#i forgot people got to see this michael with pink hair on stage]

[ghost-of-you]

I just wanna get back to us 'cause we used to have more...

#5sos #5sosedit #my edit #michael clifford #flashing tw #i forgot people got to see this michael with pink hair on stage] #i am jealous #oh god #jersey michael my beloved 💜 #mc

[atlafan]

Take it Slow - Part Seventy-Seven

a/n: okay this is my first shot at a harry:y/n fic, and it will be multiple parts. y/n had a bad experience with an ex over a year ago, and finally accepts her coworker and good friend Niall’s invitation to go on a blind date with his friend Harry.

Warnings: Fluff and smut.

a/n: shorter part tonight since last night was so long.

Masterpost (all previous parts can be found in the masterpost)

“Babe? Gotta package.” Harry says as he comes in from work.

“Oh I wonder if it’s my shirt for the concert!” You rush over to him and snatch it. “I got a shirt from Etsy cause I don’t really like the merch.”

Harry smiles as you open the package and you gasp with delight. You got a black short sleeve crop top that said “Blinding Lights” on it it glittery writing.

“It’s perfect! Do you like it?”

“Yeah, looks nice.” He kisses your cheek and goes to sit on the sofa with Buster.

“I’m so excited, Harry. I still can’t believe you got fifth row seats!” You plop down next to him.

“Was thinkin’ we could go in and eat at Beer Works beforehand, would you like that?”

“Yeah! Love it there. Only a couple more days!” You squeal. “Do you feel like you know enough of the lyrics?”

“Yeah, babe. Think I got it.” He smiles.

“I wonder what songs he’ll do from his older albums. I hope he does Party After the After Party, that’s one of my absolute favorites.”

“I know, that’s your go to when we’re fuckin’.”

“Shut up.” You swat at him and giggle. “I like Aquainted too, and I Feel It Coming. Honestly, every song by him is a good song.”

“And you’ve really never seen him live before?”

“Never! This is the best early birthday present ever.”

“Does your family have anythin’ planned for you. I know we’re gonna be gone for a long weekend during your actual birthday…”

“No, I think our plan is to do a conjoined thing. Michael’s birthday is the weekend after mine, and my dad’s is the weekend after that. Michael’s gonna be one I can’t believe it. So we’ll just go to his birthday party. My family will call me on my birthday.”

“That’s right, I forgot about Michael’s party. Damn, this summer is just flyin’ by.”

“I know! We leave for London soon too, it’s crazy.”

“Are you sure your mum is cool with having Buster for an entire week?”

“Yeah, she loves watching him. I’m gonna miss him so much.” You pout.

“I know, he’s just too big to bring on a plane, unfortunately.”

You grab the remote and turn the TV on.

“Do you mind if I watch Glee? I feel like once I start I can’t stop.”

“Yeah, I don’t care.”

“You like it a little, don’t you?” You look at him grinning.

“It has some funny moments. Jane Lynch’s character is hilarious. It’s a little cringey though.”

“That’s Ryan Murphy for you.” You shrug.

“Plus…I’m fully invested in this will they won’t they with Rachel and Finn. I’m hooked on it.”

“God, I don’t think you’ve ever said anything sexier to me.” You kiss him and get snuggled up.

//

The night of the concert you make sure your hair looks perfect. You had really grown it out, and your waves looked great. You put your new crop top on and get to work on your makeup. Tonight was a false lash kind of night. You grab a high waisted pair of black jeans with some rips in them and put them on. You could just see the top of your naval piercing. You cuff the bottoms of your jeans and you’re very happy with how you look.

Harry had a pair of salmon pink shorts on and a black silk shirt with the first few buttons undone tucked into them. You liked that you and Harry had different fashion senses. You also loved when he wore anything to show off his tattoos a bit.

“You look so good, Harry.” You wrap your arms around him.

“So do you.” He kisses the top of your head. “Niall will be here soon to watch Buster, he just texted.”

Niall comes up with Sarah.

“Damn! Okay, out on the balcony, gotta take some cute pics before you get all sweaty at the concert.” Sarah says and you giggle.

She takes some pictures of the two of you outside. You take some nice ones and some silly ones. You kiss him on the cheek in one.

“Kiss each other, go on.”

Harry chuckles and turns to you. He tilts your chin up and kisses you.

“So cute.”

“Thanks, Sarah.” You take your phone from her.

“I’m so glad you finally got a new phone, the camera is so much better.”

“I know! I was just waiting for a good deal to upgrade.”

“You two kids have fun.” Niall smiles. “Do you want us here? I don’t mind bringin’ him across the street.”

“It’s up to you.” Harry says. “You guys can stay here if yeh want, doesn’t matter.”

“Yeah, make yourselves at home.” You smile and give Buster a hug. “Thanks again for watching him.”

You and Harry head out. You decide to take the green line over towards the Garden. You walk over to Beer Works which isn’t too far away, and sit at the bar. You each do a tequila shooter and order some apps. Harry sticks with beer, and you get a hard cider.

You walk hand in hand, slightly buzzed, into the Garden. Your tickets get scanned in and you make your way to your seats.

“Harry…holy shit, look at how close we are.”

“Want me to take your picture in front of the stage?”

“Please!”

You beam at him and hand him your phone. Someone offers to take a picture of the two of you in front of the stage as well.

“We’re really going to be able to see him, oh my god.” You hug him and he chuckles.

“Want me to grab us some drinks?”

“Yeah, that would be great actually. Do you want some money, I brought-“ He looks at you.

“I’ll be back with some beers.”

You watch Harry walk away, and look back to the stage. You can’t help but squeal with excitement. Harry comes back about ten minutes later with two large beers.

“Line was already crazy.” He hands you yours.

“Thanks, babe.” You sip on it and he sits down next to you.

You both were taking advantage of the little time left you wouldn’t be on your feet. You were happy you both were smart enough to at least wear sneakers.

You and Harry go for bathroom and beer runs during the two opening acts, not really interested in their music as much. You get back in your seats just when the second opener is done. The Garden goes dark and you squeal. You both stand up and you scream along with the crowd when he comes out.

He starts off with Alone Again, and works his way through most of the After Hours album. The crowd goes nuts when he goes into Starboy. You were having a great time. You ended up standing in front of Harry so you could rock against him. You would occasionally here him sing along and it sent a shiver up your spine. You got some great pictures and videos of The Weeknd, you swore he looked right at you. He sings I Feel It Coming, and Harry wraps his arms around you tighter. Another song you two had on in the background many times. Next he goes into Earned It, Often, and Acquainted. You were losing your fucking mind. He sounded so good loud, and you were having the best time just jamming out.

“So I thought I’d talk to the crowd for a minute, we’re at that point in the show.”

The crowd roars as he addresses certain people. He calls different people out, it’s a lot of fun. He has thre lights up in the balcony so he can thank the people from farther away. He walks along the stage, calling out people closer to him. Then his eyes fall to you.

“This girl, who’s been dancing on her man all night, where’d you get that shirt?” You freeze and point to yourself. “Yes, you. That’s not official merch.” He scolds you and you laugh.

“It’s from Etsy! Get better merch!”

“Get better merch, huh?” The crowd laughs. “Well, I’m glad someone made some money, guess that’s all that matters. You having a good time?” You smile and nod your head yes. “I know you are, you’ve been grooving the whole night, we love to see it.”

He moves on to someone else and you turn to look at at Harry, your mouth agape.

“I filmed that whole thing! Look!” Harry shows you his phone.

“That was the coolest fucking thing ever!”

He does his Dirty Diana cover, and then goes into Party After the After Party. You turn around to Harry and squeal, then you turn around to watch the stage again. Harry couldn’t help but laugh at your excitement. You had been a ball of energy all night. The show ends, and he comes back out to sing The Hills.

You and Harry wait a minute or two to head out, letting the crowd disperse before fighting your way through it. You walk through the Garden, keeping your hand on the back of Harry’s shorts while he leads you through the people. You get down to the green line, and only find one seat available. He sits down and pulls you into his lap. You turn to look at him and smile.

“This was one of the greatest nights of my life. Thank you so much.”

“I’m so glad you had fun. That was one of the best concerts I’ve been to in a long time.”

“I can’t believe he actually spoke to me! That was so cool.”

Harry moves to whisper in your ear.

“I can’t wait to get you home. You were grinding your ass on me all night, it was torture.” He kisses your cheek and holds you a little tighter. You smile at him and kiss him quick.

//

Sarah was passed out, leaning on Niall’s shoulder. The two thought Buster would be more comfortable in his own home. They were watching TV when she fell asleep. Niall was half asleep when he heard the shuffle of feet and giggling from the front hall.

“Babe, I think they’re back.” He lightly nudges her.

“Hm? Okay.” She yawns.

Harry gets you through the door, and lifts you up so you can wrap your legs around him. He pushes you up against the wall and kisses on your neck. You start giggling. Your hands move to unbutton Harry’s shirt. You push it off his shoulders and he lets it fall to the floor. He takes your crop top off and kisses on your chest. You had a simple black bra on.

“Bedroom.” You groan into his ear.

He gets a better grip on you and starts walking into the rest of the apartment.

“Oh my god!” Sarah says.

Harry sets you down and hugs you to his chest. You hide your face in him. He needed you to stay close to hide his raging boner.

“You two are still here?” He says embarrassed.

“Yeah, we were gonna stay until you got home! Are you both drunk?!” You turn your head slightly to look at them and nod.

“Jesus.” Niall laughs. “Glad yeh didn’t get full naked out there.”

“Okay, well, thank you both so much for watchin’ Buster, goodnight.”

“Wait, how was the concert?”

“It was good Sarah, goodnight!” You say to her.

“Alright, alright, we’re leaving.”

Niall gives harry a thumbs up before they leave.

//

“They act like they never get a chance to do it.” Sarah laughs and looks at Niall. “How come we never do that?”

“Do what?”

“You never feel the need to get my clothes off the second we walk in the door.”

“Oh, you mean like this?”

Niall lifts Sarah up over his shoulder the second they get into his apartment and she squeals.

//

“I completely forgot they’d be here.” Harry says laughing.

“Me too!” You look at each other for a second. “Are gonna stand here or?”

“Oh right.”

He lifts you back up and carries you to the bedroom. Buster stays asleep in his dog bed. Harry undoes your jeans and yanks them down your legs. You do the same with his shorts. His lips connect with yours and you moan against him as he pushes his hips to yours. He really was hard.

You suck his bottom lip into your mouth and he groans. His hands dip into your panties and he drags them down your legs. He stays kneeling before you and grabs you by your ass, pulling you closer. He tugs one of your legs over one of his shoulders and he lips connect to your clit. You gasp when you feel his tongue lick up and down your folds. You tugs at his hair and he moans against you. He sucks and slurps on you and you feel like you’re going to lose your balance, but he steadies you. Just like when you feel you’re gonna come he stands up.

“Sorry.” He smirks. “My knees just hurt.”

“Thought you were trying to tease me.” You pout.

“Not tonight, angel.”

His hands move around you to unclasp your bra and it falls to the floor. He moves you over to the bed and he hovers over you. He kisses down your neck and chest, and sucks one of your nipples into his mouth. You reach for him and pump him slowly. He twists your piercing between his teeth while he kneads your other breast.

“Harry.” You groan. “Want you inside me, please.”

“Want you on top.”

He kisses you and sits up against the headboard. You swing a leg over him and line yourself up to sink down on him.

“Fuck.” You breathe out.

You swivel your hips and grind against him. Harry wraps his arms around you and thrusts up. You move in a rhythm together and it feels amazing. You tug at his hair and kiss him, tongues gliding along each other. Your head rolls back when he starts to rub your clit. His other hand slides up to your throat. You make eye-contact with him.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, go for it.” You smile, and he tightens his grip around you.

He moves his other hand faster on you as both continue in sync. You start panting, and love the way Harry’s large hand grips your throat. Harry looks at you, loving the way you’re just losing yourself.

“Shit, I’m not gonna last much longer.” He grunts.

You feel your stomach tighten and you clench around him.

“Fuck!” He moans as you both release at the same time. He thrusts up hard one more time as you gasp.

He loosens his grip on you, and you rest your head against his chest.

“You forgot to take your rings off.” You say, looking up at him.

“Oh, baby.” He smirks and moves some hair out of your face. “I didn’t forget.” He lightly grazes his fingers over the forming bruises on your neck. “I like the way you can kind make out my initials on you.” You involuntarily tighten around him. “And I see you don’t really mind it either.”

“I feel like I should…but I’ve always liked when you leave marks on me.” You smile. “It’ll fade, it’s fine.”

He kisses you, and you both sit there making out while he’s still inside you. You roll down on him and his cock twitches. His hands move to your hips and he rocks you back and forth on him.

“Harry, will you fuck me from behind?” You say against his lips.

“Always.” He smiles.

You giggle and get off of him to lay on your stomach. He grabs ahold of you to slide in, he gets fully on top of you how you like so his chest is flush with your back. You moan as he rocks in and out of you.

“God, you’re like balls deep, it feel so good.” You grab at the pillow under you.

Harry hooks an arm under you to grab one of your breasts, his other hand pressing into your hip. You press your ass against him as he moves around in a circle.

“Fuck, Harry.”

“Yeh like when we fuck like this?” He says into your ear.

“Yes.”

“M’not crushin’ yeh?”

“Not at all.” You moan again when he thrusts deep into you. “Fuck, I’m gonna come again, oh god, right there, keep doing that.”

Harry keeps thrusting in and hitting your g-spot. You scream into your pillow and back your ass up right into him. His release comes shortly after. He lays on top of you for a few minutes before getting up. You get up to use the bathroom after he does.

You face each other as you lay in bed. Harry rubs your back and smiles at you.

“This was the perfect night, Harry.”

“Even when we almost got naked in front of our friends?”

“Especially when that happened.” You giggle. “No, but seriously. I love making these memories with you. I’ll never forget this.”

He pulls you in closer to him and rests his chin on the top of your head. You end up falling asleep like this. Ten months ago you never thought you’d be where you are right now. Being held by the person you loved most in the world, and him loving you right back.

#take it slow #harry styles #harry styles x reader #harry styles y/n #harry styles x y/n #harry styles imagine #harry styles fluff #harry styles smut #harry styles fic #harry styles fluff fic #harry styles smut fic #yeah its a shorter part #but at least we got to the concert!

[cottegecorepanarabread]

10 Things I Hate About Tsuki pt.4

I'm on the verge of a category 4 mental breakdown. I have not studied for my ap bio final on the 10th and 11th nor the ap bio exam on the 14. I wrote this tho. I hope you enjoy. Send me one shot requests if you want. as always a big thank you to the writers of 10 thing I hate about you

transition song 1- pink socks by mickey darling

transition song 2- go home. play music. feel better. by Michael Cera Palin

transition song 2- I forgot to take my meds today by Prince Daddy and The Hyena

“I’m starting to think like my car more than me Tsuki.” Tadashi laughed when they saw Tsuki leaning against their car again. 

“What can I saw she’s beautiful.” Kei smirked.

“Assuming my car’s pronouns now huh. How will I ever forgive you.” Tadashi crossed their arms.

Sugawara and Akaashi came up behind Tadashi and laughed. Kei looked down in embarrassment.

“Is this guy bothering you Yama?” Suga said.

“No it’s fine.” Tadashi unlocked the car, “get in we’ll be done in a second.”

They climbed into the car leaving Tadashi and Kei alone again. 

“Look I’m sorry if my friends embarrassed you. They can be a lot sometimes.” Tadashi’s suddenly turned sympathetic.

“I’m sorry too for possibly misgendering your car,” Tadashi snorted at that, “or you.”

Tadashi was touched. No one, other than family or friend, had ever felt that bad about misgendering them. 

“I use he/they but on some days I lean more to one or the other. Today it’s they but you could really use either.”

“Thanks for telling me. Now will you tell me if you will go to Kuroo’s party with me.”

“You were just being nice to try and take me out. Why are you so annoying. I don’t understand.” Tadashi snapped.

“Pick you up at 9 then.”

“Shut the hell up”

You say you just wanna be friends

And I’m not mad, bitch I’m livid  

So now I’ve been fucking all of your friends 

Every night, cause I’m desperate

“Terushima!” Kei yelled down the hall.

“What do you want glasses?” Terushima spit back.

“He’s too much trouble. I don’t care if you want to rail his brother, but I was $100 a day if you want me to keep doing this.” Kei snapped.

He had Terushima against his locker and held him there with one arm. 

“Fine just let go of me. I don’t want you ruining my perfect body for my photoshoot tomorrow.” 

After being released, he handed Kei $600 for payment in advance. Kei smirked. He had Terushima in the palm of his hand. 

I will not falter, I will not budge

I will stop trying to say it doesn’t matter so much 

Take on a cause, hold for the applause

Impulsive vanity’s a common crutch

“Hi I’m Hinata,” he stuck his hand out to Kei, “So we are the real masterminds behind this operation. Terushima is just a pawn.”

“I asked him to pay you so Hinata could really date Kageyama.” Bokuto said.

They had stopped him during another science lab.

“Jesus Christ,” Kei muttered going back to the beakers in front of him.

“Wait, please, I can help. I’ll get Kageyama to tell me what Yamaguchi likes so you know what he likes.” Hinata grabbed his arm.

“Look,” Kei yanked Hinata’s hand off his arm, “I don’t care as long as I’m still getting paid.”

“Hey Kageyama I need your help. So I got this guy to try to take out Yamaguchi but I need to know what your brother likes.”

“You act like I care to know everything about them. Also it’s sibling not brother. We need to search their room.”

Later in Yamaguchi’s room, Hitana went through stacks of CDs as Kageyama rummaged through his closet and drawers. 

“Why do they dress like this?” Kageyama sighed, “it’s like they don’t want anyone to date them.”

Hinata came to help Kageyama after making a list of bands.

“I mean it’s not that bad,” Hinata pulled an item out of the closet, “I would wear this.”

Kageyama blushed upon seeing the skirt he held up. It wasn’t anything against skirt wearing, no. He was just imagining Hinata’s legs in the skirt. No, bad brain!

Later that day Hinata handed Kei the list of likes. It included Wes Anderson films, punk and soft music, Vietnamese food, the color black, and…blonds. At the bottom of the list was a date: Prince Daddy and They Hyena at Club Skunk, April 24th. Kei shrugged. Why not go?

I forgot to take my meds today

I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday 

Figures it hit me on the highway

I forgot to take my meds today

Kei walked into the club. He wished he had just stayed home. He definitely should have looked into the band before coming. Screams and heavy bass filled the room. 

He went to the bar to get a water and hopped it would calm his nerves. He almost choked on his water when he saw Tadashi. 

He bounced along to the song (I imagine it to be Trashville 1/3) while holding onto another boy’s arm. They sang along together. After the attitude, the outfit drew his attention next. He wore a cropped black turtleneck with black ripped mom jeans. His hair was up in a bun showing off his various piercings. Every time Tadashi raised his arms, the shirt revealed more of this chest. 

Tadashi whispered something to his friend then made his way to the bar. Kei leaned his back against the bar. Tadashi saw him and rolled his eyes. 

“Are you following me?” Tadashi snapped crossing his hands over his chest. 

“Can’t I just come see a band I like in concert. I mean they aren’t Ashes to Amber but their good.” Kei smiled at him.

“You know who Ashes to Amber is. Well, you really are full of surprises aren’t you.” Tadashi drank the water the bartender handed him.

Kei followed him back to the stage to where Suga was standing. They went back to dancing. 

“You know,” the song ended and the room went quite without him noticing,” I was watching you out there and I’ve never seen you look so hot.”

People around them laughed, and these the lead singer noticed and poorly held back a smile. Kei blushed. It wasn’t really a lie. If they weren’t somewhere so crowded Kei would have taken Tadashi on the closest table. Kei pushed the idea quickly from his mind as the song restarted.

“Come to Kurro’s party with me, please?” He pulled Tadashi close.

“What is with you and this” he groaned.

“I just want to have fun with you.” Kei was being honest even if he was being paid. 

“Maybe.” Tadashi smirked.

“I’ll pick you up at 9 then.”

“I said maybe”

#haikyū!! #haikyuu!! #tsukiyama #kagehina #bokuaka #disuga #I wrote this instead of studying #10 things I hate about you au #author pushes her favorite music on fictional characters #kei tsukishima is bad at feelings #flirty tsukishima

[pixiegrl]

Somebody’s Gonna Love You

Luke's not ready for Ashton to spend the night and find out his secret but Ashton does anyway

A prequel of sorts for the Lingerie Luke series

Also on AU at: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27032632

The first time Ashton spends the night, Luke’s not expecting it. They’ve only been officially dating for a few months, tentatively taking their relationship from friends who occasionally kiss to boyfriends . It’s made Luke giddy, makes him feel like a teenager with a crush again, like the 15 year old kid who’s heart fluttered when Ashton walked into band practice, who stopped breathing when Ashton would casually brush against Luke during a show, not a 23 year old adult with a career and a boyfriend.

It still makes him smile, full of shock and awe that Ashton would pick Luke. Of all the people in the world, Ashton would choose Luke to be with. That apparently Ashton’s liked him for so long, since that first day at the movie theater and that he wants their relationship to be serious. Luke can picture a life with Ashton, is already imagining what it would be like to wake up next to Ashton, make coffee in the morning, whine until Ashton cooks him breakfast. Luke’s picturing being able to kiss Ashton whenever he wants, cuddling up next to him on the couch at night, listening to Ashton whine about how cold Luke’s feet are but making no move to change their positions. In the dark of the night, when Luke’s feeling his loneliest, Luke pictures their wedding, what it would be like to stand up in front of their family and friends, tell them all how much he loves Ashton. Luke knows it’s too soon, they’ve only been dating for so little time, but Luke’s known Ashton for years. He’s loved him for so long that it’s so easy to picture a full life with Ashton, a life where he gets to bask in Ashton’s love, gets to tell Ashton how much he loves him over and over again.

However, Luke and Ashton haven’t spent the night together since they started dating. They’ve managed to start their relationship during a break from tour, hanging in the limbo of coming off an album and starting to create new music and it’s allowed them the freedom to explore the change in their relationship and go on dates and spend time together. Luke’s enjoying it immensely, for getting to spend time with Ashton, with Petunia, having lazy days at home, dinner and coffee dates with Ashton. It’s been nice, getting to feel like a real person, being able to take the time to just breathe and enjoy having a boyfriend.

Luke doesn’t have a problem with Ashton spending the night. In fact, he’s thrilled by the idea of Ashton staying over, getting to cuddle up to him and wake up to kisses, sitting outside on Luke’s patio and drinking coffee with the sunrise. It’s just that...Luke needs time to prepare for Ashton to spend the night. Both physically and mentally.

Luke’s been wearing panties. There’s no easy way to put it. It had started years ago, sometime after they made Sounds Good Feels Good , when Luke had started to grow his hair out and was wearing makeup. Michael had dared him once, to put on the silky underwear and wear it during a show. Luke had taken the challenge but hadn’t expected just how right it had felt, standing there on stage, in front of millions of people wearing the panties and glittery eyeshadow. Luke had started buying his own pairs after that, going into whatever Target or Walmart they were near and buying whatever he could that looked soft and pretty and floral. He’s been doing it for years at this point, almost completely replacing all of his boxer briefs with the panties now, creating his own perfect collection.

The thing is though, none of the other guys know about it. Sure, there was the dare, but Luke hasn’t told them about what he’s done since then. Whenever they share hotel rooms, Luke always changes in the bathroom, making sure to keep it out of sight. It just feels right , looking at himself in the mirror, the lace and bows, framed in softness. There’s a feeling of being at home in his own body when he feels them, feeling like he can finally breathe .

Which, therein lies the whole problem for Luke really. Even now that they’re dating, Luke hasn’t told Ashton about it yet. Whenever they hook up, before they were dating and now that they are, Luke is very careful to not wear them. He doesn’t know how to talk to Ashton about it, isn’t sure how that conversation would go. What would he even say, “Oh by the way I like wearing women’s underwear because it makes me feel beautiful and at peace?” How would Ashton even take that? What if Ashton takes it the wrong way, thinks its something sexually charged for Luke when it’s only part of the equation? What if Ashton decides Luke’s too weird to date once he finds out?

Luke’s spent an agonizing amount of time thinking about how he’ll tell Ashton, but he never expected for him to just accidentally find out. They’re wrapped up a movie night with Michael and Calum, catching up on the Marvel movies they’ve missed while busy and it’s late. Calum’s half asleep already, head resting on Michael’s shoulder, unbothered by how Michael keeps jostling him whenever he points excitedly at the scene. Luke’s got his head in Ashton’s lap, dozing while Ashton plays with his hair. He’s content like this, Ashton’s fingers scratching at his scalp, warm and loved.

The movie wraps up and Ashton leans down to whisper to Luke. Michael’s arguing with a half asleep Calum about whether or not Civil War is a good enough lead in to the rest of the current MCU.

“Can I spend the night?” Ashton asks. He sounds worried and anxious, like he’s unsure if he can ask this of Luke. Luke wants nothing more than to have Ashton stay, to never have him leave. Luke can’t believe Ashton even has to ask, that he’s even unsure of Luke’s own desires.

“Of course you can,” Luke whispers back, turning to face Ashton. Ashton smiles, pressing a kiss to Luke’s temple and Luke’s shocked by the look of wonder on Ashton’s face. It surely can’t be for him. He’s just Luke, stupid silly Luke, baby of the band.

Ashton nudges Luke off his lap, clapping his hands and starting to shoo Michael and Calum off the couch, even as Michael is caught between half hearted protests and shooting them both a suggestive wiggling of his eyebrows.

Ashton finally manages to get them both out of the house with the promise of continuning another night, shutting and locking the door behind them.

“Aren’t you going to get up?” Ashton asks, lips quirked up in a smile when he sees Luke still curled up on the couch. Luke reaches out towards Ashton, smiling sleepily.

“Carry me? Too tired to stand,” Luke mumbles. He’s not expecting Ashton to oblige him, cross the room in a few strides and scooping Luke up into his arms. Luke lets out a squeak, flinging his arms around Ashton’s neck at the sudden movement. Ashton snorts, pressing a soft kiss to Luke’s cheeks, his forehead, his nose. Luke giggles, leaning forward to capture Ashton’s lips in a soft kiss.

Ashton stops on his way to the stairs, kissing back. Luke tilts his head, trying to deepen the kiss.

“If you keep distracting me, we’re never going to make it up the stairs,” Ashton mumbles against Luke’s lips. Luke laughs, pressing a kiss to Ashton’s jaw.

“Maybe that’s my goal.”

“Please, like you’d have sex in anything but a bed. And besides it’s late. You deserve a bed, someone who can take their time to worship you. I would just fall asleep on you.”

Luke giggles, kissing Ashton on the lips again, “How romantic of you sweetheart.”

“Don’t make fun of me. You’re dating me.”

“I never said it was a bad thing,” Luke says, pressing kisses to Ashton’s lips to try and placate him. Ashton only pouts for a few moments before finally pulling away and continuing up the stairs, letting Luke press kisses to his jaw and neck along the way.

It isn’t until Ashton’s laid him out on the bed, is tugging off Luke’s T-shirt and kissing down his chest that Luke even remembers that he’s wearing the cotton panties. They’re pink, covered in little flowers, bright and vibrant, edged in lace with a little bow in the center. They’re cute, Luke’s favorite pair, and he’d wanted to wear them for the extra boost of confidence for his date. It’s just that wearing the panties have become so natural to Luke, just part of who he is now, that he forgot in that moment that Ashton doesn’t know about them.

“Ashton, wait…” Luke starts to say, but it’s too late. Ashton’s already tugged Luke’s sweatpants down, getting an eyeful of the panties. Ashton pulls back, looking down at them. He’s running his fingers along the edge, just barely brushing against the lace.

Luke tries to prop himself up and out of Ashton’s touch. He’s afraid suddenly, filled with a sense of worry that Ashton won’t love him anymore. That Ashton will decide that he doesn’t like this part of Luke. Luke’s weird and different, he’s always known that, head in the clouds and unable to talk to people without shaking or stuttering some days, but this is out there , it’s more than just different and maybe it means that Ashton will decide Luke’s not worth it.

“Did you put these on for me?” Ashton asks, slipping his fingertips under the waistband. Luke whines, arching slightly into the touch. Ashton smiles softly, lips just barely turned up.

“No I...I wear them all the time.”  

“Since when?”

“Since Michael dared me to wear them on stage.”

Ashton looks up at Luke, head cocked to the side. He reaches out, grabbing a hold of Luke’s hand and kissing the back of it gently. Luke doesn’t realize he’s shaking until then.

“That’s been so long Lu. How didn’t we know?”

Luke shrugs, “I was careful about it. I didn’t want anyone to know. It felt like...too much. Too big of a part of me to share.”

Ashton makes a noise at the back of his throat. He leans down, pulling Luke into a soft, open mouth kiss. It’s warm, Ashton holding onto his face in both hands, and heated. Luke’s dizzy from the love he feels.

“Why?” Ashton asks, pulling back, still holding Luke’s face in his hands.

“Why what?”

“Why do you wear them? Why didn’t you tell me ?”

“I just wasn’t sure how to bring it up. Like it’s not something I can just mention and I was so careful on all our dates. I didn’t want you to know.”

“Luke, I’m your boyfriend. I love you.”

Luke’s eyes feel wet, “I just wasn’t ready. It’s not...it’s not a kink, it’s not like one of those porns Michael used to show us. I’m not wearing them to be hot or attractive, even if I do feel like that sometimes. They just feel right. I put them on and I see myself in the mirror and it feels...like coming home. Like I see myself and it all falls into place. I don’t feel like Luke Hemmings, the rockstar . I just feel like Luke . They make me feel...beautiful. I feel beautiful when I wear them. And I didn’t know how to tell you without it being weird.”

Luke sniffling now, desperately trying to hold in his sobs. He doesn’t know how to explain it, the feeling that wearing the panties gives him. Luke never feels perfect, always feels too clumsy and large and loud. He takes up too much space, too much time, too much energy from everyone, especially Ashton. He’s just too much. But the panties, they make him feel like he can breathe. It’s the first time in a long time he’s felt comfortable in his body. And somehow, even though it’s Ashton , it feels too personal to tell him that.

“Oh Luke. Sunshine,” Ashton says, pulling Luke up and into his chest. Luke starts crying then, tears spilling onto Ashton’s shirt as he clings to it. Ashton keeps whispering into Luke’s ear, soft encouragement and praise, rubbing at Luke’s back.

“It’s so stupid I don’t know why I’m crying. You just wanted to do something fun and sexy and I had to be me. ”

“Luke, honey, I love you. There’s nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you. You are truly so wonderful and golden. You’re the light of my day, the light of my life . I love you in whatever form you are and this is simply just one of them. If it makes you happy, if it makes you feel good, then what’s the harm in it,” Ashton says, cupping Luke’s face in his hands to press a kiss to his lips again. Luke whines slightly into it. He’s so overwhelmed, by how exposed he feels, by the love Ashton feels for him. He can’t even find the words to explain how he feels, instead pulling Ashton into another hug, wishing I love you , over and over into Ashton.

Ashton presses another kiss to Luke’s temple, stifling a yawn. “Can we go to sleep now?”

Luke frowns, “But I thought you wanted to have sex.”

“I just wanted to spend the night with you. I want to cuddle you and deal with your cold feet and spend breakfast with you. Sex is nice, but getting to just sleep next to you, wake up to you? Even better.”

Luke snorts, “How domestic of you.”

“Isn’t that what everyone wants?” Ashton says. The sincerity in his voice throws Luke off guard. The idea that maybe he and Ashton are on the same page, that they’ve both been dreaming about the future and the what if’s, thrills Luke. He wants forever with Ashton and the concept that Ashton wants that too is just too much.

“You can’t say sappy stuff right before sleeping.”

“How about this? We go to bed and in the morning, we discuss the concept of moving in together or getting a new place or something.”

Luke’s breath catches. The look of utter love and devotion in Ashton’s face is just too much.

“Ashton, I love you,” Luke whispers. Ashton grins, kissing him again.

“I love you too. Now, bedtime. You’re cranky if you don’t get enough sleep.”  

Luke huffs, but allows Ashton to pull off his sweatpants, give him another kiss. He tugs his own shirt off, handing it to Luke without asking and tugs off his jeans. Luke realizes that Ashton wants Luke to wear his shirt. Luke blushes, tugging it over his head before he can rethink it. Ashton grins when he sees it, snagging Luke’s sweatpants and pulling them up. He flips the light off, crawling on the bed next to Luke and manhandling him into the perfect position for cuddling.

“Yes.”

“To what?”

“Moving in. I want to move in with you.”

“Good. I already have places picked out that would be perfect for us. We can start hunting in the morning,” Ashton mumbles, sleep tired, as he presses a kiss to Luke’s shoulder. Luke kisses Ashton’s hand in return. He loves Ashton so much it’s overwhelming. It feels like coming home .

#5 seconds of summer #my writing #lashton #luke hemmings #ashton irwin #lingerie luke series #its a prequel

[spaceskam]

The kissing booth (part 2)

part 1

"I can't stop thinking about him."

"God, you're such a sap."

Michael ignored the pillow to the chest that Isobel threw, happily focusing on the man in his mind. It'd been hours since the kissing booth ended and Michael had kissed 50 girls after that guy, and yet he was the only one he could think about. He didn't even know what he looked like.

"You don't get it, Iz, he was amazing."

"He talked to you for two seconds, made out with you, and then left, how amazing could he be?" Isobel asked. Michael just hummed. "I still can't believe you manage to kiss a guy in the 5 minutes I left you alone. You were blindfolded and you still found a guy."

"My skills are unparalleled."

"Shut up," she laughed. Michael hugged the pillow tight and tried to construct a face in his mind by the way it felt. It was much harder than it sounded. He rolled onto his stomach and looked up at her.

“Do you think you could find him for me?”

Isobel scoffed, “How on Earth would I do that?”

“I think I could probably know him if I heard his voice, you know, so... Help me find guys that go to your school who it might be,” Michael suggested. Isobel rolled her eyes. “I’m serious! He had this, like, really soft voice. His hair was kinda short-ish, super soft. Had great cheekbones. Maybe he’s athletic? He had a great body.”

“Oh my God, Michael, you are insane,” she groaned. He gave her a wide smile anyway. “What if he doesn’t even go to my school?”

“He has to! He was at the fundraiser,” Micahel insisted, “Please? Please, please, please, please.” 

“Jesus Christ, fine! I’ll try to talk to all the out guys at my school,” she caved. He almost jumped on her bed to give her a hug, but he decided against it since she had a gross facemask on that he wasn’t really eager to get on his shirt.

“Thank you! You won’t regret it!” 

-

“You owe me your life for this illegal shit I did for you,” Isobel said as she made her way into Bean Me Up. Michael always made it there first since it was closer to Roswell High, but they never failed to have their after-school coffee.

Where they went after their after-school coffee depended on the day.

“Ooh, tell me,” Michael said excitedly. It’d been three days since the kissing booth incident and Michael was still stuck on that mystery man. But, since it was now Monday, Isobel finally had some feedback from her explorations.

“I was talking to a few out guys around school and probably coming off as super creepy, but I was talking to one and he had the high cheekbones and was kinda thin and was soft-spoken... so I recorded him,” Isobel admitted. Michael smiled widely.

“You’re the best sister I’ve ever had, let me see!” Michael insisted, leaning over to see. She pulled up a video of a guy with pale blonde hair that was shot from a very unflattering angle.

“I swear, he’s cute in person,” Isobel promised. Michael held the phone to his ear and listened to the guy talk. “Well? Is it him?”

“No,” Michael said, pausing as he listened closer, “I don’t think?”

“You don’t think?”

“I’m pretty sure my guy has a deeper voice,” Michael said, frowning. But, the problem was, he wasn’t sure. The guy had only spoken a few sentences and then kissed him senseless and three days had passed, so the memory of that voice was fading. “Fuck.”

“Caramel macchiato for Michael,” a barista said. Michael stood with his frown still in place.

“Look, if you don’t remember his voice, we’re kinda stuck,” Isobel said. He sighed and turned to go grab his drink, smacking straight into another body.

“Oh shit, sorry,” the guy he ran into said.

“Sorry,” Michael said at the same time, looking over the guy to make sure he didn’t spill his coffee. He was in the Atherton uniform like Isobel with his coffee safe in hand. Michael got to his face and saw his bright smile slowly fade as recognition set in. Which was wild because Michael had never seen the guy before. “Sorry, do I know you?”

“Uh…” he trailed off, “No, I don’t think so.”

For a moment, Michael wished he did. He was fucking gorgeous, tan skin and dark hair adding to his stunning face. Michael slipped on his charming smile.

“That’s too bad,” he said. The guy gulped visibly and his cheeks started tinting a little red.

“Right, well… See you around, I guess.”

Michael turned to Isobel without even getting his coffee. “Who was that?”

She rolled her eyes. “His name is Alex and, before you ask, he’s straight. You got over mystery kiss man awfully fast.”

“I’m not over him,” Michael protested, looking out the window to see Alex stopping to put his headphones in. He was even pretty from afar. “I’m just… exploring my options.”

“Yeah, well, go get my coffee, Zeus.”

“Oh, that’s just cold.”

Michael got the drink and waited a few seconds for his own drink to be finished, bringing them both to the table. Isobel grabbed her macchiato like it was a lifeline. Which, knowing her, it kind of was.

“So, like, how do you know that guy is straight?” Micahel asked, his eyes drifting to the window again to see if Alex was still there. He wasn’t.

“He’s on the football team,” she answered simply. Michael raised his eyebrows.

“Are you telling me queer dudes don’t play football? Izzy, that’s just plain willful ignorance,” he said. Isobel snorted and rolled her eyes.

“Look, it’s not about him. I just spent all day talking to all the out guys in my school and I don’t know how we’re even going to find him if you don’t remember his voice,” Isobel said. Michael pursed his lips and got to thinking. There had to be some way to identify him. “Is it possible he’s not out?”

“If he’s not, then it’s pretty ballsy of him to just kiss a stranger from a different school who was blindfolded and--” Michael paused as the event started sounding less sexy and more like a crime of opportunity, “I”m beginning to think he might not be out.”

“Then I don’t know what you want me to do,” Isobel said, “I can’t hunt down people and out them.”

“Well, no, but maybe if he knows that I’m looking for him, he’ll come out on his own,” Michael suggested. Isobel didn’t seem to buy it. “Listen, if I kiss him again, I’ll know it.”

“Michael. No. You can’t go kissing random guys,” Isobel scolded. He rolled his eyes.

“I can hold another kissing booth for guys!”

“If he’s not out, he’s not going to go to a kissing booth,” Isobel pointed out. Michael sighed and slumped into his seat. Before he could come up with anything, Isobel got a bit serious and leaned closer. "Where are you sleeping tonight?"

"Don't worry about it," Michael replied, giving his sweet smile. She eyed him but nodded without another word.

They stayed and talked for another hour and a half before Isobel had to go home. The sun was in the beginning stages of setting, the sky turning pretty shades of pink and purple. He sat in his truck in the parking lot until it got dark completely.

Then he drove to the Crashdown, parking on the side of the building as a semi-decent way to hide the fact that his truck would be there all night. He knew Mr. Ortecho had probably noticed it, but he never said anything. Michael walked in and saw Liz behind the counter. She'd gone to Roswell High through her freshman year before getting a scholarship to Atherton. Michael had been offered one once upon a time, but then he got in a couple fights and surviving became a lot more important.

"Hey, Ortecho," he said, walking up to the counter. Surprisingly, Alex from the coffee shop was already sitting there. Michael gave him a smile. "And guy who I ran into."

"Michael, this is Alex. Alex, this is Michael," Liz introduced. Alex gave a two finger salute.

"Hey."

"Hey," Michael said, "I've never seen you before and now suddenly I see you twice in one day. Must be fate." Alex's neck and his ears slowly started turning red, his attention going to the basket of fries before him.

"Stop harassing my friends," Liz laughed. He just grinned even wider. "Rosa's upstairs, go around back though because my dad's in the kitchen."

Michael shot her a pair of finger guns. "Gotcha. See you around, Alex."

Michael gave him one last glance before heading out the door and going around the back of the building. He quickly scaled the fire escape that led straight into Rosa Ortecho's bedroom. He wondered how thought-out that placement was.

He felt through the window with ease, landing on a pile of clothes. Rosa was sat on her bed with a sketch pad in her lap and didn't even look up at the commotion.

"If you break something by climbing that one day, I'm not gonna help you," she said. He just smiled and stood up, flopping down on her bed. She kicked him, scolding him in Spanish for fucking up drawing.

"You'd help me," he said, pulling her pillow beneath his head, "You like me too much."

"Don't get it twisted, I like that you punched Jake Thibodaux for grabbing my ass two years ago. Doesn't mean I like you as a person," she told him, but the smile on her face said otherwise. Hell, the fact that she gave him a place to stay three times a week said otherwise. He made a personal rule not to stay more than three times a week with her or the Evans' strictly so he wouldn't overstay his welcome. That meant only one night a week in his truck which, at this point, wasn't the end of the world.

"So, I met a guy at the kissing booth I told you about," he grinned. Rosa raised her eyebrow, putting her sketch pad to the side.

"Spill."

"So I was on break and I still had my blindfold on and he came in back and kissed me. Like, really kissed me. Like, I forgot my name for a minute kissed me," he said. Her eyes widened and she grinned, teasingly prodding his ribs with her socked foot.

"Who is he?"

"I don't know," Michael sighed, "I was blindfolded and he just left. And now I have no idea how to find him. All I know is he goes to Atherton."

"Ah," she said, her smile fading, "Then maybe you don't want to know him."

"Why not?"

"Most of the guys there are assholes, trust me. They think they deserve the world because of their parents being rich. They have no fucking respect for anyone," she informed him. Michael frowned. "The only one I've ever met that I didn't want to punch was Alex."

"Oh, that guy downstairs with Liz? He's unfairly hot."

"He's sheltered as hell," Rosa said, "Sweet guy and super smart, but his dad is on his ass. His curfew is 8 PM and he's got, like, concerningly low self-esteem. I asked him if he'd ever had a girlfriend and he's just like 'girls don't like me'."

"Maybe he's not straight," Michael offered. She rolled her eyes just like Isobel.

"He's on the football team."

"Why do you guys think that's a straight indicator? Your gaydar is severely flawed," he said, "He blushed when I talked to him."

"Yeah, because he's sheltered. He blushes when anyone talks to him."

"Crushing my dreams one hot guy at a time."

"Hey, your mystery kisser might not be hot."

Michael gasped dramatically, "How dare you insult the love of my life like that?"

"You're ridiculous," Rosa laughed, shaking her head, "You don't even know him."

"I will," Michael insisted, "I can't pass that up."

"Well, go to sleep and dream about him. The bags under your eyes have bags," she said. He stuck his tongue out, but didn't retort as he let his eyes close. He'd spent the night prior camped out behind the public library. The ladies there never checked. However, he still only got a couple hours.

"Thanks, Rosa," he said, kicking off his shoes. She threw her blanket over him, engulfing him in darkness and her distinct scent. He didn't mind.

"No problem, papi."

#I've decided this is gonna have 5 parts #malex #malex fic #Michael Guerin #Michael Guerin fic #Roswell new Mexico #Roswell new Mexico fic #rnm #rnm fic #my fic #the kissing booth

[ververa]

‘Ecstasy’

@misssmephisto thank you for dealing with me and the breakdown I had while writing this <3333

A/N: This is a part of Twelve Shades of Love storyline, though I don’t have enough time to write all of it now, so just Xandra <3

(Sorry if this is bad, but I suck at describing places? Or maybe in general at describing)

Words: 1.991

Xandra x fem!reader

What am I doing here? You asked yourself as your best friend dragged you to the nightclub. It’s not like you didn’t want to party. It’s rather the opposite. It was just that you didn’t like such places. You had some bad memories connected with events like that, but you went there anyway.

That was the beginning of your new life. Your freedom and independence. For the first time you could go wild and nobody would call your mothers. And that was for sure worth celebrating.

Geez. What would Lana say? The question crossed your mind, though you forgot about it as soon as you got in.

From the outside it may not seem to be anything unusual. At first you’re taken aback, knowing that your best friend always chose the fanciest places possible. But then he brought you there. You took a glance at the building and couldn’t deny it looked more like a warehouse rather than a club. The walls were made of black brick and seemed not to be renovated in a long time. It looked neither promisingly nor encouragingly. It really was nothing special. Just another hellhole… You thought, but then you entered. What you took for a main entrance turned out to be only a burden on your way to the right door. Behind the wooden, black door there was a gate, almost, from heaven. At least it looked like that. Something in imitation of a golden halo was hanging above it and on both sides there were white and blue LED lights arranged as if they were clouds. Even the security guards were dressed in white suits. And that was glamorous.  

Two muscular men asked you for your tickets, though instead Simon informed them you’re on a VIP list. They checked it and then politely opened the door for you informing that you need to go to the right.

You followed Simon and soon you found yourself passing through the long hall. The walls, the floor and the ceiling were made of granite. It was completely black, except the kind that their used on the ceiling, which was resembling a galaxy. On the walls there were hanging LED lamps of different geometric shapes, which made the ceiling glimpse in white and blue swaths of lights. You’re fascinated by the extraordinary design that made you feel a hint of magic and mystery.

The further you moved the louder the music became. You could feel how the floor vibrated with the beat, which made your anticipation grew higher and higher. Finally you reached the end of the hall.

There was another door, but that time it was thrown open for you by two men – this time in black suits.

“Ecstasy” - a red lighted inscription was the first thing that came into your view. You looked around and were in awe. You knew it’s going to be fancy, but you did not expect it to be that fancy. It was far from familiar to you. That place was completely different to all expensive restaurants your mothers used to take you. You had never been to such an extravagant place before, but damn you were enchanted at once. Despite the exterior look, which was quite deceptive, the interior turned out to be not only marvellous, but also enormous. The club was split into two levels. As you get in you’re at the second one – arranged in a kind of balcony – separated from the rest by the glass balustrade and stairs. You stopped at the stairs and took a look around the place, while Simon was talking with some man.

It wasn’t hard to notice the second level was designed to be a VIP area. White sofas, tables made of glass, a bottle of champagne on each of them and the bar full of various drinks. If that hadn’t been enough, there were still booths for those who needed more privacy and were ready to pay for it. Everything about that place was luxurious. Every little detail was in the most fashionable style possible.

Mirrors on the ceiling and at the stage made the room flicker with colourful lights. The star-shaped lights on the floor, video walls and imagines of such icons like Marylin Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor or Michael Jackson made the place even more majestic and electrifying. It was all unknown for you, but still so fantastic and exciting that you were standing there in awe.

If, somehow, the inner design wasn’t enough to blow your mind all the rich and famous people you saw for sure were.

For a moment you’re so preoccupied by admiring the place, that you didn’t notice a woman looking at you. She was standing at the other end of the balcony – exactly opposite you. As she noticed that you finally spotted her, she emptied a glass of some alcohol and smirked at you.

“Y/N?” Simon placed his hand on your shoulder making you look at him “What are you starring at?”

You averted your gaze to look at the beautiful blonde once again, but she wasn’t there any more.

“I… nothing”

You didn’t know how it happened that the two of you managed to get to the VIP are, considering they didn’t let in a few other people who were ready to pay for it. But did that really matter? You were there and could do whatever you desire and you, for sure, weren’t going to blow your chance.

You’re amazed by the place more and more with every hour.

It’s a Sunday’s night – one of the best and probably unforgettable one in your life. Everybody, including you, were drinking whisky and wine. You even got some champagne and met a few important people, who were working in your (future) field, but it was all nothing in comparison to the show you’re able to watch.

None of you knew that night was a burlesque time. Neither did you expect to see so much, but that definitely was worth it. You loved every moment of the performance – from the pole dances to the stripping. You’re sitting in the front row, which was a privilege of being a VIP, and admired the performances. That was until the last show, when one of the women came really close to you – way too close and you didn’t know how to act. You enjoyed the performance, of course, but her coming off of the stage and approaching you was unexpected. Why me? You were wondering, when a barely  dressed woman stopped in front of you.

“Well well well. What we have here?” she looked at you “First time, sweetheart?” she asked probably seeing your red cheeks

You only nodded not knowing where to look.

“Will you join me at the stage?” a short haired blonde asked offering you her hand

You were about to answer, when another woman – luckily for you fully dressed – appeared. You recognised her immediately. It was her – the woman from the balcony. She said nothing, only looked at the dancer, who almost immediately got back on the stage.

You wanted to say something, but as you turned to face the mysterious woman she was gone. She was at the bar talking to one of the security guards and you couldn’t stop starring at her.

She was tall, or rather came across as that, because of her enormous high heels. Her long, blonde hair were falling on her shoulders making her look even more gorgeous in a tight, black dress.

Her eyes seemed to be really big, because of the fake eyelashes. A mix of pastel and dark pink eyeshadow and a pink lip gloss, which were sparkling in the colourful lights, made her look like a big, sweet candy. But you knew better. She may look like lollipops and rainbows, but behind closed doors she, for sure, was latex and whips. But that made her even more attractive. No wonder, forbidden fruit is the sweetest.

“It’s Xandra” Simon said

“W-what?”

“The woman you’re eye-fucking”

“I…” you blushed “I don’t know what you’re talking about”

“Yeah, sure” he laughed

“So… you know her?”

“Kind of. She’s the owner of the club and my parents’ friend”

You looked at the woman again. Though that time she wasn’t at the bar only with the security guard. The dancer, who had approached you before, was right next to her. It seemed as if they were arguing and, sweet Jesus, pissed off Xandra was even hotter.

You didn’t realise you’re starring, until she turned around and your eyes met. She smirked, just as she had done before, but soon she left together with the dancer. You were a bit frustrated and didn’t know why. You tried to start a conversation with Simon to occupy yourself, but your brain was already full of Xandra, even though you didn’t know her.

You couldn’t help she was sending those weird vibes that were attracting you so much. She came off as a typical bitch, so vain and self-confident. But you liked it. You wanted it more than anything. You wanted to mess up her hair and her to press you up against her pink coloured lips.

You took a sip of another drink, hoping it could help to cool your mind

“So, why is it called ‘Ecstasy’?” you asked Simon

“Because” you heard a female voice “That’s where all your fantasies can come true and gave you the feeling of ecstasy”

You turned back and saw the beautiful woman.

“People want a show and I’m giving them what they want” she continued “Well, far more actually” she winked at you

You only smiled, while Simon stood up and greeted her.

“You look great” your friend complimented

“As always” she said confidently “How are your parents?”

“Good. Well, very good”

“Great” she didn’t pay much attention to what Simon was saying, she was too busy checking you out. She didn’t even try to do it discreetly. She just stood there and eyed you up and down

“I didn’t know you have a girlfriend” she cut him off

“I…” he didn’t manage to finish his sentence, as she continued

“I’m Xandra” she offered you her hand

“Y/N”

“She’s my best friend” Simon explained, but it seemed as she didn’t hear him

“Well, Y/N… that might sound too forward, but that’s how I’m. You’re perfect darling”

You weren’t able to say anything, so you just looked at her and smiled.

“It’s not often that such beauties like you come here”

“Well, you’re here everyday, so…” you flirted back

Xandra smirked.

“Now, I don’t know if you’re looking for a job, but I’ve just had to fire one of my employee and you’d be just perfect to take her place. With that body of yours you’d be even better”

“I… Thank you. I mean I’d love to, but I don’t think I can do that…”

“Why is that?”

“I… I just don’t plan on stripping in front of people”

“Oh, honey, I don’t ask you to do that. I wouldn’t like you to strip for them either. Would far more prefer that all for myself” she licked her perfect lips “Never mind. You’d perfect as my assistant. I need someone young, pretty and assertive. You just… my God, you got that something that makes me want you. I’d love to give it a try, but no pressure, darling. If you make up your mind we’re going to have some kind of audition tomorrow. So, after you deal with your hangover, feel invited” she said smiling

You nodded reciprocating the smile.

“It was good to see you Sam” she said winking at you and leaving

You followed her with your eyes until she disappeared.

“She called me Sam… I’m not Sam” Simon complained, but you’re too excited to care

You knew it was going to be a crazy night, but that was unexpected. Yet you couldn’t deny you wanted to see where it all could go…  

Let me know what you think and if you’d like to be tagged in future works

@cordwliagoode

@sarahpaulsonisgod

@namelesslosers

#xandra #xandra x reader #sarah paulson imagine #sarah paulson x reader #the goldfinch #twelve shades of love

[newtmassangsters]

A million dreams - Newtmas AU (oneshot)

Also available on Ao3

Newt had been playing the piano for ten years now, taking lessons at the Conservatoire with Abigail since he was eight years old. Although he wasn’t her best student, he was the oldest one, and her favourite. The weekly hour they spent together always included at least fifteen minutes of gossips, when they shared everything from their thoughts on music to their personal life. Newt was quite a shy person, but he knew he could trust Abigail on anything, they had known each other for ten years and he felt like she knew him almost as good as his parents did, and definitely better than himself.

Abigail was a 30-year-old woman, with dark, long, hair that fell on her shoulders with elegance. She was very talented, but was nothing like the classic, serious pianist type. She was an eccentric person, took samba dancing lessons, listened to Michael Jackson as well as Rachmaninov, wore long skirts and peace-and-love homemade necklaces, yet had graduated from a musicology and pianist degree at the best school in the country, and knew how to play seven instruments. Because she carried such an unlikely background, she believed in each and every one of her students. When Newt first entered her classroom, he didn’t even know who Mozart was. Now, ten years later, he was able to play Mozart, of course, but also Beethoven, Handel, Bach or any composer she asked him too.

Newt was currently sitting behind the piano, practising a piece for the Conservatoire’s Annual Concert in a month. Each teacher had to choose five of his best students to play at the town’s theatre. The piece Abigail had chosen was a perfect fit for the boy: it was one of Rachmaninov’s Preludes, an elaborate piece, fast but gentle and delicate, that was often left over and unnoticed by famous musicians, yet it could be so deep and meaningful if played right.

At the moment, Newt was struggling with the metronome, trying, and failing, to speed up on the keyboard while not messing up the rhythm at the same time.

“You have to straighten up your hand, love, if you want to get passed 100 beats.” She finally helped him, realizing he was not figuring it by himself. He looked up at her, then stopped everything and sighed in defeat.

“I’ve been trying for half an hour now, Abigail, I’ll never be able to do it!”

“Yeah, right.” She rolled her eyes. “Stop being a drama queen and try harder, Newt. That might save us some time.”

“I just want to give a good performance this time, that’s all.” He admitted with a slightly panicked expression on his face. She didn’t seem to get how much he was afraid of failing.

“Stop worrying, Newt, I know you’ll do good. Thomas will be impressed, I promise.” She leaned on the piano as she winked at him.

The boy looked at her with wide eyes and red cheeks. “W-what do y-you… I… I d-don’t…”

“Oh, come on, buddy, I know you like Thomas! It’s so obvious that I still don’t understand why nothing happened between you two yet. Although they do say that love makes you blind…” she laughed at his embarrassment, but that only made Newt blush even more.

Thomas was another one of Abigail’s student, although piano was not his main instrument. He was the son of the double bass teacher, and at first, he had learnt how to play that instrument, but he soon moved to the saxophone, which was now his main. Three years ago, he had decided to start the piano, in order to be an “accomplished jazz man” as he had told his mom, joking. Because he was a very fast learner, and a known figure in the Conservatoire, most of the first years looked up to him, and everybody knew his name.

“Hey, love, it’s totally fine, I’m not judging. Why do you think I put his class right after yours? You two are adorable blushing and stuttering and eyeing each other every week…” Abigail tried to comfort Newt, coming to sit beside him.

Newt had always admired Thomas, of course, and had had a crush on him for years now. They were in the same music theory class, but Newt was so shy that they never really had an actual conversation, except for the stupid jokes Thomas whispered to him to make the lesson go faster. Thomas was funny, but he was also talented, and kind, and really cute; he was the only one to actually stand up to their terrible music theory teacher when she would pick on Newt. Newt admired the boy so much, he often daydreamed that they could become a thing one day, but he was too afraid to ever admit anything to him, not even that he was into boys. He just dreamed, and hope a miracle would happen someday.

Abigail sighed at the sight of Newt’s face, all sad and desperate. Newt was so much more than what he saw himself as. The blond was so focused on what was around him, Thomas, and the others, he spent so much time daydreaming about what could happen that he didn’t see how important he was to everyone. He wouldn’t notice how the little kids also looked up to him, because he was the oldest student in here, and one of the best. First years kept telling her that they wanted to play “exactly like the blond lizard boy when they grew up”. He was also an important figure of the Conservatoire, always a part of every concert; arriving an hour or so in advance to help fix everything. And, of course, he failed to notice that the brunet was obviously in love with Newt, just as he himself was obsessed with Thomas. They were both hopelessly lovesick and oblivious and had been for years.

“So, will you help me with that bar line, or?” Newt tried to casually change the subject, his cheeks still pink. Abigail rolled her eyes but turned the metronome back on and went on with the lesson.

Thomas closed the front door of his house in a rushed movement and hurried down the street in the direction of the Theatre. He was late for the concert, as always, and if his mom noticed, she would murder him. He had promised her he would come and help fix the stage for once but got caught up in his show and didn’t notice the time until he was half an hour late already. He felt bad for letting her down once again, not to mention that he knew Newt was also helping with the stage and they could’ve done it together. He couldn’t help the little smile on his lips at the thought of spending time with the blond, even if it was carrying chairs and heavy instruments on a stage. Maybe, maybe, this time they would’ve been able to hold an actual conversation, but it was too late now. Plus, he was really looking forward to hearing Newt play. He had already, technically, since their lessons were following each other, but they had never performed the same concerts before, and everyone showed a different side of themselves on stage. He admired Newt’s talent as a pianist, and he wanted to be able to watch him play, also maybe talk to him about it, laugh with him backstage. Thomas really loved to make him laugh.

By the time he finally arrived at the Theatre, and entered by the stage door, he was sweating and out of breath. The first person to notice him was his mother, who immediately sent him a death glare. So much for trying to be unnoticed, he thought bitterly. She sent him to watch over the kids who were waiting backstage and preparing their instruments. As much as Thomas hated it, he went upstairs without arguing.

As soon as he entered the room, he was met by a sight worse than his sister’s room when she invited her friends for a sleepover. Instrument’s cases were left open all over the room, mostly on the floor, with or without the instruments inside. Some kids were playing tag and running over the room, occasionally tripping over the instruments. A group of girls were braiding each other’s hair in a corner, gossiping loudly, another was standing by the open window throwing objects to people on the street, and one boy was crying in a corner because his violin chord was broken. Thomas cursed under his breath for being late, before taking a step into the mess that was the room and getting to work. After fifteen minutes, all girls were decently braided, the majority of the kids had been sent to the courtyard to play whatever game they wanted to that involved running, thus significantly reducing the noise, and the violin chord had been replaced. But Thomas himself was exhausted and sweating ten times more than he had been already. He was just about to allow himself a little rest when he heard someone walking in the direction of the room.

“This is far too quiet. What bloody happen-” Newt suddenly entered the room with a frown on his face, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he noticed Thomas leaning by the window. The latter straightened as soon as he saw the blond and offered him a shy smile.

“Oh, hey Tommy, I didn’t know you were there.” Newt said very quietly, not meeting his eyes.

“Yeah, Mom sent me to calm down the kids. That was not easy.” Thomas chuckled, trying to break the awkward silence between them. His eyes brightened as he saw Newt smile at his comment.

“Yeah, I know, I used to have a sister.” Newt said as he fully entered the room and looked around. “I’ll help you clean up the rest of the room if you want.”

“Thanks.” Thomas smiled as he realized he did get to spend time with Newt before the concert. “And I’m sorry for your sister.”

Newt frowned again, that cute frown he seemed to carry everywhere, until he finally understood what Thomas had meant. “Oh, no! Nothing actually happened to her! My sister, I mean. She’s just… I meant I do still have a sister but what I meant was that she’s grown, now, so I don’t need to watch over anymore.” He tried to hide his embarrassment by bending over to the closest item to clean the place, blood rushing to his face.

Thomas giggled at his stuttering and looked at him with a fond smile. He stared as the blond kept on randomly moving objects in the room, not really caring about ordering it but trying hard to make his blush go away. He could go on studying him all day, and he almost forgot about the kids all around them, lost as he was in the sight of the boy in front of him.

Almost. Because after thirty seconds of him staring all adoringly at Newt, a little girl tugged at his leg and asked with a high-pitched voice, loud and clear: “Hey, mister Thomas, are you in love with mister Newt? Why are you looking at him and smiling like my Mommy and my Daddy look at each other after they say I love you?”

It was Thomas’ turn to blush furiously as he sent a furious glare to the little girl, while Newt turned to him with wide eyes. He opened his mouth in an attempt to justify himself but was cut short by another boy in the room.

“Pfff, that’s not possible, Julie! Two boys can’t be in love, it’s so weird!”

“Yes, it does!” Julie shrieked, clearly upset by the boy’s comment. “My sister says she likes a girl and I even saw them kiss once! And she told me that boys could do that too! So, you don’t talk if you don’t know what you are talking about because if you say mean things like that, then I will tell my sister, and she will ground you!” Thomas looked up at Newt, who was now smiling at the girl, amused by her outburst.

“Puah, your sister, she’s all wrong and bad,” Another boy intervened. “my father, he says it’s very, very bad if you’re a girl and you want to kiss a girl and also if you’re a boy and you want to kiss a boy, and on the lips. And I think Newt is a very cool boy and I want to be just like him when I grow up, so I don’t want him to be a homosexual person because that’s wrong. Also, my father, he is never wrong, so now I don’t like your sister.” Julie turned to him with a furious expression. She was all red and her eyes were almost spilling tears.

Thomas caught her in his arms just as she was about to jump on the boy, and he thought the incident would end there, as he sent the kids away. But Newt quickly turned to the boy and spoke in a very angry and slightly hurt voice.

“Well, I’m very sorry to break the news to you, buddy, but your father might be wrong on that one. At least I know that you are, because I am definitely gay, which means that I do want to kiss boys on the lips even though I am a boy myself. And there is nothing wrong with it, you hear me? I don’t care what bullshit your father wants to say but -“ He was cut off by Thomas’ calming hand on his shoulder. He turned to the brunet who was still holding Julie and looking at him with wide eyes. The sight calmed Newt right away, and he took a deep breath before turning back to the boy, who remained completely silent before Newt.

“It’s alright. You are allowed to be wrong sometimes. But I still want you to apologize to Julie there, for calling her sister a bad person.” The boy nodded and went to Julie to apologize. Newt turned to Thomas again, who was now staring at him with what looked like a proud smile. The blond smiled back, slightly blushing when he realized he had just come out to Thomas and half of the kids of the Conservatoire without even meaning to.

“So, Mister, are you a gay person like my sister and Newt, too? Is that why you are looking at him again?” Julie turned back to Thomas after she had ended her conversation with the other kid.

The question took Thomas by surprise again, and he wished for the second time that she would learn to give people privacy, or at least start speaking quietly. He contemplated not answering, but when he looked up, everyone was staring at him expectantly, including Newt.

“Hum, huh… Yeah, I am. Well, not exactly, more like I like boys and girls both, but… Yeah, that’s the idea.” He avoided looking at the blond at all costs as he struggled explaining his sexuality to the nine-year-old. Exactly how I had dreamed to come out to Newt, he thought.

She opened her mouth to ask another question -  and very probably embarrass him more when Abigail barged into the room.

“There you are!” she exclaimed looking at Newt and Thomas both. “I should’ve guessed you two would be all blushing somewhere together. Well, come on then, the concert starts in ten minutes, and I want everyone downstairs in five!”

Newt let his fingers move by themselves in the pattern he knew by heart now. His eyes went from the music sheet to the keynote, checking his movements, although he didn’t really need to read the sheet anymore. He knew it by heart, but it wasn’t elegant to keep his eyes fixed on his hands, and it helped his focus to read the notes as he played. He was so nervous, knowing that Thomas was in the building somewhere, listening to him play. But as soon as his fingers had started moving, he got lost in the music, as he was now. A large grin grew on his face as he played the last chord and he realized he hadn’t made one single mistake. He looked up to Abigail behind the curtains, who was applauding furiously, like everyone else in the Hall. He got up to bow to the public, then gathered his sheets and walked back behind the stage. As soon as he was out of the public sight, behind the curtains, someone ran into him, almost knocking him over, holding him in a tight embrace. His eyes widened when he realized it was Thomas.

“Newt! You were amazing!” the brunet exclaimed as he pulled back, his smile almost as big as Newt’s.

“Boys, keep quiet, will you?” Abigail whispered at them, winking at Newt at the same time. And he didn’t know if she meant it for his performance or for the unexpected hug he just received.

“Let’s get out” Thomas offered as he grabbed Newt’s hand to lead him away. He didn’t know why he felt so bold and touchy suddenly, if it was because of their forced coming-out from earlier, or the fact that they were both tired, but none of them complained.

“Thomas, you’re in in twenty minutes, so don’t get too far!” Abigail reminded them before turning her attention back to duet of clarinets playing on stage.

Newt followed Thomas to a flight of hidden stairs that lead to the upper circle of seats, next to the control room. They had the floor to themselves, as almost no one knew how to get there.

“I found that place years ago when my Mom used to bring me with her at her concerts and I would get so bored that I started exploring the building. Now I go there all the time because there is no one to bother me here and I have a very good view.” Thomas explained as he lead them to seat by the balustrade, still holding hands.

Newt simply nodded and turned his attention to the jazz quartet that was now playing. There was a pianist, a double bass, a saxophone and drums. They were all playing with true passion and it showed in the way the instruments interacted. They responded perfectly to one another, in perfect harmony, yet each one was able to portray its own emotion and added its own version to the story they were writing together. It truly was beautiful, and everyone in the theatre seemed to be caught on their music.

“They’re very good.” Thomas said, stating the obvious. They were sitting side by side, their shoulders touching. Newt had his elbows resting on the balustrade, and his face resting on his arms, looking as if he were sleeping when he had never been more aware of his surroundings, the wonderful music in his ears and before his eyes, Thomas’ shoulder on his, his presence by his side. Thomas was sitting cross-legged, his chest leaning forward and his arms balancing above the void. His eyes were fixed on Newt’s adorable position, but his ears didn’t miss a single note the quartet was playing.

The atmosphere had changed from cheerful to a more serious, nostalgic one. The musicians were playing There Will Never Be Another You, and the saxophone was currently pouring all his feelings in a heart-breaking solo.

Newt finally turned to Thomas, looking at him in the eyes, his head still fixed on his arms. “They are. But I like it better when you are playing.” He was being serious, and Thomas smiled kindly at his answer.

“Thanks.”

They went back to the music. The piece was so known that both of them, even though Newt wasn’t into jazz, could sing the lyrics. It talked about impossible dreams of being with someone that might have left forever.

“Do you have dreams, Tommy?” the blond asked after a few seconds of silence.

“Some. I don’t know. Do you?”

“Yes.” Newt smiled at him. “But they’re always different. Sometimes I have my all life all planned, each second of it, and some other days I have no clue where to go. I can’t make up my mind.” He sighed, thinking about how life always seemed to ignore his wishes and had left so many of his dreams disregarded. He didn’t really know why he was sharing all of it tonight. He didn’t even know why he was feeling so nostalgic and serious all of a sudden. It could have been the music, or the intensity of Thomas’ brown eyes staring right into his. He might not know, but he felt comfortable sharing all of it with him, because the other was listening, and Newt felt like he could trust him. Both of them could somehow feel the thin connection that was linking them together on that night. It was fragile, but they just needed to make it grow stronger, like a seed that had the potential to grow into a beautiful flower if one put enough affection and dedication in the effort.

“So what is this dream about, tonight?” Thomas asked.

“Tonight, I want to be a good musician, a real pianist.”

“You already are.” The brunet cut him off. Newt just smiled.

“A better one, then. A professional. I want to play good music all over the country, all over the world even, I’d be good, but it wouldn’t matter, because it would be all about the music.” He said all of it in a quiet voice, his gaze fixed on the painted ceiling. He didn’t really know where he was going with it, he was making everything up as he said it, letting the music guide his thoughts.

Thomas had leant closer, mirroring Newt’s position resting on the balustrade, his own face now inches from the blond’s one. It was now or never. They might never have another night like this one, just the two of them at the top of the theatre, on the top of the world, looking down on a stage where four men sang about lost love and missed opportunities. Thomas did not want Newt to be an opportunity he missed, he wanted him to be the love he could be proud of, the one that grew strong and beautiful.

“Am I in this dream, Newt?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah” the other whispered, locking their eyes together. “Tonight, I imagine you would be by my side, always. We would be playing together. Just the two of us, together.” The last sentence was so quiet, it was hard to hear it over the bass’ solo.

“And tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. Ask me tomorrow.” They both smiled, not breaking eye contact, Thomas leaning just a little bit closer. They listened together to the music, again. It was about time moving too fast, but they felt like they could ever be able to leave the moment they were lost in.

“I really like you, Tommy.” Newt suddenly confessed, as if it was so evident that he didn’t even need to say it. And it was. It felt so clear, unmistakable, obvious as they were sitting here, on the highest row of the theatre, staring so intently at each other. And he knew how Thomas felt it too.

“I really like you too.” The brunet smiled even bigger, and finally closed the gap that was between their bodies.

There will be other lips that I may kiss, but they won’t thrill me like yours used to do. Yes, I may dream a million dreams, but how can they come true, if there will never ever be another you? The song went on, but lost in their own kiss, thrilled by the feeling of their own lips against the other, the boys didn’t need to be dreaming a million dreams to know that this one was true.

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[your-dietician]

15 years ago, 'Rock Star: Supernova' rocked reality television

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/entertainment/15-years-ago-rock-star-supernova-rocked-reality-television/

15 years ago, 'Rock Star: Supernova' rocked reality television

Gillby Clarke, ‘Rock Star: Supernova’ winmer Lukas Rossi, Tommy Lee, and Jason Newsted in 2006. (Photo: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

Before David Cook became the first rock winner of American Idol or Adam Lambert made TV history with his game-changing, Jeff Buckley-esque “Ring of Fire” cover, there was CBS’s Rock Star: Supernova — a search for the lead singer for a new supergroup comprising Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, ex-Metallica bassist Jason Newsted, and ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke. (Lambert even credited Rock Star: Supernova runner-up Dilana’s “Ring of Fire” performance as an inspiration for his Idol arrangement.) 

The Dave Navarro-cohosted talent show, which premiered 15 years ago on July 5, 2006, was an “anti-Idol” of course, featuring covers of songs by Nirvana, the Verve, Hole, Radiohead, the Killers, Dramarama, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, the Kinks, Living Colour, Failure, Franz Ferdinand, the Police, Talking Heads, Cheap Trick, Bob Dylan, Soul Asylum, Stone Temple Pilots, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, and even the actual Jeff Buckley — at a time when that was unheard-of on all other singing competitions.

“It was real. It wasn’t like karaoke with somebody up there just singing some dumb s***. It was real music,” Lee tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I really think [Rock Star: Supernova executive producer] Mark Burnett was way ahead of his time in wanting to deliver that kind of thing to prime-time America. Like, ‘Here’s some real s***. These guys are going to look for a singer. They’re going to make a record. They’re going to go on tour.’ … It totally was ahead of its time.”

The blueprint for Rock Star: Supernova was arguably created a year earlier with Rock Star: INXS, a questionable and somewhat distasteful reality show set up by Burnett and the surviving members of Australian pop-rock band INXS to replace late INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. (Another future American Idol rock trailblazer, Chris Daughtry, actually unsuccessfully auditioned for that show.) Canadian glam-rocker Lukas Rossi eventually won Rock Star: Supernova after performing his self-penned original power ballad “Headspin” on the finale (which, again, was not typical for reality shows of the era), but he tells Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume that when his friend suggested he try out for Burnett’s new Rock Star spinoff, he balked — because initially, Rock Star Season 2 was going to be a search for the replacement singer of another big, established rock group, not for the singer of a brand-new band.

Story continues

“My life seemed pretty grim at that point. I was in Montreal, going from friends’ to friends’ houses and trying to get my band, Rise Electric, off the ground. I was literally in minus-40-degree weather, living in an abandoned bowling alley and covering myself up with newspaper just to keep warm. I got a call out of the blue from a friend of mine, [EMI Music Publishing executive] Barb Sedun, and she was like, ‘Hey, there’s this show and they’re looking for a singer.’ And she mentioned another band. I was like, ‘I can’t replace that singer! That’s just not right!’ … It was Van Halen — that’s what she said to me. And I was like, ‘Absolutely not. I don’t want to pretend to be their new singer.’ I mean, I love Van Halen, but that’s just not my persona. I’d be lying to the fans and their fans and to myself.”

Rossi was homeless and destitute after leaving his home base of Toronto following a breakup with a cheating girlfriend, and he had focused all his energy on the fledgling Rise Electric. “I put all my eggs into one basket, because I’m a firm believer. My daddy used to say, ‘Whaddya got for plan B, after all this music s***?’ And I’m like, ‘If you need a plan B, that means your plan A is pretty s***ty, dude.’ So, I didn’t have a plan B. Or a plan C.” Still, Rossi admits that he was tempted to try out for what he believed was going to be Rock Star: Van Halen. “It was a hard freakin’ pill to swallow, because I was frickin’ broke, dude. I had nothing.”

However, a week later Sedun phoned Rossi again to let him know that Rock Star had changed direction, and its second season would instead center on a new hard-rock supergroup featuring A-list musicians, with superstar producer Butch Walker set to record their album. “I was like, ‘Hell yeah, dude! That’s what I was like!’” When Rossi had no way of affording a trip to the nearest audition city, Vancouver, Canada, Sedun footed the bill. “She’s like, ‘I’ll pay for you to get there. Just go and kick ass. I know you can do this. I believe in you.’ I packed up my backpack — I had all my belongings in a backpack — and I went there, terrified.”

Rossi confesses that he “drank a few too many pints” before he tried out with “Headspin” (which he’d written just a week earlier) and Live’s “Lightning Crashes,” and he initially thought he’d ruined his chances. “I was so nervous. I walk in, and there’s this dark room. It’s like really weird, like this little stage lit up with one light and the rest is this empty theater,” he recalls. “And then halfway through that I hear, ‘Why are you sweating so much?’ I was like, ‘Who said that?’ I’m looking around, and then I see Jason Newsted through the darkness. And I said, ‘Oh, hey, dude. I just had a couple of pints and it’s hot as s*** in here. That light above me is hot, dude!’”

Apparently the skunk-haired Rossi’s rock ‘n’ roll attitude — which likely would not have impressed the stuffier powers-that-be on, say, Idol or America’s Got Talent in 2006 — was an asset on Rock Star: Supernova. “There was a chuckle in the darkness,” Rossi remembers. Moments after he left that audition and started walking down the street with his guitar case in hand, a casting agent from the show chased him down and invited him to return the next day. And even later, when Rossi got on the show and botched his live, televised performance of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” — when his “brain took a big dookie” and he forgot the words — that rawness and authenticity worked in his favor. “When you take your life too seriously, man, that only goes so far. That’s, like, a real person. [Rock musicians] trip over things once in a while. We do things wrong. You have to be yourself,” Rossi shrugs. 

Unfortunately, the Rossi-fronted band that formed after the show’s finale was not nearly as successful as the show itself. First, there was a branding issue when the new group, which was supposed to be called Supernova, had to officially change its name to the clunkier Rock Star Supernova (minus the TV series title’s colon), after an established Orange County pop-punk trio named Supernova sued and was granted an injunction. (One key piece of evidence was a Myspace message from Butch Walker noting that Burnett Productions, CBS, Lee, Newsted, and Clarke had been informed that another Supernova already existed, but they had proceeded anyway.) 

The hastily renamed Rock Star Supernova’s surprisingly solid, Walker-produced self-titled album, which included “Headspin” as a single and featured Rossi’s writing credits on four other cuts, debuted at No. 4 in Rossi’s native Canada, where it eventually went platinum. (Check out two circa-2006 performances by the band at Yahoo’s studio below.) But in the U.S., the album stalled at No. 101 on the Billboard 200 and received virtually no radio airplay. It was likely that the reality-television stigma hurt Rock Star Supernova’s chances of being taken seriously in the hard rock world, despite the project’s A-list pedigree.

“I think a lot of people think it’s baggage, like it is not ‘authentic’ or whatever, like it’s the ‘Hollywood TV version’ of something,” Walker, who also appeared as a guest judge on the show, tells Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume. “But that being said, I mean, that’s what people sign up for when they watch.”

“We toured everywhere, all the way to Australia and back, but I’m a firm believer that timing is everything, you know?” muses Rossi. “And honestly, I don’t know, because I went out there every single night and gave it my all, dude. Me and Tommy were hungry, but maybe the rest of them — I’m not gonna mention people — but maybe somebody wanted Dilana to win instead of me. We’ll just leave it at that.”

Dilana, who toured as Rock Star Supernova’s opening act in 2007, was actually happy and relieved to place second on the show, as she ultimately didn’t think she was the right fit for the supergroup’s music. “I wanted to get as far as I could, but after I heard their first original, I was kind of bummed,” she confesses to Yahoo Entertainment. “That was exactly when I knew: ‘I don’t want to be the singer in this band.’ I’m not dissing them — I mean, they’re great songs, and Butch Walker is a fantastic, amazing, creative artist — but they’re just not me. They picked me to be the first [contestant] to sing an original on the show, and it was a challenge for me. After that, I knew there was no way I would be in this band, singing this material. And I made the mistake by actually informing some people about it the night before the finale.

“Someone posed the question, ‘What are you going to say [if you win]? What’s your little speech going to be?’ And, I said, ‘Well, if I win it, I’m going to decline it,’” Dilana continues. “Everyone knew it was either Lukas or I, so I said, ‘Lukas, you’re going to get it.’ And I think they were videotaping us at that point. So, I have a sneaky suspicion that somehow the producers got word to the band, and maybe they decided to make sure that I didn’t get picked. … Maybe they told the band and the band was like, ‘We’re not going to get humiliated like that.’ But, maybe the TV people were like, ‘Oh, this would be great television!’ Who knows what happened? But everyone also knew that Lukas was definitely Tommy’s favorite from day one, so it worked out perfectly for me. I didn’t have to embarrass anybody, I didn’t have to get kind of nervous if I had won, and I got exactly what I wanted. I wanted the exposure, and that’s what I got.”

“There was a lot of people involved. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Everybody had their own manager. I mean, you can just see how that’s going to go,” sighs Walker. “There were a lot of people trying to get squeezed through the same rathole with all of their ideas. But they were all great people. I really enjoyed the experience, and Mark Burnett is awesome.”

Rossi was disappointed when Rock Star Supernova lasted only one album/touring cycle, but like Dilana, he used the exposure to further his solo career, and he and Lee remain buddies to this day. (“He’s the best dude. He’s like my tall, skinny daddy. I love that dude,” Rossi gushes.) Most recently, Rossi sang two tracks on Lee’s 2020 solo album Andro, the original “You Dancy” and a cover of Prince’s “When You Were Mine.” And Rock Star: Supernova changed Rossi’s life in a more important and lasting way: Shortly after the show, Lee and Navarro fixed him up with their friend, former adult film actress Kendra Jade. “We met up at Barney’s Beanery and literally spent the next two whole weeks in bed. It was mental,” Rossi laughingly recalls of their first date. Lukas and Kendra eloped in 2007; adopted a son, Bryden, in 2015; and now happily reside in Nashville. 

“The music was secondary [to the Rock Star: Supernova experience]. Everybody I’ve met through that whole journey was so awesome,” Rossi adds. “Like I was telling you, I was on the street, I had nothing, and all of a sudden I get thrown into meeting all these wonderful people. … We were all there to do what we love most. Plus, we got to have free drinks and be on television and make a bunch of wonderful, wonderful fans. I mean, God, it was the best time of my life.”

Tommy Lee and Lukas Rossi (Photo: Jordan Strauss/WireImage)

“That’s all it ever was to be — it was a great experience,” says Lee. Rossi does wish that Burnett had continued focusing on rock ‘n’ roll reality shows instead of moving on to the more mainstream and less rockin’ NBC show The Voice (“Why? That’s like McDonald’s cutting off their Big Macs,” he quips), but Lee does believe that Rock Star: Supernova changed music television 15 years ago, attesting: “I think it paved the way for a lot of the shows that are here today, definitely.”

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This above Lukas Rossi and Butch Walker interviews are taken from their appearances on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Full audio of those conversations are available via the SiriusXM app.

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[kentkennyradcliffe]

April 26th 1991 – April 26th 2010 (18 years)

Birth (0-1):

 In Bloom – Nirvana

  I was born into the grunge movement, and the album never mind by nirvana was a landmark album for the band. I never knew about nirvana until I was much older, in my teens, but after listening to the entire album, I really liked In Bloom the most. I feel like it could be about me. It captures the teenage attitude perfectly, an attitude that I always wanted to avoid.

 Baby (2-3):

 Jeremy – Pearl Jam

 I heard this song when I was two I think and it stuck with me ever since. I always hear the guitar part in my head when I am about to do something I shouldn’t do.

 The Voice – The Moody Blues

Tuesday Afternoon – The Moody Blues

I Know You’re Out There Somewhere – The Moody Blues

 My mom used to play these songs in a cassette in this order. I remember always liking the first song the most . I would listen to it constantly, and always wanted to hear it when mom would play it in the car. All of these songs made me feel good as a little boy, especially Tuesday Afternoon and I Know You’re Out There Somewhere. Tuesday Afternoon has a part in the song when the singer hits this note for almost 30 seconds, and I used to challenge myself to see if I could hold the note too. I never could do it as a little boy, but as I got older, I trained myself to do it. It always frustrated me when I would have to gasp for air after about 20 seconds. I Know You’re Out There Somewhere reminds me of my first dog Brownie. She was a vicious dog to strangers, and since we didn’t have a fence, we had to let her go when we moved to Kentucky when I was about 3. The song was playing when my mom told me that Brownie was gone, so I told myself as a little boy that I “would find her somehow, somehow, somehow.” It never happened, and as I got older I forgot about her. Maybe when I got my new dog star, it sort of made me forget, but now that I think about it, I think I knew deep down that Brownie was better off on that farm. At least there she could run around and be free.

  Kid (4-13):

 You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me – Dusty Springfield

 This song was my go-to for help when I was confused and my parents were of no help. I couldn’t talk to them about my sexuality. I was condemned.

Freshmen year:

 I first heard of fall out boy, all American rejects, panic at the disco, 30 seconds to mars, and bands like that in my drama class, my very first class in my very first year of high school. A boy with mohawk hair and gauges sat behind me and his friend (a girl who looked like she rolled out of bed each morning) always talked about music. One day she brought in a cd with four guys on the cover, in a silhouette fashion, with what looked like a stage with red curtains in front of them. These four guys are sitting facing towards the stage, and if I remember correctly there was a tree or a cab or something in the stage. The title of this album was called From Under the Cork Tree and it was by the band Fall Out Boy. I never heard of them and was interested in the band, so I asked to see the cd. The girl showed me her favorite song. The title was long, and I lost interest right then and there. I never realized this band was going to become major in about 3 months. I figured it was a local band too, I never took the time to ask what genre they were or where she got the cd from. So, I dismissed the band and instead kept listening to my Avril Lavigne and no doubt. When I went home I turned on the radio to the station I always played, 99.7 djx, and after while I heard my first fall out boy song, sugar we’re going down. I liked the song, and that is when I became a follower of the emo scene that would become huge in the next year. My friends at this time where two goth/emo girls who knew how to be rebels. They were redheads and twins. One girl always wore crazy goth clothes, the other would have on something fun, like Pokémon or some anime t shirt. They rode my bus and had me listen to music I cannot even remember, but they got me into the punk scene. There was also a girl named Shelby who rode my bus too, and she played the knack my sharona, and I loved it. She was a huge rush fan, but I never got into that band. I remember hearing all the songs that were popular 2006 on the bus. Like lose control my missy Elliot, my immortal by evanescence, a lot of rap and hip hop, and Kelly Clarkson. I was introduced to prince that year, but never got into him until my sophomore year.

 Sophomore Year:

I was entering my second quarter of the second semester of my sophomore year. I used to use a music website called project playlist to discover music. Everyone that I knew on myspace had one, because you could have up to 100 songs on it, so much better than the one song that myspace used to let you have, now myspace even lets you have playlists. But back when it was new and hip, project playlist was like finding pandoras box, I discovered so many songs and artists from that website. I could listen to any song I wanted, without having to buy it, so I looked up all the bands that my friends were talking about, like My Chemical Romance, AFI, The Used, Paramore, act… I used it to listen to classic songs by David Bowie, Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson, Queen… I also was into the movie Moulin Rouge. I heard my first David bowie songs (heroes, diamond dogs) and Madonna songs (like a virgin, material girl) in that movie. I credit that movie for my taste in music actually. I never would have known who Bowie was until much later in life if not for Moulin Rouge. I also looked up U2 (in the name of love) and queen (the show must go on) I went out and bought 3 CDs that pretty much defined the last half of my sophomore year: I’m not dead by pink, Greatest hits platinum by queen (which included 3 CDs, the first being there classic rock songs, the second their 80’s hits, and the last one with solo stuff by Freddie and the 90’s hits) and The Immaculate Collection by Madonna. Later during the summer I bought Mika’s debut cd – Life in Cartoon Motion. I fucking loved that cd. Every song in it meant something to me. Then I bought The New York Dolls Life in Manhattan Cd and Feists Cd the Reminder. All these musicians I discovered through YouTube, project playlist, or myspace. So I give them a lot of thanks.

 Junior year:

 The beginning of my junior year, I was a happy, fun, person. Everyone knew me, and everyone knew about me. I was comfortable with myself and outgoing and headstrong. The music I liked was still a carryover from the summer, (New York dolls, feast, mika) and my friends knew I liked the emo stuff and the weird stuff. I never was actually emo, I never dressed like it, or even tried to be associated with the scene, but as time went on, I would find things to be changing. I went to a concert called less fest and saw a band called sum 41. I really liked their energy. I remember I went with some friends who would later become my best friends, like taylr, cory, coty, logan. I was also becoming close to Sydney during that time, but we didn’t become good friends till later. I remember seeing kimmy and sally and lots of people. But things went south after that night, I was drunk and planning to get with Logan later. It was a well-known fact that I went both ways back then, and Logan wanted to join in on the fun. I remember being excited about the whole thing, I thought this was going to mean a possible relationship, but I realized the next day that any hopes for a boyfriend were gone. This sent me down a path that was destructive, and I ended up turning to drugs. At first it was simply pot, and I was familiar with it. Over the summer I smoked it for the first time down in Florida and liked it a lot. I was reading a book called the perks of being a wallflower at the time too, and I looked up the music in that book. I had a friend named Lauren who introduced me to a band called chiodos, which got me into the whole screamo/posthardcore scene, and I began to lose my head with the drugs. I became closer friends with Sydney and we hung out a lot. She confided in me that she was bisexual, and we talked a lot about our experiences. I went to a lot of parties that fall and became hooked on cocaine. It was a drug I should have avoided, but I didn’t. And around late October Halloween I lost it. I told the whole school about what Logan and I did, I turned to Sydney for support and help and then we began dating as a cover up for our sexuality, well more for her, so her parents wouldn’t think she was with girls. And I turned to bands like my chemical romance, the used, Thursday, Paramore, the song loving touching squeezing my journey, Manson, and anything loud that would make me feel better. MCR and the Used were bands that I became dependant on because their music hit exactly what I felt with my life. I felt like a monster or a freak. Like I did not deserve sunlight. Like I was meant to be alone and damned for what I did. I let the fear of being gay get into my head and I began to call out to the black parade for help. I lost myself in Gerard’s words and Bert McCracken’s screams. From November to about January I was in the darkest part of my life. My drug habit was becoming worse and I lost my friends. I hurt Sydney when I stupidly said I did not believe she was bi; I was hurting Logan for no reason, and I was coming to school fucked out my mind. I began to lose weight and became very weak. I wore makeup and would go overboard with the eyes. I thought I deserved to look as bad on the outside as I did on the inside. At that time I thought I was all alone, but I forgot that I had taylr right there listening to me. He was a great friend to me and I thank him for that. I think taylr actually sought me out, because he knew he could talk to me about relationships. He was called gay for being my friend, but he didn’t care. He saw that I didn’t base my whole life on my sexuality, and he respected me. He knew I was into music a lot, and he pushed me in a direction that would help me out later in life. I started to play the piano because of him, and I learned how to interpret music because of him. He was into the emo stuff and he introduced me to a lot of that music. All time low, etc. the pop punk stuff. He was straight edge then and didn’t like that I did drugs, but he never tried to change me. He just accepted me as I was, and let me be who I wanted to me. We got along so well during my second half of my junior year. I was getting acid from a boy I used to mess with named Michael browning, I knew him from Ronnie back when I was sophomore.

 I should go on a little side story about my sexuality, the confusion, the confrontations, the revelations, and the religious disturbance inside of me when I learned what sin was, and the events that led to how I am now, but I will do this some other time. I don’t want to divert from the main story about my music history.

 During my time spent with taylr, I met some people who shared my interest in music, clover, and Frankie the girls who dated each other, Alex the girl who dated cory for about a year, Hailey the Asian. Then I met Kaitlyn Becker.

  We Are Gonna Friends – The White Stripes

Money for Nothing – Dire Straights

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For – U2

Love Reign o’er Me – The Who

Peace of Mind – Boston

Foreplay/Longtime – Boston

The Tears of a Clown – Smokey Robinson

Dude Looks Like A Lady – Aerosmith

Sweet Emotion – Aerosmith

Train Kept a Rolling – Aerosmith

American Woman – Lenny Kravitz

Little Black Packback – Stroke 9

Don’t Tell Me – Madonna

American Life – Madonna

Die Another Day – Madonna

Love Profusion – Madonna

It’s My Life – No Doubt

Just a Girl – No Doubt

Bathwater – No Doubt

Sunday Morning – No Doubt

Hey Baby – No Doubt

Trapped in A Box – No Doubt

Spiderwebs – No Doubt

Addicted – Simple Plan

Mr. Brightside – The Killers

Starlight – Muse

Beautiful Soul – Jesse McCartney

I Say Yeah – Dream Street

Bye Bye Bye – N Sync

Pop – N Sync

It’s Gonna Be Me – N Sync

Incomplete – Backstreet Boys

As Long As You Love Me– Backstreet Boys

I Need You Tonight – INXS

Love Is A Stranger – Eurythmics

Serious – Gwen Stephani

Sugar We’re Going Down – Fall Out Boy

Emily – Elton John

Understanding Women – Elton John

Chasing Cars – Snow Patrol

Error: Operator – Taking Back Sunday

Makedamnsure – Taking Back Sunday

Call Me When You’re Sober – Evanescence

Walk Away – Kelly Clarkson

Dirty Little Secret – The All American Rejects

Something to Save – George Michael

Praying For Time – George Michael

Controversy – Prince

Renegade – Styx

They Don’t Care About Us – Michael Jackson

Stranger in Moscow – Michael Jackson

The Way You Make Me Feel – Michael Jackson

 Songs that describe me:

 Girl You Really Got Me Now – The Kinks

Lola – The Kinks

A Well Respected Man About Town – The Kinks

Light My Fire – The Doors

(What  A) Wonderful World – Sam Cooke

Hound Dog – Elvis Presley

Suspicious Minds – Elvis Presley

All Shook Up (30th Anniversary Edition of NBC-TV) – Elvis Presley

Sympathy for The Devil – The Rolling Stones

You Can’t Always Get What You Want – Rolling Stones

Miss You – Rolling Stones

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction -  Rolling Stones

Gimmie Shelter – Rolling Stones

Let’s Spend the Night Together – Rolling Stones

Sound of Silence – Simon And Garfunkel

Under My Thumb – Tina Turner

Acid Queen – Tina Turner

 Voodoo – Godsmack

The Kids Are Alright – The Offspring

The Missing Frame – AFI

Miss Murder – AFI

Love Like Winter – AFI

Kill Caustic – AFI

Endlessly She Said – AFI

The Leaving Song Pt. 2 – AFI

Bleed Black – AFI

Silver and Cold – AFI

Death of Seasons – AFI

Paper Airplanes – AFI

The Great Disappointment – AFI

But Home Is Nowhere – AFI

Rabbits Are Roadkill – AFI

Fall Children – AFI

The Boy who destroyed the world – afi

Totalimmortal – afi

The art of drowning – Afi

Black Sails – AFI

Shut your mouth – Afi

Fire on high – electric light orchestra

Get Your Gunn, Lunchbox, Antichrist superstar, Mechanical Animals, Holy Wood, The golden age of grotesque - Marilyn Manson

Dark Days – The Used

Mayday Parade

Earth Crisis

Escape the fate

Chiodos

Secondhand Serenade – A twist in my story

The Mars Volta – The widow, illeyna

Against me – new wave

Killing monsters in the rain, black eye – steel train

Books and letters, clouds – The Morning Light

Karate High School – League of Tomorrow

Ten Second Epic – boys will be boys

Chain Me Free, Sick Little Suicide, Salty Eyes, Papercut Skin, Clumsy Heart, Shoot Me in The Smile, Am Tilts, Wake the Sun, To Build a Mountain, Between Halloweens - The Matches

Nine in the Afternoon, Do You Know What I’m Seeing, That Green Gentleman, Pas De Cheval, Mad as Rabbits – Panic at The Disco

Second Hand News, Dreams, Never Going Back Again, I Don’t Wanna Know, Gold Dust Woman – Fleetwood Mac

Jefferson Starship

Jimi Hendrix

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, With a little help from my friends, getting better, when I’m sixty four, a day in the life, Across The Universe, Hey Jude, Imagine, I want to hold your hand - The Beatles

Greatest Hits - Paul McCartney

Neutral Milk Hotel – King of Carrot Flowers

Great D.J., That’s Not My Name, Shut Up and Let Me Go - The Ting Tings

 Viva La Cobra - Cobra Starship

Underdog Alma Matter - Forever the Sickest Kids

Brokencyde

3oh!3

That’s Classy - Breathe Carolina

Taste, Magnetic Baby, Genius, Time Zones - Semi Precious Weapons

The Pink Spiders

Billy Boy On Poison

Astronaut, Runs in The Family, Have to Drive - Amanda Palmer

The Academy Is – High School Album

Happy happy Joy Joy song

My Sharona – The Number Twelve Looks Like You

Hello Hooray, Sick Things - Alice Cooper

Space Oddity, Cygnet Committee, Wild Eyed Boy From Free Cloud, The Width Of A Circle, All The Madmen, She Shook Me Cold, The Man Who Sold The World, The Superman, Changes, Oh! You Pretty Things, Kooks, Quicksand, Queen Bitch, Moonage Daydream, Starman, Lady Stardust, Star, Ziggy Stardust, Rock n Roll Suicide, John I’m Only Dancing, My Death, Watch That Man, Drive In Saturday, Time, Let’s Spend The Night Together, Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise), Rebel Rebel, We Are The Dead, Station To Station, Golden Years, Word On A Wing, TVC15, Stay, Wild Is The Wind, Breaking Glass, What in The World, Sound And Vision, Always Crashing in the Same Car, A New Career In a New Town, Heroes, Blackout, V2-Schnider, Fantastic Voyage, Boys Keep Swinging, D.J., Look Back In Anger, It’s No Game Parts 1 and 2, Scary Monsters Super Freaks, Ashes to Ashes, Modern Love, China Girl, Never Let Me Down, I’m Afraid of Americans, 7 Years In Tibet, Hallo Space boy, The Hearts Filthy Lesson, Thursdays Child, Survive, Seven, What’s Really Happening, Cactus, Heathen (The Rays),Never let Me Down,  - David Bowie

Fall Out Boy – I don’t care, w.a.m.s.

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Skeletal Lamping – Of Montreal

Lotus Flower/MPLSound – Prince

Family Tradition, Ali For Cody, Chandelier – Sense Fail

Time to Pretend, Weekend Wars, Electric Feel, Kids, Of Moons Birds and Monsters – MGMT

I will possess your heart – death cab for cutie

Big Ten Inch Record, Sweet Emotion, You See Me Crying – Aerosmith

Defeater – Nameless Streets

Baker – Plans

Polar Bear Club – Living Saints

Fun – At Least I am Not as Sad

By Surprise – CB Radio

Therefore I am – I am only an island

A Loss fo words – stamp of approval

Transit- stay home

Lions lions – angles with dirty faces

These green eyes – paramedic

Death before dishonor – our glory days

Snowing – pumpfake

Drug rug – Hannah please

Mark schwaber – to be better

NOFX

A day to remember

All time low

p.o.s.

Jeffree star

hit the lights

aiden

lovehatehero

anti flag

Thursday

Paramour

Madina lake – statistic

There for tomorrow

You me at six

 Thursdays Child, Survive, Seven, What’s Really Happening – David Bowie

Propagandhi

The Unthanks – Because he was a bonny lad

The boxer rebellion – the flashing red light means go

We fell to earth – lights out

Santogold – lights out

Edward sharpe and the magnetic zeroes – 40 day dream

Lovers in captivity – ima robot

Jay reatard – wounded

Paul McCartney – tripping the live fantastic

Elton John – Captain fantastic and the brown dirt cowboy

Cute is what we aim for – doctor

The spill canvas – all over you

Every avenue – think of you later

Bayside – you’ve already been

Four year Strong – so hot and sweat it out

Rise against

Foxy shazam – dangerous man

 The Smiths – Greatest Hits

Placebo – everything

Chevelle – straight jacket fashion, sleep apnea, Mexican sun, shameful metaphors, letter from a thief, high lands apparition, Roswell’s spell, a new momentum

Jack the Ripper – AFI/Morrissey

Piccadilly Palare, The Last of the Famous International Playboys, Suedehead, Alma Matters, The Boy Racer, Irish Blood English Heart, I Have Forgiven Jesus, This World Is Full Of Crashing Bores, I’m Not Sorry, How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel, I Like You, Dear God Please Help Me, Life Is a Pigsty, On The Streets I Ran, I Just Want To See The Boy Happy, Something Is Squeezing My Skull, Black Cloud, That’s How People Grow Up, I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris, It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore, Sorry Doesn’t Help Us, I’m Ok By Myself, If You Don’t Like Me Then Don’t Look At Me, Gang lord, Dearest Love, Friday Morning, My Life Is An Endless Succession Of People Saying Goodbye – Morrissey

An unexpected rain, threesome, the universe listened, imagine that, what happens tomorrow, I need to wake up – Melissa Etheredge

Sing the changes – the firemen and Paul McCartney

Thriller (album) – Michael Jackson

No line on the horizon (album) – U2

Tonight (album) – Franz Ferdinand

London calling (album) – the clash

Live from royal albert hall – the killers

From now on we are enemies – fall out boy

The fame monster/the fame (albums) – lady gaga

Dead by sunrise- (out of ashes album)

The used – artwork (album)

The high end of low (album Marilyn Manson)

Crash love (album – afi)

Foo fighters – greatest hits

 The get up kids – something to write home about (album)

Iggy and the stooges – raw power (album)

 April 26th 2010 - 2020

A good start:

2010- Goldfrapp - Headfirst Nevershoutnever –What is love?

Lou Reed – Berlin: live at St. anns warehouse Rachel Yamagata Mika – The Boy Who Knew Too Much

A work in progress... I have 10 years to cover now.

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art/

John Waters Takes Us on a Funny, Filthy Tour of His Fine Art

Walking behind John Waters last week while he talked to a small gang of critics, reporters, and art world insiders about his pieces included in John Waters: Indecent Exposure at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I got everything I wanted: the tailored, outlandish clothes (black and gray suit printed with a geometric repeat, splashy red slip-ons), the big smile, the giant eyes, the pencil-thin mustache, the head shaped like a light bulb, and the candor and brilliance keen enough to cut glass.

The aphorisms flowed: “The only obscenity left in the art world is celebrity.” And his timing was perfect: “I hate celebrity, too.”

But this material—the photographs made to look like film stills from imaginary movies, interactive pieces, a G-rated version of Pink Flamingos acted entirely by children, some weighty installation pieces, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson puppets, sculptures, ephemera—this was all new to me.

Even with Waters as a guide, there was more to his work than I could grasp, because a lot of it references (often obscurely) the work of other artists and sensibilities I’m unfamiliar with—outsider art, if you will. And this despite the fact that I’m a longtime consumer of his films, books, and stage appearances.

Waters’ art is defined and liberated by his influences, his hometown of Baltimore, gay culture, DIY punk ethos, and a society obsessed with celebrity. Most of this work would have been lost on me were it not for his enthusiastic answers to the one question I had at every stop along his tour—Why?

The upside is, he wants to talk, to explain. He wants you to get it. But he doesn’t give everything away. Some stuff requires the viewer to put in the same years of research and thought that Waters went through to make this stuff. Who has that kind of time?

John Waters means different things to different people. Musical theater nerds might love the remake of Hairspray adapted from the Broadway musical that was adapted from a subversive film John Waters made in 1988. A film buff might consider only his early cult films that were played as midnight movies: Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), and Pink Flamingos, while clamouring for his rarely seen earlier movies, some of which are included in an installation at the BMA (the show runs through January 6, 2019).

At first glance, much of it seems pointless or contrived. Without packing the show’s catalog/coffee table book and reading along the way, even a seasoned collector of contemporary art might well stand staring for a long time in a losing struggle to comprehend. More research, thought, and archiving went into each work than I would have imagined. The more you know, the better it gets.

Waters prefaces his tour of the show by saying, “I am always trying to imagine the worst that can go wrong in the art business and the movie business. I am a fan of both. I always just make fun of things I love. That’s the point.” Every few steps, he reminded us, like a mantra, “I’m always trying to think of the worst thing that could happen in show business and celebrate it.”

“It’s about images,” he said. “I believe that people remember film stills. They don’t remember film plots. Everybody remembers From Here to Eternity and making out in the water. Who knows what the movie was about? That thing with Divine with the red dress in Pink Flamingos is more famous than anything that happened in the movie.”

There is an urgency to his photographic art—maybe to everything he does—implied in the phrase that continued to crop up: “I had to…”

His output as a fine art photographer began out of necessity. In 1992, he needed, but didn’t have a still for Multiple Maniacs. “So I just put the VHS on and took a picture in the dark on the TV screen. And that’s what started it, because it had a different quality. It doesn’t work digitally. I still have to take it with real film with a camera. This was the first one,” he said, pointing to a photograph entitled “Divine in Ecstasy.” “So I finally had a still. This is kind of how it started.”

Waters curates frames from others’ movies or photographs into assemblages all his own. “I’m going into other people’s movies, taking images, and putting them in a new narrative.” So curator as creator, he filched Ingmar Bergman’s Grim Reaper from The Seventh Seal and spun it into “this famous shot of [the Kennedys] getting off the plane. But I had Bergman’s Death following them, which was true, though.” The import of the original photograph is tragic: the president and first lady deplaning in Texas on November 22, 1963. Now add Death with the sickle shadowing them, and you have “Grim Reaper.” Why is it okay to laugh? “Camelot” and the superficiality of stylish Jackie pushes JFK’s horrific death into the background. Years of cinematic depictions dull the shock. Waters turns up the volume on the iconography and lowers it on the gruesome head wound, while commenting on his obsession with Bergman’s films of the ’50s and ’60s.

“And Ingmar Bergman, I saw his films at the same time [as the Kennedy assassination]. That was it. I loved him from then on.” Fine, but I was getting lost. Here and elsewhere in the show, Waters references movies (not to mention other cultural totems and taboos) so obscurely that only someone who has watched every film ever made will get what’s going on. Luckily that someone and I have been friends for 30 years.

So when I got home, I called my friend for help. As soon as I showed him “Grim Reaper” and mentioned another Bergman-influenced sequence, “Puking in Cinema,” the floodgates opened.

“I bet if you showed me the stills from “Puking in Cinema,” I’d know what films they were all from,” said my friend. And he did, rattling off the titles while doing push ups: “Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Persona, and The Silence all have puking. So, now there’s puking in Waters’ movies, and I guess his art, too.”

I don’t know if this is the correct interpretation or not, but aesthetics before investigation. If it’s just puking, who cares? I’d hate “Puking in Cinema” if I hadn’t had my friend. But now I don’t, because I realize it’s reverential through the cinephile lens. It certainly contextualized Waters’s quote about his love for Bergman, and maybe why he’s called the Prince and not the King of puke (that would have to be Bergman himself).

I was on my own to interpret and figure out most of Waters’ work for myself. About “Lana Backwards,” Waters said, “Lana Turner. I always noticed they kept her one beat longer when she left a room. The director never cut. I was fascinated at that. I realized women wanted to see the back of her outfits, and the men wanted to see her ass.” Eight stills of Lana’s backside prove his point. Collectively, unconsciously, moviegoers agreed implicitly that they needed a longer look at Lana’s ass in the days before pressing pause. But only John Waters noticed.

His habit of “going into things no one else notices in a movie” sharpened his democratic eye, such that, as far as he’s concerned, “there is no such thing as a bad movie. You can find one frame in there that’s great. When you don’t like the movie, stop watching it as a moviegoer. Watch it like you’re at an art show. Just concentrate on the furniture or the color blue, and then all movies are good.”

I sat starstruck during my private Q&A with Waters. I contemplated his mustache, and saw a few greys mixed in the black line. I wondered if it’s tattooed, then remembered it’s not, because he once let Justin Bieber pencil it in. I forgot every question I had. Instead of kicking me out of my chair and shouting, “Next!” he graciously moved the conversation for me. Intuitively, he understood the question at the heart of my blathering: What’s up with the marriage of true crime, celebrity, and the play on tabloid who-wore-it-best in his “Manson Copies…” photo juxtapositions? Who but John Waters noticed Charles Manson’s evolving fashion?

“Manson Copies” is a series of paired photos. Each set puts a photo of Manson beside a photo of a celebrity, and in each set, Manson and the celebrity are somehow sartorially similar. “The first one—I saw this picture of Manson I had never seen with his hair cut like Divine’s in Pink Flamingos. [“Manson Copies Divine’s Hairdo.”] So I did that. Then, I had to wait for every parole hearing that Manson had, so I could see what his new look was. I just photographed it off the TV screen like I did for everything. Then, I had to go and find news stories of celebrities that were facing the same way in the same outfit. I had to look through everything to find a picture to match Manson’s parole hearing look, so I could say [Manson] copies this one and copies this one. I’d have to look through everything. I have Richard Gere with the same sunglasses on. Brad Pitt with the beard like [Manson] had.”

Waters gets a pass for things other people would be called weird or creepy for acknowledging. Why? His wink and nod give us permission to glimpse into stuff that was pulpy—like true crime—but has becomes mainstream, because he’s been our guide into our depraved world for 50 years. He’s not condoning it. He’s pointing it out. He’s removed from it. His art doesn’t show corpses. Instead, Charles Manson is depicted as the celebrity he became—a failed musician and cult leader, safely imprisoned, which is turning up the volume on high camp. But, lower the volume and Manson is a murderer, responsible for taking lives from victims and perpetrators.

There’s a lot of Dorothy Malone in Waters’ work, not only in “Manson copies…” but again in an eight-image sequence devoted to her popped collar, “Dorothy Malone’s Collar,” and in “Divine Copies Dorothy Malone’s Collar,” and in “Peyton Place…The Movie.” I asked my friend about this. Again, he rattled off the facts.

“Probably because she won Best Supporting Actress for Written on the Wind and she slowjacked the Oscar during her acceptance speech, and played a serial killer in Basic Instinct. Then, there’s Peyton Place, which was a banned book, and bestseller, and a nighttime soap with her.” He actually said much more, but I forgot everything but the highlights—just the very worst thing to do to the statue when winning Best Supporting Actress.

Celebrity rarely, if ever, accompanies talent. With that in mind, Waters pays homage to people who are known for nothing more substantial than the most vapid kind of fame. “Melissa” is a photograph of white clouds against a blue sky with the words: Starring Melissa Rivers. That’s it. That’s the photograph, and it’s a lot of things—all of them bad, so again I stood wondering, why? Once I found out, I wanted to own it.

“I’m always trying to celebrate the things that don’t work in show business,” Waters said, by way of introducing “Melissa,” which purports to be the opening credit in a movie, but a movie that never happened and never will. It may not be the stand-out piece in the show, but it made me laugh, because it’s a fantasy piece. Joan Rivers’ daughter would be hard to place on a seating chart at a dinner party. The irony to Melissa Rivers is that there is no irony.

“There is no credit,” Waters explained. “This is a completely made up credit. That ‘Starring’ above your name means you’re first billing, and Melissa, God bless her, she never was first billing in any movie that I know of. So, in a way, it’s a sad piece. If any piece is a little mean, it might be this one. But she did star in a movie where she reenacted the death-suicide of her father. She acted finding the body. So, I feel, in bad taste, we’re sister and brother.”

For Waters, unwatchable is “the worst thing you can say about a movie. It’s the worst review you can get. It’s literally unwatchable. So, I want to think, what movie can be in that category? It’s an extreme one. I had a friend who said, ‘That’s the most irresponsible movie I ever saw.’ I said, “It’s not that good.’ That would be something that is really important.” “Melissa” might fall into this category.

The simplest pieces are the most acute. One work, baldly entitled “9/11,” pairs movie title shots from Dr. Dolittle 2 and A Knight’s Tale. “This is, I think, the scariest, saddest one in the whole thing,” Waters says. “You look at these two titles and you think, Why? They’re the most forgettable movies that no one talks about. They aren’t good or bad. Why did he put these together? Well, It took me awhile to research and find out, but these were the two movies that were playing on the 9/11 planes that day.” How did he research this? Who did he call? Weighing the banality of the in-flight entertainment against the awareness of imminent death and tragedy felt heavy and trivial at the same time. A few seconds were needed to work through that. “But, they never put them in. They never even got that far. So, if there’s any optimism—it would have been worse.”

The childhood puppeteer in Waters shines forth in a few pieces, although we’re way beyond Punch and Judy territory here. One disturbing piece in particular, “Control,” could seem, if taken at face value, to condone domestic violence, although anybody familiar with Waters knows that would never happen. Still, what in the world is a Barbie-sized Tina Turner doing strung up as a marionette manipulated by Ike Turner who looks like he just slid across the stage on his knees Chuck-Berry style? Again, why?

“I liked her best when she was with him. I saw them in Baltimore in 1964, she had a mustache and a ratty mink coat, and them in a broken down school bus. That was the best show I ever saw in my life. I agree, she left, and she should have. She’s in Switzerland, about as far away as she could ever get from Ike Turner. But still, I went to the Tina Turner museum and there is no mention of Ike in it at all, so I just want to remember how great they were no matter how horrible their personal life was. I always stick up for the bad guy. I visit friends in jail. When someone gets a bad review, I call them the next morning. I’m always the one that will call you if something goes bad, so I’m trying to remember something that did go very very very bad. Kind of put it in a way that puts a good spin on it and remember maybe the one second that was great.”

He stopped next at a long red-velvet theater curtain extending almost the length of one wall, and pulled the curtain to reveal: “Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot,” only this time “I had to search porn to find pictures of assholes that had no hands, mouths, arms, penises—anything invading its moment in the sun. You can never find them them alone. They’re really rare.” The curtain is there, he explained, “in case your parents are coming over, or the IRS is auditing you.” Somebody asked him which was his favorite. He laughed and walked over to the last photo. “Here’s the dirty foot,” he said triumphantly. Again, he “had to…” Why the dirty foot? “A dirty foot, first of all, is up when you’re having sex, right? But a dirty foot is the one thing you will never find in porn, because they always wipe it off whenever it’s shown. There is someone there whose job is to wipe off the bottom. So, it was really hard to find. It was like Rosebud!”

While poring over the exhibition catalog of the 160 pieces in the BMA show, I consulted my 21-year-old daughter, who knew that “he made movies with his freak friends.” And added, “He doesn’t seem like a Taurus.” Weird somehow that my daughter knows Waters, but my parents, who are his age, 72, do not.

Could Waters have imagined “Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot” hanging permanently at the BMA? He said, ”The Baltimore Museum, I could have, because [former BMA curator] Brenda Richardson was the first person here that gave me a full film retrospective before I made Hairspray, before I was safe. People were outraged that city money was being spent. The censor board lady went crazy and everything. So the Baltimore museum was the first artistic institution that ever embraced me. So, yes, if anywhere was going to do it, I could have imagined it here.”

“‘Gay is Not Enough.’ It isn’t. It’s a good start. It helps but I am not a separatist. I think that heterosexuals can be great artists. They can’t be good florists, but they can be great artists. It has some sensibility about being an outsider or being other, no matter what—gay or straight or minority or anything that’s not fitting in with everybody.”

When I look at “Gay is Not Enough,” all I see are the words “Gay Is Not Enough” against a blurry background sending an at best ambiguous message. Again, with my Knowledgeable Friend:

“I don’t know,” he said. “ You have to show it to me.”

As soon as I turned my phone toward the image, he came back with, “It’s the typeface for the title sequence of the film of Jacqueline Susann’s novel Once Is not Enough (terrible, out of control, still got nominated for an Oscar), The blurry background is the water on the frosted glass door where Kirk Douglas is showering.”

I told him what Waters said about gay sensibility not being enough.

“Like he said, it’s not enough. You have to be the most extreme version of whatever you want to be. If you’re fat, you have to be Divine eating a meatball sub. If you’re skinny, you have to be anorexic.”

“What’s John Waters superlative?”

“His delivery. He’s the best person to say it.”

I was very happy walking around living in John Waters’ world for awhile, and I was sad when we reached the final exhibit in John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a room lined with a row of booths, each with a courtesy box of Kleenex. “The very last room are peepshows, which I always liked, but in them are my very first movies I ever made: Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup. They shouldn’t really be in movie theaters or anything. It’s much better in a peepshow on a loop. They are really ephemera. They were movies I made when I was a kid.”

The tour ends where all of his career began, so for those without much insight into John Waters, understanding where Indecent Exposure is heading really is the beginning. This show reaches back to the filming of 1964’s Hag in a Black Leather Jacket. Intentionally, or not, showing the early films on a loop juxtaposed to explicit peepshow content is as sweetly charming as nickelodeons of the past—almost. His work in the ’60s seeded the visual art he created beginning in the early ’90s. Divine’s eternal return on the screens in the booths pays tender homage to their friendship, and continues as a thread throughout not only Waters’ films, but in his visual art, books, and live appearances.

During our one-on-one conversation, I asked Waters about his kindness and his lifelong friendships, particularly with the actors he dubbed the “Dreamlanders,” the cast of his earliest films. “I’m still friends with the ones that are alive,” he said. “I still see Mink [Stole] and Mary Vivian Pierce. We’re still friends, and to me, that’s the success of living. That you do have friends. That’s what keeps you sane. That’s the only thing that really matters, that you have friends that have lasted for awhile. I don’t trust people who have no long-time friends. I mean, ‘Why?’ That’s the only comfort that you’re going to have, because your parents are going to die, usually before. So basically, I’m saying my friends are very important to have for me, and that’s another reason I live in Baltimore. I have people here. I’m showing movies I made fifty years ago out there, and the sad part is, many of them aren’t here with me. Divine, he’d be much happier if he wasn’t dead. He’d rather be here.”

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art/

John Waters Takes Us on a Funny, Filthy Tour of His Fine Art

Walking behind John Waters last week while he talked to a small gang of critics, reporters, and art world insiders about his pieces included in John Waters: Indecent Exposure at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I got everything I wanted: the tailored, outlandish clothes (black and gray suit printed with a geometric repeat, splashy red slip-ons), the big smile, the giant eyes, the pencil-thin mustache, the head shaped like a light bulb, and the candor and brilliance keen enough to cut glass.

The aphorisms flowed: “The only obscenity left in the art world is celebrity.” And his timing was perfect: “I hate celebrity, too.”

But this material—the photographs made to look like film stills from imaginary movies, interactive pieces, a G-rated version of Pink Flamingos acted entirely by children, some weighty installation pieces, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson puppets, sculptures, ephemera—this was all new to me.

Even with Waters as a guide, there was more to his work than I could grasp, because a lot of it references (often obscurely) the work of other artists and sensibilities I’m unfamiliar with—outsider art, if you will. And this despite the fact that I’m a longtime consumer of his films, books, and stage appearances.

Waters’ art is defined and liberated by his influences, his hometown of Baltimore, gay culture, DIY punk ethos, and a society obsessed with celebrity. Most of this work would have been lost on me were it not for his enthusiastic answers to the one question I had at every stop along his tour—Why?

The upside is, he wants to talk, to explain. He wants you to get it. But he doesn’t give everything away. Some stuff requires the viewer to put in the same years of research and thought that Waters went through to make this stuff. Who has that kind of time?

John Waters means different things to different people. Musical theater nerds might love the remake of Hairspray adapted from the Broadway musical that was adapted from a subversive film John Waters made in 1988. A film buff might consider only his early cult films that were played as midnight movies: Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), and Pink Flamingos, while clamouring for his rarely seen earlier movies, some of which are included in an installation at the BMA (the show runs through January 6, 2019).

At first glance, much of it seems pointless or contrived. Without packing the show’s catalog/coffee table book and reading along the way, even a seasoned collector of contemporary art might well stand staring for a long time in a losing struggle to comprehend. More research, thought, and archiving went into each work than I would have imagined. The more you know, the better it gets.

Waters prefaces his tour of the show by saying, “I am always trying to imagine the worst that can go wrong in the art business and the movie business. I am a fan of both. I always just make fun of things I love. That’s the point.” Every few steps, he reminded us, like a mantra, “I’m always trying to think of the worst thing that could happen in show business and celebrate it.”

“It’s about images,” he said. “I believe that people remember film stills. They don’t remember film plots. Everybody remembers From Here to Eternity and making out in the water. Who knows what the movie was about? That thing with Divine with the red dress in Pink Flamingos is more famous than anything that happened in the movie.”

There is an urgency to his photographic art—maybe to everything he does—implied in the phrase that continued to crop up: “I had to…”

His output as a fine art photographer began out of necessity. In 1992, he needed, but didn’t have a still for Multiple Maniacs. “So I just put the VHS on and took a picture in the dark on the TV screen. And that’s what started it, because it had a different quality. It doesn’t work digitally. I still have to take it with real film with a camera. This was the first one,” he said, pointing to a photograph entitled “Divine in Ecstasy.” “So I finally had a still. This is kind of how it started.”

Waters curates frames from others’ movies or photographs into assemblages all his own. “I’m going into other people’s movies, taking images, and putting them in a new narrative.” So curator as creator, he filched Ingmar Bergman’s Grim Reaper from The Seventh Seal and spun it into “this famous shot of [the Kennedys] getting off the plane. But I had Bergman’s Death following them, which was true, though.” The import of the original photograph is tragic: the president and first lady deplaning in Texas on November 22, 1963. Now add Death with the sickle shadowing them, and you have “Grim Reaper.” Why is it okay to laugh? “Camelot” and the superficiality of stylish Jackie pushes JFK’s horrific death into the background. Years of cinematic depictions dull the shock. Waters turns up the volume on the iconography and lowers it on the gruesome head wound, while commenting on his obsession with Bergman’s films of the ’50s and ’60s.

“And Ingmar Bergman, I saw his films at the same time [as the Kennedy assassination]. That was it. I loved him from then on.” Fine, but I was getting lost. Here and elsewhere in the show, Waters references movies (not to mention other cultural totems and taboos) so obscurely that only someone who has watched every film ever made will get what’s going on. Luckily that someone and I have been friends for 30 years.

So when I got home, I called my friend for help. As soon as I showed him “Grim Reaper” and mentioned another Bergman-influenced sequence, “Puking in Cinema,” the floodgates opened.

“I bet if you showed me the stills from “Puking in Cinema,” I’d know what films they were all from,” said my friend. And he did, rattling off the titles while doing push ups: “Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Persona, and The Silence all have puking. So, now there’s puking in Waters’ movies, and I guess his art, too.”

I don’t know if this is the correct interpretation or not, but aesthetics before investigation. If it’s just puking, who cares? I’d hate “Puking in Cinema” if I hadn’t had my friend. But now I don’t, because I realize it’s reverential through the cinephile lens. It certainly contextualized Waters’s quote about his love for Bergman, and maybe why he’s called the Prince and not the King of puke (that would have to be Bergman himself).

I was on my own to interpret and figure out most of Waters’ work for myself. About “Lana Backwards,” Waters said, “Lana Turner. I always noticed they kept her one beat longer when she left a room. The director never cut. I was fascinated at that. I realized women wanted to see the back of her outfits, and the men wanted to see her ass.” Eight stills of Lana’s backside prove his point. Collectively, unconsciously, moviegoers agreed implicitly that they needed a longer look at Lana’s ass in the days before pressing pause. But only John Waters noticed.

His habit of “going into things no one else notices in a movie” sharpened his democratic eye, such that, as far as he’s concerned, “there is no such thing as a bad movie. You can find one frame in there that’s great. When you don’t like the movie, stop watching it as a moviegoer. Watch it like you’re at an art show. Just concentrate on the furniture or the color blue, and then all movies are good.”

I sat starstruck during my private Q&A with Waters. I contemplated his mustache, and saw a few greys mixed in the black line. I wondered if it’s tattooed, then remembered it’s not, because he once let Justin Bieber pencil it in. I forgot every question I had. Instead of kicking me out of my chair and shouting, “Next!” he graciously moved the conversation for me. Intuitively, he understood the question at the heart of my blathering: What’s up with the marriage of true crime, celebrity, and the play on tabloid who-wore-it-best in his “Manson Copies…” photo juxtapositions? Who but John Waters noticed Charles Manson’s evolving fashion?

“Manson Copies” is a series of paired photos. Each set puts a photo of Manson beside a photo of a celebrity, and in each set, Manson and the celebrity are somehow sartorially similar. “The first one—I saw this picture of Manson I had never seen with his hair cut like Divine’s in Pink Flamingos. [“Manson Copies Divine’s Hairdo.”] So I did that. Then, I had to wait for every parole hearing that Manson had, so I could see what his new look was. I just photographed it off the TV screen like I did for everything. Then, I had to go and find news stories of celebrities that were facing the same way in the same outfit. I had to look through everything to find a picture to match Manson’s parole hearing look, so I could say [Manson] copies this one and copies this one. I’d have to look through everything. I have Richard Gere with the same sunglasses on. Brad Pitt with the beard like [Manson] had.”

Waters gets a pass for things other people would be called weird or creepy for acknowledging. Why? His wink and nod give us permission to glimpse into stuff that was pulpy—like true crime—but has becomes mainstream, because he’s been our guide into our depraved world for 50 years. He’s not condoning it. He’s pointing it out. He’s removed from it. His art doesn’t show corpses. Instead, Charles Manson is depicted as the celebrity he became—a failed musician and cult leader, safely imprisoned, which is turning up the volume on high camp. But, lower the volume and Manson is a murderer, responsible for taking lives from victims and perpetrators.

There’s a lot of Dorothy Malone in Waters’ work, not only in “Manson copies…” but again in an eight-image sequence devoted to her popped collar, “Dorothy Malone’s Collar,” and in “Divine Copies Dorothy Malone’s Collar,” and in “Peyton Place…The Movie.” I asked my friend about this. Again, he rattled off the facts.

“Probably because she won Best Supporting Actress for Written on the Wind and she slowjacked the Oscar during her acceptance speech, and played a serial killer in Basic Instinct. Then, there’s Peyton Place, which was a banned book, and bestseller, and a nighttime soap with her.” He actually said much more, but I forgot everything but the highlights—just the very worst thing to do to the statue when winning Best Supporting Actress.

Celebrity rarely, if ever, accompanies talent. With that in mind, Waters pays homage to people who are known for nothing more substantial than the most vapid kind of fame. “Melissa” is a photograph of white clouds against a blue sky with the words: Starring Melissa Rivers. That’s it. That’s the photograph, and it’s a lot of things—all of them bad, so again I stood wondering, why? Once I found out, I wanted to own it.

“I’m always trying to celebrate the things that don’t work in show business,” Waters said, by way of introducing “Melissa,” which purports to be the opening credit in a movie, but a movie that never happened and never will. It may not be the stand-out piece in the show, but it made me laugh, because it’s a fantasy piece. Joan Rivers’ daughter would be hard to place on a seating chart at a dinner party. The irony to Melissa Rivers is that there is no irony.

“There is no credit,” Waters explained. “This is a completely made up credit. That ‘Starring’ above your name means you’re first billing, and Melissa, God bless her, she never was first billing in any movie that I know of. So, in a way, it’s a sad piece. If any piece is a little mean, it might be this one. But she did star in a movie where she reenacted the death-suicide of her father. She acted finding the body. So, I feel, in bad taste, we’re sister and brother.”

For Waters, unwatchable is “the worst thing you can say about a movie. It’s the worst review you can get. It’s literally unwatchable. So, I want to think, what movie can be in that category? It’s an extreme one. I had a friend who said, ‘That’s the most irresponsible movie I ever saw.’ I said, “It’s not that good.’ That would be something that is really important.” “Melissa” might fall into this category.

The simplest pieces are the most acute. One work, baldly entitled “9/11,” pairs movie title shots from Dr. Dolittle 2 and A Knight’s Tale. “This is, I think, the scariest, saddest one in the whole thing,” Waters says. “You look at these two titles and you think, Why? They’re the most forgettable movies that no one talks about. They aren’t good or bad. Why did he put these together? Well, It took me awhile to research and find out, but these were the two movies that were playing on the 9/11 planes that day.” How did he research this? Who did he call? Weighing the banality of the in-flight entertainment against the awareness of imminent death and tragedy felt heavy and trivial at the same time. A few seconds were needed to work through that. “But, they never put them in. They never even got that far. So, if there’s any optimism—it would have been worse.”

The childhood puppeteer in Waters shines forth in a few pieces, although we’re way beyond Punch and Judy territory here. One disturbing piece in particular, “Control,” could seem, if taken at face value, to condone domestic violence, although anybody familiar with Waters knows that would never happen. Still, what in the world is a Barbie-sized Tina Turner doing strung up as a marionette manipulated by Ike Turner who looks like he just slid across the stage on his knees Chuck-Berry style? Again, why?

“I liked her best when she was with him. I saw them in Baltimore in 1964, she had a mustache and a ratty mink coat, and them in a broken down school bus. That was the best show I ever saw in my life. I agree, she left, and she should have. She’s in Switzerland, about as far away as she could ever get from Ike Turner. But still, I went to the Tina Turner museum and there is no mention of Ike in it at all, so I just want to remember how great they were no matter how horrible their personal life was. I always stick up for the bad guy. I visit friends in jail. When someone gets a bad review, I call them the next morning. I’m always the one that will call you if something goes bad, so I’m trying to remember something that did go very very very bad. Kind of put it in a way that puts a good spin on it and remember maybe the one second that was great.”

He stopped next at a long red-velvet theater curtain extending almost the length of one wall, and pulled the curtain to reveal: “Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot,” only this time “I had to search porn to find pictures of assholes that had no hands, mouths, arms, penises—anything invading its moment in the sun. You can never find them them alone. They’re really rare.” The curtain is there, he explained, “in case your parents are coming over, or the IRS is auditing you.” Somebody asked him which was his favorite. He laughed and walked over to the last photo. “Here’s the dirty foot,” he said triumphantly. Again, he “had to…” Why the dirty foot? “A dirty foot, first of all, is up when you’re having sex, right? But a dirty foot is the one thing you will never find in porn, because they always wipe it off whenever it’s shown. There is someone there whose job is to wipe off the bottom. So, it was really hard to find. It was like Rosebud!”

While poring over the exhibition catalog of the 160 pieces in the BMA show, I consulted my 21-year-old daughter, who knew that “he made movies with his freak friends.” And added, “He doesn’t seem like a Taurus.” Weird somehow that my daughter knows Waters, but my parents, who are his age, 72, do not.

Could Waters have imagined “Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot” hanging permanently at the BMA? He said, ”The Baltimore Museum, I could have, because [former BMA curator] Brenda Richardson was the first person here that gave me a full film retrospective before I made Hairspray, before I was safe. People were outraged that city money was being spent. The censor board lady went crazy and everything. So the Baltimore museum was the first artistic institution that ever embraced me. So, yes, if anywhere was going to do it, I could have imagined it here.”

“‘Gay is Not Enough.’ It isn’t. It’s a good start. It helps but I am not a separatist. I think that heterosexuals can be great artists. They can’t be good florists, but they can be great artists. It has some sensibility about being an outsider or being other, no matter what—gay or straight or minority or anything that’s not fitting in with everybody.”

When I look at “Gay is Not Enough,” all I see are the words “Gay Is Not Enough” against a blurry background sending an at best ambiguous message. Again, with my Knowledgeable Friend:

“I don’t know,” he said. “ You have to show it to me.”

As soon as I turned my phone toward the image, he came back with, “It’s the typeface for the title sequence of the film of Jacqueline Susann’s novel Once Is not Enough (terrible, out of control, still got nominated for an Oscar), The blurry background is the water on the frosted glass door where Kirk Douglas is showering.”

I told him what Waters said about gay sensibility not being enough.

“Like he said, it’s not enough. You have to be the most extreme version of whatever you want to be. If you’re fat, you have to be Divine eating a meatball sub. If you’re skinny, you have to be anorexic.”

“What’s John Waters superlative?”

“His delivery. He’s the best person to say it.”

I was very happy walking around living in John Waters’ world for awhile, and I was sad when we reached the final exhibit in John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a room lined with a row of booths, each with a courtesy box of Kleenex. “The very last room are peepshows, which I always liked, but in them are my very first movies I ever made: Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup. They shouldn’t really be in movie theaters or anything. It’s much better in a peepshow on a loop. They are really ephemera. They were movies I made when I was a kid.”

The tour ends where all of his career began, so for those without much insight into John Waters, understanding where Indecent Exposure is heading really is the beginning. This show reaches back to the filming of 1964’s Hag in a Black Leather Jacket. Intentionally, or not, showing the early films on a loop juxtaposed to explicit peepshow content is as sweetly charming as nickelodeons of the past—almost. His work in the ’60s seeded the visual art he created beginning in the early ’90s. Divine’s eternal return on the screens in the booths pays tender homage to their friendship, and continues as a thread throughout not only Waters’ films, but in his visual art, books, and live appearances.

During our one-on-one conversation, I asked Waters about his kindness and his lifelong friendships, particularly with the actors he dubbed the “Dreamlanders,” the cast of his earliest films. “I’m still friends with the ones that are alive,” he said. “I still see Mink [Stole] and Mary Vivian Pierce. We’re still friends, and to me, that’s the success of living. That you do have friends. That’s what keeps you sane. That’s the only thing that really matters, that you have friends that have lasted for awhile. I don’t trust people who have no long-time friends. I mean, ‘Why?’ That’s the only comfort that you’re going to have, because your parents are going to die, usually before. So basically, I’m saying my friends are very important to have for me, and that’s another reason I live in Baltimore. I have people here. I’m showing movies I made fifty years ago out there, and the sad part is, many of them aren’t here with me. Divine, he’d be much happier if he wasn’t dead. He’d rather be here.”

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art