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nitewrighter · 5 years

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Short fic prompt for either Alt!Rei &Talon!Aedan or Canon!Reidan about that post you reblogged wherein the protag is secretly pining over their Archnemesis that is pining them down, please? :3c

(Referring back to this post)

Let’s go with Talon!Aedan because I really do like that Moira concept tentacle rig I gave him.

----

It was a cool night in Venice as Aedan rematerialized from his fade atop a high balcony.

“I still find it ridiculous that they’re making me do this,” he muttered into his comm.

“You can’t hide up in your lab forever, Twiggy,” Seye spoke in the comm in his ear, “Sooner or later, we all have to do field work.”

“’Patrol,’” Aedan scoffed, “If they’re that afraid of Overwatch infiltration, they should start with the grunts. An enforcer would do perfectly well, rather than have me getting all this low-tide stink on myself.”

“You’re more subtle than an Enforcer?” Seye didn’t seem convinced of his own answer.

“This is to keep me humble, isn’t it?” said Aedan.

“You’re Moira’s clone. I don’t think humility’s in your DNA,” Seye’s chuckle was slightly static on the comm.

Aedan just huffed again and leaned against the guardrail of the balcony. “Hell, even a sniper---” he cut himself off as his vision registered the slightest bit of movement from rooftop to rooftop.

“Aedan?” Seye spoke in his earpiece and Aedan perched atop the guardrail, watching the skyline before catching that movement again. A flicker of dim maroon feather-shaped light, that disappeared against the purple of the light pollution-stained sky.

“Oh hello,” said Aedan, leaping, fading, and rematerializing on another balcony on the opposite side of the canal before letting his biotic rig’s four tentacles spring out from his back and using them to easily climb up onto the roof.

“Twiggy, if you see anything you have to call it in--” Seye started as Aedan scanned the rooftops, his feet floating above the ground as he used two of the tentacles to hold himself up at a higher angle. Aedan squinted. Maybe just a trick of the light--No, there it was again.

“I’ve got this,” said Aedan, the cement of the roof buckling and cracking from the pressure as he pushed off into a high leap with the biotic tentacles before landing on another roof. He had a bead on her now, no amount of tactical black could hide the slight silhouette of valkyrie wingframes.

“Aedan, if it’s Overwatch, call it in!” Seye said but Aedan clicked off his earpiece and started chasing. The wings disappeared against the night, but they stayed in place just a little too long, even if she was gone by the time Aedan reached that rooftop, he’d still have a visual on her next time she used them. The biotic rig pushed off once more and he landed on the gravelly roof of a small cathedral, finding... nothing.

Nothing but an open skylight.

Aedan grinned and faded, dropping in through the skylight to the interior of the cathedral, exploding in a cloud of smoke on the floor, and reforming on one knee before rising to his feet. He liked churches, in his own way. He always felt his very existence was a little blasphemous, so it was always a bit of a thrill walking along the long aisle between the pews.

“I know you’re in here,” he said, his eyes flicking around. The cathedral was dead silent in response, only the reverberation of his own voice answering him.

“You can’t hide from me,” he went on, stepping up onto the altar and giving a cursory glance to particularly gory crucifix that oversaw its center, “There’s biotics in your blood and nanites in mine. My cells are your cells’ natural predators.”

That was only partially true, he knew that--both biotics and nanites were only as good as the multicellular organism they were a part of, you couldn’t say either was a natural predator of the other any more than you could say protons were predators of electrons.

An audible scoff echoed through the church and Aedan’s head swiveled around, trying to find its source. The tentacles of his biotic rig instinctively riled up ready to fight when he turned to see a winged silhouette, but he eased up slightly seeing it was just a statue featuring three angels framing a Madonna and child in admiration. He turned on his heel and moved to start checking if perhaps she might be hiding in the confessionals when he was impacted hard by a kick from the side. Not three angel statues. Just two. Well played. He grunted as the impact knocked him against the pews, the tentacles of his biotic rig catching himself and turning him towards his aggressor.

“Rei,” he said with a smile.

“Aedan,” he couldn’t even get a clear visual on the girl in front of him before she attacked again, drawing twin tantos from two sheaths at her back and mercilessly slashing at him, the tentacles of his biotic rig only barely managing to block her blows. If he could get one to latch onto her, he could use the biotic rig to suck the energy right out of her, but she wouldn’t let that happen either, so all that was exchanged was a dizzing series of slashes and parries as they moved back and forth around the cathedral. He could make out more of her as they fought--the fierce eyes, dark gray, but appearing black in the dimness of the cathedral, the feathery hair, just as much a shadow as the rest of her, and the valkyrie wings, bobbing along with her as she fought, sometimes spreading in a fierce wingbeat to knock off a flanking tentacle.

A winged angel and a demon with creeping tendrils fighting in a church, Aedan thought as he blocked another blow from Rei’s tanto, A bit obvious, symbolism-wise.

“You’re faster now,” said Rei, “New rig?”

“Some upgrades,” said Aedan, “Still being a sword-wielding relic, I see.”

“Well maybe if your technology could keep up with actual skill--” Rei started.

One of his tentacles caught Rei’s arm. He nearly started sucking the life from her but caught a hard fist to the collarbone and was knocked away.

“You could have stabbed me there,” said Aedan, feeling at his bruised collarbone, “What’s the matter? Didn’t want to spill blood on holy ground?”

Rei snarled and lunged at him. Careless. He grinned and caught the chestplate of her valkyrie wings’ rig with the pincers of his biotic tentacle before pivoting on his heel, hoisting her off her feet, and slamming her hard against one of the cathedral’s support columns. With a cry she brought up her tantos, but two more tentacles pinned her arms over her head and another tentacle pinned one of the wings of her valkyrie rig against the column as well to keep her from zipping out of his grip. She struggled against the grip of the biotic rig, but her movements slowed as the biotic rig started sucking the energy out of her. A ragged grunt fell out of her.

“Poor little Rei,” Aedan cooed, leaning close to her, “Not as strong as daddy or as clever as mummy... making both their mistakes...”

Rei grunted again as the biotic rig sucked more energy from her. “Poor...ngh...” she winced at the biotic grip, “Poor... little Aedan... knows... he’ll never be a real boy....but just... does what Talon tells him... or else they’ll make one that does.”

Aedan visibly flinched at her words and the biotic grip shut off briefly. “You--” he started.

Rei took advantage of the cessation in the biotic grip and kicked him hard in the solarplexus, sending him tumbling back hard, bouncing against the tiles as Rei dropped down from the column. Aedan was coughing from the blow when Rei impacted him again with a knee to the chest, keeping him on the ground. He brought up a tentacle to seize her arm and she slashed it off with her tanto.

Aedan cried out--even if it was only a part of a biotic rig, the fact was that his tentacles were, even if artificially, a part of his nervous system. He felt their loss like losing an arm. She kneed him in the stomach this time, further knocking the wind out of him as she stabbed another tentacle into the floor tiles with her other tanto. He couldn’t seem to get his breath in, between the wails of the pain. He couldn’t fade out from underneath her. His eyes flicked up to her, furious, but he only found pity in her face. Just a second, he thought, Just a second to breathe, that’s all I need---

But he found Rei’s tanto pressed against his neck.

“...so they really might do that to you,” said Rei quietly, looking down at him, something seemed to shift in her. Something he didn’t like. No. Not more pity.

“You know,” said Rei, “If... if you’re really only doing what they say because you think they’ll destroy you and replace you otherwise... you might be safer with us.”

“Talon is building the only world I can exist in,” Aedan snarled back at her.

“So Talon decides who gets to exist?” said Rei, her face unchanging.

Aedan’s breath drew in short. He was going to tell her off but couldn’t quite find the words. “Overwatch--” he started.

But Rei was suddenly yanked off of him by a graviton charge and cried out as she was hit by a charged fusion blast, knocking her flat on the ground a few feet from Aedan, unconscious. Aedan bolted up to an upright seated position to see Seye, gauntlet still extended, looking at him.

“You okay?” said Seye.

“Yeah,” said Aedan, looking at the unconscious Rei.

“I told you to call it in,” said Seye.

“I really thought I had her....” said Aedan.

Seye rolled his eyes, “Let me be the egotistical ass next time, okay?” he said, putting his hands on his hips.

“Okay,” said Aedan, yanking the tanto out of his tentacle and getting up to his feet. He glanced back at Rei, “So... if we’ve captured an Overwatch agent--”

“You haven’t captured anything,” a voice spoke in both their comms with so much feedback both Seye and Aedan winced.

“Marti--” Seye started.

“Shut up. I have two snipers in the wings fixed on your heads. Aedan can fade, Seye, but you can’t.”

“Come on, Marts,” Seye grinned, “You know you can’t kill me.”

“No, I can’t,” said Marti in their comms, the feedback slightly reducing, “Jaime though? Jaime has no problem killing you. Rei’s a part of my team, Seye. She’s a part of Jaime’s team too.”

“I see,” said Seye, looking at Aedan.

“So I suggest you both back away from my teammate,” said Marti.

Both Aedan and Seye put their hands up and backed away from Rei.

“Samir?” Marti’s voice sounded in their comms.

A blue portal suddenly materialized near Rei and a masked figure in a light blue hood materialized out of it. He scooped up Rei in his arms, hauled her over his shoulder, and disappeared once more in the blue portal, which disappeared shortly after him.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Seye,” said Marti.

“I’m not the one running with her tail between her legs after her teammate got taken down,” said Seye. Aedan pressed his hand to his forehead. If Seye’s ego got them both taken out by sniper fire...

“You’ve had to scrub just as much of your share of missions, Seye,” Marti responded in their comms, “The difference between us is Talon put someone replaceable under your command. Overwatch didn’t do that to me.”

With a fizzle of static Marti was out of their comms and Seye huffed.

“She didn’t mean that--” Seye said to Aedan.

“I know,” Aedan cut him off, “Just... shut up. Don’t... mention it.”

A long silence passed between them.

“Call it in next time--” Seye started.

“I know,” said Aedan.

#reidan #marsey

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neirawrites · 5 years

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Like a love story, by Abdi Nazemian

This book is monumental and beautifully written. This book is something that everyone, especially young LGBT people need to read. This book also left me with the desire to read something else.

Spoilers ahead:

A book about a closeted Iranian teenager, a rebellious gay activist and plus sized young ally should have been my favorite thing I’ve read this year, and yet my favorite character was the gay uncle.

Positives (spoiler free)

Some of the quotes in this book made me pause for a few moments and regret my decision to listen to it instead of reading it because I wanted to underline them and reread them, over and over again. I’m going to look for them online just so I can share them with others.

I love the note of hopefulness that permeates the whole book, despite the grim circumstances. it shows the worst of the worst, the darkest hours of our history, but it doesn't leave you broken and hopeless. that sense that love will save us, the passion and the community behind it all, a cause worth fighting for, it is something I aspire to in my writing. I call this the “Bury your gays, but don’t bury the hope” approach, like in the works of Adam Silvera (review here) and also my own Phantom Limb (I hope)

Uncle Stephen is awesome and I kinda want a spin off novel about him.

The small bits of character developments and the arc of learning to accept their loved ones we see in side characters was a nice detail and it shows most people need time and education. The fact some never change their minds was also a good reminder assholes will always exist

I like the bitter sweet last chapter. So much progress, so many great things, but the fight is not over yet.

Negatives (spoiler free)

The main characters just struck a wrong cord with me.

I get the Madonna thing and I like the explanation, but too much Madonna is too much. I would have like if they put an emphasis of maybe some actual queer icon of time. It’s a nit pick, I know, but it stacks up after 11 hours.

Negatives (spoilers)

I don’t know. Maybe I’m too old, maybe too prudish, but the fact Art and Reza spent a solid 1/4 of the book thinking about sex kinda bugged me. I get the symbolic meaning, that gay sex isn’t diseased, isn’t a sin, isn’t dirty and won’t kill you, but it just seemed too heavy handed for me. I like the emphasis on the safe sex tho. More YA books would benefit from mentioning that. Maybe I’m just not a teenage boy and I’m a repressed robot who never even held hands with someone. Art was waaaay to pushy sometimes and it honestly made me uncomfortable. (but, as I said, I am a prude and it has come to a point my prudishness and inability to talk about sex, love or pretty much any other emotion is slowly ruining my life, so take my opinion with a boulder of salt)

Judy drew the short end of the stick writing wise. I wanted to like her, but that part where she ignores her best friend for months on end because he dared to have a crush on the same guy she was dating just came off as a dick move. I get she was hurt and I would have been fine if their feud lasted a few days or weeks, but months just makes her seem like a bad person and a bad friend.

I would have liked to see a lesbian or a trans character or two. I know, not every book has to have every single demographic represented, but I was waiting for the reveal Judy’s new girl friend was gay to happen or something like that, but it never did. Just a missed opportunity, especially given the importance of trans women in the LGBT+ history.

Final thoughts (spoiler free)

I love the fact this book is set in the middle of the AIDS crisis. I don’t know enough about that period of history and that is a shame. Like Stephen said, I don’t want it to be forgotten, all the fighting, all the sacrifices. But I found myself wanting to drop this book and finally watch Angels in America or read a non fiction book about the AIDS crisis. It made me want to message the local organization and ask them where I can read about the LGBT history in ex Yugoslavia.

But then again, maybe that was the point. Maybe that was what Abdi Nazemian wanted to do in the first place.

All in all, I would recommend you read this book, if you are interested in this era of time. If nothing else, it is a great opportunity to get the conversation started.

#bookblr #book review #like a love story #Abdi Nazemian

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musicdeejaysorceress · 5 years

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2019 Inspired Valentines Day Songs To Also Enjoy Year Round by Stella Carrier

2019 Inspired Valentines Day Songs To Also Enjoy Year Round

1-I Feel The Earth Move by Martika-In honor of Valentines Day tomorrow and in the spirit of happy andor fun love songs year round I Feel The Earth Move by Martika is one of those songs that come to mind. I was around 8 or 9 years old when I first heard this blissful pop/dance song.

More Than You Know by Martika-More Than You Know by Martika is another classic and happy pop love song that I first heard around the time I was 8 or 9 years old. I remind my husband from time to time how I love him more than he may realize fortunately he believes me. I feel that More Than You Know is a positive happy love song because it symbolizes in a self explanatory way how someone romantically cares for someone more than they may realize even if the person in love acts in a different way that is typical for someone in love.

3-It’s Not Unusual by Tom Jones-I admit that it was around the summer of 2009 when I first heard this classic love song It’s Not Unusual by Tom Jones. I had obtained one of his greatest hits collections from a public library in Orlando Florida.

4 Dirty Talk (Official Youtube Video) by Wynter Gordon-I admit that this is not a typical Valentine’s Day love song. Dirty Talk by Wynter Gordon is far from what would be considered a conventional Valentines Day love song. However, this dance/electronic love song stands out to me as bold in a creative way because of Wynter Gordon’s radiant vocals and the gleaming music. I unexpectedly discovered this song in the summer of 2011 from a dance music collection that featured various artists.-

5-More Than You Know by Axwell and Ingrosso-I enjoy the blissful vibe of this electronic/dance love song that is More Than You Know by Axwell and Ingrosso. The sunny music adds another meaningful dimension to More Than You Know.

6-Slide In by Goldfrapp-I unexpectedly heard this atmospheric/dance mashup of Slide In by Goldfrapp around the summer of 2009. The vocals and electronic music pair very well together.

7-Whine Up by Kat Deluna ft. Elephant Man-The area my husband and I resided in around the 2007 timeframe (through the navy)played a variety of music on the local radio stations and Whine Up by Kat Deluna ft. Elephant Man was one of those club dance songs that had me enjoying this song the more I heard this tune on the radio andor television.

8-This song Falling Into You by Celine Dion is such a beautiful love song. I am very lucky that I was first exposed to this original and enchanting love song around the time I was 20 or 21 years old (around the 2001 and/or the 2002 timeframe) via a various artists music collection that was a European music import. Nonetheless, I first enjoyed this song some time before unexpectedly meeting my angelic husband in real life. Fortunately we are still married 15 years later we celebrated our 15 year wedding anniversary this past January 22..

9-Irresistible by The Corrs-Technically this riveting song could be either a love or lust type of song. I personally take this song to be more of a love type of song because of the upbeat vibe. Regardless I confess that I mainly know about this song because this was one of the songs from one of their greatest hits collections that drew into my soul less than a couple of months after purchasing and listening to this song. I had purchased one of their greatest hits collections the same week as my 21st birthday.

10-The Dolphins Cry by Live-The Dolphin’s Cry by Live is a poignant rock love song. I am very lucky that I unexpectedly first heard this song around the age of 19 via local radio.

11-This epic rock song Bad Medicine by Bon Jovi is a classic rock tune that I feel compelled to credit and admit I unexpectedly heard via local radio by the summer of 2017. One of the local radio stations plays some brilliant classic rock songs that at times also happen to be love songs.

12-Around the summer of 2015 was when I was introduced to this outstanding alternative rock/indie rock song that is Dreams by Beck that also appears to be a love song (a local Washington D.C. area rock station played this song).

13 I am aware that I might be in the minority for admitting this though I actually found out about this club song Bon Appetit by Katy Perry feat. Migos via Amazon music. I usually hear a multiple number of her popular hits on local radio.

14-This Summer by Maroon 5-Normally I have mixed feelings on endorsing even catchy songs that are sometimes tough on how a love interest is looked at by the person who is secretly in love with said love interest. However, the way that the narrator of the music story in This Summer by Maroon 5 describes their love interest with curiosity/trying to understand their love interest makes me gravitate towards this song even though I’m fully intuitively aware the full meaning of this love song. Still, I consider This Summer by Maroon 5 to be both a terrific and honest song in a novel way.

15 What Lovers Do by Maroon 5 feat. Sza-The music collaboration of Maroon 5 and musician Sza in What Lovers Do creates an excellent love song. The summery music and the beautiful vocals add to the richness of this love song.

16 Seein Red by Dustin Lynch-As an eclectic music listener I admit to being fascinated by this country song as an original love song. Additionally, I truthfully became more aware of this song after hearing it via Amazon through the Now That’s What I Call Country Workout 2018.

17-Around and Around by Kim Leoni-I admit that I unexpectedly discovered this song sometime by the summer 2017 timeframe(I think via Amazon). I enjoy the blissful vibe of this electronic/club love song that appears to be about doing one’s best to be therapeutic andor healing to someone.

18 Secrets by Tiesto&KSHMR-This edgy club song is definitely one of a kind to me because the music narrator of this song is the one who appears to express themselves as bold and self confident in their communication. I first heard this song by the summer 2015 timeframe.

19-Commander by David Guetta feat Kelly Rowland-Music magic was definitely created in this music collaboration song of Commander by David Guetta feat. Kelly Rowland. I first heard this superb dance song by January 2011 via one of the UK versions of the Now music collections.

20-Tall Cool One (Live) by Robert Plant-I admit that I only realized that this classic rock love song that is Tall Cool One (Live) by Robert Plant existed after hearing the live version on the music collection currently pictured with this youtube video via Amazon (the Live At Knebworth music collection featuring various artists). This is a spicy type of love song.

21-All Night by Steve Aoki feat. Lauren Jauregui-I unexpectedly started to enjoy this electronic/dance love song by March 2018 after hearing it on an Amazon dance music station. This love song has a bubbly/cheery vibe to me.

22-Superstar by Madonna-This was actually one of my favorite songs on Madonna’s MDNA music collection. I wish that this love type of song actually got more attention/recognition when it was released. However, I am also glad that this song is available to listen to here online.

23-Desire by U2-I have actually been familiar with this love song since the 1999/2000 timeframe because one of my friends had purchased one of U2’s greatest hits collections for me featuring this song. It was mainly after 2008 when I started to hear this song more often via local radio.

24-My creative intuition/intuitive heart is influencing me to honor my husband with this love/dance song that is Like a Drug by Kylie Minogue. I truthfully purchased the music collection by Kylie Minogue in late 2007 featuring this song and I got into this Like A Drug song more by the 2008 timeframe when I was residing in Norfolk Virginia. Fortunately my husband is encouraging me of listening to her music to this day since he was significant in influencing me to enjoy more of her music when after we first met in 2002.

25-This song Beautiful by Armin Van Buuren feat. James Newman is a musically powerful and creative love/dance song with gorgeous music and fascinating vocals. I remember this song penetrating my soul when I first heard it by May 2008. I take this song to be a positive love song about two people who are therapeutic to each other in a healing way.

26-I Am You by Depeche Mode-This is another song that I am honoring my angelic husband with for Valentines Day tomorrow and beyond because Depeche Mode is another band that he significantly opened my mind to listening to more often after we met in August 2002. I confess that I still am in the process of fleshing out the full meaning of what sounds to be a meaningful song. However, I am interpreting this song to symbolize a positive/happy/joyful message of enduring love between two people who met by destiny-whether planned or unintentional/unexpectedly.

4 songs added on February 14 2019

27-High On You by Survivor-I understand why their Eye of the Tiger song is very popular. However, I find High On You by Survivor to be an elevating love song.

28-Paradise by America-I understand that this song transcends beyond what would be considered a love song. However, I enjoy listening to Paradise by America because to me it symbolizes making the best of life.

29-Crush by Dave Matthews Band-I first heard this delightful love song via their Before These Crowded Streets Collection Around the Time I was 19. However, I admit that I started to enjoy this song more often after 2008 after a local radio station in Norfolk Virginia played this song a multiple number of times. I already posted a comment to this song that I intend to let be for Valentines Day in honor of Valentines Day

My comment from around 5 months ago about this song

I remember being around 19 years old when I first heard this Crush song by Dave Matthews Band via the Before These Crowded Streets Music Collection for whatever reason I remember starting to enjoy this Crush song by the Dave Matthews Band even more after the May/June 2008 timeframe after hearing it played more often on local radio in Norfolk Virginia, it is such an uplifting love song

30-Groovy Kind of Love by Phil Collins-This song also symbolizes to me in a blissful way the type of marriage/union that I have with my angelic husband and also perfect for both Valentines Day and a year round love playlist.

My youtube comment from a year ago regarding A Groovy Kind of Love by Phil Collins

This romantic song of a Groovy Kind of Love by Phil Collins makes me think of my relationship with my sweet husband in a magical type of way.

31-She and I by Alabama-This is another song I am honoring my husband with by sharing because this is another group that he influenced me to listen to after he first played their music during the first week of our wedding. Imagine my delight when I purchased Alabama’s The Essential Alabama collection on January 8 2010 and he still enjoyed listening to a multiple number of their songs with me. She and I by Alabama is one of my favorite love songs by Alabama because to me it symbolizes a strong and powerful bond between two people in a joyful way.

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sluttyshakespeare · 5 years

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Three Great Details About Apeshit By Beyonce & Jay-Z

“I can’t believe we made it,” sings Beyoncé in “Apeshit,” the first single from her surprise joint album with Jay-Z, Everything Is Love. And to prove that she and her husband have made it, in the song’s accompanying video, Beyoncé delivers this line from the Louvre. As the New York Times has pointed out, it is not actually that expensive to shoot a video in the Louvre (about $17,500 for a full day’s shoot). But music videos aren’t about numbers; they’re about how things feel — and there’s no place on earth that feels as lavish, as rich with accumulated cultural power and wealth and colonialism, as the Louvre. If you want to show that you have made it, that you are rich and powerful and one of the greatest artists of your generation, you go to the Louvre. And as an artistic choice, the Louvre is par for Beyoncé’s course. For the past few years, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has increasingly cribbed from the iconography of classical Western art in her own image-making. Her pregnancy announcement photo shoot and her birth announcement photo shoot both referenced Botticelli’s Venus and the Renaissance trope of the Madonna and child, and her 2017 Grammys performance drew on goddess imagery from multiple artistic traditions. So when Beyoncé shoots at the Louvre — taking on by turns the poses of Venus de Milo and Victory — she’s continuing an artistic project of recontextualizing classical Western art, of making herself the aesthetic object on which so much wealth and cultural capital has been spent. And coming from a black woman, that’s a radical statement. “In a way, Beyoncé is exploiting/marketing her blackness as creativity — as a kind of weapon — within and against the very Eurocentric system of culture and consumption from which she has benefited,” says James Smalls, a professor of art history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. That’s an especially radical statement to make in the context of the Louvre, where little of the art features people of color in positions of strength and power. “From the Middle Ages up to the 19th century, works of art that showed black people usually represented them as servants or secondary figures,” explains Smalls. “They were not deemed worthy subjects of paintings, sculptures, or other kinds of cultural works.” One of the few exceptions to that trend is Marie Benoist’s “Portrait d’une négresse,” also displayed at the Louvre. “That painting is an anomaly because it presents a black person as the sole aestheticized subject and object of a work of art,” Smalls says. And it’s the painting that appears at the end of the “Apeshit - Beyonce & Jay-Z” video, after shot after shot of portraits of white people.

Benoist painted “Portrait” in 1800, during a brief period in which France had abolished colonial slavery. (In 1794, the French emancipation proclamation liberated the colonies; in 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery.) In that six-year span, portraits of heroic black people became popular in France, and that created an opportunity for an image of a black woman who is not tending to or subordinate to a white person, who is instead considered worthy of being at the center of her own portrait. As Smalls has pointed out, in its full context, “Portrait” is not a wildly politically subversive image. It’s most likely that the unknown and unnamed subject was a servant with few legal rights who had little choice about how she posed or whether she was okay with her breast being exposed to the world for the next 200 years. Benoist the painter has much more agency here than the black woman at the center of the picture. But in the context of “Apeshit,” with its montages of painting after painting of white faces and white statues, “Portrait” feels both shocking and subversive. It’s a black face in the center of the frame, apparently in control of her domain. And it’s one of the only figures in the Louvre that we don’t see get reinterpreted by either the Carters or their dancers: The only figure in the Louvre that can withstand the unstoppable force that is Beyoncé, that does not need to be remade and reexamined. Part of Beyoncé’s project over the past few years has been to treat art as a form of power: It is a form of focused aesthetic attention, of social capital, and of wealth given solid form. Taking over the Louvre means taking all that power for herself and for the black bodies she brings in with her — except for the “Portrait.” In “Apeshit,” it can stand on its own. What do Beyoncé, The Smurfs 2, and you have in common? All three have the theoretical ability to rent out the Louvre. Though there was widespread awe that the Carters’ video for “Apeshit” took place inside the most famous museum in the world, turns out, it’s actually not all that uncommon. According to the New York Times, about 500 shoots take place at the Louvre each year, which have included films on opposite ends of the “is this a good movie” spectrum, from last year’s Wonder Woman to 2013’s The Smurfs 2, which even the Louvre couldn’t save from its 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. Though the museum only allows photography in the galleries for private use, it makes exceptions for professionals through written authorization. As of 2015, the Louvre’s policy states that to shoot a short film or music video, the cost for both interior and exterior shots would be just €4,500, or about $5,200. It’s possible that if the Carters had a crew of more than 50 people, that number would have been closer to €18,000, but as the Times notes, “there are hotel rooms here that cost more than that.” Hosting private events, however, will cost you a bit more. A tour for under 50 guests will set you back €10,000, while renting out the reception hall beneath I.M. Pei’s pyramid will cost, at the very least, €28,000. Though, to reiterate, that isn’t an amount at which anyone would gasp, “Mon dieu!” Lorde, I have an idea for you about where to film your video for “The Louvre.” Call me! In the video for Beyoncé and Shawn Carter‘s “Apeshit,” the first visual from the pair’s surprise joint album Everything Is Love, the two stars romp through the Louvre in Paris, seizing center stage in a high-culture palace that – like most Western art museums – historically made little room for non-white artists. Some of their mission involves the strategic highlighting of non-white images already in the Louvre. Beyoncé and Jay-Z rap in front of an Egyptian sphinx, and in galleries filled mostly with neo-classical French paintings – white artists, white subjects – the camera singles out black faces. (The video is directed by Ricky Saiz, who also helmed the “Yonce” video from Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s eponymous 2013 album.) Viewers catch brief glimpses of a pair of black figures in Paolo Veronese’s painting “The Wedding at Cana,” where Jesus turned water into wine, as well as a quick look at Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait d’une Négresse,” a depiction of a black woman staring guilelessly back at the viewer. But the Where’s Waldo? moments highlighting black figures are fleeting – the possibilities for this in the Louvre, or any major Western art museum, are limited from the start. So Beyoncé and Jay-Z set about interjecting blackness into a space that has never placed much value on it, claiming one of the centerpieces of European culture with gleeful defiance. They frequently film themselves moving in opposition to the frozen stillness of paintings by Jacques-Louis David, a French neoclassical artist whose work – like “The Oath of the Horatii” and “Madame Récamier” – invokes the Greco-Roman tradition. Much of the potency of the “Apeshit” video comes from the contrasts drawn between the “white” art on the walls and the black women on the gallery floors. In front of David’s “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine,” a court scene of relentless white extravagance, Beyoncé and eight black dancers hold hands and begin to dance. It takes just a few synchronized sashays to upstage David’s massive painting, replacing an ornate symbol of white authority with a celebration of black bodies in motion. The Louvre’s stature depends on people believing that “The Coronation of Empress Joséphine” is the art, but the eye tells a different story – hanging behind Beyoncé and her dancers, the painting is reduced to wallpaper. Throughout the “Apeshit - The Carters” video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z repeatedly upstage some of Western classical art’s most famous images in one of its central sacred spaces. Beyoncé holds a series of chopping micro-poses with her hands before Saiz cuts quickly to an image of a distressed character, hands held up to shield her head, taken from another David painting, “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” The placement of the hands connects the two frames, but Beyoncé’s is virile, aggressive and in charge, while David’s figure seems merely fearful.

Radical gestures roll in on a mightily slippery sliding scale these days, don’t they? We’re far past any cultural division between high and low or pop and art at this point, and artists on the charts are also sniffing out their next inspiration, album cycle, or comparison to their own personal affairs in the grander schemes of culture and history. You’d be hard pressed to find a more hallowed repository of the West than the Louvre, so of course that’s where Beyoncé and Jay-Z have rolled up to set their new music video for the track “Apeshit” from the fresh album they dropped like an anvil right on top of your weekend. Of course this isn’t the first time they’ve been there, nor the first time some Pop-ish upstarts made a Major Statement at the French museum, but it would seem to be a major escalation in the Carters x Louvre relationship, to say nothing of the pride re: their own marital ties that the album and video are so keen to showcase. When worlds (and genres) collide is still a strong trend across multiple spheres of art and culture—turning meaning and message into something of a competitive game of Russian nesting dolls or an arms race of spectacle-based oneupmanship—but what might we make of this night at the museum if considered in light of the 1960s Marxist avant-garde French Situationist International? Founded in 1957 by Guy “Barrel of Laughs” Debord and Asger “Beware the Palette Knife” Jorn, the Situationists were guys and gals, but mostly guys, who wanted to, as the name would indicate, create some situations and elevate to the level of philosophy the notion of taking a freaking walk outside. But they also had a strategy! And key among their techniques, to which you can probably attribute the rise of “culture jamming” and just whatever Banksy thinks he’s doing, was the détournement. Discussed in chapter 8 of Debord’s 1967 tract The Society of the Spectacle, the technique calls for taking advantage of existing cultural objects or canonized art, rerouting their message, and even advocates for theft: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.” You would not have wanted this guy for your editor, but if you were looking to smash the state (of meaning), Debord was your man.

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So, if “détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through the historical correction that is its true allegiance,” then is the spectacle of “Apeshit” a glam, historical correction of the Western assumption that houses of European culture contain the highest achievements of man- and womynkind? Beyoncé and Jay-Z have more clout and pull at this point than a merely rich person or garden-variety aristocrat putzing around the Cotswolds or Monaco, and they built that for themselves. When they pull off a stunt like this, it feels like another chime in the prosperity gospel that Doreen St. Félix examined in the arc of Rihanna’s career, as well as further evidence that the ability to make a compelling spectacle of oneself, to write a personal narrative as large as that of the progress of a civilization, is success. The false idea here is white supremacy, and perhaps the correction then is that European colonialists may not have had the time or the means to make their masterpieces if it weren’t for the economic boon of slavery and historical pillaging of resources from southern and eastern continents for the benefit of countries like France. The Situationists didn’t really like spectacle much (“The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living”) but they recognized that it was inescapable in modern society (“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”). Given this circumstance, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, god bless them, would appear to be doing their best to create a spectacle that people who look like them can see themselves in too, as opposed to the near uninterrupted stream of black death spectacle the media and world is awash in on a day to day basis. Look forward to hearing this jam blasting out of car speakers this summer—it’ll be a real situation. The surprise release of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Jay-Z’s new album, Everything Is Love, (credited as “The Carters” on the album to recognize they’re performing as a united duo, not as individuals) on Saturday, June 16 has left the music world reeling. Already, what fans have been carefully dissecting – and what we’re interested in unpacking, too – is the imagery from the music video for the album’s lead single, “APESHIT”. The six-minute video is likely going to be considered one of the best of 2018, with The Carters and a troupe of dancers taking over the Louvre. In case you couldn’t already tell, the fact that Bey and Jay Z even got unfettered access to the Louvre for their own use is a stunning power move – adding a glorious power to the “APESHIT” lyric “I can’t believe we made it/ This is why we’re thankful”. Let’s start with the primary location in “Apeshit”: the Louvre. Historically, it’s a predominately white space that primarily features white, male-created works of art. It’s a microcosm of history, which itself is mostly white, male, and heterosexual. Tradition and the Louvre go hand-in-hand, too, which means that Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s presence is a total disruption from the beginning. For modern audiences and fans of The Carters, the disruption is surely welcome. Not only can we expect to see (and do see) The Carters standing next to some of the most famous works of art, including the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory of Samothrace, but we see that they are aligning themselves with it right out of the gate. Their presence in a place that preserves what history has deemed the most important artworks, standing next to said art while themselves looking like art and using their body language to engage with this art, already implies they are as worthy of being there as the older work. It’s a middle finger to convention, a dare aimed at squarely at the gatekeepers of history and artistic tradition: You know we deserve to be here. The Carters begin positioning themselves as iconography from the moment we first see them, standing in front of the “Mona Lisa”. Sure, it’s a callback to the first time they took a photo with arguably the most famous painting in history back in 2014, but something is different this time around. Like the “Mona Lisa”, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are dressed simply, but powerfully. Suits for both, in bright colours and styles specific to their tastes and representative of the times they live in; again, just like the “Mona Lisa”. But even more of an echo of the painting is their expressions: a strong stare straight ahead, lips pressed together, shoulders back. They are telegraphing to us that they are as iconic as the “Mona Lisa”, without even saying a word. By donning expressions very much in the same vein as the iconic painting, they’re telling the viewer that they’re basically in the presence of a peer. But even more than that, they’re commenting on the beguiling and enticing space they occupy in our own culture. Much like the “Mona Lisa”, they are telling us that they know we think about them in a way we don’t think about other music artists. They know that we’ll spend hours analysing them and their work, attempting to find meaning in their movements and lyrics, trying to work out the symbols and icons they’ve put forth, and hoping to crack the impenetrable fortress they’ve built around them (from which they only emerge to become vulnerable when they want to). Humans have spent centuries trying to unpack the enigma of the “Mona Lisa” and still continue to do so to this day; do you really think you can figure out The Carters in a day? Another immensely important moment from “APESHIT” comes in the repeated glimpses of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait of a Black Woman (Negress)” from 1800. One of the few works of art painted by a woman in the Louvre, the painting is deeply important both as a feature in the Louvre and its place in art history, because it is the only painting of its time to depict a black woman who is not a slave or similarly subjugated person, but rather simply presented in all her glory.

The painting affirms that black women are worthy of being in artistic spaces, and in enduring imagery. The painting is shown a few times, and it’s the second to last painting we see before the video closes on Bey and Jay turning around to regard the “Mona Lisa” – further confirmation that Benoist’s painting and its subject deserve recognition. It’s also no accident that the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” statue is frequently seen in “APESHIT”. Implying triumph and power, the statue has endured over centuries, and The Carters imply just as much by once again standing in front of it, in perhaps a nod to their own triumph and the power they’ve achieved. According to the Louvre website for the piece, the statue depicts Nike, and was likely created to commemorate a naval victory by the Rhodians (who hail from Rhodes, part of the Dodecanese island group in Greece). The towering relic from the Hellenistic period is, as the Louvre’s description notes, intensely dramatic and glorifies the female body in connection with something traditionally masculine (victory in war). That endowment of power to a female body is then emulated in the female bodies that stand before it in present day, through Beyoncé and her troupe of female dancers. All of these women come together and move as one being, with Beyoncé presiding over them all. She is the modern image of victory over the warfare placed on her body, career, intellect, personal life; having succeeded, she can now dress like “Winged Victory” and, in a sense, pass along her victories to the women who dance on the steps in front of her. Twitter user Queen Curly Fry’s in-depth Twitter thread breaking down the art seen in “Apeshit” is thorough, and her comments on the incorporation of the “Venus de Milo” into the video is so neatly articulated that we couldn’t have said it better if we tried: “Here, Beyoncé once again models herself as a Greek statue, this time the Venus de Milo. However, in this shot she wears a nude bodysuit with wrapped hair, reframing both goddesses of beauty and victory as a black woman. This dismantles white-centric ideals of beauty.” Similarly, Twitter account Tabloid Art History nails why it’s so important and iconic for Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and her dancers to be dancing in front of “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine” by Jacques Louis David from 1804: “What I especially like about this part of the video is that the painting itself depicts a disruption, Napoleon taking the Pope’s role from him and crowning Josephine himself. Beyoncé further disrupts this by taking on Josephine’s role as the one being crowned.” If we consider Napoleon’s role as a major coloniser in the early 19th century, particularly in Northern Africa, then Beyoncé’s placement in the shot is extra symbolic. Beyoncé standing underneath the place where Napoleon is seen crowning his wife in the painting is a symbolic retrieval of stolen power. One of the other paintings we see in “APESHIT” is another Jacques-Louis David painting, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women.” Interestingly, we only see portions of the painting, never the entire artwork. This could be a sly comment on the dissection and appropriation of black bodies by white culture for their own aesthetic uses – or it could just be a deft use of quick cuts for dramatic effect for the video. Or maybe it’s both. Twitter user Queen Curly Fry notes here that the painting, for the puposes of “APESHIT”, depicts “(white) female fear evoked by (white) male violence is juxtaposed w/ (black) female empowerment (‘get off my dick’).” The painting’s use of white female tears –long criticised as a way for white women to shift any blame they deserve for racist behaviour, or to turn a blind eye to racial injustice – is in direct contrast with Beyoncé and her dancers’ freedom, calm, and enlightenment. In the end, “APESHIT” is a triumph because it is a statement that only The Carters could successfully make. The visual tells the powers that be to fuck off with their tradition, their preciously guarded history that has sought to erase non-white people from the history books, and their preconceived notions about how black bodies can be ornamental. They’ve used art to push back, to demand honour for the work they’ve contributed. “APESHIT” is a force to be reckoned with, and The Carters’ use of art to make a statement is an announcement to the world that they’ve shaped culture as much as anything hanging on a gallery wall.

#jayz #beyonce #shawncarter #carters #carter #thecarters #music #apeshit

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actuallymollyweasley · 7 years

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kids of the in-between: ch. 14

aka “Ticking Backwards”

Honestly, you’re all amazing for being so patient all this time, and I hope this chapter was worth the wait! Managed to finish just in time to celebrate the end of the beauty that was Pynch Week haha. Feel free to ask to be tagged in future updates if you want!

Read all parts: on tumblr | on ao3

One second, Adam was highlighting his calculus lecture notes from last week in an effort to try and remember how the hell he was supposed to answer the questions in his problem set. The next second, Blue Sargent had somehow managed to snatch up his notebook and highlighter, toss them onto his bed, and perch herself on his desk, all in a single motion. She then proceeded to smile at him as if this was completely normal.

(Although Adam supposed that because Blue Sargent was involved, it kind of was.)

“Hello, Adam.”

Adam narrowed his eyes. She was using her customer-service voice, the one that managed to convey I'm running on two hours of sleep so you can be polite to me or die just by the way she shaped her vowels. “Blue. What do you want?”

“Can’t I just want to talk to my best friend, whom I love dearly and never see anymore?”

“You can,” Adam said. “But you generally do that from your own desk, not mine. Also, it's not my fault that you've only slept in your own bed three times in the last week.”

“Adam!”

Blush was an interesting color on Blue. It clashed rather horribly with the neon green streak Noah had dyed in her hair the other day—but the neon green streak also clashed horribly with her ripped purple overalls, so maybe it all balanced out in the end.

“I'm just saying,” Adam continued, “don't try to pass all the blame off on my double shift and weird boyfriend.”

To his surprise, that statement made Blue eye him carefully. “That's what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.”

“The double shift?”

“The weird boyfriend, you idiot.”

“Could have gone either way,” Adam argued, although he couldn't quite keep the corners of his mouth from twitching. “What about him?”

Blue snagged one of his pens and started doodling on her overalls, as if owning ripped purple overalls wasn't anti-establishment enough already. “How are things going between you two? Since your… since that phone call?”

“They're good,” Adam said, and was surprised to find that for once in his life, he actually meant it. Good wasn't something he came across very often.

Blue drew a suspicious smiley face on her overalls. It sported a single raised eyebrow and a curled mouth and a judgmental stare that pointed directly at Adam. “So no problems at all?”

“I said good, not perfect.”

After all, Ronan had blown into this very dorm room yesterday morning to show Adam a caricatured painting of Gansey that he'd created using Gansey's sleeping face as a model. Adam had been working at his desk with his deaf ear pointed toward the door and all his focus directed toward his assignments. When Ronan had let the door slam shut behind the tail end of his hurricane, Adam had flinched. It had been instinctive, and unavoidable, and had nothing to do with Ronan himself, and he had still freaked out and left and refused to talk to Adam for the next several hours out of misplaced guilt.

So they were working on it.

But that was good too. It was nice to work for something that Adam actually thought he could get.

“There's already too much perfect in our friend group,” he continued. “Henry and Noah never even frown at each other, and don't think I didn't notice that Gansey’s wearing a lavender polo shirt today.”

“Coincidence,” Blue insisted.

“You guys matched outfits,” Adam replied, unrepentant. “Ronan and I have to have disagreements just to balance out the rest of you.”

“That's a terrible reason to have a fight.”

“You yell at Gansey for wearing boat shoes every day just to keep up your three-week streak.”

“This conversation isn't about me and Gansey.”

“The thing about a conversation,” Adam said, “is that you shouldn't start one if you don't want it to go both ways. Why are you suddenly asking about Ronan?”

At that, Blue finally looked up from the drawings on her overalls, rolling Adam’s pen between her palm and the desk. “I just… Are you sure you want to stay here for Thanksgiving instead of coming home with me? Because I know that you don't want to cause issues with money, but you know my mom always cooks too much food anyway, and you really wouldn't be imposing and my baby cousins would love to see you and I don't want you to have Thanksgiving with Ronan just because you don't think you have any other options.”

“Oh, Blue.” Adam reached out, rolled the pen out from under Blue’s hand, and started drawing. “I'm staying here for a lot of reasons. One reason is that I don't want to go back to Henrietta so soon after telling my father that I don't need to.”

“But Adam,” Blue protested, “you shouldn't—”

“Another,” Adam continued pointedly, “is that Calla always looks at me like I'm either going to destroy the house or fall down dead at any moment, just because she knows I notice when she's doing it. Also, your mom always burns the turkey, and Ronan has never actually burned anything that he's cooked in front of me. Not to mention that I genuinely like Ronan and am looking forward to making out with him over break. I'm pretty sure all of those are valid reasons. Do you disagree?”

Blue looked at him, blinked, looked down at the vines now twisting across the hem of her overalls, and sighed. “No. I just had to make sure I didn't need to beat Ronan up for you. And I was hoping I could convince you to come so I wouldn't have to suffer through my mom’s burnt turkey alone.”

“And the truth comes out,” Adam grinned, capping his pen. “Don’t worry about it, Blue. I'm sure Orla will show up with her husband for Thanksgiving dinner so she doesn't have to cook anything herself, and if Orla enjoys doing anything with you, it’s painting nails and complaining.”

“You got me there,” Blue said, then paused. “You realize that I'm never going to be able to wash these overalls now, right? These drawings are a symbol of our friendship and ability to have serious conversations without deflecting. I have to preserve them forever.”

“All I did was make squiggly lines,” Adam said. “If you really want something worth preserving, hand them to Ronan and give him a Sharpie.”

“He'd just write the lyrics to the Murder Squash Song across my ass.”

“Or he'd draw something really thoughtful on your front pocket and pretend Chainsaw did it.”

Blue considered that statement. “Knowing Ronan, he'd do both.” She clapped both hands on his shoulders—a distinctly Gansey gesture—and looked him in the eye. “He really is perfect for you.”

Then she hopped off his desk.

“Did you just… give me your blessing?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Isn't that Gansey’s job? Are you assigning each other parental duties now?”

“Sorry, gotta go, meeting Henry to tear holes in our clothes and drink tea from his expensive mugs.”

“Henry would never defile his vintage Madonna t-shirts and designer jeans.”

“My and Noah’s clothes,” Blue corrected. “Have fun with your calculus.”

Blue had been his best friend for over three years at this point. Adam didn't know why he kept making the mistake of attempting to understand her.

“Now, I restocked the coffee beans and cereal—and remembered to buy milk this time, before you ask,” Gansey said, glancing around the kitchen like the cabinets would help remind him of what he wanted to say. “Ronan said you two were fine to do the grocery shopping on your own, but I didn’t know if you would get a chance to go out before breakfast tomorrow so I wanted to make sure you didn’t have to worry about that. The lock on our door is still broken, so you might want to push the couch in front of it at night just in case. Declan and Matthew are welcome to stay in my room if they don’t want to book a hotel. I’m planning to return Sunday afternoon around four, but if anything happens before then, just give me a call and I can be back in three hours. In fact, if you think I might need to be here for any reason at all, say the word and I can cancel my plans. Maybe I should just call Helen right now and tell her to let Mom know that I can’t make it home for Thanksgiving after all. I’m sure she’d underst—”

“Gansey.” Adam had been planning to let Gansey tire himself out, but this was getting out of hand. “I have been self-sufficient for the last ten years. I'm pretty sure I can handle a week in the dorms, even if that week does involve Ronan.”

“Dickface,” Ronan called out from inside his room.

“Are you talking to me or Gansey?”

“Yes,” Ronan said.

Gansey’s face contorted like he wasn't sure whether to feel offended or amused. “Regardless. You'll call me if the need arises, won't you?”

“Yes, Gansey, we'll call you.” Adam pushed at Gansey's rolling suitcase with his toe, watching with satisfaction as it bounced off the kitchen cabinets and slowly rolled back. “Now go enjoy your Thanksgiving.”

“You too.” Gansey considered Adam for a moment and then held out one hand for a fistbump. It was absurd and boyish and brilliantly Gansey, and Adam accepted it with a smile tugging at his lips.

Gansey's responding grin was blinding as he reached down and grabbed the handle of his suitcase. “Ronan, I'm leaving!”

“Good fucking riddance!” Ronan replied before sticking his head out of the doorway. “Watch your shifts into second gear. That's when the Pig stalls out most often.”

Adam wouldn't have thought it possible, but Gansey's smile widened. “Thanks, Lynch,” he said, and then he was gone, and Adam and Ronan were alone.

Adam turned and raised his eyebrows at Ronan, who very purposefully turned around and retreated back into his room. Unfazed, Adam followed him. “Second gear, huh?”

“You're the mechanic,” Ronan said. “Didn't you notice?”

“Oh, I noticed,” Adam said, “but I wasn't the one who made sure that Gansey knew too.”

“Shut up,” Ronan said, and kissed him.

They'd been dating for a few weeks now, but kissing Ronan Lynch still felt like starting a wildfire. Adam had to break away before they burned down the whole dorm.

As he did, he eyed the extra sheets draped across half of Ronan's room. “When are you going to let me see what's under those?”

“When I’m fucking done with it.”

He frowned. “‘It?’ Is all of that for one art piece?”

Ronan shrugged. “Dr. Azalea.”

“But I thought you already turned in your last assignment.”

“This,” Ronan gestured vaguely, “is for my first assignment.”

Adam felt his heart collide against his ribs, a bang rather than a thump. “Happiness?”

“Yeah.” Ronan tugged the sheets more securely over his stack of canvases. “It's stupid.”

“It's not.” Adam reached out and took one of Ronan's hands in both of his, rubbing his thumbs over Ronan's knuckles. “Now come on, what are we supposed to be buying for tomorrow?”

“This was a terrible idea.” Ronan looked about five seconds away from throwing the pasta he was cooking out the window. “Adam, why the fuck did you let me cook? We should have met them for lunch somewhere. I shouldn't have let them come here in the first place. We should have driven to D.C. We should have stayed here by ourselves. Fuck, this dish is shit.”

Adam peered over Ronan’s shoulder. “Doesn't look like shit to me.” He snagged a bite of penne with a fork before Ronan could stop him. “Doesn't taste like it either.”

“It’s shit compared to my mom’s,” Ronan said, and that was startling enough to make Adam turn off the stove and take the spatula from Ronan’s slightly shaking hands. He hadn't heard Ronan mention his mother since before his father had died. Actually, he'd never heard Ronan mention his mother at all.

“Ronan.” Adam frowned at his boyfriend’s hands, trying to find the right words. He'd never been particularly skilled at offering comfort. He'd never really needed to be. “It doesn't have to taste like your mom’s to be good. I'm sure they'll love it.”

“Matthew might,” Ronan muttered. “Declan’s going to hate it.”

“He won't,” Adam insisted, but the look on Ronan's face told Adam he knew that Adam had no idea what he was talking about. He was an only child, his parents were both alive and terrible, and he had never met Declan Lynch before in his life.

“I mean it,” Adam said, not sure how he would back up that statement, and then there was a knock at the door.

Ronan tensed, gave the pasta one last stir, opened the door—and was promptly tackled by a medium-sized bundle of brightly colored clothing and hair like sunshine.

“Ronan! I've missed you so much! Your hair is so short! How is college?”

It's mostly like high school,” Ronan said, voice a little rough, “but with better friends. Are you still growing?”

“Like a weed,” came from behind Matthew’s mass of curls. “If you don't watch out, he’ll end up taller than you, Ronan.”

“Doubtful,” Ronan said, shoulders stiff but eyes still soft because Matthew had stuck his tongue out at him in response. “Are you coming inside for lunch or what?”

“Or what,” Matthew replied, although he was already passing Ronan in the doorway.

Adam hid a smile in his shirt collar.

At the same moment, Matthew caught sight of him and bounded forward like a wayward basketball, only skidding to a halt to extremely vigorously shake Adam’s hand. “Hi! I'm Matthew, Ronan’s brother. It's great to meet you! What’s your name?”

Adam’s smile froze onto his face. Had Ronan seriously not told them—

“Hello, I’m Declan Lynch, and you must be Adam Parrish.” Ronan's older brother slipped past Matthew to introduce himself. He had Ronan’s sharp cheekbones, the type of suit that a millionaire would wear for a casual evening out on his own personal yacht, and a handshake with half of Matthew's enthusiasm and twice his firmness. “Matthew, don't you retain anything Ronan says?”

“I retain the things that matter, like that he said lunch was ready,” Matthew retorted. Then he glanced at Adam. “Um, not that you don't matter, obviously. I just forgot that you were going to be here the whole time. But now I'm even more excited to meet you! Ronan’s never had a boyfriend before.”

The Lynch in question was currently glaring at the pot on the stove—probably because he couldn't bring himself to glare directly at Matthew, Adam thought with amusement. “Shut up,” Ronan said, “and grab a plate.”

“I'll shut up if you let me drink beer with lunch,” Matthew said.

“Not a fucking chance,” Ronan replied.

Adam had no way of proving it. But when he turned around to shut the front door, he was pretty sure he glimpsed a small smile on Declan’s face.

The rest of Wednesday went so well that Adam had to refrain three times from asking Ronan what he'd been so worried about. As he’d expected, Matthew had nothing but compliments to bestow on the food Ronan made, and Declan didn't mention it at all, which Ronan claimed was its own kind of silent approval. After that, they spent most of the afternoon shopping for last-minute groceries—or rather, Ronan and Declan argued about what they needed to buy while Matthew stealthily added cans of whipped cream to the shopping cart behind their backs. By the time they reached the checkout line, there were at least fifteen cans tucked between the bags of sweet potatoes and fresh green beans, but the older Lynch brothers placed each new can on the conveyor belt without a word.

Declan made dinner and spent most of the meal talking about his job.

Matthew begged Ronan for beer unsuccessfully half a dozen times.

Ronan painted all through the night, telling Adam that with a little luck, he could be finished by the end of Thanksgiving break.

And then Thursday morning came.

Adam woke up to yelling, which was both familiar and discomfiting. For a moment, he couldn’t distinguish reality from his dream about the double-wide trailer he’d grown up in. The sheets felt scratchier. The room felt smaller. He even thought he heard the sound of breaking glass.

But then Declan shouted, “And it’d be nice if you’d answer your phone every once in a while,” the polar opposite of anything Robert Parrish would have said to his son, and Adam refocused.

“It’s college,” Ronan snapped. “I’m fucking busy.”

“Oh, please, you’re an art student.” Declan’s voice was scathing. “Don’t bother pretending that you’re drowning under some heavy workload.”

Adam decided to grab a pair of sweatpants and open the door before somebody got punched.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly, doing his best to pretend that the walls weren’t paper-thin. “You’re up earlier than usual, Ronan.”

“Didn’t sleep,” Ronan growled, which Adam already knew. “I was working on an assignment for class.”

“And I’m sure it’s very pretty,” the eldest Lynch brother said. Ronan was still silently fuming behind the kitchen counter, but Declan’s expression had shifted from derisive to politely neutral the moment he caught sight of Adam. “Good morning, Adam. Would you like some coffee?”

“I’d love some,” Adam said.

“Sugar? Cream?”

“Just a little cream is fine, thanks.”

“Gross,” Ronan muttered.

“You’re gross,” Matthew said over a yawn, wandering into the hallway. “What are we talking about?”

“Coffee,” Ronan said.

“Oh, yeah. That is gross.”

Adam furrowed his eyebrows. “I thought you two were staying in a hotel room?”

(It was the type of decision he had a feeling he would never understand—in his opinion, spending money on a hotel when there was a perfectly usable bed and couch in the suite was a frivolity and a waste. But Declan had thought a hotel room would be more comfortable, and so the money was spent.)

Matthew rubbed a hand across his eyes, yawning again. “We did.”

“But Matthew said he was going to use the restroom and ‘accidentally’ went back to sleep on your friend Gansey’s bed,” Declan explained.

“Lame,” Ronan said. But this time he reached out and ruffled Matthew’s hair, so Adam figured things would be all right.

Less than an hour later, the Lynch brothers were arguing again.

“What do you think you're doing?” Declan demanded.

“Making the spice rub for the fucking turkey, like I said I was going to,” Ronan growled.

“With those spices? You're doing it completely wrong.”

“No, I'm fucking not.”

“It doesn't need sage.”

“Yes, it does.”

“How would you even know?”

“Because I actually cared about helping Mom out with Thanksgiving dinner, unlike you, and I listened when she was teaching me! It's parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, like in that fucking song, but without the parsley because who the fuck needs parsley anyway. And then if you’re not a fucking idiot, you’ll remember that it also uses salt, pepper, and garlic powder. That's what she told me.”

“Yeah? Then I'm sure she would have loved to hear you repeat it back like that.”

“Guys,” Matthew whined.

Ronan turned to him. “Matthew, you always hung around the kitchen at Thanksgiving too. Tell Declan that he's wrong.”

Matthew bit his lip, eyes darting between the two of them, and said, “I'm sorry. I don't remember how Mom made it.”

Declan and Ronan both froze for such a long moment that Adam inexplicably remembered the drawing he’d seen on Ronan’s wall the first time he ever entered his room—Declan and Matthew wrestling in the grass, Ronan perched on Niall’s back, and Aurora Lynch smiling softly in the background.

Which was worse? To have never felt the kind of love that the Lynches offered each other, or to grow up surrounded by that love, only to have it all ripped away in a single bloody morning?

Declan sighed. “Maybe it has been too long since I helped Mom in the kitchen,” he said. “Go ahead and do what you want, Ronan.”

Ronan’s knuckles were white as he gripped the edges of the mixing bowl. “Who even fucking cares about the turkey anymore?”

“I do!” The turkey was lying on the other end of the counter, so Matthew nudged it within Ronan’s reach. “Come on, Ro, I’ll help you with the turkey.”

“I can start peeling potatoes,” Adam offered.

Declan stiffened like he had forgotten Adam was there. But when he turned to face him, his smile looked unshakable. It would have been enough to make Adam question whether Ronan and Declan were actually related, except that they shared too many facial features. “That’d be great, Adam,” he said, as if tension wasn’t stretched between everyone in the room like bungee cords just waiting to snap. “But I don’t want you to feel like we have a monopoly on tonight’s menu. Do you have any family recipes you want to make?”

Adam flinched—but a quick look at the rigid lines of Ronan’s back told him that one family’s worth of drama was enough for this Thanksgiving, so he covered it by pulling the bag of potatoes closer to him. “No,” he said simply. “My parents never cared much for Thanksgiving.”

Ronan snorted, and not kindly. “You can say that again.”

Matthew looked between his siblings and Adam, frowning. “So. What are we doing for lunch?”

Lunch was an argument, as Ronan thought they would be too full to eat dinner and Declan thought he was just trying to be difficult. Cooking was an argument, as they were constantly bumping shoulders and using each other's mixing spoons and changing the oven temperature. Chainsaw flew into the kitchen at one point, looking for scraps, and that sparked yet another argument, as Declan couldn't decide which was more horrifying: that Ronan had broken the dorm’s rules to get a pet, that said pet was a raven, or that Ronan was planning on feeding her some of the leftover turkey later.

When the Lynch brothers got along, it made this too-large-for-a-couple-of-college-freshmen dorm feel like a home.

When they were fighting, it made this too-small-for-a-couple-of-angry-boys dorm feel like a certain double-wide trailer that Adam was still trying to put behind him.

And on top of that, he was developing a migraine—because everything sounded louder when you could only hear out of one ear.

So when Matthew went digging through their grocery bags, surfacing only to exclaim that they had forgotten to buy pumpkin pie filling, Adam jumped at the chance to get out of Walton.

“I think there are a few grocery stores just off-campus that are still open on Thanksgiving,” he said. “I can bike around and see if any of them carry pumpkin pie filling.”

“Oh, we couldn't ask that of you,” Declan said.

“It's really not a problem,” Adam replied. “Besides, I want pumpkin pie just as much as Matthew does.”

“Don't be stupid,” Ronan said. Then, when Adam turned to frown at him, “It’s fucking freezing outside.” And he tossed the keys to the BMW at Adam.

Adam caught them out of reflex and sheer luck, furrowing his eyebrows. If he'd been having a shitty day, how much shittier had Ronan been feeling? He’d spent the entire day arguing with the only family he had left. “Ronan,” he started, and then hesitated, not wanting to offend Declan. In the end, he settled on, “Do you want to come with me?”

Ronan just shoved his hands in his pockets. “Nah,” he said. “Gotta keep an eye on the turkey.”

Adam frowned at him again, but when Ronan didn't budge, he had no choice but to leave.

Buying pumpkin pie filling on Thanksgiving afternoon took Adam almost an hour. It turned out to be more difficult to find an open store than he'd anticipated, and if he'd lingered in the one store he had found, walking through every aisle and relishing that it was quiet enough for him to hear the buzz of the fluorescent lights… well, no one could prove it.

In any case, by the time he returned, Ronan was no longer in the kitchen. Instead, his awful electronic music was blaring inside his room.

“The turkey finished cooking, so Ronan decided to let us make the rest of dinner while he went back to painting.” Declan didn't roll his eyes, but with that tone of voice, he didn't need to.

“Well,” Adam replied, “he’s extremely dedicated to his art. He wants everything he works on to be perfect. That's what makes him such a good artist.”

Declan looked like he couldn't imagine Ronan Lynch being dedicated to anything. “Good for him,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “Were you able to find the pumpkin filling, then?”

Adam nodded.

“Awesome!” Matthew sprang up from where he'd been lounging on the couch. “Do you want to help me make the pie, Adam?”

What Adam really thought he should do was check on Ronan. But Matthew’s eyes were shining with excitement, and Adam found himself unable to refuse.

Between making pie, throwing together a few side dishes, and reheating the turkey once everything else had finished baking, hours passed without Adam noticing. Suddenly it was seven o’clock, and dinner was ready.

“We usually try to eat by five,” Declan said, sliding into his chair at the kitchen table, “but with putting everything together ourselves, I suppose delays were inevitable. I hope you don't mind, Adam.”

Adam thought Declan must not have actually gone to college to believe that a seven o’clock dinner was some horrible catastrophe. “It's fine,” he assured him. “Should I go get Ro—?”

“RONAN!” Matthew shouted out of nowhere, making Adam jump. “DINNER!”

“He's fifteen feet away, not five hundred,” Declan chided, although even he seemed unable to properly discipline Matthew. “I’m pretty sure you didn't have to scream that loudly in order for him to hear you.”

“Yeah, but it was fun,” Matthew grinned. “And apparently necessary, because he's STILL NOT OUT HERE!”

A pause.

“RONAN?!”

“I'm coming, I'm coming, Jesus,” Ronan said, shrugging on his leather jacket as he came out of his room. “I had to finish the thing I was working on, calm the fuck down.”

“We were all waiting for you,” Matthew said, in a supercilious tone he could only keep up for half the sentence before breaking into giggles, but Adam’s eyes narrowed as he took a second look at Ronan’s hands.

Declan followed his line of sight and frowned. “Ronan… Ronan, are those bandages? Are you all right?”

“Calm the fuck down,” Ronan repeated. “My hands slipped, it's not a big fucking deal.”

Declan’s frown only deepened. “You cut yourself… on art supplies?”

“Ever heard of a palette knife?” Ronan said, scathing.

“Nope!” Matthew broke in cheerfully. “Now come on, Ronan, sit down, we have to pray.”

Ronan's shoulders stiffened. “Right.” He sat down next to Adam. “I guess that's your job now, Declan?”

For the first time since Adam had met him, Declan looked visibly uncomfortable. “Actually, I was thinking we could all say it together?”

Ronan clasped his hands together so tightly, Adam thought it must be hurting the cuts on his palms. “Fine.”

He bowed his head, and after a moment, Matthew and Declan followed suit. “Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from thy bounty, through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”

“Amen,” Adam said along with them, although he wasn't sure he believed in gifts or bounty, let alone a benevolent God who supposedly offered them. It just seemed like the polite thing to do.

When they were done, Matthew's head popped back up like a puppy's. “Okay! Let's eat!”

Declan smiled, passed Matthew the mashed potatoes, and stood up to begin cutting into the turkey. Adam got so caught up in filling his plate with green beans and sweet potato casserole and stuffing and peas and turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce—he may have been getting three meals a day from the dining hall, but putting as much food on his plate as he could, whenever he could, was second-nature by now—that he didn't look over at Ronan until he'd sampled everything in reach.

“Ronan,” Adam said, “this turkey is amazing. Whenever I go to Thanksgiving at Blue’s house, her mom always burns it and makes us eat it anyway, but I… Ronan, why is your plate empty?”

Ronan was staring off at nothing.

“Yeah, Ronan, if you don't get some food soon, I'm finishing off the sweet potato casserole without you.”

No, not nothing—the empty chair at the head of the table.

Adam started to get a hard feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Ronan?”

Ronan stood abruptly and nearly knocked his chair over. “I need a drink,” he said before heading toward the refrigerator.

“A drink,” Declan said drily.

Ronan threw open the refrigerator door.

“Are you serious? Beer on Thanksgiving?”

He grabbed one, seemingly at random, and slammed it on the counter. “Yeah, Declan, beer on fucking Thanksgiving. Who's gonna stop me?”

“I—”

“No, I mean it,” Ronan said. “Who's gonna stop me? Because Mom hasn't spoken in months, Dad’s dead, and I don't have to listen to a word you say. You're not our fucking parents.”

Declan went completely still, as if this was another one of Ronan's paintings. Adam thought he knew which emotion Dr. Azalea would accept this one for. Heartbreak.

“Shit,” Ronan said, “I’m sorry.”

The door slammed shut behind him when he left.

For a moment, silence.

Then, “Ronan, wait!”

Matthew scooted out of his chair and hurried after him.

Adam got up and ran to Ronan's room, intending to use his window to see if Ronan headed into the parking lot, but when he finally tugged Ronan's door open, he couldn't do anything but stare.

At last, the sheets Ronan had been using to hide his happiness assignment had been tossed aside, leaving the project in full view.

It was a wreck.

Adam thought Ronan had actually been proud of how his artwork was turning out, but that was clearly no longer the case. Several of the canvases had been slashed through, while others looked like they had been kicked in. A paint tube had been squeezed out over a few more, leaving behind red paint hardened and flaking to the touch like dried blood. Preliminary sketches had been torn up and scattered over the mess, perverted confetti celebrating creative disaster. And when Adam finally remembered to lean out and look for Ronan, all he noticed was another pile of Ronan's ruined paintings that he’d apparently thrown out of the window. Everything was just—

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s his art,” Adam said. “He's been working on these canvases for weeks, insisting that he was getting close to finishing, insisting that his next idea was going to be the right one, and now it's all destroyed.”

But when he turned around, Declan wasn't staring at the ruined paintings. He was staring at the objects that Adam had gotten used to after spending so much time in Ronan's room.

“What?” Adam asked. “You can't tell me you don't know about Ronan's dreams.”

“Of course I know about his dreams,” Declan snapped, his eyes too wide and horrified to make his harsh tone effective. “But these are…”

Adam looked around and tried to remember how it had felt to see Ronan's room for the first time. The unnaturally bent sword, the twisted clock that ticked backwards, the dark stain on his floor that was now mostly hidden by ripped canvases and red paint…. That pit in his stomach came back. He'd known the objects weren't exactly fun dream souvenirs, known they could even look menacing, but they were just dispersed among the other objects, right? Tucked between self-bouncing balls and clocks that worked properly, hidden behind dream lights and whimsical inventions? Everyone had nightmares sometimes, and anyway, Adam hadn't seen Ronan dream up anything bad since that night at the campground. Of course, he hadn't been around Ronan every night—but he'd been around sometimes—and Ronan had never objected when Adam asked to spend the night, he'd never said that there was anything to be worried about—but then he was always the one who woke up first, and last night he had never fallen asleep at all.

“This isn't normal,” Adam said. It wasn't a question because he already knew the answer.

He knew it wasn't normal.

But Ronan had been so happy for the last few weeks—he’d thought Ronan had been so happy—that he'd stopped worrying.

Adam felt, abruptly, like a terrible boyfriend.

“No, it’s not normal,” Declan said derisively. “None of this is fucking normal. I haven’t seen him dream like this since…”

“Since Kavinsky?” Adam guessed.

“How do you know about Kavinsky?”

For some reason, the question snapped Adam into action. “This may surprise you,” he said, “but being in a relationship occasionally requires communication.” Except, apparently, when you destroy weeks’ worth of hard work. No, that’s not worth mentioning at all. Adam pushed the thought out of his mind. “Listen, Declan, I still have Ronan’s keys. That means he can’t have gotten that far. You should take your car and look around off-campus. He likes to go to St. Agnes or Nino’s, but check liquor stores too. I’ll search his usual on-campus hideouts because you can’t exactly find those on Google Maps.”

Just then, someone started banging on the front door. For one hopeful moment, Adam thought Ronan might have changed his mind about storming out. But when he flung the door open, only Matthew was waiting on the other side, red-faced and breathless.

“I tried to run after him, but by the time I went into the hallway, he was already gone. I went down the stairs and looked around, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t figure out which direction he’d taken.”

“That’s okay, Matthew,” Adam said. “We’re going to find him. You stay here in case he comes back, all right? Do you have my phone number?”

Matthew shook his head, so Adam took Matthew’s phone out of his hand and punched his number into his contacts, sending himself a text so he would have Matthew’s number as well. Then he did the same to Declan’s phone, grabbed his coat off the couch, and felt in his pockets to make sure Ronan hadn’t taken his keys without Adam noticing after all. They were there, a cool and hard and reassuring weight.

In the same time span, Declan had barely managed to put on one shoe. “You seem to have this search-team business down to a science. Have you… has something like this happened before?”

Adam felt something shatter inside of him. “Not in a while,” he managed to say.

Then he was gone.

Adam checked everywhere. Every classroom Ronan had bribed or broken his way into, every tree he’d sketched, every bench he’d fallen asleep on. By the time he got back to Walton, it was almost nine, Thanksgiving dinner was a forgotten feast weighing down the kitchen table, and nobody had been able to find Ronan Lynch.

Finally, feeling guilty and desperate, Adam called Gansey.

“Adam! I’m so happy to hear from you! I hope you’re having a lovely Thanksgiving. I’m just,” he hiccupped, “watching Food Network with Helen. Because obviously we haven’t seen enough—hic—food for one day.”

Gansey sounded sleepy, wine-drunk, and content. Adam could picture him leaning against Helen on an extravagantly luxurious couch in their living room, even though he had yet to actually see a photograph of Gansey’s sister. It made him feel even worse about saying, “Ronan is missing again.”

Gansey caught himself mid-laugh. “What? But I thought—”

“I don’t think it’s anything serious,” Adam was quick to add. “I mean… you know. Now that we know the truth about that one time. But he left during dinner and Declan and I have checked all the usual places and I….” He sighed. “I would just feel better if I knew where he was.”

Gansey was quiet for a while. “Did he take his car?”

“No.”

More silence. “Did you check the roof?”

Adam felt his heart stop, restart, and stutter again, all in the space of a moment. “The roof?! Gansey, I thought we just established that Ronan wasn’t—”

“Not like that!” Gansey interrupted hastily. “Ronan and I used to go up to the roof to talk. We haven’t been up since… but anyway, it’s worth a shot.”

Adam’s heart did its best to reestablish a natural rhythm. He didn’t think it was particularly successful. “Oh. Okay. Thanks, Gansey.”

“Do you need me to come up? I wasn’t being flippant, you know, when I said I would the other day. If you’re concerned that Ronan might—”

“No!” Adam’s voice was too loud for the near-empty campus. “No, Gansey, you really don’t need to come. You’ve already been helpful enough.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” Adam hesitated, squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again. “I’m sorry for calling you like this. Don’t worry, all right? Ronan is fine. This isn’t like before.”

“Just text me when you find him, okay?”

Gansey’s voice was smooth, measured, and nowhere near immature enough to belong to an eighteen-year-old boy.

Adam tried not to let the guilt crush him like a cartoon anvil when he said, “Of course I will, Gansey. Have a nice night.”

After a moment’s indecision, Adam ducked into Ronan and Gansey’s suite on his way up to the roof. It had gotten cold, and Ronan’s leather jacket offered almost no insulation, so he just wanted to grab a couple hats and maybe a blanket before heading up to the roof.

Of course, Matthew Lynch stopped him in his tracks.

“Did you find Ronan yet?!”

Adam shook his head. “Still looking. Gansey told me about another place I haven’t checked yet.”

“Okay,” Matthew said before handing Adam a brown paper bag.

Adam frowned. “What is this?”

“Well, you both pretty much missed dinner, so I filled up some plastic containers for you,” he said. “They should still be warm. There are forks and knives in there too.”

“I—thank you, Matthew.”

“I had to do something while I waited,” Matthew shrugged. “Now I’m working on this.”

He turned around in his seat and gestured at the kitchen table, on which rested a medium-size square canvas. From the underlying design, Adam recognized it as one of the ones that Ronan had elected to squirt paint over rather than completely mutilate, but it was getting harder and harder to make that distinction. Matthew was methodically covering every inch of the canvas in a gentle, chrysanthemums-at-sunrise yellow.

“You’re repainting one of Ronan’s canvases?” Adam asked in surprise.

Matthew shrugged. “He said he was having trouble with his happiness assignment. I thought this might help.”

Adam looked at the bag of food in his hands, at the serene smile on Matthew’s face, and at the yellow canvas. For the first time, he understood why Ronan had such a soft spot for Noah Czerny.

“Paint fast,” he said. “Ronan will be back soon.”

He draped one of Gansey’s spare blankets over his shoulders and took the stairs as high as he was allowed to go, and then higher. The door to the roof read, Locked: Authorized Access Only, but when he pushed on it, it swung open.

Adam poked his head out. The wind whistled in his one good ear, making it difficult to hear anything.

He squinted into the darkness.

“Ronan?”

@reytrashqueen @nymphhadora @thehufflepuffshuffle @thegreywarenloveshim @siriiusblcck @thefangirldiaries98 @adamprrishcycle @xerxesians @lirapheus @sacrebleusargent @laniemoriarty @actuallyronanlynch @iridescentsparrows @sapphicclary

#pynch #trc #pynch fic #pynch fanfiction #adam parrish #ronan lynch #i wrote this #kotib #kids of the in between #gangsey #otp: the ocean burned #otp: scio quid hoc est

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/sports/historys-best-super-bowl-halftime-shows/

History's best Super Bowl halftime shows

Written by Allyssia Alleyne, CNN

Oh, the Super Bowl. For football fans, it’s the most important day of the season, the culmination of five months of National Football League competition. And for those less interested in the sport, there’s the halftime show, when the world’s most famous performers deliver 15 minutes of high-voltage entertainment.

The halftime show has long been popular among viewers, whether they’re into football or not, if the perennial Twitter jokes about the game being the opening act for the performer are to be believed. Indeed, the most-watched halftime show, Katy Perry in 2015, attracted 118.5 million viewers, while the game itself drew an average audience of 114.4 million viewers.

This massive audience makes the halftime show a valuable platform for artists to promote designers and spread messages through their costume choices — sometimes courting controversy and backlash in the process.

Ahead of this year’s Super Bowl, here’s a look back at some of the most memorable costumes of halftime shows past.

1993 – Michael Jackson rocks the military look

Michael Jackson performs at Super Bowl XXVII in 1993 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Credit: Steve Granitz/WireImage/Getty Images

Given its significance today, you’d think the Super Bowl halftime show has always been a prestige event. But it was only in 1993, when Michael Jackson brought his trademark pageantry to the event, that it took on its current reputation. Before then, the show had mostly been dominated by marching bands.

Jackson’s performance — introduced by no less than James Earl Jones — opened with him springing eight feet into the air from underneath the stage (a trademark of his 1992 Dangerous World Tour), against a backdrop of pyrotechnics. He then stood motionless for one-and-a-half minutes in a military-inspired black-and-gold ensemble, before launching into a medley of his hits.

Given Jackson’s repertoire of songs against police violence, war and injustice, this look was subversive. “Michael made (the uniform) his own by pushing the envelope, rebelling against the establishment the uniform is supposed to represent with all those badges and making it rock ‘n’ roll,” Michael Bush, one of Jackson’s costume designers, told Rolling Stone in 2012.

But it was also just fantastic theater for an audience that had previously settled for Disney characters and an Elvis-impersonating magician.

2004 – Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction

Janet Jackson performs during the halftime show at Super Bowl XXXVIII at Houston’s Reliant Stadium in 2004. Credit: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s 2004 performance will forever be remembered as the incident that brought “wardrobe malfunction” into popular parlance.

While performing a duet, Timberlake ripped off a part of Jackson’s bustier, exposing her breast to 143.6 million viewers, and “Nipplegate” was born.

A lot of people were unhappy. The Federal Communications Commission reportedly received more than 500,000 indecency complaints about 9/16 of a second of exposed flesh, and levied a $550,000 fine against CBS, the network airing the game, and its affiliates. (The fine was thrown out by the Supreme Court in 2012.)

Jackson took on the brunt of the backlash and has not performed at the Super Bowl since. Timberlake, however, performed a set alternately described as “forgettable but flashy,” “sonically challenged” and “a total disaster” in 2018.

2007 – Prince’s perfect timing

Prince at Super Bowl XLI in 2007. Credit: Philip Ramey/RamneyPIX/Corbis/Getty Images

Prince — dressed in blue suit and chest-bearing orange button-down, hair covered with a black scarf — performing “Purple Rain” in the middle of a torrential storm, purple “symbol” guitar in hand, was a glorious finale to a performance that saw one of history’s most incandescent performers giving his all for 140 million views.

“The heavy rain made the smoke and lights seem mysterious, instead of merely ridiculous. And there was a sneaky thrill in watching Prince steal the field from guys three times his size, if only for a few moments,” opined music critic Kelefa Sanneh in the New York Times following the show.

2012 – Madonna brings high fashion to halftime

Madonna wears Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci at Super Bowl XLVI in 2012. Credit: Al Bello/Getty Images

The 2012 Super Bowl is when halftime officially went high fashion. To add an extra veneer of dark glamour to her performance, Madonna enlisted designer Riccardo Tisci, then creative director of Givenchy, to design her costumes.

“Following my collaboration with Madonna on her last tour three years ago, it is a great honor for me to be a part of yet another historical and iconic moment,” Tisci told Vogue after the performance. “People say everything has a limit, but limits do not exist with Madonna.”

Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci’s love letter to New York

The bespoke outfits, inspired by looks Tisci had designed for the French fashion house, included an embellished gold cape and a gladiatorial black mini skirt with a studded belt, each accessorized with an Egyptian-inspired headpiece by British milliner Philip Treacy.

2015 – Katy Perry goes (more) pop with Jeremy Scott

Katy Perry, wearing Jeremy Scott, performs her single “Roar” atop a metal lion during the Super Bowl XLIX halftime show. Credit: Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Fashion took the spotlight again in 2015, when Katy Perry wore four Jeremy Scott outfits on stage. The looks were a perfect marriage of Katy Perry’s over-the-top cartoonish-ness and Scott’s penchant for bedazzled Americana and pop culture.

One of the highlights? A metallic skirt-and-jacket combo covered in flames worn during the first number, inspired by a pair of shoes from the designer’s archive. Perry wore it to perform her song “Roar” atop a metal lion.

Exclusive documentary: Around the world with Jeremy Scott

“I love pop culture, and for me that’s one of the things that’s so exciting about this opportunity,” Scott told the now-defunct fashion news site Style.com. “The audience is so vast, it’s so much more outside our nuanced world of high-fashion lovers.”

That “vast” audience ended up encompassing 118.5 million TV viewers — the standing record for a Super Bowl halftime show.

2016 – Beyoncé gets political

SANTA CLARA, CA – FEBRUARY 07: Beyonce and Bruno Mars perform during the Pepsi Super Bowl 50 Halftime Show at Levi’s Stadium on February 7, 2016 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images) Credit: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Super Bowl weekend was a busy one for Beyoncé. On Saturday, she released the video for her new single, “Formation,” a visual exploration of southern black femininity and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which ripped through predominantly black New Orleans neighborhoods in 2005. On Sunday, she took to the stage to perform in one of the year’s most-watched televised events.

Her performance was unabashedly politically. She opened the show with an all-black dance troupe donning afros and black berets, an obvious reference to the way the way Black Panther Party members dressed in the ’60s. (Forgoing the beret, Beyoncé tipped her hat to Michael Jackson with a black-and-gold military jacket recalling his own Super Bowl look.) The dancers also assumed an “X” formation at one point, a reference to Malcolm X.

While fans and critics praised the performance, and the audacity of making such a powerful statement in front of her entire country. New York Times Magazine staff writer Jenna Wortham put it well: “I think she wants us to know that even though she’s headlining a mainstream event like the Super Bowl, she has opinions and isn’t afraid to share them, nor is she afraid to do it on a national and global scale.”

(It’s worth noting this was in February 2016, seven months before Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem in protest against police brutality and racism in the US.)

Others took offense at what they perceived as an anti-police sentiment. Some were so upset that they organized a poorly attended anti-Beyoncé rally at the NFL’s New York headquarters. Rudy Giuliani, the outspoken former mayor of New York mayor and Donald Trump’s attorney, called it “outrageous.”

“This is football, not Hollywood,” he told Fox News, “and I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers who are the people who protect her and protect us, and keep us alive.”

2017 – Lady Gaga takes to the skies

Lady Gaga performs during Super Bowl LI Halftime Show at Houston’s NRG Stadium in 2017. Credit: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Leave it to Lady Gaga to take the Super Bowl halftime show to new heights. The Oscar-nominee started her set singing “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” before being lowered into the stadium on cables to sing, dance and play piano to her greatest hits.

Surprisingly, she wore only two outfits throughout: An iridescent, crystal-embellished bodysuit (which she later covered with a spiked golden jacket); and a white jacket that resembled football shoulder pads with matching hot pants. Both were designed by Atelier Versace, so subtle they were not.

#fashion #latest sports news #news sport #Sport #sportnews #sports articles #sports breaking news #sports latest news #sports news headlines #sports news in english #sports scores #Super Bowl: The most memorable halftime shows and costumes - CNN #today's sports news #today's sports news headlines

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fck-dis-shit-im-out · 5 years

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Seven Spectacular Details About Apeshit By Beyonce & Jay-Z

“I can’t believe we made it,” sings Beyoncé in “Apeshit - The Carters,” the first single from her surprise joint album with Jay-Z, Everything Is Love. And to prove that she and her husband have made it, in the song’s accompanying video, Beyoncé delivers this line from the Louvre. As the New York Times has pointed out, it is not actually that expensive to shoot a video in the Louvre (about $17,500 for a full day’s shoot). But music videos aren’t about numbers; they’re about how things feel — and there’s no place on earth that feels as lavish, as rich with accumulated cultural power and wealth and colonialism, as the Louvre. If you want to show that you have made it, that you are rich and powerful and one of the greatest artists of your generation, you go to the Louvre. And as an artistic choice, the Louvre is par for Beyoncé’s course. For the past few years, Beyoncé has increasingly cribbed from the iconography of classical Western art in her own image-making. Her pregnancy announcement photo shoot and her birth announcement photo shoot both referenced Botticelli’s Venus and the Renaissance trope of the Madonna and child, and her 2017 Grammys performance drew on goddess imagery from multiple artistic traditions. So when Beyoncé shoots at the Louvre — taking on by turns the poses of Venus de Milo and Victory — she’s continuing an artistic project of recontextualizing classical Western art, of making herself the aesthetic object on which so much wealth and cultural capital has been spent. And coming from a black woman, that’s a radical statement. “In a way, Beyoncé is exploiting/marketing her blackness as creativity — as a kind of weapon — within and against the very Eurocentric system of culture and consumption from which she has benefited,” says James Smalls, a professor of art history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. That’s an especially radical statement to make in the context of the Louvre, where little of the art features people of color in positions of strength and power. “From the Middle Ages up to the 19th century, works of art that showed black people usually represented them as servants or secondary figures,” explains Smalls. “They were not deemed worthy subjects of paintings, sculptures, or other kinds of cultural works.” One of the few exceptions to that trend is Marie Benoist’s “Portrait d’une négresse,” also displayed at the Louvre. “That painting is an anomaly because it presents a black person as the sole aestheticized subject and object of a work of art,” Smalls says. And it’s the painting that appears at the end of the “Apeshit” video, after shot after shot of portraits of white people.

Benoist painted “Portrait” in 1800, during a brief period in which France had abolished colonial slavery. (In 1794, the French emancipation proclamation liberated the colonies; in 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery.) In that six-year span, portraits of heroic black people became popular in France, and that created an opportunity for an image of a black woman who is not tending to or subordinate to a white person, who is instead considered worthy of being at the center of her own portrait. As Smalls has pointed out, in its full context, “Portrait” is not a wildly politically subversive image. It’s most likely that the unknown and unnamed subject was a servant with few legal rights who had little choice about how she posed or whether she was okay with her breast being exposed to the world for the next 200 years. Benoist the painter has much more agency here than the black woman at the center of the picture. But in the context of “Apeshit,” with its montages of painting after painting of white faces and white statues, “Portrait” feels both shocking and subversive. It’s a black face in the center of the frame, apparently in control of her domain. And it’s one of the only figures in the Louvre that we don’t see get reinterpreted by either the Carters or their dancers: The only figure in the Louvre that can withstand the unstoppable force that is Beyoncé, that does not need to be remade and reexamined. Part of Beyoncé’s project over the past few years has been to treat art as a form of power: It is a form of focused aesthetic attention, of social capital, and of wealth given solid form. Taking over the Louvre means taking all that power for herself and for the black bodies she brings in with her — except for the “Portrait.” In “Apeshit,” it can stand on its own. What do Beyoncé, The Smurfs 2, and you have in common? All three have the theoretical ability to rent out the Louvre. Though there was widespread awe that the Carters’ video for “Apeshit” took place inside the most famous museum in the world, turns out, it’s actually not all that uncommon. According to the New York Times, about 500 shoots take place at the Louvre each year, which have included films on opposite ends of the “is this a good movie” spectrum, from last year’s Wonder Woman to 2013’s The Smurfs 2, which even the Louvre couldn’t save from its 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. Though the museum only allows photography in the galleries for private use, it makes exceptions for professionals through written authorization. As of 2015, the Louvre’s policy states that to shoot a short film or music video, the cost for both interior and exterior shots would be just €4,500, or about $5,200. It’s possible that if the Carters had a crew of more than 50 people, that number would have been closer to €18,000, but as the Times notes, “there are hotel rooms here that cost more than that.” Hosting private events, however, will cost you a bit more. A tour for under 50 guests will set you back €10,000, while renting out the reception hall beneath I.M. Pei’s pyramid will cost, at the very least, €28,000. Though, to reiterate, that isn’t an amount at which anyone would gasp, “Mon dieu!” Lorde, I have an idea for you about where to film your video for “The Louvre.” Call me! In the video for Beyoncé and JayZ‘s “Apeshit,” the first visual from the pair’s surprise joint album Everything Is Love, the two stars romp through the Louvre in Paris, seizing center stage in a high-culture palace that – like most Western art museums – historically made little room for non-white artists. Some of their mission involves the strategic highlighting of non-white images already in the Louvre. Beyoncé and Jay-Z rap in front of an Egyptian sphinx, and in galleries filled mostly with neo-classical French paintings – white artists, white subjects – the camera singles out black faces. (The video is directed by Ricky Saiz, who also helmed the “Yonce” video from Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s eponymous 2013 album.) Viewers catch brief glimpses of a pair of black figures in Paolo Veronese’s painting “The Wedding at Cana,” where Jesus turned water into wine, as well as a quick look at Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait d’une Négresse,” a depiction of a black woman staring guilelessly back at the viewer. But the Where’s Waldo? moments highlighting black figures are fleeting – the possibilities for this in the Louvre, or any major Western art museum, are limited from the start. So Beyoncé and JayZ set about interjecting blackness into a space that has never placed much value on it, claiming one of the centerpieces of European culture with gleeful defiance. They frequently film themselves moving in opposition to the frozen stillness of paintings by Jacques-Louis David, a French neoclassical artist whose work – like “The Oath of the Horatii” and “Madame Récamier” – invokes the Greco-Roman tradition. Much of the potency of the “Apeshit” video comes from the contrasts drawn between the “white” art on the walls and the black women on the gallery floors. In front of David’s “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine,” a court scene of relentless white extravagance, Beyoncé and eight black dancers hold hands and begin to dance. It takes just a few synchronized sashays to upstage David’s massive painting, replacing an ornate symbol of white authority with a celebration of black bodies in motion. The Louvre’s stature depends on people believing that “The Coronation of Empress Joséphine” is the art, but the eye tells a different story – hanging behind Beyoncé and her dancers, the painting is reduced to wallpaper. Throughout the “Apeshit - The Carters” video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z repeatedly upstage some of Western classical art’s most famous images in one of its central sacred spaces. Beyoncé holds a series of chopping micro-poses with her hands before Saiz cuts quickly to an image of a distressed character, hands held up to shield her head, taken from another David painting, “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” The placement of the hands connects the two frames, but Beyoncé’s is virile, aggressive and in charge, while David’s figure seems merely fearful.

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The painting affirms that black women are worthy of being in artistic spaces, and in enduring imagery. The painting is shown a few times, and it’s the second to last painting we see before the video closes on Bey and Jay turning around to regard the “Mona Lisa” – further confirmation that Benoist’s painting and its subject deserve recognition. It’s also no accident that the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” statue is frequently seen in “APESHIT”. Implying triumph and power, the statue has endured over centuries, and The Carters imply just as much by once again standing in front of it, in perhaps a nod to their own triumph and the power they’ve achieved. According to the Louvre website for the piece, the statue depicts Nike, and was likely created to commemorate a naval victory by the Rhodians (who hail from Rhodes, part of the Dodecanese island group in Greece). The towering relic from the Hellenistic period is, as the Louvre’s description notes, intensely dramatic and glorifies the female body in connection with something traditionally masculine (victory in war). That endowment of power to a female body is then emulated in the female bodies that stand before it in present day, through Beyoncé and her troupe of female dancers. All of these women come together and move as one being, with Beyoncé presiding over them all. She is the modern image of victory over the warfare placed on her body, career, intellect, personal life; having succeeded, she can now dress like “Winged Victory” and, in a sense, pass along her victories to the women who dance on the steps in front of her. Twitter user Queen Curly Fry’s in-depth Twitter thread breaking down the art seen in “Apeshit” is thorough, and her comments on the incorporation of the “Venus de Milo” into the video is so neatly articulated that we couldn’t have said it better if we tried: “Here, Beyoncé once again models herself as a Greek statue, this time the Venus de Milo. However, in this shot she wears a nude bodysuit with wrapped hair, reframing both goddesses of beauty and victory as a black woman. This dismantles white-centric ideals of beauty.” Similarly, Twitter account Tabloid Art History nails why it’s so important and iconic for Beyoncé and her dancers to be dancing in front of “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine” by Jacques Louis David from 1804: “What I especially like about this part of the video is that the painting itself depicts a disruption, Napoleon taking the Pope’s role from him and crowning Josephine himself. Beyoncé further disrupts this by taking on Josephine’s role as the one being crowned.” If we consider Napoleon’s role as a major coloniser in the early 19th century, particularly in Northern Africa, then Beyoncé’s placement in the shot is extra symbolic. Beyoncé standing underneath the place where Napoleon is seen crowning his wife in the painting is a symbolic retrieval of stolen power. One of the other paintings we see in “APESHIT” is another Jacques-Louis David painting, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women.” Interestingly, we only see portions of the painting, never the entire artwork. This could be a sly comment on the dissection and appropriation of black bodies by white culture for their own aesthetic uses – or it could just be a deft use of quick cuts for dramatic effect for the video. Or maybe it’s both. Twitter user Queen Curly Fry notes here that the painting, for the puposes of “APESHIT”, depicts “(white) female fear evoked by (white) male violence is juxtaposed w/ (black) female empowerment (‘get off my dick’).” The painting’s use of white female tears –long criticised as a way for white women to shift any blame they deserve for racist behaviour, or to turn a blind eye to racial injustice – is in direct contrast with Beyoncé and her dancers’ freedom, calm, and enlightenment. In the end, “APESHIT” is a triumph because it is a statement that only The Carters could successfully make. The visual tells the powers that be to fuck off with their tradition, their preciously guarded history that has sought to erase non-white people from the history books, and their preconceived notions about how black bodies can be ornamental. They’ve used art to push back, to demand honour for the work they’ve contributed. “APESHIT” is a force to be reckoned with, and The Carters’ use of art to make a statement is an announcement to the world that they’ve shaped culture as much as anything hanging on a gallery wall.

#jayz #beyonce #shawncarter #carters #carter #thecarters #music #apeshit

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theadmiringbog · 7 years

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An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.

is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.

In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would “disturb” them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered “yes.”

But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes.” In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.

According to The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, when people move today, it is more often to live near others who share their views. People are segregating themselves into different emotionally toned enclaves—anger here, hopefulness and trust there. A group of libertarian Texans have bought land in the salt flats east of El Paso, named it Paulville, and reserved it for enthusiastic “freedom-loving” followers of Ron Paul.

And the more that people confine themselves to likeminded company, the more extreme their views become. According to a 2014 Pew study of over 10,000 Americans, the most politically engaged on each side see those in the “other party” not just as wrong, but as “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Compared to the past, each side also increasingly gets its news from its own television channel—the right from Fox News, the left from MSNBC.

And so the divide widens.

To begin with, I read what other thinkers had to say about the rise of the right. At one extreme, some argued that a band of the very rich, wanting to guard their money, had hired “movement entrepreneurs” to create an “astro-turf grassroots following.”

Others argued that extremely rich people had stirred the movement to life, without arguing that grassroots support was fake. The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer describes the strategy of billionaire oil baron brothers Charles and David Koch to direct $889,000,000 to help right-wing candidates and causes in 2016 alone.

“To bring about social change,” Charles Koch says, “requires a strategy” that uses “vertically and horizontally integrated” planning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” It was like a vast, sprawling company that owns the forest, the pulp mill, the publishing house, and pays authors to write slanted books. Such a political “company” could wield astonishing influence. Particularly in the years after Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court decision permitting unlimited anonymous corporate gifts to political candidates, this influence is, indeed, at work.

Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presidential election of 2016—$138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats.

Tracing their roots to a caste system, whites in Dixie states treasure local control and resist federal power—linked as that is to the defeat, 150 years ago, of the South by the North.

When we listen to a political leader, we don’t simply hear words; we listen predisposed to want to feel certain things.

At play are “feeling rules,” left ones and right ones.

The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.

“deep story,” a story that feels as if it were true.

I began to recognize the power of blue-state catcalls taunting red state residents. Limbaugh was a firewall against liberal insults thrown at her and her ancestors, she felt.

“I do that too sometimes,” she said, “try to get myself out of the way to see what another person feels.”

Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes—through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor,

“We’re on this earth for a limited amount of time,” he says, leaning on the edge of the window. “But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That’s the most important thing. I’m thinking long-term.”

The logic was this. The more oil, the more jobs. The more jobs, the more prosperity, and the less need for government aid. And the less the people depend on government —local, state, or federal—the better off they will be.

If, in 2010, you lived in a county with a higher exposure to toxic pollution, we discovered, you are more likely to believe that Americans “worry too much” about the environment and to believe that the United States is doing “more than enough” about it. You are also more likely to describe yourself as a strong Republican.

Powell drew up a list of characteristics of the “least resistant personality profile”:

• Longtime residents of small towns in the South or Midwest

• High school educated only

• Catholic

• Uninvolved in social issues, and without a culture of activism

• Involved in mining, farming, ranching (what Cerrell called “nature exploitative occupations”)

• Conservative

• Republican

• Advocates of the free market

“Environmentalists want to stop the American Dream to protect the endangered toad,” she says, “but if I had to choose between the American Dream and a toad, hey, I’ll take the American Dream.” Others I spoke to also pose the same either-or scenario—

“How can you tell straight news from opinion?” I ask.

“By their tone of voice,” she explains. “Take Christiane Amanpour. She’ll be kneeling by a sick African child, or a bedraggled Indian, looking into the camera, and her voice is saying, ‘Something’s wrong. We have to fix it.’ Or worse, we caused the problem. She’s using that child to say, ‘Do something, America.’ But that child’s problems aren’t our fault.”

The Tea Party listener felt Christiane Amanpour was implicitly scolding her. She was imposing liberal feeling rules about whom to feel sorry for. The woman didn’t want to be told she should feel sorry for, or responsible for, the fate of the child. Amanpour was overstepping her role as commentator by suggesting how to feel. The woman had her feeling guard up. “No,” she told herself in so many words, “That’s PC. That’s what liberals want listeners like me to feel. I don’t like it. And what’s more, I don’t want to be told I’m a bad person if I don’t feel sorry for that child.”

A deep story is a feels-as-if story—it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel.

Such a story permits those on both sides of the political spectrum to stand back and explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the world. And I don’t believe we understand anyone’s politics, right or left, without it. For we all have a deep story.

When the tax payer finally gets to retire, he sees the bureaucrats in Washington have raided the fund. And the rest of us are waiting in line.

In his interviews with Tea Party members in New York, Jersey City, Newark, and elsewhere in New Jersey, the sociologist Nils Kumkar found spontaneous mention of the idea of annoyance at others cutting in line.

As I and others use the term, however, racism refers to the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom.

Missing from the image of blacks in most of the minds of those I came to know was a man or woman standing patiently in line next to them waiting for a well-deserved reward.

For the right today, the main theater of conflict is neither the factory floor nor an Occupy protest. The theater of conflict—at the heart of the deep story—is the local welfare office and the mailbox where undeserved disability checks and SNAP stamps arrive. Government checks for the listless and idle—this seems most unfair.

If unfairness in Occupy is expressed in the moral vocabulary of a “fair share” of resources and a properly proportioned society, unfairness in the right’s deep story is found in the language of “makers” and “takers.”

For the left, the flashpoint is up the class ladder (between the very top and the rest); for the right, it is down between the middle class and the poor.

For the left, the flashpoint is centered in the private sector; for the right, in the public sector.

Ironically, both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.

I see that the scene had been set for Trump’s rise, like kindling before a match is lit. Three elements had come together. Since 1980, virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground, a fact that made them brace at the very idea of “redistribution.” They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media as backward. And they felt part of a demographic decline; “there are fewer and fewer white Christians like us,” Madonna had told me.

They’d begun to feel like a besieged minority.

#Strangers in Their Own Land #book review

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