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thisyearingaming · 5 years ago

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2011 - This Year in Gaming

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - Nintendo DS, January 11th

A quirky adventure game where you are fucking dead, and you gotta work out who killed you. Ghost Trick is like Ace Attorney at first glance - it looks similar, and is made by effectively the same development team. Give it a shot on iOS.

Dead Space 2 - Multiplatform, January 25th

Dead Space 2 was the undisputed king of alien horror until Alien: Isolation released. Yeah, you battle massive acid-spitting aliens, but it’s the necromorph babies you’re gonna be shit-scared of. It isn’t quite as unique as it’s predecessor, but it’s definitely much better to play. Bring your brown pants.

The Nintendo 3DS Releases - March 27th

The 3DS was like magic when you first fired the 3D slider all the way up - then it became a gimmick you never used again. Releasing with a few decent launch titles and being able to boast Street Fighter IV as playable, the 3DS arguably didn’t really pick up much steam until a few months after launch. While more powerful than the original DS which was six years old at the time, I can’t remember being particularly interested in it at the time.

Portal 2 - Multiplatform, April 19th

Valve’s final single player experience until their jump into VR was a bloody good one - very funny and amusingly written with the best Steve Merchant performance since The Ricky Gervais Show, Portal 2′s puzzle solving adventure is rarely a chore to play through, and has thousands of custom maps courtesy of the Steam community.

L.A. Noire - Multiplatform, May 17th

Rockstar’s foray into adventure games has stood the test of time as an enjoyable and often startling journey nto the seedy underbelly of 1947 Los Angeles - as Cole Phelps you’ll threaten a Jewish man with the gas chamber, arrest a paedophile instead of a clearly guilty father, quote Hamlet to a prop skull at the scene of a car crash, destroy thousands of dollars of property, and yell at a child whose mother’s just been murdered. Great fun!

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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - Windows

CDPR hit it out of the park with a fantastically improved sequel to 2007′s Eurojank diamond in the rough The Witcher, and really introduce Geralt of Rivia to more people for the first time with this game. A branching story that sees Geralt hunting Letho, the killer of King Foltest, and allying either with smelly hippy elven leader Iorveth and his terrorists who don’t appear in the sequel or the very cool but quite racist Vernon Roche and his special forces group, who are supporting characters in the sequel.

Alice: Madness Returns - Multiplatform, June 14th

A surprisingly charming, unsettling dive into the fractured psyche of the Victorian equivalent of an actual goth gf, Alice is a sequel to American McGee’s Alice from 2000. Surreal as fuck and absolutely drowning in atmosphere. Just don’t look at any of the YouTube comments on videos of the soundtrack. Rather bizarre show...

Duke Nukem Forever - Multiplatform, June 14th

Sometimes it’s best NOT to bet on the Duke. I bought this game to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I did neither - DNF is fucking boring, and I blame it ALL on Randy Pitchford’s devotion to ruining things I like. DNF could’ve been brilliant - either embrace your heritage like Doom Eternal would eventually do, or make it into a “last hurrah” kind of thing where Duke realises he’s getting old and can’t kick ass forever. The greatest disappointment of the 2010s so far - but worse would follow with it. The King is dead - hail to the King, baby.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Multiplatform, August 23rd

The piss-tinted prequel to 2000′s excellent conspiracy RPG Deus Ex, Human Revolution is like smashing Robo-Cop into a world where Detroit is not a humanitarian disaster zone. Adam Jensen, the gravelly-voiced biomechanically enhanced security chief of David Sarif, is dragged into a world of American conspiracies involving FEMA death camps, the government enforcing martial law in US cities and massive Chinese conglomerates plotting to control the world. Just like real life! DXHR is my favourite in the series for its design, atmosphere and narrative.

Dead Island - Multiplatform, September 6th

Eh. Wasn’t that good. Notable for having the most misleading fucking trailer since Metal Gear Solid 2, but nowhere near as fulfilling upon release. An open world zombie survival game with a focus on melee weapons more fragile than your granny’s second hip. Oh great, now there’s a dead kid on my page. Thanks, Techland!

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Driver: San Francisco - Multiplatform, September 6th

A game you literally can’t buy anymore, DSF was incredible to play when it came out and has only really gotten better with time. It’s still so unique for a driving game that I’m surprised Ubisoft have had the good sense to just leave it and not go pants-on-head retarded with the franchise since. Nick Robinson had to buy Subway gift cards just to purchase this game.

Batman: Arkham City - Multiplatform, October 18th

Arkham City was so cool at launch and it still is today. A proper Batman epic with twists, turns, and the most addictive combat arena for years. This whole thing is gold from start to finish, except for the Harley Quinn DLC. I can’t even go into detail about it here, but I fucking LOVE this game.

Sonic Generations - Multiplatform, November 1st

Sonic Generations is the best Sonic game since 3 & Knuckles, but has now unfortunately convinced Sega that not only do people despise the Adventure games, they also really want to see Classic Sonic and Green Hill EVERY GODDAMN DAY. Generations is like a proper celebration of Sonic’s history, even including stuff from every reviewer’s favourite punching bag Sonic 2006 - I really like Generations and it has a stellar modding scene on PC.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception - Sony PlayStation 3, November 1st

The “finale” of the Uncharted series until Naughty Dog decided it wasn’t. Uncharted 3 may not be as tight as Among Thieves, but it’s just as enjoyable. As quipping invincible action hero Nathan Drake, you’ll ruin historical artifacts and “incapacitate” about 4000 guys in your quest to find Iram of the Pillars, chased by Cruella de Ville and her mercenary squad of a million faceless Englishmen.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - Multiplatform, November 8th

God I was so excited for this. World War 3 never looked cooler, and then it came out - and it wasn’t that good. It didn’t feel as epic as MW2, not as well-written as MW, and not as interesting as World at War and Black Ops. Multiplayer was... fine? I think this is the point where most people realised that Call of Duty was basically downhill from here.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Multiplatform, November 11th

See this paragraph? You can read it. Another installment in Bethesda’s cross-franchise “Little Lies” series, Skyrim has been released more times than China’s created a pandemic. But it’s still really good and when you rub it the right way it comes all over your screen like a particularly excited storyteller, ready to point in the direction of adventure.

Super Mario 3D Land - Nintendo 3DS, November 13th

Yeah this was the point I decided I wanted a 3DS. It looked incredible and so fluid, and it really was! Playing this was great fun. That’s really all there is - I can’t be funny about it, nor overly critical. What do you want from me?

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations - Multiplatform, November 15th

I didn’t like this when it came out - I thought the new graphic style was bad, Constantinople was dull, and the music was too different. Ezio was angrier, older, and the complete lack of any supporting cast from Brotherhood had me thinking this was a game that nobody wanted to work on - but now that I’m older, I can see this for how good it really was. Revelations blends the Ezio and Altair stories together, culminating in a satisfying emotional climax.

Saints Row: The Third - Multiplatform, November 15

This video speaks for itself.

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Minecraft - Windows, November 18th

There’s something beautiful about those early builds of Minecraft. Quiet, unassuming, and riddled with potential for exploration. I could talk for hours about the first time I was thrown into Mojang’s survival experience, about how I still get a bit weepy hearing Wet Hands by C418, about how shit-scared I still am of the mines and caves. Minecraft is immortal, and always will be.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years ago

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“Children … taken from the parents and placed in nurseries for three years,” Margie Laflin.

The Milwaukee Journal, Dec 29, 1981 pages 1 and 3A

New Berlin – Two months ago, Margie Laflin, 20, was selling flowers on street corners and preaching the principles of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Now she is free … and said she wanted to warn other young people not to get involved with a cult as she did. She said she planned to speak at area colleges and high schools. …

To marry, a member must be in the cult for at least three years and must be between the ages of 24 and 29. Marriages are performed by Moon, she said, and the partners are then separated and allowed to consummate the marriage only with Moon’s permission. Children of such marriages are taken from the parents and placed in nurseries for three years, she said. They are taught Korean which many believe will become a universal language, Laflin said.

___________________________

Lodi News-Sentinel, Sept 6, 1980 San Francisco (UPI)

By Lidia Wasowicz

“… I accepted an invitation to lunch at the San Francisco C.A.R.P. headquarters … At a Sutter Street flat, I was delivered into the hands of Loretta, a magnetic woman of 29, who impressed me, and the other newcomers, with her soothing voice, assuring smile and sincere warmth. …

By dinner time, Loretta had showed me pictures of two of her babies, who were staying with other Moonie children at the Unification Church nursery in upstate New York while the parents travelled spreading God’s word.”

___________________________

The Bulletin, Bend, Oregon May 27, 1984 page B4

Moonie marriages – Arranged matches typically unconventional.

Washington (UPI)

Like other sun Myung Moon inspired rituals in the Unification Church, marriage is far from conventional.

The 64-year-old church leader hand-picks a spouse for each of his followers. Then he presides over a mass ceremony, cloaked head to toe in white.

One such spectacle on July 1, 1982, paired 2,075 couples in Madison Square Garden. Three months later, Moon married 5,837 couples in Korea. A large percentage are Western-Oriental or black-white mixes. Part of the ceremony called for followers to drink wine tinged with blood from the “True Parents,” Moon and his wife.

Unificationists rely on them to choose their mates because “Reverend Moon knows better than us – he can see the future,” says Jack Harford, a member for more than eight years who is married to a Japanese woman.

Marriage and procreation are viewed as an essential for entry into the kingdom of heaven. …

Although members may request partners of a particular ethnic background, the final decision is up to Moon. As soon as the matchmaking takes place in a special ceremony, couples spend some time together to see if marriage looks feasible. Moon’s first choice is usually honored, although he has been known to match a follower several times before finding an acceptable mate.

Detractors see the process as a disaster.

“His marriages are the worst P.R. mistake Moon has ever made. That is the number one criticism I hear from people who left the church,” reports of Dr. Lowell Streiker, who works with former members and their families at his Freedom Counselling Center in Burlingame, California.

Marriage practices are precisely the reason a former church leader left.

“The marriage itself is treated like an engagement,” he remembers. “You go through a separation after the ceremony, 40 days to five years.You can’t sleep together until Moon gives the say-so.

“That’s not why I quit, though,” he adds. “I left the church because Moon said all the families would have to separate for three years and the kids would go in a church nursery and wives would go on an evangelizing tour of college campuses. We put our eight-month old daughter in a nursery and my wife, who was pregnant, went on a bus tour.

“That made us think that Moon was not who he claimed he was. Here’s his ‘ideal family’ where the wife is one place and the kids as someone else.”

His family fled the church five years ago and requested anonymity so they can “cut it clean” with their past.

Some church critics also find Moon’s matchmaking techniques “shocking,” as a Washington, D.C., mother of a member puts it. Revealing her name would “cause problems for my son,” she said.

“He married a Japanese girl, at Madison Square Garden, who he had never met until a week or two before the wedding,” she said. They work apart now; I think he’s maybe seen her once or twice a year. I’m numb at this point.”

Another East Coast mother is equally distraught.

“My daughter was sent to Korea to marry a man she had never seen before,” she says of the ceremony that took place in the fall of 1982. “She said she was crying so hard during the ceremony, she didn’t even know what nationality he was.” As it turned out, he was a Jewish New Yorker.

When asked if her daughter loves the man, the mother says: “She says if you love God more than you love yourself and if your partner loves God more than he loves himself, you should be able to live happily ever after with anybody…”

Followers, however see it all differently. Argues Bento Leal, a member for 10 years: “We are not his slaves. Reverend Moon is just more spiritually advanced than most. His marriages are a very rich experience.”

___________________________

Linda Feher has written on this topic:

Don’t forget that it wasn’t only demanded of earlier members. I know so many “sisters” who joined the UC and were told they had to “sacrifice” their “blessed” children in order to “save” the “Cain” children of the world. So they abandoned their children to fundraise and witness for Moon. (The purpose of witnessing was to bring in more fundraisers.)

Also, when the marching orders came for all sisters all over the world to leave their blessed children to join IOWC (International One World Crusade) teams and travel all over the USA, I witnessed much suffering and tears.

When I asked some who I saw suffering and crying the most why they didn’t just stay home with their children I was told, that they were told, “If you don’t sacrifice your blesses children Satan will attack them”. To me that is spiritual terrorism. They left their children and joined mobile IOWC teams because they were threatened with harm to their children. It makes my blood boil! …

Moon convinced the leaders that Satan will attack us if we didn’t follow his every whim, they believed him and then learned from Moon to use that same form of spiritual terrorism to control our every thought, feeling and action.

One sister on my IOWC team left to visit her husband to start their family. During the 3 day ceremony she got pregnant. She was told that she was not supposed to get pregnant during her 3 day ceremony. That it was “bad luck” and that her child would be invaded by Satan. I watched her cry day in and day out on the IOWC team because she was made to fear for her unborn child’s life. That kind of teaching/belief is evil and sickening.

Living on the IOWC team was like living at a funeral 24/7 because so many sisters were hurting over the fact that they had left their children for what was an UNSPECIFIED time period. We had to move to a new city every 21 days. never knowing how many years we would have to serve on IOWC teams. Even that fact, never knowing how long we’d have to be on IOWC traveling teams was a form of spiritual terrorism. Would it be months, years? No one knew and so we were always kept in an emotionally unstable frame of mind. …

How many couples and how many children have suffered because Moon terrified them into abandoning their families in order to serve him and his insatiable appetite for power and wealth?

___________________________

Why Love Matters – book by Sue Gerhardt

Infants abandoned by UC parents in the US. Two die at Jacob House.

UC babies dying and UC members starving

Michael Warder’s reasons for leaving. As a top UC leader in the US in the 1970s he reported directly to Moon.

Moon instructed: “Whenever the Blessed couples have children, as soon as the child become 100 days old, they will put him in the nursery school.”

#child abuse #FFWPU #Sun Myung Moon #Unification Church #FFWPU broke up families

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sequence2022 · 3 years ago

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Nina - There's So Much You Don't Know About Me

I entered Northwestern as a classical voice major even though I have never wanted to work in opera and always wanted to be in theatre (to me this somehow made PERFECT sense in high school, like a lot of bad ideas do at that time).

I missed the last three months of high school and didn’t go to my graduation because I was hired to do a musical at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. It was a show called A Walk on the Moon and I played an orthodox Jewish girl named Myra. In a song about a boy I got to sing the line “I thought I wanted bacon but I might want something more” 8 times a week for two months and it was my favorite that’s ever happened.

I sometimes have crazy, crazy nerves when I audition or perform that make me shake and/or break out in a weird rash/blushing situation that makes me look diseased. It is probably unsurprising that for this reason I have had many horrific auditions. I have tried many tactics to get over this, but have yet to find a strategy that works other than “let’s just see what happens.” My childhood voice teacher once told me to just “be a lion” and “let them hear you roar.” I am still not sure what that means, but I think about it a lot. It is some of the least helpful advice I have ever received.

I was once ejected from a polling location at age 4 for wearing a shirt my dad bought me that said “I’m a democrat” on the front and “fuck Bush” on the back. Why anyone thought this was an appropriate shirt for a child, or on election day, I couldn’t tell you.

#nina

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walterfilmmemorabilia-blog · 5 years ago

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8 Great Black Jazz Musicians

BY BILL REED

In the first half of the 20th Century these eight, great black jazz musicians, who helped to create one of America’s unique contributions to the musical canon, come alive in the wonderful posters, photographs and promotional pieces that are part of Walter Films’ collection of African Americana. Jazz, a music genre that originated in the African American community, is known for its soulfulness and complex musical variations.

MILES DAVIS

BACKGROUND

One of the greats in the pantheon of African Americana is Miles Davis (seen above). Davis picked up the trumpet at age 13. Before it was all over, he’d won just about every honor and glory a jazz musician can achieve, including six Grammys and numerous best-selling albums. The Grammy Hall of Fame inducted ten of his releases, including 1949’s Birth of the Cool, and, from a decade later, Kind of Blue. *

The groundwork above and much more was laid down when, in 1944, he relocated to New York City. He soon became part of the wellspring of the new jazz sound, known as be-bop. His contemporaries included the likes of bandleader Billy Eckstine, alto sax giant Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

Before long, Davis became well-known enough to start up his own small music group. It included name musicians, like Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey. Its descriptive title . . . “The New Sounds.”

ON THE WAY UP

In rapid order came two record contracts. The first was with the noteworthy Prestige outfit, followed by a mainstream affiliation with none other than one of THE big three record labels, Columbia.

THE “IG TIME

There are far too many highpoints to address here; however, two of which cry out are the album Kind of Blue (1959), which became the most significant selling jazz album of its day, and the Miles Davis- [arranger] Gil Evans big band trilogy: Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. One of his major European engagements included a period of early ‘50s residency in France where he was awarded the rubbed shoulders with the likes of Jean Cocteau, and conducted an affair with singer Juliette Greco.

FINAL DAYS

Davis’ later years were filled with many health issues resulting in the musician’s death at the relatively young age of 65. Inasmuch as this WalterFilm photo of Davis does not seem to appear in other known jazz collections, it should be regarded as rare.

SARAH VAUGHAN

TWO LEGS UP

No doubt about it. The numbers one and two female jazz vocalists in the golden age of the art form were Ella, Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. Three-quarters of a century later, that still — more or less — holds true.

Along the way, there were many memorable recordings, and the winning of countless awards, including four Grammys.

Though Sarah came along a decade-or-so later after Ella, like “First Lady of Song” Fitzgerald, she got a head start by winning the historic talent contest at Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

One of her very earliest sides, “Lover Man,“ (1945) found her backed by Charlie “Bird” Parker (also in this WalterFilm collection) and Dizzy Gillespie. Several decades later, France’s Michel Legrand made a recording with Vaughan. He remarked of her, “She sings from the stars.”

Not long after completing her final recording in 1990, “Sassy,” as Vaughan was lovingly nick-named, passed away.

DUKE ELLINGTON

There is little question that Duke Ellington was the most famous, respected, charming, talented, elegant figures of the jazz musician and “beyond category” a definition oft-used to describe him.

The elegance of this WalterFilm poster gives some sense of how much admiration his label, Victor, accorded him. The Master had been primarily with that label from 1924 onward, with stops along the way at Columbia, Capitol, and Bethlehem records.

Flash forward to the end of his life (in 1974), and Ellington had created music for just about every form of show business, including theatre and film.

The Duke once claimed that the only reason he kept his band together was so that he could hear what his imaginary musical notes on paper sounded like in real-time. A hang-up for which we, his listeners, are eternally grateful.

This retail store advertisement (above) does not appear to have been recycled into any other Victor placement, i.e. catalogs, record jackets, etc., which would make it doubly rare.

NANCY WILSON

RIGHT OUT OF THE STARTING GATE

Born in Ohio, jazz vocalist Nancy Wilson, after much performance time on the road, arrived in New York City in 1960. She soon signed with Capitol Records. Right off, she had the good fortune to record with the label’s stars Cannonball Adderley and George Shearing. Both recordings were hits. It probably helped in marketing Wilson that she was exceptionally attractive.

Wilson would have a successful career with Capitol, lasting from that start in ‘60 to 1971. She would also have success on TV–with her own show, in nightclubs, jazz festivals, etc. Her honors were many, including multiple Grammys and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. She continued to perform and record with other labels until 2011. It was then that she remarked: “I’m not going to be doing it anymore, and what better place to end it than where I started, in Ohio” –– her last professional engagement. She died in 2018.

CHARLES MINGUS

VERSATILITY PERSONIFIED

It was a long row to hoe for this master musician, from the ‘40s L.A. Central Avenue Swing-to-Bop crossover scene. Eventually, however, he could be found starring at the likes of major Japan concert halls. In 1971, he even recorded an album while performing there.

TRACKS RECORD

Mingus had first recorded in the early 1940s. The overall sound was much like swing stars of that era, such as Benny Goodman. However, a Mingus 78 rpm disc from just a few years finds this player/composer/arranger thoroughly ensconced in the bubbling bop cauldron.

Later in his career, Mingus could be found versatile enough to be performing with players from any era. An example: an early Sixties trio of Mingus, vibist Red Norvo and guitarist Tal Farlow.

WAY TOO SOON

Although Mingus died at 56, his name remains high on the list of jazz greats. Two major documentaries attest to this.

MUSICAL INTEGRATION

In addition to his significant seven-decades-long career as a jazz musician, bandleader, vibes player, African-American Lionel Hampton (1908-2002) is also remembered for another undertaking. In 1936 he helped Benny Goodman tear down the walls between white and black musicians in “live” performances.

Years later, Hampton observed: “The Benny Goodman Quartet made it possible for Jackie Robinson to get into major league baseball. This was such an important development that we just cannot fluff it off or forget about it.”

This re-formatted groundbreaking Goodman Quartet would end up playing at the likes of the Waldorf-Astoria.

Of interest is the number of awards Hampton received along the way, including the National Medal of Arts and several Honorary Doctorates.

Somewhat ironically, Hampton’s big band ended up lasting even longer than Goodman’s. It has the distinction of giving jazz vocal stars Betty Carter and Little Jimmy Scott their first big.

CHARLIE PARKER

FAST FORWARD

Starting in the mid-Thirties, alto saxophonist Carlie Parker found himself inspired by the swing era likes of Ellington and Basie. But not for long. It would not be stressing things too much in calling this Kansas City, Missourian, “the man who invented modern jazz.”

Parker has received numerous forms of tribute, including documentaries, biographies, and stage productions, with one of the most well-regarded being the big screen docudrama, Clint Eastwood’s Bird.

As noted in the description of the press kit herein for director Clint Eastwood’s daring work, the film “remains one of the few classic movies about jazz.”

Sadly, Parker dies at the implausibly early age of 34. One can only wonder how he would have developed artistically if he had been given more time. Parker is a prime example of The Good Die Young.

COUNT BASIE

ON THE T.O.B.A *

Starting in show business, pianist Count Basie worked as a back-up player on the historic black vaudeville circuit, the Theater Owners Booking Association *. Eventually, these musical meanderings landed him in Kansas City, Missouri. It was there, in 1935, that he founded his first big band, which would endure for the next half-century.

Basie didn’t leave his Jersey home (and place of birth) entirely behind; he would become widely known as “The Kid from Red Bank.” It stuck with him for the rest of his life.

However, a few of the noteworthy Basie instrumentalists and singers who gained early-on professional experience include Lester Young and Freddie Green, and songsters, Joe Williams and Jimmy Rushing.

The Count was especially popular with Jewish comedians, namely Jerry Lewis (Cinderfella) and Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles).

WALTER FILM’S AFRICAN AMERICANA COLLECTION

WalterFilm.com offers a range of African-American Cultural History that celebrates the achievements of black actors, black artists, black musicians, black athletes, black politicians, and other members of this country’s African-American Community. To see the extensive vintage original collection click on this link; African-American Collectibles and Black Memorabilia,

OUR GUEST AUTHOR

BILL REED

Bill Reed is a journalist and writer whose articles on show business, the arts, and popular music have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Examiner, International Documentary, and Japan’s Swing Journal. Among his books are: Hot from Harlem: Profiles in Classic African-American Entertainment, Brains as Well as Feet, Early Plastic: A Memoir, and Shared Air: My Six-Decade Interface With Celebrity. He as also worked as a video jack-of-all-trades for the Criterion Collection, and produced many jazz recordings for SSJ Records, Japan. More: https//musicians.allaboutjazz.com/billreed

Blog is originally published at: https://www.walterfilm.com/8-great-black-jazz-musicians/

It is republished with permission from the author.

#jazz #jazz musicians #collectibles

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punchlinesf · 6 years ago

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Stretch It Out With Shawn Pelofsky

Ronn Vigh: Hey Shawn! How are you? It's been a long time!

Shawn Pelofsky: (singing) Reunited and it feels so good.....

Before I continue on, let me tell you that I've known Shawn for many years before this interview. I ran a comedy show at a gay bar for 10 years that Shawn would regularly perform at. We've shared stages and a few after-show drinks together where I would stare at her perpetually flawless hair as we would discuss all sorts of things. One night, a big topic Shawn fixated on was how I was in a two year relationship and still had not seen my boyfriend's apartment. Cut to 2018, that same boyfriend now lives with me and I never did see his apartment. After a week-long game of phone tag and email exchanges, we are finally on the phone together to chat about her upcoming shows at Punch Line.

RV: Let's start with the basics. How did you become a working comedian?

SP: I didn't have a choice but to become a standup comedian because I grew up Jewish in Oklahoma.

RV: So, was it your upbringing that cultivated your sense of humor and dictated your career choices?

SP: My father went to medical school at Oklahoma University and my mother is from Brooklyn. My family had a good sense of humor and I was always an extrovert. I loved performing at a young age and making people laugh, watching SNL, the different characters and I really loved watching Bette Midler. She inspired me and made me want to be an entertainer.

RV: You perform for a variety of audiences but you're straight and have developed a very large gay following. Why do you think that is?

SP: You too can break your nose three times and look like Barbara Streisand and the gays will flock to you!

RV: Yea, but you just don't perform for a bunch of gay men. You really seem to be a part of the community.

SP: Well, In sixth grade, I became friends with the only guy who came out in class. I was always fascinated by gay men. Growing up, every Sunday in Oklahoma, my dad would pack up the Mercedes wagon and we would all go to the Chinese restaurant as good Jews do. There was a guy there named Sean which was weird because he was a "Gaysian." He managed the restaurant and loved my dad and would always float out to greet him as Dr. Pelofsky. I was obsessed and loved everything about him and his energy. I figured out early on the magic and honesty and loyalty that gay men and the community as a whole have. They don't pass judgment, anything goes, you can say anything and they will listen and laugh at a time where people are so sensitive. It's a time where you make the wrong step and say the tiniest wrong thing and people hold that against you forever. The gays don't judge, well at least they don't judge me.

RV: The hardest part for a comic sometimes is to figure out what their crowd is and often they will unfairly get pigeonholed into a one dimensional label such as "gay comic," "urban comic," "Jewish comic" and so on. That really hasn't happened to you though?

SP: I'm lucky that I really do a lot of different gigs for different people. Yeah, I've performed for a lot of gay men and women on cruises and I really enjoy it. You get to travel in style and have fun and great experiences like none other. It's very different from other types of gigs I've done. I performed for our troops in the war zones. That's what I love about my life, one minute I'm performing for the military and the next I'm at a bear convention. People are people and you just need to assimilate to what person you are standing in front of. Cancer patients. Children. Masons. You've just got to be fast on your feet.

RV: You mentioned that you're Jewish. Do you do a lot of Jewish shows?

SP: To be honest, I try not to. I'm pretty sure they are all waiting for Shecky Greene and Mort Sahl to come out and I will just be a big disappointment.

RV: From what I've seen, you have a very loyal following and when someone sees you for the first time, they too quickly become a loyal follower. However, have you had any instances where an audience member wasn't quite as hospitable toward you or your comedy?

SP: Oh yeah, many times. I was performing at a base in Japan, entertaining the troops and within 20 minutes of my routine somebody pitched a cherry right at my face and it hit me hard. I went right out into the audience and threatened a six foot man's life while wearing Manolo Blahniks. They were drunk and rowdy and didn't care that I traveled 18 hours to perform for them after 9-11 but that's just another crazy experience.

RV: Good job! Despite all the successes, isn't it funny that sometimes it just takes one show like that to make you question all of your choices as a comedian. I used to get really down after a shit show like that would happen but now I just look at my comedic influences and some situations where they overcame adversity as an inspiration to keep going. So, is there anyone like that for you? Who are your current comedy crushes?

SP: Oh well, there's a few. I love to watch Vicki Barbolak. She is someone who I really admire and was just a finalist on America's Got Talent. She's incredible. Not only is she off-the-cuff funny and a great joke writer but she's a very beautiful person and someone who I aspire to be as good as. Also, Bobby Lee because no matter how the room is going, he will be that one person that brings everybody to their feet. Oh and Bryan Callen too because he's eccentric, random and different. He can do characters and voices and morph into a different person and make you believe that character is standing in front of you. It's hilarious.

RV: You do characters too, don't you?

SP: Yeah, my biggest character is playing a 25 year old woman. Ah, Ronn, really I think I'm character enough. These days on stage, I'm into improvising with the audience more than I have been in the past and I just like to test myself and see how I can work on my feet. In comedy, bringing everybody together is the real art form.

RV: Since I have known you for a while and follow you on Facebook, I do know that you have had a lot of highs and lows recently. For instance, you got married but your mother also passed away.

SP: Is marriage really a high Ronn? That sounds like two downers to me.

RV: Well, I ask this because when major life events occur I pretty much notice that comedians do one of two things. They either shut it off and ignore it and just do comedy as usual. Or, such as Laurie Kilmartin did with the illness and death of her father, they really incorporate it into their performances and find comedy through tragedy as a way to cope and entertain. I was wondering how these experiences have affected you as a performer?

SP: Comedically, it doesn't keep me from saying what I want to say. Thank God I had comedy during a time when my mom felt very ill. The only solace is getting on stage and finding the funny in those dark moments and I will never hesitate to talk about the experiences I've had. When your parents get older- it's really hard to see. And then there's my marriage- who knew that I would be married and to a Brazilian. Also so many people are surprised that someone actually married me. I proved everybody wrong. It's been such a juxtaposition, from my mom getting sick and passing and now feeling even more pressure to do well because she was my #1 fan. My special just came out and I shot it when she was alive. She actually opens it up. My mom is the funniest thing about my special and I'm so happy that she will always live on that way and the world gets to see her.

RV: By the way, your special which is available now on ITunes, Amazon, On Demand and more is called Stretch It Out. I've heard you say that so many times in your act but I never understood what it actually means?

SP: "Stretch It Out" is a tag line that I've used for years. It means nothing. A lot of the gays have been asking for years. There's been so many times when a group will come up to me at a show and say, "Shawn, We all discussed it at dinner and we think it means that or this." It really means nothing. It's my own rim shot. It's just one more moment to kind of stretch out that joke I guess.

RV: And, you will be "stretching it out" at Punch Line San Francisco October 18th, 19th and 20th. Are you excited?

SP: Oh yeah, I love the political correctness in SF and that I will be the one to deface it.

RV: Since I've know you for years, I want to make sure that I didn't accidentally gloss over anything.. So, before I let you go, is there anything else you would like our readers to know?

SP: Yea, that I'm much skinnier now Ronn.

Shawn Pelofsky At Punch Line San Francisco on Oct 18, 19, 20. One show Thursday. 2 Shows on Friday and Saturday. Tickets are $18.50 - $24.00 in advance.

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brothermarc7theatre · 6 years ago

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“Falsettos” show #786

When William Finn and James Lapine set out to write what we know today as Falsettos, it wasn’t quite a finished product. There’s a mantra of the falsetto voice that serves as a strict metaphor, another character in the show even. What we 2019 audiences have today is a compact look into a “tight-knit family” where the head of the unit, Marvin, is set on having his cake and devouring it, too. Structured as a two-act journey between 1979 and 1981, audiences are encouraged to lean forward and take a gander at what it would be like to be a homosexual man with a wife, child, and male “friend” in this time period. And don’t forget the friendly lesbians next door! This current national tour of the Falsettos revival is timelier than one would expect, full of compelling social commentary and affecting nuance that will have you embraced by emotion and heart.

(Max Von Essen (Marvin) and Nick Adams (Whizzer); Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

A true ensemble piece, Mr. Lapine’s direction pairs with David Rockwell’s versatile, affecting set design extremely well, in a fashion that informs the audience of the camaraderie this troupe of characters shares. As head of the family unit in focus, Max Von Essen is an illustriously charismatic Marvin. This serves to balance the fact that Marvin’s imperfections and self-absorbed nature get greater prominence over his redeeming qualities in the first act. Mr. Von Essen accurately depicts the journey Marvin undertakes in the second act, showing the audience the depth of his character. Complemented by a stellar vocal instrument, Mr. Von Essen is able to sing through Marvin’s bad qualities, whether in a domineering “A Tight Knit Family,” an intimate “What More Can I Say?” or a fatherly soothing “Father to Son.” Nick Adams is a stalwart Whizzer, the heart and soul of the play’s male characters. Mr. Adams’ presence and illuminating smile makes his journey through what struck down a lot of young, homosexual males in the early 80’s all the more the heartbreaking to see unfold. Mr. Adams’ voice is tops among the Lapine and Finn score, highlighted ever so well in a passionate, big-voiced “The Games I Play,” and in a well-motivated, moxie-filled “You Gotta Die Sometime.” Cementing Mr. Von Essen and Mr. Adams’ love connection is not just well-crafted chemistry, but a comedic ability expressed in delivery and reaction by the two veteran performers.

(Eden Espinosa (Trina), Thatcher Jacobs (Jason) and Max Von Essen (Marvin); Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

Eden Espinosa is a show-stopping Trina, wife to Marvin and mother to their son, Jason. Ms. Espinosa has the gift of comedy and belting working well in her favor, both on sterling display in “I’m Breaking Down,” “Trina’s Song,” and its reprise, which are interrupted by more male antics in a quite enjoyable “March of the Falsettos.” Ms. Espinosa’s act two solo, “Holding to the Ground,” truly supports her well-rounded character and gives the audience every last ounce of vulnerability Trina has to offer. Nick Blaemire is a standout as the very Jewish psychiatrist, Mendel. Not just a strong singer and gifted comedian, Mr. Blaemire’s physical chops in the more dance-y numbers are perfect in executing Spencer Liff’s exuberant choreography, namely in “Everyone Hates His Parents,” the opening “Four Jews in a Room Bitching,” and the aforementioned “March of the Falsettos.” Mr. Blaemire’s individual connection to the surrounding characters is honest, logical, and altogether entertaining to see develop, especially in “A Marriage Proposal” opposite Ms. Espinosa’s Trina, with whom Mendel is desperately in love.

(Audrey Cardwell (Cordelia) and Byronha Marie Parham (Dr. Charlotte); Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

John Mussolino was Jason on the Sunday matinee I attended, a role he alternates with Thatcher Jacobs. Mr. Mussolino’s dynamite vocals and knack for youthful innocence and comedic timing is well-suited in this story. Though Jason has plenty to do in act one, dealing with the fall out of his family unit and trying to make sense of it all (including being told that he should go see a psychiatrist), it is his act two track that really takes the cake. Mr. Mussolino shines in his journey of deciding what to do with his bar mitzvah now that Whizzer is sick. From Mr. Mussolino’s vocal contributions in “The Year of the Child” to “Cancelling the Bar Mitzvah” to a beautiful “Another Miracle of Judaism,” he delivers a fully-realized performance in true compelling nature. Audrey Cardwell as Cordelia and understudy Melanie Evans, as Dr. Charlotte, deliver a phenomenal tag-team duo as the next-door lesbians. Both ladies have to wait until act two to make their appearance, but it’s worth it. Ms. Evans shines comically in her track in “The Baseball Game,” as well as “Unlikely Lovers” alongside Ms. Cardwell, Mr. Von Essen, and Mr. Adams. Ms. Cardwell has the bubbly personality down pat, but not without a grounded disposition when there is trouble in paradise. She is a standout in her scene work opposite Ms. Evans, especially when in song in “Something Bad is Happening.”

(Cast of Falsettos; Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

As a whole, Falsettos sings out well in their San Francisco leg of the tour. In addition to Mr. Lapine and Mr. Liff’s excellent staging, Jennifer Caprio’s subtle costume design is period-appropriate and gives key clues to each character on whom the clothes or uniform fall. Jeff Croiter’s lighting design makes true use of the more-barren set, accenting the intimate moments well. Falsettos continues its caroling and intoning through Sunday, the 14th, so jump aboard if you can and catch it before it’s too late!

The Details:

Falsettos plays through April 14th

Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco

www.shnsf.com

#falsettos #williamfinn #jameslapine #musical #theatre #musicaltheatre #nationaltour #bayarea #bayareatheatre #sanfrancisco #sanfranciscotheatre #theatrereview

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nataliej-animation · 6 years ago

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Great Women Animators (Additional)

http://greatwomenanimators.com/

So I was searching again for women in animation, and I came across this website. It is so amazing to see a huge list of female animators. I don’t know why I haven’t come across this website before! Not only does it show you the name of the animator and where she comes from, but also the animation she specialises in and giving examples of her work or links to her website/portfolio.

The irony here is, I’M FINDING BLACK WOMEN!!! Not even on purpose, but accidentally.

Ebele Okoye

Ebele Okoye is a German 2D animation film maker of Nigerian descent based in Berlin. After a Design-study stint at the University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf, and a traineeship at the West German Broadcasting Corporation, WDR, Ebele Okoye furthered in Animation at the International Film School Cologne . Upon graduation in 2004, she worked as a studio animator before going independent with own films as well heading international Co-productions one of which is “Anna Blume” winner of the 2007 Robert Bosch Foundation Promotional Prize for Animation. Also a two time winner of the African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) in the category Animation, Ebele does a lot of mentoring for young Animators and animation enthusiasts from the sub Saharan African region. Aside running the Facebook group and online community “The Animation Club Africa”, she is the founder and co-ordinator of Shrinkfish Media Lab (smedLAB), a very young audiovisual training initiative focusing on young artistic talents in the West African region.

Jessica Ashman

Jessica Ashman is a BAFTA in Scotland award winning animator, artist and arts educator. In 2014 she graduated from the Royal College of Art with a MA in Animation and her work has been supported by Animate Projects, Jerwood Visual Arts Bursary, Arts Council England, UK Film Council and Channel 4’s Random Acts. Jessica’s films have been exhibited in over 60 film festivals internationally, including The Edinburgh International Film Festival, London Short Film Festival and Encounters Short Film Festival. Jessica has also been selected for the Berlinale Talent Campus, Edinburgh International Film Festival Talent Lab and B3 Media’s Talent Lab. As well as creating moving image work, Jessica also engages in arts education, teaching her practice at Goldsmiths, The University for the Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire and Arts University Bournemouth, as well as running arts workshops for the ICA, Tate Modern and the Wellcome Trust. Commercially as a director, Jessica has created content for clients such as the Sky One, BBC, Channel 4, Asda and Heart FM.

Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi (born 22 November 1969) is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author. atrapi became famous worldwide because of her critically acclaimed autobiographical graphic novels, originally published in French in four parts in 2000–2003 and in English translation in two parts in 2003 and 2004, respectively, as Persepolis and Persepolis 2, which describe her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe. Persepolis won the Angoulême Coup de Coeur Awardat the Angoulême International Comics Festival. In 2013, Chicago schools were ordered by the district to remove Persepolis from classrooms because of the work's graphic language and violence. This incited protests and controversy. Her later publication, Embroideries (Broderies), was also nominated for the Angoulême Album of the Year award in 2003, an award that her novel Chicken with Plums (Poulet aux prunes) won. She has also contributed to the Op-Ed section of The New York Times. Comics Alliance listed Satrapi as one of 12 women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition. Satrapi prefers the term "comic books" to "graphic novels."[15] "People are so afraid to say the word 'comic'," she told the Guardian newspaper in 2011. "It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and that disappears. No: it's all comics."

The Brumberg Sisters

(Not women of colour, but I thought they’d be interesting to add)

Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg, Jewish sisters who became known as the “Grandmothers of Soviet Animation” for their contribution to the field of animated fairy tales within the Soviet Animation studio Soyutzmultfilm. Died age 76 and 82

Michelle Kranot

Beginning their career in animation, Michelle and Uri Kranots’ work has expanded beyond the traditional: their art straddles experimental genres and unfamiliar mediums, fusing handmade crafted images and new technologies into contemporary experiences. Their current work continues to test the frontiers of immersive art and moving images. The Kranots are the founders of TinDrum, an animation production company and the producers and creative directors of ANIDOX, focused on development and production of animated documentaries. Part of The Animation Workshop in Viborg Denmark, where they hold various key positions. The Kranots first gained recognition with films such as Black Tape, Hollow Land, How Long, Not Long and most recently, the VR film installation Nothing Happens . They have been honored with the top industry awards for their work, including the Fipresci Prize at Annecy International Animation Film Festival, The Oscar® Academy Award Shortlist and the Danish Statens Kunstfond award for the performing arts. In recent years, the Kranot have focused on collaborative projects using cross-media innovations to enhance emotional human storytelling, exposing the depth and beauty in the things – physical and intangible – that connect us all. Originally from Israel, Michelle and Uri live in Viborg where they are raising their three sons.

Makiko Futaki

Makiko Futaki (June 19, 1958 – May 13, 2016) was a Japanese animator best known for her work at Studio Ghibli for more than thirty years. Futaki, who joined Studio Ghibli in 1981, worked on all of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated feature films, beginning with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1984. Her best known Studio Ghibli’s productions include My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). Her last film credit was Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There (2014), which is Studio Ghibli’s final feature film to date. In 1981, Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founders of Studio Ghibli, hired her to work on their film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1981), which began her thirty-year relationship with the studio as a freelance animator. Makiko Futaki died from an unspecified illness at a hospital in Tokyo on May 13, 2016, at the age of 57.

Jane Cheadle

Jane Cheadle was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She studied Philosophy at the University of Cape Town and Animation at the Royal College or Art. She lives and works in London.

Regina Pessoa

Regina Maria Póvoa Pessoa Martins (born 16 December 1969) is a Portuguese animator. She graduated in painting from University of Porto in 1998 and during her time as a student took part in different animation workshops, having participated in Espace Projets (Annecy, 1995) with the short A Noite, which she would finish in 1999. In 1992 she started working in Filmógrafo - Estúdio de Cinema de Animação do Porto, where she collaborated as animator in various films. Her short Tragic Story with Happy Ending is the most awarded Portuguese film ever. Her short animated film, "Kali, the Little Vampire" was awarded the Hiroshima prize at the 2012 Hiroshima international animation festival, the "1st Prize Animated Short Film – CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S FILM FESTIVAL 2013", "The Golden Gate Award for Best Animation Short - 56th SAN FRANCISCO INT. FILM FESTIVAL 2013", "40TH Annie Awards Nomination in the Best Animated Short Subject Category 2013", Nomination for the Cartoon d’Or 2013.

#dairyofanintern

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iluvtv · 6 years ago

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Thank you, it’s my attitude that keeps me young...

Processing Russian Doll has not been easy. It took a week and a full rewatch for me to even begin to touch this beautiful program’s intricacies through type. The iterations and research I prepared for this post have been almost as vast and extensive as the show itself. Nearly a month later I decided to save the diatribes for casual conversation. Theories on how the show is a study of the Jewish allegory of Dybbuk or that the loss of characters throughout each life is mirroring the constant death of video game culture can surely be found elsewhere. Instead, I share a version of the draft I started jotting during my rewatch of this beautifully complicated story while sitting on the couch next to my own Mother, both of us quietly reckoning with the histories which brought us to that shared moment.

Writing, like experience, is a process. For many, this show has brought on personal reflections of their own existential crisis. Presently, a communal and varied reception is floating through our technological ether, acting as intellectual interpretations of such.

And so, in an unusual act of rebellion, I will let my work here act as nothing more than an experiment in my strange and frequently limited relationship with emotions. An armored sort of void that is not without its own challenges.

Like Nadia I sometimes might be written off as the abyss.

And yet neither of us are enthusiastic about or entirely unharmed by such descriptions.

I have no illusions of blowing any minds here with an overtly innovative (though so often it feels that way to me) analysis of Russian Doll, and if you want to avoid spoilers perhaps just stop now (though nothing I say here would ruin your own experience with the show). However, if you want to go exploring through some proverbial baggage with me — I have just too many thoughts, tangents and feels not to write anything at all...

But first:

Holy.

Fucking.

Shit.

I am at once moved, inspired, shaken and totally stunted. The vast creativity in writing and performance and imagery and music within these eight 24-minute episodes could debilitate many an artist. It's so easy here to rationalize giving up. There is no way I could ever create something as powerfully moving and detailed as Russian Doll.

This speaks to the intense fragility (so rarely acknowledged) which Headland, Lyonne and Poehler’s creation has provoked within.

This show, like it’s namesake which holds infinite women inside one another, is an onion. It can be peeled endlessly away— there is no core. The similes housed are so nuanced that solving them all would be a luxurious and laborious service. An intellectual’s ideal wank. Something future generations may hang their Philosophy dissertations on; much like the very pretentious characters which this show so cleverly mocks.

How very unusual, a narrative with notably distinct translations identifiable to everyone from the now aging homeless advocate of New York City in the 90’s to the Jewish millennial living in San Francisco currently participating in gentrification, to the middle-aged dad who never quite got over his suicidal tendencies, to the gamers and engineers entirely distracted with code. It is a glorious conglomeration of our own narcissism and the show’s creative genius which will allow us all to see ourselves here.

Twitter threads and articles debating such translations could distract our own heart for hours. In the end, though it is compassion which will leave room for growth and learning. In time we will not just slice the orange in half and find the ripeness in the fourth dimension but we will also discover another layer, or perhaps metaphors even the creators missed.

In part isn’t this some of the beauty of an increased number of minorities (ahem women) making art reaching the mainstream? The long-whispered narratives of silenced humans have become far more infinite and intricate than the stories we have heard before.

One might argue that the very notion that Nadia’s misfortune is provoked because she is “bad” defies a complex yet deeply scientific female perspective. It seems rational that a writer's room compiled exclusively of women would have enough experience in niceties to understand that no experience or person is entirely one thing. It is empathy whicxh allows us to view the sum of one’s parts. It is humanity which allows us all to persevere, coexist and most importantly notice that others are just doing the same.

And so there are moments in Russian Doll which speak to me so precisely.

The show’s playful exploration into Jewish Mysticism, which I once studied so diligently.

Nadia’s food choices, which I consistently noted before the subtle stitch of their relevance became obvious threads of the tapestry of her stories. The cottage cheese and roast chicken which is so spot on and terribly, neurotically Jewish. The fact that I noted her breakfast of cut watermelon in episode two as though it were a plot point -- which it did eventually become. My takeaways here so painfully reflect my own layered and tumultuous relationship with my body and moreover nourishment.

Nadia’s penchant for drugs and the ability to maintain her relationship to artificial mood enhancements. Through my lens of a similarly uncomplicated love affair with inebriation, I can’t help but find this characteristic terribly charming.

And oddly enough, Nadia’s clear choice of Emily over Anne. This one is tricky as I have zero memory of reading Emily of New Moon and yet I clearly remember loving it while Anne of Green Gables bored me. I know this sounds contrived but my mother concurred: I was a girl who loved Emily; couldn’t be bothered with Anne.

Then there are the less overt parts of Nadia. The painful side effects of what can be more easily spelled out. These are the elements of self I skip over (as did Nadia presumably) the histories of abuse and dysfunction, the draw towards said abyss and the imaginary, the solitude. Here we have a vibrant woman, unabashedly possessing an immodest thirst for life — an extrovert essentially, who somehow manages to remain on the peripheries. Again, this would be a perfectly apt way to describe me. Through silly, fun, terrifying, real and completely magical events however, Nadia is forced to reckon with both her past (and future) and come to terms with relativity.

I mean life is relative, right?

Watching all this forced a reckoning of my own.

People fade, plants and animals die, fruit rots and all the while Nadia battles with the existentialism turning 36 inevitably breeds.

(Speaking of invoked narcissisms I have for years threatened to throw myself an “I still haven’t gotten married or had kids so you never had to go to a bunch of bullshit showers but I’m going to have a huge double chai blowout” of my own. As the time approaches (14 months) this seems increasingly unlikely but the relevance of this age was definitely not lost on me).

Through all this sadness it is the small acts of kindness which somehow makes everything all right again and again. Very subtle pieces of humanity perpetuate life.

Relatively speaking.

Compassionate and honest interaction essentially induces a continued existence.

Alan says, “Our bodies can’t keep lying the way that our minds can”

And when Ruth mentions she heard the author of Emily of New Moon is haunting a house rather than the more familiar trope of Lucy Maud Montogomery’s suicide this makes me think the show is so much more about how you survive and persevere than how you fade.

As I slowly worked through these episodes (the first time) I wished hard that this show would offer hope and eventually it did just that.

But boy did it put me through the wringer through the process.

#dybbuk #russian doll #natasha lyonne #amy poehler #leslye headland #jewish fod #hey alma

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 6 years ago

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Who Is the Captive?

Barbara Underwood from her book, Hostage to Heaven

AUGUST 1976.

“Come immediately to Hearst Street. Pack for a week. You’ve got to look mature, up-to-date. This is a very special mission so I can’t tell you over the phone. They’re probably listening in. All right?” The voice was not waiting for an answer. It had delivered its command.

“Teresa, there’s one thing. My mother’s flown all the way to San Francisco to spend the weekend with me. I haven’t seen her in two years. She’s coming to Washington Street tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t worry about your mother. You can pray for her,” the voice advised, determined and dispassionate.

“Shall I call her tonight?” I asked hesitantly. “What shall I do?”

“No, absolutely don’t call. You’ll have to explain too much. Leave a note at the front desk and someone’ll treat her gently when she arrives tomorrow. Say you’ve been called out of town on an unexpected emergency,” Teresa ordered. “Now come quick. Amos and Irene are waiting.”

I hung the phone up, nervous with the excitement of imminent intrigue. Racing upstairs two at a time, I thought of my sparse wardrobe packed in brown grocery sacks in various closets. I had nothing fashionable to wear, only corduroy pants and turtlenecks, my daily uniform for flower selling or Boonville ranch life. As I rooted around the sisters’ wardrobes, I suddenly felt inadequate, wrongly chosen for the mission. Trying on dress after dress, I appeared to myself too young, too babyfaced, too tomboyish.

All the dresses were too short.

“Oh, no, my poor mom,” I thought abruptly. “She’ll never understand.” But I knew such thoughts were looked on as total faithlessness; I had to extinguish them.

Finished packing, wearing a tailored blue dress a staff sister had lent me, I scribbled a note which read: “Dear mom. I’m sorry I can’t see you. I’ve been called out of town on an emergency because a Family friend of mine needs me. I’ll write you later. Love, Lael (Barb).”

As I was driven across town, guilt was replaced by a secret sense of power which flooded me—after all, I’d been chosen to represent God and the Lord of the Second Advent. I was being given this chance to help establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Irene, an elegant, angular-faced Jewish woman from New York with a gutsy, omniscient manner, greeted me at the door of the palatial Hearst Street center. I’d never felt comfortable around her. I’d been in the movement two years longer than she, but she had swiftly ascended to a higher position of responsibility and power. I knew too well about myself what Teresa had once told me, “Your problem is, you came as a wild rose and you’ve never been properly pruned.” Irene was already pruning others.

Amos, tall and restrained, disguising his urchin spirit, waved me a good night as he crawled into his sleeping bag next to the front door to guard the entrance to Hearst Street center. “Heavenly dreams,” he called out in a paternal voice. “Get some sleep. In the morning we’ll tell you what’s about to happen.”

Irene and I marched up the three flights of newly carpeted stairs. We opened our sleeping bags, removed our first layer of clothes, and, in order to execute a quick wake-up in the morning, hopped in, slips, hose, and all. “Let’s pray, then I’ll tell you the plan,” Irene said.

“O.K. You and either Jonah or Amos will be flying to Columbus, Ohio, to try to free Michele Tunis from deprogrammers and bring her back to the Family. We know where they took her after her parents kidnapped her because she left a note with her wallet in the San Francisco airport indicating Phoenix, Arizona. Then two days later she left a message and address in the stall of a john in Illinois; someone mailed it to us. She’s at the Alexanders’ house in Munroe Falls, Ohio, being deprogrammed. Of course, she’s there against her will, and we don’t have much time before they could break her. They could even be torturing her right now. You’re to go along to help influence anybody in the state government or courts, or police departments, to help release her. This is criminal. We’ll talk more in the morning. We only have three hours till we get up. Good night.”

“Amazing,” was all I could answer; my shivering I kept to myself.

“Hurry, Amos,” Irene yelled. “Onni and Abba are expecting us for breakfast by eight!” Onni (meaning “elder sister” in Korean) was the handsome, forbidding spiritual commander of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church in California. Her will was undisputed, her decisions about policy matters autocratic and final. With her mystically manipulative aura, she was Moon’s most faithful and accomplishment-oriented disciple, was called his “daughter-in-spirit,” and was often bodyguard and caretaker of Hak-Ja Han, Moon’s wife, when she attended special public events in New York and San Francisco. Although everyone worshipped Onni’s passionate and indefatigable ambitions for God, privately she was regarded as impersonal and scary by certain staff members and novitiates alike. Abba (meaning “father” in Korean) was the name Onni had given to Dr. Mose Durst, a kindly, philosophical, tender Jewish college professor whom she’d handpicked as her husband and been married to in a “blessed” service performed by Moon himself. Dr. Durst, a credible public performer, had developed a benign front organization called New Education Development Systems, Inc., whose generalities about love and sharing appealed to and brought in many innocents, who later discovered they had somehow become members of the Unification Church. Together, Onni and Abba formed the leadership of the Moon mission on the West Coast.

We piled into the car. Within minutes, Amos, Irene, and I entered Onni’s magnificent western-style Berkeley Hills mansion, named The Gardens, through a controlled intercom system of electronic gates and doors.

We took off our shoes, stopped for pious and grateful prayers, and looked to each other for further directions. Soon someone beckoned us into the kitchen, where breakfast was being served: pancakes, bagels, yogurt, cheeses, eggs, juice, coffee. Preparations were always dignified and bountiful around the local “true parents.”

Onni came in with a flourish and indicated we should sit. Abba trailed in behind, fatherly, affectionate, with his arm around Jonah, one of the business-brain-children of the church.

I rose to shake hands with Dr. Durst. We all waited to see what kind of mood Onni was in. Our spiritual lives—which is to say everything that mattered to us—depended on pleasing her.

She wore curlers in her striking black, usually stylish hair; she was the least adorned I’d ever seen her. She radiated impatience, anxiety. Dr. Durst, too, looked more than usually upset.

“So, Jonah, you know how to get Michele back?” Onni barked in her idiomatic Korean-American blend.

“Well, we know where she is, but we don’t know who to go to when we get there. Play it by ear, I guess,” Jonah answered.

“You mean you don’t know what to do?” Onni accused. An oppressive silence followed.

“Amos, you go instead. Jonah, you don’t have head for this.” Jonah, shocked and speechless, turned to Dr. Durst for support. But there was no help there, either.

“Amos, you know all legal part? You and Lael make plane reservation right now. Lael, do exactly what Amos says. You must get Michele back. She so stupid to go with her dad. Good luck.” Onni got up and went out of the room.

Dr. Durst seemed near to tears. We knew he, too, saw deprogramming as the violent death that stripping away one’s spiritual life meant to the Church. The end of all hope for Michele ... He showed us out the door, offering unspoken encouragement.

Amos and I stood for a moment on the doorstep. We had our orders, but no strategy. We’d have to devise a battle plan, using only God’s intervention and guidance.

At the airport Amos immediately assumed the parental role. From now on, I was to be his “object” and support, his obedient assistant ... his attractive child. He purchased the tickets and we boarded the United airliner.

Picking out window seats, Amos motioned me to sit down. He took my hands in his and, as older brother-in-charge, urged, “Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, we’re so sorry for your misery. We know you’ll never have a moment of happiness until our Father has subjugated Satan in the spirit world and started the Kingdom on Earth. We’ll do everything we can to claim our sister, Michele, back from Satan’s grasp.” His beseeching voice concluded, “We pray that you can work through Lael to follow Amos exactly, and that together we can bring victory to our True Parents. Amen.”

It was a long ride. Amos opened his attache case and handed me piles of news articles and leaflets on the recent barrage of kidnappings and deprogrammings by parents of various cult young people, from Unification Church to Hare Krishna to Children of God. To the Church, the real devils appeared to be Ted Patrick, a black man known for his forceful snatches; Joe Alexander, senior and junior, noted for their legally sanctioned deprogrammings; and the Alexanders’ “mercenary” attorney, young Michael Trauscht from Tucson, Arizona. Michele was being held captive by the legal device of a conservatorship her father had just been granted by a California court. Her father had claimed she was in need of temporary parental guardianship because she was susceptible to “artful and designing” people in the ranks of the Unification Church. This was the first I’d ever heard of such a legal tangle; it sounded threatening, and I agreed with Amos that conservatorships must be fraudulent. We made a solemn vow to use any means necessary to spring Michele from her captors.

The plane let down in Columbus after two hearty meals, a catnap, and lots of earnest prayer and discussion. It was midnight.

Determined to save every penny for God, suitcases in hand, we Walked arm in arm two miles down a straight highway to the Holiday Inn. Stiff and formal, I felt like I was enacting American Gothic amidst the hayfields and cricket sounds of the Ohio summer.

I hid outside while Amos rented a single room. Dr. Durst had advised Amos to “be careful,” which, in the puritanical Church doctrine of total chastity before marriage, meant “no compromise” or, practically speaking, two separate bedrooms. But, eager to be frugal, Amos simply prepared a separate bed for me—the tub in the bathroom! We both laughed uncontrollably at the primly propped pillow, delighted we’d “obeyed” Abba without spending the extra cash.

At 5:00 a.m. Sunday we woke for Pledge Service. Together we carried out the Familial Unification Church ritual, chanting our lifelong devotion to God and Moon and our burning antipathy to Satan—who was everyone opposed to Moon.

Honoring the sacrifice Moon had made for us during his imprisonment in North Korean prison camps years ago, we drank orange juice and coffee but couldn’t eat till noon. Amos, in an elaborate and sanctimonious gesture, put sugar and cream in my coffee. To serve another in the Church is the highest honor; inverting usual habits, the server becomes the victor. A cup of coffee or tea offered and taken has cosmic significance.

Amos rented a silver Dodge and we drove to Ohio State University and made ourselves comfortable in the faculty club. Chanting under my breath for a good lead into our puzzle, I sparked up a conversation with what turned out to be the head of the dental school. After hearing my careful story, it developed that he’d graduated from Berkeley and knew the dean of a law school in northern Ohio very well. What a gold mine!

Amos was pleased with God’s effort so far.

After several phone calls, Amos made arrangements to meet with the dean of the law school that night. We knew Munroe Falls, where Michele was being held, was a suburb of Akron. Only two hours’ drive away, we were getting warmer....

The dean of the law school invited us into his orderly office. Calling himself a follower of New Education Development Systems, Amos pleaded Michele’s case. After Amos finished, our dean promised us that his assistant, Dean Reece, who’d handled the Vietnam Calley case, would help us the next day. The dean showed us briefly around his law school, bought us hot chocolates, and offered to let us sleep in sleeping bags in the student lounge. Surprised but grateful, we declined the hearty invitation because we needed to be where we could plan more privately.

Monday morning we charged into the Akron Public Library, fighting crowds of people swarming to see the famed Soap Box Derby, and combed through thousands of feet of microfilm of newspaper and magazine articles about the Alexanders, Michael Trauscht, and deprogramming.

The microfilms led us deeper into espionage and masquerade. We discovered there was an Akron person who conducted deprogramming from a subterranean office in an alley beneath the haunted-looking Brown Derby Hotel. The label on his door read Mind Freedom.

Inside worked a young, slapstick psychologist who claimed he knew everything about the recruitment methods of Hare Krishna, T.M., Scientology, and, worst of all, in his opinion, Unification Church.

We introduced ourselves as Amos and Lael; soon he’d handed me a New Age Magazine article by a journalist named Bob Banner about our own Boonville ranch. I recognized the magazine writer instantly; the article was all about Bob Banner’s experience in my group (and he named me) up on the recruitment farm! I excused myself hastily to go to the bathroom while Amos—unaware—kept presenting himself as a deprogrammer with special expertise in the neurophysiology of brainwashing. Amos, however, was soon handed the article, came across my name, and shortly excused himself, too, to fulfill “other obligations.”

Close call! we breathed, out on the street.

Dean Reece met us that afternoon. A gentle southern hulk of a man, he took in every word of our story and scoured it in his mind. I trusted him at once, but Amos made it clear by several sharp looks that I was not to reveal so much information. Reece himself, a loyal Baptist, said he didn’t care for the deceptions and dubious goals of some of the cults, especially Moon’s army (whom he suspected, despite our circumspection, we had some connection with), but he was concerned for the civil rights of “a woman being held against her will.” He promised that if we could verify Michele’s presence in Joe Alexander’s Munroe Falls house, he would go there accompanied by the local chief of police and talk to her. He recommended we do some sleuthing that night and find out exactly where she was.

Equipped with new Penney’s tennis shoes, a can of chemical eye-spray, and a deafening noisemaker, I stole through the molasses-black woods behind Prentiss Street, while Amos patrolled the pleasant rural neighborhood from the car, its headlights switched off. I’d never spied on a suspected house before, but I was well versed in stealth; flower sellers for the church dare illegal entrances to restaurants, bars, and office buildings, all of which forbid solicitations, from San Diego to Toronto. I prayed to be invisible and for the chorus of neighborhood dogs to stop yelping so suspiciously.

I crept up to the back of what I was sure was the right house and clung to one side of a tree. Finally I dared to look in.

Sure enough, Michele herself sat in the kitchen with a group of people. She looked tired and high-strung, but that was to be expected. After all, she was surrounded by the worst people on earth, the ones God raged against.

Yet, as I watched in fascination, eight ordinary-looking people around the dinner table bowed their heads and prayed. Then everyone laughed and talked companionably as they ate.

I grew more and more outraged. How could they pray, even presuming to address God? How could they pretend to be happy? I remembered Dr. Durst’s lecture: “God and Satan, good and evil, look exactly alike. But one is for world benefit, one is for self-benefit.” Who, the thought flashed in me, dictates or defines world or self-benefit? I let the troublesome wonder escape, seized as I was with the abrupt desire to let Michele know that her saviors had come, that her true Family was nearby, that her captivity was about to end....

Then, through the gold-lit window of the homey kitchen, I watched Michele get up, yawn, stretch, and leave the room with three young people. Eventually I edged across the moonlit lawn on hands and knees, hiding myself in the shadows alongside the back porch in order to eavesdrop on the people who had just entered it. A pair whom I guessed to be the Alexanders were talking with another couple whom I recognized from photographs as Michele’s parents. I studied their faces, earnest and worried; they looked malevolent, plotting....

Then a phone rang. When it did, I recognized my only chance to dart away unnoticed in the flurry of interruption.

Panting, and fearful of discovery, I caught up with Amos’s car and climbed in the window to avoid the noise of the door banging. Amos yelled when I stepped on his hand. I shushed his cry, only to sit down on the noisemaker in my back pocket! The pair of us, unintentional clowns that we were, eased the car through back streets to the main highway.

“Amos, she’s there! I saw her! We’ve got her!” I exulted.

“Is she tied up? Does she look bruised or beaten?” he demanded.

“Mostly just nervous. Out of place,” I replied, more slowly.

“Great, we’ll have her out by tomorrow. The dean’s reliable.

Thank you, Heavenly Father. Let’s pray.” Then, “You hungry, partner?” Amos coaxed.

“Anytime you are, chief,” I joked.

“We haven’t eaten all day. Let’s stop at the Red Barn. You order and I’ll call and give the good news to Onni.”

“Give her my love,” I offered awkwardly.

“I expect she gets all she needs from God,” Amos rebuked me. I felt like Cain, whose offering had been rejected.

After we ate it was midnight, but Amos’s and my night watch wasn’t over. Shortly after Michele had disappeared with her father in San Francisco, Mitch, a responsible Church member, had been seized in a hotel by his uncle and father on a conservatorship order and flown to Ohio to stay with one of the Alexander sons. Amos was intent on recovering Mitch, too, though his loss to the church was considered less disastrous than Michele’s, as she was a top staff member. We roved from one end of Akron to the other blindly searching for every Alexander listed in the phone book. We turned in unsuccessfully at 4:00 a.m. after singing boisterously to keep ourselves awake.

We met Dean Reece at ten sharp in his office the next morning. Amos told him the results of our reconnaissance the night before, filling in more details about my part than I’d supplied him. Reece listened closely, then put in a call to the Monroe Falls chief of police. An appointment was set up an hour from then in the sedate bedroom town.

As we crowded the dean into our rented car, he talked about an episode a month earlier when a boy had come bursting into his office, insisting that he buy some peanuts. Reece, from Georgia, couldn’t refuse, but he fumed to us now about the brazen intrusion. “That was Unification, wasn’t it?” he pressed. “I tell you, that kid acted like a little demigod, as though his work was more earthshaking than any I’d ever heard of.” Amos and I, in silent fraternity, winked at each other. Someday it would all be clear....

The sterile beige police station didn’t offer us much relief from our anxiety. We chanted incessantly in a lifeless cubicle while Reece conferred with the cop. When both insisted on going to the Alexanders’ home without us, Amos rebelled.

“No representation without us. Satan could get into the dean, especially with that policeman beside him. He’s not sympathetic,” Amos muttered to me confidentially.

More conferring.

Amos lost.

But as soon as the two men left, Amos instructed me to stay behind in the jail and pray hard. He was going to take the rented car and park outside the house on Prentiss Street anyway. After all, God had made him Michele’s guardian.

Amos later told me that at the very moment of his arrival, Michele and her mother had driven up from an errand. The dean and chief were with Esther Alexander on the front lawn awaiting their arrival.

Amos had hurled himself out of the car and run toward Michele.

“Michele, Michele, Lael and I are here. Onni and Teresa love you,” Amos shouted.

Instantly Michele turned to Esther, wild-eyed. “Get me away,” she begged. Esther Alexander grabbed Michele’s hand and ran with her into the house.

“Hey, you go back to the police station,” the chief came out on the porch and angrily shouted at Amos. “We told you to stay away.”

In dismay, in anguish, Amos drove back to join me. He didn’t interrupt my chanting nor did he offer any insight. Instead he held his head in his hands and cried for the pain of Michele’s betrayal.

The minutes we waited were merciless; more like light-years.

Dean Reece and the chief finally entered our room, sober-faced. The chief said, “The girl doesn’t want to see you. She says she cares for you both but she plans to stay with the Alexanders. She believes the conservatorship is justified. So do we,” added the chief.

I shot a hard, blazing glance to Amos. “But I thought conservator-ships were a fraud, a setup,” I backed him up.

“What did Michele say about Onni or Teresa?” Amos begged.

“I heard someone say—I can’t remember who—that Teresa has a devil’s mesmerizing ability,” commented the chief; he seemed open to that possibility.

“That’s a lie! They’re the devils!” Amos pounced.

“Now listen here, you’re a nice-looking pair of kids. The woman you claim is being held against her will wants to be there. Something’s fishy,” the chief remarked.

Dean Reece stood, judgelike hands behind his back. “It seems Michele’s undergone an experience called deprogramming. You’ve heard of it, of course....”

“Yes, and that’s exactly why we’re here. They’ve just finished intimidating, maybe even torturing her, ripping God out of her life in hateful cold blood,” Amos exploded in fury. “If Michele doesn’t come back with us, it’s because they’ve planted false, evil fears in her about a life she loved just two weeks ago. They’re the ones doing the brainwashing, can’t you see?”

“Look,” calmed Reece, “she appears to have control of her senses, and although she appreciates what you’re trying to do for her, she’s happy where she is and wants to stay there.”

“What makes you so afraid of deprogramming?” suddenly asked the chief.

Shocked, vulnerable, I waited for Amos to speak up. “Well,” he said, “my faith must be deeper than Michele’s ever was, but all the same, I wouldn’t relish having it threatened in inhuman ways.”

“How do you know it’s inhuman? Michele speaks highly of both the Alexanders and her parents.”

“She must be brainwashed,” I concluded.

“They’ve taken the Messiah out of her life and Satan’s possessed her spirit. She’s no longer responsible,” Amos added.

“Nonetheless, you two had better think pretty hard before you go traipsing all over America trying to uproot people from a situation they prefer to be in,” warned the cop.

“She no longer knows what she wants. She’s captive. Michele can’t be herself,” I spoke up.

“That, my girl, is a very serious accusation. Who are you to go around legislating or determining one preferred reality for another?” Reece moralized.

The policeman jumped on me. “Who told you to do this anyway? Maybe you’re the captive?”

I didn’t care what he said; I knew I was absolutely right. He simply didn’t understand God. How could he know that the final Truth of God had been proclaimed by the Lord of the Second Advent, who was living in New York at this very hour?

“I hope we’re still friends. I expect you’ll hear from this Michele again. She seems like a sweet person, and sincere. Let me take you both to lunch back at the Holiday Inn,” offered Reece. Since we’d been trained never to refuse a gift to a heavenly child, Amos and I accepted. But the meal was pervaded by our stunned silences.

On the phone to Onni before our return to San Francisco, Amos tried to explain Michele’s action. He told me it seemed beyond Onni’s mental capacity to accept. Michele, Onni said, was lost in Satan’s hands.

Then Amos surprised me by a more practical note: Onni feared that Michele knew many secrets about the inner operation of the Church and would tell.

We were ordered home immediately. We owed God a thousand repentances; Onni left us with customary guilt.

“Amos,” I summarized on the plane, “one thing I’ve realized through this disappointment is how vicious and deceiving Satan is. Satan turns everything upside down. And God is helpless without our faith. I could never be deprogrammed. God needs me and I love Him too much.”

Two weeks later I finally talked by phone to my parents. Teresa told me my father had called our centers repeatedly trying to find me. I explained to my mother the mission I’d been on; she made little comment about being abandoned on the Washington Street porch when she came to visit.

What I couldn’t tell either my father or mother was that in June, when I’d begged them to come down just once more to a weekend seminar and they refused, I’d gone out and spent two hours in the dark crying under a tree in Lafayette Park.

That evening I’d finally given my mother and father up. I’d prepared never to see them again in my life, if God demanded.

When I’d come in from that heartbreaking darkness, my real parents had irrevocably and eternally become Moon, Hak-Ja Han, Onni, Dr. Durst. As I had been repeatedly taught in the cult, it was they who were my True Parents.

Onni Durst – The Dragon Lady

One Family meeting with Onni Durst scarred my soul

Moon’s ultimate truth is … absolute obedience – Allen Tate Wood

#Barbara Underwood

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auskultu · 8 years ago

Text

Monkee Davy Talks About The Beatles

Keith Altham, New Musical Express, 4 March 1967

"GEORGEPAULJOHNRINGO," our very own pop monster, has now grown to that exalted position where it is a kind of sacred cow whom none may speak of without reverence or doffing the cap.

The Beatles have always based their enormous appeal on being human, but certain of their more fanatical followers have decided they are gods and when Monkee Davy Jones was quoted as saying: "The Beatles are finished, tired and on their way out," the screams of sacrilege rent the air all over Beatledom. Has Davy been chipping at the very pedestal of the pop Caesars ? Was he misquoted? What does he really think of the Beatles? Before he returned to America I got the facts straight from Davy at his London hotel.

"Oh, come now," grinned Davy through his sun-tanned face. "The Beatles are the top – people tried to make out that I had said they were finished. I said nothing of the kind. What I said was that they were tired and I believe they are. I'd be tired.

"I've only been in the business five minutes but I know how I would feel after five years of it at 26 years of age.

"I bought all the Beatles albums and once I hitched from San Francisco to New York just to see them appear – I spent all my money on that trip.

"A reporter came up to me in the U.S. and asked what I thought about John Lennon's Jesus quote when he said he thought the Beatles were more popular. I said that there was some talk about us being more popular than the Beatles at the moment, so where did that put us! I can imagine this guy going away now and writing: 'Davy Jones says he's God.' I never said that either!"

Just to prove how much he enjoys the new adulation Davy stepped to the hotel window to wave to the hundreds of screaming fans gathered below. This had the immediate effect of causing three young ladies to step back into the main road to get a better look at him and brought a furious driver's taxi to a screeching halt! A uniformed commissionaire fought valiantly to stop the girls invading the hotel lobby!

"That's nice," smiled Davy, "The doorman's waving too." He was too, and in no uncertain manner!

Davy began launching into one of his famous monologues and in a heavy Lancashire accent addressed the crowd as if they were a union meeting! They had no idea what he was saying, which was: "Now I've noticed that there is a lot of secondhand rubbish in the streets. This has got to stop!"

"Tomorrow morning I only want to see first-class rubbish."

"And another thing – I've noticed that some of you haven't been coming to the Saturday night singalong. Well, tomorrow I want all of you there and..."

"We want Davy!" screamed the girls and began to run berserk about the car park, while the commissionaire sat down on a bench to have a quiet cry. Davy returned to seat himself on the sofa. On a table by it a pile of autograph books were waiting for him for signing.

"I'm going to sign this one 'Peter Tork' and really blow their minds out there," smiled Davy. He flicked back a few pages in one book. "Say, that's good. This girl's got Eleanor Rigby's autograph!"

Significantly Davy raised an objection to our photographer taking a shot of him smoking a cigarette. He explained that the group has now got such an incredible influence on young people that he did not want any fans to start smoking just because Davy Jones does.

"And if you think that's crazy just remember all those kids who tried to jump off buildings in the States and fly when the Batman series hit TV," qualified Davy. Having swallowed a pill designed to keep him wide awake for a further 24 hours and another dozen interviews, Davy began a non-stop conversation for over an hour. This included a monologue on the U.S. police, who still tend to victimise young people with long hair. He recounted a recent incident in which he was somewhat unnecessarily handled after being stopped on his motorbike in LA. We also discovered that Jane Asher once taught him a cockney accent when he appeared with her in a stage version of Peter Pan in Britain and that one of his favourite U.S. comedians is Bill Crosby.

On the other hand, he did not want to discuss Mick Jagger! Enter a waiter with coffee who said: "Good evening sir!" to Davy. Davy took the waiter quietly on one side. "What's your name, waiter?" "Joseph sir," "Well mine's Davy. Would you please call me that the next time you come up. I hate all this 'sir' bit." Exit pleasantly surprised waiter.

The name of Cassius Clay was mentioned and it produced an all-star performance from Davy, who leapt to his feet and began dancing about the room yelling: "Watch my feet – watch my feet! My God, if I were a foot-and-a-half taller I'd kick him to pieces!"

He climaxed this piece of cabaret, which he chose to call the Mohammed Jones double clutch shuffle, by bringing his elbow smartly back against the door with a resounding smack – it seems Mr. Pearl is not the only exponent of karate and I have it on good authority that Davy has a head like a bullet – loaded, of course!

I also noticed Davy was wearing a badge labelled "Jewish Power," which I would think had absolutely no significance except to signify his sense of humour. He embellished this by informing me he is sending away for another badge: "Sterilise LBJ – no more ugly children!"

Of religion Davy says: "Young people are bored with the Church as an establishment. There are too many conflicting dogmas. They should all put their heads together and come up with a new, more acceptable religion. "I read the Bible because my mother used to read it to me, and because it is so beautifully written and can give you good ideas for new songs."

Before leaving I was invited to participate in the sport of "wall creeping," which consists of sliding along the wall flattened up tight against it. All a part of life's rich pattern, I suppose, and a fair reflection of the kind of 'happy kick' that Davy is getting out of his new found fame.

I would add one thing about him. Before I met him Sonny Bono told me in confidence that he believed Davy was a nice person because of something he had done for someone – and related the incident. I won't cheapen the deed by publicising it except to say it makes Davy Jones a decent human being first – and a Monkee second.

#monkees #davy jones #nme #beatles #interview #music journalism #1967 #1960s #sixties #60s

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janiklandre-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Sunday, March 5, 2017

9:25 a.m. very cold but sunny a lonely Sunday morning - somewhere I read about the Sunday blues - earlier I have also written about all the people going to church - obviously a way to combat the Sunday blues. I tried - but rarely found services inspiring. For a while Paco and I attended the 6th Avenue Methodist Church in Brooklyn. Paco's second wife Elaine - 16 years younger than he, she dumped him and I met him - Elaine before being with Paco had found her way to the church of Finley Schaef - then off Washington Sqare to the West, Finley had been the first minister to speak out against the Vietnam war from the pulpit. His church was called the peace church - a group my friend Ari Salant was part of, Resist, met there and I went with him, Grace Paley was there - and days before I met Paco I had gone there with Robert Goldscheider and my sons - our sons - to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe performing at the church. My son later tried joining them in San Francisco, alas they said something to the effect that too many Jewish boys from New York were coming (our Jewish name does make us Jewish - there is my Jewish grandfather and Robert's Jewish father - Robert later with his third wife Janet joined a synagogue - my lose affiliations have been Christian, my sons never sought any, as far as I know.

Finley's church was a lively place - but then Finley became involved with the youthful assistant Nancy, his wife with the youth minister - Finley and Nancy a pair to this day - the liaison of his wife did not hold long - still the Methodist church too a dim view, Finley list his church (now condos) - worked in a bar for a year - then made apologies and was assigned the church in Brooklyn - this was around 1973 and Park Slope still a waste land where we could have bought a house for peanuts and I wish we had. While there, the area became gentrified and by the time Finley retired - I visited him and Nancy in Saugsrties not too long ago - it had become a posh neighborhood and a posh church.

After Elaine dumped Paco she was banished from his church, but Finley - and many other people - loved Paco, the charming and prolific azrtist. At times we walked to the church from our second avenue loft - over the Brooklyn bridge, up Flatbush avenue - we loved these long walks, took interesting photographs - all gone - we allotted two hours, still often came after the service had begun and Finley would stop and grandly welcome his painter friend and probably call me his wife - there was talk we might get married in a church ceremony, not the civil one - no legal obligations. We never did.

Finley had a strong theatrical flair - his services were theatrical and fun - he was of Catholic Lithuanian background but had converted to the Methodist church. The church was also very political, much attention was paid to events in Latin America and demonstrations were joined.

At the end of the service we always were invited to the Parish House - a select group - to a lavish brunch and often ended up in nearby Prospect Park. These were not lonely Sundays.

However, in the spring of 1988 when Paco decamped to East Hampton without me (he had waited until it got warm) - on mother's day I went alone to the church where I met Patty Lee Parmelee from my German group and the German woman theologian Soelle was visiting and Patty said, we are going to the Parish house - and I said, I am coming and Nancy stopped me and said: I don't think there is enough room.

Wham bam - only as an adjunct to Paco had I been welcome. Interesting. I did write them a letter and for many years stayed out of contact until I ran one day in the street into Finley who embraced me warmly, asked where I had been - he had forgotten all about that mother's day - by then he had retired and they had left New York - and invited me to come to Saugasrtie's - where I also have another friend who gave me warm hospitality. I spent a lovely weekend there - alas I no longer have the get up and go of my younger years - though coming Tuesday I will test if I can still catch the 5:49 to New Haven and find a bus there to take me to Northampton - a trip I enjoyed not that long ago.

Well, C.B. has shelved me - avoiding any conflict - unwilling to sit down for a talk - finding excuses not to see me. Which also does bring once again the highly critical letter of me I received from another friend - reminding me that when I met Robert G. in 1953 he had three close friends - Lenny, Kenny and David - he and Lenny Harvard law, Kenny and David Harvard med (( did write a novel about them in 1964, after Robert an I had attended his 10th reunion of Harvard law - a theatrical weekend) I did send the novel to a major publisher, got it back saying, very interesting, keep working on it - alas I never learned to work on my writing, In any event, Robert proudly told me of the mutual admiration society the four had formed - three were Jewish, Robert had a Jewish father - determined social climbers - aware of the importance of giving each other support and building each other up. Gesine in Germany is one of my women friends building me up - alas not all women are. So often I de experience women tearing each other down - a late glaring example the granddaughter of Dorothy Day at Mary House. I am aware of the envy and jealousy I have encountered - also sometimes disappointing friends - I can think of three - who met me when I was teaching at Columbia, expecting me to rise in the ranks - social climb myself! - disappointed when I sang: Hallelujah, I'm a bum again - hanging out with bums - not climbing socially but declining. Downward mobility they call it. It has not been voluntary poverty - I've now been around the Catholic Worker for more than 20 years - readily give them credit for making me part of their family - for giving me a home away from no home on ,many lonely days - feeding me a lot of food - and yet at this very moment deeply disappointing me.

I have lived many different lives with many different groups of people - for many at the CW there has been great continuity in their lives - Roger going back to the 50's - Jane going back to the 70's - Dorothy Day's granddaughters - Kate who now is promoting her book - they have mountains of photographs, letters, books that go back to the time if my birth - 1933 when inspired by Peter Maurin the first issue of the Catholic Worker was published - a penny a copy - peddled in Union Square - a penny a copy to this day and still in the same format - I've read much of Dorothy's excellent writings - her memoir The Long Loneliness, very openly talking about her early days, her recently published extensive journals, a lot of her other writings - it is a fascinating story - what the synergy of two people created - a vital movement that today encompasses the world - and crfeated great continuity in the lives of many people whom I met and watched - good people.

After C.B. drew me in after 1997 - I helped her in the kitchen - saving my life on the day of the 2000 fire, when I left my apartment minutes before a feroceus fire broke in to go and help her in the kitchen.Having just returned from 10 years in Bolivia she knew few people in New York and cherished me as a friend - until very recently - when at the behest of her dear friend M.H. I too was put on their list of the old and feeble minded - to be tolerated as long asd they don't open their mouth. M.H. who always had followed C.B.to my house and was welcomed by me, found it deeply offending how dared I asking to be included when she was asking out C.B. for a humburger. She insulted me, ran off - and later said - I'll talk to you when you'll be a sweet silent old woman.

I guess when you have grown old and not climbed socially - have status and money - that is to be expected. Having watched the C.W. all these years I have come to realize that while the myth declares everybody equal - there too is rank and status and in earlier writings I often wrote about watching French Christine - the general's daughter of aristocrstic background - fighting tooth and nail to climb in the ranks - and glad for myself not to share that ambition. It caused her much grief - she constantly felt left out - she and I did have a few very pleasant encounters and we did like each other - but most of the time she was seeking out "people of value".

The young people who arrive - their youth much valued - if they so desire, quickly rise - immediately there writing in the paper is valued, they are invited on journeys to South Korea, Russia, Afganistan, Iraq and on and on - they are asked to give talks - I turned 60 in 1992 - I was appreciated washing dishes, chopping carrots and later labeling the newspaper - 80.000 copies not long ago, now reduced to 30.000 - postage too expensive. I quickly realized that bar coding would be cheaper than hand labeling - but a woman who has died, Kathy Temple - asked before her death fow a vow that bar coding would never be used - and so people continue to hand lable - it's a bit like in Russia where three people under communism were given the same job to maintain full employment and make sure everybody had a job..

I did it when I was joined by an interesting French priest - who introduced me to interesting French writers - on the tip of my tongue - an early critic of communism whose chauffeur he had once been, later an inmate in a German concentration camp - he was refused housing at CW when evicted in Brooklyn, was a mad driver and died shoveling his beat up Toyota out of the snow. I acutually was asked to write his obituary - I had much liked him

Then all kind of discord broke out in the mailing room - also I preferred writing this here now blog - I no longer was wanted in the kitchen - and alas, not a published author I ended up in a rather numerous category of poor, lonely old women who are greeted kindly and then ignored.

But the place does abound in interesting characters - Jane always talked of writing a Gothic Novel and I hope she has - weirdness abounds - and you don't have to go to any theater, there is enough theater there. Still - it is time for me to widen my circle - and deal with the fact that I can come as silent observer, but there are so many pwople with a great need to talk and men do assert themselves - and boy, do they talk and talk - but forbid women to talk, not only me. Must accept realities.

And so goes my life. Went for an icy walk yesterday, listenened to the ever crazier news - went out to buy the Sunday Times - quickly escaped a violent encounter between two men - violence in the air. Read the Sunday Times, slept rather well - left house at 7 a.m.. - empty cold streets, tons of litter - Bean not very cosy -loud militsry sounding music - a worker sawing metal - walked - ran into a couple people I knew, stopped at the bakery where I've gotten into talking to the woman from former Yugoslavia, 49, a grandmother, drives daily 40 minutes - does not know where in former Yugoslavia her parents came from, does not talk to her Muslim mother - has some nerve problem and barely sleeps but says she is never tired - a bit worrisome, I find - and here I am, spending my lonely Sunday morning g writing - enjoying writing - it's 11 I'll call a friend

Got her answering machine - I know she's not in church but likely out with her daughter. Yesterday I noticed what looked like an interesting lecture at the Deutshes Haus at NYU - modern German authors - since Goethe Haus on 5th Avenue closed I've lost touch with German writing - still - it still is of interest and so I'll skip the CW brunch.

This may the lst of my longblogs at least for a while - tomorrow at 9 a.m. I am to see the eye doctor about the cataracts - he gave me a long form to fill out and extensive material to read - others have told me about the tedious eye drops - and then I'll see how the day develops - Tuesday early I plan to leave for Massachusetts and let's see how this will go. I will take my ipad and see if my daughter-in-law can give me some lessons - many do write on it at length - and then also, those of you who have followed my writing - is it ten years? - have been witness to my waning and waxing energies - somebody called it being a prisoner to our emotions - I would love to keep going at my present rate - since my energies began waxing once again and M.H. and C.B. have been so totally offended by an "energized Marianne" - how dare you not be sweet and even tempered - I have done a lot of organizing, taken care of many things that my waning energies don't allow me to do - when I feel so blah, oh, so blah - yet my psychiatrist friends have assured me "Marianne "you don"t know what real depression is" - and I am thankful to them - thankful I never listened to the pill happy nurses who tell me - you MUST take pills - and worried about others in my life who may suffer from more serious forms of depression than I do. With me until now it has been a passing condition - when I barely find three words to stay - stop writing this here blog - do feel like, hey can't you pull yourself together - this all started after my mother killed herself in 1982 - days before her 80th birthday - she had had with indignities of old age. Only I wished she had not done it the way she did. A year later I for the first time urgently wished for death myself. It threw me and those close to me into terrible disarray. It took me time to learn about waning and waxing energies - I often have not dealt well with it - allowed my anger to surface - but am working hard at trying to be as palatable as possible to myself and to those around me. Whomever I may have offended, please forgive me - and those of you who recites the Lord's prayer, please listen to the words you utter and act on it. A la prochaine, until next time, as French Chrstine used to say - she is now in Paris, battling cancer, would like to be called on her cell phone which is terribly expensive, has not seen to getting hold of a computer - here she only went to the library where a kind young man helped her. Well - perhaps she does not have the energy. I do miss her. She did understand what others do not.

Last - I wish I had learned to write in word - as things get long - my email mode gets a bit rebellious. Still, thanks again Ken, and now Molly to getting me were I am. Marianne

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gigslist · 4 years ago

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How Hollywood Killed the Oscars

Conceptual performance artists and the ethics of art and activism…

Foreword: I investigated and wrote this at the beginning of 2021, but had to wait until the pudding proof. I only sent it to those I knew personally who would think about it. I feared that rest of you would’ve castigated me.

Traveling and working in the arts I've lived and worked with different cultures for years at a time. Arts and trades friends and I lobbied Australia gov to save an Aboriginal sacred site as a natural open-air arts venue in Byron Bay. I’ve lived in Haight Ashbury for the past 20 years. One of the reasons I like San Francisco is that all races get along here. That is until BLM. Then everybody was deer in the headlights afraid of each other. Now people are trying to shake off the whole BLM and other acronyms and get back to being nice to each other.

But it was scary-ass sh.t. A white chick was trying to gather people for a riot on Haight Street. I wiped the slogan, in big letters, off her van. She came out of her van swinging her baseball bat. I let my Outback Ozzie Battler come out and a tai chi maneuver to fend her off. Then let out my inner Haight Ashbury freak and screamed like a crazy psycho at her.

Then I told the huge black armed security guards on Haight Street if they see anybody with riot and its slogans to nip it in the bud. Anybody who’s worked with big crowds at concerts knows about crowd psychosis. A frot man or front woman on stage has two jobs. To entertain and to keep a crowd under control.

Then I did some research to see what the fuss is about...

The Black Lives Mater movement reclaims slavery as a 1960's protest. It so wasn’t about that! I live in a loft in Haight Asbury, which was the speakeasy for the Black Panther’s fundraisers in the 1960s. The original bar is still here. So are some interesting hidden cupboards. We assume they were stash boxes, because cannabis was illegal in the 1960s. But I digress from why BLM and associated acronyms are blowing smoke up your ass. In the 1960s the Black Power Movement was not about slavery. Black Panthers and associates couldn’t claim black slavery as a protest. Because their ancestors were slave traders. White slavery has been around for thousands of years and is still going. I’m not an expert on the subject, but you can look it up in a real history book. Some Hasidic Jewish men still sell their wives and daughters into sex slavery. There are non-profits in New York about it. If researching black and white slavery, try the non-USA versions for perspective. Below is a nutshell. The American black slave trade was self-defense. After thousands of white settlers kidnapped and sold into slavery in Africa. Such as the town called Roanoke. The whole town of settlers taken twice. Roanoke sits on the African slave traders’ route from South America. From their fleets of ships on the sea, African slavers could see the smoke of the settlers’ cooking fires. There were no US navy and Coast Guard to defend the coasts back then. The problem with studying history is that ancient aliens aren’t interesting anymore. Art history is the most nit picking. Why art gets created and destroyed. What’s the motivation? Wha’s in the artist’s head? The origin of their inspiration? Is their work really a protest, or art dressed up as activism? Are they creating the art for art, ego, madness or money? The founders of Black Lives Matter. Patrice Collors, and AOC, real jobs are trained performance artists, from Hollywood. There are years of LA arts industry press about them. Their act is public group performance. Getting crowds to gather to do something, including public agitation.

That act didn't sell enough books to pay for multimillion$ houses and $25,000 restaurant tabs. So they called themselves Marxists and touted black rights spiced with fake history. To get uneducated students riled to cause riots. Now Patrice Collors does red carpet at the Oscars. For hyping up people to hate each other and hurt each other and destroy businesses and lives. To young men angry and attack defenseless elderly people and other races. That’s not art, that’s a nasty ego with greed and madness. Yes?

If you work in the arts or media for a few years in California you see psycholical patterns in artists seeking fame in Hollywood. Red carpet at the Oscars and multimillion$ houses are their ultimate goal. Else they wouldn’t be in Hollywood. New York or San Francisco is where top art for art’s sake is at in the USA.

Hollywood artists will do and say anything to get their time on the red carpet. A conceptual artist can tell themselves it is all art, no matter what it is, harmful or not. To them it is nothing but art and a form of madness, but the lure of money brings the ego, “fame”, into it.

I'm an art historian. I research why art gets and destroyed. Including marxism. That Patrice Collors actually trained in marxism I find doubtful. African Americans are staunch Baptists. God bless them and their amazing music. Marxism doesn’t mix with freedom of art or religion. Follow the money and do the math. The total is an artist doing her “art” for money and ego’s sake for the red carpet and multimillion dollar real estate. Not for art’s sake, nor the people’s sake, and not for her people's sake.

I’ve not looked into AOC, because what I found of Patrice Collors was blowing my mind enough. I actually thought AOC was an organization. What made me notice AOC is a selfie video rant that youtube autoplayed. To jaded cynical me who's seen it too many times... AOC looked like she’d had a “bump”, roadie slang for a dose of heavy drugs. Even the freaks in Haight Ashbury said “… she looks like she’s on crack.” Their words, from hardened rock and rap concert roadies. Seen a lot of people on many kinds of drugs in San Francisco and Hollywood.

“Interventionalist History” What AOC seems to be accusing those who don’t disagree with her.

“…a policy of interfering in another nation's affairs through coercion or threat of force. Intervention can be political, military, economic, cultural, or humanitarian, or often some combination of these...” study.com

“…an intervention is defined as a threatening act that is unwelcome by the target of one's intervention…” britannica.com

“… practice of intervening specifically : governmental interference in economic affairs at home or in political affairs…” merriam-webster.com

“…coercion or threat of force… unwelcome by the target of one's��intervention… specifically: governmental interference in economic affairs at home…” What is BLM and AOC and associated acronyms doing to everybody who doesn’t agree with them in their home, the USA? How can anybody truthfully agree with anything based on fake history or fake news? The reason why so many people publicly agree with this cr.p is fear of being threatened, bullied and Black List. Even if they don’t understand what the cr.p is about.

The Hollywood Black List has turned USA screen offerings into unwatchable cr.p. Even on TV. It’s now rewriting history books into Ancient Aliens and winged beings with super powers. Instead of the truth. The truth that people from prehistory to the 21st century are smarter than Hollywood and media allows us to know. That’s the real reason why the Oscar ratings are at record lows.

Hollywood is writing for teenagers who want to know about sex and violence and ETs. They are not writing for jaded adults who want to relax with something think about. They watch the same English TV series over and over every night to avoid the Hollywood sex and violence. It’s also why youtube and social media are popular. Now I’m talking like an art historian.

I’m always surprised at how many USA citizens prefer English TV. Including hardened roadies and ICU nurses living in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco. They see violence and sex on the street and at work every day. They want to relax and think about something else on their time off. Once people are out of college, they are usually over the sex and violence. And kiddie lit is for baby bumps.

Pump sex and violence into kids’ heads whenever they can hack into it. Which is every night after the parents are asleep. And on their phones going to and from school. And accosted on social media by predators every 10 minutes. What will happen?

Remember that concentrated light, the screen, is the strongest hypnotic medium ever. Clinically tested and used by all the “secret agencies” and as medical therapy. Hypnotize sex and violence and UFO’s into impressionable minds for more than ten, 10, years on end. What will you get? Think about it.

Another thing that often surprises me is the politics of many people at the top of show biz. The producers behind the producers. They also don’t watch the sex and violence shows. They are progressive conservatives, not liberals, even in San Francisco. They feel safe talking to me, because I’m from Australia and an open minded neutral observer. And I'm too jaded to be bothered.

You could castigate me, but in show biz “The proof is in the ratings.” Hollywood created this big m…f… mess by indoctrinating hate and fear and greed! The Oscar ratings told you so. Hollywood is who can cleans the big m…f… mess up.

Make money from art yes, that’s why we are all here, we work in the arts industries. But don’t indoctrinate people to be hateful and fearful and greedy and call it art. Allow people to be adults. Allow people to be nice to each other.

In case you haven’t looked it up, all art and music originated out of spirituality and religion. Not out of politics.

The ancient Romans actually changed their laws to accommodate the Hebrew region. It was the Hebrews to wanted to fight anyway and destroyed all the art. Hollywood movies are not history.

Grow up and play nice and allow your children to be children and allow them grow up in a safe world that plays nice. A dripping tap fills a bucket of hate or a bucket of nice the exact same way. You are a public mirror, will you mirror hate and fear and greed? Will you mirror a community of all races and cultures living in harmony?

That is what the Black Panthers were really about. That is likely why their fundraising speakeasy was in Haight Ashbury. Nobody hated anybody in Haight Ashbury in the 1960s. They wanted the freedom to be and do what you want to.

And do no harm, because all lives fucking matter.

You all need a sense of something higher than yourselves to be humble to. It will enable you to stop being self-entitled assholes.

With Love

GigsList

#patrice collors resigns from blm

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kartiavelino · 6 years ago

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Roseanne calls #MeToo founders ‘hos’ in bombastic interview

WASHINGTON — In a brand new off-the-rails interview, Roseanne Barr calls originators of the #MeToo motion “hos” and assaults Sen. Kamala Harris, Christine Blasey Ford and plenty of different ladies. “They’re pretending that they didn’t go to commerce sexual favors for cash,” Barr says, rhetorically asking why some ladies discover themselves in males’s lodge rooms at three a.m. Interviewer Candace Owens replies by pointing to the ladies who accused comic Louis C.Ok. of sexual misconduct, prompting Barr to say, “That’s who I’m speaking about, too.” “I do know a ho once I see one,” proclaims Barr. She was kicked off the rebooted “Roseanne” present after posting a racist tweet about former President Barack Obama’s adviser Valerie Jarrett final Could. Talking in an episode of the “Candace Owens Present” that goes on-line Sunday, Barr holds nothing again speaking about race, faith, politics and Hollywood. She goes on a nasty tirade in opposition to Harris, the California Dem who’s working for president. “Take a look at Kamala Harris, who I name Kama Sutra Harris,” Barr snipes, pointing to the pol’s prior relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. “Everyone knows what she did… she slept her technique to the underside,” the comic says, drawing settlement from Owens, who directs comms for the younger conservative group Turning Level USA. Barr additionally means that Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Supreme Courtroom Justice Brett Kavanaugh of a sexual assault once they have been teenagers, “needs to be in jail.” “White ladies privilege” is the one factor that stored the accuser out of jail, Barr opines. Transferring on to freshman Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Barr declares, “It’s scary that we’ve got Hamas in our Congress,” referencing the Palestinian terror group. Each pols are Muslim. Owens chimes in to say that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) overtly “hate[s] Jews.” Barr herself is Jewish. The crazed comic tells Owens that she helps the interviewer’s “Blexit” motion encouraging black folks to depart the Democratic Social gathering. “I assist Blexit trigger I do know that that basically is the linchpin of the entire thing. You name it the plantation — I really like that,” Barr says. “I name it Egypt as a result of I’m Jewish. It’s leaving Egypt and getting freed from Pharaoh. For all of the African-American folks I do know who’re Blexiting, I say to them, ‘Please take two Jews with you.’” Barr, who performed a powerful supporter of President Trump in her short-lived reboot, additionally bashes some former buddies in Hollywood. “After I went to bat for Sandra [Bernhard], Kathy [Griffin] and Sara [Gilbert] to get them on TV — as a result of I gave all of them their TV jobs… what folks on the networks informed me? These ladies are too ugly to go on TV,” Barr recollects. “And I mentioned that is so extremely sexist. Take a look at me, I’m no magnificence. You’ll be able to’t take expertise, for a girl, and scale back it to their facial flaws. Are you sh—ing me?” She’s modified her thoughts since turning into a Hollywood outcast. “These days, I’m like, you’re proper. They’re too ugly to be on TV,” Barr concludes, saying her colleagues have “ugliness inside.” Share this: https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/roseanne-calls-metoo-founders-hos-in-bombastic-interview/ The post Roseanne calls #MeToo founders ‘hos’ in bombastic interview appeared first on My style by Kartia. https://www.kartiavelino.com/2019/03/roseanne-calls-metoo-founders-hos-in-bombastic-interview.html

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how2to18 · 6 years ago

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RAPE JOKES aren’t funny. What to make, then, of Vanessa Place’s new book, You Had to Be There, which collects such jokes but is not a joke book?

Place is a poet, performance artist, and criminal defense appellate attorney representing convicted sex offenders who can’t afford a lawyer. She has previously written about her work in The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law (2010). Culled, according to Place, from 4chan, Sickipedia, and other musty online corners, the jokes she has woven together here — and, in some cases, written herself — unspool over 130-plus pages with no editorial commentary aside from a foreword (by Dave Hickey), an afterword (by Natasha Stagg), and a brief artist’s statement. Though there’s an undeniable logic and rhythm to the unspooling, readers will be forced to navigate Place’s text (or “verbal artifact”) on their own, without the usual niceties. This is a potentially terrifying, but perhaps also liberating, experience for readers coddled by the gatekeepers of predictability — one that makes commentary of either stripe seem perfunctory, a failure “to go beyond either condemnation or understanding.”

“The structure of a joke, according to Freud, is that it is a sudden discharge of repression, often sexual, often kind of obscene,” Place has written. “And so, in that way, the joke itself ends up being structured, or ends up having the same structure, as a rape — a violent discharge of repressed sexuality.” Laughter is implicative, and you almost have to laugh or stifle your discharge. But these are not jokes that rely on laughter to complete them. When she performs the piece, Place neither greets nor thanks the audience, training the spotlight on the crowd while she remains in the shadows. “So … joke’s on you.” It’s an apt analogy for a book in which readers are both in control of turning the pages and forced to participate in their own discomfort as they do so, particularly in an era in which “aren’t we all complicit?” has become a dinner party cliché. It reminds one of the kind of incisive critique Conceptualism is still capable of — as a cultural intervention, a mirror for examining parts we’d prefer not to see.

I queried Place via email, and she responded graciously. We spoke about comedy, consent, the worship of mastery, and the audience as a potential witness rooted, as Place puts it, in “the gorgeous muck of their desire.”

DAN ELKIND: I can imagine that some people browsing the Humor section won’t be amused to find this book shelved next to Jeff Foxworthy or whatever. Is there an appropriate section? Where would you shelve it?

VANESSA PLACE: Museum bookshops and home toilets.

This piece was inspired by the debate about rape jokes in stand-up comedy. What was your initial reaction? Did you take it as a challenge?

The hivemind response — and we could take some time to think about why this is currently a term of approbation — was that rape jokes are categorically not funny. I thought that this was wrong: they are funny, but funny contextually. The more interesting question became: Why, and under what conditions? If one rape joke is told by way of shock or solidarity, what happens if 250 jokes are told, and told publicly, in a voice that is not supposed to tell?

The book’s disclaimer states that this is a text version of a live performance — “art performance, not stand-up comedy.” What would you say is the fundamental difference between the two?

Stand-up comedy is meant to get a laugh; art may get a laugh, but that’s not a predicate for the practice. Stand-up comedy is typically performed as a kind of intimacy, the performer doing a bit of prefatory audience-banter, couching the gags conversationally, as if speaking, as if telling something about themselves, as if revealing. Art performance is formalized as a performance: for me, I do not speak to the audience, neither greeting nor thanking them for their attention. The material is read from a text, recited without affect, and is more or less obviously impersonal material. Representatively, as a matter of disciplinary practice. After all, I’m wearing a suit, and sometimes a nice tie.

You’ve said that this piece allows you to observe the audience. What has the response been like? Have you noticed anything that surprised you?

I’m never surprised, except by love.

Your performance seems to say that honest emotional responses are mysterious. The laugh you’re going for is the involuntary kind. I’m a Jew and found myself laughing most at the Jewish pedophile jokes, and then nervously laughing about that.

What’s the question, then?

Touché. You’ve also said that there’s no such thing as rape culture: “It’s just culture.” I imagine you mean everything from catcalling to “conjugal debt.” Can you elaborate on that?

I’d be even broader, so to speak, in my claim. Structurally, at least here, at least now, at least in our insufferable present, we are enthralled by mastery. Even if we don’t like a particular master, we believe ourselves, or our preferred designees, capable of being some better master. Mastery itself is not questioned, meaning the real question of domination and submission is not questioned. It’s like the cops: you may think you hate the cops but simultaneously think they should be on the scene of what you consider a crime, and will self-deputize to police others, such as with call-out culture.

This suggests that we want these structures, and again, the question then becomes why. A culture that loves mastery will have many masters, some in balaclavas, some in blue suits, some with a lot of online followers. Of course, we are predisposed to recognize certain demographics as embodying mastery more than others, and may rail against the particular manifestations of this, but that’s debating interior design, not architecture. As an easy example, many people ask me whether I’ve ever been raped, and those more psychoanalytically affined ask if I want to be, but no one asks me if I am, or want to be, a rapist. That’s just culture.

For a long time the law defined rape as nonconsensual intercourse with a female that was not one’s spouse. As a practicing defense attorney, how do you see this gap between social and cultural mores and the legal code?

Rape is not a thing, rape is a verdict: there has been some judicial determination that a sexual encounter was nonconsensual. This can lead to the woman being raped — i.e., having had an encounter that she did not consent to — and the man not being a rapist — i.e., he did not know or understand that there was no consent. The gap appears when we level the categories, such that every unwanted encounter is deemed rape, regardless of its indeterminacy. Put another way, I could consent to something in the moment, then reconsider, realizing that my then-consent was the result of various pressures, prejudices, fears, et cetera, and decide, or understand, at least to myself, that the encounter was nonconsensual. This is a subjective historical process rather than a retroactive historical fact.

Put still another way, it would perhaps be better if Americans were less Protestant in our thinking about sex: rather than insisting on a kind of subjective purity on both sides, marked by virginal intent, we could operate from a colder, dumber objective politeness. If I am scrupulous in treating you with respect, do you care very much if I think you’re a fuckwit? Or if you mean nothing to me? Mores are not morals, nor should they be.

I recently read something Kurt Tucholsky said about Soviet Russia: that the “November 7 demonstration on Red Square […] reminded him of an Easter procession in Rome, a kind of state religion in which a humanitarian ideal had been turned into a new tyranny.” Do you think political correctness or whatever you want to call it has become a humanitarian ideal turned orthodoxy? Does laughter constitute heresy?

Laughter signifies nothing but ideology: we laugh because we agree, wholeheartedly, or because we agree, ironically, with the ideological donnée. The right is nostalgic for the past, the left is nostalgic for the future. What’s funny about that? Everything.

Besides provoking an honest reaction, is there anything that you would like readers to take away from this experience?

I would be happy if they didn’t take anything away, if they could simply stay in the gorgeous muck of their desire.

Daniel Elkind is a writer and translator living in San Francisco.

The post Her Dark Materials: A Conversation with Vanessa Place appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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