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#is 1984 a classic or is it too new? it feels like a classic
desert-dyke · 5 months
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I told my booktube friend I'm reading 1984 and she asked me what I thought of it so far and I was like "it's got good ideas but the writing can be a bit annoying. It's pretty infodumpy" and she was like "Yeah I can see that" and then later in the conversation she mentioned a part that made her so mad and she was curious what I thought. And so I thought oh maybe it's a wild twist? No. I'm pretty sure I got to the part and it's the main character reading a book to another character which he reads verbatim for like a good chunk of the chapter. I was like absolutely fuck off
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teddypickerry · 9 months
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A teen!dad jess. He has a best friend from New York (she can have a name or it can be Y/N, you can choose) (they are endgame, jess never had feelings for Rory but she has feelings for Jess, it won't go anywhere) Jess and his best friend have a kid, they co-parent (whether they are dating already or in the future is up to you) Jess gets sent to Stars Hallow, she ends up moving to stars Hallow to, to be close to Jess and so their kid can be with him too (she is emancipated, plus Jess knows she's coming because they keep in contact) if anyone reading this would like to turn this into an actual story, I'm totally down for reading it :) if you choose this request, I look forward to reading it. Thank you!!
↯ 𝐂𝐀𝐍 𝐈 𝐆𝐎 𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐆𝐎?
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pairings — teen dad! jess mariano x y/n
warnings — none!! (unedited tho so…)
word count — 2.9k
a/n — i’m not the biggest fan of how this turned out (feels lowk out of character even tho i typically write jess best bc i am him), but i LOVEDDDD this plot. i plan on making a part two if that’s something you guys would want!! also dad! jess is my fav (as you guys know) so to have him be bowie’s dad??? FUCKING LOVEEE.
BEING SENT TO STARS HOLLOW was worse than one would imagine. especially for jess mariano, a kid who'd been taken from his hometown and placed in a small apartment above a diner with an uncle he hardly knows. this would be enough to drive one mad, one could presume. but to make matters worse, he was leaving behind his son.
the moment liz danes found out her sixteen year old son had gotten a girl pregnant, she freaked out. as any mother would do. but liz wasn't just any mother, she was (to put it lightly) a whack-job. so she spiraled when she figured this one out. what happened when liz danes spiraled you may ask? who was there for her? her sane big brother, luke.
the practical idea seemed to be sending jess to the quaint down of stars hollow. a place where liz grew up, where she knew luke would keep an eye on him. where she also knew he couldn't cause any havoc. and his world wouldn't become corrupt like hers, being a teen parent.
the months of the pregnancy was difficult to be away. y/n was just a girl he'd met at a party, he was sick and tired of his mother's new boyfriend's hurtful words. y/n was going through something similar and they decided they'd lean on one another one night. until three weeks later when she called jess asking him to coffee, and surprising him with something much more. y/n was scared, as any pregnant sixteen year old would be. being without jess didn't help her case.
the teenage boy didn't let the separation get to them however. his nights sneaking out were spent at a phone booth in the middle of town, talking to y/n about everything and anything. his breaks at the diner were calling to ask about doctors appointments. sure, she had just been a girl he'd met at a party. but the emotional bond of a baby knitted the two together. they were scared kids, they had no one but one another. so they became much more than kids who once went to a party. they were friends.
when y/n went into labor, jess ran out of school like his life depended on it. hoping into his car and speeding back to new york. luckily making it so he could see his son born just in time. his first time meeting his son was only his fourth time seeing y/n. the fourth of many, many visits. stars hollow became less and less entertaining to him as time went on. especially after coming back almost two weeks after his son was born. the pranks, the stealing, the teasing around with this girl rory... it wasn't anything to him. he missed his son, he missed the woman who had his son. jess mariano wanted to be with his family. because for the first time in his life, he had a family. someone loved him, and he loved someone.
"1984 is the most overrated 'classic' book i've ever read," rory gilmore smiled at jess with a teasing look. now, almost a year after his son's birth, jess mariano was nearing eighteen. his adolescence was coming to an end (although it did when the stick turned pink). the toying around was still very much in his nature. hence the conversation with the good girl in a pink sweater.
"nu uh, it's a classic. you can't just hate on 1984," jess counters while standing behind the diner's countertop. the diner was slow, despite it being around the early afternoon and a sunday. which is why two teenagers were sharing false opinions like it was bible. he didn't like her — he was sure of that. ever since bowie mariano was born (guess who named him), jess's feelings had become aware. the love he felt for his son was prominent in his everyday life. unlike anything he'd ever felt before. it was hard for him to even imagine ever having feelings for someone. not when being a dad was his number one priority.
"you're just saying that," rory laughed at his words once more. her late night talks with her mother about jess seeming to not be recalled. the ones where lorelai stressed to rory what jess was going through as a teen parent, something she knew all too well. especially being away from his kid. in her eyes, he was a christopher who'd left his rory. lorelai didn't exactly want her daughter involved with that. but it was hard to resist when he kept giving rory that james dean look. matched with the leather jacket and the book references.
"when are you going to see bowie?" lorelai asked the teenage boy, attempting to remind her daughter of his priorities. jess didn't see this as a question with ulterior motives. he knew lorelai had a deep understanding of him, whether she'd like to admit it or not. "soon, hopefully."
"is y/n liking her new place?" luke questions genuinely from lorelai's side, being reminded of jess's child's mother who he'd grown fond of. "it's kinda hard to like a place where you're crashing on your friend's sofa bed." jess scoffs, being reminded of his friend's condition. when y/n had first gotten pregnant, jess was aware of the darkness in her home. especially when she freaked out to him one night. the first time they opened up to one another. she was too scared to tell her dad about the baby, knowing he'd hurt her.
less than two years later, y/n was emancipated. working a part-time job in the city. where her friends helped watch bowie when necessary. along with (hesitantly) liz, whenever jess made sure she was sober and had an okay boyfriend. it was a lonely life: just like jess's.
"that poor girl," lorelai commented with a sympathetic look making jess's stomach twist. he hated thinking about the living conditions of his family, he hated thinking of being apart from them. but when he did, he couldn't stop. which is why that night, when luke came upstairs to the apartment after closing, jess stopped him to have a serious conversation. "can i talk to you?"
luke searched his nephew's face for sincerity once he heard those words. curious if this was gonna be a 'steely dan sucks' conversation or an actual serious one. a rare option for the teenage boy. "yeah, what's up?"
there was a deep expression anguished on jess's face as he sat at the table. he was clearly unsure how to put his words, which was prominent in his eyes. "i... i can't be away from bowie anymore. i can't let y/n live in that shithole. they're my responsibility."
luke heard his nephew's words clearly. he agreed with every word, a sigh erupting when he processed the stress his teenage nephew was experiencing over this. "where are you going with this, jess?" the diner owner questioned with a calm tone. he still wanted the best for his nephew. he still wanted him to finish high school and start a worthy life. one he didn't want to be started by running off to new york and working to provide for his family. "i need to be with them one way or another. i can't be away from bowie, i can't do that to my kid. i can't be my dad."
"you're not, kid. you're nothing like jimmy, i'm telling you that right now. you would do anything to be with bowie and that proves you're better than him," luke explained before letting out a sigh and nodding his head. "you're a good guy, jess."
a conversation continued throughout the night until the two finally came to a conclusion. or at least luke did. taking matters into his own hands, he picked up the phone once his nephew hit the pillow. a hushed tone rushing into verses of explanations until it all made sense.
the next morning, jess mariano woke up like any other day. not too long after he woke up he went down to the diner to get started on work. his thanksgiving break had begun, so his monday would be spent annotating a new book for his son in between rush hours. it was when two familiar faces entered the diner that he hardly glanced up, noticing the gilmores immediately. "hey jess, how's it going?"
"well, i'm not bleeding or anything so..." jess shrugged towards the woman while he scribbled in a final note for an older bowie. rory kept her eyes on him while luke handed the two mugs of coffee. he had something in his head, especially when he kept glancing out the window every few seconds. "that's good," lorelai nodded before turning to luke.
"what are you reading now? more jane austen?" rory teased while eyeing the boy and taking a sip of her warm coffee. his eyes didn't dare look up from her while he shut the book, "uh huh." he nodded with a thin lipped smile. rory noticed the children's book in his hands and grinned, "didn't know you were that behind. that makes sense with your book taste though."
"this is bowie's, i'm just writing some stuff in the margins for him for when he learns to read," jess shrugged without noticing the sudden change in demeanor when he mentioned his son. the baby had never been to stars hollow. jess also rarely brought up his son to anyone, especially stars hollow-ers. miss patty and babette already whispered about the rebellion enough as it was. he didn't need to add to it by opening up to people who didn't care about him. "oh... that's sweet," rory forced a smile before sinking down into her seat. she felt shorter.
jess picked up the coffee to begin to refill a few cups throughout the diner. his stance was interrupted once the diner phone began to ring, luke noticed this quickly. it wasn't long before he grabbed the coffee from jess's hand and hardly offered to do refills for him instead. jess knew luke was up to something but hesitantly took the phone call, "luke's."
"nice greeting," a voice echoed on the other side making jess's infamous smirk spread across his face. y/n. "well, i thought i'd ask you to marry me. but i was worried our meat supplier was on the other line," jess teased into the phone while his hand went in his pocket. he subconsciously turned around so his back was to the rest of the diner. wanting to be alone with y/n, as if that was possible through this.
"thought so," y/n hummed with an obvious smile. "hey, bowie's missing his dad."
"is bowie's mom also missing bowie's dad?" jess asked with his typical teasing tone towards his friend. "bowie's mom may be. but she doesn't exactly want to give him the satisfaction of that. bowie's dad is very cocky," y/n says through the phone while luke spots something through the window and smiles.
the sound of the bell was a familiar one. reminding the people in the diner that someone had arrived. jess was so used to it now that he didn't bat an eye typically, but this time he glanced around his shoulder for a moment. his eyes glancing back at the figure stood infront of the door. jess's brown eyes locked on them for a second as he dropped the wired phone and bolted past the counter to them.
stood before his eyes was y/n and bowie. the eleven month old was in her arms with a pacifier between his lips. y/n wore a smile while she placed her phone in her pocket with a free hand. she was engulfed in jess's scent immediately as he threw the two into his arms. cigarettes, cheap cologne, and coffee erupting comfortably into her. "hey, watch out i have a baby."
jess ignored her words, but lightened his grip on her while taking bowie out of her arms to hold him. "bowie, hey..." his voice trailed off as he held onto his son. he was interrupted with emotion by being with his son once again. because as much as fatherhood was something he never wished upon himself, ever desired whatsoever, it had turned into the best thing that ever happened to him.
"hi kid," luke greeted the teenage girl while walking over to give her a side hug. he turned his attention towards jess who was hugging his baby with a grin he hadn't seen in awhile. "i thought about our talk last night, jess. you were right."
jess glanced over at his uncle before looking back at y/n with a smile. which shocked even him, because a smile was not something he'd done while being in stars hollow. "so..." luke's voice trailed off while he gave the floor to y/n. who took it and looked at jess, "i think bowie needs to be with his dad... and his mom."
the group shared a few looks, mixed with confusion and happiness. "i asked lorelai for a favor, y/n and bowie are gonna stay at the inn for a few weeks. until you guys can figure out a place." luke started with a nod. "you're gonna be eighteen in a few months, you're gonna graduate in a few months. i want you to do that, jess. so, i brought you some courage... as cheesy as that sounds."
jess looked between the two for a moment before sharing a nod with his uncle, as if a thank you in their own language.
"hey, i'm lorelai. it's nice to meet you i've heard so much about you. we seem to have a lot in common," lorelai interjected as she walked over and introduced herself to y/n. y/n knew her fair share of scoop of the town. her daily phone calls to jess were hardly just baby talk. she'd spent a lot of them telling him to go out with lorelai's daughter, who seemed good for him. but every-time... something was holding him back. "yeah you too, i'm y/n. thank you for everything, by the way. you really didn't have to let me."
"c'mon we're moms, we help eachother out. we can be like desperate housewives. but with no men," lorelai smiled while giving y/n's hand a squeeze. "oh! this is my bowie, rory."
"hey," y/n greeted with an awkward wave towards the other teenage girl who still seemed in shock by the situation. she forced a smile and waved, "hey."
the dispute was a lot more awkward than y/n could have hoped. but a sense of envy had taken over the both of them as they reflected on past or current relations with jess. an awkwardness that washed away quickly when y/n’s eyes locked back on jess and her son. a favorite sight of hers.
“c’mon,” jess nodded towards y/n while she took the baby out of his arms. he grabbed her bag and placed a free hand on her back, mumbling goodbyes before exiting the diner with his two. the three took the scenic tour towards the inn. bowie cracking a million smiles at the tons of birds in sight. the two teenagers reciprocating the action with shared giggles at the baby’s happiness.
the moment they entered the room, jess sat down with bowie to let y/n unpack a little bit. while the two caught up on unspoken things. “so… that was rory,” y/n says suggestively while unpacking her toiletries in the bathroom. jess was sprawled out on the bed with bowie in his arms, playing superman. he turned to her once she erupted from the bathroom and took a seat beside him. “that was rory.”
“she’s pretty,” y/n nodded with a small smile. in an attempt to be polite about jess’s possible love interest, yet he seemed hardly interested when bowie was around. “i guess,” jess shrugged before holding bowie back up in his arms. “have you asked her out yet?”
“i’m not too focused on that,” jess answered while clearly wanting the conversation to be done. y/n only smiled at the sight of the baby, gently rubbing his back. jess’s eyes locked onto her once more. watching her look at bowie with all the love made his eyes gleam. the way her smile spread with love, only made his heart beat faster happily. “thanks.”
y/n glanced over to him at his word, furrowing her eyebrows gently while she looked into his eyes. “for what?”
“for being here, i guess.” he mumbles while turning back to face bowie and bring him closer to him, the baby resting his head on jess’s chest. y/n smiled at the sight while leaning into the pillow, happily watching the two. “of course.”
so, the two laid back into the bed. smiling at the sight of their baby falling into a comforting sleep. followed by y/n minutes later, at a moment of peace. finally having someone she trusted with her baby so she could peacefully have a break. jess shut his eyes to the sound of the light breaths of both his favorite people. never having felt something so perfect once again in his life.
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dearlyjoonie · 10 months
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New Books | KNJ
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Pairing: booklover!namjoon x bookshop worker!reader
Genre: college au / non-idol au / romance / strangers to lovers / fluff
Warnings: fluff, meet-cute, first date, they're both book nerds, both are obsessed with each other actually (!!!), possible book spoilers kinda??
Word count: 2k
Synopsis: you catch feelings for a customer at the bookstore <3
author's note!: my first one-shot! i have been so unsure about writing one-shots, but i thought i'd give it my best shot. this was more or less just writing practice for me, but i honestly got this idea because it's something that i have always wanted to happen to me LOL (meeting a cute boy at a bookstore?!? c'mon!! a girl can dream...). i included some of joonie's favorite books in this... iykyk. i was also inspired by this specific prompt i saw. i honestly love these characters so much, im already attached to them lol cause wtf!! they are so adorable. i aplologize if the ending seems a bit rushed, i was trying to avoid a high word count and just cut to the chase. also, what is my thing with writing bookish characters? anyway, i hope you enjoy & as always feedback is appreciated! 💗
The time is nearing 8pm, and you’re anxiously awaiting for your shift at the bookstore to be over so you can get back to your dorm and work on some homework. You picked up a part-time job at the bookstore at your university for the chance to make some extra money while still attending school.
“You doing anything tonight?” Your coworker asks you, while the two of you clean up and get ready to close the registers.
You nod, then reply with a chuckle. “Yeah, studying.”
It was pretty much all you did most of the time. Afterall, being a law-student wasn’t exactly easy.
“Again?” She sighs, as she straightens up a display in front of the register. “You did that last night too.”
“Sorry,” You laugh. “I can’t help it that I always have homework. It’s kinda part of you know… school. You’d know that if you didn’t skip multiple times a week.” You retort.
She rolls her eyes and laughs, then goes to say something back but is cut off when the door opens and a customer enters. You both turn to watch as the boy enters and starts to browse the shelves, seemingly unaware that the store is closing soon.
“Ugh seriously…” She sighs, irritated. “Who comes in a half-hour before closing to shop around?”
“Maybe he doesn’t know.” You shrug.
“It’s posted right on the door,” She replies. “He obviously just refused to read it.”
“Relax,” You chuckle, as you make to leave from behind the register. “I’ll see if I can get him to leave.”
You walk the aisles, trying to find him, before you spot him in the classics section.
“Just so you know,” You announce as you approach him. “We close in 30 minutes.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” He apologizes, even though he doesn’t have to. “I’ll be quick, I promise.”
He turns to face you, which allows you to get a better look at him. 
Shit. He’s cute.
He’s dressed casually — jeans and a sweatshirt, which is similar to probably what you’d be wearing if you weren’t working, but he just looks effortlessly attractive, along with his glasses resting on the bridge of his nose and book bag slung over his shoulder. 
Your eyes drop to the books he has in his hand, and you recognize some familiar books you’ve read before as well.
“You have good taste.” You smirk as you nod towards the stack of books in his hand.
His gaze follows, and he suddenly appears shy that you noticed his book choices.
“I’ve read this one before,” He states as he lifts up the copy of 1984 that he had in his hand. “I liked it a lot but I never actually owned a copy of it. Funny isn’t it?” He smiles.
He has dimples.
“I never liked that one that much, if I’m being honest. I can’t say I’m that much of a fan of Orwell’s work.” You smile. “I always preferred Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott. But either way, if I liked the book or not, I always thought that the classics deserved to be read.”
You pause with a laugh.
“That is, of course if I don’t get bored one chapter in.”
He smiles at your humor.
“What else have you read?” He asks, as he seems interested now in your taste in books.
“Well, lately all I have been reading is romance, so I doubt you’d be interested in that.” You laugh. “But, recently I read The Alchemist, I thought that one was pretty good.”
“Oh really?” His expression lights up. “My roommate loves that book, it’s his favorite.”
You smile back at him.
“I’ve been in here quite a few times, I’ve never seen you before.” He adds.
“I just started working here a few months ago,” You say. “I just work here a couple days for some extra money while I go to school, and I read a lot of books; so it’s fun for me.” He nods.
“Probably not good though, considering I just spend more and more money on books.” You both laugh.
“I better get going,” He checks his watch, realizing the time. “…Before you kick me out. I swear, I would’ve been here earlier, but my class ran late so I didn’t get a chance to.”
“Don’t worry about it, you’re just cutting into my big night of studying, that’s all.” You sarcastically remark.
You watch him as he suddenly sets the books he once had in his hands, back down on the shelf.
“I thought you wanted to buy those?” You eye him, confused.
“No, I’ll come back,” He smirks as he adjusts his book bag over his shoulder. “Gives me another excuse to, anyway.”
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。
“Hey,” You greet your coworker with a smile as you come in for your shift. You shove your bag and iced coffee behind the counter, having just come from class. “How’s it been today?”
“Not too busy, I’ve just spent most of the time stocking,” She says as she straightens up, trying to look busy, making you chuckle at her.
“He’s here again, by the way.”
“Who?” You’re confused, at first you don’t know who she’s talking about.
“The guy from last night. He came in again.” She continues, as you suddenly feel excitement wash over you. She smirks at you as she realizes.
“Y/n, what happened with the two of you last night?”
You shake your head, even though there’s no denying the blush that forms on your cheeks.
“Nothing, we just talked. But he was cute. and we have similar taste in books.”
“I think he’s still here, he came in not long before you.” She says. “Go find him and talk to him.” She urges you on.
“I don’t even know his name!” You say, then laugh. “What am I going to even say?”
“Don’t think about it so hard, just go!” She smiles, then jokingly shoves you away.
You start making your way down one of the aisles, the you turn the corner to enter the next one over when you’re stopped short & bump into somebody.
A small pile of books fall to the floor, and you immediately bend down to pick them up for the poor person you just collided with.
“I’m so sorry!” You apologize, then nervously laugh. “That’s my own fault for walking too fast. I wasn’t looking.” 
“That’s okay,” The person chuckles, now bending down across from you to help you. “It’s not too often that I’m not the clumsy one.”
That voice.
You look up at the person in front of you and realize you do recognize that voice, it’s the boy from last night. 
He looks just as good as he did last night, only this time he’s not wearing his glasses.
“I was hoping you’d be here, I didn’t see you when I came in.”
“Yeah, I can make quite the appearance can’t I,” You laugh, handing him the books you gathered off the floor. “I was hoping to properly introduce myself but it looks like that isn’t happening. I’m y/n." You introduce yourself.
“Namjoon,” He smiles, then he appears shy as he hesitates to ask you the next question. “Listen…I was wondering maybe if you wanted to do something later? I’d like to talk to you more, hopefully when you’re not working.” He laughs slightly.
You nod and keep your composure even though you literally feel like your heart is going to pound out of your chest any second.
Oh my god. Oh my god. 
“Yeah, I would like that. I get off at 7.” You reply. “I’ll see if my friend can close up for me.” 
Namjoon nods, “I’ll come back here around 7 to pick you up. You like coffee?”
“Love it.”
“Perfect,” Namjoon smiles at you. “I’ll see you later.” 
You wave goodbye to him and immediately leave to find your coworker and tell her you had to leave a little early, and you find her stocking a shelf.
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…” You say aloud as you make your way over to her.
“What happened?” She asks, shoving a small stack of books on a shelf.
“He just asked me out tonight,” You’re beaming, “I can’t believe it.”
“Y/n!” She turns to face you. “You’re supposed to close with me, did you forget?”
“Yeah… about that… would you be able to do it alone tonight? It’s only 1 hour.” 
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” She shrugs you off. “You know me, I can handle it.” 
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。
It’s exactly 7 o’clock when Namjoon comes back to the bookstore, and you’re practically at the door waiting for him when he arrives.
“You ready to go?” Namjoon asks when he enters, and he laughs when he notices that you were pacing by the door.
“Yeah, let me grab my things.” You reply, then briefly walk away to grab your purse.
“Have fun,” Your coworker says to you as you go behind the counter to grab your bag. “I want all the details when you get back.” She smirks.
You roll your eyes and laugh.
“Of course.” You sarcastically reply. “If you need help with anything tonight just text me, I’ll try to be of help as best as I can.” 
“I’ll be fine!” She insists. “Just don’t bore him to death and talk about just books, okay?” 
“Shut up!” You smile. “Bye.” 
You leave her and go back over to Namjoon, who is patiently waiting for you.
“Where are we going?” You ask him as he opens the door for you to exit first, and he follows behind you.
“There’s a coffee shop not far down the street,” He replies. “We can just walk there, it’s just a few minutes.”
You arrive at the coffee shop, taking your seats at a table seated by the window, a spot Namjoon claimed to be his favorite.
“I’ll order our drinks,” Namjoon says, as he pulls out your chair for you to allow you to sit down. 
What a gentleman.
“What do you like to drink?”
“Iced americano is my favorite.” You reply.
He smiles. “I’ll be right back.”
Namjoon comes back minutes later, both drinks in his hands and sets them down on the table, taking a seat across from you at your table.
You don’t see him watching you at first because you're momentarily rummaging through your bag to find your chapstick that seems to get lost in there. You glance up to notice him.
“Thank you,” You nod towards the iced americano he placed in front of you, then laugh. “Sorry I was looking for my stupid chapstick, everything seems to get lost in here. It doesn't help that I carry so much shit with me at all times.” You open your bag to him, so he can see it’s full, but his eyes zero in on something else.
“You carry a book with you everywhere?” Namjoon questions, curious.
“Yeah,” You laugh despite yourself, taking it out of your bag. “Normally I just have it to read to kill some time between classes or when work is slow.”
“You figured there’d be lot’s of down time for some reading tonight?” Namjoon jokes, then takes the book out of your hand to get a better look at it.
“I’ve read this one before.” He examines the cover.
“You’ve read Me Before You?” You ask him. “I’m kind of surprised.”
“Why?” Namjoon asks, confused, brows furrowed as he takes a sip of his coffee.
“I just didn’t think that guys read books like these, it's pretty romance-y if you ask me,” you continue. “A girl getting a job as a sort of ‘caretaker’ to show a quadriplegic that despite his handicap that life is still worth living when he doesn’t believe it to be, then she falls in love with him? Sorry, I just don’t see guys enjoying that type of book.” You smirk.
“In my defense, it’s considered fiction, not romance.” Namjoon laughs.
The evening progresses, and eventually you both decide to call it a night... especially considering you had an 8am class the next morning.
"Let me walk you to your car." Namjoon says, as the two of you exit the coffee shop.
"Joon, it's like ten feet from here." You laugh.
He smiles. It's your first date and you're already using a nickname for him. Something tells him this won't be the last time that he sees you.
"No I want to, c'mon." Namjoon insists, as he grabs your hand.
After whats about a 10 foot walk, you arrive at your car, your hands still interlocked together.
"I had fun tonight," You tell him, smiling at him. "Are you going to come by the store tomorrow? I'm working after class."
He nods, smiling back at you as his dimples appear.
"Yeah, I think I will."
He glances down for a moment at your hand, and chuckles a bit to himself when he realizes that you've started to fidget with his fingers that still remain in your grasp.
He looks back up at you, your eyes meeting again.
"I would very much like to kiss you." Namjoon blatantly states, his gaze falling to your lips briefly.
You nod. "Please."
It's the only word you can manage to get out before he's gripping you by your waist and pulling you closer to him, and his soft lips are on yours as he kisses you tentatively at first, but deepens once he feels your hand on his cheek, then your fingers threading through his long hair at the nape of his neck.
He pulls away, your faces still close to one another, and you're left nearly breathless, your heart beating so hard you're sure he can hear it.
"Goodnight y/n," Namjoon says, smiling again. "I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"
You nod. "Okay."
You notice him still smiling as he starts to leave, and you're left standing at your car, looking probably like a total idiot, smiling so hard your cheeks hurt.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。
Tags: @souryoong @gutchy @whoisbts @dearlyjun @moretwice @0anodite0 @jooniescaffe @annamsworldx
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sebastianthemadlad · 2 months
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I've been thinking about a Stardust Crusaders Ghostbusters AU where Holly divorces Sadao and moves back to New York with Jotaro to live with Joseph and Suzi, Joseph and Jotaro discover that there are a ton of ghosts around and start their own ghost hunting agency because stands are one of the only things that can physically fight ghosts. Suzi is the receptionist
All of the ghosts are based off of the classic ghosts from the original Ghostbusters like Slimer and Marshmallow Man as well as Jojo villains from parts 1-3 (both side villains and main villains) and the big "boss" villain is Dio who came back from the dead
Kakyoin's parents are Joseph and Jotaro's first clients as they feel their son has been possessed, after a few cheesy exorcist parodies turns out the ghost who possessed Kakyoin is Rubber Soul (referencing how in the original manga/anime Rubber Soul used his stand to pretend to be Kakyoin)
After finding out Kakyoin also has a stand Joseph and Jotaro let him join.
It takes a while for the trio to have their 2nd client but soon 2 roommates living together in a small house call up, surprisingly its Joseph's friend Avdol and his new friend Polnareff who have been living together as roommates and suspect the small house they live in has been inhabited by a poltergeist
The poltergeist turns out to be Centerfold, the ghost of the man who killed Polnareff's sister and was caught and executed but had now come back as a ghost as revenge since Polnareff was the one who caught him and got him arrested
Centerfold attacks them, they manage to fight back but unlike Rubber Soul they do not manage to capture him and he escapes the house.
Avdol and Polnareff join the ghostbusting crusaders and a parody of the hotel scene from the original 1984 movie begins. The 4 are called over to a hotel where they meet Slimer, Kakyoin gets slimed
Unlike the movie they chase Slimer out of the hotel where the ghost eats all of the hotdogs from a hotdog stand as well as chase Polnareff around trying to slime him too, and we sll know Polnareff is not up for that. Luckily for him, he is saved by a hungry dog who also wanted those hotdogs, the dog uses his stand to fight Slimer, he then hogs all the hot dogs for himself
The team names this dog Iggy and he officially becomes the pet as well as the new members of the ghostbusting crusaders
So you get the basic idea of what I'm thinking here, I haven't watched ghostbusters in a few years so I don't remember a few parts of the basic story but I just adore the idea of a Jojos AU of it
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sweetdreamsjeff · 3 months
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Jeff Buckley Revisited
by Simeon FlickMarch 2023
Remember me, but oh, forget my fate. ––Henry Purcell, “Dido’s Lament”
When Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River tributary of the Mississippi on May 29, 1997, just as his band was arriving at the Memphis airport to start helping him finally nail down the long-awaited and already agonized-over second album, music lost not only one of its most singular and revolutionary of raw talents, but also the most mythologized—even during his lifetime—since Kurt Cobain’s death just three years prior. Buckley bore the boon and bane of being the scion of an also semi-famous and ill-fated folk/jazz/soul singer named Tim, and spent his entire life and career—following a single week-long reunion just before Tim’s 1975 death from an accidental heroin overdose—futilely trying to distance himself from the wayward father he never knew apart from the music of nine mostly half-baked studio albums. That an ever-growing number of people, the majority having discovered Jeff’s music post-mortem, feel they know the son better than he or anyone else knew his father, and still feel his loss as acutely as one would a dear family member, is a testament to the unparalleled emotional conveyance and lasting legacy of Jeff’s music despite having released only one official studio album during his lifetime (1994’s hauntingly gorgeous, seamlessly diverse Grace, which has found a home on innumerable “Greatest” lists and has been declared a personal favorite by many of his idols). Jeff Buckley’s influence lives on in the burgeoning underground cult of posthumous acolytes, and in the hyper-emotive, falsetto- and vibrato-laden, multi-octave vocal histrionics of so many subsequent singers, which only seem to come off as pale and obvious allusions that smack more of imitation than assimilation, much less embodiment, and we may never see his like again.
**************
Jeff Buckley entered the world during a meteor shower on the evening of November 17, 1966, the son of an already absent father and a mother, Mary Guibert, who at 18 wasn’t much more than a child herself. Like Cobain, who would arrive only three months later, Jeff had a typical Gen X childhood, replete with divorce, paternal estrangement and maternal domination, often violently reinforced alienation from his formative peers and unstable itinerancy (Mary dragged him through virtually every backwater town in California for all too short stints before he finally put his foot down in Anaheim, where both parents had grown up, and where extended family awaited). The sole refuge, besides the brief but stabilizing presence of the occasional father figure like stepdad Ron Moorhead, was the music men like him turned Jeff onto: Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and countless others who would seemingly become part of his DNA. Music became his north star, his raison d’être, and when things went wrong, which was all too often (Jeff had to be a rock for flighty mother Mary, taking on too many of her responsibilities too young), he would escape into it for hours.
This would compound once he took up the guitar. Like many children of musicians do, in order to carve out a distinct musical identity (and to maintain a healthy generation gap), Jeff—or Scotty, as he was known by his middle name then––gravitated towards Gen-X’s chosen instrument: the electric guitar, to the exclusion of his mother’s classical piano and his father’s acoustic guitar and vocalizations. Aside from the occasional lead vocal in a high school cover band, mostly for the high-ranged prog-rock and new wave classics none of his other bandmates could pull off, he considered himself just a guitar player in the ’80s. But not just any player; with Al DiMeola as one of many paragons, Jeff threw himself headlong into the world of virtuosic technique, teaching himself complicated licks by ear as he worked diligently to master not just the instrument but music itself.
This trajectory was maintained after his 1984 high school graduation with a stint at the derided Los Angeles organization, MIT (Musician’s Institute of Technology), with its many specialized subsidiaries, including GIT (Guitar Institute of Technology), where Jeff continued his musical edification. After obtaining his virtually useless professional certificate from GIT but with his gun-slinging reputation solidified a year later, he gigged in various area bands and worked as a studio rat, arranging and recording demos for other aspiring artists. But the lead vocalist in him remained as of yet dormant.
y the late ’80s it was already soul-crushingly evident that Los Angeles was a dead-end cesspool of intolerable immersion in other people’s music, and that a drastic change was required to sweep away the bad influences and external white noise to finally get him in touch with his own muse. New York City beckoned—just as it had to Tim in the ’60s—as a locus were people could become the epitome of themselves, get as weird as they wanted, and be unconditionally accepted or ignored as merely part of the scenery, and reach their full, rewarded potential in whatever their chosen field. Jeff tested the waters for a few months in 1990, but his money and options ran out, and he reluctantly returned to Los Angeles.
It wasn’t until April 26, 1991, when he performed as part of the Hal Willner-curated Greetings from Tim Buckley tribute show at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Church that he was able to lay the groundwork for a permanent relocation, having garnered the interest of several music industry types offering tangible professional succor, not to mention his first real girlfriend. That night marked the beginning of Jeff’s mythology-building not only as an artist in his own right, but also as an inextricable extension of his father’s legacy; many of the concert’s attendees were blown away not just by Jeff’s supposedly similar voice and delivery, but also by his physical resemblance (apparently there were some eerie backlit cheekbone shadows cast against the church hall walls that heightened the drama).
That there was so much defensiveness and/or mandated avoidance in so many subsequent interviews seems very bite-the-hand-that-feeds, but everyone has to break free from their parents at some point; that it often requires the assistance of those selfsame parents is a frustratingly ironic aspect of adulthood most of us have to face and embrace. Jeff simply had the misfortune of doing it in a highly scrutinized industry with zero—or even negative—expectations or tolerance of rock star progeny. He was also not only abandoned by his father, to whose funeral he was not even invited, but also projected on by Tim-obsessed fans and former love interests expecting the son to deliver on the father’s failed promise(s).
Jeff set up shop, and with the assistance of a demo tape of original songs he had recorded while still languishing in Los Angeles (courtesy of father Tim’s old manager, Herb Cohen), and a threadbare press kit (the only news clipping being a photocopied review of the Tim memorial show), he began beating the Manhattan pavement to drum up gigs and busk on the streets.
As of yet, short on original material, he leaned on sophisticated covers that resonated with his emphatically empathic and emotive spirit as he wall-pasta’d in search of a unique artistic identity. Songs by more recently assimilated influences like Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, and Leonard Cohen stood side by side with pitch-perfect deep-cut gems by Van Morrison and the beloved Zeppelin, with all-inclusive guitar arrangements that cast his different-every-time performances in full-blown Technicolor. His self-accompaniment on electric guitar as opposed to the acoustic form usually favored by the often excessively earnest—if not outright cheesy—solo folk artists of the past (including early-phase Tim), differentiated him from obsolete traditions, and it also broadcast the implicit message that this lone performer would eventually have a band behind him.
But the comprehensive guitar skill was just a tripod for the potent weapon his voice was becoming.
It’s difficult for most laypeople to differentiate between learned technique and natural timbre. Jeff didn’t inherit his father’s vocal gift; his was high-ranged and effeminate instead, with a thick palate and some huskiness occasionally muddying up his tone production. But what he did with it despite or because of the confines of those “limitations” is absolutely astounding. Instead of self-consciously diluting his delivery, he threw the book at it, almost as a diversionary tactic, like a magician smoke-and-mirror distracting his audience from an otherwise debunkable prestige move. With his uncanny imitative abilities and concomitant penchant for self-pedagogy, he adopted a rapid vibrato in accordance with essential influences (Simone, Piaf, Garland, and even father Tim, as was his undeniable birthright), nicked tricky classical and R&B trills and phrasing, turned his angelic upper register into a strength by frequently, often breathily leaning into his falsetto, incorporated various operatic (chromatic glissandos) and jazz (scatting) effects, learned how to push a full chest voice into his higher register like Robert Plant (and Tim) and to raggedly scream like Cobain and others of his generation. He ran sustain drills as he traveled across the city in cabs or on foot, drawing out his notes as long as possible to hone his deftly rationed breath support (just try holding out along with the 25-second E4 at the end of Grace’s “Hallelujah”). Tim had set the bar high for the younger Buckley, and Jeff rose mightily to the challenge, developing a comprehensive technique that kept pace with his guitar mastery, which had been pared down to unassailable jazz progressions and Hendrixian blues tropes and, like Cobain, would feature downplayed––if any––solos for the duration. If Jeff’s musical continuo was a haunted house, his voice had become the ghost that lingered within it.
(There’s something more compelling about the resulting output of singer/songwriters who start out exclusively as instrumentalists; it makes for more effective and meaningful musical accompaniment and better structured songs, and they tend to work more diligently and eruditely at mastering vocal technique. Tim leaned almost exclusively on his phenomenal voice, and insufficient thought was given to structure and harmony in his songs, and the lyrics were by turns predominantly unremarkable or unwieldy, the main drawback of being able to sing the phonebook. The resulting chord changes and accompaniment were more limited, derivative, yet ironically more obtrusive. Jeff had harnessed hooks, vivid and compelling lyrical imagery, and upper harmony into underlying works that left room for everything important, but especially the vocals. Thus, Jeff managed to achieve with one album what Tim failed to do in nine; he produced a timeless classic.)
Jeff’s most crucial influence––his self-declared Elvis––was the Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Qawwali singing introduced Jeff not only to its mystical eastern harmony, which was a subtle but unmistakable undercurrent in his guitar parts and his music in general, but also to a highly freeing ilk of vocal improvisation he would use to sparing but profound effect in his live performances, most notably in his wordless vocal warm-ups for things like “Mojo Pin” and “Dream Brother,” and in the way he would subtly tweak the songs’ melodies from show to show.
With all of this gelling within and beginning to burst out of him, Jeff flogged his wares at many a Manhattan venue, but he would find his symbiotic Shangri La at Sin-é, a hole-in-the-wall café run by a fellow man of Irish descent, ex-pat Shane Doyle. Jeff crystalized into the self-accompanying male diva he had been striving to become there at Sin-é and found a home away from home not only on the small stage, where he reveled in an unparalleled, as-of-yet anonymous freedom within the material, but also behind the counter, where he could often be found washing dishes.
This is where Jeff’s buzz began to build, thanks to his Monday night residency, the impression he had made on the industry folk at Tim’s memorial concert (including several Columbia employees who started showing up on the regular), and the steadily growing crowds comprised predominantly of young women. As word of mouth spread and audiences began to overflow onto the sidewalk, the higher-ups at several major labels started circling to investigate the fresh blood in the water. A hilarious bidding war ensued, with record company execs actually trying to make table reservations at the tiny walk-in café, and the street’s curbs clogging with limousines. Jeff would end up signing with Columbia, a Sony subsidiary that was home to many of his heroes, and that made all the right overtures and promises to this hot young talent who was desperately intent on accomplishing the impossible feat of using and defeating the music industry from the inside, as opposed to being consumed by it like his father had been.
**************
Jeff’s “million dollar” deal––consisting of a $100,000 advance, a higher than normal royalty rate, and a three-album guarantee––was unusual for a solo artist of that time, considering there were scant few original songs, no band, and no official demo tape to speak of (the L.A. recordings, which Jeff in his humorously nihilistic cups had dubbed The Babylon Dungeon Sessions, technically fulfilled the applicable criteria but weren’t aurally suitable). Columbia knew they had a hot property on their hands, the Gen-X manifestation of a Dylan or Springsteen-esque heritage artist, and Jeff made sure they knew, mostly through intentional late arrivals to countless business meetings. But because his talents spanned so deep and wide, everyone was initially at a loss as to what form his recorded output should take. What the hell do you do with an artist that has the chops and versatility to go in any direction??
The logical first step was to try and capture the solo version of Jeff on tape and issue it as a soft introduction. Live At Sin-é was culled from two performances recorded during the summer of 1993 and released on November 23 as a perfunctory, slightly disappointing four-song EP consisting of two originals (“Mojo Pin,” and “Eternal Life,” both of which would get definitive, full-band versions on Grace), and two covers (a rhapsodically incendiary rendition of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do” and a transcendent reading of Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin,” complete with a fingerpicked merry-go-round guitar waltz for the French-sung refrain).
In Columbia’s posthumous ambition to exploit remaining vault caches to continue paying down Jeff’s sizable debt to the label, the original release’s felonious dearth was rectified with 2003’s Legacy Edition, a two-disc, one DVD set that was a much more complete representation of Jeff not just as an artist during that pre-fame period, but as a person. Along with scads more songs from the same shows, the expanded set includes between-song banter that manages to do what his scant, more visceral studio work couldn’t: put his pronouncedly nerdy, madcap, sometimes salacious sense of humor on full display.
Meanwhile, Jeff had also begun working toward his only completed studio LP. Sony had brought him in to record the lion’s share of his repertoire in February of ’93 as a way to gently kick off the A&R cataloguing and selection process for the album (these were later released as part of the 2016 compilation You And I), and recording sessions were scheduled for September at Bearsville Studios, which was located near Woodstock in upstate New York. The only problem––and it was a big one––was that he didn’t have a band. Like so many other aspects of Jeff’s career, this got rectified at the last possible moment; he met and connected with bassist Mick Grondahl first, then drummer Matt Johnson less than a month out from the initial recording dates.
A tall, dark, and handsome Dane, Grondahl had an ideal combination of low-key receptiveness and musical adventurousness that allowed him to be the perfect on- and offstage wingman: he was interesting in an unobtrusive way. Johnson was a wet-eared Texan who had the ideal balance of power and precision (a slight and diminutive presence, Johnson’s physicality was bolstered by his construction day job) and the breadth of taste and experience to match the extreme dynamic variations of Jeff’s sonic palette (Johnson could crush it like Bonzo or play pindrop-soft like a seasoned jazz pro––whatever the music required).
Columbia was less than pleased that Jeff had recruited a rhythm section with virtually no stage or studio experience, but he would eventually be proven right in his selection of introverted, lump-of-clay rookies that doubled as a gang of friends who could hang with him in every sense, especially through all the spontaneous twists and turns he threw at them. This was one of many battles he would actually win for the better against Sony, though he would initially come off as the loser (it took a few months for the band to get up to speed on the Grace repertoire, because they rarely if ever played the album’s songs during rehearsals or soundchecks, preferring to fill that time with “jamming,” since they needed to build an intuitive rapport. They also knew they would be playing the same emotionally demanding songs night after night for the next year or two).
The trio began work on Grace at Bearsville Studios, which had been pre-rigged with several different recording environments to spontaneously capture whatever came out of Jeff and his band in any permutation and style, whether it was solo, low-key jazz combo or full-on rock group. Andy Wallace, who had dialed in the mixes for Nirvana’s Nevermind, wore the coproducing and engineering hats for these sessions, along with providing a regimented lens through which to focus and refract Jeff’s chaotic genius. Recording proceeded slowly and steadily, without too much fanfare, but then, again at the last minute there was an explosion of prodigious productivity. Among other developments, German vibraphone prodigy Karl Berger was in town, and with the assistance of a local quartet, he and Jeff co-arranged string parts for “Grace,” “Last Goodbye,” and “Eternal Life.”
The eleventh-hour burst of creativity suddenly began transforming Jeff’s modest debut into something more akin to the fully produced masterpiece that usually doesn’t happen until later in a discography. More studio time was booked for intensive overdubbing of additional layers, which pushed costs beyond the initial budget, and though Columbia held Jeff in high esteem and generally handled him with kid gloves (full artistic control was implicit), the majority of expenses went into his recoupable fund, which had to be paid down by Jeff through album sale royalties. Though Grace would eventually prove itself beyond worthy of the investment, this was one of the first major manifestations of Jeff’s Sony-sourced headache that would plague him for the duration.
Grace, which was finally released on August 23, 1994, tends to vex the neophyte at first blush. There’s so much to unpack, the resulting bottleneck can be off-putting. Only through repeated listens will it reward those who “wait in the fire,” as the title track has it. Once that rote assimilation has inured you to Jeff’s eccentric voice and anachronistically innovative affectations, and Grace has dilated your emotional receptivity wider than you ever thought possible, you will tend to listen obsessively for a while before you realize you need to take a break so your strung-out, wrung-out heart can snap back to normal. You will probably only be able to listen to it every once in a while thereafter, as the lachrymose music makes demands of your psyche that require exceptional equanimity to withstand (the irony is that while Grace might help you grieve a breakup or death, listening to its ten tracks can also exhume that grief long past the time you have worked through it). The fact that Jeff is no longer here but still sounds undeniably alive in the speakers, and that the making of this album led to insurmountable expectations for a satisfactory follow-up that added to his pre-death stress, only augments the album’s haunting intensity.
The sonic progeny of Robert Johnson, Nina Simone, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Dowland, Jeff comes off as the wide-amplitude, tragic-romantic, card-carrying Scorpio that he was, irresistibly obsessed with love and death, singing often of the moon and rain (and yet also of burning and fire), and bedroom-as-sanctuary-and-wellspring, and a melancholic, nearly heart-rending yearning for absent lovers past and present. All of this can’t help but feed into his steadily growing mythology, not to mention strike he’s-all-alone-and-vulnerable-go-save-him reverberations of longing through the heartstrings of every heterosexual female within earshot, while also getting straight men of all walks gratefully as in touch with their feminine side as he was. In the age of grunge––which force-fed emotion through intimidating volume and distortion––Grace was an anomaly, delivering a wider range of feeling through a listener’s induced surrender to its heightened peaks and valleys, with Jeff’s by turns angelic and demonic voice keeping pace, and, unlike Cobain, with absolutely no irony to lean on, hide behind, or use as disclaimer.
“Mojo Pin” is the perfect overture for an audiophile quality album with such wide yet still somehow cohesive style and dynamic oscillations, with softly looping guitar harmonics fading in, followed by a wordless melody delicately sung over a fingerpicked folk/jazz guitar pattern. The music rollercoasters from there, with dramatic stops featuring vocal melismas that proceed into straight 4/4 time, finally crescendoing in a loud, climactic buildup, and a ragged scream from Jeff that tapers seamlessly back into the jazz feel.
The first stanzas tell us so much about the author:
I’m lying in my bed, the blanket is warm This body will never be safe from harm Still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal Touch my skin to keep me whole
Oh, if only you’d come back to me If you laid at my side I wouldn’t need no mojo pin To keep me satisfied
Here we find a vividly lovelorn artist who tends to compose from the subconscious (as with many of his original songs, “Mojo Pin” was inspired by a dream he had had) has already begun confronting his mortality, equates love with addiction like so many troubadours before him (“mojo pin” is a euphemism for a shot of heroin, which, inspired in part by his father, Jeff used for a short time during the tour in support of Grace), and feels hopelessly separated from it all, with a heightened sense of longing that can’t help but garner the listener’s sympathies.
The title track picks up the thread in more ways than one; along with “Mojo Pin” it is the second of two pre-Sony songwriting collaborations with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas—as part of his short-lived Gods and Monsters project (that’s Lucas’s guitar-noodle wizardry on both). And with lines like “Oh, drink a bit of wine––we both might go tomorrow,” it ups the mortality-as-enabler-and-aphrodisiac ante.
With its churning 6/8 groove, and with Jeff starting the song in typical fashion––toward the bottom of his discernable vocal range (D3), “Grace” culminates cathartically on a sustained, heavily vibrato’d, full-chest E5 bad-assedly blasting from his manic larynx and also marks the first of several ominous allusions to being harmed by water (“…And I feel them drown my name…”).
“Last Goodbye” was supposed to be the big first single. It even got an MTV video treatment (just look at his dour expression as he and the exhausted band take a precious day off from a European tour to do this exorbitantly expensive production of a compromised artistic concept in a despised medium), but with no real chorus to speak of, its chart success was modest at best. A Delta blues slide glides across an open-tuned electric 12-string guitar before dropping into a mid-tempo dance groove and a lyric full of bittersweet memories of a failed relationship with an older woman in L.A.
Not only was Jeff a bit shorthanded when it came to filling an entire 52-minute album with originals, but it also would have been a shame not to round out the running order with some well-chosen and interpreted covers in emulation of the intimate immediacy of Jeff’s Sin-é days. The first of these appearing on Grace is “Lilac Wine,” a torch-song standard written by James Shelton and adopted by Nina Simone. Jeff gives the distant-lover-as-intoxicant lyrics the hyper-emotive treatment, with perfectly sustained vibrato on the drawn-out notes and with his voice occasionally breaking into a heartrending sob, especially on the line, “…Isn’t that she, or am I just going crazy, dear?”
“Lilac Wine” is a significant indication of the barely fathomable depth of Jeff’s––and by extension, the band’s––versatility and their ability to do exactly right by the artist and repertoire (it’s difficult, in that sense, to listen to any of Tim’s records without taking umbrage with the musicians in the various band incarnations smothering Tim’s voice and stepping all over his 12-string guitar with their ego-fulfilling and poorly––if at all––thought-out parts).
“So Real” represents not only the successful search for a second guitarist, but also a tenacious battle fought and won against Columbia for the very soul of the album.
Michael Tighe, a mutual friend of Jeff and his ex Rebecca Moore (the one he had met and fallen in love with at the Tim tribute, and whom “Grace”s lyrics supposedly feature) joined the band on second guitar after most of the work on the album had been completed, and he brought an intriguing set of chord changes with him. When it came time to record B-sides and possible non-album singles (a cover of Big Star’s “Kangaroo”, which, to Sony’s consternation would often stretch out to 15 or 20 minutes in concert, was also laid down), Tighe’s progressions, which were inordinately sophisticated considering he hadn’t been playing guitar for very long, were dusted off, tracked with engineer Cliff Norrell, and Jeff did the lead vocal in one take after a last-minute walk to finish the lyric.
Distinguished by the verses’ seamless changes in meter (back and forth from duple to triple time), its by-now standard mélange of tragic-romantic imagery in the lyrics (“I love you / But I’m afraid to love you,” and the foreboding “And I couldn’t awake from the nightmare that sucked me in and pulled me under…”), another wildly climactic E5 at the end, and a massive chorus hook, the song fit Jeff’s MO––accessible innovation and wide-amplitude expression––perfectly.
So much so that it quickly shed its B-side status and usurped a coveted spot on the record from another, highly contested original: The excessively personal and harsh “Forget Her,” which in retrospect would have been the sole manifestation of irony on the album. Jeff was justifiably dissatisfied with this disingenuously caustic 12/8 blues-pop dirge waltz he had allegedly penned about the aforementioned, hapless Moore, upon whom the lyric displaced Jeff’s own culpability for the relationship’s dissolution. But the label was head over heels with it, as the song’s melodramatic, Michael Bolton-esque chorus made it the one and only potential crossover smash in their minds. Columbia exec Don Ienner, who was essentially Jeff’s boss, tried everything short of bribery to futilely sweet-talk Jeff into keeping it on the album, which, in itself, was a tangible reason for Jeff to dig in, though he also feared that the slightly smarmy song would be a one-way ticket to One-Hit-Wonder-ville. As it turned out, “So Real”s chorus was hookier anyway, enough to warrant its own video treatment, though its subsequent commercial impact was also negligible.
A plaintive sigh kicks off what is now widely regarded as the definitive recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the second cover of the album, performed solo and glued together from multiple takes into a solemn paean to the ecstatic pain of long-term relationships. Inspired by John Cale’s 1991 reading, Jeff sticks to the ultra-romantic verses that find love and suffering linked in paradox, and the guitar tone and reverb augment the song’s church hymn vibe, almost as though it was recorded at a service or funeral. If you’ve heard this recording or noticed it in myriad movies and TV shows and haven’t cried at least once, you’re not human.
“Lover, You Should Have Come Over” is a classic swinging blues adagio, perhaps the best known and most covered original on the album. Water and death are linked once again (“Looking out the door, I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners / Parading in a wake of sad relations as their shoes fill up with water…”), and then Jeff abruptly breaks that train of thought to do right by Moore in recognizing his role in their breakup (“…Maybe I’m too young / To keep good love from going wrong”). Again, his vocal starts low and builds to another E5 at the end. In the hands of another artist, all of this would have sounded forced and over the top, but somehow Jeff was able to make it work. That’s his genius/madness; he himself was fully dilated and committed in a way that wasn’t healthy or sustainable, but damn, did it make for visceral listening.
“Corpus Christi Carol” reaches even further back than 1950’s “Lilac Wine” and completely blows the listener away with its expectation-defying display of musical depth. He becomes a bona fide classical singer here, exhibiting total immersion in the anonymous 16th-century lyric that the aptly named English composer Benjamin Britten incorporated into 1933’s Choral Variations for Mixed Voices (“A Boy Was Born”), Op. 3, finally arriving at Jeff’s adolescent ears through the version for high voice recorded by Janet Baker in 1967. Jeff completely inhabits the allegory of a bedridden, Christ-like knight endlessly bleeding, witnessed by love and the purity of his cause, with the empathic delicacy that was already his trademark. The stark arrangement for electric guitar and scant overdubs is superbly matched by the lamenting vocal, which ends on a ghostly, falsetto’d E5 that is utterly cathartic in its climactic glory.
Jeff wanted to make an album that compelled rock fans to forget about Zeppelin II, and “Eternal Life” delivers on the heavier side of that promise. Written during his time in L.A., the creepy intro stops on a dime before a bludgeoning, yet highly danceable groove drops in and a reactive lyric confronts applicable listeners to wake up and smell the mortal coffee:
Eternal life is now on my trail Got my red-glitter coffin, man––just need one last nail While all these ugly gentlemen play out their foolish games There’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names…
Racist everyman, what have you done? Man, you made a killer of your unborn son Oh, crown my fear your king at the point of a gun All I want to do is love everyone…
There’s no time for hatred––only questions What is love, where is happiness What is alive, where is peace? When will I find the strength to bring me release?
With distorted bass as well as guitar alongside complementary strings and a killer groove featuring a highly effective, accelerating hi-hat pattern from Johnson on the verses, the song successfully proselytizes for universally incontestable causes, and reinforces Jeff’s projected mythology as a doomed soul whose seemingly relished fate awaits him sooner rather than later.
“Dream Brother” may be the last song on the album, but it was the very first idea Jeff and the band had worked up together. At the risk of overusing the word, and just like the album as a whole, it is haunting from start to finish, with a droney, string-cranking intro giving way to an eastern-inflected guitar motif. Jeff’s more static but no less sublime vocal melody goes beyond complementary; it builds tension by hanging on or around the fifth for most of the verse stanzas before resolving to the tonic on the last note of the phrase. Grondahl’s bass line, as with all his work on the album, is a sublime treat; here we find him working his way through the exotic Phrygian mode, recasting the guitar parts into a harmonically complex, emotionally compelling accompaniment that perfectly underpins the vocal.
The song features another penned-and-sung-at-the-last-possible-minute lyric, the chorus of which admonishes dear L.A. friend Chris Dowd (of Fishbone) not to abandon his new family like Tim had Jeff and Mary: “Don’t be like the one who made me so old / Don’t be like the one who left behind his name / ‘Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine / And nobody ever came.” Grace’s only allusion to Jeff’s father builds in intensity to an instrumental bridge with wordless Qawwali wailings that are utterly bone chilling in their echoing-into-eternity saturation. The album’s final line puts an ominous capstone on the pyramid of the untimely-death-by-water preoccupation: “Asleep in the sand, with the ocean washing over…”
PART TWO
From ’94 to ’96, both solo and with the band, Jeff Buckley toured the world and elsewhere. Those two years were highly transformative; he met and/or was lauded by so many of his personal heroes (including Zeppelin’s Page and Plant, Paul and Linda McCartney, U2’s Bono and The Edge, David Bowie, and he had a brief affair with Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, who had covered Tim’s “Song to the Siren” [for aural proof of the romance, go to YouTube and check out their unfinished, embarrassingly smitten PDA duet on “All Flowers in Time”]), picked up an all but unshakeable smoking habit as a late-blooming extension of delayed formative-year rebellion and as a temporary, self-harming relief from the stresses of touring and just-shy-of-A-list fame (he managed to make People magazine’s 50 most beautiful list in May of ’95, which mostly appalled him, and also had an eye-opening night out with Courtney Love), turned down numerous primetime opportunities—SNL, Letterman, and acting roles and commercial placements—in favor of “underground” platforms like MTV’s “120 Minutes,” and was constantly at odds with his record label.
Australia and France embraced him like a returning hero, with the latter country’s Académie Charles Cros presenting Jeff with the rarely-awarded-to-an-American Grand Prix International Du Disque in honor of Grace on April 13, 1995 (two live shows, the second representing a career peak, were recorded during a French leg of the tour and later released as 1995’s Live at the Bataclan EP and 2001’s Live à l’Olympia).
The tank ran dry on March 1, 1996, which marked not only the final date of a hastily booked Australian/New Zealand tour to capitalize on Jeff’s surging popularity there and subsequently the last in official support of Grace, but also the final show with percussionist Matt Johnson, who had reached his hard limit with the band leader’s exacerbated lifestyle excesses and reckless behavior, not to mention Jeff’s escalating hazing of him.
Drummerless and exhausted, a different Jeff Buckley returned to a different New York. Though it suited his dysfunctionally nomadic, reactively noncommittal spirit, touring is not conducive to one’s mental or physical well-being nor is any level of fame, which is unfortunately what moves the units at the cost of anonymous normalcy. As a result, Jeff could no longer frequent any of his old haunts without being recognized and approached by strangers who thought they knew and deserved a piece of him beyond his timeless music. But then even his friends couldn’t help but feel jilted in their wanting a less ephemeral friendship with him, as he made them feel like the undeniably corroborated center of the universe when he was around, having given of himself interpersonally as completely and unadvisedly as he did in his music.
With inchoate fame now cutting him off from his usual decompression options, Jeff couldn’t recharge his psychic batteries. That coupled with the fact that Columbia and the press had been persistently hounding him regarding a follow-up to Grace piled even more pressure on the stress heap, further hampering his creative process and making The Big Apple taste more of the cyanide within the seeds than the once novel fruit of clandestine self-discovery.
There’s an industry saying: a recording artist has their entire life to make the first album and six months to make the second. Already no stranger to writer’s block under normal circumstances (he was inherently a better interpreter than a composer and understandably loath to commit to locked-in versions of anything), Jeff found himself hitting the creative wall in the midst of his increasingly stifling paradigm. The new songs were coming, albeit more slowly than everyone preferred, and in a different, more current vein than Grace. Having kept an ever-vigilant ear to the cultural ground, Jeff had met the Grifters and the Dambuilders while on tour, gaining a new love interest—Joan Wasser, to whom he related early on that he was going to die young—from the latter band and befriended Nathan Larson of Shudder to Think, and their contemporary alternative rock vibes ignited a light bulb over Jeff’s head, giving him the inspiration to pursue a rawer sound, much as Cobain had for Nevermind’s 1993 follow-up—In Utero.
It wasn’t necessarily Sony’s cup of tea. Though the label was by no means dead-set on putting out Son of Grace, they were a bit befuddled by the significant shift in musical mores away from the classic heritage artist sound toward the aural marriage of the Smiths and Soundgarden evident in the newer material. His sagacious selection of classic solo repertoire, and Grace by extension, had gotten Jeff’s foot in the door, as their sophisticated old-school values were arguably a premeditated affectation on Jeff’s part to woo the industry’s boho Boomer gatekeepers into signing and unconditionally supporting him. Now that he was more or less ensconced on the inside, and having gained more than a little leverage from all the hard work of the past year and a half, Jeff wanted to change things up to reflect more of what he’d been listening to and writing as an artist of his own generation. Though jumping high through Jeff’s hoops was by now second nature, Columbia was nevertheless befuddled.
This vexation next manifested as bewilderment over the choice of legendary Television alum Tom Verlaine (RIP) to aid and abet his alt-rock vision as the inexperienced coproducer for the second album. No one at Sony thought Verlaine was the right man for the job; they would just as soon have gone with Andy Wallace again rather than someone who, as with Grondahl, Johnson, and Tighe, didn’t have a track record to speak of. Whether or not Jeff’s choice was ill informed was irrelevant; it became his new crusade against the label, a pyrrhic war waged solely on the principle of getting his way even if it ended up biting him in the ass.
Columbia green-lit some bet-hedging recording with Verlaine to humor Jeff, but also to surreptitiously gather leverage as a failed, debt-enlarging investment, as the odds were slim that he could pull another rabbit out of his hat within the limited, impossible-for-Jeff parameters. Two brief as they were dissatisfying sessions occurred at various New York studios in 1996 and then a third at Memphis’s Easley McCain studios with Johnson’s permanent replacement, Parker Kindred, in early 1997. Jeff had become interested in recording at Easley through Grifters guitarist and Memphis resident Dave Shouse, and in relocating to that hallowed town for its legendary status in the history of blues and rock ‘n roll, and yet also as an escape from the lost anonymity, label pressure, and detrimental distractions of New York.
Jeff began striving for—and was at least able to temporarily reclaim—some semblance of a normal life in Memphis; he settled in at 91 Rembert Street, where he could often be found lying in the overgrown grass of his front yard, staked out all the good local restaurants, got a Sin-é-reminiscent Monday night residency at a downtown venue called Barrister’s, proposed marriage to Joan Wasser, and spent time with local friends who didn’t treat him like a rock star. At the time of his death, and as this evidence indicates, Jeff was trying to settle down, but he also felt ready to finally nail the landing on the second album, which he earnestly hoped would not only eclipse Grace but would frighten people as well. He was also noticeably uneasy.
The iteration of what was going to be called My Sweetheart the Drunk that came out almost too soon in May of 1998, not the barely attainable one Jeff would have overworked himself to complete had he lived, is the version the label should have agreed to put out had he been willing and able to play the long game. Though disc 2, with the exception of “Haven’t You Heard” and the cover of “Satisfied Mind,” is mainly for diehards (it contains sloppily recorded and produced home recordings that only hint at greatness, as well as superfluous original mixes of select disc 1 material), the ten Verlaine tracks are nothing to scoff at. In fact, the minimally but still excellently arranged and produced songs not only sound surprisingly finished, but would have also found Jeff paving the way for the future of alternative rock/pop in a manner that was more in touch with the times but still rang true to Jeff’s old-school tragic-romantic sophistication. Hindsight finds these recordings nothing to be ashamed of, the natural, expectation-managing and yet still promise-fulfilling continuation of Jeff’s artistic journey, though he didn’t—and wouldn’t—agree with that assessment (the tracks probably could have used just a little more tightening up… At the very least, and as it stands, disc 1 of My Sweetheart the Drunk could have been a highly respectable and acceptable “sophomore flop”). Jeff would have had to ease up on the malignant perfectionism had he lived, and in that light it both does and doesn’t seem strange that he continued massaging these recordings—with additional overdubs and polishing occurring at Easley after the band’s return to New York—despite his clearly declared intention to abandon what he had already recorded, concede defeat regarding Verlaine (who urged Jeff to erase the tapes), and start from scratch with Andy Wallace.
Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk has plenty of wide-amplitude thrills (“Vancouver,” which started life as an instrumental break on the Grace tour, now featured a soaring vocal that found him suddenly clued in to the detriments of giving too much of himself: “I need to be alone / To heal this bleeding stone…”), lots of tragic-romantic flair (the beautiful, minimally orchestrated ballads “Morning Theft” and “Opened Once,” the swinging caveat “Witches Rave,” and the macabre, “Come as You Are”-ish “Nightmares by the Sea” are by turns self-castigating and wary), more struggle over suitable repertoire (Jeff harbored hypocritical paranoia that the set-apart, slinky R&B slow-jam, “Everybody Here Wants You” would be chosen as a single against his wishes [it was], even though the song is an instant classic, and the album could have done without the cover of the Nymphs’ “Yard of Blonde Girls,” though he didn’t trust Columbia to agree), two Qawwali nods (the mantra jam “New Year’s Prayer”, and the utterly harrowing “You And I”), and plenty of fodder for precognition-of-untimely-death speculators (“Stay with me under these waves tonight / Be free for once in your life tonight…” from “Nightmares By The Sea”, and “Ah, the calm below that poisoned river wild…” from the goosebump-evincing “You And I”).
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Recording contracts have always been a Faustian bargain for the artist, especially at the onset, when it is weighted heavily in the card-holding label’s favor. Art and commerce often meet in the cultural-industrial ring as irreconcilable spouses who stay together for the kids, with the artist wanting to make a unique, challenging, and hopefully timeless statement for theirs and successive generations, and the label needing to make a profit, not lose their shirt, or just break even. The latter often requires innocuous music that has been dumbed down or otherwise compromised for mass consumption, usually the antithesis of the former. The artist, though, according to the standard contract they signed, is legally beholden to the label, which owns the master recordings and the right to exploit them until such a time, often years or even decades down the road, when the artist has gained enough cachet through account-balancing sales and accumulated cultural pertinence to renegotiate the contract into a more equitable form that befits their too-hard-earned stature. As with life in general, and back when labels were still labels, one had to play a patient, penitent, somewhat circumspect long game, with eyes intent on the future prize in order to succeed as a recording and touring artist, and to eventually win out over the label.
Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, now in or on the cusp of their 80s respectively, managed to successfully undergo and even control their fame-reconciling heritage artist transformations and break through to the other side. Jeff Buckley, who realized too late and too far out to sea that he had given up essential access to a normal life, and whose DNA and hardship-forged personality was geared for fleeting, heightened moments of impulsive escape and unrealistic levels of emotional outpouring during which there was no tomorrow, did not. After an itinerant childhood in a chaotic, single-parent household, neither of which allowed him any bonded, bolstering long-term friendships or gave him the necessary emotional support to instill enough confidence to enable him to pace, self-nurture, and recharge as an adult, Jeff was predestined for burnout. Add to this the looming legacy of his father’s similarly self-inflicted and untimely doom, the demoralizing fiscal and creative debt to—and incongruent association with—a major label, and pervasive generational nihilism, and you have the recipe for a death by misadventure.
The world generally eats pure-heart-on-sleeve empaths like Jeff Buckley for breakfast, and just like house-always-wins Vegas casinos, record labels are particularly good at exploiting, devouring, and then remorselessly shitting out their charges no matter how vigilant the artist may have been to the contrary. In Jeff and Columbia’s case, it’s difficult to pick a winner; dying got him out of both having to deliver on a second album and pay off his way-in-the-red recoupable, but his absence-generated popularity and Sony’s dogged determination to monetize ample vault caches in the aftermath may have balanced the ledger by now anyway. Either way you slice it, and for what it’s worth, the artist is gone, and Columbia is a tawdry shadow of its former self, but Jeff’s timeless music remains.
Trying to imagine how Jeff would have navigated the post-5/29/97 waters is not challenging, considering the comprehensive changes already in motion that would herald not only the end of his generation’s all-too-brief moment in the sun, but also the beginning of the end of the record industry as he had known it. Jeff probably would have seen Sony’s support slowly dwindle, becoming even more isolated until his contract came up for renewal and he was then most likely dropped from the label, as its various employee archetypes, which were industry-wide revolving doors, would have inevitably jumped ship for higher positions elsewhere. This exodus would have severed nurtured—and nurturing—connections, leaving Jeff in the hands of green, bottom-line-focused reps that had had nothing to do with scouting or signing him and were subsequently less inclined to offer the kind of largesse and preferential treatment to which he had been accustomed.
A new generation was also coming of age, one that sought shallower, more effervescent thrills to match their innate, well-nurtured ebullience. Soundgarden, Jeff’s now fellow-in-untimely-death friend Chris Cornell’s band, which was the first of the Seattle grunge era to sign to a major label, broke up almost on cue that year. Groups like Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Hanson, and solo artists like Brittney Spears, Ricky Martin, and Christina Aguilera were prepared to replace grunge’s locked-up engine in the zeitgeist car, with already emergent, transitionally mellower sounds from the likes of Dave Matthews Band, Blues Traveler, Phish, Spin Doctors, and Hootie and the Blowfish having paved the way. Autotune was introduced that year, with computer-based digital recording having begun its ascendant journey to becoming the analog-supplanting, music-devaluing standard.
Within a decade, for better and worse, the industry as Jeff knew it would no longer exist, nor would the focus on organically profound music on which he had been brought up and of which he had become a part. With no plan B (he endearingly applied for what would have been a meagerly if at all remunerated position at the Memphis zoo’s butterfly exhibit), Jeff would have been hard-pressed to maintain a subsistent income—let alone pay down his debt to Columbia—inside or outside the new, less tolerant manifestation of the industry, which would have scoffed derisively and dismissively at his to-date album sales. And he probably would have recoiled from the rising popularity of bubblegum pop and nü-metal buffoonery in disgust.
Kurt Cobain once said he wished he had paced himself better, played more of a long game by holding back some of Nevermind’s material for subsequent albums, and a general feeling persists that Jeff had similarly neglected any thought of the future by putting everything he had into Grace, and there wasn’t enough left to create something new to match its grandeur, at least not within his unsustainable paradigm. It seems as though he was done, that his music’s true moment in the sun could only begin after he had disappeared somehow. Amassing cachet would have to rely on his premature-demise-as-career-move absence, the removal of his chronic perfectionism that allowed Sony to put out whatever was in the vaults without his opposition (albeit in full, duly diligent cooperation with next-of-kin trustee, supposed legacy preserver / promoter, and posthumous stage mother Mary), and amassing fin de siècle malaise that would find solace in Grace. But Jeff’s death feels wrong as well, redolent of the same sense of tragedy as JFK’s assassination, as if we had truly lost one of the good ones, and the subsequent sensation of all hope for a fair and just future having been annihilated in a flash, regardless of whether or not either of them actually deserved that idolization.
The grief-sourced application of culpability gets complicated when someone who has deeply affected strangers and loved ones alike is directly responsible for their own death, but it can’t exactly be called a suicide. And though we have plenty of lyrical and anecdotal evidence that could easily be construed as self-fulfilling prophecy (like Cobain, Jeff had consistently and insistently telegraphed his denouement), it is otherwise difficult to substantiate rumors that Jeff had been dreaming of his demise just weeks—if not longer—beforehand. But as with the cinematic portrayal of Mozart obsessively composing what would become his own requiem in Amadeus, if someone persistently gives thought and voice to fatal intent, walks that fine line long enough, the border between this world and the next will begin to blur and smudge until it finally wears thin enough for one to cross over without even noticing. Freud may have said it best: “Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
Unlike influencee Rufus Wainwright, whose songs are also emotive but restrained in comparison, Jeff never developed the necessary filters to mitigate the harmful aspects of his heightened sensitivity and permeability, preferring instead to empty his emotional ballast onstage night after night to the adulation of interchangeable, undemanding strangers (though some of them often clamored annoyingly for renditions of Tim’s songs), as if each show were his last (which he had hypocritically accused Tim of in a 1993 interview). In all of Jeff’s 30 years, he had never learned the kind of self-love that would awaken and bolster the basic long-term survival instincts to enable him to throw off the chains of his deeply ingrained fatalism. With his pallid, fey appearance, alluring gender-balanced charisma, heart-rending empathy, unregulated outflow of emotional energy, and foolhardily unshielded vulnerability, he seemed to many as though he was marked for an early end no matter what evasive action he might’ve taken.
Though Jeff had been exhibiting unstable, borderline bipolar behavior in the weeks prior to his drowning, he didn’t consciously intend to die that night (a nearby witness apparently heard a single cry for help), but his willful ignorance of the dangers of his impulsive and fatalistic nature and the whimsical flouting of the perils of his immediate surroundings would be the co-conspirators of his mortal undoing.
Fully clothed at twilight, Jeff waded backward into a notoriously dangerous river despite a lifetime aversion to water—and in denial of all the overt signals his subconscious and conscious had sent him. Doing the recently learned backstroke to the braggadocio boom-box strains of Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” in a roiling river all but universally avoided for its severe, passing-boat-generated undercurrents was supposed to be a spontaneous trip to and from the edge to take his mind off of life’s untenable pressures for a short while. But instead, and to his torch-carrying fans’, friends’, and family’s ongoing bereavement, it lasted forever.
**************
England’s annual Meltdown Festival consists of a series of concerts given over several days by contemporary artists and is curated by a celebrity participant with an ear toward the high-minded performance of unconventional repertoire. Jeff was invited by 1995’s chosen Master of Ceremonies—Elvis Costello—to take part on July 1, which serendipitously coincided with that year’s European tour in support of Grace, though it was inconveniently sandwiched between concert dates across the channel.
Along with collaborations in mixed ensembles comprised of co-billed artists, Jeff did a four-song solo set that featured the apropos “Corpus Christi Carol” (the song that had originally piqued Costello’s interest), Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman,” and “Grace.”
He began with an absolutely devastating rendition of “Dido’s Lament,” which Costello had personally requested from the setting of Dido and Aeneas by 16th century British composer Henry Purcell. Jeff was indistinguishable from a fully trained, operatic countertenor as he delivered the moribund lines with innate familiarity:
Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me On thy bosom let me rest More I would, but Death invades me Death is now a welcome guest
When I am laid in earth May my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast Remember me, but oh, forget my fate
Costello came out after the last of the four songs and accompanying ovation had died down and following some gracious comments recognizing the young artist’s overflowing docket, he essentially summed up Jeff’s contribution—and the debt of gratitude music owes him—with his closing salutation that now stands as a fitting epitaph:
“He gave everything. Thanks, Jeff.”
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depressedraisin · 9 months
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assigning every song from the car a leonard cohen record
purely based on vibes and overthinking
There'd Better Be A Mirrorball - You Want It Darker (2016)
(soul-y, sometimes cinematic orchestral elements, themes of bidding farewells and reminiscing over the past. it's also cohen's last record, released a few days before he passed away)
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I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am - I'm Your Man (1988)
(funky jazzy sounds, lots of synths in the production and a general vibe of wry humour and playfulness in the songwriting)
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Sculptures Of Anything Goes - Death of A Ladies' Man (1977)
(probably not the most obvious match but the way the soundscape is built in sculptures is very reminiscent, to me, of the infamous 'wall of sound' in this album. also i think upon first listen the song feels as puzzling as cohen's new sound might've felt to his audiences)
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Jet Skis On The Moat - Various Positions (1984)
(cohen had started experimenting with more synths and modern elements in his music with this album and i get a feel of smooth jazz/lounge from the songs. very jet skis imo. also alex's use of abstract, surreal imagery might've reached a peak with this song - which should firmly place him in the "successors to cohen's mantle" line)
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Body Paint - Various Positions (1984)
ehhhh not happy with this choice but can't think of anything better. let's say i want body paint to become as iconic as hallelujah so that's why
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The Car - Songs of Love and Hate (1971)
the album is very classic spanish guitar heavy folk rock and extremely bleak and gloomy in vibes. the acoustic version of the car could fit right in. also im pretty sure this is alex's fav cohen record. he got the shirt and the references and all that
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Big Ideas - Recent Songs (1979) and New Skin For The Old Ceremony (1974)
this one was a tricky one to place. both these albums have some piano and some strings, but are less layered and sparser in sound than big ideas. but the vibes match don't ask me why
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Hello You - I'm Your Man (1988)
you know why i already told you
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Mr. Schwartz - Songs From A Room (1969)
very sad. very very sad. very folk Rocky guitary too but not as much as songs of love and hate
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Perfect Sense - Death of A Ladies' Man (1977)
this song is sooooooooo death of a ladies man like the way the string lines interact with the lyrics and the heavy orchestration and the grandiose soundscape. there's a reason why id die for this song
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beardedmrbean · 9 days
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The administrators of a public high school near the library i work at went into their collection of classic books and required reading and literally cut out all the "inappropriate" scenes in those books like not to be over dramatic but uuuhhhh i have to wonder if any member of that administration read Fahrenheit 451
Curious what would count as classical, saw a thing earlier today with Iowa banning sexually explicit books from school libraries, I'm gonna find it.
Depicting sex acts, I was close.
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I do enjoy the bit that pops up later in this one
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I'm curious how many of these parents monitor their kids internet use, not that i think the kama sutra has any place in a Jr High school library, but
The 51-year-old Democrat said depriving children of the ability to make choices about what they read and of perspectives they may see reflected in their own lives is damaging — including for her own children who identify as LGBTQ.  Leaverton said she is shocked by the lists of classic novels that have been removed from schools, such as “1984” and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell, and feels the law is further marginalizing LGBTQ and other underrepresented voices 
Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, close enough at least, 1984 does have some naughty stuff in there tho, pretty sure those two were chosen as examples for a very obvious reason too.
My personal thought of a good way to solve all of this is to send the TV censors in and if you can't publish it on the 5:00 or 6:00 news broadcast it doesn't go into a school library.
Then again that might get books like "Night" pulled because of the whole deal in the train cars as they were being carted off to the extermination camps so maybe not.
There should be a line somewhere because I've seen sections from some of the books that got pulled and they're just straight up pornography.
Cutting passages you don't like out is how we wound up with the "Jefferson Bible" where Thomas Jefferson cut out all the bits he had issues with, namely those dealing with the divinity of Christ, which that's the point of the New Testament my guy, so that's just dumb. Remove the books or leave them in and whole.
It's all madness at this point anyhow so we might as well leave the books the way they are.
Remove the stuff that's basically straight up pornography from school libraries, someone wants to read the porn ones they'll find a way anyhow, the internet is wild like that.
But don't edit stuff out of existing book, that's just lame.
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yasminewestbank · 3 months
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all movie asks answers from the ask meme post bc it was fun
Your favorite movie released this year DIDNT WATCH ANY 2023 MOVIES YET.. CRIES
A movie you think is underrated - obliged to say An Elephant Sitting Still by hu bo bc i can never find it in dvd stores and i unfortunately honestly dont know if i will find a screening of it in a cinema available to me ever again but i dream of it
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A movie you think is overrated - going to put two, one new and one classic. first one is parasite. im bitter abt this movie bc it was advertised like crazy and the reviews were so hyping and then i went and it was average. its not a bad movie but not only doesnt deserve the hype the hype ruined it for me bc if i went with the proper expectations i wouldnt have gotten so disappointed. a classic is alphaville of godard... obviously its a good movie and im sure it was groundbreaking at the time but by now the story doesnt feel as sophisticated bc this genre of story is at this point.. i wouldnt say overdone bc its still a great genre but its not fresh or suprising by now without making it more complex. this movie felt like a blueprint to the 1984 book soviet dystopia genre so it didnt keep up with the times. many classic movies are still exciting and fresh just like when they came out including other movies of godard but this isn't one of them. but i can also see how it was probably one of godard's top commercial movies, bc it was easier to digest and more basic than his other work
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A movie you like but wouldn't recommend - stalker of tarkovsky and tarkovsky movies in general bc i think it would probs be boring to most ppl (its slow and not much plot) + tarkovsky movies r slow and the kind of movies u have to watch in the movie theater
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A movie musical you like - annette of leox carax. and its not only a good movie the music is so good too
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A horror movie you like - audition by takashi miike . love japanese violence
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A sci-fi movie you like - high life by claire denis. AND it has robert pattinson in it!!!!!!!111 and hes amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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A fantasy movie you like
A movie in your native language you like - Life According to Agfa by Assi Dayan. one of the only good israeli movies that exist bc i didnt see so far any good, worthwhile or complex israeli movie besides this one (not including documentaries).
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A foreign-language movie you like - (i put a bunch already so ill do one in a language i didnt put yet) tori and lokita by the dardenne brothers. takes place in belgium in french about a young refugee woman and a refugee child from africa who pose as brother and sister. this is going to destroy you but its such a good movie i cant recommend it enough but i still cant recover
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A movie you wish you could un-watch - the disney secretariat movie. it was so bad oh my god it was so fucking bad im in pain. i want disney to give me back the braincells i lost. this actor horse deserves so much better
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A performance you think is underrated - Vicenç Altaió (yeah had to google this one) in story of my death by albert serra. his acting was insane. probably one of the best acting perfomances ive ever seen, specifically the toilet scene stuck with me. so it's a period movie about casanova. there a scene in the movie that all of it is just him taking a shit. and of course it sounds goofy but it was actually a really human and sensitive depiction and his acting was so natural i completely forgot i was watching a movie. he really made this scene what it is. and tbh i think even from those other photos u can see what i mean on him
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A performance you think is overrated
A movie made better by the ending - only thing that comes up in my mind is barton fink of joel coen.. i can barely remember this movie bc i watched it years ago but (spoilers) i can just remember there was a twist in the middle that flipped the whole movie on its head and it was super enjoyable. besides this i cant think of anything
A movie ruined by the ending - the holy mountain of jodorowsky... at the time i watched it i was so disappointed by the ending it was so anticlimactic. i think he thought he did something but it just didnt work. (might be spoilers) same vibes when a story pulls "and then he found out it was all a dream". like.. in this case it just didnt feel fitting it was disappointing. but i watched it years ago so i wonder if i would feel the same now
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A trilogy/franchise you like cant think of anything
A movie you never get tired of talking about - drive my car by ryusuke hamaguchi. its fun to talk abt this movie bc even tho there are a lot of themes and details that make it what it is, its not too complex to not be able to grasp and pinpoint them. so its complex enough to be a good movie but not too complex to not be able to talk abt it, both abt the good and bad things (bc there r also choices the director made that i dont like). and there's also so much to talk abt that stems from this movie not only in the movie itself but also what it shows abt japanese cinema, contemporary japanese cinema/this generation of japanese directors versus the previous generations. also i love this director in general i recc all his movies
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A movie you never wanna hear about again - if i hear one more thing abt any marvel movie im going to kill myself
A movie you look forward to watching (could be an upcoming release or not) - aki karutismaki's fallen leaves that came out this year
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A movie you think looks beautiful - red desert of antonioni. i adore the aesthetic of this movie. tbh its probably my favorite movie visuals wise. i just cant stop adding photos from google bc i love everything slkfdsflsfgds
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A director you think is underrated - tbh hard to think of anyone.. i think any director i like got some kind of recognition, and if i think ok which one doesnt get mainstream recognition it would be basically most of them. so im trying to think.. who do i rlly think doesnt get recognition. maybe the crown should go to the photographer petra collins who actually directed the first season of euphoria before sam levinson kicked her out and claimed he did it and stole all her work
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A director you think is overrated - HITCHCOCK!!!!!!! HES NOT THAT GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HES TRULY NOT THAT GOOD!!!!!!!!!!! I COULD PULL UP 10 DIRECTORS FROM HIS TIME AND BEFORE HIM THAT ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN HE IS THAT ARENT AS HYPED UP. godard and kurosawa made movies so much better and decades before him so the reason hes hyped cant even be that what he made was groundbreaking for the time. hitchcock is MID
An animated movie you like - the cowboy bebop movie... its so fun and satisfying to watch i watched it so many times dsfdf
A silent movie you like cant think of anything
Your favorite movie - possession by andrej zulawski. im speechless abt it. dont read a summery go into this blind. its such an insane experience (sin look my fav movie is a polish movie)
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Your least favorite movie i dont rlly have one i have a whole bunch of movies i dont like but i dont have THE hated movie
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kentopedia · 4 months
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What kind of books do you think Nanami owns/reads?
I LOVE THESE KINDS OF ASKS !!!! <3
this may be kind of silly, but personally, i have this little hc that nanami loves history. so i think he probably has a collection of history books/biographies of things and people that he finds interesting. in particular i feel like he would really enjoy the renaissance era, as well as all the revolutions of the 1600-1800s ! not just the wars, but like the scientific & industrial revolutions too, since you can trace how society got to the point its at today.
in the same vein, i think he would enjoy philosophy books a lot. he doesn't take them at face value, but he likes to read to gather specific ideas and curate his own thinking about the world (as is the point of philosophy books).
as for fiction, i think nanami mostly enjoys classics. obviously he owns the most of japanese lit, but i think he probably cultivates a little library of books from all over the world. also, i could see him reading some sci-fi and fantasy, but like... the older ones. like you can't tell me teenage kento wasn't a lord of the rings fan bc i know he was.
oh also i think nanami would also enjoy 1900s satire books & dystopians. like 1984, animal farm, fahrenheit 451, brave new world etc. i could see him thinking about those frequently.
those are probably what he reads the most, but really, i think he'd be open to reading almost anything, especially if its something his s/o really loves. like is kento going to pick up acotar of his own volition ?? absolutely not. will he read it if you talk about it nonstop and tell him how much you enjoy it??? OF COURSE! he loves being able to talk about books with you, and he hope you'll read the ones he recommends as well
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watchmenanon · 1 year
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Exclusive: Noah Schnapp, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb Mclaughlin & Sadie Sink Spill Stranger Things 3 Secrets
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Classic, gory, fun, sad, bigger – those are just some of the words used by the young cast to sum up “Stranger Things 3” on Jimmy Fallon’s “The Tonight Show”.
The last time we left Hawkins, it was set in late 1984 and things have somewhat become normal once again. Well, as normal as it gets considering there are killer creatures from the Upside Down that can access our world.
When “Stranger Things 3” premieres on Netflix, the storyline will fast-forward to July 1985. There are new villains and a whole new threat . Having said that, the biggest obstacle that the group of wannabe Goonies are facing aren’t just Demogorgons but something more unnerving – puberty.
As producer Shawn Levy points out, “Our tagline is that ‘One summer can change everything’, but the reality is that growing up doesn’t happen at a constant or consistent speed. People develop in very different ways and at different rates“. To echo SFX, while some might be content playing “Dungeons & Dragons”, others are starting to feel that the kiddy stuff are well behind them.
As part of their Asia promo tour, Hype got the chance to sit down with Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Caleb Mclaughlin (Lucas Sinclair), and Sadie Sink (Maxine “Max” Mayfield) to talk about the exciting Netflix series.
Prior to our roundtable interview, the cast of “Stranger Things 3” made an appearance at the Stranger Things Summer Festival event held at Akiba Square.
During the Q&A session, the young actors got to interact with popular Japanese celebrities Ms Yuko Oshima (former group member of girl band AKB48) and comedy duo Speed Wagon (Jun Itoda and Kazuhiro Ozawa). They were also gifted with custom traditional Japanese outfits called HAPPI.
Fans who attended the event got to experience zones and game stalls that were inspired by elements of Summer in 1985 Hawkins, Indiana, and more. We were geeking out real hard but our highlight was, of course, our exclusive interview with the quartet.
How is “Stranger Things 3” different from season 1 and 2? 
Caleb: It’s different from the last 2 seasons, which had like a fall-wintery vibe. This one is bright and fun. We see the kids hanging at the Starcourt Mall… It’s essentially the same formula but you can’t tell as a viewer because the storyline is different and there are new characters.
What were your first reactions when reading the script? 
Sadie: Usually before reading the script, we hear rumours about what’s going to happen. Especially if there’s something big like a death.
Do you just get your own parts? Or are everyone’s parts included in the script as well?
Sadie: Yeah, we get the full script. It helps us get into the characters.
Gaten: Some people choose not to read everybody’s parts. They just go into their scenes.
Sadie: It make sense too because how is your character supposed to know what is going on with other characters.
Caleb: Sometimes I do that. It helps because I’ll have a natural reaction to the situation, especially when everyone is back together.
What would you say is the biggest change about your characters compared to the last season?
Caleb: I feel like Lucas faces battles differently; in a more composed way.
Sadie: I think Max is now more established in Hawkins. She’s not the new girl anymore. She’s earned her place in the group. She’s not letting Billy push her around anymore. She’s also super confident and that’s why I was drawn to her.
I like that we’re getting to see some girl power through Max and Eleven’s friendship too.
Sadie: Yes, we get to see this strong female friendship when Max kind of takes Eleven under her wing and shows her what it means to be your own individual self and teaches her to have her own style. It’s cool to see Max become her role model in a way.
Of course me and Millie have a genuine relationship off screen as well so I think that chemistry really shows.
Gaten: I think it’s great that the girls aren’t necessarily just the girlfriends.
Sadie: Yeah, they have their own storyline. Max’s purpose wasn’t to be Lucas’ girlfriend. She has her own thing going on and she’s very independent.
What is the craziest rumour or fan theory you’ve heard about your characters?
Sadie: In the beginning, there were a lot of rumours floating around about Max before you’ve seen her on season 2. People were like, ‘who’s this red head chick’ joining the show. Many assumed that she was going to have superpowers like Eleven.
Caleb: Or that you were going to take Mike away.
Gaten: We’ve been there from the beginning. So there’s not much for them to speculate, caused they know the characters already. Coming in later in the show, I can imagine (it being harder for Sadie). Every new addition, fans are going to be skeptical about it.
Sadie: One of the weirdest thing I’ve heard someone say was like ‘Oh, the character is supposed to be tough. But she has red hair, she can’t be tough’. People say the weirdest things.
Eleven is the only one with powers. If you could possess one in real life or as your character, what would it be?
Sadie: I want to be able to teleport. Max will probably like invisibility so she can steal stuff.
Caleb: For Lucas, maybe like Hawkeye in Avengers or something. It’ll be cool to see him be a sharp shooter. Or like Green Arrow too.
Noah: I guess for me, I’ve always wanted to have invisibility cause then you’d get to do anything you wanted. It’d be so fun! Like maybe just walk up into the plane and skip all the queues.
Gaten: For me, I’d like to be a shape-shifter and change into different animals. For Dustin, I think he’d be really cool in manipulating technology. Say there’s a bad guy attacking with missiles, he could just reprogram them with his mind. If a car is coming towards him, he could just turn off the engine.
Noah, your character has gone through some pretty dark encounters. How do you detach once the director yells cut? What about the rest of you guys?
Noah: I separate the two things as much as I can. So usually, after an intense scene, when the director yells cut, I’m never really sad.
Sadie: You can just snap out of it?
Noah: It’s just two different worlds, you know.
Gaten: I think it’s good that you’re able to shed it so quickly cause there are so many performers that hold on to it. Especially when a character that deals so much as Will does.
Sadie: It depends on the scene too. If it’s really emotional, it’s harder.
Gaten: I feel like after those big emotional scenes, everyone is usually very quiet afterwards.
Do you have a favourite storyline for “Stranger Things 3”?
Caleb: I’d say that my favourite parts in this season are the last few episodes.
Before we end this session, can you leave us with a little tease ?
Noah: The ending is very sad.
Gaten: It’s an emotional season and there’s heartbreak.
Sadie: It’s very different from the season two ending. Tears will be shed.
Gaten: More than previous seasons, I feel.
Caleb: The first two seasons were very dark and eerie, while season three is more comical and light-hearted. It is still dark, but it’s different from what I was used to… There’s a really good cliffhanger too.
“Stranger Things 3” premieres on Netflix on 4th July 2019.
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tsintotwo · 1 year
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(Part 4/4)
(Earlier: Parts 1, 2, and 3)
Okay, finally getting to the 4th and last post talking about Tom Sturridge in his projects. There's not too much left to say as these are mostly cameos.
Vanity Fair (2004)- This was the first movie Tom was in as a grownup (edit: nope, this was the 2nd)- in period clothing (and looking like a million bucks, as you would suspect). Screentime: 2min. You can tell he's still finding his footing in all this. But he's got the it factor already.
Journey's End (2017)- Movie about Brit soldiers stuck in trenches waiting for death during WW2. Sam Claffin and Paul Bettany are in this and I recognized neither before seeing credits 🤦‍♀️ Anyway, Tom plays a bad soldier: drinks and girls are his forte, fighting- not so much. His character is in this movie to basically show the bone-chilling, hope-crushing, cruelly pointless side of wars. He uses his 3/4 scenes to drive that point home like a master. There's one super emotionally charged scene with Sam that sears into the mind- they both absolutely chew it up.
Song to Song (2017)- Tom being in this movie is just the most RANDOM thing in the world, guys. Song to Song is about the music industry and rockstar life, and Tom shows up for like 2mins to play Ryan Gosling's hometown farmland brother of all things??? Wut. 2 lines of dialogue. Cute hair, tho. Cute everything.
Hello Apartment (2018)- Slice-of-life short film about how we all leave our mark in the spaces we move through. Dakota Fanning made this and asked Tom to be in it- they've been friends since doing Effie Gray. Tom is MC's stormy bf- a bit of kissing, a bit of pouting, a bit of shouting. Worth it. (Aside: some STUNNING shots in this, kudos to Dakota). This is on youtube.
That's it, actually. Only movie of Tom's I haven't gotten to is Junkhearts (2011). It's on Amazon Prime for $4 which is worth it, but it seems like an intense movie and I'll take a break before trying to watch this one.
A significant part of Tom's career has been theater work. From what I've gathered, seems like he's done some phenomenal work there- both in UK and US. Got cool awards and noms. Of course, if your play isn't Hamilton, it doesn't get to be on any screen, so there's no way to see any of those now. The one I'm most gutted about is 1984 (2017) on Broadway. I love the og classic by George Orwell, and by all accounts this adaptation/interpretation was banging (AND controversial!). Tom playing a role like Winston Smith... I'd have loved it so fuckin much * screaming-into-pillow break*
How does Tom choose his projects?
"The first thing I’m drawn to is a piece of writing, to an author, to a director. Weirdly, it’s rarely a character. I want to work with people or with texts that push me and make me learn things that I think I can’t do. Because if I think I can do it, then I can’t surprise myself. And if I can’t surprise myself, then I’m definitely not going to surprise an audience." -Tom for Interview magazine, 2022
Why does he often do troubles characters?
"... I think what I’m attracted to is being able to explore a spectrum of emotion. It’s easier to find comedy in something sad than it is to find darkness in something funny. I can be all kinds of people when the darkness is there. Also, the first character I ever played onstage was a boy who murders all of his schoolmates [in Punk Rock]. I do think there’s something to be said by, “You get stuck in a gorge that you start with.” People have always gone, “Oh, yeah. He’s the fucked-up guy.” - same
Here's something about me: I love falling in love with men on silver screen. It's the only space where it's okay to be in love with a version of someone you made in your head because you're not going to know any other version. The only space you get to channel your feelings six ways to Sunday: write posts, write stories, draw, make any art- people will actually celebrate those (whereas try talking to your friend about a new irl crush for five days straight, on the sixth they'll smack you upside your head). The feelings are intense because these men are deliberately performing for you, the emotions forever unsullied because they're not gonna come hurt you (unless they're being cancelled lol). And they're all the finest specimens! So, yeah, I love it, and it happens periodically. What's rarer, tho, is that I get attracted to an actor's whole personality. I mean, like, all of these hot men are hella charming, and you can yassify almost anyone based on interview moments. But, idk, it doesn't always click with me, and I love a character, ship a couple, then move on. Tom, tho, is going to be one of those 2/3 permanent ones. I just find him interesting which to me, is the thing. (And also, he turned out to be one of those rare people in life who lets you know things about yourself that you didn't know before. Huh. Who knew?) And yeah, okay, he's very hot and insanely talented which started this whole intense phase but while this won't last, a genuine fondness and love will. He has a place in my heart forever. It's been such a good time discovering him that I'm legit grateful to the universe.
I'll do a bonus post with links to Tom interviews/vids/ stuff that are worth checking out. Until then, guys.
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video-gh0st · 8 months
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So back in June I watched all the Ghostbusters films cause it was the anniversary of the original movie and I thought I'd do a quick bullet point review since it's been a bit since I watched them all together.
Ghostbusters (1984)
It's still a classic. Has memorable moments that will live on.
Fun scenes. Going after Slimer is always silly and chaotic.
Peter Venkman is a rough. I actually had a person tell me that Venkman is the reason why they never watched the first movie, and I don't blame them.
Wish there was a bit more build up to the confrontation with Gozer. Would be neat if they kept uncovering clues rather than just the moment they figured it out in the jail cell.
Ghostbusters II (1989)
I don't know why people dunk on this movie, it's great!
You can tell the cast and crew are having more fun and things are a bit more fleshed out.
Venkman actually has some good character growth and is not a total creep!
I actually like the build up to the climax on this one. Throughout the movie, there's a focus on the slime buildup in the city and the flow of the story feels good.
Some fun light scares.
I kinda don't like the whole "the ghosts just stop showing up" thing. It's a trope specifically for this franchise that's not really explained. Just "yeah nothing happened between the movies and people think, we're frauds again! Gotta do it all over again!"
Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)
This movie gets a lot of undeserved hate thrown towards it for being the female lead reboot. A bunch of misogynist trolls threw a fit and never gave it a shot the moment it was announced.
The cast was great tbh. Everyone seemed to gel with one another.
Chris Hemsworth plays a himbo and we see him with his shirt off.
I really like the main antagonist in this movie. I think his character could have been fleshed out a bit more, but still fun idea.
The gear looks really cool in this movie.
Some scenes do keep going a bit too long and has like not good Saturday Night Live skit energy. I think they relied a bit too much on improv.
How the fuck is Chris Hemsworth the funniest motherfucker alive and why is he so cute?
There's a teeny tiny bit a queerness in this story, but I also feel like there's themes of found family going on here too and I like that.
Chris Hemsworth plays a himbo and we see him with his shirt off.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Trailers do this movie a disservice by making it feel like it's going for a Stranger Things feel, kinda relying a bit too much on nostalgia or even doing the "wow kids these days." It just felt like they didn't have any confidence on the movie itself when marketing this tbh.
The tone is a bit more serious, but honestly I'm fine with it. Still has some funny moments, but it's leaning more into the horror part a bit more.
Watching Phoebe learn more about her grandfather is honestly fun. And this movie does a great job with handing things off to a new generation in a way that doesn't feel like it's disingenuous.
Literally cried at the end. Honestly that ending felt wonderful and it felt like a good tribute to Harold Ramis.
I don't know why, but my first watch of this last year wasn't as good as the second watch this year. I don't know what happened. But I remember the first time I watched this and felt like it was just ok but not my favorite. Maybe it was just a bit of frustration that the sequel to Answer the Call got cancelled before it could even get into full production.
I appreciate the movie using some practical effects. There are just certain elements that you can't mess with in Ghostbusters movie and they nailed it.
Muncher is my least favorite ghost tbh. Idk, there are people who love Muncher and I do like the tardigrade inspired design, but idk, they didn't appeal to me like the other ghosts did.
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olderthannetfic · 2 years
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Two of the recent asks on your blog just made me realise how fucking EXHAUSTED I am of of all the "boy who cried wolf" and "boy who vaguely heard about a stray dog looking for food in their area and decided it was obviously an invasion of rabid wolves" situations on this website, and in fandom in general.
I hate that my first thought when someone on anon talks about being groomed as a minor by an older person who "let" them interact with their nsfw fanworks, is "let me guess, is this gonna turn into a spiel about how because minors often ignore warnings and can't be trusted not to lie about their age to strangers online, everyone who posts nsfw anywhere but on places you need to be given a password or to pay actual money to access is a pedophile?" Because I've already seen every possible version of "checking out the rating, warnings, and tags and clicking "proceed" when the "this work could contain adult content" thing shows up isn't the same as consenting to see adult content" and I'm fully prepared for the day when we all get hit with "if you're an adult and don't have Minors DNI in all your social media profiles and your fandom accounts you're clearly a predator.""
And I hate that my first thought when someone on anon talks about being uncomfortable with some literature classic and getting told they're just too sensitive or equated with pro-censorship people is, "yeah, well, assuming it really went like that, people ARE gonna be on the lookout for the next big clout-chasing "Mark Twain was a horrible racist bastard for not foreseeing how the English language would evolve and not using words appropriate for a modern audience so having students read Tom Sawyer in school is basically a hate crime" or "there is sexist content in 1984 which means George Orwell was a pretentious hack with nothing of value to say about society or politics" thing, or the next person saying "Emily Bronte was just some idiotic romance-addicted white woman trying to pass a toxic abusive relationship as Twu Wuv" and proclaiming themselves the one lonely enlightened feminist in the land, or the next fic writer "Dante was just some racist homophobic creep who wrote some weird Bible fic so his blatant Self Insert could keep on harassing the girl he was obsessed with even after her death" to prove they're so forward-thinking and original and deserve to be regarded as a BNF defending fandom as a whole against the hordes of evil literature professors supposedly out to destroy it... I mean, this is the website that came up with "don't use a quote about Orestes and Pylades for your OTP because that's an incest" and "gay men shouldn't call themselves Achillean because Achilles and Patroclus might have had a pederastic relationship" yet worship Sappho as this relatable quirky wlw icon without giving a single fuck about the fact that she might be the one surviving example we have of institutionalized female pederasty, and I'd trust it to fall for a whole new MedievalPOC scam before I'd trust it to give a nuanced take on any kind of literary work, ESPECIALLY any literary work older than the early 2000s."
Sometimes I just feel the wolf could be right there howling at my door and I'd probably just say "ugh, great, those stupid kids got into my brain enough that now I can't even go about my day without imagining that there's a fucking wolf howling for no reason" and not even check out of the window. Or I'd check and still assume the wolf is just a big dog even then.
--
It's a genuine problem. Because there are still predators out there.
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palant1r · 1 year
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Week 2: The Right is Right about "Brave New World"
Every so often, some right-wing talking head will state that our current world is just like 1984 or Fahrenheight 451 or Brave New World, the most recent example being Elon Musk. This inevitably results in rightful mockery from Tumblr and Twitter, pointing out that the figure in question likely has not read the books, or if they had, did not understand them. This is, in all cases, likely true. However, I feel like there's an implied corollary in this response: that the reason we can tell that Elon Musk or Ben Shapiro or whoever didn't understand these books is that these books do not actually align with their politics, and they're simply using the surface-level signifiers of dystopia without actually comprehending the actual societal issues the author was taking aim at.
In the case of Brave New World, this is false. Aldous Huxley would be horrified at today's world, and would likely see his dystopian creation mirrored in it. This is because Brave New World is incredibly reactionary.
Dystopia is a very powerful tool for social critique in literature, because it exaggerates the problems the author wishes to highlight to the degree that they cannot be ignored or excused, forcing the reader to confront the true implications of processes or norms they may have come to take for granted. However, this also makes it harder to immediately disagree with the politics compared with a dystopian work, and makes it important to isolate what issues a dystopia is actually taking aim at, and what anxieties such writing stems from.
Brave New World is a progressive dystopia — unlike, say, the Handmaid's Tale, the world Huxley depicts was ruined by progress and new ideas. It's a book that longs for the old world. Its thesis can be summed up by "Reject modernity, embrace tradition," which is an automatic red flag.
I won't go fully into detail as to how I've derived what Brave New World is taking aim at, given that this is just a blog post about my book of the week and not an essay. I shall instead give a numbered list of the things that Aldous Huxley is trying to say that I don't like.
The nuclear, heterosexual, monogamous family is an essential facet of a good and just civilization. Any deviation from that is a modern perversion.
New art is not valuable, and it is dangerous in its valuelessness. The old works of the broader Western canon must be the basis by which we judge the aesthetic and moral value of art.
Conflict and struggle is necessary to form the moral core and solidarity of a nation, and should be elevated to a place of glory. (Yes, this is fascist as hell)
A society cannot be moral and individuals cannot be grounded without God. Modernity leaves no room for God. (The Native Americans in this story worship Jesus, which helps John become Enlightened. It's fucking weird and racist.)
Contraception is a direct agent in the degradation of important sexual norms, and these strict sexual norms are essential for humanity to experience its fullest potential. It's also bad because it deprives women of their natural need for motherhood.
Globalism Bad because World Too Big
Eugenics is bad, not because of any of the actual reasons that eugenics is bad, but because it is New Science and results in the undermining of what is natural
What is natural is good.
The arrival of radio and other new forms of storytelling represents the dearth of societal intellectual development
When the masses are given control, they will clamor for happiness instead of fulfillment
There's absolutely more wild reactionary stuff in Brave New World, but I'm not in the mood to fully analyze it. My point is, I'm starting to realize how much I've internalized the idea that classic dystopias are taking aim at the modern realizations of the things they criticize, rather than contemporary anxieties about modernity. It's important to remember that just because an author wrote a popular social critique doesn't mean they have a monopoly on what is Bad in society.
And when conservatives cite Brave New World as proof of modern society's degeneracy, yeah sure, it's fun to dunk on them for not reading it. But I need to make sure I don't fall into the trap of arguing that they're wrong because they didn't read the book — even if they read and totally understand the book, I do not want the direction of society to be shaped by Aldous Huxley. Modern conservatives are not misinterpreting Huxley's work. They are the modern custodians of the worldview it represents.
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tatelangdonsweater · 1 year
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I just finished all 11 seasons of AHS, and… honestly, I’m amazed. I came for Evan Peters, but I stayed for the beauty of the series and the other amazing actors in it.
Now. Here’s my ranking of all eleven seasons (note: I’m ranking AHS Red Tide and AHS Death Valley separately). Disclaimer: everything here is just my opinion. You don’t have to agree with me.
1. Murder House. It’s a classic for a reason. Tate and Violet’s romance is to die for (no pun intended), and Jessica Lange does a great performance as Constance. Also, Addy and Violet deserved better.
2. NYC. For some reason, I love learning about this specific period in LGBT history, and the last two episodes were a heartbreaking- but realistic- portrayal of AIDS. Made me cry. And the soundtrack was the best of all the seasons.
3. Hotel. It was dark, it was sexy, and I loved the plot twist- totally came out of left field. Also, Lady Gaga and Angela Bassett? Iconic.
4. Coven. Has my comfort character, Kyle Spencer, in it. Also love Misty Day (that girl is definitely autistic I do not make the rules). I didn’t really warm up to Madison in this season, but I did eventually in Apocalypse. This season also has very striking visuals- the intro is the best one of the series, imo.
5. Cult. Evan’s acting as Kai was superb (and he’s also really hot hehe). I liked how it differed from previous seasons in that there weren’t any supernatural elements here. I also liked the political commentary.
6. Freak Show. As much as I love Evan’s darker characters, I also love when he plays good boys. And Bette and Dot are lovely. That being said, I don’t really understand why they threw in the character of Chester so close to the end of the season. Didn’t make much sense to me but 🤷🏽‍♂️
7. Red Tide. I liked how it satirized the whole “all artists are a little crazy” trope, and how far people are willing to go for greatness. I loved Alma (the little girl). It’s a little unnerving to see creepy child characters, but she did it well.
8. 1984. This one was kinda mid. But I do love a good slasher. I liked the ‘80s outfits and soundtrack, and the intro was great. I just feel like they dragged it out a bit.
9. Apocalypse. I know this is a fan favorite, and I liked seeing characters from Murder House and Coven again, but I feel like it was really rushed and the new characters (save for Michael) weren’t really developed. Also wasn’t a fan of how much the narrative jumped around.
10. Asylum. I’m so sorry 😭 but there was too much going on in this season. Maybe if they’d stuck with the Bloody Face + asylum storyline, then it would have worked, but the whole alien abduction thing was…. idk. Maybe it’s just because I don’t enjoy those types of stories. I loved Kit and Lana, though, and loved to hate the nuns.
11. Roanoke. Again, this one was a dud. No AHS intro, characters weren’t exactly memorable… this gets points for Kathy Bates’s character, though. And Audrey and Rory’s relationship, which reminded me of Tahani and Jason from The Good Place.
12. Death Valley. This one was just a snooze-fest. The characters and story weren’t memorable at all, and like I said, I’m not a big fan of alien abduction plotlines. Also felt rushed to me.
Can’t wait to see what else Ryan Murphy comes up with!
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whileiamdying · 5 months
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We’ll Never Live in a World Without Tina Turner
Nothing could ever scare the fire out of her voice, which carried the whole story of American music in it
BY ROB SHEFFIELD MAY 24, 2023
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DENIZE ALAIN/SYGMA/GETTY IMAGES
Tina Turner didn’t just pull off the greatest comeback in music history — she invented the whole concept of the comeback as we know it. She became a solo superstar when she was 44. Things like that simply don’t happen. That’s how old Brandy, Usher, Adam Levine, Lance Bass, and John Legend are right now. At that age, Tina Turner was just beginning.
Turner, who died Wednesday at 83, carried the whole story of American music in her voice, because in so many ways, she was that story, but she was also a lot more. She was Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee, daughter of sharecroppers, fighting her way in and out of the chitlin circuit. She was just a kid when she got famous, as half of Ike & Tina Turner. Her deep-country voice and his guitar always made a fearsome combo, in Fifties hits like “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and “I Idolize You.” “The emotions I expressed were real because I lived those feelings,” she wrote in Rolling Stone in a 2019 essay. “Even ‘Private Dancer’ — which seems to be about prostitution, but is also about wishes, hopes, and dreams — tells the story of women like me, caught up in sad situations, who somehow find a way to go on.”
Her defining hit was “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” a shocker from the summer of 1984. The song has gotten so familiar, it’s easy to overlook how it shocked the audience, on the radio in between Madonna, Prince and Cyndi Lauper. Unlike anyone else near her age, she had zero interest in passing for young. This woman had lived. She’d stared down more hard times than your miserable Smiths-loving teenage mind could imagine. The audience didn’t know what she’d been through — she wasn’t telling those stories yet. But even a kid could hear the rage and pain in her voice. A grandmother, and tougher than anyone.
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She emerged in the Sixties as a one-woman genre — too rock for R&B, too R&B for rock, too brawny for girlie novelties, too raw-voiced for youthful romance. Her most famous hits with Ike were about how much hard road she’d already traveled, like “Proud Mary” and “Nutbush City Limits.” But her never-quite-youthful youth was just the opening act, because she truly became Tina Turner in 1984, with Private Dancer. It was a whole new kind of blockbuster, shimmying over generational, racial, cultural, musical boundaries. She was the first rock star who made a big deal about being a grandmother. Lots of stars had claimed to be the Queen of Rock & Roll, but after Private Dancer, nobody came near that crown.
She had a new audience of Eighties fans, but hardly any of them knew any of the music she’d made with her ex-husband. For them, Tina Turner was right now. Neither she nor they wanted to recall her past. “Rhythm and blues to me has always been a bit of a downer,” she said. She couldn’t stand it when the press used the word “victim.” She had rocking to do.
Tina told her life story many times — in interviews, her books (the keeper is the 2019 memoir My Love Story), the Broadway musical Tina, the classic biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It. (Your mom is probably watching it on Lifetime right now.) The story turns on her escape from and triumph over her abusive marriage. But people still underestimate the cultural importance of Turner telling that story. Strange as it might seem today, she was the first star to talk aloud about domestic violence, to insist on it as part of the story, not to gloss over it or act coy. Until she came along, the idiom “domestic violence” wasn’t even part of the language. “I admire her survival as a battered wife,” Gloria Steinem told Rolling Stone in December 1984. “For someone well-known to talk about it helps.” 
Hero worship for Tina Turner is practically an industry, yet we’re still underrating what she did and how much interior resources she had to call on to get it done, at a time when there was no precedent or protocol. She still doesn’t get enough credit for that, but it’s not the kind of credit she really wanted. Part of her greatness is refusing to be the professional survivor the media wanted her to be. She didn’t need another hero.
She epitomized the story of rock if anyone did. She sang her ferocious “Come Together” just three months after Abbey Road, breathing more sex and dread into it than even John Lennon could have imagined. Many years and several lives later, she was onstage with Paul McCartney in 1986, when he sang “Get Back” live for the first time since the rooftop. It’s a star-studded charity event with Elton John, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, etc. Yes, obviously, Phil Collins is on drums. Tina sings the verse about Sweet Loretta, an American girl who leaves a home she can’t get back to. She’s the only Black artist here, almost the only American, definitely the only woman. She lived Loretta’s story before Paul even wrote the song. The jam keeps rolling, but after Tina, nobody goes near that microphone. She has just shut up the planet’s most un-shut-uppable men. She’s the grown-up on this stage. Every other rock star here is a child.
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JANUARY, 1975: Ann-Margret Olsson, a TV variety special, from the golden days of TV variety specials. Ann-Margret introduces Tina as her best friend. They duet on “Nutbush City Limits,” Tina’s life story, and then “Honky Tonk Women,” the Rolling Stones’ ode to Memphis queens. (Ann-Margret screams the line “He blew my nose and then he blew my mind!”) Then they bump and grind to — what else?— “Proud Mary.”
What could be a more American duet? Ann-Margret, the Swedish song-and-dance girl, star of Kitten With A Whip, the Hollywood bombshell who shook her hips with Elvis in Viva Las Vegas. Tina Turner, the sharecropper’s daughter from Nutbush, Tennessee. They bonded when they were filming The Who’s rock-opera movie, Tommy. (In the movie, Tina plays the Gypsy Queen who symbolizes acid; A-M gets drowned in baked beans. Times were hard for rock & roll queens in 1975.)
But here they are singing about rollin’ on the Mississippi River steamboats. They’re laughing so hard as they dance, they’re practically falling over. Neither of them really belongs on a steamboat, and neither did the guy who wrote the song, a white suburban kid from El Cerrito named John Fogerty. He’s never set foot on the bayou, but he’s gotten drafted, served his time, and worked his way back into the bar-band scene with Creedence Clearwater Revival. This song is a fantasy, but all three of them traveled a long distance to get here, and the song is a generous river that carries them all. “You on a riverboat?” A-M asks. “There hasn’t been one of those around in 75 years!” Tina laughs, “I wear my eighties well!” 
Tina already had a hit with “Proud Mary” in the Sixties, but in 1975 she has no idea what this song will mean to her in years to come. She’ll turn “Proud Mary” into a feminist rock anthem, representing all the unspeakable (and unspoken) violence she escapes and her determination to claim her own story. But right now, she’s still trapped in her marriage to Ike. In less than a year, she will finally leave him, on the Fourth of July. She’s got nothing to her name but 36 cents, a gas-station credit card, and the blood-stained white suit on her back. Ann-Margret takes her in, hooking her up with designer Bob Mackie and a divorce lawyer.
But right now, it’s just Ann-Margret and Tina, singing on a TV soundstage in London. They can’t stop laughing hysterically. Two women sharing a weirdly private joke in a public place. The big wheel keeps on turnin’.
AFTER SHE ESCAPED Ike, Tina was written off by the whole music business. She was a Black woman in her forties. It was time for the oldies circuit. But she discovered that there was a rising Eighties generation of New Wave kids, especially in the U.K. And they idolized Tina Turner. She did a 1982 duet with Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, in their side project as B.E.F., the British Electric Foundation. She was shocked these kids didn’t see her as washed-up. They saw her as a vibrant, relevant legend in her prime. As she wrote in My Love Story, “Martyn, who was practically a boy, though a very talented one, happened to think that this middle-aged singer had a bright future.”
Tina sang “Ball of Confusion” with them, in one take. To her amazement, it took off on a brand new cable network the kids were into. MTV had a nationwide audience and a playlist full of unconventional Black rockers who didn’t fit into radio: Prince, Grace Jones, Joan Armatrading, Peter Tosh, Bob Marley. “Ball of Confusion” made her an MTV star, even though American radio wouldn’t touch her. She cut another single and video with Martyn Ware, a remake of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” an even bigger hit.
That led to the night that changed her life, in NYC, January 1983. David Bowie was having dinner with his new record label, right before Let’s Dance came out, getting wined and dined, but he informed them he had plans for the night: He was going to see Tina Turner live. He wouldn’t dream of missing her. He dragged everyone along with him. Her manager Roger Davies got a last-minute call, asking for 63 spots on the guest list. “My Cinderella moment,” she called it in her book. “That night at the Ritz was the equivalent of going to the ball (minus the part about Prince Charming) because it changed my life dramatically.” 
After the show, she raised hell all night with Bowie, Keith Richards, and Ron Wood, sitting around the hotel piano, singing Motown classics, guzzling Dom Perignon. They posed for one of the coolest rock photos of all time: Tina, Keith and Bowie all drinking from the same bottle of Jack Daniels. She was a rock star now, forever. Her story was just beginning. 
It was funny for fans how she was so into old-school rock, but she spiced up her live set with ZZ Top’s “Legs” (she had them) and Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” (she wasn’t). At Live Aid, dueting with Mick Jagger, the song they did was “It’s Only Rock & Roll But I Like It.”
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But she was really ahead of her time. The concept of “classic rock” didn’t exist yet. (Not until the radio format began in 1986.) Rock culture was still so stuck on the mythos of youth and newness that her Seventies-retro concept was kinda ahead of her time. In a way, it’s an underrated Tina innovation: the Black grandma who invented dad rock.
ROLLING STONE BLEW up Private Dancer with one of the most influential reviews the magazine has ever run, from the brilliant critic Debby Miller. The review framed the Tina Turner comeback narrative, as the world has known it ever since. The final lines: “Last year, I heard Tina Turner sing that awful Terry Jacks song ‘Seasons in the Sun’ on television, and she found something in it that broke her heart. Imagine her doing the same thing to good songs.” 
She and Bowie always had one of the most endearing rock-star friendships — they always brought out the weird in each other. They duetted on his strange Pepsi commercial, starring David as Dr. Frankenstein and Tina as the rock goddess in his laboratory, both singing on “Modern Love.” They also duetted on a weirdly touching synth-reggae version of “Tonight” in 1984, about lovers separated by death, their voices meshing for the payoff lines “I will love you till I die/I will see you in the sky/Tonight.” She found her permanent home in Zurich, becoming a Swiss citizen. In so many ways, her closest career twin was Leonard Cohen, a fellow Nicheren Buddhist devotee. They were both born in the Thirties, but blew up in the Eighties as icons of middle-aged cool, after decades in the game. They showed everyone else how to age gracefully, flaunting the cracks in their voices, living their long weird lives in the tower of song.
When her life story became the Angela Bassett movie What’s Love Got To Do With It, she stole the show at the end with “Proud Mary.” But she couldn’t bring herself to watch it. As she wrote in Rolling Stone, “I never saw What’s Love Got to Do With It because I was too close to those painful memories at the time, and I was afraid it would be upsetting, like watching a documentary.” She resisted the idea of the 2019 Broadway musical Tina for the same reason, saying, “I didn’t feel like talking about that stuff from the past because it gave me bad dreams.” But she loved the musical when she saw it with an audience. She said, “I want to pass the baton, so to speak, to them, and anyone facing a challenge, so they leave the theater standing proud, with their chests out and chins up, inspired to believe, ‘I can do it.’” 
Really, she spent her whole life doing that. And that’s why Tina Turner’s voice will never go silent. In the end, she is the big wheel who keeps on turning, forever.
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