people who were screaming, crying, throwing up over when we almost thought kinnporsche were cousins were weak bc they never had to go through shipping Them:
The following interview took place last June. Unfortunately, Mustard had taken a break from the website at the time (due to the general chaos of life) and did not post it. Mustard has since caught up with Meggie! Meggie would like to share:
“I do not have any new releases coming up now, but I have had one new release since we last spoke. It’s called “Tell Me Summer Never Ends.” Every summer I…
Fifteen years is such a fuck-off long time to know someone. Like, how long is long to know someone is always relative to your age but it’s like almost half their lives. Basically their whole adult lives. Like they KNOW each other in spite of all the bullshit that got in the way.
And! More importantly to this post: everybody knows them together. Like, if you had asked any random Worcesterite in their orbit before the show if Allison McRoberts and Patty O’Connor were friends, you’d get “yeah, sure, Kevin and Neil are best friends and they all hang out constantly, I [love those guys/hate those maniacs]!”
So the change over the course of the series, to Allison and Patty being publicly best friends, slots directly into that framework. I bet to any given person it feels less like new information and more like something you always knew and just never actually thought about. It doesn’t matter if they were only observable huddled on their porches or walking around town talking all the time for like what, two or three months, they must have been doing that always, just you never had cause to pay attention.
So I want you guys to think about what hearing all this stuff from the outside is like in context: Patty O’Connor is dating a woman (not really a surprise, right guys?), that woman is a cop (ok that IS a surprise), Kevin McRoberts is like running for office and then like locally famous, Allison McRoberts DISAPPEARS for six months, Kevin dies in a house fire, surprise Allison is back, Patty dumps the cop and the two of them now live together. In certain circles you might even guess that the drug-dealing ties in. Like seriously at least one person in Worcester has gone full Pepe Silvia dot gif trying to convince people that Patty O’Connor and Allison McRoberts have been fucking for years and have at last murdered Kevin.
Reloaded 3
2001
Alternative Rock / Indie Rock / Pop-Rock / Britpop / Post-Grunge / Nu Metal
Back in the early 2000s, the compilation arm of Universal Music put out a brief series of double-discs in the UK called Reloaded that ended up serving as something of a contemporaneous snapshot of the country's wide alternative rock landscape, spanning from soft and folky, indie-type stuff, to the most banal of radio rock, to the leading rock sound du jour at the time that was nu metal. And for an American listener like me, this series' third installment here, from '01, mostly makes for a great and clashing mix of bad and dumb nostalgic fun with some genuinely good turn-of-the-millennium rock fare that I'm not nearly as familiar with.
But although this comp is heavily dominated by rock music, the tracks that close out each disc are actually electronic, and I think they happen to be the two best songs of this whole set. Maybe you don't know Finnish band Pepe Deluxé's nifty vocal breakbeat tune, "Before You Leave," by name, but perhaps you remember it from this big and strange 2001 Levi's ad? 🤔
youtube
And the other swell non-rock tune is UK duo I Monster's retro-futuristic trip hop classic, "Daydream in Blue," which was then later sampled by Lupe Fiasco for his own "Daydreamin'." But as you could probably tell, I Monster themselves sampled from another song to create their own too, which was a cover of Belgian band Wallace Collection's "Daydream," that was done in 1960 by a German group called Günter Kallmann Chor.
Now, for the cream of the crop when it comes to the actual rock music on here, there's Cali indie band Grandaddy, who also happen to provide the theme music for one of my favorite podcasts too, Citations Needed, which isn't a music-related show, but you should definitely listen to anyway 😁. On "Hewlett's Daughter," the group provides a soft and light, floaty indie groove, with frontman Jason Lytle playing keyboards while also delivering some Neil Young-type vocals.
And another rock song I really love on here is one that feels way more formulated for an alt-rock radio type of format, but in that regard, it excels exceptionally well as an unrelentingly smooth and upbeat tune: "Catch the Sun," by UK indie band Doves. This one doesn't appear to have charted in any capacity Stateside, but it probably would have if it had been given a real chance to. And it was featured in Project Gotham Racing too, which is a videogame that I happened to play a lot of when this song was around, so maybe that's partially why I enjoy it as much as I do 🤔.
And for the fun and dumb nostalgia, we have a whole litany of stuff: Limp Bizkit's "Rollin'," Papa Roach's "Last Resort," Matchbox Twenty's "If You're Gone," Wheatus' "Teenage Dirtbag," Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch"—whose new wave intro I've always really loved—and Creed's "With Arms Wide Open," which sees Scott Stapp singing the word 'man' like no one had probably ever heard before ('mahhn') and then singing the word 'demand,' which partially rhymes with 'man,' in a completely different way, but also pretty much exactly like you would've expected him to sing it anyway ('demayhnd')?
So, I pretty much love this thing. Quality rock music, a couple terrific alt-electronic tunes that have aged really well, and then a bunch of songs that will take you right back to the silliness that represented so much mainstream rock music in 2001.
Highlights:
CD1:
Limp Bizkit - "Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)"
Papa Roach - "Last Resort"
Muse - "New Born"
Queens of the Stone Age - "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret"
Wheatus - "Teenage Dirtbag"
Feeder - "Seven Days in the Sun"
JJ72 - "Algeria"
Placebo - "Taste in Men"
Ocean Colour Scene - "Up On the Down Side"
Grandaddy - "Hewlett's Daughter"
Elbow - "Red"
PJ Harvey - "A Place Called Home"
My Vitriol - "Grounded"
Bloodhound Gang - "The Bad Touch"
Pepe Deluxé - "Before You Leave"
#TBT to March when i photographed the now Tony nominated cast & director of AMERICAN BUFFALO during one of their rehearsals on Scott Pask’s INCREDIBLE set! … i go back 20 years with Sam Rockwell (and almost the same with Neil Pepe!) so they were kind enough to invite me over for an afternoon hang where i met Laurence Fishburne & Darren Criss for the first time and they were BEYOND sweet, funny & COOL … i LOVE the process, so it’s always a thrill for me to get some BTS action!
I think ROTG could have been more interesting story-wise and in character-design if there were less/shorter fight scenes, more interesting/longer verbal exchanges, more information and showing of magic and spirits, and less money spent on dream/nightmare sand. Also, having more gray morality: properly acknowledging the Guardians and Moon for wronging Pitch and Jack, Pitch's and Jack's resentment for them, etc. Also, it's a film I think would be better as a series, like Neil Gaiman's Sandman.
Hey, Anon!
Yeah, all of this is probably true, but the source books are also pretty black/white with the morality, and the verbal exchanges are not what I would call stellar, so I don't think RotG was ever going to be that nuanced. Frankly, Gaiman and Joyce are not on the same level, and that's likely the core of it.
But also I love fight scenes!! I'm a huge fight scene fan. Action/adventure is one of my favorite genres, so I can't be mad about a film spending time in a fight sequence. They can be some of the coolest parts of a story. RotG was limited in this way by TOOTHIANA NOT HAVING SWORDS and making all of them ranged fighters and/or not particularly effective. Like, does North ever actually get to sword fight? He waves them around a lot but my memory-impression is that he mostly jumped at things and those things poofed or moved away. So exciting, right?
More information would have been so nice. But I'm not sure that information was there to show. Like writing a character's backstory after making the whole film, if nobody has stopped to make a pepe silvia board about how it all works, then there's no way to put that information on screen. It's nice that it's open for fic and art to interpret, and we sure do interpret, but I like the feeling of fleshed out worlds and RotG does not deliver that.
Truly, RotG is a stunning work of visual art. Every one of those visual artists showed up and went above and beyond. The dream/nightmare sand looks like so much was spent on it because those artists believed in what they were doing. It's super not their fault that the writers phoned in their half of the movie. If the writers had written it differently, I'm sure the animators would have made those expanded dialogue and information scenes just as gorgeous as everything else.
But RotG was also made for kids, and someone on that staff definitely thought kids couldn't handle nuance. I suspect Joyce thinks kids can't handle nuance. The writing is so shallow because it was never meant to be that deep. The story suffered for it. I'll probably never forgive the writers. But I am going to give the artists a standing ovation for the time, thought, and effort they put in to what they were given.
So yeah, Anon. You're right. We could have had so much more. But I don't think it was ever in the cards.
Would have written this out like what I did with ‘Cakes’, but it may take a long, long while. Who knows, usually after a few days, I end up writing the actual fic.
——
Cronus is up to his usual schemes again, and this time he plans to take away Pegasus.
The Gods gave Belle the Golden Bridle when Belle first came to New Olympia when she first met Pegasus. Remembering the tale and how the bridle made Pegasus into an obedient servant, she could never do that to him. Not to any other animal, nor a majestic mythical creature like him.
She said no.
As usual Cronus sends one of his minions to get the bridle. Once Pegasus was out and about, they grabbed onto him and placed the bridle on his head.
Belle turned, enraged. Not only did they took her friend, they robbed Pegasus of his free will.
Now Pegasus was a servant of Cronus. Herry, remembering how Cronus used the dogs and Pepe against all of them that one time felt for Belle.
Cronus was now Pegasus’s rider on the battlefield. It hurt Belle that much more that she had to face her friend.
Cronus took out all the teens, one by one, but when he got to Belle, he had him at his hooves.
As Belle held on to the last of her strength, the colour of her hair reminded Pegasus of Bellerophon.
Shaken by the shackle of the Golden Bridle, Pegasus bucked off Cronus, making him fly high into the sky. The Golden Bridle shattered.
Sorrowful of what he did to Belle, their bond had never been stronger. He expressed condolences to the others for what he did when he was possessed under the bridle. All accept Neil. Though at that point Neil was used to Pegasus beating the crap out of him.