the porch railing again, without a care in the world. Besides, her mother must be wild with worry by now.

When Thomas looked at her, her stomach felt like it was being squeezed by a fist, and she felt like yelling out in powerlessness. In her confusion the thought came to her that Thomas could pull that very same trigger on her if he pleased, with only Mr. Grimm and the junkyard crows to bear witness. All earlier excitement was as stale as Mr. Grimm’s bread. Thomas's finger twitched. Would he? Could he?

Maisie tried to reassure herself. It was just a game of hide-and-seek—or better yet, they were a pair of secret agents waiting to expose the bad guys and save the day--only Maisie wasn’t sure who the bad guy was.

Then time went from barely moving to racing. With a considerable amount of effort, Mr. Grimm stood up from his chair and turned around. When he saw them, a look of drunken loathing contorted his face. The crows understood; they scattered, cawing their warnings. Maisie closed her eyes. Thomas cocked the gun, and in that moment she knew that whatever he was going to do, she couldn’t stop if she tried.

#story #short story #storytelling #my story #my short story #writer #writers #writing #sixties #60s #gun tw

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theoutsidenormal · 7 years

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Resident Evil 7 is an experience that feels undeniably authentic

Tone and tropes made Resident Evil 7 such an improvement over its predecessors. I attempt to argue that the game made important steps forward by looking back at just what made its series feel true to itself, and by allowing itself to exist within that universe made it that much better than previous games in the series.

'WHADDYA BUYIN?!' The words, spoken gruffly, echo against the walls of a damp, dark cave, while a man wrapped in a headscarf chuckles his way through transactions, using money that I got from selling a brass pocket watch that had been fished from a well filled with wet, stinking excrement. The image is comical, as my crap-coated keepsake earnings translates into a first aid spray and presumably some kind of magic blessing on my handgun that means I am able to reload faster.

After I finish my shopping, the gruff merchant closes his jacket and waves me off, calling 'come back anytime!' after me as I press forward, eventually coming to a haunting graveyard, the atmospherics chilling me to the bone as a crow caws as if warning me away. A thick fog descends around me and then I hear the shrill scream of an unseen female assailant, murderously gripping a kitchen knife, her eyes aglow with evil as she calls for my death. The tension could be cut with such a knife, as I hesitantly wander around my foreboding surroundings in search of the scream's origin.

Such a story, adapted from just five minutes of gameplay, tells you all you need to know about what it feels like to play Resident Evil 4; the game shifts dramatically in tone from one moment to the next, from cheesy dialogue written with one's tongue pressed firmly into his cheek, to nerve-wracking tension and dread in just those five minutes.

In a lesser game, such a disconnect between the serious and the comedic could be called 'immersion-breaking', or 'disjointed', but in Resident Evil 4, widely considered one of the best and most-influential action titles of all time, the result is decidedly flavoursome - instantly, the game fits right into its own niche and becomes something instantly memorable, ironically the disconnect between the cheese and the tension only adds to the sense of immersion in the wacky world in which the game is set.

To say that Resident Evil's universe is odd is an understatement. In this world, men with huge biceps can punch boulders, one can heal crippling wounds instantaneously by eating plants, and doors can be unlocked by playing the piano conveniently located just a few feet away. Such elements wouldn't be out of place in a comedy-adventure game like Monkey Island, but instead these are staple tropes of the flagship franchise of the survival horror genre.

The important thing about this kind of authenticity is that the developers are creating experiences in order to be 'true' to the Resident Evil 'feel'. I hesitate to use the word 'formula' in this instance, because the 'formula' of Resident Evil has been thrown out the window enough times that such a word feels nonsensical in this context. However, I think the most important part of a Resident Evil game is the commitment to the vision of a horror B-Movie. The best moments in the series come from such an approach; Leon Kennedy's quip exchange with scenery-chewing villains in the fourth installment, and even in the first installment, with its Jill Sandwiches and Masters of Unlocking. Such moments have the kind of quality of bad horror movies of old, and if nothing else, the Resident Evil series definitely holds that influence clearly over its head.

This is where Resident Evil 7 succeeded where 6 failed. While the older entry in the series tried to wow with an approach to action not unlike a Michael Bay movie, with bombast, big explosions and frantic gunfights, it had all but ditched its previous horror influences in favour of an experience that simply did not feel like it belonged in Resident Evil. The truth of this is clear in how the game was received; many thought that while it was a well-polished, functional videogame it just was not what the series needed, and I think this is because it was lacking that undeniable element universal in Resident Evil; authenticity.

In 6 there were goofy moments, certainly, but the goofiness came from the game simply trying too hard to be something bigger than it was, not from understanding where it had come from. Trying to think back to Resident Evil 6, it just did not feel as hands-down memorable as other entries in the series; at least 5 had boulder-punching, after all. There simply wasn't a singular sense of feeling in the game; the adventure offered was set in a wide variety of locales, but none were allowed to stick, to show off how and why the atmosphere was creepy. It's telling that my favourite location in the game was also the one that seemed closest to a scene in Resident Evil 4; the scene in the church in Leon's campaign. The atmosphere became grim and the design of the levels at this point were excellent and felt truly in the style of the series. It is only a shame that the game was not confident enough in this vision.

However, 7 succeeded in all the areas where its predecessor fell flat. Right from the start there was an excellent sense of place; the swampy, ramshackle map where the game is set just bleeds atmosphere and feels strongly like approaching the village of Resident Evil 4. Particular attention is paid to the environment, which is dilapidated, dirty and broken, perfect for a horror setting.

Then the rest of the game's character set in; when compared with the over-the-top action of Resident Evil 6, 7 feels claustrophobic, slow and plodding. The difference is like night and day, especially as day turns to night in the game and you are acquainted with the Baker family; a group of people torn from all the negative stereotypes of the South of the USA. Much like the great villains of 4, Salazar and Saddler, the Bakers, Jack, Marguerite, and Lucas, are allowed to chew the scenery to their heart's content; their overacting adding to the general sense of unease and terror surrounding them. Even just looking at the characters there is something off-putting about them, a design decision that is almost certainly deliberate.

The storyline of the game shows that the developers understand where Resident Evil is at its best; aping and translating B-Movie horror tropes into videogame form with a sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-terrifying sense of character for added effect. Influences from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hallowe'en, Evil Dead et al. are clear from the outset. Jack Baker, in particular, apes a perfect horror movie villain; overacting in a way that is almost comical in his every movement, but then when he is threateningly bearing down on you there is a massive sense of panic that will certainly get your heart beating faster. The disconnect is meticulously paced, showing far more refinement than even the scene described in the first paragraph. It is undeniable that a sense of authenticity, the 'feel' of Resident Evil, has returned triumphant in this game.

Special honours go to Lucas, whose conversations with the player are a great send-up to the sharp radio dialogue between Leon and Salazar in Resident Evil 4, the villain allowed to go all-out in how much of an asshole he is, and the protagonist simply trying to make quips and one-liners as the 'straight-man' in all of this insanity. For this reason, I think Lucas' dialogue perfectly fits the tone of the game, and demonstrates the singular commitment to the vision of Resident Evil 7.

While I can get away with simply saying that Resident Evil 7 was excellent because of its commitment to horror, I believe that when you look deeper into what has changed between this game and its immediate predecessor is its commitment to Resident Evil, the series and the tropes associated with it. While 6 tried to evolve the series into something new, 7 looked precisely at what the series was, and through its tone, authenticity of character, embracing its B-Movie tropes, and allowing its world to exist in its totally-illogical way, perfectly recreated an experience that is truly, genuinely Resident Evil.

The reason for the series' wackiness is, in my opinion, all about authenticity. In creating such ubiquitous insanity, Resident Evil has crafted its very own niche and offers deep, albeit nonsensical immersion into an experience that is truly its own. It creates its own rules and sticks to them, even if the rules don't make much sense. This wackiness gives the series a definitive 'flavour', such that if you pick up and play any game you can instantly recognise that you are playing a Resident Evil game.

#resident evil 7 #biohazard #resident evil #resident evil 4 #authenticity #gaming #video games #horror #analysis

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dgoldradio · 4 years

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Twitter https://twitter.com/dgold post: Radio charts top song Devendra Banhart - Long Haired Child @honestfm @Spotify https://t.co/EuUoocpK7Z Cripple Crow https://t.co/5SW83BL8bf

#IFTTT #Twitter #dgold #radio

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cripplecrowradio · 2 years

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youtube

#cripple crow radio #shintaro sakamoto #Music #music video #Youtube

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sandiegodjstaci · 5 years

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The Hipster's Guide to Classic Country Music

Let’s face it…if your mountain man beard, microbrew fetish, and pipe collection are no longer enough, classic country music can help you get to the next level of hipster (so can a pair of Wrangler jeans). My name is DJ Staci, the Track Star, and I grew up on country music. I lived on a 5-acre llama ranch just outside of Seattle during the grunge era…do you see how there’s a hipster seed in there? I knew I was not your standard redneck when, at 14, my dad’s hunting drew me towards vegetarianism (celebrating 26 meat-free years now). At 18, I pierced my nose and moved to southern California where I could eat tofu, get feminism tattoos, and vote for democrats in a diverse, shame-free environment…but that country music seed definitely grew roots throughout my childhood. In fact, during my 20s, I escaped my days of drinking expensive juice and visiting organic farmer’s markets by honky tonkin’ every week. I would go line dancing at the Brandin’ Iron Saloon in San Bernardino (the biggest & best honky tonk a.k.a. country bar west of Gilley’s…and watch John Travolta & Debra Winger in “Urban Cowboy” if you don’t understand either of those references).

Memes from We Hate Pop Country

Unfortunately, country music withered up and died after the 2000s. After DJing at the world’s largest country music festival (Stagecoach–the country cousin of Coachella), I had to stop listening to country music on the radio. The so-called country you hear on the radio today is known as “pop country” by country music purists (those of us who prefer classic country or “real” country). The artists who “ruined” country music are people like Taylor Swift, Sam Hunt, Florida Georgia Line, Thomas Rhett, & Luke Bryant (and many others). Follow “We Hate Pop Country” on Facebook to learn more.

If you like “Wake Me Up” by Avicii, “Honey I’m Good” by Andy Grammer, “I Will Wait” by Mumford & Sons, “The Country Death Song” by the Violent Femmes, “Easy” by Sheryl Crow, “Wish I Knew You” by the Revivalists, “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show, or Philip Phillips, classic country will be a great fit. If watching the movie Walk the Line turned you into a Johnny Cash fan, rest assured there is plenty more music like that out there. If you resonate as a defiant outsider or a feminist or a government-hating pothead, classic country music welcomes you with open arms! Classic country is outlaw music–pure and simple. It was created by people who knew they were on the outskirts of mainstream society and unshakingly flipped it the bird à la Johnny Cash at San Quentin (below).

Johnny Cash after photographer Jim Marshall asked him to do a shot for the warden (San Quentin Prison – 1969)

Did you know Loretta Lynn, who sang the feminist anthem “The Pill,” & Jack White from the White Stripes, who also has some killer bluegrass tunes, created an album together? Did you know Johnny Cash has covered songs by Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode? Have you heard Lady Gaga’s country roads version of “Born This Way?” Did you know Beyonce has a kick ass collab with the Dixie Chicks (the girl-power Texas band who was banned from country radio for saying they were ashamed that George Bush is from their home state) called “Daddy Lessons”? Did you know the black lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish bailed on the band so he could start a solo country music career (country fans know him as Darius Rucker)? Did you know when I DJ classic country parties, I have to ask the client if swear words are OK?

Do I have your attention now? I thought so. Let’s continue 🙂 You’ll love the country artists as much as you love their music–I promise.

Justin Timberlake & Chris Stapleton performing together at the 49th Country Music Association Awards

THE KING OF COUNTRY MUSIC

First, let’s start with the forefather of all country music kick-assery: Hank Williams. Hank signed to MGM Records in 1947 and his twangy anthems changed country music forever. He was famously fired by the Grand Ole Opry in 1952 after one of many no-shows. He lived a turbulent life that his son Hank Jr sings about in his cornerstone song “Family Tradition.” In true rock star style, Hank Sr. died of heart failure brought on by prescription drug abuse and alcoholism in 1953. Hipster-friendly Hank Williams songs include:

I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry

Hey Good Lookin’

Jambalaya (on the Bayou)

Tear in my Beer

Your Cheating Heart

TOP 125 CLASSIC COUNTRY SONGS FOR HIPSTERS

Pour yourself some Popcorn Sutton’s Tennessee White Whiskey (that’s legal moonshine for you city slickers) & get ready for some serious drinkin’ music free of “Friends in Low Places,” “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” “Old Town Road,” and “The Git Up.” I’ve includes lots of notes & trivia about the playlist songs because we hipsters can’t just enjoy music in a vacuum…we like to sound like a seasoned expert when putting on a playlist for friends, yes? I’ve included standards as well as a number of “B sides” that will even impress country music enthusiasts…you know the kind of people who still say “Country Western.”

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18 Wheels & a Dozen Roses, Kathy Mattea

9 to 5, Dolly Parton

A Boy Named Sue, Johnny Cash

All My Exes Live in Texas, George Strait

Amarillo by Morning, George Strait

Are You Ready for the Country, Waylon Jennings

Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?, Waylon Jennings (Referring to Hank Williams Sr.)

Back Where I Come From, Kenny Chesney

Bed You Made for Me, Highway 101

Before Country Was Cool, Barbara Mandrell

Born to Boogie, Hank Williams Jr. (Hank Sr’s son)

Chattahoochee, Alan Jackson

Church on Cumberland Road, Shenandoah

Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn (Watch her biographical movie “Coal Miner’s Daughter” staring Sissy Spacek!)

Coat of Many Colors, Dolly Parton

Copenhagen, Chris Le Deux (Yep, chew killed this underground country singer with a cult following. His catchy, hilarious love song to Copenhagen chewing tobacco is like a country version of “Can’t Feel My Face” or “Mary Jane.”)

Copperhead Road, Steve Earle (Listen carefully…After coming home from war, this soldier gives up on the family tradition of making moonshine because he realized when he was in Viet Nam that he could just grow weed instead.)

Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams Jr.

Country Club, Travis Tritt

Country Roads, Take Me Home, John Denver (Lucky if I get through this one without tearing up…)

Cowboy Take Me Away, Dixie Chicks

Crazy, Patsy Cline (Sadly, the anthem of Battered Woman’s Syndrome…Patsy was in a violent marriage at the height of her fame. Written by Willie Nelson.)

Cripple Creek, Earl Scruggs & Lester Flatt

Devil Went Down to Georgia, Charlie Daniels Band

Digging Up Bones, Randy Travis

Dixieland Delight, Alabama

Down at the Twist & Shout, Mary-Chapin Carpenter

Dueling Banjos, Roy Clark & Buck Owens

El Paso, Marty Robbins (After writing this song, Marty Robbins was flying over El Paso & had a revelation that he was the cowboy in the song in a past life…so he wrote “El Paso City” about that experience.)

Elvira, Oak Ridge Boys

Every Little Thing, Carlene Carter (Yep, June Carter’s daughter…she called Johnny Cash “Stepdad.” Roseanne Cash’s “Tennessee Flat Top Box” is also a good one.)

Family Tradition, Hank Williams Jr (A proud nod to his famous father…”Put yourself in my position–if I get stoned and sing all night long, it’s a family tradition.” When you hear this song at a honky tonk, know the customs! When Jr sings, “Why do you drink?” The crowd shouts back “To get drunk!” When Jr sings, “Why do you roll smoke?” The crowd shouts, “To get high!” When he sings, “Why must you act out the songs that you wrote?” The crowd shouts, “To get laid!”)

Fancy, Reba McEntire

Fishin’ in the Dark, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Flowers on the Wall, Statler Brothers

Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash

Fool-Hearted Memory, George Strait (His first of SIXTY #1 hits–the most in country music history! Too many for this list but do check them out.)

Get a Rhythm, Johnny Cash

Guitars & Cadillacs, Dwight Yoakum (One of the few west coasters on the list…from Bakersfield, California — also a vegetarian!)

Have Mercy, Judds (A female country duo–mother & sister to famous actress Ashley Judd!)

Highway Man, The Highwaymen (The Highwaymen are Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, & Kris Kristofferson.)

Hillbilly Rock, Marty Stewart

Honky Tonk Man, Dwight Yoakum

Hooked on an 8-Second Ride, Chris Le Deux (Pronounced “Le Doo”)

Hot Rod Lincoln, Commander Cody

I Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This, Waylon Jennings

I Love a Rainy Night, Eddie Rabbitt

I Think I’ll Just Sit Here & Drink, Merle Haggard

I Walk the Line, Johnny Cash

I’m No Stranger to the Rain, Keith Whitley

If You’re Gonna Play in Texas, Alabama

If You’ve Got the Money, Willie Nelson

If Your Heart Ain’t Busy, Tanya Tucker

It Only Hurts When I Cry, Dwight Yoakum

Jackson, Johnny Cash & June Carter

Jolene, Dolly Parton

Jose Cuervo, Shelly West

Kaw-Liga, Hank Williams Jr. (Hank Sr also does this one.)

Lay You Down, Conway Twitty

Long Time Gone, Dixie Chicks

Louisiana Saturday Night, Mel McDaniel

Luckenbach Texas, Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson

Mama Tried, Merle Haggard

Maybe It Was Memphis, Pam Tillis

Meet Me in Montana, Dan Seals

Midnight Girl in a Sunset Town, Sweethearts of the Rodeo

Mountain Music, Alabama

Mud on the Tires, Brad Paisley

Mule Skinner Blues, Dolly Parton

My Kind of Girl, Colin Raye

Next to You, Shenandoah

No Time to Kill, Clint Black

Nobody Wins, Radney Foster

Norma Jean Riley, Diamond Rio

One Piece at a Time, Johnny Cash

Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line, Waylon Jennings

Orange Blossom Special, Johnny Cash

Pancho & Lefty, Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard

Papa Loved Mama, Garth Brooks

Past the Point of Rescue, Hal Ketchum

Pick-Up Man, Joe Diffie

Play Something Country, Brooks & Dunn

Redneck Girl, Bellamy Brothers (During the corresponding Redneck Girl line dance, when the song says, “A redneck girl got her name on the back of her belt,” dancers shout, “Bullshit! Bullshit! F— you!” When the song says, “She’s got a kiss on her lips for her man and no one else,” dancers repeat, “Bullshit! Bullshit! F— you!” When the song says, “A coyote’s howling out on the prairie,” dancers howl. Finally, the song says, “First comes love, then comes marriage.” After “love,” dancers interject, “Then sex!!!”)

Ring of Fire, Johnny Cash

Rockin’ With the Rhythm, Judds

Rodeo, Garth Brooks

Rough & Ready, Trace Adkins

Saturday Night Special, Conway Twitty (Yes, the same guy they famously poke fun at on “Family Guy”–see below)

Sin Wagon, Dixie Chicks

Smoky Mountain Rain, Ronnie Milsap

Sold, John Michael Montgomery

Some Girls Do, Sawyer Brown

Song of the South, Alabama

Stampede, Chris Le Deux

Stand by Your Man, Tammy Wynette

Straight Tequila Night, John Anderson

Streets of Bakersfield, Dwight Yoakum

Sweet Dreams of You, Patsy Cline

Tempted, Marty Stuart

Tennessee River & a Mountain Man, Alabama

Thank God I’m a Country Boy, John Denver (He’s an outspoken vegan and & rep for P.E.T.A #MeatlessMondays)

That Kind of Girl, Patty Loveless

That’s My Story, Collin Raye

That’s What I Like About You, Trisha Yearwood (She’s married to Garth Brooks & is a celebrity chef with a reality cooking show.)

The Gambler, Kenny Rogers

The Pill, Lorettta Lynn (Also check out her cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”)

The Race Is On, Sawyer Brown (or any of the older versions)

The Thunder Rolls, Garth Brooks

Ticks, Brad Paisley

Tight-Fittin’ Jeans, Conway Twitty

Tonight We Ride, Tom Russell (We played this at my dad’s funeral…definitely a “b side.”)

Tougher Than the Rest, Chris Le Deux

Tulsa Time, Don Williams

Two Feet of Topsoil, Brad Paisley

Walkin’ After Midnight, Patsy Cline (Check out the Cyndi Lauper cover!)

What Was I Thinkin,’ Dierks Bentley

When You Say Nothing At All, Keith Whitley (Alison Krauss’ version might be more popular though…)

Whiskey, If You Were a Woman, Highway 101

Why Not Me, Judds

Wide Open Spaces, Dixie Chicks

Will the Circle Be Unbroken, dozens of versions

Wrong Side of Memphis, Trisha Yearwood

You Ain’t Woman Enough, Loretta Lynn

You Really Had Me Going, Holly Dunn

You’ve Never Been This Far Before, Conway Twitty

youtube

There are a few current country artists with that classic country sound: Chris Stapleton, Brothers Osborn, some Miranda Lambert (try “Gunpowder & Lead” or “Little Red Wagon”), or Cody Jinks.

If you’re afraid country music is too white, straight, or conservative for you, check out Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush,” Maddie & Tae’s “Girl in a Country Song,” the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” Los Lonely Boys’ “Heaven,” Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow,” Big & Rich’s “Love Train,” Garth Brooks’ “We Shall Be Free,” John Anderson’s “Seminole Wind,” or anything by Charlie Pride, Cowboy Troy, k.d. lang, or Freddie Fender.

If you enjoy a good DJ mix, I’m not the only one doing creative things with country music–check out DeeJay Silver, DJ Sinister’s Country Fried Mix, VDJ JD, DJ Bad Ash, or DJ Hish (who I was on the roster with at the Stagecoach Festival and the Moonshine Miles Festival).

Film enthusiast? In addition to watching Johnny Cash’s biographical Walk the Line, you can also try some of these country cult classics: Coal Miner’s Daughter (about Loretta Lynn), Urban Cowboy (with John Travolta & Debra Winger), Pure Country (starring George Strait), Sweet Dreams (about Patsy Cline), Eight Seconds (with Luke Perry)…as well as anything starring Dolly Parton (like 9 to 5 or Steel Magnolias) or Kris Kristofferson (like A Star Is Born or Blade). Dwight Yoakum has a few famous cameos as well (like Sling Blade or Crank). But the real question is: are they “acting” or just “acting natural”? Once you understand that reference, you officially get a gold star in the hipster country music Olympics!!! (Leave me your thoughts in the comments below.)

If you enjoyed the Hipster’s Guide to Classic Country Music, I urge you to explore bluegrass and folk music. And, yes, I know not every “staple” classic country jam is on the list (again, comment below). I also have my Guitar-Infused Country & Classic Rock Wedding Cocktail Hour Playlist and Ultimate Bluegrass Wedding Cocktail Hour & Dinner Music Playlist you can scope out. Some say “crank it up,” but, around here, we say “Hank it up!” Enjoy your hip classic country tunes!

LISTEN TO THE HIPSTER’S CLASSIC COUNTRY PLAYLIST

Check it out on YouTube or Spotify.

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Like DJ Staci's vibe? Stalk her wedding DJ services below! shshsh...

GIVE IT TO ME BABY

#dj staci playlist #General Playlists #Music &amp; Mixes

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torentialtribute · 5 years

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MARTIN SAMUEL: Derby County and Wayne Rooney are just playing the game… so lay off

Jermaine Jenas started his new job as columnist for the daily newspaper this week. He was revealed thanks to a deal with footie5 from thepools.com.

& # 39; Download the app and play … & # 39; said a mistake at the bottom of the page. So we can't have it in all ways. Wayne Rooney Wayne Rooney Does it, but a legitimate source of income on this page and beyond.

Must, that's what it's all about. The media – print and electronic, websites, radio stations, television broadcasters and also this publication – will not reject valuable advertising at a time when rates and revenues are falling.

Wayne Rooney & # 39; s move to Derby County has been criticized for moving the way it occurred

And Derby is going to find a way to recruit and reward Rooney that allows them to bypass the Football League's tax on ambition, in the form of financial fair play regulations.

It is not only, as said, that Derby Rooney could not pay without sponsoring a gambling company; they would not have allowed Rooney either.

Buying him, paying him the usual rate given his talent and profile, could lead to an FFP infringement and a crippling fine. However, if the sponsors of Derby, 32Red, open the tab, it's different. Every club in the championship with an eye for promotion will look at ways to bypass the system.

Derby did that before. Last season they were threatened with legal action by Middlesbrough president Steve Gibson Mel Morris bought the Pride Park stadium and then rented it back to the club.

This enabled Derby to post £ 14.6 million profit on their accounts. Challenged, Morris pointed out that the sale of fixed assets is legal and that in 2016, in order to comply with FFP, the club chose to sell the football club's tax loss to its parent company, thereby generating income. This too was cool at the time. That club was Middlesbrough.

So everyone is working on it. Not in a way that is crooked or illegal, they do it because running a business often requires investment from the owner and promotion as well, but the Football League are not friends for clubs that think big.

Rooney participates on the side of Phillip Cocu and takes on a player-coach dual role at the club

They have numerous rules to prevent owners from jumping up, not so much to guard against those bleeding dry clubs. Now the Rooney deal has shed an unhelpful light on a different revenue stream.

Tim Crow, an expert in sports marketing, says gambling ads on shirts will be banned within five years. So the League Pass rules the prohibition of one form of investment and the Government Pass rules the prohibition of another.

From this season on, 30 clubs have gambling companies as their primary sponsor source and, since the market is competitive, exposure rate is undoubtedly high. If that is forbidden, other sponsors may not feel compelled to pay that much.

Morris is not the perfect owner, but he has ambition for Derby. He gave Frank Lampard the job of the manager last season – a smart, forward-thinking idea that almost raised Derby's profile and almost paid off with promotion – and made another splash by signing Rooney as a player-coach since January.

There is no guarantee that Rooney will have an impact from Midfield in the championship, which is of a higher standard for Major League Soccer.

But no matter how he makes a player, Rooney is the coach a fascinating proposition. He has long been an undervalued game analyst and has ambitions to manage.

Sir Alex Ferguson recalls that he tried to guess the first XI on the eve of competitions and often got some nuance or tactical change correctly.

Rooney will make the move in January when his MLS season with DC United comes to an end

Roy Hodgson often praised his interventions with England, even as Rooney & # 39; s growing confidence in his unilateral decision to remove Harry Kane from middle service .

Rooney & # 39; s return to English football would have garnered almost universal praise, were not for the involvement of 32Red.

Instead, critics stood in line. The mediocre spirit of Iain Duncan-Smith spoke contemptuously about the amount of money gambling companies made, undoubtedly as part of the new corporate strategy of the conservative party under Boris Johnson.

Carolyn Harris, Chairman of the Parliamentary Gambling Group, asked: & When will celebrities realize that involvement in gambling is not right or moral? & # 39; as if the famous, not the governments, were responsible for Britain's lax gambling laws.

Clinical psychologists and academics and anti-gambling campaigners – and victims of addiction – are all confused with disapproval of what a sponsorship agreement has been made necessary by the over-regulation of football.

Yet, the reason that every newspaper now has a special pull-out in the week of the Cheltenham Festival is the placement of advertisements for gambling.

It is tempting to bet, odds, and prizes that fund it all. For example, transfer deadline for daily news on many newspaper websites was sponsored by Betway.

So even if Rooney didn't wear No. 32, the paying company would still find an outlet for their product – most likely on the pages of the publications in which the Derby deal becomes convicted.

Boron also happens to have the same sponsor "class =" blkBorder img-share "/>

[1945908] Middlesbrough (left), Leeds (right) and Preston are also sponsored by 32Red like Derby County

Nobody claims that the modern shift in gambling habits – watching sports with gambling on it, via in-play- apps – is healthy. Yet it is a major simplification to hope for the problems of the industry on one player and his club.

& # 39; We see players' names becoming synonymous with gambling brands & # 39 ;, said shadow minister Rosena Allin-Khan.

No, we are not. There are too many gambling companies to remember them all and most football fans would not know their Dunder from their Dafabet, their 32Red from their Fun88.

It is a hugely successful but flooded market, so Rooney will become synonymous with his club, Derby, as always, and the most publicity his sponsors will get out of this deal is now, with so much pontification that the makes headlines.

Interestingly enough, however, after last season's friction, there is a very subdued reaction to Derby's rival of their championship rivals.

Perhaps because Middlesbrough, Leeds and Preston are also sponsored by 32Red, while Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol City, Charlton, Fulham, Huddersfield, Hull, Queens Park Rangers, Stoke, Swansea and Wigan also have gambling companies as shirt sponsors and kick themselves for not thinking about it first

Woodward earns credit for the hard sale of misleading Lukak u

As usual, the transfer window with fans of Manchester United ended up in arms over Ed Woodward. Still, the £ 72 million from Inter Milan was a decent thing for Romelu Lukaku. The Italians wanted to pay nearly £ 20 million less, but United persisted – and the impact of Lukaku on Old Trafford was so overwhelming that they could even make a profit.

Part of Lukaku & # 39; s deal upon joining Everton was that United would have to pay £ 5 million each time if he has scored 25 league goals in his first three seasons, so with a total of 16, 12 and a day for everyone, that has already saved £ 15 million.

[1945908] Romelu Lukaku finally got his move on deadline day, with Man United set to receive £ 72m

The reality is that Lukaku arrived with the reputation of being destroyed against smaller clubs and left intact.

In his time with United, he scored goals against West Ham, Swansea, Stoke, Everton, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Newcastle, Bournemouth, West Brom, Huddersfield, Brighton, Burnley, Watford and Fulham, but pulled blank spots Manchester City, Liverpool, Tottenham and Arsenal. The only top-six club he found against was Chelsea on February 25, 2018.

This does not only apply to his club form. In the World Cup year, he scored against Greece, Gibraltar, Cyprus, Costa Rica, Panama and Tunisia, but not against Japan, Brazil, France or England. His movements suggest that he is a big club player – but not necessarily against big clubs. Woodward did well to come back.

Open Relaxation Therapy

Hinako Shibuno & # 39; s Women & # 39; s Open was the perfect example of why it is sometimes better to relax in a tournament

Shibuno admitted that he came to Britain to taste the food and see the sights, instead of having any ambition to win the tournament.

Hinako Shibuno admitted he came to Britain to taste the food and see the sights

She was so under-prepared that she thought she would play a left lane instead of Woburn, about 160 miles inland. Her manager, Hiroshi Shigematsu, also seemed to be doing very well – costumed in the course every day.

On Friday he went to Mount Fuji, on Saturday in a kimono with an electric blue clown wig and plastic Samurai sword. On other occasions he dragged a supporting cast of hugs. Maybe Trevor Bayliss should try.

Moeen needs rest, but Smith is not afraid of Leach

Everyone agrees that Moeen Ali needs a break from the pressure of international cricket.

In the past, the time away from the English scene has led to a recovery in its form. Certainly, his appearance at Edgbaston approached a call for help.

But while leaving him out of the Lord's mind seems inevitable, the assumption that Jack Leach's answer is dramatically overplayed. In the past month, Leach threw waste three times for 26 points against Ireland. The call for his selection is largely based on the idea that Steve Smith is weak against the orthodox spider left

England's performance at Moeen Ali in Edgbaston was approaching a call for help

This idea grew in South Africa last year when three of Smith & # 39; s first four were fired for Keshav Maharaj and Dean Elgar.

Smith takes an average of 34.9 against orthodox bowlers on the left, as opposed to 48.77 against leg spinners, 65.28 against fast bowlers on the left, 68.38 against fast right bowlers, 92.85 against off-spinners and 119 against left-wrist spinners

Still a large number of his layoffs against left-arm orthodox supplies are against Rangana Herath and Ravindra in Sri Lanka Jadeja on tours of the subcontinent. Leach will not only have to bow much better than Ali, he will also have to bow considerably better than with the last time of the Lord.

Smith is vulnerable to good leftists, not cake holders.

Why save Bury after £ 4million blunder?

The day of the transfer limit reached its peak when the Football League was announced that Bury & # 39; s Carabao Cup match with Sheffield Wednesday was out.

Under the circumstances, it is easy to make comparisons between football matches and equipment; the fraction of the transfer costs of Harry Maguire who would keep the football 10 miles away. How much leaked out of the game to agents when Bury and Bolton were dying.

United still paid the excessive rate for a sought-after center half, or an agent who insured his compensation for a complex sequence of transfers, is not the reason why Bury is struggling. They spent money that they did not have to pay for a promotion that they could not afford.

Bury misunderstood it terribly. That is the story of football through time. Clubs rise and fall due to good and bad decisions. These decisions are made in the field, by managers and coaches or in the boardroom.

Bury spent money they didn't have the financing they couldn't

The gradual decline of Huddersfield from a club that won three straight titles between 1924 and 1927 can be deduced from the decision to buy a second-hand stand from Fleetwood for £ 170, at a moment that Arsenal invested many thousands of infrastructure. There are a hundred minor appraisal errors that have put Bury at risk – and they were made long before Maguire left Leicester for £ 80 million.

Nigel Clough said the Premier League was responsible for wrestling in the lower division clubs, but how would that work? Bury spent while other clubs did not. Bury won promotion due to £ 4.2 million in debt while other clubs kept the budget and remained in League Two. And now that Bury receives a Premier League rescue fund? Does that not reward financial carelessness?

Dodi Lukebakio left Watford for Hertha Berlin in a deal of nearly £ 20 million, arrived for £ 1.5 million and played 17 minutes of soccer from the first team. This seems like madness. Yet elite clubs are moving into a completely different market. The amounts of Bury are correct, not their business activities to ensure that Bury is managed correctly. Bury has two weeks to solve this problem, and the answer must come from within.

A number of Chelsea fans are saddened by the departure of David Luiz to Arsenal. They miss the bigger picture.

Think about it. This is now a defense with Luiz and Shkodran Mustafi in his heart, protected by Granit Xhaka.

It is time to take a seat, to break open the popcorn and to start the comedy.

David Luiz signed for Arsenal on deadline day but it remains to be seen whether it will be the answer

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#MARTIN SAMUEL: Derby County and Wayne Rooney are just playing the game… so lay off "

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adventurerocketship · 6 years

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Adventure Rocketship playlist for Tuesday, 12/06/16

Every Tuesday night 9-11pm on Valley Free Radio 103.3fm Northampton or streaming at valleyfreeradio.org. Also on Facebook and Instagram.

Adventure Rocketship (advrs095) 12/06/16:

Elephant Stone - Love Is Like a Spinning Wheel - Ship of Fools (2016, Elephants on Parade) Pete Astor - My Right Hand - Spilt Milk (2016, Slumberland) The Hanging Stars - Crippled Shining Blues - Over the Silvery Lake (2016, Crimson Crow) Varsity - Smash - Smash/Still Apart single (2016, no label) Bad Sports - Where Are You? - Living With Secrets (2016, Dirtnap) Frankie Cosmos - Sinister - Next Thing (2016, Bayonet) Jay Som - Peach Boy - Turn Into (2016, Polyvinyl) Young Scum - If You Say That - Zona EP (2016, bandcamp) Ashley Shadow - Tonight - Tonight (2016, Felte) The Bats - Antlers - The Deep Set (2017, Flying Nun) Chook Race - At Your Door - Around the House (2016, Trouble in Mind) Cosmonauts - Doom Generation - A-Ok! (2016, Burger) Posh Lost - Fabricate - Post Lost (2016, Mirror Universe) Red Sleeping Beauty - Cheryl, Cheryl, Bye - Kristina (2016, Shelflife) The Feelies - Been Replaced - In Between (2017, Bar None) Toy - Clouds That Cover the Sun - Clear Shot (2016, Heavenly) Belgrado - Wiatr - Obraz (2016, La vida es un mus) The Death of Pop - What a Day - Turns (2016, Discos de Kirlian) Andy Pawlak - Perfect Days - In the Kitchen (1985 Demos) (2016, Firestation) The Perfect English Weather - English Weather - Isobar Blues (2016, Matinee) Ultimate Painting - Monday Morning, Somewhere Central - Dusk (2016, Trouble in Mind) Ghost Wave - Who’s Doin’ the Talkin’ - Radio Norfolk (2016, Flying Nun) Mall Walk - Call Again - Funny Papers (2016, Mount St. Mountain) Sea Pinks - Depth of Field - Soft Days (2016, CF) The Turns - Believe Me - single (2016, Lollipop) Drowners - Human Remains - On Desire (2016, Frenchkiss) The Fireworks - Bury Me - Black and Blue EP (2016, Shelflife) Film School - Give Up - June EP (2016, Film School) Hideous Towns - Value - single (2016, Lost & Lonesome) Tamaryn - Softcore - Cranekiss (2016, Kemado)

#indiepop #psychpop #community radio

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hellofastestnewsfan · 6 years

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The Nation recently published a poem in which a homeless narrator speaks a complex, nuanced variety of English with a long and interesting history.

The variety of English is Black English, and the poet is Anders Carlson-Wee, a white man. In the wake of the controversy, The Nation’s poetry editors have appended a kind of trigger warning to the poem calling its language “disparaging.” (They also apologized for its “ableist language;” the poem used the word “crippled.”) Carlson-Wee has dutifully, and perhaps wisely, apologized that “treading anywhere close to blackface is horrifying to me” and declared that the poem “didn’t work.”

However, I suspect that many are quietly wondering just what Carlson-Wee did that was so wrong—and they should.

The primary source of offense, in a poem only 14 lines long, is passages such as this, in a work designed to highlight and sympathize with the plight of homeless people: “It’s about who they believe they is. You hardly even there.” The protagonist is referring to the condescending attitudes of white passersby who give her change. Yet Roxane Gay, for example, directs white writers to “know your lane,” and not depict the dialect.

To be sure, America long harbored a tradition of mocking black speech in exaggerated “minstrel” dialect. Minstrel shows highlighting this kind of talk, full of “am” used in all persons and numbers, and mangled words such as “regusted” for “disgusted” (that one used as late as the 1940s on the radio show Amos n’ Andy, in which white men portrayed black ones), were central to American entertainment well into the 20th century.

This wariness of the minstrel stereotype underlies much of the discomfort that the artistic depiction of Black English often arouses. However, while verdicts on statutes of limitations will differ, barely anyone alive recalls seeing a minstrel show in person. It is ever harder to draw a meaningful line of influence from white (and black) men guffawing on stage during the Taft administration and anything being created today.

But more to the point, the Black English Carlson-Wee uses is not exaggerated: It is true and ordinary black speech. The production of Oscar Hammerstein’s rendition of Carmen in Black English, Carmen Jones, has elicited similar objections against its characters using Black English, with Hilton Als dismissing the libretto as stained with “ridiculous Amos n’ Andy lyrics.” James Baldwin had the same take on Carmen Jones, charging that the characters’ speech sounds “ludicrously false and affected.” Some might see pieces like this as the link between minstrel shows and our times. The characters, though, are actually using speech that would have been quite familiar to my relatives, and those of Baldwin and Als, in the 1940s. Carmen Jones, and especially its film version, has been adored by black people of a certain age, and I’ve known quite a few of them who would be mystified by the idea that Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey were forced to sing “minstrel” in it. I caught the current production, and as someone who has both studied Black English a fair amount over the past 25 years and also loves old radio, am quite sure that I did not endure an evening of Amos n’ Andy dialogue.

Whence the outrage among so many against black people depicted accurately speaking in a way that, well, a great many definitely do?

One source of the objection could be an impression that Black English is bad grammar. That notion is tragically common, and under it, many may suppose that even if black people do use Black English, it’s a bad habit, a legacy of lack of access to education, perhaps. Naturally, then, it will seem offensive for a white person to show black people engaging in it. Accuracy or even affection will be seen as bleeding into condescension and critique.

Black English, however, is not a degraded variety of the language—it’s an alternate form of English. If a sentence like People be lookin’ at him funny seems unsophisticated because the be isn’t conjugated, try wrapping your head around the fact that the be also expresses, overtly, a nuance that the standard sentence would not—that this looking in question happens on a habitual basis. You wouldn’t say People be lookin’ at him funny if it were happening at the moment. Black English jangles with things that we are trained to hear as “slang,” but which foreign learners would struggle to master, in the same way as they would with pluperfects and subjunctives.

A quest to get schools to respect African-American English

In many other places in the world, people live their intimate lives in varieties of a language quite different from the standard and no one operates under the impression that the vernacular form is “broken.” Try telling a Moroccan that his everyday Moroccan Arabic is “wrong” compared to the Modern Standard Arabic used on the news. He’ll tell you that it’s a matter of context: The news is in standard, you talk about it in vernacular.

The difference between Black English and Ted Koppel’s speech is of the same kind as the one between Moroccan and standard Arabic. Does anyone think the characters in August Wilson’s plays spend hours speaking “bad grammar”? Baldwin was, to me, more useful on Black English in the years after his Carmen Jones essay. “If this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) ‘sheer intelligence,’ this incredible music,” he taught us, “does not indicate that Black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of a language is to be trusted.” What “broke”? Nothing—something grew.

Black English was born not of lack of access to blackboards, but of intimacy—people who spend more time with one another and trust one another more talk more like one another. Moroccans hang with Moroccans, and thus speak an Arabic of their own, different from that of Algerians hanging with Algerians next door. If black people didn’t have their own English, given the segregationist history of this country, it would be extremely peculiar.

Yet a white person’s depiction of Black English may still rankle, and I have often sensed that the rub is that the white person may think Black English is the only way that black people can talk, that they are somehow impervious to mastering standard English. And that prejudice was definitely real for a great while.

Now, however, educated whites are quite often aware that black people can talk in two ways depending on circumstance. Carlson-Wee, for example, is certainly aware of this: “If you a girl, say you’re pregnant,” the protagonist says, alternating between leaving out the be verb (a process actually subject to complex constraints in black speech—you don’t just leave it out willy-nilly) and using it (you’re). This is a spot-on depiction of the dialect in use, as something dipped in and out of gracefully.

Or, to take another example, Emmett Till’s great uncle Moses Wright has sometimes been quoted identifying Emmett’s killer in court by saying “Thar he” for “There he is.” One historian has questioned whether he would have spoken that way, at least in a public setting. This evidences a sensitivity to the reality of black speech of the kind I am suggesting, even bordering on insensitivity in that the reporter who depicted Wright as saying “Thar he” was black himself.

The idea that non-black people seeing black people depicted as using their own speech form will think that’s the only way black people can talk corresponds better to another time than our own. It assigns a rather brutalist naivete to people who, albeit hardly devoid of subtle racist biases, have come a long way from Jim Crow. Progress happens slowly, but it happens.

Of course, this controversy also touches on the issue of cultural appropriation. Whether Black English is coherent and whether black people are bidialectal, might we not consider it a kind of encroachment for whites to utilize what is “ours”? Especially when the utilization entails them expressing themselves, in a sense, in something rooted in a culture they don’t belong to?

What does “cultural appropriation” actually mean?

Perhaps—but we end up tripping over countervailing goals here. We often say that we want whites to understand black pain, the black experience, black difference. We want them to empathize. But upon achieving this understanding, white artists, as artists, will naturally seek to express it through their creations. Are we to decree that they must not? Would this muzzling of basic human creativity, as well as the fundamental drive to share between cultures, be worth something larger?

I’m not sure what that would be, other than a sense of victory in having laid down and enforced the diktat—and the novelty of that would wear off fast. Rather, Carlson-Wee, as a young white man dedicating a poem to a homeless black person’s suffering and trying to get inside her head, would seem to be displaying exactly the kind of empathy that we seek. “Feel it but don’t show it,” we tell him, instead. “Empathize, but block that empathy from your creative impulses, on the pain of hurting us by imitating us without our consent.”

There is logic here, but it is fragile. One suspects it will only ever convince a few. Quite simply, what do we gain, or what do we ward off, by drawing this line in the sand? What are we so afraid of? The Nation might consider publishing more poetry by black writers, such that Black English doesn’t only make a rare appearance in its pages from the pen of a white man. But that isn’t Carlson-Wee’s fault, and the question remains as to what he, as an individual artist, did wrong.

Of course, if a Carlson-Wee depicted Black English gracelessly in terms of the grammar, it’d be time to call foul. But he got it right. As did Hammerstein—in all of the lyrics of Carmen Jones I detect nary a flub, other than a tendency in the written text to apostrophize words that all Americans shorten in casual speech. Carmen Jones’s characters are written as saying “an’” for and, when all English speakers say it that way as often as not. But then, black writers depict Black English the exact same way, and have for eons. If a Carlson-Wee depicted a black person using the dialect who either would be unlikely to ever use it, or would not use it in the context depicted, then critique would be warranted—it’d be bad art and possibly “disparaging” as well.

The case against the grammar scolds

Gay in fact later wrote on Twitter: “The reality is that when most white writers use [African American Vernacular English] they do so badly. They do so without understanding that it is a language with rules. Instead, they use AAVE to denote that there is a black character in their story because they understand blackness as a monolith. Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy.” Indeed. But it isn’t clear to me that Carlson-Wee is guilty of either of these flubs.

That is, when a Carlson-Wee briefly explores the pain of a black homeless person and shows her using precisely the speech variety she actually would, or an Oscar Hammerstein knows that working-class black people in a parachute factory would not talk like the characters in his previous hits Oklahoma! or Carousel, it’s time for educated America to get past the cringe of seeing Black English depicted on the page by someone who didn’t grow up speaking it.

Whites writing Black English in 1895 almost always meant it as either disparagement or infantilization. Whites writing Black English since then, more often than not, deserve some credit for having come a considerable way. The vigilance, the hesitation, the antennas going up—all of this has legitimate roots and will persist. But this evaluation metric should not swat down all nonblack artists who depict black people speaking the way most black people—alternating with standard English—quite definitely do, will, have, and should.

Anders Carlson-Wee engaged in nothing we moderns need slur as “blackface.” To wit, while we must evaluate each case on its own basis, to the extent that any white person’s depiction of Black English of whatever quality or diligence elicits rolling eyes at best and social media witch hunts at worst, we have lost step not only with linguistic science, but also with what most would consider norms of how human groups co-occupy social spaces and learn from one another.

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Don't be Deceived by the Media’s Pro-Immigration Child Exploitation

American conservatives are crowing from the rooftops of Trump Towers. Their biggest foe, the mainstream media – the Prince of Darkness who masquerades as an angel of light, has been stripped of his horns and pitchfork. Lucifer has fallen from heaven into the shithole of Dante’s Inferno, and is being tormented by the angelic host of conservative radio commentators and Republican roosters cock-a-doodling at the cyclopean cock-up committed by TIME magazine.

The fakestream media have broken Jeffrey Archer’s eleventh commandment: "Thou shall not get caught." TIME was caught with its pants down and its picture of a crying three-year-old Honduran girl exposed as fake news. The girl was real, the crying was real, the picture was real, but the context was faked, framed and photo-shopped.

TIME shamelessly featured its child pawn like child porn on the cover page of its July 2, 2018 issue. It shows the girl facing Donald Trump, who is looking down on the child with bemusement. TIME would like its readers to interpret the look on Trump’s face as callousness. A canny three-word caption completes the toxic cocktail of half-truth and digital demagoguery: Welcome to America.

The image is further inflated by a TIME human-interest story zooming in on Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, John Moore, who sheds copious crocodile tears as he spins his tale of sanctimonious poppycock. Moore recounts photographing the child on the US-Mexican border as mother and child were trying to enter the US illegally and were apprehended by law enforcement.

"When the officer told the mother to put her child down for the body search, I could see this look in the little girl’s eyes," Moore tells TIME. "As soon as her feet touched the ground she began to scream." The Border Patrol is taking mother and child away in a van and Moore’s bleeding-heart explodes as if he is Mother Theresa. "All I wanted to do was pick her up. But I couldn’t," he recollects.

Am I sounding like a cynical son-of-a-bitch? To this day, I cannot forget what I saw when I was six – a child being separated from his parents. A man with a sack walked through the slums in Mahim, Mumbai. He stopped outside a hovel, picked up a child, threw him into the sack and walked away.

I froze, traumatized with terror, unable to cry or scream or call for help as I watched from the window of our first floor apartment. In India, children snatched from their parents are sold to gangs who cripple them and force them into beggary.

Since when does the Left care so much about keeping the family together?

To this day, I cannot forget what I saw later in life – a British working class grandmother who sat weeping through a service at the Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich, where I served as Chaplain. She accosted me at the door after the service and blubbered like a child about to break down.

She was holding pictures of three beautiful children. Her partner told me her story. Social Services (SS) had forcibly removed her grandchildren from her care. She was looking after her grandkids in lieu of her alcoholic daughter, but the SS wouldn’t let her even see the kids any longer. The SS were giving one child to a gay couple for adoption, despite grandma’s objections. We did our best to help her reconnect with her grandchildren, but the State had kidnapped them.

So when American’s leftwing media erupted into hyper-hysteria over Trump separating immigrant children from their parents and cruelly caging them in Nazi concentration camps and Japanese internment camps, my hermeneutic of suspicion went into overdrive.

"Since when does the Left care so much about keeping the family together?" I asked myself. After all, one of the primary goals of the Left is the destruction of the family. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels "usually wrote about the destruction, dissolution, and abolition of the family," observes historian Richard Weikart.

Marx fulminated against "the bourgeois claptrap about the family" and "the hallowed correlation of parent and child," both of which he found "disgusting". Charles Fourier, a utopian socialist proposed that children be separated from their parents and raised communally. Robert Owen, one of the most influential advocates of utopian socialism declared war on the family. In his commune, children after the age of three were removed from their parents for proper education.

Under Mao, children pulled from their parents. All parents were to eat in large mess halls while their children went into day nurseries. Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai was adamant that the "worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine," but "must remember that there are only our children" who would be wards of the state.

If you think this is history, think again. Prof Melissa Harris-Perry, who holds the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University, believes that children should be separated from their parents. Harris-Perry laments the lack of "a very collective notion" of our children. She wants us "to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities".

Since when does the Left care so much about keeping the family together? I asked myself again. There can be no more permanent separation of a child from his or her mother than killing the child in its mother’s womb. And what about the Left’s dogma of single-parenthood separating children from father or mother and depriving the child of its most fundamental human right to two parents?

Don’t be deluded into believing that the Left cares about children. They are using children as a battering ram against Trump – a socially acceptable form of child abuse, I thought, as the 'separation of immigrant children’ debate raged. But surely, they wouldn’t stoop to the gutter and use images of little children for their political agenda? Wouldn’t that be a socially acceptable form of child pornography?

My worst suspicions were confirmed when it was revealed that the images of immigrant children in metal cages were actually four years old and taken during the Obama administration. Gotcha! Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau was among the many to condemn the photos – until he realised they dated back to His Master’s Reign.

Then came the bombshell – the crying girl in the border picture on the cover of TIME was actually never separated from her mother! It was fake news. TIME took its own time to issue a correction, but chief editor Edward Felsenthal stood defiantly by the picture, saying that while agents may not have taken the child, the photograph captured the mood of the story.

I remembered how the mainstream media had abused the image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi – the Syrian boy tragically drowned while going from Turkey to Kos. The MSM couldn’t even give the little boy the dignity of getting his name right, and called him Aylan Kurdi. The family were trying to get to Canada and join their relatives in Vancouver. The media, activists and politicians fanned the flames of the picture and cried themselves hoarse demanding open borders.

Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Spectator, responded and termed the use of the child’s image "moral pornography". "It’s more like a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers," wrote O’Neill. "When it comes to producing moral porn for the right-on, it seems the normal rules of journalism – and civilization – can be suspended," he scathingly added.

They will exploit suffering, dying and dead children in a contemptible game of moral and emotional blackmail.

One of the most morally despicable stories of the media’s use of child porn is the case of Kevin Carter’s picture of a dying girl in the Sudan in March 1993. The girl, no more than five years old, had collapsed while crawling toward a UN feeding center. As Carter crouched to take her picture, a vulture landed nearby, awaiting her death.

Carter waited for 20 minutes, hoping the bird would spread its wings so he could capture a better shot. It did not, and after he took a few images, he shooed the bird away and watched the girl continue to struggle. TIME, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers emblazoned their pages with the picture.

Only later did people raise questions about the girl’s fate and about the "appropriateness, decency, vulgarity, and the tasteful function of photojournalism", writes Barbie Zelizer in her book About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Why did Carter not help the girl or make certain the vulture was gone before he moved on? "Which is the true vulture?" asked one reader in a blistering indictment of the media.

Carter’s callousness cost him his life. Hounded by phone calls in the middle of the night criticizing him for not rescuing the girl, he killed himself in 1994.

The mainstream media doesn’t give a damn about children. The Left doesn’t give a damn about the family. Their agenda is open borders and uncontrolled immigration. They will exploit suffering, dying, and dead children in a contemptible game of moral and emotional blackmail. Their ultimate goal is totalitarian control. For once a country is swamped by immigrants and Balkanized into warring ghettos –all warring with each other– people will turn to the supreme nanny-state for security and salvation.

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