#Bohemian Embassy
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thejohnfleming · 5 months ago
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The fight in a Toronto strip club which led on to much, much more (Part 1 of 3)
Back in March, in a follow-up to a piece I posted ten years before (in 2014) I posted a new 4-part blog which started out about a Toronto strip club called Le Strip and then veered into totally true and unexpected tales of Canadian spies, neo-Nazis, double-crosses, counterfeiting, 1980s terrorism, US white supremacists, South African secret agents and much else. All this came from the far-from…
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esteemed-excellency · 10 months ago
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also 12 (date nights) for hiram and the deviless? 👉👈
12. What are their date nights -- or secret trysts -- like?
They usually dine at Dante’s, or at a similar exclusive restaurant, and there they decide where to spend the rest of the evening. They don't always plan in advance, they prefer to see what the city has to offer. After dinner they like to stroll around Veilgarden to see if there's anything new in the bohemian circles. They are both interested in art: the Deviless adores to attend poetry readings and Hiram enjoys all kinds of theatrical performances, and if they plan to go the theatre he always reserves two seats at Mahogany Hall. Their first date was at a concert, and they've canonically been to many dances and private soirées at the Brass Embassy.
They like to be in a busy place together, it makes them gravitate towards each other even more, and the Deviless particularly appreciates the background hum of a crowded place, but they always end their evenings in a quiet place, to spend the rest of the night playing music or slow dancing together, they value their intimacy. They both have a piano and a phonograph at home, but Hiram's townhouse is bigger and there's more space to waltz around so they prefer to go to his place.
Hiram doesn’t sleep much and the Deviless needs to sleep even less, she always remains with him until he falls asleep. Sometimes she stays until the morning comes, and he never has nightmares when she does.
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starryeyed-seer · 2 months ago
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Working on a fic idea for my Koloman(ian? Kolomens? Kolomani?) Tourist. Basically some fluff fun to also help me practice writing on the Neath setting more. They cross paths with Grietje and become friends, with Grietje becoming a Neathly advisor on what the Tourist should do— despite her lack of experience, since she's only heard of half the stuff through newspapers and novels.
The Tourist fled the Koloman Delegation after robbing them, intending to return to the surface to a new life. So they want to experience the Neath as much as possible while remaining alive and safe.
My Neath Tourism list so far: (would love to hear ideas especially as I don't know hinterlands stuff)
Mrs Plenty's Carnival
Catching a show at Mahogany Hall
Touring the museum
Visiting a rat craftworker
Mushroom wine tasting
A little light Zailing to Mutton Island
Strolling through the Bazaar shops
The upper coils of the Labirynth of Tigers
Open stage night at the Singing Mandrake
Picnic and False-star gazing on Watchmaker's Hill
Sneaking into some manner of society ball
Bohemian art gallery walk
Light honey sipping and weird dreams
Trying to get into the house of chimes
Fashion, makeover montage, many hats
Become transgender (this just happens to most people who enter the neath)
Mushroom hopping races
Going to a cat cafe (in the Neath this is where revolutionary cats gather to nap/philosophise)
Attending a lecture at the brass embassy to see devils first hand.
Strolling along the Stolen River, checking out street sellers and enjoying the sights
Roof running in the Flit
OC specific stuff: going to Mikhail's show, forcing Enoch to take them on a zub ride, discussing poetry with Grietje
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viric-dreams · 5 months ago
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Jones' primary affiliation is with the Great Game. He plays for Black on the chessboard, though he was scouted based on his past and this was not his active choice. Regardless, he's not looking a gift horse in the mouth. He has a lot of contact with Revolutionaries of all sorts, though he tries to keep his ideological distance from them. He has a closer relationship with Hell due to work he'd done with the Brass Embassy regarding the Unlucky Devil he'd encountered at some point during his time in Newgate. He also has several contacts within the Church, that make him a good candidate for the Game's work in that direction.
In his free time, he seems to move between Society and Bohemian circles. On the wall behind his desk hangs a diploma from Summerset College, with a date of graduation that wouldn't make sense had you been close enough to him to know where he'd been in the 1880s.
If there's any faction he has strong animosity towards, it's the Constables. He'll never show this externally, however. In fact, he seems to have no qualms about taking on work for them, when asked. If asked, he'll tell you that it would call more attention to himself not to, and moreover, letting himself fester in it and letting it bother him seems the path to madness. Much better to sweep it under the rug and take the job, personal feelings aside.
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She is suspected of involvement in at least 10 armed attacks and robberies, including a gun attack on the US embassy in Bonn in 1991 and the bombing of a prison in Weiterstadt in 1993.
White-overalled forensic investigators filed out of Klette’s flat in a run-down 1950s housing block removing boxes and bags, her bike and even an anti-tank weapon, on top of the Kalashnikov rifle and a machine pistol discovered there two days before.
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rebeccasteventaylor · 1 year ago
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All right, episode 1 again
The crank! The crank to wind up the universe! Just like the Bentley’s crank that he couldn’t let go of! Even when he forgot who he was somewhere he remembered.
So Crowley worked on stars and Aziraphale worked on people? No wonder Crowley loves the stars and Aziraphale longs to protect the people of Earth.
The minute Aziraphale meets Crowley he’s trying to protect him from Heaven and Heaven’s punishment. And then moments after that Crowley’s song goes up over Aziraphale to protect him from the falling stars. Crowley’s actions speak to his real feelings again.
That shot following the letter through the letterbox is brilliant. How did they do that?
Maggie can’t spell. And Maggie seems the least phased about all the things that happen. Is Maggie a demon? And why would a pub in Edinburgh need to get records from a shop in Soho? Edinburghs full of record shops.
The song playing in Maggie’s shop the first time Aziraphale goes in is ‘You don’t own me’ by Lesley Gore. It’s about a girl telling a boy he doesn’t own her, he can’t tell her what to do, she’s young and free and likes it that way. In this case I feel the boy might be heaven, and Aziraphale the girl. Or it might be about Gabriel who is right at that moment leaving heaven.
Aarrghhj! Aziraphale telling Maggie he’s very good at forgiveness, it’s one of his favourite things!
Some people say that the Shostakovich symphony that Aziraphale gets has a theme of rebirth. Again - a reference to the journey Gabriel is going on right at that moment?
Why the hell is Crowley reading the Tadfield Advertiser!! And his snake is definitely higher up than it is later on when he’s talking to Gabriel. That tattoo MOVES.
So Michael appears to still be contact with Hell?
If Aziraphale’s shop is officially an embassy, then it would be one of the safe places angels and demons could meet so perhaps Gabriel and Beelzebub had designated it as their meeting spot?
I had thought Crowley’s Bentley was parked in a South Downs village but now I can see that you can see the Gherkin in the distance so he’s in still in London. Goodness knows were but you do get these hidden little streets in London.
So the fly is now loose in Aziraphale’s shop so is Beelzebub and/or Gabriel aware of everything that happened in the bookshop?
The music in the coffee shop is a orchestral arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody…
Crowley’s ‘precious, peaceful, fragile existence’ he thought he was building with Aziraphale - but he cannot resist helping Aziraphale
I have to go out now. I’ll continue this later
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oldshowbiz · 10 months ago
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Don Cullen was the only Canadian in the cast of Beyond the Fringe when it played Broadway as Beyond the Fringe '65. Cullen ran the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, a coffee house venue where Margaret Atwood did poetry readings, Joni Mitchell played music, and Lorne Michaels produced revues - long before any of them were famous.
Cullen later became a longtime member of the Wayne and Shuster repertory company on CBC Television.
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bishopofstdiesis · 2 years ago
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Diatoms Are Forever
O.K. no, they are not forever. But the artwork? It could last forever. During these times (maybe one day we shall enter 1900...) we are seeing a number of artists competing for the best diatom arrangement & some of the more talented amongst have vowed to new share the secret of their immaculate methods. Many of us are familiar with the Cloistered Diatomist (the Monastic Diatomist is also a rising talent). While he would not allow his method to be shared nor publicised (very reclusive), we did find several Bohemians willing to share.
In the process of trial & arso...error, I found some amusing ways to break the diatom’s place on the Great Chain & found a way to have a large window created with diatoms (stained glass is very 1899 [the first one]) in my Embassy Suites. Millions of diatoms & like the people who must silence the surrounding grounds of the palace over & over, the Monastic Diatomist is giddy (for him) to continually make a living piece of art that people HAVE to look at to get in my home. Especially since it requires a very secretive method & the diatom art movement loves nothing more than secrets...
[For interesting information in this, the year of Victoria 1899 the 123rd, there is an artist named Klau Kemp doing diatom art & is self-taught because the Victorians of 1899 would have taken their methods to the grave, so secretive an art form it was. For more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/secretive-victorian-artists-made-these-intricate-patterns-out-of-algae-180952720/ which has led me to really dig this little art form. It’s my second favourite weird Victorian thing I’ve found. The first will always be spirit signatures... I LOVE THOSE so much.]
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kammartinez · 1 year ago
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By Lesley Chamberlain
The horror of a functioning democracy turning into a brutal dictatorship in a single month is etched into the German psyche. While Nazism claimed millions of victims at home and abroad, it also disfigured the national literary fabric. No biographer, critic or historian of the outstandingly creative 1920s and 1930s can ignore the moment when Hitler’s party, the NSDAP, tore apart the culture of the permissive Weimar Republic by targeting Jews, homosexuals, communists and “degenerate” expressionists. Writers and artists confronted a nightmare, with beatings in the street and storm troops at the door. For the 500 or so who eventually fled, the question was how long to hang on; where to go; how to survive. The panic strained families and ripped lovers apart. Personal loyalties were not always steadfast.
Uwe Wittstock, a prizewinning journalist whose late mother was two years old in 1933, suggests that while we struggle to grasp the catastrophe now, it was all the more unimaginable to its contemporary victims. February 1933: The Winter of Literature revisits moments in those well-documented lives by way of diaries, letters and public events. The personal routines, giddy socializing and creative obsessions belong to some of the best-known names in German culture of the last century, from the monumental novelist Thomas Mann and his brilliant, provocative adult children Erika and Klaus to the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, the fabulous jazz-age composer Kurt Weill, who was Brecht’s collaborator, and the unforgettable satirical painters Otto Dix and George Grosz.
That transformative February Mann loftily decried his intellectual enemies as “hideous, violent little creatures”. His “Avowal of Socialism” (1922) had made him an enemy of the new regime. Yet he waged a curious battle in his last days in Germany, with his attachment to the high cultural past prompting persistent equivocations. Brecht, meanwhile, had recently written an “instructional play” – one of several such Lehrstücke for revolutionaries – which also made him radically unacceptable. In Erfurt the premiere of Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken) was prevented by the police. Brecht demanded a bodyguard as he considered ways of escape.
The Nazis targeted not only individuals, but also the democratic institutions they served. Heinrich Mann, Thomas’s brother, fellow novelist and a staunch supporter of the Republic, was eased out of the Prussian Academy of Arts in what struck everyone as a scandal. Fellow academicians, ashamed, found themselves powerless to object. He was a huge name on the literary scene, thanks to Der Untertan and, Professor Unrat, soon to be filmed with Marlene Dietrich as The Blue Angel. Yet so vulnerable was his position that the French ambassador offered him his embassy should he need refuge.
But it is on figures less familiar outside Germany, such as the writer Else Lasker-Schüler, the left-wing editor Carl von Ossietzky and the anarchist poet and playwright Erich Mühsam, that the perverted age extracted particularly brutal revenge. Lasker-Schüler, born in 1869, aged sixty-three in January 1933, was occupying a tiny room in a Berlin hotel when Hitler was elected chancellor. “For a couple of years she [had been] the undisputed queen of Berlin’s bohemian society, boyishly slight, her black hair cut noticeably short, garbed mostly in baggy clothes and velvet jackets with glass-bead necklaces, clattering bangles and rings on every finger.” As Hitler began targeting every aspect of German life, her play Arthur Aronymus was blocked. It had won a coveted award, as the Nazi rag the Völkischer Beobachter fumed: “The daughter of a Bedouin sheikh receives the Kleist Prize!”. As if her clothes were not enough, her latest play featured conflicts between Jews and Christians. The avant-garde director Gustav Hartung was already in trouble with the NSDAP in Darmstadt over plans to produce Brecht’s Saint Joan. To put on the Lasker-Schüler play in Berlin seemed just too provocative. The author, knocked to the ground in her hotel foyer, bit her tongue so hard that she needed stitches.
Ossietzky, meanwhile, as editor of Die Weltbühne (“The World Stage”), the sharpest political and social weekly of the Weimar Republic, had already served two years in prison for decrying German military violations of the Versailles treaty. As the “winter of literature” closed in his friends begged him to flee, but this brave man insisted he would stay “to watch history unfold”.
On February 17 Mühsam rushed to the pub where Ossietzky was speaking that evening and spread the newspaper out on the table. Henceforth Reichsminister Hermann Goering was permitting the police to shoot to kill. “We will probably never see one another again”, Ossietzky responded, but “let us promise … to remain true to ourselves and to stand up with our body and our lives for what we have believed in and fought for”. Meanwhile, on February 18 the disruptive Brownshirts of the SA, Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, broke up the premiere of Kurt Weill’s musical The Silver Lake. Weill, the genius who had set Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera to music, was Jewish. The playwright Georg Kaiser was not – indeed, he was only vaguely leftist – but the Nazis went after him nonetheless. Wittstock doesn’t make the point, but it was a reflection of how politically powerful theatre had been in Germany since the time of the French Revolution that it represented such a threat. Overall, the Nazis feared “Bolshevization” – and their fear of socialist radicalism and artistic modernism stirring up Germany in the Soviet wake was in many ways well founded. The German Communist Party (KPD) would win eighty-one seats in the March 5 election (though its mandates would be annulled three days later). The Nazis especially hated the Jewish Mühsam for his involvement in the briefly established Soviet Bavarian Republic of 1918.
Ossietzky and Mühsam were both arrested in Berlin on February 28, the night after the Reichstag fire, together with the Czechoslovak Communist journalist Egon Erwin Kisch. Kisch, eventually released after ten days because of his foreign passport, witnessed abominable tortures administered to homosexual men at police headquarters. Mühsam held out, but died in a concentration camp in 1934. Ossietzky survived a while longer. The Nobel peace prize for 1935, organized by the future West German president Willy Brandt and awarded to Ossietzky the following year, recognized the courage of his spirit, but his body gave out shortly after the publicity that brought his release.
Throughout that February of 1933, blacklists of every kind grew longer. At her provocative Pfeffermühle (“Pepper Mill”) show in Munich, Erika Mann spotted three sombre figures in the audience taking notes on myriad sexual transgressions and political innuendo. Sex was always an issue for the Nazis (despite the culture minister Joseph Goebbels’s own secret adventures) and cabaret, particularly in Berlin, was an easy target.
Wittstock’s present-tense chronicle is packed with detail, from the crowd that formed a human pyramid so that someone could hand Hitler a rose at his window to the first book-burning in Dresden on March 8. As orgies of destruction spread across the country, university students lined up to pronounce “fire verdicts” on chosen works. “I consign to the flames…”, they chanted, naming Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, essays by the country’s foremost drama critic, Alfred Kerr, and anything by Ossietzky and his outstanding predecessor, the journalist and poet Kurt Tucholsky. Wittstock was mindful of the Capitol riots of January 2021 as he researched his book. He knows that history can repeat itself.
Each of Wittstock’s thirty-five days ends with brief newspaper reports of violent incidents around the country – including news of two brave souls who cut the cable during the broadcast of a Hitler speech – and there is a glossary of what happened to the main characters subsequently. My only criticism is that all this detail doesn’t actually build tension on the page. This reader had to work hard to bring the drama together.
Florian Illies has a more engaging – indeed, at times sensational – style. In Love in a Time of Hate the time span is ten years rather than one month, but many of the characters are the same, shown here in intensely private moments of their suddenly besieged lives. Like Wittstock, Illies immerses us in a stream of gossip (exchanged not least at the Romanisches Café in Berlin), and political rumour, in love affairs past and present, somehow carried on amid great personal achievements and terrible folly. There is a Freudian element and no little writerly brilliance in the way Illies implicitly asks: what did these people mean by love? The question lies at the heart of this racy catalogue raisonée of private passions.
Illies’s entries range beyond Germany to include the outrageous Black dancer Josephine Baker, the cold-hearted young Jean-Paul Sartre and his tortured new partner, Simone de Beauvoir, the Berlin-based fugitives from the Bolshevik Revolution Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Véra, Picasso and his serial mistresses, and the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and his devoted Gala (once the wife of the poet Paul Éluard, and still occasionally to be found in his bed). The catalogue of love affairs includes the extravagant bisexual adventures of Marlene Dietrich in America and even the infidelities of Charlie Chaplin, while Christopher Isherwood and Henry Miller look for extreme sex in Berlin and Paris respectively. All these characters and their antics belong to the same era as Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, established in Berlin to clear up, on a wave of post-Freudian enthusiasm, any problems with inhibition and malfunction. This, then, was Europe in love.
Key figures in Illies’s German story are once again Klaus and Erika Mann, their choices homosexual and occasionally incestuous. The serial heterosexual loves of their uncle Heinrich also feature, though it’s his poor taste in women that upsets the family when they reunite in exile. (The erratic behaviour of his alcoholic wife, Nelly Kröger, he tries to blame on a fall.) Well known but worth repeating is the record-breaking callousness of Brecht as anti-lover of the decade. Unlike the novelist Hermann Hesse, who only left his bride to honeymoon alone, Brecht left his actual wedding to the actress Helene Weigel to spend the evening with his mistress. “Here you have someone on whom you can’t rely”, he told each new conquest, perhaps believing that exculpated him. Illies has some astonishing vignettes, all related, like Wittstock, in the present tense. One was the moment when Baker was bowled over by the modernist architect Le Corbusier. Soon they were dressing up as each other, an erotic encounter culminating in the shower, with Josephine washing the black make-up off Corb’s white skin. Another was the plight of Thea Sternheim, whose ex-husband, the playwright Carl, was raving with tertiary syphilis while Klaus Mann introduced their untameable daughter Mopsa to cocaine. Thea rented adjacent flats to house her loved ones. But then Pamela Wedekind, daughter of the playwright Frank, former lover of Erika Mann and now fiancée of the dying Carl, moved in too. Thea, distraught, begged for opiate injections from her ex’s carer.
If this was the age of “the New Objectivity” in Germany, it was also, in Erich Kästner’s variation on the theme, the age of Reasonable Romance. It seems to have been a value-free erotic zone stretching from Munich to Berlin, Vienna to Paris. Its actors had little concern for politics, except when it spoilt the fun. Nightclubs and foreign travel, great villas built on some of Europe’s most beautiful coasts: such were the backdrops to their realized dreams. When numerous leading intellectuals were forced to bed down for a short idyllic summer beside the Mediterranean, it didn’t seem like the Hitler emergency at all. When the Mann family held court at Sanary-sur-Mer from June to September 1933, Aldous Huxley and Sybille Bedford, as well as the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger in his mansion on the cliffs, were their near neighbours.
Only the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn complained, in a letter to Klaus Mann: “Do you think history is particularly active in French seaside resorts?”. This is an odd question, because it sounds as if Benn had really had too much of Marxist-inclined German writers occupying the moral high ground. But it does have some critical force, helping to pinpoint two European ways of being culturally modern – a New Man, a New Woman – in the early twentieth century. You could be a ruthless communist theoretician. Or you could be a sun-worshipping, god-building, car-driving, sex-crazed, drug-addled individualist.
Or, indeed, you could be Benn, a practising doctor and brilliant poet who, back in a Berlin he would never leave, was setting a new standard for the merciless “objective” coldness of the age. “Life is the building of bridges over rivers that seep away” seems like decent enough German pessimism; “Love is a crisis of the organs of touch” is simply cruel. Benn still attracted a steady stream of women, one of whom, invited for a drink to his flat for the first time, felt that, dressed in his medical white coat, he was going to dissect her with surgical instruments. Was it Benn’s coldness that led him to invest emotionally in the Nazi vision of a new civilization? His fellow writers tried to dissuade him from advancing his uncongenial views, as if they didn’t really take him seriously. The Nazis left him alone because they didn’t want the support of an expressionist degenerate. When his muse returned he wrote some of the greatest poems of the century.
In his novel Mephisto Klaus Mann had based the main character on Gustaf Gründgens, the former husband of his lesbian sister. The three made a foursome, on occasion, with Pamela Wedekind. Illies’s book is full of such permutations, as if all the sexual taboos dictated by culture had vanished in a new age. Many of the heterosexual Weimar-era men believed that their creativity depended on pain, violence and new conquest, at whatever cost to their discarded partners. Neither of these books analyses the extremes it chronicles, but one remembers the strange and ambivalent role played by sexuality in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (originally drafted in 1944), where the culture of Reason, now apparently reaching its apotheosis in Hitler, was somehow the product of rechannelled sexual aggression. A kind of sexuality hitherto underground had become a new extreme cultural and political force.
So what of love, in the end? Some of the most moving stories here concern children and pets. When sex was out of the way everyone behaved better. Ex-spouses helped each other in extremis. Wittstock has the marvellous story of how Brecht and Helene Weigel had their daughter, Barbara, smuggled out of Augsburg with the help of a German nanny and an Englishwoman living in Vienna. Irene Grant, with her four-year-old son on her passport, crossed the border and brought Barbara, two and a half, dressed as a boy, to her parents. (My own husband had a similar escape six years later.) The singer Lotte Lenya had divorced Kurt Weill, but then he helped her to escape Germany and eventually they got back together. Other friends made sure that Weill was reunited in exile with his dog. Back in Berlin, much worry went into not abandoning Gründgens’s sheepdog, Haari.
They were all enemies of Nazism, certainly. But what kind of politics, what kind of society, would have best suited this licentious, aesthetic-minded generation, with its gigantic artistic talents and potential for deep moral waywardness? Presumably, our ultra-liberal own. Perhaps that’s why Illies remains so reserved in his moral judgements, finding the antisemitic vamp Alma Mahler pretty nasty, but only the Hitler-loving film-maker Leni Riefenstahl (“there was a strong streak of elitism to her nymphomania”) “diabolical”. He’s rather lenient, to this reviewer’s mind, and rather hard on Thomas Mann’s “noun-heavy moralizing”. I would have liked to hear him call Brecht not only a great artist, but also a pernicious moral fraud. Illies engages with some relish in his tale, where Wittstock, two generations older, is outraged and sad. In m
aking these observations, though, I may be the product of a staider generation. So let me conclude by saying that, for all the compelling studies on the Weimar Republic, no one will want to miss either of these well-translated books on Weimar writers and Weimar in love.
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ekp0133f · 9 months ago
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I'm so fucking close.. Everything is falling into place. All shall be well and all shall be well! The zubmarine shall be mine! More below.
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This has been going on for three fucking weeks. Every time the Cheery fuckin Gentleman comes by and makes me flip the fuckin coin and his dumbass eight fingered hand. I'm genuinely gonna grind for 50 antique mysteries just to get somethin out of him for once. I'm aiming for the Brass Embassy guest room but my brilliant soul grinding has dried up I'll also take the Royal Beth room. Damn them! I'll never room up with some Master bastards!
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Am inching towards 5 notability for the Correspondent job. Need some Scholar of the Correspondence too... I know you get them on expeditions but they're so dang costly and time consumin. And you gotta do a lot of em.
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I know it's the joke about her becoming an anarchist but RS has genuinely become an anarchist finally. She was closest to Bohemians since the beginning but I finally flipped to my true allegiance.
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kamreadsandrecs · 1 year ago
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By Lesley Chamberlain
The horror of a functioning democracy turning into a brutal dictatorship in a single month is etched into the German psyche. While Nazism claimed millions of victims at home and abroad, it also disfigured the national literary fabric. No biographer, critic or historian of the outstandingly creative 1920s and 1930s can ignore the moment when Hitler’s party, the NSDAP, tore apart the culture of the permissive Weimar Republic by targeting Jews, homosexuals, communists and “degenerate” expressionists. Writers and artists confronted a nightmare, with beatings in the street and storm troops at the door. For the 500 or so who eventually fled, the question was how long to hang on; where to go; how to survive. The panic strained families and ripped lovers apart. Personal loyalties were not always steadfast.
Uwe Wittstock, a prizewinning journalist whose late mother was two years old in 1933, suggests that while we struggle to grasp the catastrophe now, it was all the more unimaginable to its contemporary victims. February 1933: The Winter of Literature revisits moments in those well-documented lives by way of diaries, letters and public events. The personal routines, giddy socializing and creative obsessions belong to some of the best-known names in German culture of the last century, from the monumental novelist Thomas Mann and his brilliant, provocative adult children Erika and Klaus to the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, the fabulous jazz-age composer Kurt Weill, who was Brecht’s collaborator, and the unforgettable satirical painters Otto Dix and George Grosz.
That transformative February Mann loftily decried his intellectual enemies as “hideous, violent little creatures”. His “Avowal of Socialism” (1922) had made him an enemy of the new regime. Yet he waged a curious battle in his last days in Germany, with his attachment to the high cultural past prompting persistent equivocations. Brecht, meanwhile, had recently written an “instructional play” – one of several such Lehrstücke for revolutionaries – which also made him radically unacceptable. In Erfurt the premiere of Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken) was prevented by the police. Brecht demanded a bodyguard as he considered ways of escape.
The Nazis targeted not only individuals, but also the democratic institutions they served. Heinrich Mann, Thomas’s brother, fellow novelist and a staunch supporter of the Republic, was eased out of the Prussian Academy of Arts in what struck everyone as a scandal. Fellow academicians, ashamed, found themselves powerless to object. He was a huge name on the literary scene, thanks to Der Untertan and, Professor Unrat, soon to be filmed with Marlene Dietrich as The Blue Angel. Yet so vulnerable was his position that the French ambassador offered him his embassy should he need refuge.
But it is on figures less familiar outside Germany, such as the writer Else Lasker-Schüler, the left-wing editor Carl von Ossietzky and the anarchist poet and playwright Erich Mühsam, that the perverted age extracted particularly brutal revenge. Lasker-Schüler, born in 1869, aged sixty-three in January 1933, was occupying a tiny room in a Berlin hotel when Hitler was elected chancellor. “For a couple of years she [had been] the undisputed queen of Berlin’s bohemian society, boyishly slight, her black hair cut noticeably short, garbed mostly in baggy clothes and velvet jackets with glass-bead necklaces, clattering bangles and rings on every finger.” As Hitler began targeting every aspect of German life, her play Arthur Aronymus was blocked. It had won a coveted award, as the Nazi rag the Völkischer Beobachter fumed: “The daughter of a Bedouin sheikh receives the Kleist Prize!”. As if her clothes were not enough, her latest play featured conflicts between Jews and Christians. The avant-garde director Gustav Hartung was already in trouble with the NSDAP in Darmstadt over plans to produce Brecht’s Saint Joan. To put on the Lasker-Schüler play in Berlin seemed just too provocative. The author, knocked to the ground in her hotel foyer, bit her tongue so hard that she needed stitches.
Ossietzky, meanwhile, as editor of Die Weltbühne (“The World Stage”), the sharpest political and social weekly of the Weimar Republic, had already served two years in prison for decrying German military violations of the Versailles treaty. As the “winter of literature” closed in his friends begged him to flee, but this brave man insisted he would stay “to watch history unfold”.
On February 17 Mühsam rushed to the pub where Ossietzky was speaking that evening and spread the newspaper out on the table. Henceforth Reichsminister Hermann Goering was permitting the police to shoot to kill. “We will probably never see one another again”, Ossietzky responded, but “let us promise … to remain true to ourselves and to stand up with our body and our lives for what we have believed in and fought for”. Meanwhile, on February 18 the disruptive Brownshirts of the SA, Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, broke up the premiere of Kurt Weill’s musical The Silver Lake. Weill, the genius who had set Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera to music, was Jewish. The playwright Georg Kaiser was not – indeed, he was only vaguely leftist – but the Nazis went after him nonetheless. Wittstock doesn’t make the point, but it was a reflection of how politically powerful theatre had been in Germany since the time of the French Revolution that it represented such a threat. Overall, the Nazis feared “Bolshevization” – and their fear of socialist radicalism and artistic modernism stirring up Germany in the Soviet wake was in many ways well founded. The German Communist Party (KPD) would win eighty-one seats in the March 5 election (though its mandates would be annulled three days later). The Nazis especially hated the Jewish Mühsam for his involvement in the briefly established Soviet Bavarian Republic of 1918.
Ossietzky and Mühsam were both arrested in Berlin on February 28, the night after the Reichstag fire, together with the Czechoslovak Communist journalist Egon Erwin Kisch. Kisch, eventually released after ten days because of his foreign passport, witnessed abominable tortures administered to homosexual men at police headquarters. Mühsam held out, but died in a concentration camp in 1934. Ossietzky survived a while longer. The Nobel peace prize for 1935, organized by the future West German president Willy Brandt and awarded to Ossietzky the following year, recognized the courage of his spirit, but his body gave out shortly after the publicity that brought his release.
Throughout that February of 1933, blacklists of every kind grew longer. At her provocative Pfeffermühle (“Pepper Mill”) show in Munich, Erika Mann spotted three sombre figures in the audience taking notes on myriad sexual transgressions and political innuendo. Sex was always an issue for the Nazis (despite the culture minister Joseph Goebbels’s own secret adventures) and cabaret, particularly in Berlin, was an easy target.
Wittstock’s present-tense chronicle is packed with detail, from the crowd that formed a human pyramid so that someone could hand Hitler a rose at his window to the first book-burning in Dresden on March 8. As orgies of destruction spread across the country, university students lined up to pronounce “fire verdicts” on chosen works. “I consign to the flames…”, they chanted, naming Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, essays by the country’s foremost drama critic, Alfred Kerr, and anything by Ossietzky and his outstanding predecessor, the journalist and poet Kurt Tucholsky. Wittstock was mindful of the Capitol riots of January 2021 as he researched his book. He knows that history can repeat itself.
Each of Wittstock’s thirty-five days ends with brief newspaper reports of violent incidents around the country – including news of two brave souls who cut the cable during the broadcast of a Hitler speech – and there is a glossary of what happened to the main characters subsequently. My only criticism is that all this detail doesn’t actually build tension on the page. This reader had to work hard to bring the drama together.
Florian Illies has a more engaging – indeed, at times sensational – style. In Love in a Time of Hate the time span is ten years rather than one month, but many of the characters are the same, shown here in intensely private moments of their suddenly besieged lives. Like Wittstock, Illies immerses us in a stream of gossip (exchanged not least at the Romanisches Café in Berlin), and political rumour, in love affairs past and present, somehow carried on amid great personal achievements and terrible folly. There is a Freudian element and no little writerly brilliance in the way Illies implicitly asks: what did these people mean by love? The question lies at the heart of this racy catalogue raisonée of private passions.
Illies’s entries range beyond Germany to include the outrageous Black dancer Josephine Baker, the cold-hearted young Jean-Paul Sartre and his tortured new partner, Simone de Beauvoir, the Berlin-based fugitives from the Bolshevik Revolution Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Véra, Picasso and his serial mistresses, and the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and his devoted Gala (once the wife of the poet Paul Éluard, and still occasionally to be found in his bed). The catalogue of love affairs includes the extravagant bisexual adventures of Marlene Dietrich in America and even the infidelities of Charlie Chaplin, while Christopher Isherwood and Henry Miller look for extreme sex in Berlin and Paris respectively. All these characters and their antics belong to the same era as Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, established in Berlin to clear up, on a wave of post-Freudian enthusiasm, any problems with inhibition and malfunction. This, then, was Europe in love.
Key figures in Illies’s German story are once again Klaus and Erika Mann, their choices homosexual and occasionally incestuous. The serial heterosexual loves of their uncle Heinrich also feature, though it’s his poor taste in women that upsets the family when they reunite in exile. (The erratic behaviour of his alcoholic wife, Nelly Kröger, he tries to blame on a fall.) Well known but worth repeating is the record-breaking callousness of Brecht as anti-lover of the decade. Unlike the novelist Hermann Hesse, who only left his bride to honeymoon alone, Brecht left his actual wedding to the actress Helene Weigel to spend the evening with his mistress. “Here you have someone on whom you can’t rely”, he told each new conquest, perhaps believing that exculpated him. Illies has some astonishing vignettes, all related, like Wittstock, in the present tense. One was the moment when Baker was bowled over by the modernist architect Le Corbusier. Soon they were dressing up as each other, an erotic encounter culminating in the shower, with Josephine washing the black make-up off Corb’s white skin. Another was the plight of Thea Sternheim, whose ex-husband, the playwright Carl, was raving with tertiary syphilis while Klaus Mann introduced their untameable daughter Mopsa to cocaine. Thea rented adjacent flats to house her loved ones. But then Pamela Wedekind, daughter of the playwright Frank, former lover of Erika Mann and now fiancée of the dying Carl, moved in too. Thea, distraught, begged for opiate injections from her ex’s carer.
If this was the age of “the New Objectivity” in Germany, it was also, in Erich Kästner’s variation on the theme, the age of Reasonable Romance. It seems to have been a value-free erotic zone stretching from Munich to Berlin, Vienna to Paris. Its actors had little concern for politics, except when it spoilt the fun. Nightclubs and foreign travel, great villas built on some of Europe’s most beautiful coasts: such were the backdrops to their realized dreams. When numerous leading intellectuals were forced to bed down for a short idyllic summer beside the Mediterranean, it didn’t seem like the Hitler emergency at all. When the Mann family held court at Sanary-sur-Mer from June to September 1933, Aldous Huxley and Sybille Bedford, as well as the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger in his mansion on the cliffs, were their near neighbours.
Only the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn complained, in a letter to Klaus Mann: “Do you think history is particularly active in French seaside resorts?”. This is an odd question, because it sounds as if Benn had really had too much of Marxist-inclined German writers occupying the moral high ground. But it does have some critical force, helping to pinpoint two European ways of being culturally modern – a New Man, a New Woman – in the early twentieth century. You could be a ruthless communist theoretician. Or you could be a sun-worshipping, god-building, car-driving, sex-crazed, drug-addled individualist.
Or, indeed, you could be Benn, a practising doctor and brilliant poet who, back in a Berlin he would never leave, was setting a new standard for the merciless “objective” coldness of the age. “Life is the building of bridges over rivers that seep away” seems like decent enough German pessimism; “Love is a crisis of the organs of touch” is simply cruel. Benn still attracted a steady stream of women, one of whom, invited for a drink to his flat for the first time, felt that, dressed in his medical white coat, he was going to dissect her with surgical instruments. Was it Benn’s coldness that led him to invest emotionally in the Nazi vision of a new civilization? His fellow writers tried to dissuade him from advancing his uncongenial views, as if they didn’t really take him seriously. The Nazis left him alone because they didn’t want the support of an expressionist degenerate. When his muse returned he wrote some of the greatest poems of the century.
In his novel Mephisto Klaus Mann had based the main character on Gustaf Gründgens, the former husband of his lesbian sister. The three made a foursome, on occasion, with Pamela Wedekind. Illies’s book is full of such permutations, as if all the sexual taboos dictated by culture had vanished in a new age. Many of the heterosexual Weimar-era men believed that their creativity depended on pain, violence and new conquest, at whatever cost to their discarded partners. Neither of these books analyses the extremes it chronicles, but one remembers the strange and ambivalent role played by sexuality in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (originally drafted in 1944), where the culture of Reason, now apparently reaching its apotheosis in Hitler, was somehow the product of rechannelled sexual aggression. A kind of sexuality hitherto underground had become a new extreme cultural and political force.
So what of love, in the end? Some of the most moving stories here concern children and pets. When sex was out of the way everyone behaved better. Ex-spouses helped each other in extremis. Wittstock has the marvellous story of how Brecht and Helene Weigel had their daughter, Barbara, smuggled out of Augsburg with the help of a German nanny and an Englishwoman living in Vienna. Irene Grant, with her four-year-old son on her passport, crossed the border and brought Barbara, two and a half, dressed as a boy, to her parents. (My own husband had a similar escape six years later.) The singer Lotte Lenya had divorced Kurt Weill, but then he helped her to escape Germany and eventually they got back together. Other friends made sure that Weill was reunited in exile with his dog. Back in Berlin, much worry went into not abandoning Gründgens’s sheepdog, Haari.
They were all enemies of Nazism, certainly. But what kind of politics, what kind of society, would have best suited this licentious, aesthetic-minded generation, with its gigantic artistic talents and potential for deep moral waywardness? Presumably, our ultra-liberal own. Perhaps that’s why Illies remains so reserved in his moral judgements, finding the antisemitic vamp Alma Mahler pretty nasty, but only the Hitler-loving film-maker Leni Riefenstahl (“there was a strong streak of elitism to her nymphomania”) “diabolical”. He’s rather lenient, to this reviewer’s mind, and rather hard on Thomas Mann’s “noun-heavy moralizing”. I would have liked to hear him call Brecht not only a great artist, but also a pernicious moral fraud. Illies engages with some relish in his tale, where Wittstock, two generations older, is outraged and sad. In m
aking these observations, though, I may be the product of a staider generation. So let me conclude by saying that, for all the compelling studies on the Weimar Republic, no one will want to miss either of these well-translated books on Weimar writers and Weimar in love.
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renatajiji · 2 years ago
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Bohemian Embassy/ L'ambassade Bohémienne #electroniccanvas #techspressionism https://instagr.am/p/ClOMLc5A4tK/
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hometoursandotherstuff · 4 years ago
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Visual artist Viivi returned from Paris to Finland and purchased a bomb-ready villa that needed to be extensively renovated. Now, it’s been turned into a gorgeous summer home.
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The magnificent villa was built in the 1920s and is entered via a semicircular veranda. Because the building was originally long and barn-like, they lightened it with the veranda.
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Viivi loves old furniture. When decorating the villa, she looked for it at flea markets, auctions, and second hand shops. The windows of the veranda were commissioned in Estonia. The armchairs were both inherited and flea market finds. An impressive group of lamps on the side table is Viivi's art.
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This unique table on the veranda was made by a carpenter.
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Different horned heads are one of Viivi's favorite subjects. Their gentle, soulful gaze fascinates her. On the table are Wish Boxes.
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The bohemian kitchen is located upstairs in the villa. The cabinets were made by a carpenter. Are those drawer fronts fabric? I can’t tell. Not really loving the cabinets.
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The stove in the kitchen is from the Canadian Embassy. (Of all the weird places to buy a stove- did you ever think of going to a foreign embassy and asking if they have anything you can use?)
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This handmade table matches the smaller one on the veranda. Love the mismatched chairs.
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Love the fireplace and black & white dishes.
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Downstairs is Viivi's studio. The press needed to make the graphics needs fixing and there’s a huge amount of work on the walls.
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Viivi’s bedroom has a gentle color palette. The golden wallpaper is 20 years old.
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In the picture above, I thought the custom made closet was peeling wallpaper, from the side. Anyway, I like the fixture on the ceiling.
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This is the room of Viivi’s adult daughter who chose the wallpaper, suitable for the era of the house.
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The furniture was found in flea markets. Very nice.
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The decorative railings on the staircase were made by a carpenter.
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Viivi commissioned the lounger from a local wooden boat sculptor, in the upstairs lobby lounge.
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Viivi found the bathroom's stunning purple tiles on sale. The floor tiles and the bathtub are recycled.
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I like the glass in the shower. The tile looks like it may have been on sale, too, but it fits.
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In summer, breakfast is usually had up on the terrace. What a great house it turned into considering that it was “bomb-ready.”
https://www.meillakotona.fi/artikkelit/kuvataitelijan-kesahuvila-fiskarsissa
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hopelikethemoon · 5 years ago
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Professor (Javier x Reader) {MTMF} [Smut]
Title: professor Rating: Explicit  Length: 4000 Warnings: Smut (praise kink, roleplay, fingering, unprotect sex, pregnant sex, on a desk) Notes: You can find the Maybe Today, Maybe Forever Timeline here. Set late January 1997.  Summary: Javier and Reader spice things up. 
Taglist:  @grapemama​  @seawhisperer​ @huliabitch​@pedropascalito​ @rogrsnbarnes​@thewallpapergoesorido​ @twomoonstwosuns​ @gooddaykate​@livasaurasrex​ @ham4arrow​ @hiscyarika​ @plexflexico​ @readsalot73​ @hdlynn​@lokiaddicted​ @randomness501​ @fioccodineveautunnale @roxypeanut @just-add-butter@snivellusim @amarvelousmandalorian​​ @lukesrighthand @historynerd04@mrsparknuts​ @synystersilenceinblacknwhite​​ @behindmyeyes-insidemyhead​​
(gif stolen from @coredrive​ I do believe)
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You glanced at your wrist, frowning when you realized that another fifteen minutes had slipped by and Javier still wasn’t there. You sighed, shifting in your seat. They were uncomfortable on a good day. 
“How far along are you?” Asked the mother beside you — Chelly, you think. 
“Almost four months.” You answered, instinctively resting your hand on your stomach. 
“You’re Javier’s…?” 
“Yes, I’m Javier’s…” You countered, leaving the same pregnant pause after his name. The women at Josie’s dance class were notoriously nosey. Chelly was newer, but she had been quickly inducted into the ‘catch the hot dad’ club.
“I rarely see the two of you apart.”
“He has work.” You answered crisply, glancing at your watch again. 
“Oh, that’s right!” Chelly said far too cheerily. “He’s a Professor now, isn’t he? I’m sure he has all the co-eds swooning over him.”
“Jealous you can’t swoon over him?” You accused, glaring at Chelly. 
She was entirely undeterred, “I just know I’d be at his office all the time if he were my… whatever you call him.”
You rolled your eyes. “I’m sorry you don’t trust your—” You glanced at her left hand. “Husband.” 
Chelly huffed.
“What? You’re the one going on and on about someone else’s partner. Maybe your husband should be worried about what you’re up to.” You rarely engaged with the mothers at dance — but you were pregnant and more than a little pissed off now.
“I’m married, not dead. I’m perfectly capable of looking at a man and appreciating that he’s good looking and charming.” She smirked. “But you wouldn’t understand that, would you?”
Your lips parted to shoot back something equally as scathing, but you spotted a frazzled looking Javier walking through the front door of the dance studio. You caught his gaze and smiled when he smiled back. 
“Hey, baby.” Javier drawled out as he settled into the seat beside you, arm curling around your shoulders as he pressed a kiss to your temple. “I’m sorry. Traffic was a nightmare.” He gave your shoulder three short squeezes, before sweeping his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t miss her, did I?”
You rested your hand on his knee and shook your head, “She goes on in a few.” 
“It’s good to see you again, Javier.” Chelly remarked as she leaned forward to look around you. “I hear you’re teaching now. How exciting!” 
Javier’s brows furrowed as he glanced around you, “Uh, yeah. If grading papers can be considered exciting.” 
“Your students are so lucky.” She continued, her brand of enthusiasm making you consider murder. They were all so fucking shamless. “If you were my professor back when I was in college, I would’ve always been in your office.” Chelly smirked. “Do you give extra credit?” 
“Only if the situation calls for it.” Javier answered, entirely unphased by the insinuation Chelly had just doled out. “I’ve got a couple students that are balancing a career on top of education, so I’m a little more lenient with them.” 
You turned to look at Javier, watching as he loosened his tie. He caught your gaze, arching a curious brow as you subtly tilted your head towards Chelly. With a wiggle of your brows, he caught on to what you were indicating. This mother was just like the rest of the women who — for some reason — couldn’t get enough of Javi. Would they feel the same way if they knew he hogged the covers? Frequently forgot to put the seat down? Slowly drove you crazy?
You loved him, but he was not the man they put him on the pedestal as. It had to be because he was so effortlessly devoted to both you and Josie. He was aloof to their flirting and that only made them try harder. 
Javier leaned close to press a quick kiss to your lips, resting his hand on your swollen belly. “How have my three favorite girls been today?” He questioned, smiling warmly at you. 
“Josie and I drove around to look at townhomes.” You told him, chewing on your bottom lip. “We ended up finding a gorgeous little three-bedroom craftsman in Coconut Grove.” 
“I hadn’t taken you for Grovites.” Chelly interjected and Javier glared at her. “What? It’s very bohemian.”
You sighed heavily, “Anyways. It has a better backyard than the townhomes.” 
“Wanna set up an appointment to look at it?”
“I wrote the relator’s information down.” You told him with a grin, resting your hand over his on your stomach. “Josie saw an iguana and decided that’s where we have to live.” 
He chuckled, “Of course she did.”
The teacher pulled everyone’s attention to the front of the studio, dimming the lights as the little girls and boys came out to perform the dance they had been working on for weeks. Josie was such a good little ballerina. You were impressed with how dedicated she was to practicing at home — you had never been that dedicated to anything when you were little. Then again, you had a feeling that Javier’s constant praise was a big motivator. Josie was bound and determined to make him proud. 
And given the grin on his face, she had succeeded. 
After the recital, everyone made their way into another room where drinks and snacks and been set up. Josie was running around playing make-believe with some of her classmates while you and Javier made small talk with the other parents. 
“What was Chelly up to?” Javier questioned as he took a sip of lemonade, arching a brow over the rim of the plastic cup as he looked at you. 
“For someone who had half of Colombia’s finest eating out of the palm of your hand…” You laughed and shook your head at just how offended he looked by that statement. “Javi, you rambled about being lenient to working students, when Chelly was referencing the kind of extra credit you earn from a—” You lowered your voice, slipping your hand into his as you stepped into his side. “—blowjob.” 
“For fuck’s sake.” Javier worked his jaw. “What kind of man do these women take me for?”
You shrugged a shoulder, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… I don’t get it.” 
“You’re pregnant!” 
“Better reason to find yourself a hot co-ed?” You suggested with a roll of your eyes. Sliding your fingers through Javier’s where they were interlaced, you turned to look at him. “Speaking of office hours… do you have any tomorrow?”
Javier pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek as he met your eyes. “Are your grades slipping?”
You smirked and nodded your head, “It’s just been so hard.” 
“I can only imagine,” He rubbed his thumb over the back of your hand. “I’m sure I could come up with extra credit for you.”
“I’m sure you’ll rise to the occasion.” You retorted, sweeping your tongue along your bottom lip, catching Javier’s attention. “I’m serious.”
“I was hoping you were.” He said lowly, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “One to three.”
You nodded your head, “I’ll see you then, Professor.” You pressed a quick kiss to his cheek, before you caught sight of one of the mothers veering towards you. “Missy incoming.”
“It is just so good to see you!” She said, mooning over Javier before glancing at you. “Both of you.” Missy clasped her hands together. “I hear congratulations are in order.”
You rested your hand against your stomach. “Josie is very excited about being a big sister.”
Missy seemed confused momentarily, “Oh. Right! Yes.”
Javier frowned, “What were you congratulating us for?”
“I heard you got married.”
You laughed. “No.”
“This is just our birth dates.” Javier explained, gesturing to the ring he wore. “Christmas gift.”
Missy’s hands went to her hips, “That’s… modern.” 
“It’s to deter women who can’t seem to catch the hint.” You said bluntly. 
“Marriage would certainly handle that.”
Javier curled his arm around your waist, pulling you into his side. “So does having two children. Excuse me.” He looked to you then, “You ready to find Josie and go home?”
“I’d love that.” You could feel your pulse drumming in your ears with your annoyance. “I’m so fucking tired of these women.” You muttered as Javier guided you away from Missy.
“I thought you were going to start swinging.” Javier chuckled, petting his hand over your hair before pressing a kiss to your temple. “Ice cream?”
“Hell yes.” 
———
Despite the cool weather that had swept through Florida you still opted for a sundress, smartly paired with a sweater and your knee-length jacket. It was one of the few dresses you had kept from when you were pregnant with Josie, handmade by the woman down the hall that ended up watching her when you went back to work. Back in Colombia you rarely had an excuse to wear a nice dress — if you were at work you were dressing to conceal your pregnancy as best as possible, clinging to your professional wear until you had to buy new clothes from catalogues and hope that they were safely delivered to the embassy. 
It was far from ideal.
But now you were able to truly enjoy your pregnancy. A nice sundress seemed like the perfect thing to wear to visit Javier at the university. 
You made your way across the campus to Javier’s office-quad. The halls were quiet save for the murmured voices from behind closed doors as lectures took place. You glanced at your watch, it was just after one. And just as Javi had promised you — the other professors weren’t in their offices. 
Sweeping your fingers through your hair, you drew in a deep breath before you approached his office door and knocked three times. You could hear the shuffle of paper, the creak of his chair as he got up. Your heart skipped a beat as he pulled the door open. Okay, maybe you got why everyone was trying to chase him down for themselves. 
He hated suits, but he looked hot as fuck in one. And those glasses… why had he hid them from you for so long? 
“Hi.” You breathed out, scraping your teeth over your bottom lip as you looked up at him. “I was hoping I might talk to you about getting my grades up... Professor.” 
Javier smirked at you, opening his door a little wider. “I’m certain we can figure out some way to help you excel in my class.” He drawled out. 
You brushed past him closer than necessary, grinning when you caught his sharp inhale. This was something you had only ever discussed from the comfort of your bed. It was risky, but everything about your relationship had been filled with risk. 
He moved to lean against his desk, hands curled around the edge as he stared at you. “Why do you think you’ve been struggling in class?” Javier gestured to the seat in front of him.
You peeled off your coat as you sat down slowly, your hand resting on your stomach as you stared at him. “I think some of the material is just hard to understand.” You answered, wetting your lips as you met his gaze. “But I’m willing to do anything to bring my grade up, Professor.” 
Javier clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” He swallowed thickly as he rubbed at the back of his neck. “Holy shit.”
“Breaking character already?” You teased, your eyes flickering to the notable bulge in his trousers. “We don’t have to do this, Javi.” 
“I want to.” He assured you quickly, following your line of sight downwards. “How are your oral skills?”
Your cheeks flushed red and you started laughing. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” You covered your face, descending into a fit of giggles. “Do people really say this shit? I can’t.” 
“C’mere.” Javier held his hand out and you took it, letting him pull you towards him. “I don’t really want to pretend you’re my student.” He said softly, brushing his thumb over your bottom lip as he met your gaze. “I don’t want to pretend with you.” 
“Me neither.” You whispered, your fingers curling around the side of his neck as you leaned in to kiss him. You let the kiss linger, before you pulled back just enough to speak. “But I’m not leaving until you fuck me.” 
Javier groaned and kissed you again, his mouth slanting over yours as his hand creeped up your thigh, sliding beneath the hem of your skirt. You smirked against his lips as you waited for him to discover that you had opted to go without one very crucial garment. “Baby.” 
“I came here with one mission.” You grinned, bumping your nose against his. “Surprise.” 
“I love you.” Javier kissed you again as his fingers trailed over the bar skin of your hip, before he dipped his hand down between your thighs. 
You moaned softly against his mouth as he stroked his fingers between your slick folds. It wasn’t nearly enough stimulation, but you were so sensitive — every nerve in your body seemingly focused on the desire that made you throb. Your tongue darted out over his bottom lip, seeking entrance as his lips parted. 
Javier’s fingers twisted in your hair, cradling the back of your head as he kissed you back with the same desperate need you offered. He pressed a single finger into you, your inner walls clenching around the intrusion. 
“Fuck.” You swore, gasping for a breath as he pressed a second finger into you. He drew them out of you slowly, his thumb brushing over your clit. “Javi.” You practically wined, grabbing at his shoulders for support. 
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” He questioned. Javier still had his fingers tangled in your hair, holding you so he could stare into your eyes as he worked his fingers in and out of you. “Come on, baby… I asked you a question.” 
“Yes!” You bit out as he started circling your clit, the rough sweep of his thumb making your desire spike. “I’m… fuck… Javier, please.” You curled your fingers around the back of his neck, nails biting into his skin as you clung to him. Your legs nearly gave out on you as your release overtook you, your inner walls clenching around his fingers as he kept working his fingers into you. 
“That’s a good girl,” Javier murmured, pushing your hair away from your face as he pressed a row of kisses along your jaw. He kept a tight grip on your hip to hold you steady as he drew his fingers away from you. You felt heat rise in your cheeks as you watched him bring them to his lips, licking away your arousal that clung to them.
“Javi.” You breathed out, grabbing at his hand and bringing it to your own mouth. You wrapped your lips around his fingers, swirling your tongue around them. You released your grasp on his shoulder, reaching down to palm him through his trousers. 
“Fuck.” He grunted, swatting your hand away as he stood up. You shuffled back, eyes on his. “Hop up here.” Javier told you, patting the spot where he had been sitting.
You carefully perched yourself on the edge of your desk, biting down on your bottom lip as you lifted your dress up, revealing your thighs as you settled backwards. As much as you’d prefer it if he would just bend you over his desk and have his way with you — your stomach posed a slight challenge. 
Javier unbuckled his trousers, slighting the belt out of the loops and letting it drop to the ground. His trousers went next, zipped drawn down and the fabric shoved down his hips. “I have no fucking clue how I’m going to meet with students.” He gestured to you. “This is all I’m going to see.”
“Good.” You whispered, spreading your legs apart wider for him. “Tell me I’m a good girl again.” 
His brows shot upwards, “You like that?”
“I’ve always enjoyed it.” 
“Huh.” Javier pursed his lips as he rested his hands atop your thighs, fingers spanning out over your skin. 
“I don’t exactly advertise it.” You told him, holding his gaze as you reached down to stroke your fingers between your sensitive folds. “Don’t make me wait, Javi. We don’t have a lot of time.” 
“I’m a fucking lucky man.” Javier said lowly as he loosened his tie. He started to take his glasses off but you stopped him. 
“I want them on.” 
He rolled his eyes. “Suit yourself.” Javier freed his cock from his boxers, giving himself a sure stroke before he stepped towards you. 
You bit down on your bottom lip, willing yourself not to be too loud as he pressed into you. He started with just the tip of him, pressing in and then dragging himself through your folds. “Tease.” You hooked your leg around his hip, trying to draw him closer. 
“Be a good girl for me,” Javier tried, though the tone he used made you stifle a giggle. “Fuck off.” 
“Just fuck me, Javi.” You rolled your hips, groaning as he pressed forward — filling you in one swift movement. “Oh, fuck.” 
He grabbed at your hips, holding you steady as he started to move. A pen rolled off his desk behind your head and you didn’t even care what else he lost in the effort. Your hands gripped at his where they rested at your hips. 
“Feel so fucking good.” Javier managed, nearly pulling free of you entirely before he was slamming back home. Your bottom lip was going to be swollen by the time you were done with it, biting at it in an attempt to keep from crying out as he kept driving into that sweet spot within you.
“So do you.” You hissed out. “Just like that. Fuck.” 
Javier gripped at your hip tightly, holding you steady as he kept slamming into you. You curled your hand around the back of his neck, lifting up off the desk to kiss him. Your mouth slanted over his, your moans caught against his lips. The slight change of angle had you tensing, your release overtaking you as you started to clench around him. 
His grip tightened on your hip, clinging to you as he followed you over the proverbial cliff. His hips pressed into your, grinding against you as he came apart within you. You let yourself sink back against the desk, knocking papers off as you did. 
“Fuck.” He swore, rolling his hips twice more before he pulled out of you. Javier swallowed thickly as he looked down, “You are… damn.”
You moaned softly, pushing your hair off your clammy cheeks. “Holy shit.”
Javier leaned down to press a kiss to the top of your thigh, his breath hot against your skin. “Didn’t know I could possibly love you anymore than I already did.”
You laughed and teased him lightly. “I do love how you get after you come.” 
He rolled his eyes. “I was having a moment.”
You gave him a look. “So was I.” You nudged his shoulder with your foot. “My underwear are in my left coat pocket.”
“Clever.”
You smirked. “As much fun as it sounds to walk around campus sans-panties after this…” You gestured downwards. “I am not in college anymore.”
Javier narrowed his eyes. 
“You’re not allowed to be jealous, Javi.” You quipped as he slid your underwear up your thighs. You scooted off the desk, laying your dress back down. “That was fun.” You told him, pressing a quick kiss to his lips as you helped him tuck himself back into his boxers and slacks. 
“I can’t believe we finally did it.” He brushed his fingers over your cheek, kissing you again. “You were such a good girl.” 
“I’m a sucker for your praise.” You whispered, tilting your chin up as you looked up at him as you straightened his tie. “I love you.” 
“I lov—” A knock interrupted him. “Shit.” 
You quickly sat back down in the chair across from his desk, watching as Javier quickly picked up the paper and pens that had been scattered across the floor. He cleared his throat — not inconspicuously at all. “Come in.”
The door opened slowly, “I’m so sorry for interrupting Professor Peña.” The young woman’s eyes flickered towards you. “It’s good to see you again.” She was the same student that had been there the day you came to tell Javier that you were pregnant. “Congratulations.” 
“Thank you.” You smiled, rubbing your thumb over your bottom lip. You’d certainly done a number on it. 
“It’s fine Monica. What is it?”
“I can come back.” The blush on her cheeks and her inability to look Javier in the eye made you suspect that it was plainly obvious as to what she’d just walked in on. 
“What did you need?” Javier questioned with a slight edge to his voice. 
“I was hoping you might look over the report I’m working on. You mentioned you’d be willing to make sure we were on the right track and… I can drop it off later.” 
You cleared your throat, “I can check it over for you.” You offered, holding your hand out. “He usually farms things off to me anyways.” 
Monica smiled and passed the paper to you. “Thank you. I don’t know if he tells you how much he talks about you in class, but… we all think you’re a badass.” 
With a laugh you smiled at her. “If you ask the DEA, I didn’t do jackshit in Colombia, but I’m glad Javier’s keeping my efforts alive.” You looked towards him, your eyes shining with adoration for him. You weren’t the least bit surprised that he talked about you. Even when you weren’t with him, he had always been one of the few people on your side of the ring. 
“When the timing is better, do you think we could get coffee… or tea.” Monica smiled hopefully at you. “I don’t really know what I want to do after college, but I do want to pursue law enforcement in some capacity.” 
“Of course.” You leaned forward and grabbed a piece of paper off Javier’s desk, jotting your number down. “Give me a call this weekend and we can set it up.” 
“Thank you.” Monica looked between the two of you, before she excused herself. 
“She definitely knows what we were just doing, doesn’t she?” Javier questioned, folding his arms across his chest and leaning against the edge of the desk beside you. 
You nodded your head with a laugh. “Oh, without a doubt.” You grinned at him. “You talk about me?”
“All the time. I’m surprised they’re not bored as shit.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Think Connie would mind watching Josie a little longer today?”
“Why?”
Javier rubbed at the back of his neck. “You want to come to my lecture at five?”
“I’d love to.” You grinned at him as you stood up. “You call her and I’m going to go clean up.” 
He caught your arm, shaking his head slowly. “Don’t.”
You smirked, “You are such a jackass.” You slowly draped your arms over his chest, leaning up to kiss him.” 
“And you love me for it.” Javier drawled out, letting his hand slip beneath your dress so he could grab your ass. “Please?” 
“I don’t know…” You said coyly. 
“I thought you were a good girl.” 
“Don’t wear it out.” You shot back, bumping your nose against his. “Fine.” 
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sethsings · 3 years ago
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- Cabaret in Captivity, Pangea, 2018 -
Songs and sketches from Terezin/Theresienstad In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day
Performance filmed on April 16th, 2018 At Pangea
Performed as part of the National Jewish Theater Foundation's Holocaust Theater International Initiative, Remembrance Day Play Readings.
Conceived by Edward Einhorn
Developed and directed by Edward Einhorn and Jenny Lee Mitchell
Produced by Untitled Theater Company No. 61 in conjunction with Mad Jenny Theater
Original work written by Armin Berg, Robert Dauber, Hans Hofer, Vitezslav “Pidla” Horpatzky, Jaroslav Jezek, Frantisek Kowanitz, Feliz Porges, Leo Strauss, Karel Svenk, Louis Taufstein, Viktor Ullman, Ilse Weber, and Lisa Zeckendorf-Kutzinski
With: Craig Anderson, Seth Gilman, Jeremy Lawrence, Jenny Lee Mitchell, Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld, Katarina Vizina and Barbara Maier Gustern
Musical direction and piano accompaniment: Maria Dessena.
Terezin was located an hour away from Prague, and during World War II it served as both an internment camp and a way station for the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Full of satire, bitter humor, and hope, these pieces demonstrate how art became a vital survival technique for the inmates. Most of these pieces were recently recovered through the efforts of scholar Lisa Peschel, who also translated the majority of the work.
"Although honoring a somber event, the atmosphere was surprisingly pleasant and uplifting...Cabaret in Captivity is a call to action to use hope not as a means of passive daydreaming, but a powerful act of resistance. It has been said that humor equals truth plus distance. Perhaps humor was the most palatable, effective way of sharing the unbelievable creativity, will, and resistance that came from the 'Chosen' who 'had no choice.' " - Amy Oestreicher, Broadway World
Previously performed at The Center for Jewish History, the Bohemian National Hall, York Theatre, the Czech Embassy in Washington, DC, and The William Goodenough House in London, England.
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oldshowbiz · 4 years ago
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The Bohemian Embassy was where Lorne Michaels had his first job in showbiz. His job was to book new talent. Among the recruits were Don Cullen, a comedian in the touring company of Dudley Moore’s Beyond the Fringe.
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