#Belgian Knife Society

[craft2eu]

Europäischen Tage des Kunsthandwerks: in ganz Europa vom 31.03. bis 02.04.2023

Vom 31. März bis 2. April 2023 haben Besucherinnen und Besucher von jung bis alt in ganz Deutschland die Gelegenheit, eine Entdeckungstour durch die Werkstätten von Kunsthandwerkerinnen und -handwerkern und Kreativschaffenden zu unternehmen und dabei die unverwechselbare Handschrift der regionalen Kreativszene zu erleben. Vom edlen Abendkleid über die klangvolle Kleinorgel oder filigrane…

[ghostflowerdreams]

Who are your favorite artists? The art kind.

I'm a bit surprised I haven't been asked this question before!

I appreciate so many artists that it's hard to narrow it down. But based on what I can remember and what I can check on my Instagram and bookshelf, here are some of my favorites:

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) → A French artist, illustrator, and sculptor, celebrated for his intricate and dramatic engravings and illustrations. He is best known for his illustrations of classic literary works, including Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. His skillful blend of realism and romanticism, combined with his mastery of visual storytelling, has established him as a significant figure in the history of illustration and fine art.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) → A Dutch post-impressionist painter renowned for his expressive use of color and bold brushwork, which had a profound influence on 20th-century art. His most famous works, such as Starry Night, Sunflowers, and The Bedroom, showcase his unique style and emotional depth, capturing the beauty of the world around him.

Henriëtte Ronner-Knip (1821–1909) → A Dutch-Belgian painter best known for her detailed and charming depictions of domestic cats. Specializing in animal paintings, her style combined realism and a romantic touch, often portraying cats in cozy, playful, or elegant settings that captured their personalities and grace. She was celebrated for her ability to convey texture, particularly in fur, and created intimate, lifelike scenes that became popular in 19th-century bourgeois society.

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) → A British painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, known for his romantic and mythological subjects. His art style blends elements of Romanticism and Classicism, featuring realistic figures, rich colors, and a strong focus on nature and detail. Waterhouse is best known for his depictions of female figures from mythology and literature, such as The Lady of Shalott and Ophelia, which convey a sense of beauty, melancholy, and mystery, making his work iconic in the realm of 19th-century art.

Harry Clarke (1889–1931) → An Irish stained-glass artist and illustrator. His work was influenced by Gothic art, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and Irish folklore. This blend resulted in a distinctive aesthetic that harmoniously intertwines beauty with darker themes. Clarke is best known for his illustrations in classic literary texts, including James Joyce's Dubliners and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. In these works, his illustrations masterfully balance whimsy and darkness, creating striking visual narratives that continue to resonate with audiences.

Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) → A Czech painter and decorative artist best known for his distinctive Art Nouveau style, characterized by intricate, flowing lines, elaborate floral motifs, and a harmonious use of soft colors. Mucha's work often features idealized female figures, embodying beauty and elegance, and is heavily inspired by his fascination with nature and Slavic folklore. He gained fame for his poster designs, particularly those promoting the actress Sarah Bernhardt, as well as his decorative panels and illustrations.

J.C. Leyendecker (1874–1951) → An American illustrator renowned for his iconic magazine covers and advertising art, particularly his work for The Saturday Evening Post and the Arrow Collar Man campaign. Leyendecker's mastery of visual storytelling and branding helped shape American commercial art in the early 20th century, and he significantly influenced later artists, including Norman Rockwell.

Leonid Afremov (1955–2019) → A Belarusian-born artist known for his vibrant, impressionistic paintings created using a palette knife technique. His distinctive art style features bold colors and dynamic brushstrokes, often depicting landscapes, city scenes, and emotional moments, such as rain-soaked streets or sunlit parks.

Ayami Kojima → A Japanese artist and illustrator best known for her work in video game design, particularly as the character designer for the Castlevania series. Her art style is characterized by intricate, gothic aesthetics, combining dark fantasy elements with a detailed, ethereal quality.

Victoria Francés → A Spanish illustrator known for her evocative illustrations that blend gothic, fantasy, and romantic themes. She is particularly known for her illustrated books, including the popular series Faery Tales, which showcases her unique blend of fantasy and gothic aesthetics.

Yoshitaka Amano → A Japanese artist and illustrator renowned for his distinctive style in character design and concept art, particularly for the Final Fantasy video game series. His style fuses his interests in traditional Japanese aesthetics like those of wood block prints with Western fantasy elements. It results in ethereal forms, and a dreamlike quality, especially with Amano's use of watercolor techniques and intricate details to create a sense of movement and fluidity in his work.

Nico Delort (IG: nicodelort) → A French illustrator known for his detailed, black-and-white artworks created using scratchboard techniques. His art style is heavily influenced by the aesthetics of 19th-century engravings and woodcuts, blending elements of Gothic, fantasy, and mythological themes. Delort's work is recognized for its dramatic use of light and shadow, intricate textures, and atmospheric depth, often depicting moody, fantastical scenes.

Vania Zouravliov → A Russian-born artist known for his intricate, surreal illustrations that blend dark, fairy-tale-like themes with fine detail and symbolism. Zouravliov's work explores beauty and darkness, merging the macabre with the fantastical.

James Jean (IG: jamesjeanart) → A Taiwanese-American visual artist and illustrator known for his surreal, highly detailed works that blend elements of fantasy, mythology, and pop culture. Jean gained early recognition for his award-winning covers for DC Comics' Fables series.

Audrey Kawasaki (IG: audkawa) → A Japanese-American artist known for her blend of contemporary Japanese aesthetics and Western art influences. Her ethereal paintings often depict young women surrounded by nature, featuring intricate line work and a soft color palette. Her works are typically painted on wood panels, adding a quality that enhances the emotional depth of her subjects.

Jessica Cioffi (IG: Loputyn) → An Italian artist known for her enchanting illustrations and concept art that seamlessly blend traditional and digital techniques. Her work reflects the influence of 19th century neo-gothic and Japanese manga, and among the artist's favorite themes are witchcraft, folklore, and mystery.

Wenqing Yan (IG: yuumeiart) → A Chinese-American digital artist and illustrator known for her detailed, expressive art. Her style blends elements of anime, fantasy, and realism, featuring vibrant colors and intricate designs. Yan draws inspiration from nature, technology, and personal experiences, and she is well-known for her webcomic Fisheye Placebo and art series like Knite, which explore themes of activism, technology, and the environment.

Gretel Lusky (IG: gretlusky) → An Argentine digital artist and illustrator, Gretel Lusky is recognized for her whimsical, vibrant artwork featuring fantasy characters, and magical themes. Her style blends cartoon and anime elements, characterized by bold lines, expressive characters, and a colorful palette. She is well-known for her enchanting illustrations on social media, where she shares art tutorials and collaborates on various comics, book covers, and other projects. She is also known for her debut graphic novel Primer, an original graphic novel for DC Comics.

Margaret Morales (IG: margaretmoralesart) → A Filipino watercolor artist currently residing in America. Margaret Morales is known for her dreamy, ethereal portraits that intertwine feminine figures with elements of nature, such as flowers and animals. Her style, characterized by soft brushwork and pastel hues, creates a surreal, fairytale-like atmosphere. Her evolving work draws inspiration from art nouveau, mythology, fantasy, natural elements, Japanese/manga art, and fashion.

Tactooncat → An Indonesian digital artist known for creating illustrations that feature cats in a humorous and whimsical style, particularly cat memes and videos. Their work appeals to cat lovers and fans of lighthearted, expressive illustrations.

There are so many more, but hopefully the ones I've mentioned have caught your interest enough that you'll want to look them up. Each artist offers a unique perspective, whether through their distinctive style, use of color, themes, or techniques—there’s plenty to discover and enjoy.

[dutch-and-flemish-painters]

Louis-Charles Verwée - Donkey ride - 

oil on panel, height: 92 cm (36.2 in); width: 71 cm (27.9 in)

Louis-Charles Verwée or Louis Charles Verwee (3 July 1832 – 9 July 1882) was a Belgian painter known for his interior scenes, genre scenes and glamorous society portraits. His genre scenes show romantic intrigues and young society ladies.

Louis-Charles Verwée was a portrait and genre painter. Most of his works depict interior scenes with some anecdotal event. These usually involve young women or children engaged in some mundane activity such as pressing a lemon, reading a book or rummaging through a drawer. He was particularly skilled at capturing the spontaneity of the intimate moments of his characters.

He painted portraits mainly of women in a style which is close to that of Belgian painters Alfred Stevens, Gustave Léonard de Jonghe and Charles Baugniet. He is regarded as representing the modern trend in the Classical school together with the Belgian painter Charles Hermans.

The artist also created some scenes with lower class characters, such as in The knife sharpener. Belgian king Leopold II acquired his work entitled Diplomacy, which is still in the royal collections.

[chilling-seavey]

Passchendaele (AU) – Daniel’s Last Choice

A/N This is an alternate universe blurb for my Passchendaele universe; what would happen if Daniel’s PTSD got the better of him after returning home from the war…this is not part of the storyline we usually follow.

T/W: Major trigger warning for this. IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO DESCRIPTIONS OF SUICIDE/DEATH OR BLOOD, EVEN ONLY SLIGHTY, PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS BLURB. Passchendaele has been written as a completely uncensored and raw work of realist fiction and this blurb is no different. It is extremely graphic and can possibly be upsetting and triggering to some readers. Read at your own risk and please remember that suicide is not the answer and to reach out and get help if you need it. It does and will get better.

Daniel kept his eyes closed, head resting back against the trunk of the tree, the warm summer sun falling against his face. Elizabeth was resting on his lap, a book in hand, and her gentle voice filled the garden as she read aloud to him, her blonde curls housing his hand as he played with the soft strands. 

It was peaceful.

He looked down at her slowly, watching how her light eyes scanned the page she held in front of her as she read, her soft lips moulding each perfect word and he dragged his fingertip over them, interrupting her sentence. Elizabeth’s eyes shifted past the book to Daniel’s face that was hidden slightly from her view and she lowered the book to focus on him.

“Are you bored?” she asked.

Daniel shook his head lightly, caressing her face with his hand as if trying to memorize her, rubbing his thumb over her cheek and she leaned into his familiar touch. She turned to kiss his hand before shifting her head on his lap to start reading again, clearing her throat lightly.

As she continued where they had left off in their book, Daniel silently pulled his pocket watch from his pocket and read the time before slipping back away. She didn’t notice, simply continuing to read even if he wasn’t paying attention to the story anymore. His fingers danced over her jaw and down her neck to her collarbones that peeked out of the top of her dress and he traced them ever so gently. Elizabeth faded out and looked back at his face. Daniel didn’t even notice she stopped reading, eyes locked on his hand moving across her porcelain skin.

“Dani.” she rested the open book over her stomach and laced her fingers with his, pulling them to her mouth to leave a tender kiss to his hand. She shifted up on one hand against the grass on the other side of his lap to face him and they both stared at each other for a moment. “What’s wrong, darling?”

“Nothing.” Daniel breathed, eyes on her lips.

Elizabeth smiled softly and leaned in to kiss him, lingering there for a moment before pulling back again, just as quickly. Daniel moved back in, raising his hand to the side of her face to keep her close as his lips locked with hers in a gentle kiss. She smiled into it, her hand holding onto the front of his shirt as they stayed motionless for a moment. Daniel finally pulled back first, watching how her eyes stayed closed for a beat longer, as if she was stuck savouring the feeling of his kiss for as long as she could.

“I need to go home for supper.” Daniel whispered.

Elizabeth licked her lips from the familiar taste of him, replied with a just as quiet, “Okay.”

Daniel leaned in to kiss her softly again, staying against her lips for a few seconds before pulling back again, “I love you.”

Elizabeth grinned bashfully, reaching up to run her thumb across his cheek and then pushed it into the back of his dark hair, bumping her nose against his, “I love you too.”

They breathed together for a few moments, eyes locked on each other’s face and noses touching with how close they were. Daniel’s hand slid down her arm and to her waist, his hand trailing the curve of her corset, and across her back.

“You’re so beautiful.” he breathed.

Elizabeth pushed her lips on his strongly, full of passion, pulling him close by the front of his shirt until he was leaning over her a little and her other arm was tossed around his shoulders. Their lips met and parted a few slow times, sharing loving kisses until they were nearly breathless, heart beating hard in their chests. Elizabeth pulled back slowly first, massaging her fingers through the back of his hair as their eyes met.

“I will see you later then.” she whispered.

Daniel nodded weakly.

He had already made up his mind.

His house smelt like his brother’s favourite supper when he returned home and Daniel didn’t speak as he closed the front door behind him. He kicked off his shoes and headed down the hallway slowly.

“Where have you been?”

His father’s voice stopped him in his tracks and he turned his head to the right slowly to look at his father behind his newspaper in the parlour. The paper was lowered and his father’s cold stare burned into him.

“Have you been with her?”

Daniel bowed his head, staring at his socked feet, “Yes.”

“I mustn’t be surprised, however, I still am. While the real men are fighting for our country, my cowardly son is going out and chasing girls who do not even know their right place in society. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Daniel just continued walking towards the kitchen without an answer to his father. It was routine to be ridiculed by his father day in and day out; so much so that it hardly phased him anymore. He had endured so much that his words just seemed to bounce off his numb conscious and fall at his feet like a ball and chain, weighing him down more and more.

He helped his mother and sister set the dining room table, setting each fork and knife down with a gentle clink after clink. Four place settings. The chair beside Daniel’s usual chair sat empty. 

The family sat around the table as his mother served dinner and they all said a prayer before starting to eat. Daniel didn’t pitch into conversation, eyes downcast as he stared at his dinner plate, pushing around his food with the tip of his fork. Whenever he zoned out he could hear gunfire and the screams of agony from the war, still fresh on his mind. Daniel snapped back to the reality of his dining room with a gasp as his father slammed his hand down on the table top, rattling the dishes and cutlery.

“See what I mean?” he snapped across the table to his wife, pointing his knife in the direction of Daniel at his right. “He doesn’t speak anymore! He comes home early and refuses to speak! I haven’t heard one apology out of his mouth since he got off that train six weeks ago!”

Daniel took a silent bite of his supper, his hand trembling as he held his fork. He stared at the perfectly crisp white tablecloth, ignoring how his family stared at him; the rage and disappointment of his father, the worry and sadness of his mother, and the concern and confusion of his younger sister.

“Everyone in the congregation at church asks me why my son is home while theirs are fighting still. What do I say to that, huh?” his father continued loudly, angry eyes boring into Daniel. “That my pathetic excuse of a son is too much of a pansy to man up and fight for his country? That the actual pride of our family is rotting in the Belgian fields and not crying himself to sleep warm and safe in his bed?! Might as well just say both of my sons are as good as dead.”

Daniel scrunched his eyes closed and gently set his fork and knife on the side of his plate with gentle clinks, resting his forearms against the tabletop. His mother set a hand on his arm gently, as if to console him.

“Do not coddle him! He’s a man, not a wounded puppy!” his father snapped.

His mother’s hand lifted slowly from his arm and Daniel’s lungs shuttered.

“Or so he should be.” his father grumbled sharply under his breath as he took another bite of his dinner.

No one spoke for the rest of the meal. 

Daniel didn’t touch his dinner after that. He lost his appetite.

He had already made up his mind.

When supper had concluded, the family moved to the parlour for tea before bed. The father with his newspaper, mother with her knitting, and Anna with her book, Daniel was sat in perfect silence, staring at the fireplace. The fire flickered steadily, reflecting in Daniel’s blank eyes. He was unmoving, expressionless, numb.

He didn’t remember getting ready for bed but soon he was laying down, staring at the ceiling, listening to his parents argue in the next room over. This wasn’t unusual either; his parents bickering after the family retired to bed; his mother taking the side of ‘just let him be’ and his father taking the side of ‘he puts shame on this family’. They didn’t know that Daniel heard it all. Every night.

It was 2:30am.

Daniel’s eyes snapped open from another nightmare. He hadn’t planned on sleeping, but he must have drifted eventually. He was covered in a cold sweat yet again, chills tearing down his spine like he was back in the rain-soaked trenches, his eyes wide and staring up at his bedroom ceiling through jagged breaths. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears and each shaky breath he took.

The house was silent. Daniel sat up and swung his legs over the side of his bed, his bare feet touching the cold wooden floors. He took the stairs slow step by slow step but he felt like he was floating, unphased by the darkness of the house or the chill of the flooring, his hand dragging down the banister after him. His eyes locked on his destination: the small writing desk in the corner of the parlour where his father took his paperwork. It looked unused as it usually was – his father usually choosing to do his paperwork at the church – and Daniel walked over slowly to stand in front of it.

His mind was blank as he dragged his fingertips over the edge of the desk and down to the top-drawer handle, playing with the wooden knob for a moment before pulling it open. His father’s FN 1910 pistol was sat in velvet in the drawer, as if it was patiently awaiting Daniel’s arrival. It was a shining black, not even so much as a fingerprint was on it, and it drew Daniel closer, his hand dropping into the drawer to lift it carefully from its warm bed and into the air of the cold dark parlour. He held it up in his strangely steady hand – all too used to carrying firearms and weaponry from his months in the war – and admired it, turning it slowly to see all sides, his eyes lingering on the magazine filled with seven shiny golden bullets.

Daniel’s eyes drifted from the pistol to the fireplace mantle just next to the writing desk, catching the reflection of the moon light coming through the window off the photographs framed on top. He took a few shuffling steps across the floor to stand in front of the unlit fireplace with the pistol still in hand but hanging lazily at his side, his eyes falling onto the image of Christian staring back at him. The pride of his family that was rotting in the Belgian fields. Each framed photograph on the mantle stared back at him blankly, Christian’s face taunting him with freedom he wasn’t lucky enough to endure in the war. Daniel took a step back, not tearing his eyes from his brother’s photograph until he reached the doorway to the parlour.

His bedroom door closed behind him. He stood with his left hand on the handle for a few long seconds before stepping back from it, now in the privacy of his small childhood bedroom. The pistol was still in his hand and he looked down at it before sitting on the side of his single bed.

Daniel felt crowded and heavy, like he wasn’t alone, and he looked straight ahead into the mirror above his dresser. His reflection stared back at him, framed on either side by Christian and Zach in their military uniforms. The three of them all together were sickly pale.

Daniel didn’t speak, his mouth dry, and he looked between his brother and his best friend on either side of him through the mirror. They sent him small peaceful smiles. Zach glanced down at his hands in his lap and Daniel dropped his gaze to the black pistol sitting heavy in his hand. Out of the reflection of the mirror, Daniel was alone, but he still felt the presence of their two bodies as if they were pressed up right at his sides.

He shut his eyes tightly, tightening his grip on the pistol, the haunting memories of his brother and his best friend’s deaths coming back onto him in full force; the weight of his brother’s body on his lap, watching the life drain from his eyes, and the fear in his best friend’s face, replaced by his warm blood trickling down Daniel’s cheeks. It was a never-ending parade of disturbing and very real memories and Daniel was stuck living a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from day after day. There truly felt like only one way out. Only one way to feel truly at peace.

He raised his eyes back to the mirror across from him, the forms of Christian and Zach staring back at him calmly, unbothered, peaceful. Daniel stared at the mirror and reached his free hand out to touch his brother beside him but his hand fell right to the mattress instead, going right through the hallucination in the reflection. Christian looked down at his brother’s lap and Daniel followed his gaze back to the pistol. He raised his hand to the barrel and pulled the slide slowly, the click of the gun cocking momentarily echoing off his small bedroom walls.

His father was embarrassed of him, his mother pitied him, his community shamed him, and Daniel hadn’t felt true happiness for far too long. Every day was a struggle, every day was frightening even without the direct threat of warfare, and every day was miserable. He had never truly left the trenches. Daniel just wanted it all to end.

He raised the pistol higher, his hands starting to tremble slightly as he stared at it in front of him. He didn’t feel scared. He felt impatient.

His mind was blank. Perfectly blank.

He craved the escape from the memories.

He craved the feeling of calm again.

He craved the sweet, temping, delicious release of death from this hell he was living.

Daniel looked in the mirror again, the hazy reflection of his brother and best friend staring back at him as urging him to come join us.

Come join us where we can be at peace together.

Daniel turned the pistol around in his right hand, the barrel facing him straight on and he stared at the small dark hole at the end of it that was to be his way out.

Christian and Zach stared at the gun in his trembling hand; unmoving, silent, yet comforting.

Daniel kept his eyes on the mirror as he parted his lips and set the muzzle of the pistol in his mouth, staring himself right in the eye.

He wasn’t scared.

The taste of metal on his lips was more than apparent but it nearly made his mouth water with desire. His finger dropped steadily to the cold metal switch of the safety and he flicked it off.

Daniel moved his finger to the trigger, eyes flicking between his brother on his right and his best friend on his left through the mirror, watching them eye the pistol in his mouth calmly.

He wasn’t scared.

He inhaled.

Christian and Zach looked right at him through the mirror and smiled reassuringly.

He closed his eyes, tightening his finger on the trigger.

He wasn’t scared.

He exhaled.

A single shot rang through the house, echoing and loud for a split second before returning to eery silence just as quickly. The body had fallen backwards onto the bed with an ever so gentle ‘thud’, the dark red splatter against the white wall starting to drip steadily towards the wood flooring, being caught by the bedsheets halfway, matching the pool of blood soaking through the pale coloured quilt almost instantly and seeping thickly into the mattress. The lifeless blue eyes stared up at the ceiling; almost just as blank as they had been since they returned home from the front lines, weak hands letting the pistol fall to the floor with a dull clatter.

He laid alone.

The sun rose like any other morning, the rest of the world begin to wake with it. The kitchen was soon filled with the sounds and smells of breakfast prep, the mother peacefully working, unknowing that her second son was lying dead in the room right above her.

The sister sat in the kitchen with her mother, keeping her company while she cooked breakfast, discussing the new stitch she had learned for working at the factories, unknowing that her second brother was lying dead in the room right above her.

The father sat in the parlour with the morning paper, waiting for his wife to deliver his morning coffee, unaware of anything different in his household, too distracted and too busy to notice his desk drawer laying open across the room.

The mother noticed it first, after bringing her husband his morning coffee, making her usual stop by the fireplace mantle to offer a silent greeting to the photograph of her eldest son when her eye caught on the open drawer. Her heart stopped for a moment as the velvet inside was cradling nothing but the heavy air that suddenly seemed to settle over the room.

She whipped her head around to look towards the stairs, frozen in place for a beat.

“Daniel.” she breathed.

Her husband looked up at her over his paper and then turned to look towards the stairs too, and, when he saw no one there, he just turned back to his reading.

The mother took the stairs two at a time on shaky legs, pulling herself up the flight by the banister before reaching the closed door at the top. She didn’t even knock before pushing it open and nearly falling right inside the small bedroom.

The sight she came across had her breath halting in her lungs for a second, her only other son’s body laid limp across his bed, the blankets below him completely soaked in a dark red and the wall behind him stained in a gruesome splatter. The pistol laid on the ground at his feet.

The mother’s blood curdling scream nearly echoed through the entire town, her heartbroken shriek of her son’s name filling the house, “Daniel!”

She was sat his side in a fleeting moment, as if she could somehow save him, grabbing onto his arm and trying to pull him off the bed through her blurring tears, clutching him to her chest as she fell to her knees on the ground through wracking sobs, covering herself in her son’s warm blood and his heavy lifeless body.

Simply another casualty of the Great War.

[nicklloydnow]

"Sadism now defines nearly every cultural, social and political experience in the United States. It is expressed in the greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its wealth increase during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country has suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years.  It is expressed in extra-judicial killings by police in cities such as Minneapolis. It is expressed in our complicity in Israel’s wholesale killing of unarmed Palestinians, the humanitarian crisis engendered by the war in Yemen and our reigns of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It is expressed in the torture in our prisons and black sites. It is expressed in the separation of children from their undocumented parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a kennel.

The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the middle ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced as a way to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into the cult of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall Street or mass culture through reality television shows, the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can, before someone else gets it. This is the state of nature, the “war of all against all,” Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social collapse, a world in which life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And this sadism, as Friedrich Nietzsche understood, fuels a perverted, sadistic pleasure.

The only way out for most Americans is to serve, as Biden does, the sadistic machine. The impoverishment of the working class has conditioned tens of millions of Americans to accept being recruited into the service of the militarized police that function as lethal armies of internal occupation; a military that carries out reigns of terror in foreign occupations; intelligence agencies that torture in global black sites; the government’s vast network of spying on the citizenry; the theft of personal information by credit agencies and digital media; the largest prison system in the world; an immigration service that hunts down people who have never committed a crime and separates children from their parents to pack them in warehouses; a court system that condemns the poor to decades of incarceration, often for nonviolent crimes, and denies them a jury trial; companies that carry out the dirty work of evictions, shutting off utilities, including water, collecting usurious debts that force people into bankruptcy and denying health services to those that cannot pay; banks and payday lenders that burden the destitute with predatory, high-interest loans; and a financial system designed to keep most of the country locked in a crippling debt peonage as the wealth of the oligarchic elite swells to levels unseen in American history.

(...)

We know what this sadism looks like. It looks like Derek Chauvin nonchalantly choking to death George Floyd as his police colleagues watch impassively. It looks like Andrew Brown Jr. shot five times by police in North Carolina, including once in the back of the head. It looks like Abner Louima, who had a broomstick pushed up his rectum by police in a bathroom at the 70th Precinct station house in Brooklyn, requiring three major operations to repair the internal injuries. It looks like Navy Seal Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher randomly shooting to death unarmed civilians and using a hunting knife to repeatedly stab to death an injured, sedated 17-year-old Iraqi prisoner and then photographing himself with the corpse. It looks like Iraqi civilians, few of whom had anything to do with the insurgency, naked, bound, beaten and sexually humiliated and raped, and at times murdered, by army guards and private contractors in Abu Ghraib. Prisoners in Abu Ghraib were routinely dragged across the prison floor by a rope tied to their penises and chemical lights were used to sodomize them or snapped open so the phosphoric liquid could be poured over their naked bodies. It looks like women who are tortured, beaten, degraded and sexually violated, often by numerous men, in porn films, who are then discarded after a few weeks or months with severe trauma, along with sexually transmitted diseases and vaginal and anal tears that must be repaired surgically.

Sadistic societies condemn segments of the population – in America these are poor Blacks, Muslims, the undocumented, the LGBTQ community, radical anti-capitalists, intellectuals – as human refuse. They are viewed as social contaminants. Laws, institutions and bureaucratic structures are built in sadistic societies that function, in the words of Max Weber, as an “inanimate machine.” The machine forces most people into the mass, but it allows some willing to do its dirty work to rise above the multitude. Those that carry out the sadism on behalf of the power elite fear being pushed back into the mass. For this reason, they energetically carry out the degradation, cruelty and sadism the machine demands. The more they insult, persecute, torture, humiliate and kill, the more they seem to magically widen the divide between themselves and their victims.  This is why Black police and corrections officers can be as cruel, and sometimes crueler, than their white counterparts.

The sadism eradicates, at least momentarily, the sadist’s feelings of worthlessness, vulnerability and susceptibility to pain and death. It imparts pleasure. I was beaten by Saudi military police and later by Saddam Hussein’s secret police when I was taken prisoner after the first Gulf War. The goons carrying out my beatings clearly enjoyed them. Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians, the assaults of Muslims and girls and women in India and the denigration of Muslims in the countries we occupy are part of a global breakdown that extends beyond the United States. Wilhelm Reich in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” and Klaus Theweleit in “Male Fantasies” argue that sadism, along with a grotesque hyper-masculinity, rather than any coherent belief system, is the core of fascism, although communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union could be as murderous and sadistic as their fascist counterparts.

The sadism eradicates, at least momentarily, the sadist’s feelings of worthlessness, vulnerability and susceptibility to pain and death. It imparts pleasure. I was beaten by Saudi military police and later by Saddam Hussein’s secret police when I was taken prisoner after the first Gulf War. The goons carrying out my beatings clearly enjoyed them. Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians, the assaults of Muslims and girls and women in India and the denigration of Muslims in the countries we occupy are part of a global breakdown that extends beyond the United States. Wilhelm Reich in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” and Klaus Theweleit in “Male Fantasies” argue that sadism, along with a grotesque hyper-masculinity, rather than any coherent belief system, is the core of fascism, although communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union could be as murderous and sadistic as their fascist counterparts.

Jean Amery, who was in the Belgian resistance in World War II and who was captured and tortured by the Gestapo in 1943, defines sadism “as the radical negation of the other, the simultaneous denial of both the social principle and the reality principle. In the sadist’s world, torture, destruction, and death are triumphant: and such a world clearly has no hope of survival. On the contrary, he desires to transcend the world, to achieve total sovereignty by negating fellow human beings – which he sees as representing a particular kind of ‘hell.’”

Amery’s point is important. A sadistic society is about collective self-destruction. It is the apotheosis of a society deformed by overwhelming experiences of loss, alienation and stasis. The only way left to affirm yourself in failed societies is to destroy. Johan Huizinga in his book “Waning of the Middle Ages” noted that that the dissolution of medieval society provoked “the violent tenor of life.” Today, this “violent tenor of life” drives people to carry out police murders, evictions of families, court-ordered bankruptcies, the denial of medical care to the sick, suicide bombings and mass shootings. As the sociologist Emil Durkheim understood, those who seek the annihilation of others are driven by desires for self-annihilation. Sadism imparts the rush and pleasure, often with heavy sexual overtones, which lures us towards what Sigmund Freud called the death instinct, the instinct to destroy all forms of life, including our own. When enveloped by a death-saturated world death, ironically, is embraced as the cure.”

[dustedmagazine]

Dust, Volume 7, Number 7

What are Grandbrothers doing to that piano?

Greetings from under the heat dome, where shipments of vinyl are melting mid-journey and even the coolest of cool jazz sounds a little wilted by the time it reaches your ear. We are sitting in the shade. We are drinking lemonade and iced tea. We are looking for the window fans and lugging old air condition units up from the basement. We are, perhaps, headed to the community pool for the first time since our kids were young, though also, perhaps not. In any case, we are still getting through piles of recorded music, even in this heat, and finding some gems. Here are dispatches from the furthest reaches of Japanese psych, European free jazz, self-released indie folk, Irish lockdown angst, Moroccan raging punk and lots of other stuff. Contributors included Mason Jones, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Tim Clarke, Bryon Hayes, Jonathan Shaw, Arthur Krumins and Chris Liberato. Stay cool.

Yuko Araki — End of Trilogy (Room40)

End Of Trilogy by Yuko Araki

These 16 tracks whoosh past in just 35 minutes, with most of them clocking in around two minutes in length. Many don't reach a conclusion: they simply end abruptly, and the next one starts. Araki manipulates electronics to create whirling, sizzling atmospheres of confusion, sometimes fast-moving burbles of percussion and synths, at other moments pushing distorted hissing and confrontational tones to the front. The aptly-named "Dazed" begins with a cinematic feel, then its galactic drones give way to static and metallic scrapes. "Positron in Bloom" is like a chorus of machine voices shouting angry curses into space, and "Dreaming Insects" sounds as if the titular creatures are being pulled downstream in fast-moving rapids. Oscillating between menacing and humorous, End of Trilogy's bite-sized pieces of surrealist electronics are never boring.

Mason Jones

 Alexander Biggs — Hit or Miss (Native Tongue Music Publishing)

Hit or Miss by Alexander Biggs

Alexander Biggs blunts sharp, stinging lyrics in the sweetest sort of strummy indie-pop, working very much in the Elliott Smith style of sincerity edged with lacerating irony. “All I Can Do Is Hate You” finds a queasy intersection between soft pop and tamped down rage, Biggs murmuring phrases like “I want you to fuck me til I can’t say your name,” but melodically, over cascades of acoustic guitar. “Madeline” is the pick of the litter here, a dawdling jangle of guitar framing knife-sharp lyrics about romantic disillusionment. “Miserable,” sports a bit of lap steel for emotional resonance, demonstrating once more, if you had any doubt, that very sad songs can make you feel better somehow. Biggs is good at both the softness and the sting, and for guy-with-a-guitar albums, that’s what you need.

Jennifer Kelly

 Christer Bothén 3 — Omen (Bocian)

Omen by Christer Bothén 3

Dusted’s collective consciousness has spent a lot of time considering Blank Forms’ recent publication, Organic Music Societies, which considers Don and Moki Cherry’s convergence of artistic and familial efforts during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the two archival recordings by Don and associates, which shed light upon his Scandinavian musical activities. All three are worth your attention, but their liveliness is shaded by the awareness that almost every hopeful soul involved is no longer with us. But Christer Bothén, who introduced Don to the donso ngoni and subsequently played in his bands for many years, is not only among the living, he’s got breath to spare. This trio recording doesn’t delve into the African sounds that bonded Bothén and Don. Rather, the Swede’s bass clarinet draws bold and emphatically punctuated melodic lines, driven by a steaming rhythm section that takes its cues from Ornette Coleman’s mid-1960s trio recordings. This music may not sound new, but it’s full of lived-in knowledge and vigor.

Bill Meyer

Briars of North America — Supermoon (Brassland)

Supermoon by Briars of North America

New York-based trio Briars of North America take patient, painterly, occasionally cosmic approach to folk music. With “Sala,” Supermoon sounds like a backwoods Sigur Ros. A falsetto voice intoning a made-up language arcs elegantly over sustained waves of electric piano. Soon after, the album touches down into more grounded guitar-and-cello territory on pieces such as “Island” and “Chirping Birds,” which bring to mind Nick Drake, albeit less contrary or withdrawn. At the album’s midway point, the listener is carried into the aether with the eerie sustained brass and wordless vocals of the eight-minute “The Albatross of Infinite Regress.” A similar space is explored at the album’s end with the 12-minute “Sleepy Not Sleepy,” as strings and warbling synthesizer tones intermingle with the return of the made-up language. Though the band’s more conventional vocal-led songs, such as “Spring Moon,” are decent enough, Briars of North America touch upon something expansive and ineffable when they explore their more experimental side.

Tim Clarke

 Bryan Away — Canyons to Sawdust (self-released)

Chicago-based actor, composer and multi-instrumentalist Elliot Korte releases music under the moniker Bryan Away. His new album, Canyons to Sawdust, begins with what feels like two introductions. “Well Alright Then” is a Grizzly Bear-style scene-setter for wordless voices, strings and woodwinds, while “Within Reach” sounds like a tentative cover of Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” that runs out of steam before it had the chance to build momentum. The first full song, single “The Lake,” gets the album up and running in earnest with its melancholy piano and string arrangement spiked with pizzicato plucks and bright acoustic guitar figures. Half Waif lends her vocal talents to “Dreams and Circumstance,” another highlight featuring some lovely interplay between guitar arpeggios and drum machine. One pitfall of exploring romantic musical territory is the risk of sounding a tad saccharine, and the weakest links in the album, companion tracks “Scenes From a Marriage” and “Scenes From a Wedding,” have the kind of performative tone you’d expect to find on the soundtrack of a mainstream romantic comedy. Elsewhere, though, Korte’s judgment is sound, and there’s plenty of elegant music to be found. Fans of Sufjan Stevens will no doubt find a lot to like, and it’ll be interesting to see where Bryan Away ventures next.

Tim Clarke

 Jonas Cambien Trio — Nature Hath Painted Painted The Body (Clean Feed)

Nature Hath Painted the Body by Jonas Cambien Trio

On its third album, the Jonas Cambien Trio has attained such confidence that it’s willing to mess with its signature sound. The Oslo-based combo’s fundamental approach is to stuff the expressive energy and textural adventure of free jazz into compositions that are by turns intricate and rhythmically insistent but always pithy. This time, the Belgian-born pianist Cambien also plays soprano sax and organ. The former, stirred into André Roligheten’s bundle of reed instruments, brings airy respite from the music’s tight structures; the latter, dubbed into locked formation with the piano and jostled by Andreas Wildhagen’s restlessly perambulating percussion, expands the music’s tonal colors. The tunes themselves have grown more catchy, so much so that their twists and turns only become apparent with time and repeat listening.

Bill Meyer

Ferran Fages / Lluïsa Espigolé — From Grey To Blue (Inexhaustible Editions)

From Grey To Blue by Ferran Fages

When discussion turns to a pianist’s touch, it’s tempting to think mainly of what they do with their fingers. But it must be said that Lluïsa Espigolé exhibits some next-level footwork on this realization of Ferran Fages’ From Grey To Blue. Fages is a multi-instrumentalist who functions equally persuasively within the realms of electroacoustic improvisation and heavy jazz-rock, but for this piece, which was devised specifically for Espigolé, he uses written music and an instrument he doesn’t play, the piano, to engage with resonance and melody. The three-part composition advances with extreme deliberation, often one note at a time, turning the tune into a ghostly presence and foregrounding the details of the decay of each sound. This music is so sparse that the shift to chords in the third section feels dramatically dense after a half hour of single sounds and corresponding silences. The elements of this music have been sculpted with such exquisite control that one wonders if Catalonia has looked into insuring Espigolé’s feet; her way with the piano’s pedals is a cultural resource.

Bill Meyer   

 Grandbrothers — All the Unknown (City Slang)

All the Unknown by Grandbrothers

The duo known as Grandbrothers hooks a grand piano up to an array of electronic interfaces, deriving not just the clear, gorgeous notes you expect, but also a variety of percussive and sustained sounds from the classic keyboard. In this third album from the two—that’s pianist Erol Sarp and electronic engineer Lukas Vogel—construct intricate, joyful collages, working clarion melodies into sharp, pointillist backgrounds. The obvious reference is Hauscka, who also works with prepared piano and electronics, but rather than his moody beauties, these compositions pulse with rave-y, trance-y exhilaration. If you ever wondered what it would sound like if the Fuck Buttons decided to cover Steve Reich, well, maybe like this, precise and complex and shimmering, but also huge and triumphant. Good stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

 id m theft able — Well I Fell in Love with the Eye at the Bottom of the Well (Pogus Productions)

Well I Fell in Love With the Eye at the Bottom of the Well by id m theft able

Al Margolis’ Pogus Productions imprint has cast its gaze toward the strange happenings in Maine, netting a mutant form of electroacoustic wizardry in the process. Scott Spear is the one-man maelstrom known as id m theft able, an incredibly prolific and confounding presence in the American northeast. He draws influence from musique concrète and sound poetry, but adds a whimsical spirit, a tinker’s ingenuity and the comedic timing of a master prankster to his compositions. Sometimes this leads to the bemusement of his audience, but he tempers any surface madness with an endless curiosity and a playful sense of the meaning of the word music. Well I Fell in Love with the Eye at the Bottom of the Well ostensibly came to be via Spear’s desire to create a doo-wop tune. Only Spear himself knows whether this is fact or fiction, because it is clear from the opening moments of “Shun, Unshun and Shun” that this disc is full of sonic non-sequiturs, amplified clatter and delightful mouth happenings that are as far removed from doo-wop as possible. The madness is frequently tempered with beautiful moments: a broken music box serenades a flock of chirping birds in the middle of a mall, Spear hypnotically chants at a landscape of crickets, flutes pipe along to the patter of rain on a window. As one gets deeper into the record, the sound poetry aspects become more and more pronounced, such as on “The Curve of the Earth” and the closing piece, “Purple Rain.” Those seeking a humor-filled gateway drug into that somewhat perilous corner of the sonic spectrum would be wise to pop an ear in the direction of this frenetic assemblage of sound.

Bryon Hayes

Mia Joy — Spirit Tamer (Fire Talk)

Spirit Tamer by Mia Joy

Mia Joy turns the temperature way down on gauzy Spirit Tamer, constructing translucent castles in the air out of musical elements that you can see and hear right through. The artist, known in real life as Mia Rocha, opens with a brief statement of intent in a one-minute title track that wraps wisps of vocal melody with indistinct but lovely sustained tones. The whole track feels like looking at clouds. Other cuts are more substantial, with muted rock band instruments like acoustic and electric guitars and drum machines, but even indie-leaning “Freak” and "Ye Old Man,” are quiet epiphanies. Rocha sounds like she is singing to herself softly, inwardly, without any thought of an audience, but also so close that it tickles the hair in your ears. Rocha closes with a cover of Arthur Russell’s “Our Last Night Together,” letting rich swells of piano stand in for cello, but tracing the subtle, undulating lines of his melody in an airy register, an octave or two higher. Like Russell, Rocha sets up an interesting interplay between deep introversion and presentation for the public eye; she’s not doing it for us, but we’re listening anyway.

Jennifer Kelly  

 Know//Suffer — The Great Dying (Silent Pendulum Records)

The Great Dying by KNOW//SUFFER

It’s not inaccurate to describe The Great Dying as a hardcore record. You’ll hear all the burly breakdowns; buzzing, overdriven guitars; and grimly declaimed vocals that characterize the genre, which since the mid-1990s has moved ever closer to metal. But Know//Suffer have consistently infused their music with sonic elements associated with other genres of heavy music. Most of the El Paso band’s 2019 EP bashed and crashed along with grindcore’s psychotic, sprinting energy. The Great Dying is a longer record, and it slows down the proceedings considerably. There are flirtations with sludge, and even with noise rock’s ambivalent gestures toward melody: imagine Tad throwing down with a mostly-sober version of Eyehategod, and you’re more than halfway there. As ever, Toast Williams emotes forcefully, giving word to a very contemporary version existential dread. But there’s frequently a political edge to the lyrics on this new record. On “Thumbnail,” he sings, “I swallow what must be hidden / Hoping assimilation makes me whole / The whole that everyone thinks I am / Smiling under this mask knowing / I’m not hiding my face in public.” “Assimilation” is a loaded word, especially on the Southern Border, and it’s no joke walking around in public as a proud black man anywhere in Texas. Wearing a mask as you walk into Target? P.O.C. stand a chance of getting shot. Know//Suffer still sound really pissed off, but the objects of their anger seem increasing outside of their tortured psyches, located in the lifeworld’s social planes of struggle. That gives their grim music an even harder charge, and makes Williams’s performances of rage even more powerful.  

Jonathan Shaw  

 Heimito Künst — Heimito Künst (Dissipatio)

HEIMITO KÜNST by Heimito Künst

The debut album from Italian experimental instrumentalist Heimito Künst, recorded over several years in his home studio, uses an array of electronic and primitive instrumentation to create an overall woozy, dark atmosphere. From groaning, atonal slabs of organ, like a detuned church service, to murmuring field recordings and scrapings, these seven tracks are less like songs and more like unsettling journeys through sound. Pieces like "Talking to Ulises" blend quiet Farfisa tones and a wordlessly singing voice in the distance. Ironically, although the final track is titled "Smoldering Life", it's unexpectedly brighter, with major-key synth notes over the cloudy sound of a drum being bashed to pieces before ending with an almost gentle, summertime feel.

Mason Jones

Jeanne Lee — Conspiracy (moved-by-sound)

Conspiracy by JEANNE LEE

Lots of 1960s and 1970s jazz reissues offer beautiful music, but few redefine how liberating improvised music can be. Conspiracy, originally recorded in 1974 by Lee on vocals with an ensemble that includes Sam Rivers and Gunter Hampel, falls into the latter category without feeling forced. It combines sound poetry, the conversation of spontaneity, and grooves that don’t stay on repetition but still get ingrained into your brain somehow. Best digested in a contemplative sitting, the album demands you give your whole attention to the direction of the music and words mixed with extended vocal techniques. The sound shifts from a full-on medley of flutes, drums, bass and horns with voice, to more minimal experiments. The recording is clean and uncluttered, even at its busiest. A lushly enjoyable listen.

Arthur Krumins   

 Sarah Neufeld — Detritus (Paper Bag)

Detritus by Sarah Neufeld

Sarah Neufeld’s third solo album grew out of a collaboration with the Toronto choreographer Peggy Baker, begun before the pandemic but dealing anyway with loss, intimacy and grief. The violinist and composer works, as a consequence with a strong sense of movement, underlining rhythms with repeated, slashing motifs in her own instrument and pounding drums (that’s Jeremy Gara, who, like Neufeld, plays in Arcade Fire). You can imagine movement to nearly all these songs. “With Love and Blindness” rushes forward in a wild swirl of strings, given weight by the buzz of low-toned synthesizer and airiness in the layer of denatured vocals; you see whirling, bending, graceful gestures. “The Top” proceeds in quicker, more playful patterns; agile kicks and jumps and shimmies are implied in its contours. “Tumble Down the Undecided” has a raw, passionate undertow, its play of octave-separated notes frantic and agitated and the drumming, when it comes, fairly gallops. This latter track is perhaps the most enveloping, the notes caroming wildly in all directions, in the thick of the struggle but full of joy.

Jennifer Kelly

Aaron Novik — Grounded (Astral Editions)

Grounded by Aaron Novik

Aaron Novik is a clarinetist with an extensive background in jazz, klezmer, rock and in-between stuff, but you wouldn’t know any of that from listening to this tape. Its ten numbered instrumentals sound more derived from the sound worlds of 1970s PBS documentaries, Residents records of similar vintage, and Pop Corn’s fluke hit, “Pop Corn.” Recorded during the spring of 2020, when Novik’s new neighborhood, Queens, became NYC’s COVID central, it manifests coping strategy that many people learned well last year; when the outside world is fucked and scary, retreat to a room and then head down a rabbit hole. In this case, that meant sampling Novik’s clarinets and arranging them into perky, bobbing instrumentals. The sounds themselves aren’t processed, but it turns out that when recontextualized, long, blown tones and keypad clatter sound a lot like synths and mechanized beats. There’s a hint of subconscious longing in this music. While it was made in a time and place when many people didn’t leave the house, it sounds like just the thing for outdoor constitutionals with a Walkman.

Bill Meyer  

 Off Peak Arson — S-T (Self-released)

Self Titled by Off Peak Arson

Presumably named after the Truman's Water song — a fairly obscure name check, indeed — Off Peak Arson hail from Memphis, TN. Their debut EP's five songs are less reminiscent of their namesakes than of heavier, noisier bands like Zedek-era Live Skull, Dustdevils and Sonic Youth. Which is not a bad thing at all. The four-piece leverage the dual guitars to nicely intense effect, and with all four members contributing vocals there's a lot going on, at times blending an interesting sing-song pop feel with the twisty-noisy guitar. The band have a way of finding memorable hooks amidst sufficient cacophony to keep things challenging while also somehow catchy. Keep your ears open for more from this quartet.

Mason Jones

 Barre Phillips / John Butcher / Ståle Liavik Solberg — We Met – And Then (Relative Pitch)

We met - and then by Phillips, Butcher, Solberg

In 2018, ECM Records issued End To End, a CD by double bassist Barre Phillips which capped a half-century of solo recording. You might expect this act to signal the winding down of the California-born, France-based improviser’s career; after all, he was born in 1934. And yet, in 2018 he played the first, but not the last, concert by this remarkable trio, which is completed by British soprano/tenor saxophonist John Butcher and Norwegian percussionist Ståle Liavik Solberg. Recorded in Germany and Norway during 2018 and 2019, this CD presents an ensemble whose members are strong in their individual concepts, but are also committed to making music that is completed by acts of collective imagination. The music is in constant flux, but purposeful. This intentionality is expressed not only through action, but through the conscious yielding of space, as though each player knows what openings will be best occupied by one of their comrades.

Bill Meyer

Round Eye — Culture Shock Treatment (Paper +Plastick)

“Culture Shock Treatment,” the lead-off track from this unhinged and ecletic album, swings like 1950s rock and roll, a sax frolicking in the spaces between sing-along choruses. And yet, the gleeful skronk goes a little past freewheeling, spinning off into chaos and wheeling back in again. Picture Mark Sultan trying to ride out the existential disorder of early Pere Ubu, add a horn line and step way back, because this is extremely unruly stuff. Round Eye, a band of expatriates now living in Shanghai, slings American heartlands oddball post-punk into unlikely corners. Frantic jackhammer hardcore beats (think Black Flag) assault free-from experimental calls and responses (maybe Curlew?) in “5000 Miles, “ and as a kicker, it’s a commentary on ethno-nationalist repression (“Thank…the country. Thank…the culture”). “I Am the Foreigner” hums and buzzes with exuberance, like a hard-edged B-52s, but it’s about the alienation that these Westerners most likely experience, every day in the Middle Kingdom. This is one busy album, exhausting really, a whac-a-mole entertainment where things keep popping out of holes and getting hammered back, but it is never, ever dull.

Jennifer Kelly

 So Cow — Bisignis (Dandy Boy)

Bisignis by So Cow

This new So Cow record is a mood. Specifically, that mood during the third and “least fun” of Ireland’s lockdowns, when you head to your shed and bash out an album about everything that’s been lodged in your craw during a year of isolation — including, of all things, the crowd at a Martha Wainwright show (on “Requests”). And while sole Cow member Brian Kelly might have dubbed the record Bisignis, the Old English word for anxiety, it’s his discontent that takes center stage. “Talking politics with friends/Jesus Christ it never ends” Kelly sings on early highlight “Leave Group” before employing a guitar solo that could pass for some seriously fried bagpipes to help clear the room. This album takes the opposite approach of The Long Con, the project’s 2014 Goner Records one-off where So Cow made more complex moves towards XTC and Futureheads territory but obscured its greatest weapon: Kelly’s deadpan wit. And while a couple of these songs overstay their welcome with their sheer garage punk simplicity, others like “Somewhere Fast” work in the opposite way and win your ears over with repeat listens. “You are the reason I’m getting out of my own way,” Kelly sings, and in doing so has produced the project’s best full-length in a decade. So what? So Cow!

Chris Liberato 

 Taqbir — Victory Belongs to Those Who Fight for a Right Cause (La Vida Es Un Mus)

Victory Belongs To Those Who Fight For A Right Cause by Taqbir

In our super-saturated musical environment, another eight-minute, 7” record of scorching punk burners isn’t much of an event. But the appearance of Taqbir’s Victory Belongs to Those Who Fight for a Right Cause (the title is almost longer than the record itself) is at the very least a significant occurrence. The band comes from Morocco and features a woman out front, declaiming any number of contemporary socio-political ills. So there’s little wonder that the Internet isn’t bursting with info about Taqbir; you can find a Maximumrocknroll interview, some chatter about the record here and there, and not much else. It must take enormous courage to make music like this in Morocco, and even more to be a woman making music like this. The long reign of King Mohammed IV has edged the country toward marginal increments of cultural openness — if not thoroughgoing political reform — but conservative Islam and economic struggle are still dominant forces, combining to keep women relegated to submissive social roles. And the band is not fucking around: their name is a Moroccan battle cry, synonymous with “Alu Akbar!” Their repurposing of that slogan in support of their anti-traditionalist, anti-religious, anti-capitalist positions likely makes life in a place like Tangier or Casablanca pretty hard. The songs? They’re really good. Check out “Aisha Qandisha” (named for a folkloric phantasm that ambiguously mobilizes the feminine as murderous and rapacious monster): the music slashes and burns with just the right dash of melody, the vocals go from a simmer to a full-on rolling boil. Taqbir! y’all. Stay safe, stay strong and make some more records.

Jonathan Shaw

 TOMÁ — Atom (Self-Release)

Atom by TOMÁ

Tomá Ivanov operates in interstices between smooth jazz and soul-infused electronics, splicing bits of torchy world traditions in through the addition of singers. You could certainly draw connections to the funk-leaning IDM of artists like Flying Lotus and Dam-Funk, where pristine instrumental sounds—strings, piano, percussion—meet the pop and glitch of cyber-soul. Guest artists flavor about half the tracks, pushing the music slightly off its center towards rap (“A Different You featuring I Am Tim”), quiet storm soul (“Outsight featuring Vivian Toebich”), falsetto’d art pop (“Catharsis featuring Lou Asril”) or dreaming soul-jazz experiments (“Blind War featuring Ben LaMar Gay”). Thoughout, the Bulgarian composer and guitarist paces expansive ambiences with shuffling, staggering beats, roughing up slick surfaces with just enough friction to keep things interesting.

Jennifer Kelly  

 The Tubs — Names EP (Trouble In Mind)

Names EP by The Tubs

“I don’t know how it works” declared The Tubs on their debut single, but they’re diving right in anyways on its follow-up, Names, with four songs that explore the self and self-other relationship. Their cover of Felt’s “Crystal Ball” tightens the musical tension of the original in places but still allows enough slack for singer Owen Williams to stretch the lyrical refrain — about the ability of another to see us better than we see ourselves — into a more melancholy shape than Lawrence. Of the EP’s three originals, Felt’s influence is most obvious in George Nicholls’ guitar work on “Illusion,” especially when the change comes and his lead spirals off Deebank-style behind Williams while he questions his connection to his own reflection. “Is it just an illusion staring back at me?” “The Name Song” is the longest one here at over three minutes, and in a similar way to The Feelies, it feels like it could go on forever, which might prove useful if Williams adds more names to his don’t-care-about list. “Two Person Love” is the best track of the bunch, though, with its classic sounding riff that swoops in and out allowing room for the chiming and chugging rhythm section to do the hard work. The relationship in the song might have been “pissed up the wall,” as Williams in his Richard Thompson-esque drawl puts it, but The Tubs certainly seem to have figured out how this music thing works.

Chris Liberato

 Venus Furs — S-T (Silk Screaming)

Venus Furs by Venus Furs

Venus Furs sounds like band, but in fact, it’s one guy, Paul Krasner, somehow amassing the squalling roar of psychedelic guitar rock a la Brian Jonestown Massacre or Royal Baths all by himself. These songs have a large-scale swagger and layers and layers of effected guitars, as on the careening “Friendly Fire,” or hailstorm assault of “Paranoia.” A ponderous, swaying bass riff girds “Living in Constant.” Its nodding repetition grounds radiating sprays of surf guitar. You have to wonder how all this would play out in concert, with Krasner running from front mic to bass amp to drum kit as the songs unfold, but on record it sounds pretty good. Long live self-sufficiency.

Jennifer Kelly

 Witch Vomit — Abhorrent Rapture (20 Buck Spin)

Abhorrent Rapture by Witch Vomit

Witch Vomit has one of the best names in contemporary death metal (along with Casket Huffer, Wharflurch and Snorlax — perversely inspired handles, all), and the Portland-based band has been earning increasing accolades for its records, as well. They are deserved. Witch Vomit plays fast, dense and dissonant songs, bearing the impress of Incantation’s groundbreaking (gravedigging?) records. Does that mean it’s “old school”? Song titles from the band’s previous LP Buried Deep in a Bottomless Grave (2019) certainly played to traditionalists’ tastes: “From Rotten Guts,” “Dripping Tombs,” “Fumes of Dying Bodies.” And so on. This new EP doesn’t indicate any significant changes in trajectory or tone, but the songwriting makes the occasional move toward melody. See especially the second half of “Necrometamorphosis,” which has a riff or two that one could almost call “pleasant.” If that seems paradoxical, check out the EP’s title. Is that an event, a gruesome skewing of Christianity’s big prize for the faithful? Or is it an affective state, in which abject disgust somehow builds to ecstatic transport? Who knows. For the band’s part, Witch Vomit keeps chugging, thumping and squelching along, doling out doleful songs like “Purulent Burial Mound.” Yuck. Sounds about right, dudes.

Jonathan Shaw

 yes/and — s-t (Driftless Recordings)

yes/and by yes/and

This collaboration between guitarist Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and producer Joel Ford (Oneohtrix Point Never) is an elusive collection of shape-shifting instrumentals. Each piece is built around Duffy’s guitar, yet the timbre and mood tends to switch dramatically between tracks. The album’s run-time is fairly evenly split between dark, atmospheric pieces, such as “More Than Love” and “Making A Monument,” and hopeful, glimmering miniatures, such as “Centered Shell” and the wonderfully titled “In My Heaven All Faucets Are Fountains.” “Learning About Who You Are” looms large at the album’s heart, as nearly eight minutes of hazy, wind-tunnel drone pulses and reverberates across the stereo space. Despite the variation in tone, each track stakes out its own territory in the tracklist, and it’s only “Tumble” that comes across as an unrealized idea. While it’s only half an hour, yes/and feels longer, its circuitous routes opening up all kinds of possibilities.

Tim Clarke

[jewish-privilege]

Workers put the finishing touches on a wall of newly installed shelves at a small grocery store. Three months ago, the same wall was lined with a row of refrigerators filled with halal meat.

But a new law in the Flanders region of Belgium bans the practices required for both halal and kosher meat. That has meant such products have become harder to find and more expensive in recent months.

“I stopped selling meat because I don’t want to sell meat that’s not halal,” said Bouihrouchane Mbark, the owner of the Aswak Souss supermarket in Brussels.

The Jewish and Muslim communities have united in opposition to the ban.

With the help of an American legal fund, a group of Muslim and Jewish organizations have taken legal action and hope to overturn the new law. The Belgian Constitutional Court heard their arguments in January and is expected to rule on the case within weeks.

The groups say that the new regulation infringes on their civil rights, preventing them from freely practicing their religion.

“Jews and Muslims are vulnerable minorities in Belgium and this decision stigmatizes these minority groups,” said Joos Roets, the lead council for the Executive of Muslims in Belgium, and the Belgian Coordination Committee of Islamic Institutions, two organizations involved in the lawsuit.

Belgian law had long required animals to be stunned before slaughter to prevent unnecessary pain. It did, however, grant an exception for ritual slaughter, a practice in Islamic and Jewish religious laws in which the animals are not stunned first. Both halal and kosher slaughter require the use of a very sharp knife to slit the animal’s throat in one stroke and sever the major structures and vessels.

The new law in Flanders came into effect in January removing the religious exception. In the Wallonia region, a similar law will come into effect at the end of August.

Mbark estimates that his supermarket's sales have shrunk between 40 and 45 percent due to the ban.

“There used to be lines at the cashiers, now they are almost empty. People would come for meat and leave with all sorts of other things,” he said.

Many Muslims feel the laws are a result of Islamophobia rather than a concern for animal rights. For Jews, they are also an uncomfortable reminder of a darker period in European history. In 1933, one of the first laws the Nazis enacted was a ban on kosher animal slaughter.

Belgium isn’t the first European country to prohibit ritual slaughter without stunning. Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Slovenia have banned exceptions for religious killing, while Switzerland and Lichtenstein make an exception only for poultry.

Belgium is home to larger populations of both Muslims and Jews, who fear that the restrictions on ritual slaughter could spread further throughout Europe. There are around 500,000 Muslims in Belgium and 30,000 Jews.

...At the small Moszkowitz kosher butcher in Antwerp, the change in legislation has meant an approximate increase of 50 percent in the wholesale cost of chicken. The shop has absorbed the financial hit, preferring to keep prices the same until after the court verdict comes in.

If the community loses the suit, then the shop will likely increase prices by at least 20 percent.

“If it stays this way it will be a big problem, but hopefully it won’t take long for the law to be thrown out,” butcher Chaim Goldberg, 32, said.

...The case has attracted attention from Jewish and Muslim communities outside of Belgium, who hope that a victory will stop other European countries from enacting similar laws.

“Time and again, the Jewish community is told by senior E.U. officials that there is no Europe without the Jews. These bans undermine those statements and put Jewish life at risk,” Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said in a statement.

The Jewish community’s legal efforts have been assisted and partially funded by the New York City-based Lawfare Project, a legal fund and civil rights organization that works around the world.

“We don’t think these types of laws belong in modern society, and a state should not be able to restrict the free religious practice of minority communities,” said Brooke Goldstein, the founder and director of the Lawfare Project, whose fund has supported other civil rights cases involving both Jews and Muslims in the United States and Europe.

...Despite the strong objections of both minority communities, the politician who introduced the legislation in Flanders insists that religion shouldn’t exempt anyone from the country’s laws.

“Our convictions concerning animal welfare go above religious insights. Why should [religion] give you more rights?” said Ben Weyts, the Flemish Parliament’s animal welfare minister.

Responding to criticism that the law was politically motivated or anti-Islam, Weyts maintains he was inspired by animal welfare concerns alone.

He would eventually like to see the European Union adopt similar legislation, which is widely supported by animal rights advocates...

[Read Rachel Elbaum’s full piece at NBC News.]

[ayyponine]

yikes my dudes the main news in belgium atm is abt the uncovering of a radical student group and i just

im still pretty unsettled re: the entire thing. the coverage starts with a group of trolls meeting irl to sabotage a peaceful call fr a more humane immigration policy and just going like haha u mad??? by ripping their flags off bc they are “defacing flemish cultural heritage” and they make public appearances stressing the importance of preserving flemish culture and freeing society which is already a big fucking banner of a red flag

theyre making and sharing videos w white 20smth yr old guys saying theyve had ENOUGH of this suppression, of seeing their culture being erased by immigrants and urging to break through plitical correctness to rectify societal shit and restore traditional values (videos which gets a huge amount of views and like on yt) and then it gets even worse...

they get more into whats going on w their fb group, which is sharing memes and pictures promoting antisemitism and anti-islamic tendencies, racism, antifeminism and anti LGBT, using slurs twrds black and brown people (i didnt even know real young people still did that i thought it was just the older generation thats like “but we were raised like this, whats wrong w using that word” but it’s also done on purpose by real students who study law or political science?? what the fuck??), joking abt the holocaust, american slave lynchings, syria, even abt trayvon martin etc and idolising hitler, belgian king leopold II, that dude frm american history x and the flemish vs wallonia battle of 1302.... within their group saying the memes are a means, not the end goal (promoting adoption of a radical lifestyle 24/7?) but then to the outside denying that type of shit is on their page and saying it COULD be interpreted as racist but like, whatever

and like these are real polisci/law students theyre just creepy looking white boys with unsettlingly strong convictions and a leader thats unfortunately v stern and a convincing orator and just a sly smug fucker who know how to verbally manipulate a conversation properly and just the fact that theyre outwards kinda conform with a societally slightly more acceptable right political party but then behind the scenes talk abt wanting to infiltrate and influence people indirectly, laying low and taking over key positions in society to then “red pill civilians frm the inside”

promoting in their group hypermasculinity (to avoid white women breed w poc and further defile the race like??? holy fuck?? and theyre angrily blaming the lgbt+ for this???? what????), making jokes abt getting enough people to handle minorities if theyre being obnoxious in any way (such as. just existing, being here, out in the open) and just being rlly. angrily wrathfully jubilant abt the way theyre managing their gradual takeover, growing bolder in the process...

like i was watching this and all i thought was holy fuck......hitlerjugend. except theyre young adults and theyve got a carefully worked out plan of manipulation before a takeover already in motion... esp when nearing the end of the coverage forum messages on discord were shown w the inner core urging members to get physically fit, to get firearms and practice at the shooting range, people posing w weapons on their flemish flags, some dude had made a kind of knife shaped like the groups emblem, joking abt a new race war and looking forward to a coming day of violence and being on the side that is or isn’t prepared for that... just, holy fuck, im so disappointed and chilled to the bone with that entire report. like wow we’re really in this bitch huh. just, big yikes

[amydeleon-blog1]

“Murder on The Orient Express” 11/5/17

Summary: As you know i am reading “Murder on the Orient Express” by Agatha Christie. This book contains a lot of words that grasp the readers attention well those interested in mystery. This book is about a man named Hercule Poirot that is a retired Belgian police that then turns into a private detective. This man travels on the orient express and throughout the first 5 chapters he is meeting people that can lead to future suspects for solving a case that he then takes on the train when he is asked to. The orient express is stopped because they seemed to be stuck in snow. In the morning around 9:45 AM Poirot goes to a dining car where there is being breakfast served. After breakfast he is then told by M. Bouc that Ratchett has been stabbed to death. Poirot is then asked to take the case which he agrees to take.

Reflection: I really enjoyed reading the first 5 chapters of this book because i love mysteries and there is so much detail that Agatha puts in this book which grabs my attention even more. There was really not much shock while i was reading the book but i did feel a little confused with all the names being given and keeping track of whose who. I may be able to relate to Poirot the main character of the story because of how curious he might get or how eager he is to resolve the case. I feel as if i were ever to be put in Poirot’s shoes i would most likely be very eager and curious who did the murder i would be nosy like Poirot is to fins the clue or person that i am supposed to find. This reading reminds me of “Deep Dark and Dangerous” by Mary Dawning Hahn because they are both mysteries and have so much detail that you can imagine the scenery that is occurring. This does not remind me of anything in our world or society.

Literary Device: Foreshadowing/ “At half an hour after midnight we ran into the snowdrift. No one can have left the train since then.” (pg. 51) This is foreshadowing to the future of the story because the reader may think that the murderer is still on the train. This part of the story was intense because you can notice that Poirot’s interest in the case becomes more and more intensive.

Vocabulary: Empressement: Animated eagerness or friendliness. Shows a lot of eagerness or friendliness. What she had done was very empressement.

Quotes: “But in my opinion that open window was a blind.” (Pg.46) This quote grabbed my attention because i feel as if this a major lead on who might be the murderer. This also shows that if the murderer had escaped he would’ve left footprints on his or her way out in the snow. but turns out there isn’t any. Which also leads to another theory that the murderer is still on the train. The murderer tried to distract those looking for him or her by opening the window and fooling the dumb. Poirot is not dumb and continues searching for the murderer on the train. “Depend upon it, it was a woman. Only a woman would stab like that.” (pg. 48) This quote grabbed my attention too because the chef had said it. I mean think about it the man who was stabbed was stabbed 10-15 times with a knife. The cook or chef lives around knives. He probably is saying it is a woman so they can distract themselves form men and search for women. In my head he is one of the suspects. The chef might be the murderer i thought a lot when i read this quote. Reading and reading it over again to see if something clicked and it does make sense.

Image: 

[angrycollectordaze-me-blog]

Essay代写：The paintings of Saul

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的essay代写范文- The paintings of Saul，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了恩索尔的绘画作品。表现主义绘画是在二十世纪初开始流行起来的，而詹姆斯·恩索尔是其中一位代表性的画家。恩索尔的绘画作品主要是以充满荒诞恐怖的表现形式，运用夸张的表现方法来表达内心的某些东西，恩索尔的绘画很多都是通过极具表现力的线条和色彩来形成较强的视觉冲击。

Expressionist painting in the Nordic countries in the 20th century, the social upheaval, the bottom of the people suffering from mental and physical suffering, artists want to form an exaggerated to vent in the heart of anguish, performance on the dark side of society at the same time, through the work to shock, let people realize that social chaos, hope I can finish this volatile situation.

It is the integration of various painting schools that forms expressionistic painting, which presents abstract and beautiful pictures through exaggerated and twisted objects and body forms. In the color selection of the picture is often inclined to bright colors and strong contrast of temperature. At the same time, expressionism was also influenced by many cultures, such as philosophy and aesthetics. Ensor was a Belgian painter. Because of his depressed personality, he was rarely understood by people. Influenced by Nordic expressionism, he gradually formed a thrilling, horrible and absurd form of expression and formed his own unique form of expression.

Ensor's paintings seem to place people in a fantasyland, expressing their separation from reality through bones and masks, which is a psychological state of fear and makes people feel depressed and unhappy. Ensor used bright colors earlier in his portrait works, and his seemingly casual brushwork more vividly expressed his inner repression.

This work depicts the grand carnival in Belgium, and highlights the fools wearing funny masks in the parade. The whole picture is grand, colorful and chaotic. With his characteristic exaggeration and irony, enthor combined his own magical fantasy with religious themes. But in fact, what he wanted to show was the human variety. For the fantastical ensor, the environment he was in was false and unreal, a "carnival of demons", and all the people around him were wearing masks, which were false and unreal. This work is the beginning of his attack on the chaotic and stubborn society.

The dancer depicts several dancers dancing on a grassy field. In the front right is a piero directing the dancers. Although only from the picture, dancers are cheerful mood, picture color is also very gorgeous, but the overall picture and artistic conception or give a person a kind of weird feeling. The dancer's face seems to be a little bit masculine, and the dancing posture looks very clumsy and not light enough. Although the color is gorgeous, the use of color is very heavy, which makes the dancer seem to be being suppressed by some forces, making people feel very depressed. And the second dancer on the right hand side seems to be very dismissive of what's going on, and this dancer is in some ways representative of ensor, showing his dismissive attitude toward the twisted and twisted status quo.

This work was completed when ensel was 39 years old. At that time, he was not financially independent and needed the support of his relatives. He was squeezed into a small and dark room to create works every day, and his heart was also extremely depressed. This work is a self-portrait of ensoll. Around ensoll, there are more than 50 people with masks and skeletons. The only real ensoll is isolated in the middle, and the mask Outlines the characteristics of people such as vanity, hypocrisy and weakness.

Ensor's paintings are mainly in the form of absurd horror, and use exaggerated expression to express something in the heart. Many of his paintings form a strong visual impact through extremely expressive lines and colors. Van gogh's works highlight the characteristics of expressionism and have strong subjective feelings. Although enthold's works inherited impressionistic expression techniques, such as natural light and color, they also added subjective emotions and expressed inner anguish, anxiety and social distortion through strong lines and object distortion. The brushwork was wild, rich in texture and exaggerated in expression.

Ensor is good at creating a unique picture atmosphere with bright colors and wild strokes, and his treatment of the picture is very worthy of our reference and learning. Influenced by many schools, enthall's paintings combine the characteristics of many schools, such as the strong colors of the fauvism and the fantastic ideas of surrealism. At the same time, he was also influenced by the Florentine school, and his works were full of powerful expressive techniques.

Ensor's paintings have strong brushstrokes and bright colors, giving the impression of a rapid jump. His paintings use a lot of processing skills, such as using a scraper or thick accumulation of paint, with a knife to scratch. Through this change of brushwork, the inner world of chaos and fear was revealed. This was the inner world that ensor tried to express.

Good art is not only popular in a certain era, even through thousands of years, still has its unique charm, because art conveys the spiritual level of things, and the spirit is never out of date. His works are often referred to as "new" art, mainly because his works are more advanced than The Times. The social chaos, human indifference and human hypocrisy he shows are not backward even in today's society, which is the charm of his works.

Enthau's works are more or less influenced by some symbolist thoughts, which tend to reflect personal subjective feelings, transcend the spiritual world of reality, and lead viewers to a nihilistic and detached "ideal" world. Most of his works are abstract with strong subjective feelings. At the same time, they also show their sympathy for the people at the bottom of the society. He tries to find the comfort of the spiritual world in the substantial painting elements and tries to integrate the inner spiritual things with expressionism.

Through the interpretation and analysis of several representative works of ensoll, this paper summarizes the form of manifestation, expression method and content of spiritual world of ensoll's works, and expresses his inner depression, depression and anxiety as well as his disdain for people's hypocrisy and stupidity through his paintbrush. Ensor's painting pays attention to the expression of the spirit of the subjective world, and the pursuit of the spirit of the theory coincides with China's xieyi painting actually, xieyi painting in China is also very pay attention to the expression of the spirit world, is a bit more abstract expression, which can be found that art is without borders, people through art to express their inner world, perhaps expression way is different, but similar essence. Therefore, we must study the domestic and foreign painting technique unceasingly, integrates thoroughly, unceasingly innovates, like this can become a real artist.

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[cleopatrarps]

Prison May Have Made Belgian Attacker a Radical, Officials Say

BRUSSELS — The prison inmate on 48-hour leave who fatally shot three people and took a woman hostage at a school in Belgium may have been radicalized while in prison, and he shouted “God is great!” in Arabic during the violent rampage, officials said on Wednesday.

One day after the assault in the eastern Belgian city of Liège, which further unnerved a country that was already on edge after two deadly attacks in Brussels in 2016, officials confirmed that they were investigating the case as possible terrorism, but cautioned that other factors were in play. The extremist group Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on Wednesday.

The assailant, identified as Benjamin Herman, a 35-year-old Belgian who was shot and killed by the police as they rescued the hostage, is also suspected of killing a former criminal partner on Monday night, hours after the start of his temporary leave.

“There are signs that allow us to speak of radicalization in prison,” Interior Minister Jan Jambon said about the assailant’s possible motives. “But it can also be because he had no prospects anymore in our society, as he also committed a murder the night before.”

Mr. Herman had been serving a continuous series of prison sentences for theft, assault and drug offenses since 2003. He was granted the short leave, his 14th, in preparation for his planned release in two years.

“There would also be signals that he might have been drugged,” Mr. Jambon continued, “or a combination of both. It’s always like that.”

Mr. Herman may have come in contact with extremist inmates, investigators say, and converted to Islam, although no firm connections to a militant terrorist organization that might have helped or encouraged him have been established.

The Islamic State’s claim of responsibility, made through its Amaq media outlet, called the assailant “a soldier of the Islamic State.” It said he was acting in response to the group’s earlier call to target countries fighting the militants.

The group’s now-deceased spokesman once called on supporters around the world to use any means possible — including the use of cars and knives — to kill citizens of countries battling the Islamic State. The phrasing is typically used when the attacker is inspired by the group rather than directly guided by it.

Some experts have noted that the method used — attacking police officers in the streets with a knife and then taking possession of their weapons to kill them — aligned closely with Islamic State’s recent calls to action in Europe and around the world.

The attacker was not on a terrorism watch list, nor on a list of people suspected of being at risk of radicalization. But he was cited in two reports by Belgium’s civilian intelligence service, and one by the police, on a radicalized individual with whom Mr. Herman had been in contact.

Belgian prisons are notoriously dilapidated and overcrowded, and in recent years some have become breeding grounds for extremism.

Many of the terrorists who carried out violent attacks in Europe over the past three years had served short prison sentences for drug related offenses and other crimes, some violent. And it was often in prison that they began adopting extremist views.

Belgium has one of the highest levels of prison overcrowding in Europe, according to the 2016 Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics report, with about 120 prisoners for every 100 places available, and has drawn criticism from the European Court of Human Rights.

The woman taken hostage at the school, who works as a cleaner there, spoke to Belgian state radio on Wednesday, identifying herself only by her first name, Darifa.

She described screaming colleagues telling her that a gunman was approaching the school, and quickly closing several doors at the main entrance. But when she turned around, she stood face to face with the assailant, who was carrying two handguns.

“Are you Muslim? Do you observe Ramadan?” he asked, according to Darifa, who answered both questions affirmatively.

“Listen, what I tell you to do, do it,” he continued. “But don’t worry. I won’t do anything to you.”

When the assailant began shooting through a window looking on the schoolyard, Darifa started screaming, she said. The gunman told her to stop, to think of her Palestinian brothers and Syrian brothers, and to cry for them, she continued.

Unfazed, he then used Darifa as a human shield when the police arrived at the scene.

“I’m here to make people simmer and to be shown by the police,” he told Darifa. “I want to make them boil.”

And then, expressing a wish to die as a “martyr,” he ran outside and into a hail of police gunfire.

In addition to the terrorism investigation, Koen Geens, the justice minister, said the authorities were looking into the decisions that had led to Mr. Herman’s temporary release.

“I feel responsible,” Mr. Geens, who is responsible for prisons in the country, told state news outlets on Wednesday.

“Should this man have been released?” Mr. Geens asked. “In his wish to kill himself, he took three totally innocent people with him.”

Belgium will keep its terrorism threat at the same level — 2 out of 4 — Mr. Jambon, the interior minister, said.

“This was an isolated case,” he said. “It was someone who was not in a network, who did not receive instructions from someone else. So there is no reason to raise the threat level, because we have no qualified information at this point that there are other acts possible.”

Thousands of people gathered Wednesday afternoon at the Tivoli Square for a moment of silence, in the presence of police officers, local officials, and — in a rare show of unity — officials from the different regions and governments of Belgium. Flags flew at half-staff across the country.

Rukmini Callimachi contributed reporting from New York.

The post Prison May Have Made Belgian Attacker a Radical, Officials Say appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2JiotPS via News of World

[party-hard-or-die]

Prison May Have Made Belgian Attacker a Radical, Officials Say

BRUSSELS — The prison inmate on 48-hour leave who fatally shot three people and took a woman hostage at a school in Belgium may have been radicalized while in prison, and he shouted “God is great!” in Arabic during the violent rampage, officials said on Wednesday.

One day after the assault in the eastern Belgian city of Liège, which further unnerved a country that was already on edge after two deadly attacks in Brussels in 2016, officials confirmed that they were investigating the case as possible terrorism, but cautioned that other factors were in play. The extremist group Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on Wednesday.

The assailant, identified as Benjamin Herman, a 35-year-old Belgian who was shot and killed by the police as they rescued the hostage, is also suspected of killing a former criminal partner on Monday night, hours after the start of his temporary leave.

“There are signs that allow us to speak of radicalization in prison,” Interior Minister Jan Jambon said about the assailant’s possible motives. “But it can also be because he had no prospects anymore in our society, as he also committed a murder the night before.”

Mr. Herman had been serving a continuous series of prison sentences for theft, assault and drug offenses since 2003. He was granted the short leave, his 14th, in preparation for his planned release in two years.

“There would also be signals that he might have been drugged,” Mr. Jambon continued, “or a combination of both. It’s always like that.”

Mr. Herman may have come in contact with extremist inmates, investigators say, and converted to Islam, although no firm connections to a militant terrorist organization that might have helped or encouraged him have been established.

The Islamic State’s claim of responsibility, made through its Amaq media outlet, called the assailant “a soldier of the Islamic State.” It said he was acting in response to the group’s earlier call to target countries fighting the militants.

The group’s now-deceased spokesman once called on supporters around the world to use any means possible — including the use of cars and knives — to kill citizens of countries battling the Islamic State. The phrasing is typically used when the attacker is inspired by the group rather than directly guided by it.

Some experts have noted that the method used — attacking police officers in the streets with a knife and then taking possession of their weapons to kill them — aligned closely with Islamic State’s recent calls to action in Europe and around the world.

The attacker was not on a terrorism watch list, nor on a list of people suspected of being at risk of radicalization. But he was cited in two reports by Belgium’s civilian intelligence service, and one by the police, on a radicalized individual with whom Mr. Herman had been in contact.

Belgian prisons are notoriously dilapidated and overcrowded, and in recent years some have become breeding grounds for extremism.

Many of the terrorists who carried out violent attacks in Europe over the past three years had served short prison sentences for drug related offenses and other crimes, some violent. And it was often in prison that they began adopting extremist views.

Belgium has one of the highest levels of prison overcrowding in Europe, according to the 2016 Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics report, with about 120 prisoners for every 100 places available, and has drawn criticism from the European Court of Human Rights.

The woman taken hostage at the school, who works as a cleaner there, spoke to Belgian state radio on Wednesday, identifying herself only by her first name, Darifa.

She described screaming colleagues telling her that a gunman was approaching the school, and quickly closing several doors at the main entrance. But when she turned around, she stood face to face with the assailant, who was carrying two handguns.

“Are you Muslim? Do you observe Ramadan?” he asked, according to Darifa, who answered both questions affirmatively.

“Listen, what I tell you to do, do it,” he continued. “But don’t worry. I won’t do anything to you.”

When the assailant began shooting through a window looking on the schoolyard, Darifa started screaming, she said. The gunman told her to stop, to think of her Palestinian brothers and Syrian brothers, and to cry for them, she continued.

Unfazed, he then used Darifa as a human shield when the police arrived at the scene.

“I’m here to make people simmer and to be shown by the police,” he told Darifa. “I want to make them boil.”

And then, expressing a wish to die as a “martyr,” he ran outside and into a hail of police gunfire.

In addition to the terrorism investigation, Koen Geens, the justice minister, said the authorities were looking into the decisions that had led to Mr. Herman’s temporary release.

“I feel responsible,” Mr. Geens, who is responsible for prisons in the country, told state news outlets on Wednesday.

“Should this man have been released?” Mr. Geens asked. “In his wish to kill himself, he took three totally innocent people with him.”

Belgium will keep its terrorism threat at the same level — 2 out of 4 — Mr. Jambon, the interior minister, said.

“This was an isolated case,” he said. “It was someone who was not in a network, who did not receive instructions from someone else. So there is no reason to raise the threat level, because we have no qualified information at this point that there are other acts possible.”

Thousands of people gathered Wednesday afternoon at the Tivoli Square for a moment of silence, in the presence of police officers, local officials, and — in a rare show of unity — officials from the different regions and governments of Belgium. Flags flew at half-staff across the country.

Rukmini Callimachi contributed reporting from New York.

The post Prison May Have Made Belgian Attacker a Radical, Officials Say appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2JiotPS via Breaking News

[newestbalance]

Prison May Have Made Belgian Attacker a Radical, Officials Say

BRUSSELS — The prison inmate on 48-hour leave who fatally shot three people and took a woman hostage at a school in Belgium may have been radicalized while in prison, and he shouted “God is great!” in Arabic during the violent rampage, officials said on Wednesday.

One day after the assault in the eastern Belgian city of Liège, which further unnerved a country that was already on edge after two deadly attacks in Brussels in 2016, officials confirmed that they were investigating the case as possible terrorism, but cautioned that other factors were in play. The extremist group Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on Wednesday.

The assailant, identified as Benjamin Herman, a 35-year-old Belgian who was shot and killed by the police as they rescued the hostage, is also suspected of killing a former criminal partner on Monday night, hours after the start of his temporary leave.

“There are signs that allow us to speak of radicalization in prison,” Interior Minister Jan Jambon said about the assailant’s possible motives. “But it can also be because he had no prospects anymore in our society, as he also committed a murder the night before.”

Mr. Herman had been serving a continuous series of prison sentences for theft, assault and drug offenses since 2003. He was granted the short leave, his 14th, in preparation for his planned release in two years.

“There would also be signals that he might have been drugged,” Mr. Jambon continued, “or a combination of both. It’s always like that.”

Mr. Herman may have come in contact with extremist inmates, investigators say, and converted to Islam, although no firm connections to a militant terrorist organization that might have helped or encouraged him have been established.

The Islamic State’s claim of responsibility, made through its Amaq media outlet, called the assailant “a soldier of the Islamic State.” It said he was acting in response to the group’s earlier call to target countries fighting the militants.

The group’s now-deceased spokesman once called on supporters around the world to use any means possible — including the use of cars and knives — to kill citizens of countries battling the Islamic State. The phrasing is typically used when the attacker is inspired by the group rather than directly guided by it.

Some experts have noted that the method used — attacking police officers in the streets with a knife and then taking possession of their weapons to kill them — aligned closely with Islamic State’s recent calls to action in Europe and around the world.

The attacker was not on a terrorism watch list, nor on a list of people suspected of being at risk of radicalization. But he was cited in two reports by Belgium’s civilian intelligence service, and one by the police, on a radicalized individual with whom Mr. Herman had been in contact.

Belgian prisons are notoriously dilapidated and overcrowded, and in recent years some have become breeding grounds for extremism.

Many of the terrorists who carried out violent attacks in Europe over the past three years had served short prison sentences for drug related offenses and other crimes, some violent. And it was often in prison that they began adopting extremist views.

Belgium has one of the highest levels of prison overcrowding in Europe, according to the 2016 Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics report, with about 120 prisoners for every 100 places available, and has drawn criticism from the European Court of Human Rights.

The woman taken hostage at the school, who works as a cleaner there, spoke to Belgian state radio on Wednesday, identifying herself only by her first name, Darifa.

She described screaming colleagues telling her that a gunman was approaching the school, and quickly closing several doors at the main entrance. But when she turned around, she stood face to face with the assailant, who was carrying two handguns.

“Are you Muslim? Do you observe Ramadan?” he asked, according to Darifa, who answered both questions affirmatively.

“Listen, what I tell you to do, do it,” he continued. “But don’t worry. I won’t do anything to you.”

When the assailant began shooting through a window looking on the schoolyard, Darifa started screaming, she said. The gunman told her to stop, to think of her Palestinian brothers and Syrian brothers, and to cry for them, she continued.

Unfazed, he then used Darifa as a human shield when the police arrived at the scene.

“I’m here to make people simmer and to be shown by the police,” he told Darifa. “I want to make them boil.”

And then, expressing a wish to die as a “martyr,” he ran outside and into a hail of police gunfire.

In addition to the terrorism investigation, Koen Geens, the justice minister, said the authorities were looking into the decisions that had led to Mr. Herman’s temporary release.

“I feel responsible,” Mr. Geens, who is responsible for prisons in the country, told state news outlets on Wednesday.

“Should this man have been released?” Mr. Geens asked. “In his wish to kill himself, he took three totally innocent people with him.”

Belgium will keep its terrorism threat at the same level — 2 out of 4 — Mr. Jambon, the interior minister, said.

“This was an isolated case,” he said. “It was someone who was not in a network, who did not receive instructions from someone else. So there is no reason to raise the threat level, because we have no qualified information at this point that there are other acts possible.”

Thousands of people gathered Wednesday afternoon at the Tivoli Square for a moment of silence, in the presence of police officers, local officials, and — in a rare show of unity — officials from the different regions and governments of Belgium. Flags flew at half-staff across the country.

Rukmini Callimachi contributed reporting from New York.

The post Prison May Have Made Belgian Attacker a Radical, Officials Say appeared first on World The News.

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London train bombing: Why is Europe seeing so many terrorist attacks?

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The Sept. 15 terrorist bombing in a crowded London subway station – which injured at least 30 passengers but caused no deaths – was the latest in a string of terrorist attacks in Western Europe in recent years.

In mid-August, attacks in Barcelona and the nearby city of Cambrils killed 16 people and injured more than 130 just a few days before an attacker with a knife in Finland killed two and wounded eight others. Earlier assaults this year in London and Manchester, England, left dozens dead and hundreds more wounded.

Since 2015, there has been a sharp increase in both the number of attacks and deaths caused by terrorism in Europe. As someone who has studies European security issues, I see three key factors contributing to this development: Europe’s large and often poorly integrated Muslim population, proximity to unstable regions like the Middle East and North Africa, and terrorists’ new focus on highly vulnerable “soft” targets.

The Sept. 15 bombing was London’s second major train attack in 12 years. AP Photo/Frank Augstein

Poor integration

The Islamic State claimed on its Amaq news outlet that a “detachment” of its followers were responsible for last week’s London attack.

While terrorism in Europe today is commonly associated with Islamic extremism, since the end of World War II Europe has experienced different waves of terrorist violence. In the 1970s and 1980s, the biggest terrorist threat was secular Marxist groups such as the Red Brigades in Italy and Germany’s Red Army Faction as well as separatist groups such as Spain’s ETA and Northern Ireland’s Irish Republican Army (IRA).

But since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, radical Islam has become the greatest terrorist threat facing Europe.

In many Western European countries today, Muslims make up between 5 and 10 percent of the population. Many second- and third-generation European Muslims have struggled more than their parents or grandparents to assimilate, in part due to unemployment and xenophobia.

Their often poor integration creates a large pool of disaffected young people vulnerable to radicalization and extremist violence, though of course only a small number of them turn to terrorism.

In contrast, the U.S. has a much lower proportion of Muslim residents – about 3.3 million people, or 1 percent of the population – and they tend to be well-integrated into American society, with educational attainment, household income and employment levels comparable to those of the general public.

According to a recent U.S. government study, over a period of more than 15 years, from Sept. 12, 2001, to the end of 2016, radical Islamic extremists killed 119 people in the U.S. in 23 separate attacks – fewer than the number who died in coordinated attacks in and around Paris on the night of Nov. 13, 2015 (an attack that was, for the record, perpetrated by primarily French and Belgian nationals).

The short road to IS

Geography also works against Europe. For jihadis fleeing the battlefields of Iraq or Syria, Europe is simply easier to reach than the U.S. or other far-flung Western countries such as Canada or Australia – and vice versa.

As many as 5,000 Europeans left to wage jihad in Iraq and Syria, far more than the number of Americans who joined IS and other terrorist groups. European security services estimate that as many as 30 percent of those fighters have returned home. Many pose little security threat, but there are likely dozens who are actively plotting attacks in Europe.

And thanks to the Schengen Agreement, which dismantled internal border controls within the European Union, terrorists can slip in and out of EU countries with ease – though not necessarily the UK, which does not participate. Counterterrorism cooperation among European countries has advanced in recent years, but Europe remains a patchwork of security and intelligence agencies.

Even so, Europe still sees far fewer terrorism-related incidents than Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria and other parts of the world. In 2016 Western Europe accounted for less than 2 percent of global total terrorist attacks and one percent of deaths worldwide.

Nor is this even the worst period of terrorism in modern European history. In 1972, the bloodiest year of Northern Ireland troubles, terrorist attacks killed 400 people in Western Europe, and the region accounted for more than 70 percent of terrorist attacks worldwide.

Radical separatist groups like the IRA once represented Europe’s biggest terrorist threat. Tdv123, CC BY-SA

Soft targets

Still, the number and lethality of attacks in Europe has indeed been rising sharply in recent years, partially as a result of terrorists’ changing tactics.

While al-Qaida preferred complex, well-planned assaults like the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks and plans to take down airliners over the Atlantic Ocean, IS has demonstrated a penchant for indiscriminate violence.

Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a senior IS strategist killed last year, called on Muslims to murder Europeans by any means necessary: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.” He was especially keen on killing “the spiteful and filthy French.”

Either through incompetence or sheer good fortune, the crude, homemade bomb that shook London last week failed to detonate properly. The New York Times reported that witnesses on the train “described a tremor, a wave of heat and then a barrage of flames that quickly dissipated.”

But elsewhere IS’s modus operandi of employing unsophisticated means to spread mayhem has proven deadly. When a van mowed down pedestrians in Barcelona in August 2017, for example, it was the sixth incident of vehicular terror in Europe since last year, following similar attacks in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm and London.

European cities have added new physical barriers to guard against such crude offenses, but police and security services can do little to completely eliminate similar attacks.

Can Europe stay safe?

Security services and law enforcement in Europe are certainly getting better at identifying, tracking and arresting potential terrorists and preventing attacks, though.

Since June 2013, security services in the U.K. have foiled 13 terrorist attacks. And in the dozen-plus years between the Madrid train attack in March 2004 and last month’s attacks in and around Barcelona, Spanish authorities stopped a number of potential Islamist terrorist attacks.

No matter how well officials cooperate, Europe can’t prevent every terrorist attack. Reuters/Sergio Perez

Still, Europe will be vulnerable to terrorism for some time. It is virtually impossible to stop someone who is committed to killing civilians using everyday items such as cars, kitchen knives or bombs built with easy-to-find materials like hydrogen peroxide and acetone.

The bigger question is what impact ongoing terrorism attacks will have on European politics and societies. In seeking to reduce the frequency and lethality of inevitable future terrorist attacks, Europe’s democratic societies are confronting hard choices.

As in the U.S. after September 11, Europe is hotly debating the scope of governmental powers, how to guard public spaces without surrendering freedom of movement and ways to better integrate Muslim members of society.

Many Brits seem to accept indiscriminate, jihadist-inspired violence as the “new normal.” As one resident of Parsons Green, the site of last week’s subway attack, said to The New York Times, “We get attacked, and then we carry on, waiting in anticipation for the next one.”

Richard Maher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.