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justforbooks · 2 months ago

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Kris Kristofferson

Songwriter, singer and actor known for such classic hits as For the Good Times and Me and Bobby McGee

‘Songwriter” might be the first term that springs to mind to describe Kris Kristofferson, who has died aged 88, but he could also lay claim to being a singer, film star, soldier and academic. Highly cerebral yet also a rugged man of action, Kristofferson was from the same fine tradition of robust American individualists as his friends Johnny Cash and Sam Peckinpah.

Kristofferson’s greatest successes as a singer-songwriter came during the 1970s, especially with the albums The Silver Tongued Devil and I (1971), Border Lord (1972) and Jesus Was a Capricorn (1972), all big country hits that also crossed over to the pop album charts. However, before he achieved recognition as a performer, Kristofferson was already renowned as a supplier of hit songs to other artists.

His first to chart was Vietnam Blues, recorded by Dave Dudley in 1966, but the ball really started rolling when Roger Miller recorded three Kristofferson songs for his album Roger Miller (1969). One of them was Me and Bobby McGee, the bittersweet story of a pair of lovers and their life on the road, and Miller took it into the country music Top 20. Partly inspired by the Federico Fellini film La Strada (1954), it would become one of Kristofferson’s most covered songs.

Then Ray Stevens charted with Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, the desolate alcoholic’s lament that would be a hit for Cash the following year, Faron Young took Your Time’s Comin’ into the country Top 5, and Jerry Lee Lewis followed suit with Once More With Feeling.

The Kristofferson magic also worked for Ray Price, who took For the Good Times to a country No 1 and the pop Top 20 in 1970, while Sammi Smith scored a pop Top 10 hit with Help Me Make It Through the Night. By the time Janis Joplin’s cover of Me and Bobby McGee topped the pop charts in March 1971, several months after Joplin’s death, Kristofferson (who had had a brief affair with the troubled singer) had become one of the hottest songwriting names in Nashville.

His debut album, Kristofferson, had gone nowhere following its April 1970 release, even though it contained songs being made into hits by other singers, and despite Kristofferson’s appearance at the vast Isle of Wight festival that year. But after he turned the corner commercially with Silver Tongued Devil, the first album was reissued as Me and Bobby McGee – and earned him a gold record. In 1972, several of his songs were nominated for Grammys, and he won Best Country Song for Help Me Make It Through the Night.

By the time Jesus Was a Capricorn had topped the country charts in 1973, boosted by the crossover hit single Why Me, Kristofferson’s attention had turned towards acting. He had already appeared in Dennis Hopper’s chaotic The Last Movie (1971) and played a down-and-out musician in Cisco Pike (1972), and now it was his connection with Peckinpah that pushed his movie career into high gear.

Peckinpah cast him as Billy the Kid in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), in which Bob Dylan had an acting role and supplied songs for the soundtrack, and he worked with Peckinpah again on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) and Convoy (1978).

In 1973 Kristofferson married the singer Rita Coolidge (his second wife) and the couple scored a big pop and country hit with their first duet album, Full Moon, which delivered a batch of hit singles including the Grammy-winning From the Bottle to the Bottom. They enjoyed further success with the albums Breakaway (1974) and Natural Act (1978).

Meanwhile, Kristofferson had starred in Martin Scorsese’s first Hollywood studio production, the romantic comedy Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), with Ellen Burstyn. Two years later he soared into blockbuster heaven when paired with Barbra Streisand in the remake of A Star Is Born (their on-screen relationship continued off-screen). It was bludgeoned by critics but earned $150m at the box office, and brought Kristofferson a Golden Globe for best actor.

Coolidge and Kristofferson divorced in 1980. Coolidge commented acidly: “I can’t say enough about what a great man he was. It’s just that he was a shitty husband ... He was a very toxic human being with all his drinking and his womanising.”

Kristofferson, discussing how he had idolised the country singer Hank Williams, commented that “most of the heroes in that vein have been pretty self-destructive, and I was myself for a while. I used to drink a lot just to get up on the stage. I did not have a lot of confidence at the beginning.” He stopped drinking alcohol in 1980, after his doctor warned him that he was killing himself.

His leading role as Jim Averill in Heaven’s Gate (1980) ought to have been a crowning triumph for Kristofferson, but Michael Cimino’s portentous western became a byword for wastefulness and excess, and bankrupted United Artists studios. He enjoyed only modest success with Flashpoint (1984) and co-starred the same year with Willie Nelson in Songwriter, for which he wrote several songs, winning an Academy Award nomination for original music score. He and Nelson released the successful duo album Music from Songwriter.

During the 90s he experienced a revival after appearing as a corrupt sheriff in John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996). This led to parts in a string of successful big-budget films including Payback (1999), Planet of the Apes (2001) and the Blade trilogy (1998, 2002 and 2004).

Kristofferson was born in the city of Brownsville, Texas. He was the eldest of three children of Mary Ann Ashbrook and Lars Kristofferson, an air force pilot who rose to the rank of major general. The military life took the family to California, where Kris graduated from San Mateo high school in 1954, then studied creative writing at Pomona College.

He won first prize in a short story competition sponsored by the literary magazine the Atlantic Monthly, and was also recognised by Sports Illustrated for his many achievements in football and athletics during his time as a student.

Later, he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University, and it was in the UK that he began performing his own songs. He fell into the orbit of the “beat svengali” Larry Parnes, who secured him some recording sessions (under the name Kris Carson) with Top Rank records and the producer Tony Hatch.

Fortunately, perhaps, Parnes failed to turn him into the next Tommy Steele, and after receiving his master’s degree in English literature in 1960 – he also won a boxing blue while at Oxford – Kristofferson returned to the US.

It was not long before he was back in Europe. Having married Fran Beer in 1960, he joined the US army, became a helicopter pilot and was assigned to West Germany. He continued to write and perform music, forming a band with some fellow servicemen. One of his comrades was a cousin of the Nashville songwriter Marijohn Wilkin, who gave Kristofferson’s work a favourable report when he sent her some of his songs. After completing his tour of duty in 1965 with the rank of captain, he was offered a post at West Point military academy as an English instructor.

However, he took a trip to the city of Nashville to visit Wilkin, which persuaded him to quit the army and devote his efforts to becoming a country music songwriter. He earned a small stipend from a deal with Wilkin’s music publishing company, Buckhorn Music, and worked at various jobs, including flying helicopters to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and taking on a job as a studio janitor.

He was working at Columbia Records’ Nashville studios when Dylan came to town to record his album Blonde on Blonde (1966), and it was here that Kristofferson first met Cash, who would become a staunch friend and supporter.

“John would tell everybody in town that Mickey Newbury and I were the best songwriters around,” Kristofferson remembered. “For me, to be endorsed by someone like Cash was really something, like being endorsed by Dylan.”

Kristofferson’s increasingly left-leaning political sympathies were expressed in his album Repossessed (1987), which gave him a hit single with They Killed Him (a tribute to Gandhi, Christ and Martin Luther King), and he appeared in the television miniseries Amerika (1987), which portrayed a US under communist domination. Another politically slanted album, Third World Warrior (1990), failed to chart.

In 1985, Kristofferson and Nelson banded together with Cash and Waylon Jennings to record Highwayman, and both the album and title song were popular country chart-toppers. This gathering of charismatic and much loved country greats became known as the Highwaymen, and enjoyed further success both as a touring act and with the albums Highwaymen 2 (1990) and The Road Goes on Forever (1995).

Kristofferson completed a hat-trick of albums with the producer Don Was, This Old Road (2006), Closer to the Bone (2009) and Feeling Mortal (2013). His final studio album was The Cedar Creek Sessions (2016), which was nominated for a Grammy award for best Americana album.

After several years of suffering from memory loss that doctors believed was caused by Alzheimer’s disease, in February 2016 Kristofferson at last received a diagnosis of Lyme disease. Following appropriate treatment, his condition improved markedly. “It’s like Lazarus coming out of the grave and being born again,” commented his friend the Nashville singer-songwriter Chris Gantry.

In November 2018, he performed Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You at Both Sides Now – Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration, which marked Mitchell’s 75th birthday. He gave his final full-scale live performance at the Sunrise theatre in the city of Fort Pierce, Florida, in 2020.

Having previously been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1977) and the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1985), he was embraced by the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004, and in 2006 won the Johnny Mercer award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He once said that he wanted the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s Bird on the Wire on his tombstone:

Like a bird on the wire Like a drunk in a midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free

He is survived by his third wife, Lisa Meyers, whom he married in 1983, and their daughter, Kelly Marie, and sons, Jesse, Jody, Johnny and Blake; by a daughter, Casey, from his second marriage; and by a daughter, Tracy, and a son, Kris, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.

🔔 Kristoffer Kristofferson, songwriter, singer and actor, born 22 June 1936; died 28 September 2024

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#just for books #Kris Kristofferson #in memoriam

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shabre-legacy · 1 year ago

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Coruscant

Aric Jorgan leans against the wall of the speeder hub nearest the senate watching the traffic in and out. This is one of the busier hubs being as it’s near one of the spaceports that transport from Carrick Stations stopped at. He’d been frustrated since his demotion and being told he wasn’t allowed to stick around for part of the general’s briefing, that only his CO was allowed this time, it only made that worse. Jhasis had told him to go arrange transport to their next destination while he was busy. But it only took a couple minutes and name dropping Havoc Squad to get a taxi reserved and ready to go as soon as Jhasis got done. He’s frustrated with the whole situation. He glances around again and notices one of the men from the crowd coming towards him. He’d come in with a Mirialan woman who was now arguing with one of the taxi droids. Both of them carrying blasters. The woman had two visible and the man had one, but with his years in the field, he can tell that both of them carry more hidden blasters. The dark haired man looks vaguely familiar, bright eyes and a big grin that he could swear he’d seen at some point.

“Well, if it ain’t good to see a familiar face round here.” The mantellian drawl drips with a cheerfulness that if he’d been in a better mood might have made even him smile. He frowns trying to remember, it takes a minute to place the man.

“Riggs.. right, Viduu’s bodyguard?” He’d not paid much attention to the civilians around Fort Garnak, but his position meant he was familiar with how the Fort got their supplies after the separatists cut off transport. Which meant he was familiar with the supplier and by extension vaguely aware of the man’s body guard.

Riggs smile dims slightly. “Yeah, Corso Riggs. I was head of security, but after Viduu was killed, I found a new employer.” He jerks his head over his shoulder towards the mirialan behind him, moving to lean on the wall next to Aric. “Seems like we’re both waiting. Since you’re not stuck on Ord anymore, I’m guessing you got promoted out.”

Jorgan growls, he can’t help it and the kids overly sunny attitude is grating. “Not promoted, reassigned. Special Forces.” He’s not going into his demotion with the kid.

Corso’s grin lights up again. “Special Forces huh? So you get all the good toys now.”

That nearly makes Jorgan crack a smile, but he refuses to, not while he’s stuck here WAITING, instead of actually DOING ANYTHING. “Yeah, we get all the best gear.”

Corso goes to say something but stops himself as he pushes of the wall. “Gotta take off and go to work. Nice talkin’ with ya. Always good to know at least one face in a place like this.” He lifts a hand in farewell as he jogs over and jumps into a taxi right before it takes off.

#swtor #Aric jorgan #corso riggs #corso my darling #fanfics #my writing #corso/aric

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pb-dot · 1 year ago

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The Clockwork Boy Ch. 1: The Sky-Eyes Boy

As I mentioned in my 100 followers celebration/acknowledgment post, I'm posting the first proper chapter of The Clockwork Boy. Call it a bit of a longer sneak peek than the snippets I usually post. The chapter is just about where I want it editing-wise, but I can't promise I won't fiddle with it more. Without further ado, full chapter beneath the cut.

Jake didn’t much like hauling, and yet it was an activity he found himself doing frequently. Admittedly, it could be argued that what he did this particular day was more akin to schlepping, as pulling a hand cart loaded to the brim with tin was pushing his strength just about as far as it would go. Regardless of the exact definition of what he was doing, it was tiresome tedious work. It made Jake the kind of tired that had him making stupid mistakes or really quite clever observations. There wasn’t much of an in-between, and today he was going to do both.

The practical-minded clockmaker’s workshop always bought its materials in bulk, ideally already smelted into ingots for ease of use. While employing the economics of scale was undoubtedly preferable, this required access to a market that his humble, if not entirely disreputable workshop did not have. The biggest providers of raw materials tended to be bought out in a hurry, and the contracts for new clients quickly became restrictive to the point of exclusion. Smaller dealers usually were left to do their limited business in peace, although there was a definite limit to how big they could get before accidents started happening, or anonymous tips into shady business practices led to lengthy investigations with no protection against bankruptcy and destitution. So his employer bought materials wherever they could get them for reasonable prices, which usually meant low quanta and mediocre quality at best, and smelting them was expensive and at times dangerous, but it was better than saddling oneself with the usurious revenue garnishing payment plans that the more convenient suppliers used.

Jake had come to gain an understanding of the workings of the city. It wasn’t a place for mercy, but it was reasonable in its own way. There were rules and laws, of a sort, like any place else, but there were also strongly worded suggestions, things one was better off doing. One of the biggest rules was to keep your head down. Both avoiding eye contact in public and not standing out, in general, were strategies that Jake employed all but subconsciously after a few years in the city, and now no longer questioned. There were, of course, disadvantages to looking at the ground while lost in thought, but at least when pulling the handcart, his profile was looming enough to dissuade all but the most thoughtless jaywalkers. There is, however, no shortage of foolishness and recklessness in the world, and on occasion, a fool of as of yet unmatched magnitude will make their presence known in the worst sort of way. One such hitherto undefeated champion of duncery was driving a passing steam pavise. The horseless cart was pulled by a trio of disembodied steam-powered leg pairs, reminiscent of the brutish beasts that had once provided the propulsion to similar contraptions in days past. The steam pavise itself was about to go the way of the horse and fade from the streets as the more energy- and space-efficient Gear Walkers took over. If this changing of the guard brought any pensive humility to its drivers, said humility had not penetrated to the madman driving this particular vehicle. The wheels of the pavise didn’t as much hit the cart as they briefly snagged the handcart’s wheel, sending the whole contraption and its hapless driver into a spin, before careening further down the street with the rhythmic beat of automated hooves.

Jake felt his body sting and ache. He had managed to stop the handcart from spinning out or hitting anyone, but he was pretty sure he had pulled at least a couple of muscles in doing so. It would sting like the dickens, and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be hammering or lifting anything in the next couple of days. At least he should be able to get the cart back to the workshop, the slight slope would take him the rest of the way all but unaided.

It was only once the brightest flash of adrenaline and other pain-numbing chemicals subsided that Jake found it in himself to be angry at the pavise driver. In days gone, you could talk to the constables about that kind of behavior, but the streets hadn’t seen as much as a badge for decades now. There was always trying to sic The Enforcers on people who mistreated you, but as long as you weren’t rich they were just as likely to rough you up for your trouble. Besides, Jake thought, even if he thought the guy absolutely shouldn’t be driving, he didn’t want him beat up. Lightly chastised? Sure, but that was the extent of it. Jake felt his pulse calm and the fog of anger and pain clearing up. When he found it in himself to look up at the world around him, he realized, with a sudden shock, that he was being watched.

A street stoat was staring at him from the little side path that it and its brethren had carved through the litter that filled the sides of the street. Jake wasn’t sure, but he suspected the animal had frozen in fear from the brief moment where the cart was in danger of spinning out and hitting the little predator. “It’s alright,” Jake said, he had no idea why he was speaking to the stoat, but it felt right like the little thing deserved some attention. “You’re not in danger, go along now, don’t you have finches to hunt?” The stoat kept staring. It wasn’t freezing fear in its eyes, Jake now realized. The stoat was appraising him with some sort of mustelid intelligence.

Jake couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m flattered for the attention Mr. Stoat, but I better get going and so should you, shoo.” Jake waved a hand in the stoat’s direction to shoo it away. The little fur tube finally took the hint and darted down the street. It was probably going to hunt trash finches in some alley, or perhaps it was on its way back to whatever den it had built for itself. “When the fox sleeps the raccoon feasts, huh,” Jake murmured to himself

As he righted the cart and prepared for the last leg of his tedious transport journey, he realized it wasn’t just the stoat that had been watching him.

The boy, for Jake could not think of him as anything else despite being a head taller than him, had the bluest eyes Jake had ever seen. This, he realized with a start, had to be how the sky looked above all the smog during the golden hour. Jake had no idea how he got to this conclusion as he had lived in the city long enough to forget the smogless sky and honestly had no expertise in color or poetry even on a good day.

There was something with the pensive look in the eyes of the strange young man that just drew out the similes. His eyes weren’t blue, they were like a perfect sky; His hair wasn’t blond and tightly cropped, it was like freshly harvested wheat; His cloak was not oversized and ill-fitting, it was like an immaterial fog swathing his delicate form. Perhaps the young man could not be comprehended otherwise, at least not by Jake.

Jake barely had the time to snap out of his sudden and all-encompassing reverie before the moment was over. The sky-eyed, wheat-haired elflike youth disappeared into the nascent bustle of the city as if Jake had dreamed him up whole cloth. Jake had no idea if the boy had moved unnaturally fast, or if his reverie or his exhaustion had merely dulled his senses to the point where it seemed like it. Another strongly worded suggestion for living in the city was letting things go. If something was too unusual to understand without extra effort, or strange in a way that wasn’t explicitly dangerous, you’d be better off just forgetting about it. Little good could come out of sticking your nose where it didn’t belong, and that counted double for things out of the usual.

There were no hidden treasures, no long lost knowledge or forgotten riches just ready for the taking in the city, just disappointments you hadn’t had the option of experiencing yet, losses you hadn’t suffered, dangers that you had unwittingly avoided. It was easier to just not think twice about it, never consider what-ifs, and let bygones be bygones, lest things found a way to get even worse. It wasn’t much of a life, Jake had to admit to himself as he pulled the cart the final bit to the workshop, but it surely had to beat dying.

In the little schooling he had received, Jake had come to learn that an idea in theory and an idea in practice were two wildly different things, and seldom intersected in their entirety. There was, or so his teachers had told him, a push and pull there, where theory informed attempted practice, and experience from practice shaped future theory. It struck Jake as somewhat of a pointless exercise, an admission that you’d never truly know anything resembling the truth, but perhaps that was the point.

As he parked the handcart and signaled for his colleagues to assist him in unloading the materials, however, Jake had to concede he might need to tweak his theory regarding forgetting about the strange young man. It was going about as well as his attempts at attracting the attention of his coworkers, who did a decent job of looking entirely too busy to help. The thought of that strange young man didn’t leave him, but most of him merely haunted the peripheries of Jake’s memory. One part, though, stayed with him, as clear as when he’d first seen it. Put simply, he could not put those eyes out of his mind.

What manner of things they seen, he wondered, to seem so sad, and yet so beautiful? Now that he thought about it, it reminded him of a childhood memory. It had been one of the few excursions he had experienced in his life. The orphanage had hired a rickety old steam pavise to take them to the outskirts, to “the forest” where some natural vegetation still existed. They had played among the trees and by the brooks and river in the forests that still remained on the fringes of the city, it could charitably be called “nature.” It was a lovely memory, but one also tinged with profound sadness, and, Jake was starting to realize, anger.

He hadn’t thought about it at the time, but looking back at it, the trees looked like they were dying. Leaves and even branches curled and twisted with unknown maladies, even the evergreens lost their needles and those needles who remained gained an unnatural orange pallor and a faintly oily smell. The same stink could be felt wherever the water grew stagnant in the rivers, even as a child he had noticed that. Some of his friends had gotten sick after that, he recalled, but most of them survived it.

Jake wasn’t quite sure what to think about what he was thinking, but there really wasn’t anything for it, the thoughts were there whether he liked them or not. He was happy for remembering the fun he had had, running around and being a carefree child for once, he felt sad for his friends that got sick, and he felt angry for the world that had allowed a beautiful place of nature to decay. No, he thought, it was worse than decay, it was rot, putrescence, poisoned with the malice of carelessness or greed rather than conceded to entropy. He assumed it was runoff from the city or one of the factories dumping their waste material, and that some of whatever toxic sludge had resulted made its way to the groundwater. Jake hadn’t been back there since then, but he suspected the trees were entirely gone by now. It could even be that the city had expanded since then, and the entire diseased copse was now brick and cobblestone.

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rollingmachinery · 1 year ago

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sortyourlifeoutmate · 9 months ago

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Here’s another very specific work gripe, so feel free to ignore it.

I regularly have to deal with, uh, lists of stock, since that’s the job. When new stock comes in – new lines of surgical implants, basically – I ask the supplier for a list because, well, if I don’t have one I can’t order any of it and you guys want our money, right? Right? Right.

If I don’t have: - Item information - Item prices - Item quantities

Then I can’t do anything. In a pinch I can work with the first two, just to replace what’s used. But without knowing prices I can’t do shit because, well, how can I make orders without knowing what number to put on the order? It will not work, and nothing will happen.

Getting lists from suppliers is like pulling fucking teeth, Jesus Christ.

This is your fucking stock, you dickbags. Just make a spreadsheet! Name of item! Reference number! How many we’ve been consigned! Price! Boom! That’s it! But noooo, noooo! No that’s too hard! We can’t do that!

So hey, how about, uh, no list? Can you work with no information? Just a couple months where you talk to one guy who talks to another guy who talks to another guy, none of whom can actually just answer the question because they need to ask some other fucking guy.

Or how about a fucking mess of a list? With items misspelled? Our own fucking stock, just spelled randomly? Sometimes right on one line, wrong on another?

Or hey, how about we just miss off whole items? Like, just miss a size? Oopsie! What’s one or two mistakes in a list two hundred lines long? Pretty big mistake when YOU NEED THE FUCKING ITEM, I GUESS!

Oh, and all those reference numbers? How about we write them down not like how they’re written on the box, no, but just some other random way? Why not?

And how about we give you the wrong prices? Or the wrong quantities! No no, that’s not the level we’ve consigned, that’s some random number we plucked out of thin air for fun! And oh by the way we changed our prices five minutes ago and sent the email to an inbox that no-one has checked SINCE THE FUCKING SEVENTIES, addressed to someone WHO LEFT YEARS AGO.

ARGH!

On paper the job – like most jobs – looks simple as anything, but the instant you need someone else to do something it falls to bits, because all it needs is one person doing something that little bit wrong to throw sand in the gears. And it’s never one person, it’s a fucking parade of people, all doing something a little bit wrong, a little bit too slow, missing the point of what you said, needing to ask for permission.

It’s a fucking spreadsheet!

IF I CAN DO IT HOW FUCKING HARD CAN IT BE?!

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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Good tourniquets save lives. Bad ones kill soldiers. The global market is awash with cheaply-made knock-offs: Handles that shear off under tension, rubber tubes that won’t tighten around a limb, devices that fail when they’re needed most. That’s why most armies buy in bulk from trusted suppliers. But Evgen Vorobiov prefers Amazon. Top of his Wish List at the moment are combat application tourniquets (CATs) from North American Rescue (five stars from 1,720 reviewers). Also on the list: burn dressings, compact chest seals, trauma shears and “The Original Rescue Essentials Brand QuikLitter”—a black canvas stretcher which promises low-cost casualty evacuation and patient transfer.

Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Vorobiov, a lawyer, worked for the Ukrainian central bank and then on international projects trying to reform Ukraine’s financial system—“banking regulations, consumer protection, that kind of thing.” But, with Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, he took some courses in tactical medicine, hoping to make himself useful if the worst happened. It did.

The Ukrainian army, dwarfed by its opponent, was supposed to collapse in days. But remarkably, it held the line, bolstered by a huge wave of volunteers and reservists. Trucks filled with Kalashnikov rifles drove into Kyiv’s neighborhoods and handed out weapons to anyone who wanted to join the fight. Engaged in constant combat for days on end, the armed forces quickly ran short of supplies. Vorobiov, with his basic knowledge of combat medicine, started reaching out to anyone he knew overseas who could help find CAT tourniquets, trauma bandages, chest seals and other lifesaving equipment. He and a couple of colleagues sourced gear from the UK, US, and the Netherlands and got it to Poland. Anyone they knew coming back to Ukraine via Poland was asked to bring bags of supplies, forming “a human chain” stretching from Europe to the frontline.

Eighteen months on, his operation has blossomed. Vorobiov’s intimate understanding of Ukrainian bureaucracy means he’s been particularly effective at getting sensitive shipments over the border, making him a focal point for other donors. He’s built a potent fundraising operation on social media, tapping into an international community of supporters to raise money and find supplies. And, by driving back and forth across Ukraine, delivering right into the hands of combat medics, he’s forged relationships with units who can tell him exactly what they need and when, creating a personalized military logistics operation from his living room in downtown Kyiv. In May, Vorobiov got a call from a medic working at a makeshift field hospital close to Bakhmut, the burned-out ruin of a town that was a bloody pivot point for the frontline in the first half of 2023. They were in desperate need of a portable ultrasound machine to scan casualties for internal injuries. Vorobiov tapped his network for money, and found a secondhand device in Poland for $3,400. When we meet, it’s sitting in his apartment waiting to go east, and he’s turned his attention to getting hold of a portable charging unit for a defibrillator. Soldiers ask for everything: Drones for artillery and reconnaissance units, portable generators, Starlink satellite internet terminals, 4x4s, the things they need to keep them online and alive, which are often the same thing in a war defined by the use of technology on the frontline.

For decades, Ukrainian civil society has been built horizontally. Rather than rely on government agencies for help, people have leant on personal connections—everyone knows someone who knows someone who can get what you need, help you out. This parallel state has been providing vital aid in eastern Ukraine since Russian proxies invaded in 2014. Since the full-scale invasion began it’s become super-charged, using social media and messaging platforms to go global. Vorobiov is just one link in a relay of money, supplies, innovations, and solidarity that is keeping Ukraine’s soldiers in the fight.

The Front Line Kitchen occupies a few cramped ground-floor rooms and a shed off a sloping street on the edge of Lviv’s picturesque old town. In the courtyard, volunteer cooks peel mountains of potatoes and beets among the organized chaos of plastic vegetable crates, cardboard boxes and IKEA bags overflowing with baked goods. Inside, fridge-sized dryers are filled with shredded vegetables, meat and mushrooms, waiting to go into vacuum-sealed ration packs.

The kitchen started years before the full-scale invasion, in the aftermath of the “Euromaidan” demonstrations and “Revolution of Dignity” in late 2013 and early 2014. Protests against the Kremlin-backed government of Viktor Yanukovich in Kyiv’s Independence Square—Maidan Nezalezhnosti—were met with a bloody crackdown by security forces. As the violence escalated, protesters formed self-defense forces and medical units, repelling assaults and even storming government buildings. In February 2014, Yanukovich fled Kyiv. Days later, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, and its proxies seized government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk in the east of Ukraine, declaring themselves independent of Ukraine. They met little formal resistance: Under Yanukovich, Ukraine’s armed forces and intelligence agencies had been gutted.

That spring, Ukraine raised volunteer battalions, some directly linked to the self-defense units formed in Maidan. They were still ill-equipped, so they came to rely on other volunteers to supply them with basics—food, uniforms, medicines, vehicles—even weaponry. “The volunteers essentially replaced the function of the government for supplying the necessary resources,” says Roman Makukhin, a member of the National Interests Advocacy Network, a Kyiv-based NGO. “Protecting basically their neighbors, their friends, their brothers and sons.”

Oksana Mazar and Lyuda Kuvayskova, the Front Line Kitchen’s founders, met sewing camouflage nets and balaclavas for the volunteer detachments. Many of their friends, and Kuvayskova’s son, had been at Maidan. “The war had started, even if it wasn’t talked about like it’s a war,” Mazar says. “We just wanted to help, as the guys didn't have anything. No clothes, no shoes, and no food—because it was not [officially] a war.”

They started cooking meals for soldiers, experimenting with ways to turn home-made borscht and holubtsi (cabbage rolls) into ration packs that would survive the 1,000-kilometer journey to the Donbass, usually in the back of cars or trucks after being handed over to anyone heading that way. The cooks worked in small batches, drying food in friends’ kitchens, before they were gifted their current premises. They raised enough money to buy their own dryers, and gradually expanded. After the full-scale invasion began, the kitchen’s front yard was filled with volunteers and people bringing supplies. “They knew that we were doing food for the military, and they wanted to help,” Mazar says.

With 1 million Ukrainians mobilized to fight the Russians, the need has grown massively. The kitchen is now putting out 20,000 meals a day, sending truckloads of food east, and taking orders direct from the military. To scale up they’ve relied on donations, often sourced via the @frontlinekit Twitter account. The account is run by Richard Woodruff, who came to Ukraine from the UK early in the war, intending to join one of the international brigades in the Ukrainian army, despite having no military training. After seeing footage of the ferocious defense of Kyiv, “I kind of rethought my chances of survival,” he says. Instead, he arrived at Lviv train station a few weeks after the full scale invasion began, and soon found his way to the kitchen.

If the 1991 Gulf War was the first major conflict broadcast live on TV, the defense of Ukraine is the first full-scale interstate conflict to be shown in real time on Twitter. Ukrainians posted from the early hours of the invasion—air raid sirens sounding over a European capital in 2022; queues at the recruiting centers, calls for aid and statements of defiance. They recorded acts of insane valor, videoing themselves as they ambushed Russian columns with anti-tank missile launchers they’d barely been trained to use. Civilian drones pressed into service as surveillance tools provided a steady stream of high-definition footage made for phone screens, giving a gamer’s-eye view to the fighting. As Russian forces were pushed back, and the Ukrainian armed forces reclaimed land, the atrocities and scenes of destruction were shown live, along with poignant videos of liberating soldiers greeted by their ecstatic families. For those that wanted to see them, there were graphic videos: helmet cams showed firefights, drones dropping grenades on Russian soldiers and into the hatches of occupied vehicles.

Many of Ukraine’s new volunteers were “terminally online”—ordinary digital natives forced into a brutal conflict. Gen-Z recruits did dance videos for TikTok. Their meme game was wild. Woodruff’s Twitter bio reads “British Chef Fella”—a reference to the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, or NAFO—an online movement of Ukraine-supporting shitposters with shiba inu avatars who flood social media with memes mocking the “Vatniks” (Russian propagandists).

The NAFO movement taunted Russia, at one stage managing to send the country’s ambassador in Vienna into a public meltdown. “Imagine, literally getting a world-class ambassador to speak with cartoon dogs on Twitter,” says Ivana Stradner, an adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington DC, an expert on misinformation and propaganda, and NAFO member. “This is the future of information warfare.”

NAFO does what state-backed information warriors, particularly those from democracies, can’t do. Its members make insane, often tasteless jokes, moving quickly to jump on trends. They’re good at memes, and flood the zone with infectious pro-Ukrainian vibes, humanizing, entertaining, and explaining to people far from the war why they should care. “I think NAFO, by boosting certain narratives, can actually also help people understand the severity of the situation and what's going on there,” Stradner says.

NAFO has helped raise millions of dollars through sales of merchandise (“I invaded Belgorod and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”) and crowdfunding campaigns. Now its avatars appear on the Twitter profiles of European politicians, on official Ukrainian defense channels, and on military equipment headed to the front. It has funded everything from food to medical supplies to a mobile artillery piece to the Georgian Legion, a unit of overseas volunteers that has been fighting since 2014. When the Frontline Kitchen’s vegetable shredder broke, Woodruff put out a call for funds to buy a new one. In the time it took him to drive to the supplier, the money had already been deposited in his account.

Social media works in tandem with the tight networks of Ukrainian society. This is a war being fought close to home—everyone knows someone at the front, and the soldiers are in constant contact. Link people like Vorobiov can connect those in the trenches with supporters in Kyiv or overseas. A unit under fire can ask for drones on Telegram, and within hours there’s a call for donations out on Twitter or Instagram. Vorobiov can deliver tourniquets to a combat medic near the front, and record a thank-you video to send directly to donors.

“I see a spike in donations when there is a story that I can tell of how donations help,” Vorobiov says. “Yesterday, I received a very long message from one of the medics, and she was telling me how medical supplies we brought to her helped her basically provide care to two servicemen. I posted that story on Twitter and folks started to donate.”

Sometimes, donors become more active participants. Last February, Polish filmmaker Maciej Zabojszcz was watching the conflict unfold over Twitter, and thinking about selling some of his military memorabilia to help raise money for a 4x4 for the Ukrainian army. But then, a graphic video emerged, apparently shot by Russian soldiers, of a Ukrainian prisoner of war being horrifically mutilated. “I felt like something changed,” he says. “I said, listen, let's not only buy one car.”

In the spring of 2022 he drove his first vehicle, a Nissan pickup, to Kyiv to deliver to the Georgian Legion. While there, he met Vorobiov, who was collecting some drones from Exen, another Polish volunteer. From then on, Zabojszcz was part of the network. Because they couldn’t order supplies online to be delivered to Ukraine, Vorobiov and others started putting Zabojszcz’s home as the delivery address. Each time he drives a car to Ukraine, he’s carrying helmets, body armor, drones, all kinds of medical supplies. When we met in March in Warsaw, he’d delivered seven 4x4s, and was fixing up an eighth.

Some Ukrainian units have a tradition of naming their vehicles, and the seventh car that Zabojszcz delivered, a Land Rover, was christened Mathilda. It was used to shuttle men from their barracks to the frontline through thick mud. “The whole unit was driving the car,” Zabojszcz says. “They were crazy about Mathilda.”

But after ten days of constant driving, Mathilda broke down. Another Polish volunteer found a local mechanic specialized in Land Rovers. They arranged an online consultation. The mechanic helped the soldiers figure out what was wrong and identify the part they needed to replace. The car broke on Monday. On Tuesday, a volunteer delivered the replacement part. “And on Thursday the car was fixed,” Zabojszcz says. “This is how this network works.”

Absorbing donations has required a degree of flexibility from the military establishment. Armies typically don’t like amateurs pitching in, turning up in warzones with stuff they’ve brought from home. Getting goods into Ukraine can be challenging—it’s understandably not legal for just anyone to move military equipment across borders—and even bringing in theoretically civilian items like cars, consumer drones, and generators requires customs forms and other paperwork. But volunteers say once they’ve got donations into the country, working with the military has been fairly easy. There’s still some admin, and donors have to have forms showing that the goods they’re delivering have been specifically asked for by a soldier, but mostly, they’ve integrated relatively seamlessly with the supply chains, with commanders on the ground sometimes turning a blind eye to help their soldiers get what they need.

This acceptance is driven partly by necessity—the military simply couldn’t supply its troops to the level it needed, and unlike its adversary, doesn’t want to send them into battle with tourniquets that snap under pressure and rations years past their expiration date. Volunteer networks can take orders, source, and deliver in a way that a centralized bureaucracy can’t. They’ve helped feed the battlefield innovations that have given outnumbered soldiers an edge, linking into the networks of workshops jury-rigging consumer drones; bringing 3D printers to the frontline to help turn hand grenades into air-dropped bombs.

“For the chaotic time after the invasion, these organizations created a stopgap solution for markets that the army could not operate,” says Simon Schlegel, senior Ukraine analyst at the Crisis Group think tank. “The army is good at buying in bulk, but these smaller operations are good at finding five pieces of Chinese-made drones in different countries and shipping them to Ukraine.”

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy understands this. He has, since the early days of the conflict, often made his social media addresses direct to citizens of other countries, not just to his fellow leaders. Volunteers—and the state’s own propagandists—have built a formidable ground game on social media, which has helped with donations, but also contributed to the ratcheting up of material being sent to the frontline by NATO partners. With public support for Ukraine high in their own countries, western leaders feel emboldened to hand over money and weapons. When those weapons deliver battlefield successes, the resulting content feeds back into the loop. “I think Ukraine is literally right now the superpower in this information war,” says Stradner.

The war, as seen through the filter of social media, has an oddly gamified quality. At times it seems it’s being won by jokes, by Ukrainian farmers pulling tanks behind tractors, by “Saint Javelin” (the “patron saint” of anti-tank missiles), and shiba inu soldiers. But it hasn’t been won yet, and many people at the far end of the volunteer supply chain have taken incredible risks, and exposed themselves to unspeakable horrors. In Lviv, I met Ernest Polanski, a Ukrainian volunteer taking a brief rest on his way back from delivering equipment to troops near Bakhmut.

What he saw there, he says, was “hell.” There was constant shelling, and the smell of corpses hung over the area. Whenever the bombardment stopped for longer than a few minutes, he wondered if something worse was about to come, “like a nuclear bomb,” he says. On the way back, he rescued three bedraggled kittens from the ruins.

Polanski has been driving back and forth from the frontlines since the early days of the war, and has lost count of the number of journeys he’s made, bringing generators, trench periscopes, medical gear and other supplies. Like other volunteers, he’s formed a special connection with a single unit, which he devotes most of his journeys to. He’s currently looking for €6,000 ($6,480) to buy new wheels for one of the unit’s 4x4s. “Not a lot of people want to go to this area,” he says. “But we have a special friendship with [this unit], and we want to help.”

The volunteer networks are made up of people from all over the world, but outside of Ukraine itself the cause has resonated more than anywhere in former Soviet nations, and in particular Baltic states like Lithuania, which see themselves as next in line if Ukraine falls. Traveling with Polanski on this journey to the front is one of his most committed supporters, the Lithuanian kickboxing champion Sergej Maslobojev. “Our country had the same problem years ago,” he says. “We feel their pain in our hearts.”

Maslobojev’s profile at home has meant he’s been able to fundraise for supplies, but, he says, it’s important for him to get out into the field to witness, and show the sacrifices still being made in the trenches of eastern and southern Ukraine. “When we listen to our news, usually we’re thinking that they're winning the war. Everything is going great. Why do we need to donate?” he says. “But when you go to the frontline and help those military guys, give them ammunition, extra food and the stuff that they really need. And they look at you with almost tears in their eyes and say, ‘nobody comes to us’. And then you understand why, in this moment.”

The day after Polanski and Maslobojev returned from Bakhmut, reports came through that the town had finally fallen. Individual defeats are hard to talk about in the context of fundraising campaigns and propaganda drives that are buoyed by a sense of inevitable victory. But they also underline the fragility of life close to the front. Almost all of the volunteers I spoke to in Ukraine had their own story of raising funds, or sourcing gear, only for the intended recipient to fall in battle before it could be delivered. All that does is make them more committed. Most say their supporters are also holding the line, a year and a half into the war.

“Sometimes it feels like this continuing western support is contingent on possible breakthroughs and huge victories. But I don't feel that, at least among my donors,” Vorobiov says. “You cannot afford hopelessness, because no one is going to support a lost cause. And we Ukrainians believe in winning this war. We have to infect others with that belief. But complacency is equally dangerous.”

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