#Michel Begat

[texturesvero]

Les bâtiments complètement restaurés par les bénévoles des Amis du Circuit de Gueux

[drabmakyo]

hello! i saw your blazed post about your book, and it looks really interesting! i hope you don't mind questions, because i have something i'm curious about.

i noticed the books in your tetralogy have Hebrew titles. i think that's really cool! when i read the descriptions though i didn't see reference to that anywhere. if you don't mind answering, what's the significance of the titles?

i plan on reading the books regardless of your answer (as in right after i send this ask), but i'm always intrigued (as a Jew myself) when i see stuff like this. thank you for reading my message and for making such a cool story!

Hey, thanks so much for the ask! I guess there's a few layers to this, which I'll answer as unspoilingly as possible. And, since it'll be posted publicly, I'll go a bit into the words for other folks reading, too.

The core reason for this comes from a central character, Michelle Hadje, who was "raised vaguely Jewish" (her words, it's complicated :P) then, to varying degrees, drifted closer to those roots over the years. While this isn't often directly plot-relevant, it nevertheless informs the entirety of her and her clade (a group of copies or 'forks' of her who have long since individuated).

The base significance for each title is as follows:

Qoheleth - There's a character who goes by Qoheleth, which is an Anglicization of the Hebrew word kohelet. The word refers to a teacher or a gatherer of the assembled, and is the title of the book in the Tanakh of the same name, also known as Ecclesiastes. It's an older Anglicization (and is combined 'Hebel', an older Anglicization of the Hebrew havél, meaning breath or, in context, meaningless or vanity). The reason he's chosen this name is plot relevant, so I'll stop there. Needless to say, ideas of wisdom versus folly are woven throughout.

Toledot - The Hebrew word toledot refers to generations, lineage, or inheritance. You can think of it as the 'begats'; it's the list of generations and lineages in Genesis 25-28. The book takes place over two time periods (2124 and 2325), involving the changes that Michelle's clade goes through to become who they are. Additionally, one of their distant cousins outside of the system is a character who, despite having never met Michelle, is obsessed with her past. Finally, there is a brief discussion of a very historically fraught document called the Toledot Yeshu — the generations of Jesus — and a particular interpretation of one of the sentences.

Nevi'im - This title refers to prophets. It's the 'na' in Tanakh (Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim, the three sections of the Hebrew bible). This one is probably the most bound up in plot, so all I'll really be able to say is that some events happen surrounding a new group of characters that herald a change both for society and for the the clade at the center of all of this.

Mitzvot - I'll admit, this was a working title that just kind of stuck in the end. It initially was based off a one-off comment from a character ("As you intentionally moved towards feeling, I worked to contain and compartmentalize it within myself after you came into being. I became a being of negative commandments. I lived the 'shalt not's while you performed your mitzvot of loving and caring."). While I'd always meant to change it, it wound up growing on me. This refers to commandments, yes, but also the actions one takes to fulfill those commandments — it's the plural of mitzvah, so if you've heard something like "you've done a mitzvah", that's where that comes from. It stuck around as a title since a theme in the story is just how one defines oneself through one's actions.

Now for the "why" part, and the part that makes me very anxious about all of this. It's intensely personal, and maybe not even that interesting, and I worry that it will come off as insulting or appropriative. Feel free to skip, though. It's long and wandery.

The most abstract layer to all of this is that I think the greatest utility writing for the author is as a tool of self-exploration. It's an excuse to do a lot of research into something one's interested in, sure, but that interest comes from somewhere.

I'll be up front and say that I'm not Jewish, and I'll also be honest and say that this is a very confusing and tender part of my life.

I'm a Quaker, and I suppose I'm pretty happy with that! I get to be surrounded by a bunch of leftists who are both politically and spiritually active. My life has a built-in contemplative aspect that, combined with the community aspect, allows for a lot of introspection that was inaccessible (or at least discouraged) in a lot of my early life.

There is, however, a universe not too dissimilar from this one where I converted to Judaism. That may yet be this universe, even. Every time I think about why, though, I realize I don't know. I don't know! I've spent decade thinking about it now, and, while I've learned a ton about both myself and Judaism, I sometimes feel no closer to an understanding of my relationship to it.

The only times I do feel like I'm coming closer are when I'm writing. It's not the first time I've used writing for discernment; I have a novella that investigates a Catholic point of view which led to me veering further from that particular lived experience.

The Post-Self tetralogy was an outlet for researching Judaism, yes, but it's also an outlet for introspection and interrogation of the self. It's not even the only project that does such: a third of my MFA thesis is a braided essay, with one strand being what amounts to an exegesis of the book of Job with the thesis that, after the events of the book, he had a choice to head either in the direction of the author of Kohelet, building wisdom, or in the direction of Jonah, harboring that anger in an attempt to shield himself from his own fear.

The other strand, though, is about my own choice after an event early in the exploration into gender that led to me transitioning. From that point, I could have bundled myself up in cynicism and stayed stubbornly masculine, resenting my life and myself in order to cushion myself from those rough edges of fear, hoping only that that anger would be less likely tear up me up from the inside. I wound up choosing the other option, though, passing through the death of Matthew and the birth of Madison.

I bring this up specifically to tie back to something I said all the way back in the second paragraph: even though I wasn't raised vaguely Jewish as Michelle was, it nonetheless informs several aspects of my life. I'm not Job. I'm not Kohelet. It's just that I was presented with my own choice of Job and chose to head in what I hope is the direction towards wisdom, away from fear.

I suppose we all must be confronted with these choices at some point in our lives, and through writing-as-discernment, I guess I'm trying to untangle if the reason this isn't the universe where I converted is because, at some point in the past, I chose some other direction at some other inflection point.

This is probably more answer than you were specifically looking for, but I strive to be earnest and accountable for my actions. I do hope that you enjoy the books, even in all of their imperfections, even if you disregard this bit of introspection. I hope they stand on their own even if only as works of curiosity and queer lives in some more hopeful world.

Thanks again for asking and getting me to think through this and put into words what I've been feeling on some deeper level.

-----

Addenda:

To be clear, 'mitzvot' refers to all 613 commandments, not just the ten that I'm sure leap to mind given that word.

I chose Toledot for the title of book 2 before I knew some of the history behind how the Toledot Yeshu was used by Christians against Jews, and while I stand by the point that's made in the book by Dear and Yared, I probably could have handled it better. Nevertheless, as the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible say of Job, it is "part of the book we now have." When I read things I wrote and find things I dislike about it, it is perhaps a sign that I've become a better writer since.

[recommendedlisten]

This year especially stretched many a music writer thin, and because the new normal is that no matter what, there will always be too much new music to be discovered, this means some things despite one’s best efforts are going to be overlooked by the end of the year. There is not enough time and very much not enough human resources on this end to ensure absolute coverage of every artist with a new album cycle. Even so, it can take more bandwidth to give a great listen the necessary attention to digest properly. Perhaps the timing of its release just doesn’t sync with everything else happening in the world.

As began tradition last year on Recommended Listen, here’s to the art of appreciating music past their release date and list season with the albums these pages overlooked across 2021. These albums did not receive a full review, were not found on any volume of Listen to These., nor can they be found the 30 Best Albums of 2021 list. Some artists were never mentioned even in track or video coverage at all for that matter. From the obvious to the more obscured, it’s credit worth given where credit is due, and next time around, names not to be missed...

Arca - Kick ii / iii / iiii / iiiii [XL Recordings]

Last year, Arca made the overlooked list because the first in her Kick series was simply misunderstood here upon its release. This time, the experimental electronic futurist makes the same list because she came at us hard pretty late in the year by releasing not only its second installment, but its third, fourth, and -- surprise! -- fifth parts all on the same day amidst list season. The completion of the Kick series in one fell swoop is no sonic content dump by any means, and instead is an awe-inducing showcase of the multiplicities by which the Venezuelan producer maneuvers between pop and electronic’s present and future transformations. On accessibility, Arca melds reggaetron and hyperpop influences into one body on KICK ii and KicK iii, dismantles them in qualitative deconstructions of the digital on kick iiii, and then into compositional, ambient ether where physical matter in the form of piano and strings persevere on kiCK iiiii. Yes, it’s a lot to process in an already noisy world, but let’s not take such artful adventures for granted.

Cindy - 1:2 [Self-released]

1:2, the third full-length effort from San Francisco-based artist Karina Gill and her band Cindy, was perhaps too understated to be noticed during the year’s busier release schedules when it came out in September. It’s a shame to see that happen, but during these calmer moments on the calendar and most especially that of the oncoming winter, the band’s slowcore-leaning lullabies, which occasionally glow in keys and dance in soft, circular patterns all while Gill’s little devastations collect into view create time-stopping daydreams. In the absence of another, 1:2 makes for close, warm companionship in the bedroom or a quiet night in.

Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee [Dead Oceans]

It’s not like Jubilee hasn’t enjoyed a wealth of love across all other publications this list season. “Be Sweet” was even named one of the year’s 30 Best Songs here on this side. Like Olivia Rodrigo below, this album was overlooked over due to the timing of its release, which then begat an even busier release schedule that eventually pushed any acknowledgment of Michelle Zauner’s latest effort far out of view. At that point, it felt better to return to it after the scene had quieted down, and the rediscovery of Jubilee in early December very much faired better than it did with a closer listen to absorb in full its rich detail in ebullient orchestration and synth-pop. The rock guitars are still missed, but JBrekkie's move toward universally-bound sounds from new found planets are made for her growing stage, and using that platform to cut into the culture’s sordid details.

Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast

Magdalena Bay - Mercurial World [LUMINELLE]

TikTok fodder, millennial artistic motifs, and being signed to the label of the dude who runs Gorilla vs Bear -- Magdalena Bay practically beg you to try ignoring them with their debut album Mercurial World. The Los Angeles duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewis deliver, however, in a precise synthesis of nostalgic and progressive alternative electronic trends, a sleek disco veneer, and maximalist pop production shellac that drives every emotional ephemeral into ecstasy. This is very much one of those entry points that already feels fully formed upon being gestated into an expanding universe, but hopefully the world mercurial which Magdalena Bay have created continues to evolve with it. For now, enjoy the high that comes with it.

Mercurial World by Magdalena Bay

Olivia Rodrigo - SOUR [Geffen Records]

SOUR, the debut album from alternative pop superstar, suffered the reverse fate that Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia and the Weeknd’s After Hours did around these pages last year in that where the world closing down distracted from their rollouts, the world beginning to re-open -- conflated with a very stacked new release month featuring the likes of Japanese Breakfast, black midi, Mannequin Pussy, Squid, and a surprise drop from Navy Blue -- shifted focus away from the album everyone was talking about at that moment. SOUR is an incredibly promising start for Rodrigo, however, as the album does what Lorde and, to a certain extent, Billie could not this year in blowing out the bedroom walls with a more coarse course-correction on the angsty teenage dream topped with salacious romance gossip fodder using barbs of punk-pop, Swiftian songwriting, and Dan Nigro’s arena emo production that sprinkles a perfect sweetness over it all.

Ovlov - buds [Exploding In Sound Records]

Ovlov tends to get put over as the Steve Hartlett show, but three albums into their career, the Connecticut rockers have hit their stride on buds as a well-oiled (almost) band of brothers effort despite what fuzzy projections their electric amperage may otherwise suggest. The hooks are tighter and more succinct, there’s a wiser restraint on where they let the feedback rip, where they temper Hartlett’s odes to friends and ruminations on loss and existential queries through a stoner-friendly fog, and in inviting in collaboration with drummer Jordan Blakely (most recently of Bartees Strange’s live band, among a host of other DIY-friendly greats,) Ringo Deathstarr’s Alex Gehring, and even the Hartlett brothers’ own dad, buds is an underrated feel-good hangout sess in the living room with just the people who matter most when everything outside feels pretty grim.

Buds by Ovlov

PinkPantheress - to hell with it [Elektra / Parlophone]

Maybe you, too, have a strong reaction toward anything dubbed “TikTok pop.” That may have been the disqualifying factor for PinkPantheress leading into the buzzed-about UK pop songwriter and producer’s debut mixtape to hell with it, but unlike so many artists simultaneously trying to make their mark as influencers as well in a viral-streaming world, there’s plenty of substance behind the subversive nature of her melting pop sound which traces its origins back to emo, but ultimately showcases the rising pop star as a learned student of PC Music’s breakbeats, the condensed earworms found within 100 gecs’ hyperpop, and every Gen Z’s artists obsession with sounding born behind gauzy bedroom curtains. Through the ethereal gaze of PinkPantheress’ delicate singing, it comes out as a vibe and something to chill to made for any TikTok trend that comes calling her name.

Wednesday - Twin Plagues [Orindal Records]

Consider Wednesday the Porridge Radio of this year’s overlooked list. As was the case last year with the UK post-punk band with their breakout sophomore effort Every Bad, Twin Plagues, the third full-length effort from the Asheville rockers spearheaded by songwriter and vocalist Karly Hartzman, had too much buzz in overdrive happening around them leading up to the release, and sometimes, too much buzz just makes you mentally check out. Discovering Twin Plagues at the beginning of December probably worked out for the better, though, as Wednesday, too, take their time whirring in its conflicted emotions with flurries of cold weather shoegaze, indie rock crumpled in the leafy sticks, and slow-burning ballads born out of isolated backroads. The aching sensations around Hartzman’s words are one that instantaneously stake this sound as their own. This makes for sinking deep into your own world, too.

Twin Plagues by Wednesday

[judgmentofcorruption]

Episode 9–House of the Undead; Scene 4

Judgment of Corruption, pages 261-266

By now, Gallerian had gained a reputation from society at large as being a completely corrupted judge.

Big-shots in politics, popular actors, the top brass of the underworld—he would give anyone with money an innocent verdict, and then conversely send anyone who opposed them to prison on false charges.

Gallerian gained many new friends that way. Fairweather friends linked only through money and interest. But they were all people who stood to serve him in his goal of collecting the vessels.

There was once a great merchant by the name of Keel Freezis. He was always saying this as his catchphrase:

“Those who control information control the world”.

He had amassed a quite sizable fortune, but that was only because he had been proficient at gathering information that circulated through society.

Information begat money, and that money begat more information.

Money and information had an inseparable relationship.

The people that Gallerian currently called friends were those that had money and information. And on the other hand, destitute people who had neither of those steadily grew to despise him.

At times, Gallerian’s enemies would make attempts on his life. Not just directly—there were those who would try to drag Gallerian from his position as director through strategy.

All such people were consigned to darkness. They would be done in by Lich, Eater, or Jorm. Monsters who crept through the night, and a serial killer who could control invisible blades. With them at his disposal, Gallerian had no blind spots even in the underworld.

Many people ridiculed Gallerian as being “money-mad”.

But there was hardly anyone who knew how he was using that money, or why he had gathered so much.

Gallerian immersed himself more and more in his affection for his “daughter”.

.

Gallerian was gathering money in order to get his hands on the Vessels of Deadly Sin.

He was convinced that those vessels would restore his beloved daughter back to normal, unable to freely move as she was currently.

--That was utter nonsense. Granting a wish by collecting vessels of deadly sin? That’s impossible.

Certainly they did have the power to fulfill a person’s desires. But at the same time, they also invited misfortune for those who used them.

A great “sin” carries a commensurate “punishment”.

There was no way that collecting all seven would bring one happiness.

Ma was the one who pushed this lie on Gallerian. However—perhaps to her, this did have a grain of truth to it.

A wish would be granted by collecting all of the vessels—

But that wish would be Ma’s.

When she had all of the demons assembled, she would be able to grant her wish.

She would be able to become a truly “pure” being.

.

I am a simple bat, but I’m at least able to converse with a doll.

While Gallerian was away from home, I decided to go into Michelle’s room.

--In the center of the room was the doll, sitting upright in its wheelchair.

“Hello, good day,” I said to the doll.

“…Good day,” the doll replied. It had an adorable voice that no one outside of Gallerian, who had contracted with “Adam”, could hear. “You’re the bat that’s always fluttering around Papa.”

“Yeah, I am. –Aren’t you bored, always being here by yourself?”

“I don’t mind. I have Papa.”

“But your papa has to go out to work during the day, doesn’t he?”

“That’s alright. I have other friends here.”

“Oh my. Who are they?”

“I have my big-sis in the wineglass. She always talks to me. She has twin servants named Hänsel and Gretel.”

“I see. It must be very lively here, then.”

“Outside of them, I have my big-bro in the spoon. He looks a lot like Papa, and he’s very kind. …But he’s always with Papa, so he doesn’t play with me much. After that—”

“There’s others?”

“There’s gramps in the katana. But he left the sword recently. No matter how I call on him he won’t answer. –But Papa told me that he’ll bring me even more new friends. Papa left today to go to something called an ‘auction’ for that.”

One of the Vessels of Deadly Sin was the “Four Mirrors of Lucifenia”. It was two sets of double mirrors—in other words, a set of four mirrors in all. Gallerian had obtained some information that this set was being sold at an auction being held in the Republic of Maistia. So he had taken a vacation from work and went to the continent of Maistia with Ma.

“You’ll have more fun when your new friend arrives.”

“Yeah. But…I might have to move out of this room soon.”

“Why’s that?”

“Apparently some bad people are after this place, so Papa’s making a new home in the forest and moving me there. Papa says the new home is going to be a theater. That I won’t be bored, because I’ll be able to watch movies every day. But I’m not bored at all, even now, and I don’t want to say goodbye to everyone.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure your Papa will bring the others to the theater with you.”

“Then I’m glad.”

“You seem happy, Michelle, to be loved by your father so.”

“…”

The doll had been chattering on quite talkatively, but there suddenly fell silent.

“What’s wrong?”

“…I don’t like that name. Papa calls me that too, but that’s—not really my name. But if I tell him that, Papa won’t love me anymore.”

“—Huh. Then, what is your real name?”

“…You won’t tell Papa?”

“Of course, I promise.”

“Really? Then I’ll tell you.”

“Alright.”

“My—my real name is—”

.

Through this conversation with the doll, I learned something new.

Or rather, perhaps it would be better to say that I knew something again.

The person—whose soul Ma had put into the doll.

She…was a considerable villain, and had deceived many people.

Both Gallerian—and “Adam”.

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[readingwritingarrhythmia]

Year Goals 2019 - Reading

2019 - Reading 1. Sir Thomas More (a play, collab. Shakespeare + contemporaries) 2. Strong as Death is Love 3.  Begat - David Crystal 4. The Story of English in 100 words  - David Crystal 5. We Are Not Amused - David Crystal 6. The Devil's Cloth - history of stripes - Michel Pastoreau 7.  Landmarks - Robert MacFarlane 8. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater 9. God Bless You, Dr. Kevorikian 10. The Mabinogion 11. A Very Short Introduction to Translation 12. The Wonderful O - James Thurber 13. The Gentleman Bat - Abraham Schroeder 14. Poems Dead and Undead 15. Poems Humand and Inhuman 16. Reading Art: Art for Book Lovers 17. The Night Witches

18. AVSI Druids AVSI Celts Who Were the Celts Norse Mythology - Neil Gaiman

[careygly]

Tonight we went to a screening of the new documentary Echo In The Canyon at the ArcLight in Hollywood. It's a love letter to LA and the music of the '60s and it's absolutely phenomenal, thanks in large part to Jakob Dylan and the masterful way he interviews his father's contemporaries. Jakob and the director, Andrew Slater did a Q&A afterward and then treated us all to a concert right in the theater. The film features contemporary interviews with Tom Petty, Brian Wilson, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Stephen Stills, Roger McGuinn, Michelle Phillips, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, John Sebastian and Lou Adler. It also features modern performances of some of the greatest songs of that era, from Jacob Dylan, Fiona Apple, Beck, Norah Jones, Regina Spektor, Cat Power and Jade Castrinos. The title refers to Laurel Canyon, which was the epicenter of music in the '60s. You can even see my house in one scene of the movie! The music, past and present, is superb. “We were putting good poetry on the radio – pop radio.” That’s David Crosby’s take on the seminal California folk-rock scene of 1965 to ’67, that the movie so lovingly explores. The music’s evolution and crisscrossing pollination is explained well – Mr. Tambourine Man inspired Rubber Soul which influenced Pet Sounds which begat Sgt. Pepper’s. It's a musical odyssey. If you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it!

[back-and-totheleft]

Wars Fought, Scores Settled

Generally speaking, memoirs are an opportunity for the author to reflect on past achievements, boast immodestly if so inclined, and otherwise describe for readers what “my life” is all about. Memoirs often take on the unique voice of a public figure—be it Michelle Obama, Mariah Carey or Ulysses S. Grant. So, it’s understandable if one expects the same approach in Chasing the Light, a memoir of Oliver Stone’s formative years.

Instead, what readers get is a somber and mostly clear-eyed recounting of Stone’s upbringing, schooling, wartime experiences in Vietnam, and (in some ways) equally tumultuous life of a screenwriter and director in the 1980s. The creator of classics like Platoon and Salvador has a lot to say about that era—and there’s no denying his life has been an eventful one.

The child of a doomed marriage, Stone vividly describes the domestic turmoil of his early years in New York and Connecticut. The restless son of a stockbroker and a vivacious French woman, Stone attended Yale, but dropped out and enlisted in the Army at the height of the conflict in Vietnam. His experiences there, together with a sobering return to the States, were channeled into the making of Platoon, which remains among his signal achievements.

Throughout Chasing the Light, the war in Vietnam is the linchpin—and the source of much of the book’s most intense writing:

“And now there was an enormous roar, like I suppose the end of the world sounds. So quickly, like a shark cutting through water, an F-16 jet fighter was coming in very low over our perimeter out of the lit night sky. So low, that doomsday sound—we were all going to die. This was crazy—they were going to drop their payload on us! I jumped into the scared man’s foxhole and buried myself as deep as I could in the earth, which trembled and shook as a five-hundred-pound bomb dropped somewhere close. Somebody was being shredded to pieces, my God!”

And, of course, there are scores to settle—with the cantankerous director of Midnight Express, a producer Stone deems “difficult,” and a major film star who, at a critical moment of pre-production, was “weak” and “evasive.” There’s also an extended account of the travails involved in filming Salvador in Mexico, particularly Stone’s effort to contain the excesses of the film’s leading man.

One might have thought the writer/director of movies like Scarface would be too loud and contentious to dependably relate the chaos of a film set on location. But, surprisingly perhaps, there’s little of a swaggering tone here that matches the bombast of Stone’s biggest films.

Often, Chasing the Light has an “as-told-to” quality, in contrast to a series of carefully wrought sentences and lyrical flights of fancy. For example, here he describes the aftermath of his failed first marriage, especially the effect it had on his soon-to-be ex-wife:

“What could I be but a bastard! Break hearts. No, not really, But I was a child of divorce, yes. Why not, it’s the way of the world. Didn’t you meet my parents? Didn’t you see this coming—that great mistake they committed when they married and begat me? I brushed one of her tears away and left her without the love I could not give. The door closed on her broken expression, and feeling coldhearted, I walked down the hall, down the stairs, and into the street, where I inhaled the first fresh breath of air that I’d had in … years.”

Paradoxically, the relative artlessness in this stream-of-consciousness passage echoes the intimacy of Stone’s best work, both on the page and on the screen. Chasing the Light will be of interest to fans of his early films (the memoir ends, rather abruptly, with the Academy Awards of 1987) and those seeking an inside look at the tempestuous landscape of Hollywood.

-Lee Pelevoi, “Wars Fought, Scores Settled in Oliver Stone’s ‘Chasing the Light’”, Highbrow magazine, Oct 8 2020 [x]

[celebrityhangout]

Large sections of the Old Testament are devoted to genealogies - lengthy lists of couplings and the biblically-significant offspring that they begat.

Given the Duggars' love for the Good Book, we're sure someone in the family has compiled a similar compendium of the courtships and marriages that led to the creation of Jim Bob and Michelle's many granchildren.

It might seem like it would take a monastic scholar to keep track of the rapid expansion of the Counting On clan, but we tried. We tried.

THG has managed to create a complete list of the #LittleDuggars without locking ourselves in an abbey with a quill and parchment.

But that's not to say it was a simple task.

After all, Jim Bob and Michelle have a lot of kids, and those kids are very dedicated to the task of populating Northwest Arkansas with Duggars.

So sit back, grab a Duggar-friendly snack (might we suggest a jar of pickles?) and explore the family tree of TV's most beloved Baptist brood.

[The Duggars keep breeding, so we keep updating! Scroll down for the latest on TV's most fertile family.)

1. Meet the Duggars

The Duggar family seems to get bigger by the day. In fact, the Counting On clan has welcomed so bundles of joy in the past decade that some fans might find it difficult to keep up.

2. Humble Beginnings

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar had their first child, Josh, in 1988. Needless to say, they didn't stop there.

3. Fame Comes Calling

The family first rose to national prominence with a series of Discovery Health and TLC documentaries that mostly focused on Michelle's last five deliveries.

4. A Bunch of Stars Are Born

Viewers couldn't get enough of the wholesome Arkansas clan, and it wasn't long before the Duggars had their own show.

5. On the Grow

Initially titled 17 Kids and Counting, the series documented the adventures and unorthodox customs of the still-expanding Duggar clan.

6. Overlapping Generations

That expansion occurred in more ways than one, as Jim Bob and Michelle welcomed their youngest child (Josie Duggar, now 9) AFTER welcoming their first grandchild.

View Slideshow from The Hollywood Gossip https://ift.tt/32pZxLP

[extrafemi]

Choices and responses.

Today, 8th of August, 2019, there is a drag on twitter (that’s normal these days): an older person said a younger person was too vocal and dragged her for giving life advice. Afterall, she was in secondary school in 2012.

The younger person responded with her achievements, while calling the older one names over and over. I was impressed by her trajectory but disappointed by her manners. In a way, I can understand the headiness and pride that comes with your life being on track and on top of your game especially at a young age. There are so many things in my life that I was the youngest at but I didnt learn humility until my GPA crashed at the university.

While I am not saying either is right or wrong, I am stating that her (the younger lady) way of response was poor, rude and just showed clearly her age. Yes, she currently worked at CNN Africa (which is an enviable job by several standards) but she lacked emotional intelligence, class and basic human respect.

The ideology that “respect begats respect” is a fallacy and pushes the notion that if someone doesnt respect you, you automatically earn the right to be rude to them especially if you are accomplished like our dear aburo. Life comes at you very fast, treat people well, even when you think they dont deserve it.

A good example is Michelle Obama and Donald Trump during the elections. He called her (Michelle) names, Odindin First Last gbogbo United states! Fada Lawd; But Michelle didnt insult him back, or call in him names or list her achievements as a justification to be rude. She simply gave her now popular “When they go low, we go high..” speech.

Soon it will be your turn and you will have to make a choice: to drag someone and win a social media argument, perhaps trend or to be an example.

[tia-walker-blog]

Fosse/Verdon The Ultimate Period Piece

So now that episode 2 of FX’s Fosse/Verdon has aired I can give a bit of detail about my very fortunate BG work on this epic 8 part limited series. Why epic? Three reasons—one— the cultural signifigance of Bob Fosse to the theater world alone is a grand thing, after all he’s the legendary choreographer who begat the term “jazz hands”, the second is the cultural significance to Gwen Verdon as an iconic dancer and stage actress in the theater world, the third is the experience of working under the soft spoken Tony-award winning Director Tom Kail of Hamilton fame-utterly priceless.

1955 Theatre Patron

It seems like November 2018 was forever ago... but really it was only about 5 months back. The casting notices began to go up for 1970s, 60s and then my decade the 50s. Black & white photographs depicting the time period were attached and it really didn’t seem like a do-able Background role for anyone that wasn’t white and blonde but the notice must have said any ethnicity because I submitted and a week or so later I was booked for a fitting! My look consisted of a fur shawl, a celery colored bejeweled sheath dress and very busy pearls (see above photo in profile).

Required for the Fosse/Verdon 1955 Theatre Patron role was shoulder length hair or shorter. The day of my fitting my shoulder length hair was actually a bit longer than the hair stylists preferred so right there ?(that day) two inches were cut. Fast forward to Day 1 of the two day shoot and you get the full effect above—pincurled finger fluffed hair, complete with invisible net. My makeup was Dorothy Dandridge style compliments of the talented makeup artist, Ayinde.

Stills from Episode 2

The scene was New Haven, the theater where Damn Yankees was actually performed escapes me but the year was 1955 and the scene was shot at the St. George Theater in Staten Island. Fortunate to be visible in two scenes but one slightly more than the other. The first scene shot was in the theater lobby, I-was directed to “cross” after principal Sam Rockwell. The second was sitting in the theater and watching the performance of principal Michelle Williams performing Who’s Got the Pain (Mexican Breakfast). Though what you actually see me in as an audience member was the curtain call of Damn Yankees. Below are stills mostly of my fur “sighting” . Great time, amazing two days and blessed to have done this one!

[ryanbydefault]

“All I can say to you today is that the lavender rests in the field in this world as rare as an African lotus on the side of a mountain abundant with sunlight and water I don't know the dishonest I’ve only ever known myself I am urban I am inaccessible I don't drink soy my father used to wipe my mouth out with soap and then photograph men he wanted to fuck i didn't know it until after he was gone I am self I haven't met aman I want to fuck but I have salivated I’ve only met women who wanted to fuck me I hate them I am sugary not bitter like lemon drops covered in pure citric acid powder I don't drive I love people too much I’ll miss a modern day Keith Haring in the suburbs some kids become like they're parents “"hey my mother fucked a bag / I'm in New York at the W, heh.” Me :“"So what.” I am self the self begat by self begat by self behind self in front of self a one dimensional three dimensional creature my father wrote two stories where the wild things are and the jungle book you stole my my my my mowgli some kids become like they're parents “"I'm somebody now because someone fucked me or married me off and they're famous. I'm better than everyone I  always wanted to be better than now. I am somebody now, because of that” Me: “you’re defined by a situation that is as fickle as a leaf in an Indian winter in California like an Indian summer in the fall dying and coming alive with the coldness of the wind. and when it gets too cold ? Then you will be nobody? You'll be Janie back Eatonville?” “"No, I'll be the person that will always be connected to that person” Me: “So then you've become them?” “I guess” Me: “Goodluck with that” I am from the city there's a jungle in every city and a city in every jungle I was raised by William Burroughs after the fact and Jesus before / I’ve learned survival tips like children on camping trips and I've never had to just survive / Boostrap Bill Captain Jack Sparrow and Sparrow Junior. I've only met a Jewish person once or a million times. You don't know them. They're normal. Theyve never been on TV. or maybe so. They might've been black”

--an Excerpt from “"Flowers & three dollar bills” a small book dedicated to my father, Jean-Michel Basquiat, being released on Father’s Day, there’s also going to be another small project being released for my Dad

[tiffanie-nicole2011-blog]

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Toronto’s Best Dressed 2014: our anniversary account of the city’s best admirable people

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Twenty-three Torontonians, from shopkeepers to enterpeneurs to heiresses, who acrylic a account of a chiefly admirable city

Profiles by Jean Grant, Danielle Groen, Gabrielle Johnson and Michelle Taylor

The IT Girl

Chloe Rogers

Chloe rogers is clashing any added Toronto teenager. The 17-year-old babe of media begat Ed Rogers and his socialite wife, Suzanne, lives in a mini-château in Forest Hill. She spends her vacations in Barcelona, London and Anguilla. And she attends appearance anniversary galas and alms assurance with appearance stars like Zac Posen and Coco Rocha. Rogers afresh took her sartorial affection one footfall further, signing a arrangement with Elite Models—she’s aback appeared in beat shoots for Flare and The Kit, and donned feathered frocks in David Dixon’s abatement 2014 aerodrome show. Off the catwalk, she prefers to dress like any 17-year-old: body-con cocktail dresses, crop acme and angular jeans. They’re not absolutely the delicate confections favoured by her mother, but Chloe insists “she has never aloft an countenance at annihilation I accept worn.” Maybe Suzanne is aloof adequate that her babe alone raids her closet for the loungewear. “She has the softest bathrobes ever,” Chloe says.

The Wonder Woman

Suzanne Cohon

Suzanne Cohon is a able multi-tasker. She spent the aftermost decade architecture her PR abutting into a communications powerhouse, she has an eight-year-old babe with her -husband, CFL abettor Mark Cohon, and she’s additionally an alive philanthropist (she sits on the board for the Ronald McDonald House’s anniversary gala). For her anarchic day-to-day, she sticks to a simple and -stylish uniform: jeans, blazer and architecture studs, amped up with leopard-print Gucci slingbacks, hot blush Brian Atwood pumps or addition best from her 100-pair-strong shoe collection. But at appearance parties and alms dos, she trades out her -working-mom accoutrements for -jumpsuits, ablaze colours and beefy jewellery that ensure she gets noticed.

Vitals

The 40-year-old owns ASC Public Relations, which reps appearance heavyweights like Calvin Klein, Ann Taylor and Hugo Boss.

Style Inspiration

“My clients! We assignment with some of the best artistic and accomplished designers in the world.”

Her Current Obsessions

The Silver Fox

Paul Mason

Less than two years into a amusing assignment amount at Ryerson, Paul Mason was active to the Judy Welch agency. In the 26 years since, he’s absolved every above aerodrome in the world, and appeared in ad campaigns for Gap and Donna Karan. But admitting his industry cred, Mason is alert of adorable ever careful or styled. “I’m not actual trendy,” he insists. So what of that hipster beard? His accommodation to stop atom was a allegorical act afterward the afterlife of his mother, but the net aftereffect has additional his modelling career. Mason credits his facial beard with landing his best absorbing gigs yet: “Instead of catalogues, I’m booking crazy editorials,” he says. “For a contempo annual shoot, I spent four hours accepting affected tattoos all over my body. I never would accept done that before.”

Vitals

Mason has appeared in ad campaigns for D&G and Hugo Boss, and in editorials for GQ and Fashion.

Style Inspiration

“Daniel Craig, Jude Law—the Brits are appropriate on point with appearance after aggravating too hard.”

His Current Obsessions

The Tomboy

Elaine Lui

When Justin Bieber began aloof about in pants with a bend as baggy as the nation’s aggregate jaw, it became near-impossible to comb up a drop-crotch-pants enthusiast. But whether announcement her contempo memoir, Listen to the Squawking Chicken, or actualization on her daytime allocution show, The Social, Elaine Lui will not canal the drop. (“The fit is adulatory aback it’s put on properly, not center bottomward the ass,” she insists.) Lui favours -tailored clothes with strong, structured shapes—boxy tops, ’80s shoulders, a circumscribed white-pleather anorak she’s beat to threads—that acquiesce her to move from the baby awning to the red carpeting to the dozen circadian posts she writes for her website, LaineyGossip. The one barring to this wearable rule: Lui’s weakness for beautiful, generally absolutely abstract shoes. Akin the best adroit sartorial pragmatist needs a carnality of her own.

Vitals

Lui, 40, runs the blog LaineyGossip and co-hosts The Amusing on CTV.

Style Inspiration

“Charlotte Gainsbourg, Gwen Stefani and Kate Moss apperceive absolutely what their appearance brands are. That self-awareness sets them apart.”

Her Current Obsessions

The Print Master

J.S. Vann

When J.S. Vann was growing up, the earlier of bristles kids built-in to Cambodian refugees, there was consistently a bed-making apparatus in the house. “My dad would clothier things for us and accomplish abiding we looked absolutely acceptable branch to class,” says Vann. “Even admitting we didn’t allege English, we could still present the appropriate image.” Now, as the artistic administrator for accouterment maker Garrison Bespoke, Vann helps others do the aforementioned thing, whether for Drake (a anorak lined with a best Raptors jersey), the Toronto FC (matching pinstripe three-pieces) or his ancestors (“I accomplish abiding they’re the best dressed for proms and church”). As for his own outfits, it ability be bespatter shoes, checky pants and a houndstooth anorak one day, head-to-toe orange the next. “People allocution about accepting all-embracing style,” he says, “but I really try to alive it.”

Vitals

The 34-year-old Vann is the artistic administrator for Garrison Bespoke clothier shop.

Style Inspiration

“Kanye West and Tom Ford. I like that they don’t put banned on their creativity. They accept macho dynamics and shapes.”

His Current Obsessions

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The Sneaker Prince

Jason Burke

For Jason Burke, sneakers are a lingua franca: they affix him with punk, skate and hip-hop subcultures. Aback accepting his aboriginal Air Jordans at the age of 12, Burke has endemic abutting to 5,000 pairs of shoes. A acceptable block of that collection—snatched up in places like Shanghai, Milan and Copenhagen—is accessible on Burke’s e-commerce site, Snkrbox, for those with a affection for best bliss and a size-12 foot. (Burke would put any of his shoes on the site, admitting he does accept to bouts of seller’s remorse.) “I don’t go places if I can’t abrasion sneakers,” he says. “The Thompson Hotel adopted a sneaker action because of me.” Acquisition him there in apparel with white Chuck Taylors, or angular jeans with an old-school -basketball argot afraid out—unless he aloof awash those -Jordan 11 Concords, in which case, acquisition him there aching the accident over a drink.

Vitals

Burke, 39, is a retired CFL amateur who active up affairs for Canada Goose and runs Snkrbox.com.

Style Inspiration

“Kanye West for his attitude. Michael Jordan for his performance. Spike Lee for his cultural influence.”

His Current Obsessions

The Countess

Lisa Corbo

Lisa Corbo, who grew up in Italy and -Australia, abstruse to dress with ambition from a adolescent age. “You don’t dress for assignment or to affect someone—you dress for yourself. Always.” For Corbo, that bureau authoritative an effort, yet activity effortless—the key to abundant style. A acceptable haircut, adorable shoes, a ablaze lipstick and a acute bark affliction administration are her foundation. “It all starts from within, doesn’t it? The apron is apparently the aftermost affair on my list.” Whether she’s allowance audience at her Yorkville boutique, adequate at home or hosting a fundraiser for the Princess Margaret -Cancer Foundation, Corbo looks -striking. Structured accouterment in adequate fabrics, account accessories and her absolute red aperture complete the picture.

Vitals

Corbo, 53, is the co-owner of Yorkville’s George C. boutique

Style Inspiration

“My mother, who calm Dior accessories, and my daughter’s way with airy separates.”

Her Current Obsessions

The Marlboro Man

Markus Anderson

There’s hardly a job Markus Anderson hasn’t captivated in his 11 years with Soho House: he absolved in a waiter, managed the restaurant, again the club and now serves as a -company consultant. But it was his time spent as the House’s all-around associates administrator that shaped Anderson’s style. In London, area he befriended appearance designers like -Alexander McQueen, Anderson came to acknowledge affection structured jackets and a Chelsea boot. (“They accomplish sense—the weather’s bits best of the time,” he says.) In Sydney, area “it’s crazy hot,” he approved out jeans and T-shirts with a tailored fit. Those pieces now serve as article of a compatible for Anderson, with the casual cardigan befuddled in. “I do adore a bit of knitwear,” he says—lucky for him, aback Toronto winters are affluence long.

Vitals

Anderson, 37, is a adviser with the Soho Abode group.

Style Inspiration

“The accessible appearance of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen.”

His Current Obsessions

The Office Hipster

Morad Reid Affifi

Morad Reid Affifi is a sartorial -contradiction. He rhapsodizes about the canicule aback men wore their active finest to a hockey adventuresome at Maple Leaf Gardens, but can’t absolutely carelessness his adolescence admiration with disco colours and fits. He donned a tux every Friday night for a month—he acquainted acceptable in it, and his tux bare some wear—yet unapologetically advocates for elastic Havaianas flip-flops. It’s created some abashing in his amusing circle: “My accumulated accompany anticipate I’m a hipster, and my hipster accompany anticipate I’m corporate,” Affifi says. For now, he’s blessed to comedy the bifold agent.

Vitals

Affifi, 35, is a accomplice at the business bureau Portland Stewart.

Style Inspiration

“My dad was a huge influence—he embodied archetypal style. I still abrasion the best Pierre Cardin belt I blanket from him.”

His Current Obsessions

The Playmates

Misty Fox & Violet Keeler-Fox

Before ablution her career as a architecture artist, Misty Fox advised blur in Australia and spent a year in London alive as a model. “I afraid out with checkerboard shirt-wearing, rarely-showered blur guys while accepting to abrasion actual admirable apparel and dresses for shoots,” she says. “This adverse opened up a apple of appearance that somehow agreed to accommodated me in the middle.” While active in the U.K., she developed a aptitude for best shopping, -scouring Spitalfields and Portobello Road for different finds. Today, her babe mixes thrift-store pieces into her apparel with ease. “Violet is so chargeless with her announcement aback dressing; she doesn’t anticipate already about what anyone will think,” says Fox. “She’s an afflatus to me.”

Vitals

Misty is a 32-year-old hair, architecture and appropriate furnishings artist. Her daughter, Violet, is seven.

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Style Inspiration

“My appearance is ’60s- and ’70s-inspired boho with a beam of decrepit glamour,” says Misty. “Cool and punky,” says Violet.

Their Current Obsessions

The Maestro

Ray Civello

Ray Civello feels a little cheated by men’s accouterment options. “Guys accept so few affairs to abrasion annihilation fun,” he says. Still, he’s managed some memorable apparel over the years. In the ’90s, as a adolescent beautician at the Rainbow Room, the city’s hottest salon, he favoured all atramentous layers by Yohji -Yamamoto. These days, he takes meetings, designs salons and reviews financials while cutting glossy apparel in abrupt hues like animate dejected and aubergine, or adventuresome checks. (He opts for akin brighter colours on the golf course.) And, as you ability apprehend from a man who takes sartorial chances, he has a admirable accumulating of accessories: hats, coloured lace-ups, blooming scarves and, of course, about a dozen pairs of his signature thick-rimmed, brave glasses.

Vitals

The 56-year-old’s beard authority now comprises 11 salons, bristles training schools and added than a dozen Aveda stores.

Style Inspiration

“Though I’m Italian, I adulation Japanese designers like Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto.”

His Current Obsessions

The Natural

Elissa Mielke

When Elissa Mielke meets with music -producers, she knows she’s one amid array of ambitious singer-songwriters. So she carefully dresses in apparel that are adventuresome or asinine to angle out. Luckily, she has a closet abounding of memorable pieces from best and assignment food to draw from, like bristling leopard-print boots (“They bout nothing, so in my apperception they go with everything”), a hot blush men’s dress anorak (“I feel like I’m not accustomed to be sad aback I’m cutting it”) or one of her 30 best hats. She finds arbitrary pieces in food like Queen West’s Mama Loves You -Vintage—when she comes in, the agents already apperceive what she’ll try on—and Value -Villages in baby towns, “where bodies no -longer accept charge for their sparkly pantsuits.” It takes austere brio to put calm a -stylish accouterments from castaway clothing, and -Mielke’s got it.

Vitals

Singer-songwriter Mielke, 24, models for bounded characterization Horses Atelier.

Style Inspiration

“I adulation the women in the Advanced Appearance documentary. And Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine.”

Her Current Obsessions

The Pragmatist

Lance Chung

A career in appearance array of snuck up on Lance Chung. He activated for an internship at Sharp annual while alive on a business amount at the University of Alberta—and the acquaintance stuck. He after active on as the publication’s online editor and amusing media manager, area he drew on his business training to appraise the activity of new labels. “In appearance today, there’s so abundant accent on branding,” he says. “A acknowledged artist knows who they are targeting. They’ve done their research. It’s not abundant to focus on the -creative—they accept to attending at it as a business.” That business-first attitude extends to his wardrobe. He favours basics like brittle white shirts and aphotic jeans, again adds layers like printed ties and arbitrary accessory pins. “I stick to a foundation of acceptable menswear but comedy about with accessories”—a bright eyes that gives Chung his sartorial edge.

Vitals

Chung, 25, is a cast adviser specializing in men’s fashion.

Style Inspiration

“I adore Nick Wooster for his menswear and Lapo Elkann for application account pieces in a way that’s not tacky.”

His Current Obsessions

The Bohos

Sacha Grierson & Lola Flanery

Family is a big accord for Sacha Grierson. Not only does she allotment a business with her mother—Eat My Words, a bakery committed to adopting money for the Stephen Lewis Foundation—but she describes her own babe as her “constant accompaniment in everything.” She’s anesthetized her adulation of aggregate admirable to Lola, who started demography an absorption in clothes at the age of four. “We were activity out and she was determined about putting calm her own ensemble,” says -Grierson. “She did a solid adaptation of ’90s grunge after akin alive it: high-top -Converse, Roots sweatpants, a tutu, a checkerboard shirt and a fur hat. It looked fantastic.”

Vitals

Sacha, 40, co-founded the bakery Eat My Words. Her daughter, Lola, is nine.

Style Inspiration

“Lola and I biking calm a lot. Our appearance is afflicted by our destination.”

Their Current Obsessions

The Arch Man

Michael Burns

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After 12 years alive in bay street’s accounts shops, Michael Burns fabricated the jump to a tech startup in January. Along with the new job came a added airy wardrobe: the slim, European-cut apparel and cottony ties that he already wore to applicant affairs gave way to jeans and action jackets—and, already in a while, a brace of cowboy boots. But he still projects the composure of a arch man, akin in above accoutrements (the silver-grey at his temples enhances the Clooney vibe). And, aback he throws on a archetypal cape for a fundraising gala—he’s the armchair of the Toronto East -General Hospital Board Foundation and the co-founder of True Patriot Love, an alignment that supports aggressive families—he earns bifold takes from appealing adolescent things and association matrons alike.

Vitals

The 43-year-old exec afresh larboard Thornmark Asset Management for an e-commerce startup alleged AudienceView.

Style Inspiration

“The adult and archetypal men of Hollywood: the Rat Pack, Cary Grant and Sean Connery.”

His Current Obsessions

The Dandies

Pierre & Tristan Jutras

When it comes to activity put together, Pierre Jutras has his accepted bottomward to a -science: “A acceptable night’s sleep, a abundant workout, a algid battery and a brittle suit.” As admiral of the Spoke Club, he spends best of his canicule in accumulated accoutrements but changes out of it the minute he gets home (his alternative is jeans from Citizens of Humanity or Hugo Boss Orange, a V-neck bodice and high-end sneakers). His four-year-old son, meanwhile, embraces a added all-embracing artful and is acquisitive to aggrandize his appearance horizons. “Tristan’s mother became his claimed stylist the minute he was born, but he has aback developed his own appearance and frequently vetoes some of her choices,” says Jutras.

Vitals

Pierre is the 40-something admiral of the Spoke Club. His son, Tristan, is four.

Style Inspiration

“Alain Delon, Cary Grant—I adulation the accessible breeding of ’60s cine stars.”

Their Current Obsessions

The Shopgirls

Sydney Berchtold & Marisa Buchkowsky

As a kid, Sydney Berchtold was consistently dying to get into her three earlier sisters’ -closets. Now she has the best adorable apparel of all—Rosedale’s The Narwhal boutique, area she stocks cool-girl curve like Helmut Lang, Acne and ALC—and area her sisters appear for appearance advice. “I’m absolutely bossy!” she says. “One is into boot-cut jeans, and I acquaint her she’s not accustomed to abrasion them.” -Buchkowsky, for her part, says she’s not as bedeviled with clothes as you ability apprehend (though her accomplishments is in affairs and merchandising; Berchtold’s is interior design). “Marisa consistently looks badass,” says Berchtold, who thinks her partner’s edgy, street-style attending complements her changeable taste. “But Sydney is antic and adventurous,” says -Buchkowsky, “and she has fun with every trend.”

Vitals

Berchtold, 28, and Buchkowsky, 31, are the co-owners of The Narwhal boutique.

Style Inspiration

Berchtold: Jane Birkin, Kate Moss. Buchkowsky: the Olsen twins, the Rolling Stones.

Their Current Obsessions

The Gentleman

Jimmy Molloy

Jimmy Molloy sells alone the best -spectacular houses and condos in neighbourhoods like Rosedale, Forest Hill and Yorkville. It’s a austere business, involving austere money, and he dresses the part: in categorical pinstriped suits, he exudes the aforementioned ambience of ability as his high-profile clients. But Molloy distinguishes himself from the archetypal Bay Street types with the casual blithe sartorial touch. He ability action rainbow-hued socks beneath his signature Gucci oxfords, for instance. Or, for a night out, he’ll bandy on a superb aubergine Armani smoker jacket. You don’t absorb 21 years affiliated to Appearance annual editor-in-chief Bernadette Morra after acquirements a few tricks.

Vitals

The 54-year-old above restaurateur (he acclimated to own the accomplished dining atom Auberge Gavroche) is one of Toronto’s top realtors.

Style Inspiration

“Colin Firth. He’s consistently elegant, but still airy and approachable.”

His Current Obsessions

The Fearless Femme

Vanessa Morcom

When Vanessa Morcom was 19, she adopted clothes that were abbreviate and bound and went able-bodied with a annealed drink. That’s not so unusual—but she additionally ran her own PR firm, administration columnist scheduling for Madonna, Rihanna and Drake. It was a activity that accepted as afflictive as a pleather mini, so at 24, Morcom chucked the company, volunteered with an NGO and relaxed. Now aback in publicity, she brand clothes that are admirable but comfortable. “When I appearance up in my cowboy boots, atramentous jeans and a crisp, white shirt, I’m there to get the job done, not to attending the part,” she says. Bathrobe blazers and cottony jumpsuits are accessible staples for 18-hour days, and on weekends Morcom can be begin in apart able-bodied wear, teaching yoga and brainwork at the Toronto South Detention -Centre. “Both in and out of work,” she says, “I’ve abstruse that you accept to abbreviate it.”

Vitals

The 29-year-old Morcom is the CEO of the publicity abutting Morcom Media.

Style Inspiration

“Marchesa Luisa Casati, the Italian almsman and muse. I aloof feel her spirit.”

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Her Current Obsessions

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[chocolateheal]

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Alfonso Ossorio’s mural in Negros Occidental. His wax-resist watercolor studies for the mural appearance the articulation amid Pollock’s Abstruse Expressionism and Dubuffet’s Art Brut. —ARNOLD ALMACEN

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A new display of paintings by Alfonso Ossorio seeks to erect into the art and activity of the ambiguous artist-dilettante who had been abundantly absolved in his lifetime as bald angel to Jackson Pollock and an art dabbler, but whose acceptability for trailblazing art has so developed back his afterlife in 1990 that he’s now advised the missing articulation amid American Abstruse Expressionism and European Art Brut.

“Grazing Light,” which opens this anniversary at León Gallery in Makati, follows through the awful acknowledged display “Afflictions of Glory.” Mounted aftermost year additionally at León to mark the Philippine-American artist’s bearing centenary (1916-2016), “Afflictions” was the aboriginal anytime above appearance of Ossorio’s assignment in the acreage of his birth.

The new display will adhere 18 works, all from the Robert Ossorio Family Collection. Art restorer and conservator Liliane “Tats” Rejante Manahan, activity administrator of the new exhibit, appear that aftermost year’s works, which she helped abbey and León Gallery buyer Jaime Ponce de León insisted were of “unassailable provenance,” had additionally appear from the aforementioned source.

Liliane “Tats” Rejante Manahan, activity administrator of “Grazing Light”

“Afflictions” fabricated assertive admission amid the beatnik delineation of Christ in Ossorio’s acclaimed mural at the St. Joseph the Worker abbey in Victorias, Negros Occidental assignment and his own circuitous attitude due to his austere Catholic upbringing, accepting a actual able mother, and his homosexuality.

“Grazing Light” will somehow body on Ossorio’s conflicted obsessiveness, but with accent on his different but actual acute aesthetic techniques, such as his wax-resist painting adjustment and his avant-garde reinvention of medieval adorn address as illustrated in his Victorias abbey mural.

Drawing from her assignment additionally as an autogenous designer, Manahan said the appellation refers to ablaze or lights amid abutting to the lit apparent that brings into abatement highlights and textures. She said that Ossorio’s methods of alliteration and layering, accurate to the affected Art Brut tradition, would acknowledge layers, textures and caliginosity that accord his works their astonishing power. It may assume that “shadows” would additionally affix with the antecedent display that tackled Ossorio’s “Afflictions.”

Manahan says display interiors will arm-twist Victorias in the 1950s, back Ossorio alternate to assignment on his family’s chapel. —PHOTOS BY LYN RILLON

Repatriated

The Ossorio exhibits may be addition appearance of “repatriated” Philippine art from the West. But the affair is added complicated than that.

Ossorio, begat of a amoroso association that accustomed Victorias Milling in Negros Occidental, larboard the Philippines back he was 8 years old, acquired British and American education, became a US citizen, and lived there until his death, save for a abrupt accession in 1950 to assignment for 10 months on the now acclaimed “Angry Christ” in Victorias.

Although Ossorio was a accomplished artist, consistently announcement and alike beat art styles, he was added accepted as angel to Pollock and a artsy who captivated amplitude over aerial association in the East Hamptons, area his all-inclusive estate, The Creeks, became the hub of VIPs, artists and intellectuals. Because he was to the estate born, as an artist, he was from the art apple by and ample proscribed.

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Classified by the media as a affiliate of the New York School, Ossorio was at best an account of concern because of his ethnicity and his own art convenance was both agnate and antithetical to Abstruse Expressionism.

Such “dissimilar similarity” was conceivably prefigured when, at the advancement of Pollock, Ossorio went to Paris and met Jean Dubuffet, best of “Art Brut” (literally “raw art”). The French artisan declared Art Brut as accepting a “spontaneous and acerb adroit character.”

Dubuffet’s analogue was a ambagious way of adage Art Brut works were by patients in brainy asylums (“outsider art,” according to one British critic, somehow approximating Michel Foucault’s address on prisons and brainy asylums) and by accouchement (later “naïf art”).

Dubuffet inveighed adjoin “culture” and “civilization” for deracinating or standardizing aesthetic expression. He believed that the freest announcement could be begin alone from the mentally deranged, above the bound of acumen anchored by ability and the establishment.

Oddly enough, Pollock and Dubuffet never met, but their corresponding streams begin a arch in Ossorio—action painting and gestural abstracting abutting somehow with outsider, naïf and archaic art.

How West met West through East was, in fact, the apriorism of—“Angels, Demons and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet,” the actual important   display of the Phillips Collection in Washington and Parrish Art Museum in New York in 2013. It showed Ossorio’s cardinal role in the affair of two movements that were both agnate and disparate at the aforementioned time.

“St. Anthony of Padua Preaching with Fishes”

Pivotal moment

But as the two shows of Ossorio in the Philippines may now tend to show, the cardinal moment may accept been the “Angry Christ” mural in Victorias.

Exhibited aftermost year was a absorption of the mural fabricated in Ossorio’s brand medium, water-resistant wax on paper. It angry out he had fabricated some 300 studies of the mural, which should accentuate how Ossorio both compared with and differed from Pollock and Dubuffet.

As Manahan explained, whatever “spontaneity” could be attributed to his expressionist and raw-art inclinations was in the final analysis, “studied and actual deliberate.”

It was in the studies that Ossorio was able to absolute his wax-resist method, some samples of which would be apparent in “Grazing Light.”

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Manahan said Ossorio would absolutely band hot wax on the cartoon surface, or draw with a acicular candle, again besom water-based acrylic over it; this would banish acrylic over wax, creating shapes and fractals spontaneously, which the artisan would interpret.

Drawing from his raw-art instincts, he would repetitively band the angel added until he could adumbrate a amount or a allegory or, cartoon from his Abstruse Expressionist leaning, abstruse representation.

“16-X-79”

Obsessive, monastic

For Manahan, Ossorio’s acute wax-resist adjustment was additionally prefigured in the berserk abandonment with which he planned, conceptualized and accomplished the mural.

Manahan apparent the berserk accurateness that went into Ossorio’s art back she was asked to advance the attention and apology of the Victorias chapel.

Manahan said she apparent Ossorio acclimated ethyl silicate 40 as adhesive for the mural afterwards consulting Ralph Meyer, a admired columnist of painter’s handbooks. “The aftereffect is like a fresco: It accessories the colorant so that the assignment seems to beating with light, and admitting the abrasion and breach of time, the colorant will not crumb but aloof fade.”

She said she apparent Ossorio’s modus on the mural back she did basic scratches on the assignment to actuate the able apology approach.

“Ossorio was a nerd, a accurate researcher; he advised everything,” said Manahan.

“That’s why the mural is beauteous except for genitalia that had been corrective over through the years (due to capricious interventions),” said Manahan. “It is because of Ossorio’s use of the binder.”

Having advised in Benedictine boarding schools (St Benedict of Nursia is the architect of the Western apostolic movement and now accustomed as the airy architect of Europe), and accepting catholic widely, the Catholic-bred Ossorio was accustomed with the medieval adorn techniques.

Light for the medieval abbey was a representation of God, so the Benedictine monks, who adored age-old manuscripts from the Dark Ages by artful them, reproduced them through aflame manuscripts. Later, medieval adorn painters developed techniques to allurement ablaze that able their works with amount beam as able-bodied as a anguish faculty of animation.

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The Benedictine adage is “Ora et labore” (prayer and work). It is actual appetizing to brainstorm Ossorio active over the mural but with the attentive affection of a abbot in prayer.

This abutting of advised ambition and active assignment in Ossorio may be why Manahan said she didn’t accept that Ossorio’s address was as “spontaneous” as Abstruse Expressionism and Art Brut.

“It is so aral, so studied,” she said.

Manahan bidding her continuing allure of Ossorio’s techniques.

“I am sucked into it; the added you know, the beneath you know,” she said.

Which is not to say Ossorio did not comedy the aesthetic arch amid the ablaze American and the appropriately ablaze French.

“Ossorio was smacked appropriate into Pollock and Dubuffet,” said Manahan. “He was the accepted denominator.”

What has been accustomed added or beneath is that his Philippine studies prefigured Ossorio’s arch of absorption and Art Brut, his amalgamation of both absorption and representation.

Dubbufet afterwards commented that in Ossorio’s style, “the apotheosis seems fortuitious.” But now we should apperceive better.

Nothing is adventitious in Ossorio’s art. At the least, it could be said his is the art of both the adventitious and the adventurous.

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[readingwritingarrhythmia]

Year Goals 2019 - Reading

2019 - Reading 1. Sir Thomas More (a play, collab. Shakespeare + contemporaries) 2. Strong as Death is Love 3.  Begat - David Crystal 4. The Story of English in 100 words  - David Crystal 5. We Are Not Amused - David Crystal 6. The Devil's Cloth - history of stripes - Michel Pastoreau 7.  Landmarks - Robert MacFarlane 8. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater 9. God Bless You, Dr. Kevorikian 10. The Mabinogion 11. A Very Short Introduction to Translation 12. The Wonderful O - James Thurber 13. The Gentleman Bat - Abraham Schroeder 14. Poems Dead and Undead 15. Poems Humand and Inhuman 16. Reading Art: Art for Book Lovers 17. The Night Witches

AVSI Druids AVSI Celts Who Were the Celts Norse Mythology - Neil Gaiman

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,514 words)

In his satirical 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas de Quincey called himself a connoisseur of murder before ensuring us he hadn’t actually committed one himself. In her new book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, late author Michelle McNamara also reassures us that her interest is personal, not prurient (it originated with an unsolved crime in her childhood neighborhood). Most of us have excuses for our interest in true crime, as though enjoying it offered real insight into our own predilections. The quasi-religious impulse to consider this a perversion of society’s innate morality has led to a flurry of theories about the source of our fascination, with four main hypotheses recurring: true crime can be a cathartic conduit for our primal urges, a source of schadenfreude, a controlled environment to experience the thrill of fear, and way to arm us (women particularly) with the knowledge to keep ourselves safe. A psychologist, speaking to NPR in 2009, provided the perfect précis: “our fascination with crime is equaled by our fear of crime. It’s two sides of the same story.”

True crime is less embarrassing, like so many things, when it’s scrubbed clean. On my shelf, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping and Dave Cullen’s Columbine stick out for how unobtrusive they are amidst the loudly stylized spines of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, among others. With their unadorned print (no drips) and minimalist art (no claret), these tasteful soft covers pass for literature. They are comparable to “prestige” podcasts like Serial and S-Town and series like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, Netflix shows in which the classic hallmarks of true crime programs — overly explicit, overly emotive — are massaged into character-driven narratives for the graduate set. In the midst of this influx of classy crime content, watching throwbacks like Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, in which survivors are tasked with reliving their abuse and tear-stained grief is the closeup du jour, starts to feel like an ignominious act.

In 2016, at the beginning of the true crime renaissance, The New Yorker asked Popular Crime author Bill James whether, regardless of the highbrow livery, it was fundamentally “distasteful” (New Yorker for “trashy”) to transform tragedy into entertainment. “Well, certainly there is something distasteful about it,” James said, but, “When there is a car wreck, we ask what happened to cause the car wreck.” That is to say: The crime itself is distasteful (or trashy), therefore it’s necessarily distasteful (or trashy) when we address it. So, either we can refuse to interrogate crime, full stop, or we can ensure that the grief we cause is for a greater good. It is a sort of trash balance — less exploitation, more justice — with only one bad ending instead of two.

* * *

True crime was lurid straight out of the birth canal. Born in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the offspring of two relatively new developments: criminal justice and the printing press. Historic crime reports’ graphic nature is typically associated with a depravity believed to appeal to the unrefined, uneducated, and unmoneyed, but that was not the case with these early publications. Though they were often branded with explicit woodcuts that would have been understandable to even the illiterate, they also boasted rhyming text and only went to those who could afford them, predominantly the upper echelons. In “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” published in The American Historical Review, Joy Wiltenburg writes that “emotive language, direct dialogue, building of suspense through circumstantial detail, and graphic description of bloody violence were common in the genre.”

Favored cases were in-family and usually involved multiple deaths. The focus was on the victims, while the moral of the story was that sin begat punishment. “The combination of truth with appeals to the heart underlined the religious focus of these works,” writes Wiltenburg. “Virtually all crime accounts published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected their stories with an edifying Christian message.” This message associated brutality with the devil and positioned public order as the path to virtue. “[Sensationalism] has had religious, political, and cultural impact,” Wilternburg sums up, “promoting the ready acceptance of punitive government actions, the advancement of religious agendas, the internalization of mainstream emotional expectations, the habit of vicarious emotional experience, and the focus on distinctive individual identity.”

With a reputation for being insensitive to and financially exploiting both criminals and their victims, true crime is often accused of sensationalism, but that term wasn’t coined until the 19th century, a time that favored rational thought over the emotive prose of journalists. “While sexual scandals and other shocking events have become staples of modern sensationalism,” writes Wiltenburg, “its chief focus has always been crime, especially the most bloody and horrifying of murders.” The 1800s also gave us our first detectives, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the latter not only centering crime fiction as a genre, but granting it a modicum of respectability. The gutter was still within spitting distance, though. Penny dreadfuls arrived — demon barber Sweeney Todd in tow — as early versions of popular culture in the form cheap mass-produced serials for young, increasingly literate working-class men, featuring salacious gore; like the true crime paperbacks of today, they supplied affordable, digestible scandal to entertain tired people with no time. The last gasp of the penny dreadful coincided with the precursor to O.J. Simpson’s so-called trial of the century: The Lizzie Borden case. The 32-year-old Massachusetts woman’s trial for the axe murder of her parents spawned a media phenomenon and firmly established the mass appeal of true crime. The next century saw the trash-fired genre shooting off in various directions, from tabloids like The National Enquirer to paperbacks like Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time to shows like America’s Most Wanted.

Then there was In Cold Blood.

“Until one morning in mid-November 1959, few Americans — in fact, few Kansans — had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” Before In Cold Blood, this is not how real crime stories read. What Arthur Conan Doyle did for crime fiction, Truman Capote did for true crime. His 1965 experiment was released as a four-part serial in The New Yorker and became the reference point for every other high-brow true crime work in every other medium. “The motivating factor in my choice of material — that is, choosing to write a true account of an actual murder case — was altogether literary,” Capote told The New York Times. “It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He believed only those with the “fictional technical equipment” — novelists, not journalists — like him could do it. The factual inaccuracies that have since emerged suggest that Capote’s belief in his own skills — he neither taped nor took notes during interviews — were as sensational as the genre he was hoping to reinvent. His book is still, however, considered the pinnacle of crime lit.

It was Capote’s book that the Times referred to when designating Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line a “nonfiction feature film,” per its distributors, in 1988. This exercise in lyrical fact was groundbreaking in its own right: an elegant piece of true crime as an advocacy tool. The subject of a false conviction, Randall Dale Adams had his case thrown out with the help of evidence Morris uncovered. It’s a straight shot from The Thin Blue Line to Serial, which blew up true crime podcasting in 2014. But while an appeal followed this program’s highly subjective long-form reexamination of Adnan Syed’s conviction for killing Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee in 1999, it was Capote — “a leap in narrative innovation on the scale of In Cold Blood” — who was once again cited, this time in The New Yorker. Serial’s executive producer has said they were trying to avoid an exploitative “Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing,” but the program was serialized with its own version of a cliffhanger each week, and provided its own hero, the avatar in our ears, reporter Sarah Koenig. Yet Koenig bristled at the suggestion by the Times’ Magazine that this was entertainment. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “I’m still reporting.”

As though the two were mutually exclusive. As though true crime could only be trash if it were entertainment, and could only be entertainment if it weren’t journalism. Of course, this negates the nature of media. To entertain — to entertain a thought, for instance — is merely to take it into consideration, to allow it to hold one’s attention. Journalism is made to entertain; if it weren’t, reports would not be called “stories” and there would be no need for inverted triangles or kickers or pull quotes or anything else to catch our attention, to hold it. Because to deliver the news there has to be someone to deliver it to, and that necessitates their entertainment. Otherwise the news is nothing but fact; there is no story.

* * *

“Many of the differences between trash culture and high culture show only that storytelling adapts to changing economic, social and political conditions,” Richard Keller Simon writes in Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. It’s something to consider when watching Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly. The series was produced by a network for women branded by its schlocky aesthetic and penchant for frothy romance. An exec at Lifetime has admitted it has “erred on the tabloid side” and Surviving R. Kelly, which has a number of black women recounting the decades of abuse they say the singer has inflicted on them, exhibits the familiar tropes: the inflated score, the voyeuristic set pieces, the abused women on display. In an interview with Complex earlier this month, showrunner dream hampton revealed that she received a number of notes from Lifetime and that she was pushed to find more victims. “I didn’t like the salaciousness of stacking up all of these people who survived him,” she said, “but I got the corroboration part.” The result is a series that orchestrates rescue attempts and highlights the explicitness of Kelly’s brutality, while only gesturing vaguely at the cottage industry he has fostered over the past three decades in order to victimize black women and at our collective failure to see these women as victims at all.

When I watched it, I couldn’t shake a feeling of ickiness, particularly when one of the victims was asked to describe her abuse and dissolved into tears. We didn’t need to see that scene from the pee tape so many times, we didn’t need a tour by one victim of the room where she was allegedly tortured, we didn’t need to watch as one mother reunited with her daughter. (I’m not even including the questionable stylistic choices). The whole endeavor read trashy, old-school Lifetime. “I saw someone kind of try to drag me about why isn’t this on something more premium like Netflix. But this to me is the perfect place for it,” hampton told Complex. “I know that women watch Lifetime, and that black women make up the majority of those viewers.” Reading this made me doubly uncomfortable. It suggested that to get black women’s attention you had to feed them trash. And, okay, maybe black women weren’t trying to mute R. Kelly over The Chicago Sun-Times’ original reporting, but none of us were! The world has changed since 2002, and all of us — including black women — have become more sophisticated about predation.

“The average American today has greater familiarity with the legal process, thanks in part to procedural dramas and the round-the-clock media coverage of splashy crimes that began with the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s,” writes Lenika Cruz in The Atlantic. “And people are more aware than ever of flaws in the criminal-justice system, including police brutality and wrongful convictions.” This means that true crime has had to hustle to keep up with its audience, reframing from the crime itself to seeking its closure. NPR noticed the new true crime formula in 2015, with programs like Serial and HBO’s The Jinx (and later Netflix’s Making a Murderer and APM’s In the Dark) concentrating on ongoing cases that could be affected by new reporting. Andrew Jarecki, director of The Jinx, called this subject matter “live ball,” and so here we are in the live-ball era of true crime in which Robert Durst literally burps up a confession on camera before he is charged with murder. “Can the genre sustain this? Can they really sustain true crime as an advocacy medium?” Michael Arntfield, founder of the Cold Case Society, asked The Pacific Standard. “The success and the legitimacy of the medium hinges on being able to stay within this framework of advocacy ahead of strictly sensationalism or profitability.”

But even advocacy has its limits. Netflix’s runaway success Making a Murder eschewed Serial-like narration and Jinx-like reenactments, but contorted almost 700 hours of footage into supporting a theory that the filmmakers had already formulated, that convicted murderer Steven Avery was innocent despite everything pointing to the contrary. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos told the Times they secured interviews where others didn’t because of their “tempered approach.” Like those books on my shelf, this refined series passed for high culture.

The most balanced true crime isn’t actually true crime. Last year, American Public Media launched the second season of their hit podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. Over 11 episodes, it examined the six trials of Curtis Flowers for the same murders. Even though the precipitating incident was the crime, the attention was on everything else; the reporting team embedded itself in Flowers’ Mississippi hometown for a year, ultimately producing not only a strong — dare I say entertaining? — sense of place, but a rigorous analysis of the systemic failures of the investigation. “For us as reporters, we’re here to look at the people in power and look at the systems in place that raise questions about whether or not the criminal justice system is fair, whether it is just using facts,” Baran told NPR. “So what that results in is not our place to say. But certainly, in this case, what we’ve shown is that the evidence against Curtis Flowers is weak. So this becomes a question now for the courts.” While other podcasts rely on their relatability, this one doesn’t have to — the story is enough. In the aftermath of Baran’s team’s exhaustive reporting, the Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider Flowers’ conviction. It is a rare case in which the balance seems to be moot. It’s all justice.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[readingwritingarrhythmia]

Year Goals 2019 - Books

2019 - Reading 1. Sir Thomas More (a play, collab. Shakespeare + contemporaries) 2. Strong as Death is Love 3.  Begat - David Crystal 4. The Story of English in 100 words  - David Crystal 5. We Are Not Amused - David Crystal 6. The Devil's Cloth - history of stripes - Michel Pastoreau 7.  Landmarks - Robert MacFarlane 8. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater 9. God Bless You, Dr. Kevorikian 10. The Mabinogion 11. A Very Short Introduction to Translation 12. The Wonderful O - James Thurber 13. The Gentleman Bat - Abraham Schroeder

Uprooted Fire and Blood - GRRM Poems Dead and Undead Poems Humand and Inhuman The Night Witches AVSI Druids AVSI Celts Who Were the Celts Norse Mythology - Neil Gaiman