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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years ago

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Significantly flawed, and well-known in fandom for it. Unpopular opinion? I still think it’s better than the first Avengers film.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha and Laura pass in a single-line trade. It’s sooo close to not counting.

Female characters:

Natasha Romanoff.

Wanda Maximoff.

Maria Hill.

Helen Cho.

Peggy Carter.

Laura Barton.

FRIDAY.

Male characters:

Tony Stark.

Steve Rogers.

JARVIS.

Thor.

Clint Barton.

Strucker.

Pietro Maximoff.

Bruce Banner.

Ultron.

Sam Wilson.

James Rhodes.

Ulysses Klaue.

Heimdall.

Nick Fury.

Erik Selvig.

Vision.

OTHER NOTES:

Everyone talking about Strucker like we already know who he is...

The “Shit!”/”Language!” gag was funnier before they hung a lantern on it. Not least because it takes almost a full minute before Tony harks back to it (fifty seconds, actually. I checked). If you’re gonna make a Thing out of it, you gotta follow up immediately, not after fifty seconds of cutting around to different character intros and action shots and a whole lot of other dialogue.

Urrgghh, ok, I’m going to break my standing rule about not discussing source material, because we gotta acknowledge the colossal wrongness of re-writing the Maximoff twins - canonically Jewish Romani - as willing volunteers in a Nazi science experiment. It gets worse the more you think about it. There are a few things about this movie which generated significant negative outcry, and this incredibly offensive decision is one of them.

Tony and Thor fighting over who has a better girlfriend does have a certain charm to it. If you’re gonna have a testosterone-off, it might as well be about how great your partner is.

I got a zero out of ten on this out-of-nowhere forced romance crap with Natasha and Bruce. We’ll come back to this later.

“I will be reinstituting Prima Nocta,” Tony declares, as he prepares to lift Thor’s hammer and thereby theoretically take charge of the Nine Realms. Primae noctis (believed to in fact be a myth) refers to a supposed Dark-Ages law that granted lords the ‘right’ to take the virginity of any newlywed peasant woman who lived on their land. So, this is a wonderful little rape joke from Tony (or, y’know, not so little, since primae noctis in reality would make Tony a serial rapist). Ha ha ha ha. Hilarious. Good one.

I’m really mad about the parts here that are total garbage, because mostly, the revels sequence has a nice low-key quality to it, good solid team dynamics.

I can’t fucking believe that they played the ‘and then Bruce falls with his face in Natasha’s cleavage!’ gag. I cannot believe it. Is this a disgusting frat-boy comedy from the nineties?

Honestly, Tony, just shut up and admit that you KNEW from the get-go that it was wrong to try and make Ultron happen (that is why you kept it secret from everyone else to begin with); don’t try to defend the decision now that you’ve got a ‘murderbot’ on your hands. Take responsibility for a bad choice instead of talking shit about how you had to and everyone else is just too short-sighted, damn it!

Andy Serkis is delightful.

The Iron Man/Hulk fight absolutely KILLS the momentum of this film. It goes for way the fuck too long (eight minutes) and has no narrative significance at all. Pro tip for action scenes: they should always be driving the story somewhere. You can pull off eighty minutes of action so long as your plot is advancing alongside/within it.

Also, Iron Man causes a huge amount of additional damage during this fight, in the service of the aforementioned pointless action. His efforts to minimise Hulk’s effects are extremely poor, and calling in his relief organisation to clean up after the fact does not negate that.

Gotta love that throwing a wife and kids at Hawkeye at the same time as we suddenly start pushing this Natasha/Bruce thing. That’s not transparent at all. I also understand this to be a major deviation from Clint’s identity in the comics, and very unpopular with fans for that reason, but regardless; reinventing him as a family man to reset the romantic blather after baiting fans with the possibility of Clint/Natasha in the first Avengers movie is such a shitty move. I was not invested in the ship myself and would have loved to have them reinforce the just-friends relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow, because there are not enough platonic friendships between compatible men and women in fiction, but 'they’re not interested in each other because they’re busy with someone else!’ is a weak reinforcement indeed. Less forced romances, and definitely less token wifey who exists for no other Goddamn reason at all. This comes out of nowhere, and not in a clever-surprise kind of way.

“You still think you’re the only monster on the team?” Natasha says, after telling Bruce about her sterilisation. This earned a HUGE backlash, and for good reason - despite all arguments about how what Natasha meant was that her being raised to be an assassin makes her a monster, the direct implication of her words as they are phrased and as the discussion is structured is that her inability to have children makes her monstrous, and that’s deeply offensive. It’s also completely in keeping with a narrative which is often played out against women, in which their value as people is attributed directly to their ability to produce offspring, so it’s not even like this outrageous implication of monstrosity - the corruption of what it means to be female! - is that unusual. It’s awful, but not unusual. Add on the fact that 1) Natasha’s nightmare-flashes specifically foregrounded her sterilisation over all other details of her training, supporting the idea that she believes that it’s what makes her irredeemable (instead of, y’know, all the murdering and stuff), and 2) this is Joss Whedon’s work and he is OBSESSED with highlighting the womanhood of his female characters and treating it like their defining trait while also variously punishing them for it, and you’ve got every reason to interpret this terrible fucking line as exactly the heinous thing it (presumably, unwittingly) seems to be.

Steve ripping a log in half with his bare hands is the funniest thing in this whole movie.

Thor’s brief side-adventure with Erik Selvig is pretty out-of-place. He just...goes for a swim in a convenient magic pond that Selvig chances to know about. Seems normal.

Ultron is full of such boring, empty rhetoric. Reminds me of Loki in The Avengers, with all that sound-and-fury.

I love Paul Bettany.

Man, they sure do find Natasha instantly. It’s almost like making a damsel-in-distress of her who needs to be rescued by the team was completely meaningless...

Breaking my no-BTS rule (since I already have done for this movie at this point) because it’s well-known how Joss Whedon ordered Elizabeth Olsen not to show exertion or ‘ugly emotion’ on her face in this film, because God forbid she compromise her attractiveness by being human. Joss Whedon is not human; he’s fucking trash.

The final fight sure does just, y’know, get to a point where it ends. They really did not ratchet up the tension over the course of the Sokovia conflict, it just goes along until it stops (also, they say Sokovia is a country, but then they never call the city anything else, it’s just Sokovia. Is the city conveniently named after the country (very confusing), or is it a city-country, like The Vatican? I kinda assume it’s option three, which is that no one bothered to care because it’s just some fake European placeholder anyway and we’re not supposed to notice such a dumb oversight).

“I was born yesterday.” This is the best quip in this whole thinks-it-is-way-wittier-than-it-is movie.

Helen Cho deserved better than to be a prop rapidly dismissed and then just trotted past at the end for an ‘oh, she survived, btw’.

Back when I reviewed the first Avengers movie, I said that I considered that film to be heavily overrated, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that I actually like this one better. The two primary problems I had with that first film were the overly simplistic plot, and the fact that most of the characters were OOC compared to previous films, and this movie does do better on both scores, so I feel more engaged by it, and less annoyed. That said...this movie has still got a lot of problems, and those include iffy characterisation and a plot with various holes, nonsensical complications, and conveniently ignored or smoothed-down dynamics. When I say I like this movie better than the first one, I mean just that: I like this better. That does not mean I am here to sing its praises.

The tacked-on romance is part of the problem - for Clint as well as Natasha (but especially for Natasha). After Hawkeye was so heavily under-used in the first film (and his slightly-ambiguous relationship with Black Widow was the only human element that made him a character instead of a prop), Age of Ultron attempts to compensate by giving Clint a personal life, in the form of a magically-appearing heavily-pregnant wife and a pair of nameless children. The function of this family appears to be 1) to give Clint a reason to not be interested in Natasha, and 2) to ‘humanise’ him by giving him something to fight for and get home to, because we all know nothing legitimises a character quite like some otherwise-irrelevant dependents. Want a man to seem lovable and important? Give him a pregnant wife. That’s what women are for, anyway, right? To enhance a man’s story? In this case, to provide a man whose purpose in the story has been contested with insta-personality, because ‘he’s secretly a family man, ooh, twist!’ is way better than having to spend time on giving him something to do in the plot that is actually meaningful in some way. Great logic. Makes Hawkeye super dynamic, right?

Natasha, unsurprisingly, is hit much, much harder. As the only female avenger and one of only two prominent female characters in a cast which has seven-to-nine male characters of equal or greater importance/screen time (YMMV on whether or not you think Fury and Vision count for that list), the pressure is already on for Natasha to be served up a quality narrative, because if she doesn’t get one, well...she doesn’t have six-to-eight alternative characters to pull the weight for her gender. The best solve for this problem would be to avoid the ‘Token Woman’ cliche in the first place, but since we missed that boat...not having the personal story of your only primary female character revolve completely around her womanhood and her catering to heteronormative expectations of a love interest would have been a good choice. This weird, forced, chemistry-free thing with Bruce Banner? Was the worst thing they could have used to define Natasha’s presence in the film. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time they have an awkward interaction, and it leads in to that atrocious ‘monstrous infertility’ element (though that particular egregious mistake could have been included with or without a romantic blunder, it...probably wouldn’t be, and we’d all be the better off). Even the Hulk-whisperer part of the relationship - while not awful on its own with all the unnecessary romance and Unresolved Sexual Not-Tension removed - serves to highlight Natasha’s female-ness by making her the soft maternal figure for the team, because God forbid one of the other male members of the team be asked to ASMR-speak to the Hulk while delicately caressing his hand. If Natasha’s presence in the first Avengers film leaned too heavily on her gender identity as a defining trait (and it did), this movie doesn’t fix that problem at all: it doubles down on it.

The good news for most of the excess of male characters is, they by-and-large don’t feel as OOC as they did in the first film. The boorish romantic entanglement aside, Bruce Banner is still a naturalistic character highlight (all credit to Mark Ruffalo, who probably doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance in the first place), and Thor’s dialogue is way less ridiculous this time ‘round, so he lands a lot closer to his personality from previous films simply by virtue of sounding like the same guy (unfortunately, the plot does not have the faintest idea what it wants to do with him as a character). Steve Rogers is still being written as if being Captain America is his character, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his identity, albeit one which conveniently allows him to behave in a stereotypical self-righteously bland manner, thus avoiding the need for any nuance in his perspective or actions. This borderline fanfic-flamer ‘Captain America is my least favourite character so I’m going to write him as a boring stick-in-the-mud and then hopefully no one else will like him either!’ approach doesn’t grate quite as badly as it did in the first Avengers, and it can’t cancel out the innate level-headed charm of Chris Evans, so as disappointing as the bias is, it’s still a better balance here than it was last time. The one character who is not so flatteringly handled, however? Also happens to be the one who was arguably handled best last time, and unfortunately, he’s the one who is essentially treated as the ‘lead’.

The big problem for Tony Stark is that this movie is not interested in digging in to the pathos of any character, it’s all-flash-no-substance on that front, and Tony really, really needed a less heavy-handed slathering of ‘afraid of what might come (feat. messiah complex)’ to motivate his actions and reactions in this film, because without any exploration he’s basically just a billionaire kid playing with matches. If this were an Iron Man film (either the first or third one, anyway), we’d get into some tasty deconstruction of Tony’s mental state and confront his hubris, etc, and - crucially, most crucial of all, it’s a mainstay of all his past stories in the MCU - Tony would own up to his mistakes, listen to the advice of those around him, and take contrite steps toward fixing the problem not just in the direct sense of ‘beating the bad guy’, but also in the personal and emotional sense of working on his own flaws and making amends with the people he hurt along the way. This movie offers none of that. To begin with, Tony’s ‘I know best and I will not be taking any questions’ approach to creating Ultron feels like a significant step backwards in his character development so far (Iron Man 3 was specifically about addressing his PTSD and associated tumultuous emotions surrounding the fear of imminent alien invasion, so his reactionary and secretive behaviour in this film feels particularly out-of-touch with a mental reality Tony has been explicitly working on for the past couple of years); Tony is actively aware that it’s a bad call and thus hides it from the other Avengers until it’s too late, and then he’s bizarrely unrepentant about his mistake. Worst of all, he actually attempts to repeat that mistake, only worse, late in the film (the fact that his idiotic ‘mad scientist’ pep talk actually convinces Bruce to help him again is the weakest character moment for Bruce outside of the aforementioned romance crap). The plot rewards Tony’s second, far worse mistake, in the creation of Vision, who turns out to be ‘worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer’ and whatnot and conveniently provides every necessary skill to defeat Ultron in a deus ex machina so overt you could use it as a textbook example, so even though Tony had absolutely no way of knowing that he’d get a good result this time and almost every reason to believe he’d just compound the existing problem, his reckless disregard for the literal safety of the planet is treated like a good thing because it happens to work out this time, and they just kinda sweep under the rug the fact that Tony is playing God (and being uncharacteristically stupid and selfish about it - in other films, Tony is normally only reckless with his own safety, and it’s when his actions spill out into unintended consequences for others that he realises the error of his ways and cues up a positive learning curve; it’s what makes him palatable). At the end of the film, once Ultron is gone and Tony has thrown some dispassionate wads of cash into ‘relief efforts’, he strolls and quips and eventually drives off into the sunset in his expensive car, with nary a mention of, I dunno, maybe a little guilty conscience? Maybe a hint of having learned a valuable lesson? The closest he gets is just suggesting that it might be time he retires from Avenging, but neither he nor anyone else lets on that there’s a need for serious self-reflection. The Tony Stark in this movie is the nightmarish male-fantasy version of the character, the playboy with the cool tech and no limits who does whatever he wants and then...literally rides off into the sunset in the end, no muss, no fuss. He’s kinda like a complete reversion to his original self, pre-Iron Man, frittering money around and designing weapons of mass destruction while convincing himself he’s bringing peace to the world one explosion at a time, but that Tony has no business here, seven years of character development down the track.

While we’re talking iffy characterisation, we should also segue into plot, and that’s something we can do easily enough by looking at our villain, Ultron. Calling Ultron an actual character feels...ambitious. He’s a CGI robot full of empty rhetoric and, you guessed it, more of those quips that this movie has in place of any meaningful dialogue. I’d call him self-fellating, but he ain’t got nothing to fellate, so instead he just blathers a lot in a manner that sounds vaguely poetically intelligent but is, upon a moment’s consideration, just vapid nonsense (much like Loki in the first Avengers, as noted above, but at least Loki had the benefit of a flesh-and-blood actor delivering his lines with conviction; James Spader does solid work as the voice of Ultron, but trying to make a CGI robot who spouts a school-kid’s attempt at edgy philosophy sound like a genuine menace is an uphill battle). Speaking of genuine menace, I assume the reason the film is called Age of Ultron is because A Couple of Days of Ultron Causing Disturbances in a Handful of Specific Locations was too much. For all the big talk (and there is..so much), Ultron doesn’t get up to all that much trouble, most notably in the sense that he apparently has his code all over the internet and yet he doesn’t bother stirring up a single ounce of chaos with that ungodly power. Why bother including this as an element of the character if it achieves zero story? Is it purely to make Ultron seem ~unstoppable~ because he keeps downloading into new robots? Because it didn’t really land, y’all. They try to play it like a big victory for the good guys when Vision burns Ultron out of the ‘net, but in context it’s meaningless because he didn’t do anything while he was there. Pretty much everything about Ultron was all talk, little to no action - even a whole bunch of the trouble he did cause happened off-screen, with Maria Hill just popping in to let us know that ‘there are reports of metal men stealing shit’. Cheers, cool. And you know, Ultron makes a song and dance about how he’s going to save the world by ‘ending the Avengers’, but then he...does not pursue that at all. He tries to make himself a pretty body, the Avengers thwart him, and then he enacts a doomsday machine to destroy all life on Earth. Like every other aspect of the character, the whole ‘end the Avengers’ schtick is just white noise, there’s no meaning in it. Ultron is just a same-old-same ‘What if Artificial Intelligence wants to WIPE US OUT?!’ cliche, and maybe that’s what he was in the comics too, I don’t know, but it’s the job of the film to tell that story in a dynamic way, and they had two and a half hours to do it. And yet.

There should be more to this than a nondescript placeholder villain concept and a series of action set pieces that just kinda happen until they stop. At least the first Avengers had some variety in each of its action sequences, using the location and the different skills and weapons of its antagonists, whereas this one is just ‘there are robots and the good guys punched and shot them until they were all broken, the end’. Even making the city fly in the end doesn’t actually make it interesting, not least because the characters spend most of their time running around the (weirdly, perfectly stable) streets not having to deal with any consequences of being up in the air anyway, and the doomsday device is too nebulous to ratchet up any real tension about figuring out how to deal with it. The conflicts with the Maximoff twins have at least some spark of life in them, but the characters themselves are treated to an over-simplified and very contrived narrative arc that uses what they do and what they know more as plot devices than as details of actual people’s lives, leading to a cheap death for Pietro so that Wanda will be distracted enough to abandon the big ol’ doomsday button, and it’s just all so convenient. There’s no heart in any of it, and it makes the moments that try to have heart all the more embarrassing and out-of-place (don’t even get me started on what a prescribed attempt at tugging the heart-strings it is to have Hawkeye name his magnificently well-timed newborn after Pietro, because DAMN). When I said I liked this movie better than the first Avengers, I meant just that: I like this better. That’s not to suggest that it is significantly better in any sense, because it isn’t, and I can’t even argue that this one has a better story, because honestly, it doesn’t. The first film made more sense, it was just less interesting to watch, and the things about it that were contrived were contrived in different ways. The first film was weaker and more irritating on character, and character is always the most important part of a story for me, so as annoyed as I am by the major character blunders in Age of Ultron, I’m still not as annoyed as I was after The Avengers. That is damning with the faintest of praise; this is just not a particularly good movie, it makes a poor use of its cast at the best of times, delivers a sub-par action extravaganza, and the script is not half as witty as it gleefully convinces itself that it is. It comes as no surprise, I’m sure, that I am very glad a certain writer/director departed the franchise after disappointing everyone with this outing. I say I like this better than the first Avengers, but gee, it’s a close call.

#Avengers: Age of Ultron #Marvel Cinematic Universe #Bechdel Test #female representation #MCU #Age of Ultron #Avengers

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jennmoslek36 · 6 years ago

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IT HAS BEEN about a year now since my involvement with the Dozier School For Boys began taking over my world. Kicking off the whirlwind was my need to get my hands on the school’s student ledgers. I won’t rehash the entire adventure but what I will say is that it took many frustrating nights online, several emails to the Archivist, the potential of an $600+ bill to get digital copies & finally an 8 hour round trip before I’d actually have what I wanted…Well at least a quarter of what I wanted!

HAVING ABSOLUTELY NO clue what I was looking for, I spent the next several weeks trying to organize what I had. Almost immediately number of very distinct patterns began jumping out at me. The same sentencing judges over & over again, the SAME sentence length OR lack there of & a crap load of blank spaces; Specifically under the “WHEN/HOW RELEASED” columns. One would expect that any institution handling children would be required to keep detailed & accurate records of ALL of its charges, especially when it comes to their last known whereabouts BUT that would make too much sense, now wouldn’t it…

THE INFO THAT I had gotten was only from the latest volume of the ledgers & didn’t even make a dent in the number of boys that had been shoved through the doors to be reformed. I knew there were hundreds OR even thousands of names in those books. I maybe had a few hundred at the most. By now, I had gotten used to what I like to call the “Hurry Up & Stop” method of researching. Basically I’d need specific info, finally get said info ONLY to start looking it over & promptly figure out that I needed additional material OR even worse, I’d need something entirely different altogether. In this case, I had just assumed that I’d eventually be making another trip to the Archives; That is until I ended up becoming involved with Bob Straley & taking over his website…And right there on one of the site pages was a link to the detailed, handwritten notes that WHB Mr. Andrew Puel had spent hours putting together.

Mr. Andrew Puel At The State Archives…Sitting In The EXACT Same Spot That I Did When I Was There!

NOT IT!!

WHEN I SAW that link, I was beyond thrilled! I was finally going to have something reliable to validate what I had come up with! I had spoken with Andrew at Bob Straley’s memorial service & knew that any research he had done would be the best & most accurate info that I could possibly get. When the page loaded, it definitely did NOT show what I had been hoping for; In all actuality, it showed nothing but this:

ODDLY THE INFO was missing! I started clicking on some of the other older links on the website & sure enough, there were quite a few that led to nowhere. I don’t know why it gone OR where it went, only that it’s not there. I tried not to get to aggravated, thinking that there had to be a hard copy among the thousands of documents that I have. I spent the next several weeks going through EVERY page, folder, digital file, etc. & found nothing. Bob kept everything, so to say I was puzzled that he wouldn’t have a copy of something so important was a huge understatement. I did another look through, literally taking out every piece of paper, one by one; Still nothing.

Well Damn….

AN EVENING IN GAINESVILLE

ON A FRIDAY in late February, I made the 3 hour trip to Gaineville. With me was a small black bag filled with what I believed to be the most important material related to the Arthur G Dozier School for Boys. I pulled up to a beautiful home, tucked back in a quiet sub division that was surrounded by forest. Standing outside was a familiar face, Mr. Bryant Middleton. The “Whitehouse Boy” greeted me with a smile & a brief hug before inviting me inside to meet his wife. Both graciously spent several hours telling their personal story of Dozier & how the WHB’s Organization was founded. They were both lovely people & I was grateful that they had been so willing to meet with me & be as open as they were. When we finally moved into the dining room to look over the things that I had brought, I began pulling things out. I yanked a folder out that had been wedged inside of my over full bag & a stack of papers fell out. The stack was stapled together & folded in half. I picked it up to see what it was & as I unfolded it, my jaw hit the floor!

OH…MY…GOD…It was a hard copy of the list of missing boys! The same list that I had just spent weeks trying to find! The stuff inside of that bag was the stuff that I pulled out & reviewed quite frequently & there’s absolutely NO way that I would missed that thick stack of ledger pages! I slid the stack across the table, explaining to Bryant why I was a bit stunned at finding them. He thought it was strange as well. I’m not going to get into the specifics of my time with the Middletons in this post, although I will say that I’m very fortunate to have met with them. They’re great people & they continue to work toward keeping the future from repeating the past.

WHERE COULD THEY BE?

OF COURSE THERE is minimal info on the boys on this list. What is known is that most were listed as escaped but never recovered. A lot lacked permanent homes OR guardians, so there wouldn’t have been any concerned parents wondering about the whereabouts of their lost boy. It should also be noted that the last place they were seen was the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna. That leaves so many unanswered questions; Could ALL 185 boys on that list have actually successfully escaped & moved on to a better life? Even if that did happen, would it be possible that NOT 1 single child ever be heard from again? I suppose it could be possible for some BUT for All 185? I seriously have my doubts & given the history of Dozier, I’d say that’s highly unlikely. Especially considering the significant proof of other burial sites on the school’s 1200+ acres.Whether or not they continued life after Dozier OR their lives were taken at the school, they each deserve to be recognized. I’ll let them speak for themselves….

☆☆☆☆☆☆

JOSEPH WILK – 17 JAME HENRY COLSON SMITH – 16 BEHARD STEPHENS – 15 JOHNNIE J. RICHARDSON – 17 AB DURDEN – 16 WILLIAM RICHARD WHITE – 16 MONROE ROGERS – 16 NOWLA (SONNY) VENOS – 16 BERNARD WILLIAMS – 15 WILLIAM NICOLAS BURNETT – 15 FRED RUSH – 16 HORACE MECHOM – 16 J.W. HARRILL, JR. – 14 EDWARD MATTHEW MITCHELL – 17 LARRY DAVIS – 14. ALFONSO DEWEY DAVIS – 16 JAMES ARTHUR HARELL – 13 CARROL PITTMAN – 15 CARL HUBBARD REWLS – 14 RICHARD PEUDRY TYLER – 15 HAROLD OLDS – 14 LYNVILLE RAY – 16 LAIRD WILDES (age unknown) ALFRED SMITH GOODSON – 16 QUINCY LEWIS – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

ZANE HOPKINS – 12 ROBERT WALKER – 13 WILLIE FRANKLIN FARROW – 13 EUGENE JOHNS – 14 GABE BELL – 15 WILLIAM DEWARS – 15 LELAND LLOYD BRADY – 16 JASPER ALLEN HOLDER – 15 WILLIAM JOHNSON – 16 GEORGE HENRY ABBEY – 16 HARRY L. SAULS – 15 BEN BUNDRICK – 15 LOUIS VALOIS COUTURE – 16 ROBERT GILBERT ALBRITTON – 16 LAUDRIC BASKIN – 17 JAME HENRY COLSON SMITH – 16 JOHN JOSEPH COOGAN, JR – 16 ARINAUDO MACHIN, JR – 16 JULIAN GREEN – 15 CARL UNDERHILL – 16 WILLIAM DANIEL HATCHER – 17 DWIGHT SPRINGER – 14 JASON EDWARD LOGAN – 15 PAUL HERSHEY, JR – 17 CLARENCE C. RAULERSON – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

EVERETT BRADDOCK – 15 HAROLD EUGENE NORMAN – 16 RICHARD RUSSEL TODD – 14 EDWARD POOLE – 14 BILLY RAY BURNS – 16 MARCO GUTIERREZ – 14 WALTER C. GREEN – 16 LEON MANNING – 16 LEONARD JAMES NELSON – 16 GODSON WHITTAKER – 15 ROBERT GORDON – 15 ROBERT LAURIN GODDARD – 15 KENNETH LEE YORK – 17 TRUBEE BYRD – 17 ROWANE HOLLIDAY – 16 BOBBY WHITEHEAD – 15 WILLIAM EDWARD LEGGETT – 16 ROBERT HELGRAN – 13 OSCAR EUGENE MCCURDY – 16 WILLIAM RIVERA EMANUEL, JR – 16 JOHN LENNARD NAVE – 16 JACKIE CREWS – 16 ERNEST WOODARD – 16 ARTHUR KENT PATTERSON (aka William S. Johnson) – 14 DAVID EVANS HARRIS – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

JOHN HARRIMAN – 16 GB IRWIN – 14 HOWARD MCCALL – 17 OSCAR LEE CALDWELL – 14 JD THOMAS – 13 GEORGE F. CLAY – 13 WILLIS BUNYAN – 16 JAMES CAMPBELL – 15 BERTRAM THOMPSON – 16 WILLIE JAMES MURPHY – 17 SANDY JONES – 15 RALPH HALL – 16 MELVIN FALSON – 13 HERBERT LEE COVINGTON – 14 LUKE BENJAMIN – 16 TOMMIE L. WOOTEN – 15 WALTER ADAMS – 15 DAVID JONES (aka Cockran) – 15 EDWARD BROWN – 14 EDWARD DEMERRITT – 16 WILLIAM JENKINS – 13 MATEO BENARD COLUMBUS – 14 WILLIE C. MITCHELL – 13 CLARENCE MORTON, JR – 15 JOSEPH JOHNSON – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

CURTIS WILSON – 10 EUGENE FULLER – 16 THOMAS BOWERS – 15 LEON DUNBAR – 16 DAVID EAGLETON – 14 HENRY JUNIOR JOHNSON – 14 EDWARD FOSTER – 15 GEORGE EDWARD THOMAS – 17 ODIS SINGLETON – 16 JAMES WILEY BRYANT – 14 CURTIS DOWNING – 15 WALTER LEE NIXON – 15 JOHN TYLER – 16 ELMORE JOHNSON – 15 HENRY MELVIN JONES – 16 DOCK SMITH – 15 ROBERT LEE KING – 16 WILLARD LAMAR SHELTON – 16 ROBERT HAYS – 16 CHAS W. CHAMBERS – 16 RUSSEL HUTTON – 15 HOWARD CAYWOOD – 15 BOBBY HAYES – 16 BILLY CAUDELL – 16 WALTER R. HAYES – 17

☆☆☆☆☆☆

ARTHUR KENT PITTEBON(?) – (age unknown) WILLIAM P. NUNES – 16 EDWIN T. FINNIE – 15 MILTON LEDBETTER – (age unknown) LEROY SMITH (aka Leroy Gregory) – 17 JOE RODRIGUEZ – 17 BENARD MIXON – 15 ROBERT WESLEY DAVIS – 16 PAUL DAVID HUGES – 12 ROY JOHNSON – 13 LENARD JAMES LOTT – 16 JERRY LLOYD – 16 GABRIEL THURMAN – 16 ROBERT LEE BOSTIC – 14 GEORGE HILL – 13 JOHN ALBURY – 14 NATHANIEL TURNER – 15 LEO COLLIER – 17 TEEVESTER JAMES – 15 FLOYD RILEY, JR – 17 GEORGE NELSON – 15 NORMAN MCAULEY – 15 LYLE MACK PAULK – 16 EDWARD GIBSON – 14 WILLIAM EDWARD CORTEZ – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

ROBERT CHRISTMAN – 16 HUBERT BERRYMAN – 15 CHARLES LACGUEY – 16 CHARLES EDWARD KIDDY – 15 JOHN CHARLES CLANCEY – 15 DANNY LEE BOWMAN – 16 HOWARD GEORGE FAGG – (age unknown)

ROBERT ALTON SINGLETARY – 17 ELLIS MARLOWE HASKIN – 16 JAMES PHILLIP SLAWSON – 16 JAMES JOHNS – 17 BENARD JACKSON – 14 ARLISS BLACKMON – 15 BENJAMIN UDEL – 13 NATHANIEL BOWLES – 16 ROLAHO LYLES – 16 CLARENCE BOBBY BROWN – 15 WILLIE BRADFORD – 16 BILLY JACKSON – 13 RICHARD GILLYARD – 14 LEONARD WHITEHEAD – 15 FREDERICK NATHANIEL HARREL – 16 HENRY MCLENDON – 17 SAMOLE DARBY – 17 WILLIE LEE DOUGLAS – 15

☆☆☆☆☆☆

MOZELL BRADLEY, JR – 16 J.C. STEPHENS – 15 CHARLES BROWN – 15 GRANT BERNARD KEMP – 13 RONNIE FRANKIE ROSE – 16 JOE EDWARD ALLEN – 15 VICTOR STEPHEN GRICE – 16 TOMMY COOK (Mathias) – 15 JERRY COOK – 16 JOHNNY LEON WRIGHT – 16

IT’S AN ENTIRELY different feeling you get when you’re able to put names to the children you’ve been speaking of….

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☆ IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW SUFFERED ABUSE, PASSED AWAY, WENT MISSING OR WITNESSED ANY WRONGDOINGS WHILE AT “THE FLORIDA INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL FOR BOYS�� AKA “THE ARTHUR G. DOZIER SCHOOL FOR BOYS” OR THE OKEECHOBEE SCHOOL FOR BOYS, PLEASE REACH OUT VIA HERE AT findingflorida.blog OR ANY OF THE CONTACT INFO LISTED BELOW!!☆

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FOR PRIVATE CONTACT SEND EMAILS TO: [email protected]

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AND

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FOR FULL PHOTO GALLERIES & ADDITIONAL LOCATION INFO FOLLOW ME ON FB AT: @GRAVEAdventuresFL

THE LOST BOYS OF DOZIER: Have You Seen Me? IT HAS BEEN about a year now since my involvement with the Dozier School For Boys began taking over my world.

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thecomicsnexus · 6 years ago

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Heroes for Hope

HEROES FOR HOPE DECEMBER 1985 BY CHRIS CLAREMONT, ANN NOCENTI, JIM STARLIN, JIM SHOOTER, STAN LEE, ED BRYANT, LOUISE SIMONSON, STEPHEN KING, BILL MANTLO, ALAN MOORE, HARLAN ELLISON, JO DUFFY, MIKE BARON, DENNY O’NEIL, GEORGE R. R. MARTIN, BRUCE JONES, STEVE ENGLEHART, MIKE GRELL, ARCHIE GOODWIN, BERNIE WRIGHTSON...

JOHN ROMITA JR, JOHN BUSCEMA, BRENT ANDERSON, JOHN BYRNE, CHARLES VESS, RICHARD CORBEN, MIKE KALUTA, FRANK MILLER, BRIAN BOLLAND, JOHN BOLTON, STEVE RUDE, BRET BLEVINS, HERB TRIMPE, GRAY MORROW, PAUL GULACY, ALAN WEISS, JACKSON GUICE, HOWARD CHAYKIN...

AL GORDON, KLAUS JANSON, JOE SINNOTT, TERRY AUSTIN, DAN GREEN, JEFF JONES, JON J MUTH, TOM PALMER, AL MILGROM, BILL SIENKIEWICZ, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, CARL POTTS, AL WILLIAMSON, SAL BUSCEMA, BOB LAYTON, JOE RUBINSTEIN, STEVE LEIALOHA, WALT SIMONSON...

DAINA GRAZIUNAS, MARIE SEVERIN, BOB SHAREN, PETRA SCOTESE, CHRISTIE SCHEELE, MICHELLE WRIGHTSON, GLYNIS OLIVER, GEORGE ROUSSOS, LESLIE ZAHLER AND JANET JACKSON (NOT THAT JANET JACKSON)

SYNOPSIS

The X-men are attacked by a strange entity that makes them feel despair and end up going to Ethiopia to help people against the famine (and fighting this entity after a while).

OFFICIAL CONTEXT

CONTEXT BY CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

The most heated racial episode in my career occurred during Marvel's production of their charity book for Ethiopian famine victims. Promoted as work from "the top writers and artists in the industry-- the very best of the very best," profits from this effort were going to be donated to help the poor starving Africans. It was a truly noble effort, one the entire industry rallied behind (at least until DC decided to do their own book, thus dividing the talent pool along company lines). Denys Cowan dropped by and mentioned, amused, that he'd seen the list of talent working on the famine relief project. There wasn't a single African American creator invited to participate. This actually amused me tremendously, and I went over the list myself to make sure, but, yup, no blacks had been thought of as, "the very best of the very best," and none were invited to work on this book.

Tickled, I picked up the phone and called Larry Hama, telling him no blacks were on the list. Larry was hugely amused, and suggested we do our own charity relief book for the poor white trash of Appalachia. He and I howled with laughter, and then shook off the dumbness of it all and got on with our lives.

Only, a white staffer had overheard part of the conversation (I assume the notion of my "recruiting" Hama to do my "own alternate charity book"), and some warped interpretation of my conversation with Hama got reported down the hall to the X-MEN office (where the book was being developed). The editors became incensed and loudly demanded my head on a plate for, essentially, inciting the black talent to stop working for Marvel. I mean, this thing got blown to huge proportions, so much so that, by the end of the day, it was largely accepted as fact that I was organizing a walkout of black talent, and the EIC kind of put me and the X-Men editor in a room to negotiate a deal.

I just couldn't stop laughing. I mean, it was all so stupid. These were stupid people. It was extremely stupid to do an African relief charity project and not invite any damned Africans to work on it. It was even sillier for these stupid people to invent some massive protest out of a silly joke in a 30-second phone call with Larry Hama.

The X-Men Ed was not amused, and refused to believe me when I said I had no intention of bad-mouthing the project. I was invited to participate, but I just chuckled and said, "No affirmative action, please." And this just set the Ed off into a screaming match that could be heard everywhere in the office, "What is WRONG with you? Why do you have to make a RACIAL ISSUE OUT OF EVERYTHING?!?!?!"

It just got out of control, and the episode (along with my paying my assistant to stay home on MLK's birthday once it was ratified as a national holiday but Marvel refused to recognize it, other than the numbingly patronizing "We got us our own holiday" speech by Luke Cage in the VISION & SCARLET WITCH Miniseries) fairly cemented my pariah status at Marvel. Without saying a word and without actually doing anything, I was routinely assumed to be some radical activist who saw everything as a race issue.

I felt trapped in a world of loons. It was totally no-win, and I tended to simply withdraw from the office more and more, from people who, in my view, had now invented a justification to do what they'd been doing all along: fencing themselves off from me.

CONTEXT BY JIM SHOOTER

Pam had arranged for Oxfam America to receive our donation. Their reaction to our offer, at first, was what one might expect from people who had never seen a comic book up close: “Comic book? There’s nothing funny about famine!” Sigh.

For some reason Pam was determined that we should donate the money to them, though, and we convinced them that comics weren’t always comic. They still demanded to review the finished book before they would commit to accept our donation.

When the book was ready to go to press, we sent a mock-up to Oxfam America to review.

Their response was that they wanted nothing to do with it. Flat rejection.

Furthermore, they said that the book was unbelievably offensive and that we, the people of Marvel Comics, were racist, sexist and reprehensible.

When this was told to me by Pam and Marvel President Jim Galton I felt as if I were being called on the carpet. I was flabbergasted. I showed them the mock-up.

They didn’t see anything wrong with it.

Galton called the exec at Oxfam America we’d been dealing with to ask what their specific objections were.

Their response was that, while under no circumstances would they have anything to do with our project or with us, they would send an executive to meet with us and explain the many horrific, repugnant, disgusting elements that made our “comic book” anathema.

So they did. Oxfam America’s representative came to meet with Galton and me. The meeting took place in Galton’s office.

I do not remember the man’s name.

He was a nice-looking, thirty-something man. He had on a suit that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. Designer shoes. He had on more gold and diamond jewelry than I’d ever seen on a human being. Jeweled watch. Cufflinks. Stickpin. Bracelets. A neck chain that would make a rapper blush. Doubt me, go ahead. Discount by two-thirds what I’m telling you and you should still have an image of a guy wearing clothes and jewelry that at market price would feed a thousand starving people for a month.

After the greetings and handshaking, Galton, making conversation, said that he imagined that Oxfam America and other charitable organizations had, at least, gotten a lot of people to focus on the ongoing tragedy in Africa, and had inspired many efforts such as ours from musicians and performers and artists.

This Oxfam America fellow, let’s call him Midas, just plain gushed about how good for business the East African famine was, how donations were rolling in at record levels. He talked about the millions dying as if it were a great marketing opportunity.

Galton and I were stupefied. We couldn’t believe how thrilled Midas was that his business was booming.

Midas explained that the purpose of his visit wasn’t here to request changes or negotiate. He had come to save us from our own folly. He made it clear that Oxfam America had nothing but contempt for us and our work. He came as a favor, to urge us not to publish the abomination that we had created. He assured us that it would destroy Marvel Comics.

Right. Well, naturally, I wondered why.

Midas flipped through the mock-up. Again and again he pointed out black characters that he said “looked like Michael Jackson.” We were obviously trying to capitalize on Michael Jackson’s image and fame.

Michael Jackson in particular and the Jackson family in general were huge supporters of Oxfam America, by the way. Every drawing of a woman, he said, was sexist and exploitative. He was particularly offended by depictions of Storm, which he thought were more than sexist, a denigration of women of color.

I mentioned that the men were heroic and glamorous, too. Just like in the movies, stars tend to be good looking.

He pointed out a panel in which Chris had a carnival barker saying: “Yowza….” That, he said, was racist in the extreme. I don’t have the book handy, as explained above, but wasn’t that character Caucasian?

Moore and Corben’s pages? Yikes.

I cannot begin to tell you all the racism, sexism and hate that he (and Oxfam America) read into the words and pictures.

Wow.

The punch line is this: Midas accused Marvel of “stealing Janet Jackson’s logo.” He believed that the Heroes for Hope logo, credited to Janet Jackson, was ripped off.

I offered to introduce him to the designer on our staff who had created the logo, one Miss Janet Claire Jackson. He dismissed my obvious attempt at a cover-up.

No, really, we have a designer named…. Oh, never mind.

No wonder Janet Claire Jackson eventually started going by the name “Blog Elf.”

Finally, the lunatic left. Galton and I shared a moment of “what a jerk.”

Pam was instructed to find some other organization to which to donate the money. She came up with the American Friends Service Committee.

Heroes for Hope was a huge success. Thanks to our sales department, we got donations from downstream—distributors, retailers, even fans.

Can’t find the press release and the picture of me and Galton giving the AFSC honchos the PR “Big Check” created by our production department to symbolize the real check. I think the initial donation was $500,000. Much more came later.

It was a great thing. Jim Starlin, Bernie Wrightson, Ann Nocenti and Chris Claremont are great heroes in my book. Heroes for hope. There are people alive today who wouldn’t be without their efforts.

AND ABOUT THOSE STEPHEN KING PAGES

The non-comics writers who participated needed some help in most cases, which Ann and Chris provided. The biggest challenge was Stephen King’s contribution. I may be exaggerating here, but not by much—he gave us something like 5,000 words for three pages. Almost overnight, by the way. Chris, Ann and I somehow cut that down to what would fit on three comics pages. 500 words? I forget. Has anyone else ever had to cut out 90% of Stephen King’s brilliant words?

REVIEW

This was bound to not be a nice comic-book to review. The famine in Ethiopia at the moment had political origins that people decided to look over in favor of Live Aid and We Are The World.

Let’s just say that sending super-heroes there to help doesn’t guarantee a success (although they could have done something more against politicians, but let’s not go there).

The story is a bit abstract and the characters pretty much end up making sense of it without ever checking their facts (like the entity being a mutant and why it exists). The sequences about each X-man being tortured psychologically was too repetitive. By the time they end up in Africa (something that happens on a wild guess), the book is almost over.

The art doesn’t have a nice unifying feel. Something that could have been possible with breakdowns and less inkers and colorists.

But you know what? I understand why it had to be like that. This book was made ad honorem, and people did a great effort to just put the damn thing on the stands.

My other concern is that the X-men weren’t the right fit for a story like this. I understand they were popular back then, but these comics should attract non-readers as well (it’s for a good cause after all). And to be frank, things like Rachel Summers, Storm not having powers, Magneto being the leader... those are things of that time. Very hard to relate to. The Avengers would have been a better choice, or even Spider-man and the Fantastic Four (even if Spidey was looking a bit different at the time).

I like the message of not losing hope, and hope being the one thing keeping people alive in such tragedies... but then they kind of go back home. Leaving hope?

I don’t think the ideas in the book were brought down on something concrete or to keep thinking on. It is just confusing.

I give the book a score of 5

#heroes for hope #famine #marvel comics #x-men #1985 #comics #review #modern age #live aid #arthur adams

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downthetubes · 6 years ago

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Comics artist John Tucker reflect on his first Thought Bubble Festival experience, the culmination of his busy year as a creator…

Well, here we are then. Our first Thought Bubble is in the bag. The show I’ve wanted to do for the best part of a decade, over in the blink of an eye. I am now back in my house, near Swansea, with a cup of tea and the biggest convention of my “career” thus far in the rear view mirror. Let’s try our best to make sense of the show, the year that preceded it, and what it all means. Easy.

Thought Bubble 2018

What can I say about Thought Bubble that somebody else won’t have already said? It’s the big leagues of indie comics; small press tastemaker and impresario Sarah Harris (of Swindon’s Incredible Comics) once said that Thought Bubble is where you go to “arrive”; to announce your presence on the scene. A lot of people were making that announcement this year, including us (me and my wife, who is my salesperson and spokesperson while I’m busy drawing or scowling).

Thought Bubble looks, superficially, like other conventions, but it is not like other conventions. On its face, the process of getting to Thought Bubble was identical to the Cardiff Independent Comic Expo and True Believers processes – we applied early, sent in some JPGs and text, then we turned up with comics and a roulette wheel. There was a folding table and some chairs, and nearby people were putting up those wire print holders that you clip together. Same old. But, as we soon learned, Thought Bubble is unlike anything else we’d encountered previously.

I knew Thought Bubble was big, but I had no real concept of its breadth and scale until I saw it all laid out, taking over a large portion of the city centre. The marquee we were in, alone, would have been the largest comic convention I’ve ever exhibited at, before you consider it was one of four venues. Thought Bubble is almost too much, but of course if you’re into comics there’s probably no such thing as too much. I had grand plans to see so many people, almost all of which were lost to the blur of the event (except for Tony Esmond, Todd Oliver, and Sarah Millman, and even then I didn’t even get to see at her at her actual table; I bumped into her purely by chance in the street).

If you want to experience Thought Bubble, don’t get a table. You can either be at it or in it, and never the twain shall meet.

Image: Thought Bubble Festival

The mid-con party was a godsend in that regard, and it was a real pleasure to talk shop with other exhibitors while watching a flamboyant German attempting pistol squats to Boney M’s “Rasputin” in full cosplay.

In fact, of all the things that happened in Leeds this weekend, I think I enjoyed the mid-con get-together more than anything. It’s so rare you get to really talk to other people doing this sort of thing – comics is, by nature, an isolationist pursuit, and even if you’re tabling next to good people (as we, fortunately, have done every time so far – this time with Paul Moore, a true gent and a talented man) you never really get to talk.

I also managed to get some good conversations in with Jon Laight, fellow weird comic producer Todd Oliver, and Andy Barron (whose work is so unique it looks like it was produced off-planet, a distant civilisation’s take on sequential art). And I saw the pistol squats. Great party, cheers lads.

In regard to the actual show itself, I’m probably one of the worst people to write about Thought Bubble, because I saw very little of the actual show. We had so much fun – we met lots of great people, saw friends from shows past, Lauren met somebody off the Bake Off (I don’t watch it but she seemed very nice) – but it was just so hectic we couldn’t get a sense of what the punters experienced.

Image: Thought Bubble Festival

All I can really tell you is how we did as exhibitors, as rookie exhibitors with a half-table in a marquee large enough to accommodate several hundred of the most talented indie comic artists in the country.

How Did We Do?

I went to Thought Bubble feeling relatively conflicted in regards to expectations. What would low sales mean? What would high sales mean? Would we sell anything at all? Would we be kicked ceremoniously in the arse with a big pointed boot if we didn’t meet quota? No way to know. Had to just go there and see what happened. I had advantages here that I hadn’t had at our first show at True Believers – we’d had some experience, and some success, and we had the roller banner, at once repulsing and attracting, a cursed beacon luring punters towards it against their will.

It’s impossible to deduce your standing in comics from any one show, but if there’s one thing I learned from Thought Bubble, it is that any lessons you have learned from other shows do not apply there. Thought Bubble is a different animal; the punters look the same as the punters elsewhere, but they are not the same. They will do what other punters do – look at the roller banner with either amusement or disgust, pick up a comic to a gruesome page before sidling away, the usual – but these are not the people we encountered in Cardiff, Cheltenham, or Swindon.

At smaller shows, we sold a lot of bumper packs (complete sets of my entire back catalogue, with a sketch, for a tenner). We offered a very similar package at Thought Bubble, and we priced competitively as we always do (or at least I feel we do). But the vast majority of money that came over the table was either for a Death Roulette on its own (£5, and fine by me – it’s the highest margin item on the table, considering I’m going to be at the table anyway and I genuinely love doing them) or a single issue, typically Adrift or one of the other shorter minis (Hell – my £1 mini-comic – was the breakout star).

We put this down to the sheer crushing weight of the competition; whereas a £10 pack of comics may seem like a good deal at a smaller show, at a show the size of Thought Bubble the smart play is to get a little taste off everybody. We’ll be making sure we’ve got more little things for sale next time, and I would definitely recommend anybody thinking about Thought Bubble to make sure you have plenty of “easy pickups” – badges, short comics for cheap etc. It also helps if you have something unique, which we will come to shortly.

We didn’t quite break even – nor, frankly, did I expect to; how could we? We’d driven from Swansea and spent two nights in a hotel, and then there was the cost of the table on top.

But we came closer to breaking even than I would have imagined; very close indeed. Especially considering:

– I’m still a no-name, in the grand scheme of things (though some people did seek me out to pick up Adrift based on good reviews they’d read, and I signed my first few honest-to-goodness autographs for people who don’t realise my comics are actually worth lessif they’re signed).

– What an honour it is for anybody to spend anything at your table at an event like that. Considering the exhibitor list was essentially a who’s who of UK indie talent, I know how lucky we were to have made one red penny. I wouldn’t have bought anything from me if I’d been a visitor at that show, for fuck’s sake.

If you bought from us this weekend, even if it was just a badge, or you just took a business card or talked to us for a minute, I’m very grateful. I’m especially grateful if you joined the 2018 class of Death Roulette.

Death Roulette

For those who aren’t aware, Death Roulette is my signature convention sketch game; we bring a small toy roulette wheel, and each of the 37 numbers corresponds to an improbable mode of death that I keep hidden under the table. You pay £5, spin the wheel, I take a good look at you, and you come back in 10 minutes to find out how you died.

We welcomed an all-time record number of people to the Death Roulette hall of fame at Thought Bubble; nearly 30 people elected to be mangled, crushed, decapitated, stabbed, shot, frozen, impaled, or otherwise maimed. I love doing Death Roulette portraits, and thankfully everybody so far has seemed happy with the grim vision of their own demise they’ve received. Here’s some of my favourites from Thought Bubble.

Death Roulette has been a godsend at conventions; it’s gotten conversations started and it’s driven comic sales (either from people “upgrading” to a bumper pack that includes the portrait and all the comics, or people getting a sense of what’s inside the comics from their portrait).

Out of respect to those brave enough to take a blind punt on their own demise this year, I’ve decided to draw a line under the 2018 class of Death Roulette, in that any deaths that were drawn this year will never be repeated. If you took part in Leeds, or Cardiff, Cheltenham, or Swindon, thank you so much. You are more handsome than god and braver than the troops.

In Conclusion…

Thought Bubble has been a long time coming for me; I may have had the highest ratio of “years planning on exhibiting” to “years exhibiting” of any attendee this year. When I moved to Manchester for university (in – ugh – 2008), myself and my good friend Paul Capewell arrived a little older than our contemporaries and unenthused about the idea of chugging beer through a funnel or playing soggy biscuit on a flag frisbee team.

We were hugely fortunate, then, to have found a poorly-advertised “society” – the ragtag group of misfits responsible for running PULP Magazine, the student union publication. We signed up in the afternoon one day, and joined the editorial board that evening. I would spend my every waking hour that year writing print and video content for the magazine and the website, and Paul became its defacto web lead, building its website and churning out videos that looked far better than they had any right to considering the equipment on which they were made.

PULP Magazine had no money, no time, and no oversight beyond its perennially overworked editor. Paul and I were not the best-qualified people on campus for the jobs we did at PULP, but we were available, and willing, and if we didn’t do things, nobody else would. The editorial team of PULP 2008/09 spun straw into gold in a way I’ve not really experienced since (and would do anything to experience again).

I think everyone who worked on PULP that year got something out of it, but the main thing I got out of it is that you don’t have to ask permission to make things, and you can’t afford to wait. PULP changed hands the following year and folded shortly after due to perennial mismanagement on the part of the student union (leaving Manchester Met – a university that so prides itself on its art and design faculty – as the largest university in the world without an official print outlet for its students’ work), and shortly after it died, I began producing photocopier comics under an assumed name. I think I just needed something to fill the void that PULP had left behind. They weren’t the best work I’ve ever done, but that doesn’t matter.

Manchester had a vibrant, healthy culture of weirdo small-press bullshit where the only thing that mattered was the willingness to make something; be it zines full of emetic-grade poetry, or – in my case – self-produced compendiums of the worst comics ever made. I had experienced a late-stage conversion to comics after becoming intoxicated by the beguiling work being put out by Kate Beaton and KC Green, whose work seemed to single-handedly wash away the ungodly stench brought on by the mid-2000s webcomic “boom” (many people think the 90s was comics’ nadir, but all the foil covers in the world cannot touch the sheer volume of excruciatingly poor content produced by the supposed champions of webcomics in the early-to-mid 2000s). And PULP had taught me that nobody’s going to tap you on the shoulder to let you know it’s time – you just have to crack on with what you’ve got and hope you eventually land somewhere you want to be, knowing that even if you don’t you’ll probably feel better for having done something.

I had heard, through regional channels, of Thought Bubble, which was growing each year. I swore I would, one day, when I was ready, fill out an application, set up a table, and do it. Just do it, f*** it, see what happened. That was 2010.

A lot happened between those first photocopier comics and my Thought Bubble debut – I graduated, got a job, got married. Got a kitten, called it Potato. Life happened. I stalled on comics, but the idea of comics never really went away; I dabbled with it the whole time, aimlessly, never sure what exactly I ought to do with it. Just over a year ago, I decided to actually make a proper go at it for the first time; really put all my effort into it, and see what happens. I didn’t know what success looked like, but I thought I’d know it when I saw it.

Looking back over the past year, I think I have had a successful rookie year in comics. I’ve had profitable showings at good comic conventions, my work has had good reviews from established critics, and I finally held my own at the convention that has been my white whale, taunting me from afar, for eight years. It’s hard for anything to live up to eight years of hype, especially when that hype is entirely self-generated.

But I think the past year, and Thought Bubble with it, was a bigger success than I could have reasonably hoped for. And I believe now, perhaps more than ever before, in the ethos I learned at PULP Magazine – if you don’t make whatever it is you have the urge to make, nobody else will, and there’s never a good time. You just have to get on with it. It took me a while, but I’m just glad I finally got on with it.

Thanks for making my first year in comics a success, and hopefully I’ll see you at next year’s Thought Bubble.

John Tucker

John Tucker is an independent illustrator and writer from Cardiff, South Wales. After spending a year on the writing staff of PULP Magazine in Manchester, he began self-publishing short-run comics.

His recent works include Adrift (reviewed here by Tony Esmond), the horror-comedies The Taxi and Night Watch, the short comics Hell and Gang Culture set in 1950s Swansea, and the critically acclaimed one-shot Bald. His first graphic novel, The Floating Hand, is set for release in late 2018

• Find John Tucker online at www.johntucker.co.uk | Follow John Tucker on Twitter @johntuckerart | Facebook | Instagram

• The Thought Bubble Festival returns in 2019: www.thoughtbubblefestival.com

Thought Bubble is a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to promote literacy and artistic skills through the medium of comic art. We see sequential storytelling as an important cultural art-form, and believe it is the most diverse artistic medium in the world.

From the Trenches: Thought Bubble 2018 and My Rookie Year Comics artist John Tucker reflect on his first Thought Bubble Festival experience, the culmination of his busy year as a creator...

#Adrift #Andy Barron #Creating Comics #John Tucker #Jon Laight #Leeds #Paul Moore #Sarah Millman #Thought Bubble Festival #Todd Oliver #Tony Esmond

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masterofd1saster · 3 years ago

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CJ current events 23nov21

D/P commuted last minute

On July 28, 1999 Julius D. Jones murdered Paul Howell in the course of a carjacking in Edmond, Oklahoma. He was sked to be executed at 4:00pm on Thurs, 18nov21. Oklahoma Gov. J. Kevin Stitt announced a few hours before the execution, “After prayerful consideration and reviewing materials presented by all sides of this case, I have determined to commute Julius Jones’ sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”

Mr Jones still argues that he's innocent. https://aleteia.org/2021/11/18/oklahoma-governor-commutes-death-sentence-hours-before-execution/#

The .25 caliber chrome-plated semi-automatic pistol which was used to kill Howell was found in Jones's home in the insulation near an attic access in Jones's bedroom, and it was properly admitted. Jones admitted to his girlfriend prior to Howell's murder that he had a .25 caliber chrome semi-automatic pistol which he kept for protection. The codefendant Jordan testified that Jones had a gun, that Jones planned to use it when they planned to rob Howell and take his Suburban, and that he saw Jones with the gun in hand at the time Jones approached Howell. Jordan testified that he was with Jones when he bought the pistol and saw Jones in possession of the gun days prior to the murder. Further, the evidence established that Jones had a prior felony conviction.*** Jones v. State, 2006 OK CR 5, ¶ 37, 128 P.3d 521, 538.

***

Comparative criminal law

Steve Simon, the CEO and chairman of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), says he’s tried to speak directly with Peng Shuai, the tennis pro from China who’s has hasn’t been seen or heard from since she accused former vice premier of China, Zhang Gaoli, of sexual assault on Nov. 2. He has asked sources at the Chinese Tennis Association to connect him with Shuai, a two-time Grand Slam doubles champion who in 2011 was ranked as high as No. 14 in the world in singles. The WTA has reached out directly to Peng, 35. Thus far, these efforts have proved fruitless.*** https://www.yahoo.com/news/head-womens-tennis-fight-chinese-153205893.html

Some 3d world/totalitarian countries have a habit of disappearing people. The way it works is the [sometimes secret] police show up at your house and take you away in the middle of the night. The next day your wife or your mom goes to the police station and asks to see you. The police tell you they've never heard of you, and you're not there. The whole gov't denies any knowledge of you or your existence.

When I worked in Iraq, the republican government had created a crime of disappearing people to punish this act.

Meanwhile, the NBA Commissioner announced "Hong Kong? What's that?" He followed up telling reporters "Profits are more important than Uyghurs, which, I'm not really sure what they are."

https://rocketswire.usatoday.com/2020/10/04/today-in-2019-daryl-moreys-hong-kong-tweet-ignites-firestorm/

https://spectator.org/uyghur-protest-silenced-by-the-nbas-corporate-greed/

https://news.yahoo.com/enes-kanter-says-nba-officials-174728147.html

***

*** [U. Chicago students recently] protested , demanding more campus police and better campus security after the shooting death of recent graduate Shaoxiong “Dennis” Zheng. Zheng was killed near campus on a Tuesday afternoon, and he is the third University of Chicago student killed this year.

Students at the university had a far different tone just one year ago. Starting on Aug 29., students occupied a block outside of Provost Ka Yee Lee’s home for one week to try and pressure the university to disband the University of Chicago’s Police Department. In June, students held a 19-hour sit-in at the department’s headquarters.

The university newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, published an editorial demanding the university “disband its private police force.” Now, the paper reports that a public letter from over 300 faculty members “called on the University administration to make anti-violence a top priority, urging a larger border of University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) jurisdiction and increased surveillance and security guards in Hyde Park.”*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/students-at-university-of-chicago-discover-the-folly-of-abolishing-the-police

***

The FBI is investigating the possibility that union boss Jimmy Hoffa’s body is buried in a former landfill in Jersey City under the Pulaski Skyway, a report said.

The search was sparked after a tip passed down from a worker who said he buried Hoffa in a steel drum just outside the former PJP Landfill, now Skyway Park, the New York Times said.

An FBI spokesperson confirmed to The Post that agents had conducted a “site survey” under the Skyway last month after obtaining a search warrant, but wouldn’t say if the search had anything to do with Hoffa, the mob-connected Teamsters leader whose July 30, 1975, disappearance has become the stuff of legend.

“On October 25th & 26th, FBI personnel from the Newark and Detroit field offices completed the survey and that data is currently being analyzed,” Special Agent Mara Schneider said in a statement. “Because the affidavit in support of the search warrant was sealed by the court, we are unable to provide any additional information.” *** https://nypost.com/2021/11/18/fbi-search-jersey-city-landfill-for-jimmy-hoffas-remains/

***

Charm City

BALTIMORE (WBFF) — It's Baltimore's unbearable burden.

In just week one, no place is sacred and no age is off limits.

Thursday mourners remembered a 69-year-old woman murdered inside of her east Baltimore church.

A 13-year-old girl was shot and killed at a west Baltimore recreation center.

A 5-year-old girl marked the city’s 300th murder victim.

"If you are growing up in a community where you’re hearing the constant pop, pop, pop of gunfire you are growing up with not post traumatic stress but a constant traumatic stress syndrome," said Adam Rosenberg.*** https://foxbaltimore.com/news/city-in-crisis/the-magnitude-of-murder-expert-says-killings-taking-psychological-toll-on-city

***

Life should not imitate pornhub, especially if you're 12

BROMLEY, Ky. (WKRC) — A Kentucky woman is accused of raping a 12-year-old boy three different times. Morgan Roberts, 18, faces rape and sexual abuse charges.

Ludlow, Ky. police said the boy's mother contacted them after finding a text on her son's phone that read, "I took your V card and you liked it".***

The boy was able to describe Roberts in ways that were only possible if he'd seen her without clothes.

Two of the boy's friends also said Roberts admitted to the abuse.

All three boys said Roberts made them call her "mom," police said.*** https://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-world/woman-charged-with-raping-12-year-old-boy-had-him-call-her-mom-police-say

***

Waukesha madness

Waukesha, Wisconsin Police Chief Daniel Thompson confirmed in a press conference Sunday that a red SUV drove through Christmas parade barricades and struck at least 20 individuals, including children.

Thompson said an officer who has been on the force for just over six years opened fire on the vehicle. A person of interest is currently in custody but Thompson stressed that the investigation is “very active."***https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/waukesha-christmas-parade

+++

A woman who lives on Main Street says she saw the SUV barrel through a dance team of girls between 9 and 15 years old. Sam Kraemer tweet.

+++

The man being questioned after a red SUV plowed through Waukesha's Christmas parade, killing at least five people and injuring dozens, has been identified as Darrell E. Brooks Jr., a Milwaukee man with a criminal history dating back to 1999 that includes numerous violent felonies.***

In July 2020, police charged him with three other felonies – including reckless endangerment and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He’s also listed as a Tier 2 registered sex offender in Nevada.

A background check from Wisconsin's Department of Justice came back with over 50 pages of charges against Brooks stretching back decades. In 1999 he received his first felony conviction for taking part in an aggravated battery – for which he received three years of probation, records show.*** https://www.foxnews.com/us/waukesha-christmas-parade-darrell-brooks

+++

He pimped a 16 y/o girl.

+++

Even the New York Times had a problem with Brooks being released on low bail after assaulting his girlfriend. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/us/wisconsin-waukesha-parade.html

***

How about "adult dirtbags who molest kids?" "People who commit intercourse by force and without consent of women?"

Colorado’s Sex Offender Management Board plans to no longer recognize the term “sex offender” in its own guiding principles and policies.

The board, which controls treatment standards for people already convicted of sex crimes, voted 10-6 Friday on a controversial proposal to replace “sex offender” with “adults who commit sexual offenses.” Board members weren’t in lockstep on the issue and voted even more narrowly — 8-7, earlier this year — to consider the language change in the first place.***

Jessica Dotter, sexual assault resource prosecutor for the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council and a member of the SOMB, said before Tuesday’s vote that the new terminology — “adults who commit sexual offenses” — “fails to convey or represent any sort of victim-centeredness.”

Dotter said victims of sexual abuse “want their offender to be held accountable and to be known as an offender.”***

Ironically, the Sex Offender Management Board (SOMB) will not change its name even as it renounces “sex offender” as outdated language. That name is determined by state statute, and thus up to the legislature. https://www.denverpost.com/2021/11/19/colorado-sex-offender-state-baord/

***

Approximately 80 looters in ski masks reportedly robbed a Nordstrom near San Francisco while wielding crowbars on Saturday night.

A local restaurant owner recounted the shocking scene that occurred in Walnut Creek around 9 p.m., explaining that 50-80 people were involved with the brazen robbery.

“I probably saw 50-80 people in like ski masks with crowbars, a bunch of weapons,” said local PF Chang's manager Brett Barrette, CBS San Francisco Bay Area reported . “They were looting the Nordstrom.”*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/80-burglars-ransack-nordstrom-store-crowbars-weapons-scene-out-of-a-movie

***

NCVS Dashboard - https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/Home#hometopHome

Epstein killed himself - https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/Home#hometopHome

***

A Florida man pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud after attempting to obtain $25 million from the family of Rep. Matt Gaetz, federal prosecutors announced on Monday.

Stephen Alford, 62, appeared in federal court in Pensacola and admitted to orchestrating an extortion scheme against Don Gaetz, the congressman's wealthy father, and making false promises that he could secure a presidential pardon for his son, who has been linked to a sex-trafficking investigation.*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/florida-man-pleads-guilty-in-attempt-to-extort-25m-from-matt-gaetzs-father

***

In homicide acquittal/conviction news

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Kansas City, Missouri, police detective who shot and killed a Black man in December 2019 has been found guilty.

Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Dale Youngs announced the verdict Friday, a week after Det. Eric DeValkenaere’s four-day trial wrapped up on Nov. 12.

It was a bench trial, so no jury was seated, and Youngs ruled on the case alone.*** https://www.fox13now.com/news/crime/white-missouri-officer-found-guilty-of-killing-a-black-man-in-2019

+++

A St. Paul man has been acquitted on all charges in a jury trial stemming from an incident where he shot at Minneapolis police officers in self-defense last summer.

Court records show 28-year-old Jaleel Stallings was acquitted on Wednesday [1sep21] of multiple charges, including two counts of attempted second-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault, two counts of second-degree assault, second-degree riot and intentional discharge of a firearm that endangers safety.

Stallings claimed self-defense in court.*** https://kstp.com/news/saint-paul-man-who-shot-at-minneapolis-police-in-self-defense-acquitted-of-all-charges-by-jury/6224974/

+++

BTW, a jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse after he shot three white men.

***

0 notes

plungermusic · 3 years ago

Photo

“Kinda bent, but we ain’t breakin’… in the long run”

Maverick Saturday stretched out before us like a challenge - thirteen hours is a long time on your feet for a couple of oldsters, but we’d give it our best shot…

We didn’t catch all of Dan Walsh’s opening Barn set, but his closing number, a lyrical, backwoods folk-flavoured instrumental that peaked in an increasingly frenetic celtic reel to the whoops and stomps of the crowd, was enough to impress us with its fleet-fingered dexterity.

Kelly Bayfield made her second barn appearance with another stylish set drawn from the new album: Kelly taking to the piano to give us a new short number Sing which was twinned (“well, they’re a similar flavour, and in the same key!”) with her last single Hitchhiker, both oozing classy 70s chanteuse vibes and the latter closing in some great Telecaster work from Andy Trill in a majestic closing solo.

There’s not much that’d drag us away from a Kelly performance early, but having spotted his programme picture (“Long hair, Les Paul? That’ll do!”) we pottered down to the open air Green Stage for David Banks and his band. He did exactly what we thought it said on the tin: lots of Springsteen/Petty influenced muscular Americana with a dash of Molly Hatchett topped with excellent southern-fried guitar and classic ‘big endings’… marvellous.

He was followed by Simon Stanley Ward (another ‘old fave’) who brought his Jonathan Richmanish irreverence and wit to Old Time Country in Excuse Me While I Feel Sorry For Myself; the Graceland-African-style I’m A Worrier (”…that’s worrier, not warrior”) a swinging rock’n’roller Bigfoot, Baby (Eddie Cochran meets cryptobiology) and Rocket In The Desert (the salad leaf not the projectile) with its Lawrence Of Arabia theme tease. While lampooning his own assumed-Nashville twang in American Voice the accompaniment was as echt as you could want, and the deadpan humour of Beluga Whale was sung to a properly stirring Journeyesque anthem.

As it wasn’t raining The Green seemed the place to stay, where Forty Elephant Gang came next. Reviewing their album we were a little sniffy about their ‘crowd-pleasing festival songs’ but aside from the field holler-meets-O Brother Where Art Thou-style Songs Of Praise, this set was mostly the ones we’d liked: the relaxed Tex-Mex of Strange Things Happening with three-part harmonies and intertwining mando’n’guitar lines; the melancholic waltz of Young Man’s Game and the Squeeze-y domestic wit of Drunken Promise Song. A final ‘crowd-pleaser’ came in the chugging bluesy Hands Out Your Pockets, an instruction the assembled masses eagerly followed to add the required clap-along.

Sam Chase Trio made another appearance at The Green, wooing the larger crowd with both edgy humour (including praising UK portaloos in comparison to US versions, and introducing Everyone Is Crazy But Me as “a children’s song... now, what they mean is that it’s simple, since kids are generally at the dumber end of the spectrum”), and songs as varied as the fiery protest of What Is All The Rage and the haunting, wistful Lost Girl, (from the “Faustian Spaghetti Western Of Epic Proportions Known As The Last Rites Of Dallas Pistol”) sung by cellist Devon.

Now Plunger do like a bit of bluegrass, whether it’s grainy b/w Flatt & Scruggs clips from the 50s, through Sam Bush and New Grass to Béla Fleck and Greensky Bluegrass so The Folly Brothers should have been our kind of thing… however what we heard of them was more My Old Man’s A Dustman than anything Appalachian so we wandered off…

Back at The Barn Dean Owens and the Southerners drew a large and attentive crowd, but the popular Scot also left us a bit underwhelmed. Mellow, melodious troubadoury country that wouldn’t have been out of place on a mid-afternoon 70s Radio 2 show, the kind of thing that takes a deep listen in your bedroom to appreciate the stories told: very easy on the ear for sure but without any particular thing to grab us at a festival.

After an abortive attempt to catch Ella Spencer and her accompanist at The Moonshine (an extremely long soundcheck with problems with feedback from pretty much everything they touched meant we gave up) we caught a snatch of Los Pistoleros as we rounded The Green: probably the most C.O.U.N.T.R.Y. thing of the weekend, complete with draggy fiddle, pedal steel and old time vocal harmonies… if I’d not left my cowboy boots at home I’d have been out line-dancing with the best of them.

Plunger had only just seen Alyssa Bonagura (with Tim De Graaw’s band) less than a week since. Here at The Barn she was nominally solo but Tim joined her to add sweet harmonies and mellow guitar to Alyssa’s polished Cali-country: her strong yet ethereal vocal equally at home in slow emotional confessionals or giggly upbeat Big Yellow Taxi-style big strummers.

Listed only as ‘Dogs Play Dead’ it was only a lucky guess that took us down to The Green for what turned out to be Friday’s headliners Black Eyed Dogs playing a set of Grateful Dead classics. Mainly those with a countryish twist to them already, like Casey Jones, I Know You Rider and Friend Of The Devil; and bringing that flavour with fiddle and pedal steel to others like Truckin’, China Cat Sunflower, Playing In The Band and the epic closing Franklin’s Tower. All done with the right degree of loose, shambling rhythms and discursive noodling on guitar (and fiddle!) Fabulous stuff for grooving on the grass under what by now were glorious sunshine-filled blue skies.

Brooks Williams’ jangly sonorous acoustic and warm, smooth higher register vox was ideal early evening fare at the barn, in covers like Dave Alvin’s King Of California, traditional numbers like Deep River Blues and originals like the Gordon Lightfootish melancholy of Frank Delandry, and the damp-eyed nostalgia of Palomino Gold, aided toward the end of his set by some more excellent banjo from Dan Walsh.

The USP of Eddy Smith & the 507 is Eddy’s gravelly soulful voice, ideal for their bluesy-edged material, like the harp-led strut of It Don’t Feel Much Like Living and the new single Ticket Out Of Here, a bustling two-step with impressive three-part harmony vocals. They definitely have moved up a level since we last saw them a couple of years back.

Somehow we managed to miss Sarah Petite with her band completely on Friday, and almost all of her stripped-back Moonshine set on Saturday. Which was definitely our loss gauging by the brief snatch of crackling husky vocal over restrained bass and reverb laden guitar that we heard while hunting for a still-open toilet (a water supply problem having rendered all loos unusable for a considerable portion of the late evening... pretty much the only fly in the ointment all weekend!)

As the sun set the two-month date differential was beginning to tell: clear night skies in September aren’t quite the same as July and the growing chill was testing our stamina a bit. We headed for The Peacock and the tribute show to John Prine, hosted by Rich Hall. Pretty much every act who was on site came to do a turn in honour of the recently-deceased songwriting legend, with their own favourite from his oeuvre. Kelly Bayfield band gave us Hello In There, Tim De Graaw with Alyssa did That’s The Way The World Goes Round, Alyssa gave us the obligatory Angel From Montgomery, and Simon Stanley Ward (plus Kelly) gave a fantastic rollicking Lake Marie. Entirely in character, Sam Chase Trio broke the mould and gave us their own tribute song John Prine.

Rich Hall had to skip out on MC duties to attend his own set at The Barn: sacrilege to say, but the appeal of stand up (even to music, even from such a big name) palled a little. It was getting bitterly cold (you could see your breath hanging in the air) and given that what we could hear of his set was the same as we’d heard last time he was here we spent much the time attempting to warm up with piping hot beverages. However it was by far the rammedest set of the weekend, with the tightly-packed crowd spilling out of The Barn for some distance.

Jon Langford was unsurprisingly somewhat hindered by the draw of Rich Hall (which left The Peacock a bit underpopulated!) His spiky, punky approach wasn’t entirely our bowl of chilli, although the rendition of Eddie Waring (originally by Help Yourself with Deke Leonard and BJ Cole, who was sitting in with Jon tonight) was very good.

The programme description of headliner Jerry Joseph did its best to weaken our staying power too: with our deep suspicion of any write-ups that include the ‘p-word’, and somewhat incredulous of the mention of ‘jam bands’, Jerry looked like he wouldn’t be our kind of thing at all. However he didn’t live down to expectations (wholly). A very animated stage-prowling audience-provoking figure in shorts and no shoes, there was no shortage of energy even if it was largely unchannelled and could get a little wearing… (maybe it was that, maybe it was the chill, but The Barn steadily thinned out during his set, ending less than half full). War At The End Of The World was the pick of the bunch, although like most of his material it would probably have sounded better with a band (like, erm, Stockholm Syndrome, which he co-founded; or, erm, Widespread Panic who he has written for… so much for our ‘jamband incredulity’!)

While it might have ended as a bit of a test of endurance, there were more than enough high points to make Saturday another enjoyable Maverick experience.

“Did we do it for love? Did we do it for money? More like stubborn dumb persistence and hot chocolate, honey…”

#Maverick Festival

0 notes

deadcactuswalking · 3 years ago

Text

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 22/05/2021 (Olivia Rodrigo, J. Cole’s ‘The Off-Season’, Nicki Minaj)

Yeah, it’s a big week, given the impact of J. Cole, Jorja Smith, Olivia Rodrigo (more on that next week) and the remaining impact of the BRIT Awards. There’s a lot of nonsense on this chart, a busy as hell one at that, but this surprisingly did not affect the #1, as the remix to “Body” by Russ Millions and Tion Wayne spends a third week at the top. Let’s just attack this head on. Welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

First of all, let’s get this nonsense out of the way: what happened to songs already on the UK Top 75 chart, which is what I cover? Well, a fair few of them dropped out. Any song that spent five or more weeks in the chart or peaked in the top 40 is considered a notable drop-out, and this week, they include “Wants and Needs” by Drake featuring Lil Baby off of the return last week, “Track Star” by Mooski, “Heat” by Paul Woolford and Amber Mark, “6 for 6” by Central Cee, “Patience” by KSI featuring YUNGBLUD and Polo G, “Hold On” by Justin Bieber, “We’re Good” by Dua Lipa, “Commitment Issues” by Central Cee (Gosh, didn’t think J. Cole would take a chunk out of this guy’s audience specifically), “Up” by Cardi B, “Streets” by Doja Cat and finally, “Get Out My Head” by Shane Codd, but also interestingly “i n t e r l u d e” by J. Cole dropping out off of the top 40 debut despite the album boost. This doesn’t mean it didn’t perform well but rather this is demonstrating this silly chart rule where in the top 100, one artist can only have three songs, preventing album bombs that you see on the US Billboard Hot 100. It makes the chart less accurate but arguably more diverse and hence fun for me to talk about.

There are also a few returning entries to add some fuel to this chart fire, one that has already combusted in the US this week, as “Slumber Party” by Ashnikko featuring Princess Nokia is back at #70 thanks to the video, “All You Ever Wanted” by Rag’n’Bone Man is back at #51 thanks to a delayed album boost, and the same can be said for “Addicted” by Jorja Smith at #49.

Then we have our notable losses, songs that fell at least five spots down the chart this week, including “WITHOUT YOU” by the Kid LAROI at #18, “Higher Power” by Coldplay falling big off of the debut at #25, “Your Power” by Billie Eilish at #26, “Didn’t Know” by Tom Zanetti at #28, “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals at #30, “Leave the Door Open” by Silk Sonic at #31, “Don’t You Worry About Me” by Bad Boy Chiller Crew at #39, “Latest Trends” by A1 x J1 at #46, “Last Time” by Becky Hill at #52, “All I Know So Far” by P!nk at #55 off of the debut, “My Head & My Heart” by Ava Max at #57, “Martin & Gina” by Polo G at #58, “Miss the Rage” by Trippie Redd featuring Playboi Carti dropping hard off of the debut at #60 (Really, what was expected here?), Travis Scott’s remix of HVME’s remix of Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps” at #61, “Cover Me in Sunshine” by P!nk and Willow Sage Heart at #63, “Don’t Play” by Anne-Marie, KSI and Digital Farm Animals at #65, “Sunshine (The Light)” by Fat Joe, DJ Khaled and Amorphous at #66, “Tonight” by Ghost Killer Track featuring D-Block Europe and Oboy at #71, and finally, “Calling My Phone” by Lil Tjay and 6LACK at #73.

That’s not to say there weren’t any notable gains however as we do have some interesting remnants of BRITs excitement and some other reasons for our gains this week, which include “One Day” by Lovejoy (more on them later) at #54, “It’s a sin” by Elton John and Years & Years at #47, “Way Too Long” by Nathan Dawe, Anne-Marie and MoStack at #43, “drivers license” by Olivia Rodrigo at #35 off of the success of “good 4 u” (again, more on that later), “Black Hole” by Griff at #23 thanks to the BRITs, and finally, “deja vu” by Olivia Rodrigo at #11. Really, all of this is just me stalling because this is a massive week – I’m writing this early – let’s just get through this... starting with—oh, for God’s sake.

NEW ARRIVALS

#75 – “Taunt” – Lovejoy

Produced by Cameron Nesbitt

Two weeks in a row, ladies and gentlemen: Minecraft YouTuber-core. How this happens I have no idea but regardless, the people of the UK seem to enjoy this Wilbur Soot guy’s new band. Is the new single better than the last one that charted from this EP, at least? Well, yeah, it is, mostly because at least this one’s an actual pop rock tune that, whilst derivative again, has more hooks than “One Day”, especially those stop-and-start-again verses that give me mathcore flashbacks, just with less of a catharsis to come from it other than that infectious, trumpet-laden chorus. The content is pretty gross if anything, seemingly focusing in on this past relationship from secondary school in which Wilbur tears into a girl for being insecure despite her privileges... for seemingly no reason. I mean, surely, you’ve moved on, right? Thankfully, Wilbur does get his comeuppance by the end of the song as the girl throws his drink at him, but it does leave the rest of the song with a pretty spiteful taste in my mouth that can’t be avoided by some pretty, 2000s indie rock-esque instrumentals. It doesn’t help that Wilbur Soot is such a non-presence as well, which I can see improving as the band goes on to record more material but the problem is with this early stage is that for now, it’s all rather primitive... yet it’s still charting. Oh, and if any people happen to find this that are fans of this guy, I am terrified of you so I’ll clarify that I don’t dislike this band at all, I’m just not a fan of what I’ve heard. I just wanted to put that out there because I value my personal information.

#74 – “Crocodile Teeth” – Skillibeng

Produced by Adde Instrumentals and Johnny Wonder

So last week, Nicki Minaj re-released her classic 2009 mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty onto official streaming services for the first time, with a remastered mix of some of her classic remixes as well as some new tracks or fan-favourite loosies sprinkled in. Why do I say this in reference to some random unrelated track, you ask? Well, we’ll get back to Nicki later but this song was actually remixed by Nicki and appears on that mixtape, despite baring no resemblance or relation to that mixtape at all, given this was released in 2020. The UK Singles Chart is particularly inconsistent is crediting remixes however, so we have the original here and, for what it’s worth, I quite like this. Skillibeng isn’t the most interesting presence but does his job in being vaguely menacing and violent over this cheap piano-led Afroswing instrumental with some questionable bass mastering. The song is in Patois but you can get the gist that it’s gunplay and flexing, typically stuff you’d hear in any UK drill track and it’s generic for sure but catchy enough to ignore. This version of the song is completely passable but I do think it is elevated by Nicki’s short introductory verse on the remix. I’d obviously have preferred there be more interplay but the remix was probably only known to Skillibeng when Nicki’s lawyers reached out anyway.

#72 – “Straightenin” – Migos

Produced by DJ Durel, Atake, Sluzyyy, OSIRIS, Nuki and Slime Castro

So Migos are finally preparing to release their highly-anticipated record Culture III as the boys are back together after some time apart, in which they have had varying levels of success, with Offset probably delivering the best solo material because he has both the best qualities of Takeoff and Quavo and always delivers on guest verses... I’m sorry, what about this needed six producers? This beat is not bad by any stretch with some vague flute loop eerily played under a rote trap beat, of which the bounced 808s are probably of most interest, but I do not understand how one person, let alone just an AI, couldn’t have made this alone. Regardless, the beat is good enough to make Quavo sound like he finally cares, even if he’s just going to talk about how he just saw Tenet – a bit late to the party – and how he turned a pandemic to a “band-emic”. Yeah, okay, so we’re going to ignore Mr. Quavious and move onto Takeoff and Offset who... at least have some good flows, albeit just the same triplet deliveries they’ve had for years. I think the most interesting part about this whole song is the slippery backing vocal that follows Quavo in the later choruses, which shows an attention to detail I missed from these guys. There’s only so much I can hear Quavo say “don’t nothin’ get straight ‘bout straightenin’” before I lose my mind, though, especially by the time we get to that awkward outro, so I can’t call myself a fan of this. If we’re speaking trap-rap from acts on hiatus, I really would have preferred “Lay wit Ya” by Isaiah Rashad and Duke Deuce to chart but I guess these guys will do.

#64 – “Independence Day Freestyle” – Fredo

Produced by Handz

By the end of this episode, I will never want to hear skittering hi-hats ever again. For now, however, we’ve got the same genre, different country as we go home to Fredo, a British rapper who’s pretty consistently good to be fair to him and did release an album I liked earlier this year. This is just a random freestyle he dropped last week because he felt like it, and here it is on the chart. Okay, well, it isn’t an actual freestyle because nothing that’s called a freestyle actually is in 2021, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a trap banger in itself and it’s got the foundation for it. I love the eerie chipmunk vocal sample that adds a touch of soul to the menacing keys before they get drowned out by trap percussion and Fredo going through his typical rags-to-riches commentary and memories of gang violence in one massive verse that somehow keeps my interest throughout the entire three minutes. The flow is about as smooth as it gets with UK rap, typically a lot stiffer, especially in drill, and the mixing’s fine, so yeah, I can’t really complain. I’d have preferred a chorus, obviously, and there are extended freestyles we’ll talk about later that do this a lot better, but for now, I can dig this, especially considering it’s pretty damn quotable for what it is. “If I fell off, I must have fell off the stairs into some elevators” is a bar, as is when he says he’s got more foreign cars than an Asian wedding or when he calls himself “Lord of the Bling”... okay, maybe that one’s not as impressive.

#62 – “The Great Escape” – Blanco and Central Cee

Produced by LiTek and WhyJay

Central Cee is a more familiar name but you may not know Blanco who, despite the collaboration with Cee making it ripe for comparison and comedy, is not a French white rapper. Rather, he’s from pioneering drill group Harlem Spartans and this is actually his first solo charting song thanks to Cee’s appearance. As you’d expect, this has some loud drill production and vague acoustic guitar loop as well as some stuttering vocal production peppered with dark 808s (that do bang here in all honesty) and pointless alarm sounds. Whilst drill is so standardised now, I do actually like this beat because it’s what I want to hear Cee on; sure, it’s got the guitar and the flutes but it’s also got a sax riff, which is what made “Loading” so fun. Blanco himself is also a more charming presence than Cee and their two energies bounce off of each other pretty well, even if the most witty their punchlines get are just referencing Powerpuff Girls characters... and when they’re not basic, they’re borderline incoherent but whatever, this is a fun slice of misogyny and violence that you’d expect from the genre with at least some care put into it. Not bad at all.

#56 – “Bussdown” – Jorja Smith featuring Shaybo

Produced by Riccardo Damian, Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman and Kal Banx

This is the break-out single from the most recent “project” from Jorja Smith, going the Drake route of not bothering to name it an album, mixtape or EP, and this one features London rapper Shaybo in a track about materialism but not as much embracing it as becoming increasingly alienated by it as whilst wealth may bring you luxury and connections, it detaches you from reality, which is the point in Shaybo’s verses about being Miss Naive, someone who is increasingly aggressive as a result because, well, she always gets what she wants, right? This is not a project I listened to but the content is promising... until I actually hear the song, with its awkward, clattering percussion showered in overwhelming vocal mixing that fails in whatever intimacy it attempts to present, and that’s before the decidedly unsubtle air horns and guitar licks. The song is minimal enough for the content to kind of fall flat as well, as a song like this feels like it deserves more than a slick bass groove, rather some kind of maximalist yet subtlety eerie production. I’m thinking Shaybo would actually make more sense there than she would here as well as her awkward, pathetic-sounding flow is delivered in the most dead-pan cadence, so much so that it drifts off fully into background “vibe” music but even then, it feels too distracting in the mix to work as that. I did want to like this but it just ends up as a really disappointing track from Jorja Smith, once again.

#42 – “Seeing Green” – Nicki Minaj, Drake and Lil Wayne

Produced by GOVI and Kid Masterpiece

We’re half-way through our batch of new arrivals and what better way to celebrate than a posse cut by three rappers long past their prime by now without a chorus that pushes six minutes? Normally, that would be sarcastic, but in this case it is absolutely not as this is awesome. I love 2000s hip-hop and a chipmunk soul-inflected beat blended with early 2010s era proto-trap production is obviously going to appeal to me as that type of contrast is what I love about more lyrical hip-hop, hell, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was said this was a Kanye beat or more accurately perhaps one by Harry Fraud. It helps that over that gorgeous soul sample we have all three rappers proving they still have it as performers, with some detailed verses from the classic Young Money crew that if nothing else provide a perfect nostalgia button for their era of dominance in hip-hop, not that it’s ever stopped since. I also just love hearing Lil Wayne hungry again, because I am a pretty big fan of his voice, delivery and even some of his wordplay and one-liners, all of which he expresses perfectly in his high-energy verse that switches through flaws as if it were all some off-the-top freestyle, and knowing Wayne, it might as well could have been. I love how he starts his verse off by shooting a guy and then saying it was his bad for doing it because he was a “good cat” and somehow it gets more off the rails afterwards, as he calls his girl a vacuum and says he’s peeing lean, before this self-proclaimed “badonkadonk bikini fiend” reminisces about his bisexual ex from Atlanta in a pretty clever use of repetition in rap. This is all with his sludged drawl of a delivery, which becomes especially important when he calls us all back to 2010 as when Wayne was in prison at his career peak, Drake always said “Free Weezy” and now 10 years later, Wayne’s saying “Free Drizzy” because Drake’s locked up in Canada because of the COVID-19 pandemic... because of course. I know it just seems like I’m itching out tiny little details in the verse but that’s what’s so great about repeated listens to detailed and great rap verses. That’s not to say Wayne is the only stand-out here either as Nicki Minaj impresses with that confident delivery she’s known for as she clarifies her beef with Cardi B being less about her “copying her homework” as it was about her up-hill battle with the industry, she recites how bitches are infamously her sons and delivers some pretty clever and quotable lines of her own, like “brand new Vanilla Maserati, I’ve been Haagen-Daszin’”... which again sounds like a bar straight out of 2010. I think the best verse here might actually be from Drake as much as I hate to say it, with bravado out of the gate that seems pretty deserved for someone with as immense success as he’s had. Not only is he referencing back to 2010 and even his Degrassi days, comparing it to the run-up to his upcoming album since he’s back on two crutches, but he’s also delivering some of his most interesting and quotable lines in years, and it all runs off so effortlessly and smoothly, but with a constant hunger and conviction reminding me of some of his deeper cuts like “Dreams Money Can Buy”. I won’t go further than I already have with this song – even though I could gladly quote practically the entirety of Drake’s verse, even when he aspires to be Vladimir Putin (I guess it’s better than accidentally comparing himself to Hitler) – but I’ve rambled on enough about this wonderful track. Triumphant lyrical rapping over soulful vocal loops will never be a thing I stop having a fondness for; these are some of my nostalgia biases creeping in – especially since these aren’t close to being the best verses any of the trio have delivered – but it’s so great hearing all three back on form together. Check this out if you haven’t as it’s absolutely a highlight off of the mixtape’s re-release.

#37 – “Build a Bitch” – Bella Poarch

Produced by Sub Urban and Elle Rizk

Bella Poarch is a name I had to search up and it turns out she is another one of these TikTok stars turned pop singers and all power to them for starting their career through such a useful and culturally important platform, honestly, and realistically, anyone regardless of their career background could make a song I enjoy, so there’s no use in dismissing them as a result, especially if I actually enjoy the concept of this song. The writing tends to be a bit childish as expected – again, more on that later – particularly when she sings lines like “Bob the Builder broke my heart and told me it needs fixing”, but the song’s theme of embracing young women for how they really are instead of Photoshopped, unrealistic beauty expectations is a message I like being expressed to her audience of teenage girls; I see it as necessary in the social media age. I do think that this message could be expressed with more tact than a Build-a-Bear parody but it never goes the slut-shaming route and is more critical of the men demanding or expecting perfection from their female partners, or on a wider scale the expectation for successful women to follow fashion and beauty trends, especially by men in their industries and fields. Poarch herself is a light-hearted vocalist kind of reminding me a bit too much of a self-serious Ashnikko but the melody in the chorus is infectious enough for me to ignore how void a personality she is. It’s harder however to ignore the stiff 808s that drown out clattering, awkward future-bass production and that drop just being really gross, kind of ruining the song in how it’s clearly a lean towards hyper-pop without fully drawing itself within that lane. Either way, this is fine, and at barely two minutes it struggles to find itself as a finished song let alone anything I can be offended by. This is remarkably okay, and that’s more than I expected.

#16 – “a m a r i” – J. Cole

Produced by T-Minus, J. Cole, Sucuki and Timbaland

These songs don’t even show up when you search them on Spotify and to be honest, I was hoping that would lead to limited success but of course, it didn’t. J. Cole’s latest album The Off-Season is yet another mediocre instalment in a dull catalogue full of rambling verses from a guy who thinks he has much more to say than he actually ends up saying, and it’s exhausting to listen let alone discuss the man’s art out of a sheer lack of personality or wit that follows his every move. His Dreamville label is filled to the brim with people more consistent, skilful and interesting than Cole has ever been so it’s just frustrating to see the label boss get all of the recognition. Regardless, I’ve never liked Cole as an artist – especially not a conscious one given the ableism, homophobia and tone-deaf exchange with Noname just last year – so I’m almost glad he’s stripped off half of the pretence of making a woke, important album. He’s just rapping on this record, which gives me the excuse to run through the rest of these consecutive bores from Cole as quickly as possible. First of all, we have “a m a r i”, a barely sufferable dud from the album scored by a blend of acoustic guitars and squelching trap percussion that fails to platform Cole’s Auto-Tuned moaning, oftentimes just aggravating and barely listenable, and sometimes disguising some pretty weak, topic-less verses for a man who claims to be focused. “Want smoke? I’m a whole nicotine company” is not the silliest bar on the album, but I’m almost convinced the song ends as abruptly as it does because Timbaland’s embarrassed that he helped produce such an underwhelming beat and not even someone praised as a modern great can save it from being worthless.

#15 – “p r i d e . i s . t h e . d e v i l” – J. Cole and Lil Baby

Produced by T-Minus

One of my favourite hip-hop releases of last year was Aminé’s Limbo, a diverse selection of tracks that ranged from conscious hip-hop about his ambitions and fears about growing up and raising children in a modern world as well as typical trap-rap flexing and R&B crooners about girl problems. All of this is smoothly stirred into a pot of personality that actually attempts to bridge a gap between older and newer generations of rappers rather than just claiming to. “Can’t Decide” is not one of my favourite tracks from that record – “Compensating” with Young Thug executes its ideas just that little bit better for me – but it’s still a fun, R&B-adjacent tune with insanely catchy hooks about Aminé’s relationships. So why did we need a J. Cole remix? This guy sucks the fun out of beats like a vacuum in a bouncy castle, as he sloppily whines in an almost emo-rap cadence over a cheaper West Coast slide he just can’t convincingly sell. Lyrically, Cole focuses on the idea of pride and how it corrupts someone’s morals, criticising the flashing of money and social isolation from the family... both of which seem like Cole’s M.O. at this point, right? Success amidst independence? Platinum without features? This time around, there is a feature however from Lil Baby, who much like Cole claims to be focused in this very focused whilst pick-and-choosing between random trains of thought in his typical frog-throat delivery. Hey, at least Lil Baby flows with less strain and unwarranted, desperate effort that Cole does, and ends up out-shining the primary artist entirely, even if he’s going to “pay silly bands to have sex on the jet”. ..What?

#13 – “m y . l i f e” – J. Cole, 21 Savage and Morray

Produced by WU10, J. Cole and Jake One

The first lines of this song are “Spiralling up just like a rich person’s staircase; no fly zone, please stay out of my airspace”. Cole, I thought pride was the devil! I understand that one can still acknowledge the flaws in their worldview whilst embracing it and engaging themselves in it – that’s really a lot of the point of rags-to-riches rap – but some subtlety or at least some explanation from someone who wants you to see him as focused, woke, hungry and a master of his craft, would have been nice, right? This is Morray’s first charting hit in the UK and I’m glad he’s here as he’s basically what differentiates this from the duo’s prior collaboration “a lot”, a song that not only banged harder but felt smoother and Hell, just more coherent, especially with some soulful production that this new collaboration glaringly rips off. Morray’s biggest hit is “Quicksand” but his mixtape Street Sermons is full of soulful and honest trap-rap that I’d absolutely recommend for gospel flavour on the surface and the lyrical detail behind the bravado being extensive and confidently delivered, especially standing out on his own with no features to speak of. He has the chorus on here and I’m surprised DaBaby doesn’t have the second verse so this could be a North Carolina anthem but we do have 21 Savage, who delivers his typical brand of cold-hearted (or rather no-hearted), stoic paranoia bars but at least that’s a personality. 21 Savage delivers a slick flow over this sample and spits the pretty simple yet profound bar of “I pray that my past ain’t ahead of me”, leading to probably the most enjoyable verse on the whole album. If you couldn’t tell, the new guys outshine the old guard so obviously with so little effort it’s kind of impressive on Cole’s part even. I’m glad this is the biggest hit from this album so far as not only is this one of the best tracks out of a slim selection but it’s big for both 21 and especially Morray, who I’m really rooting for against, say, a Rod Wave or Kevin Gates in terms of southern rap with a lot more soul and grit. Oh, and Cole, “know it’s on sight when I see you like I’m working at Squarespace”? Really? Again, it’s not the dumbest bar on the album.

#2 – “good 4 u” – Olivia Rodrigo

Produced by Alexander 23 and Dan Nigro

It’s pretty fitting to book-end a batch of new arrivals mostly consisting of hardcore gritty trap with two up-beat alternative rock tracks, and I’ll say I prefer this to Lovejoy mostly because, well, like I said with “Seeing Green”, my biases will always be on full and honest display, and as someone who’s a sucker for pop-punk of all eras, especially if it’s a female-fronted band with some youthful, raspy vocals, this will obviously hit for me. Throughout Sour, I found it hard to buy into the teenage melodrama due to Dan Nigro’s production often sounding too clean for its own sake, never allowing the guitars to really crash into some lo-fi, distorted noise like they seem to want to do on tracks like this, “deja vu” and especially the opener, “traitor”. Sadly, that cuts the chances of radio airplay by a ton more than it should, so we end up with mixing that slides off Rodrigo’s reverb-drenched vocals too smoothly, creating a rather formulaic album, unfortunate for its sheer excess of promise. With that said, this is one of my favourite tracks off of the album, if only for that funky bassline and some of Nigro’s most interesting stylistic and production choices, particularly in the drumming, which sounds as organic as possible for something that was programmed by him and Alexander 23. The sarcasm-laced post-break-up kiss-off is already not unfamiliar territory for Olivia Rodrigo and neither was it for Avril Lavigne, which this track tends to sound almost like an imitation of, down to the inconsistently PG-13 image as “screw you” is delivered with as much conviction as the actual F-bomb in the same verse. Regardless of how much it wants to consistently kill its own momentum, this janky songwriting actually reminds me of early Paramore, much of which holds a special place in my heart, so whilst Hayley Williams has been off doing her solo work – and Paramore seem to have moved on from this kind of bitter, petty pop rock anyway – this quenches that thirst pretty effectively.

Conclusion

Olivia Rodrigo bags the Honourable Mention for “good 4 u” as well as it’s one of two songs debuting this week I think are pretty damn special, the other one being “Seeing Green” by Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne and Drake as it grabs Best of the Week. For the worst, I mean, pick your J. Cole-flavoured poison but personally I’d say “a m a r i” can be crowned Worst of the Week with a Dishonourable Mention to... great, I don’t want to seem like I hate J. Cole but nothing else here is even as bad as his Lil Baby collaboration “p r i d e . i s . t h e . d e v i l”. Here’s this week’s top 10:

Expect two more of those spaces filled up by Olivia Rodrigo next week as whilst we may not get any new entries from her the album will have an impact regardless on the chart. Otherwise, I guess we’ll have to wait and see with how a Queen-sampling BTS song wrecks the chart – probably will give both Olivia and “Body” some #1 competition – as well as new songs from Little Mix, Lana Del Rey, Polo G and Lil Nas X popping up not too far behind it. It should be just as busy next week, folks, so strap in, I suppose. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you then!

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yourdailykitsch · 7 years ago

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Taylor Kitsch Gets in Touch With His Inner David Koresh in ‘Waco’

Taylor Kitsch loves being Taylor Kitsch, and one of the charms of the 36-year-old actor is that if you meet him, you’ll love that Taylor Kitsch loves being Taylor Kitsch too. It was a crisp afternoon in late October, and Kitsch was sitting at a picnic table on the patio of the Mean-Eyed Cat, a Johnny Cash–themed bar on West Fifth Street in Austin. Kitsch was enjoying the sunshine. (“The weather’s been insane. It’s why you live in Texas, you know?”) Kitsch was enjoying his barbecued pork ribs. (“Eating a plate of meat is rare for me, but it’s fun right now.”) Kitsch was enjoying his sleek and very expensive-looking BMW GS Rallye motorcycle, which he’d parked in front of the bar’s entrance. (“That bike’s spanking new. It’s like my child. I love it.”)

Over the past few months, Kitsch had gone on a two-thousand-mile motorcycle trip through the mountain west, riding up Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, winding along Idaho’s Salmon River. He’d visited Africa, “because I didn’t know what the **** was going on with all the poaching, and I wanted to know.” He’d traveled to San Diego to skydive with a bunch of Navy SEALs and his friend and mentor, the macho-man director Peter Berg. He’d gone to the “Harvey Can’t Mess With Texas” benefit show at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin—“a really great concert, like top five for me”—and afterward “tipped, like, 48 beers” with his friend country music star Ryan Bingham. Now Kitsch was preparing to leave the South Austin apartment where he has lived for the past decade and move into his dream house, a 6,500-square-foot bachelor pad on Lake Austin. His whole family—mom, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews—was coming down from British Columbia for Christmas, and Kitsch couldn’t wait to show off his new place. “My mom’s going to lose her mind,” Kitsch said. “We grew up in a single-wide mobile home, then moved to a double-wide—she’ll lose it.” Kitsch was going “full Griswold” on yuletide decorations. He’d already purchased a ten-foot-tall blow-up polar bear to put on his front porch, and he and his oldest brother, Daman, were planning to install an elaborate light display before the rest of the family arrived. “It’ll hurt your eyes,” Kitsch said. “Literally, I hope we get fined by the HOA. That’s our goal, so we’ll do it.” Kitsch became famous for playing the Dillon Panthers’ bad-boy fullback Tim Riggins on the TV show Friday Night Lights, and over the course of five seasons, he made the character irresistible to watch—a teenage jumble of empathy, anger, machismo, and freewheeling fun. When the show ended, Kitsch appeared to be on a rocket path to superstardom, but he still hasn’t quite gotten there. Instead, his career since Friday Night Lights has been defined by soaring expectations, big-budget disappointments, and consistently good acting. When Kitsch and I met in Austin, he had just finished back-to-back press tours for two fall movies in which he plays supporting roles—the espionage thriller American Assassin and the wilderness-firefighter drama Only the Brave. But we were there to talk about Kitsch’s latest part—“the best work of my career, for sure”—which forced the actor to command the screen as never before and might just turn him into a bona fide Hollywood leading man. On January 24, the first episode of this project, Waco, a six-part miniseries about the 1993 standoff at the Branch Davidian compound in Central Texas, will premiere on the newly renamed Paramount Network (formerly Spike). The show stars Michael Shannon, John Leguizamo, Rory Culkin, and Melissa Benoist, but Kitsch has the plum role. Kitsch is playing David Koresh. The Waco siege has been the subject of a dozen or so documentaries that range from serious-minded to crackpot, but the new series is improbably the first dramatic re-creation of the entire event: 51 days of stalled negotiations and rising tensions that ended in an inferno that killed Koresh and 75 of his followers. The project’s genesis is unexpected: it was written, directed, and produced by brothers John and Drew Dowdle, whose handful of career credits includes low-budget horror films like Devil and Quarantine and the poorly reviewed Owen Wilson–Pierce Brosnan thriller No Escape. (Harvey Weinstein was an executive producer on the series, but his name has been removed from the credits.) The Dowdles may not have had much experience, but they had a plan: though the Waco siege has been a political and cultural lightning rod for the past 25 years, the brothers decided that their film wouldn’t dwell on the controversies. They wanted to tell the tragic, human, “no-bad-guys version of the story.” To do that, they knew that their single most important decision would be casting someone who could bring tragic humanity to Koresh. “We thought Koresh as a character is a deeply flawed individual, but there’s something a bit everyman about him, there’s something about him that people liked,” Drew Dowdle said. “The Taylor Kitsch version of David Koresh is inherently someone you would enjoy being around.” When Kitsch first heard about the part, he had only a hazy memory of news coverage of the Waco siege. But the more he read, the more fascinated he became. After meeting with the Dowdles, he reached out to his agent and said, “If they want me to do it, I’ll swing. I just need prep time.” Shooting was set to start in Santa Fe in April 2017, and as 2016 was coming to a close, Kitsch steeled himself for the next half year of preparation and production. “I went to Telluride for New Year’s and just blew it out—like, pizza, anything you could drink, ski, just go all out, don’t even worry about anything,” Kitsch said. On January 2, he arrived back in Austin, ready to begin his transformation. When Kitsch first came to Austin, in 2006, to film the pilot for Friday Night Lights, he was 24 years old, “green and raw” and mostly in the dark about acting and the entertainment business. “I genuinely didn’t know what a critic was,” he told me. Kitsch had grown up four hours west of Vancouver in the city of Kelowna, British Columbia, with his mother and two older brothers—his dad was mostly absent—and until he was 20, he dreamed about playing professional ice hockey. When back-to-back knee injuries ended his career, he moved to New York to try to make it as an actor, beginning a scrappy period in which he took classes, modeled, and, for a several-week stretch, spent his nights sleeping on the subway. Kitsch had almost missed his screen test for Friday Night Lights due to visa issues, and when he arrived, Berg, the series’ creator, first made him improvise in character for thirty minutes. Berg was suitably impressed. “What you did in there, make sure you do in this screen test with all the execs, and I think we’ll be just fine,” he told Kitsch. Friday Night Lights never had a big audience, but to the people who watched it week after week, it might as well have been War and Peace, except about high school football, and way more fun. Kitsch was the heartthrob, and even while the show was in the middle of its run, he was getting movie work, playing Gambit in an X-Men movie and the war photographer Kevin Carter in The Bang Bang Club. After Friday Night Lights ended, in 2011, Kitsch was primed to really make it big. Going into 2012, he had starring roles in two massively hyped movies with enormous budgets, John Carter and Battleship, both of which seemed like good bets to turn into franchises. “I had two ten-year contracts,” Kitsch said. “I would have been going Carter, Battleship, Carter, Battleship, and maybe an indie somewhere in there if I could.” But both films fizzled at the box office, and Kitsch’s career was forced to become more interesting. “I still have my journal from when I was in acting class in New York where it’s like, ‘All I want to do is indies and these characters and Sean Penn, Sean Penn, Sean Penn,’ ” Kitsch told me. He got his wish. He’s spent the past four years bringing a coiled-up intensity to men as varied as Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy in Lone Survivor, Gay Men’s Health Crisis president Bruce Niles in HBO’s The Normal Heart, and patrolman Paul Woodrugh in the much-maligned second season of True Detective. Instead of conquering the world as an above-the-title star, Kitsch became our most finely featured character actor. When Kitsch arrived back in Austin after his Telluride bacchanal, he got down to studying. He read the memoirs of Branch Davidian survivor David Thibodeau, watched home videos of Koresh preaching, and made a stab at grasping the Branch Davidians’ end-times theology. “I literally had a beginner’s-Bible-study version of the Book of Revelation,” Kitsch said. Koresh was an enthusiastic rock guitarist and singer (followers wore “David Koresh: God Rocks” T-shirts), so Kitsch took guitar and voice lessons to pull off the on-screen performances. To physically transform into Koresh—who did not have movie-star muscles—Kitsch dropped thirty pounds, limiting himself to eight hundred calories a day and running around Lady Bird Lake while listening to Koresh’s sermons. As Kitsch dug into his research, he saw a clear path to playing the public persona of the Branch Davidian leader. “Before the siege, it’s his birthday every day,” Kitsch said. “It’s all about him. He’s got a go-cart track and a shooting range, and he’s a rock star—obviously the lead singer, obviously the lead guitarist.” In Waco, Koresh, as played by Kitsch, oozes charm and bravado and knows just how to manipulate the people around him. That’s not a stretch. The 33-year-old self-proclaimed “Lamb of God” was in the habit of waking up his followers in the middle of the night so that they could listen to him show off his savant-like recall of the Bible. He had about two dozen “spiritual wives,” including some who were already married to other Branch Davidians. After a claimed revelation from God, he commanded all men in the compound to be celibate, with the singular exception of David Koresh. (“I’ve assumed the burden of sex for us all, but not for my own kicks,” Kitsch as Koresh says in the show’s first episode.) He was good at a drawling, tough-guy act too: he drove a ’68 Camaro, loved his firearms, and famously sent a message to the FBI saying, “You come pointing guns in the direction of my wife and my kids, dammit, I’ll meet you at the door any time.” But Kitsch also had to reckon with Koresh’s darkness. Among Koresh’s wives were women whom he had married when they were as young as twelve years old, and even if you think the federal government acted disastrously at Waco, it’s hard to see Koresh as blameless in the deaths of the 86 people who perished in the initial raid and the final fire. “Taylor and I had long talks: ‘How do you play this guy in a human way?’ ” John Dowdle said. “That was a big part of the preparation, just trying to get through the ugly stuff so he’s not a monster from the get-go.” Kitsch seized on Koresh’s childhood to understand him, trying to find that part of the Branch Davidian leader that was still Vernon Wayne Howell, Koresh’s given name. During his research, Kitsch read about a phone call that Koresh placed to his mother during the ATF raid on the compound. Koresh had been shot twice, was bleeding profusely, and thought that he was minutes from the end. His mother didn’t pick up, but he left a message, telling her he was dying, asking her to “tell Grandma hello for me,” and saying, “I’ll see y’all in the skies.” “I broke reading it,” Kitsch said. “I was crushed. And after that, I was like, ‘I’m dialed in now and I’m ready to go.’ ” The call hadn’t been in the script, but Kitsch emailed the Dowdles and urged them to add it: “I’m like, ‘This will take fifteen, twenty minutes to shoot, guys, we’ve got to have this in there. This is not Koresh—this is Vernon calling his mom.’ ” The Dowdles agreed. When Kitsch arrived on set, cast and crew who were wondering what he’d bring to the role didn’t have to wait long. On the first day, the Dowdles had scheduled a scene in which Kitsch delivered a nine-page sermon on divine joy to his congregants. “It was pretty remarkable to see him get up and do that,” Paul Sparks, who plays Koresh’s deputy, Steve Schneider, told me. “I had heard some of Koresh on the internet, but to be in the room and listen to this person talk about these complex, different ways of looking at Scripture—it was like, ‘Right, that’s what it was like.’ ” Regardless of whether Waco is a hit, Kitsch has his next project lined up. He’s planning to go to a friend’s San Saba ranch in February to shoot a movie currently titled Pieces. It will be his debut as a screenwriter and feature-film director. Pieces tells the story of “three best friends who take an opportunity to change their lives.” In this case, that opportunity is to intercept a drug drop on the Texas-Mexico border, after which, as you might assume, “all hell breaks loose.” Kitsch wrote the script over the course of several motorcycle road trips, and he used the journeys not only to clear his mind for writing but as an opportunity to conduct research. “I remember being in Idaho and there’s this truck-stop hooker, basically, and I had a coffee with her,” Kitsch told me. “Don’t read into that, it was—literally, it was a coffee—and I just bombed questions at her, and she was just super cool. I put a character based on her in the movie.” Kitsch seems to have exactly the kind of fame that he wants. He can build a dream house and get a dream role, but he can drop by a truck stop in Idaho and bomb questions at people who don’t recognize him. He has famous friends and wild adventures, but every interaction he has doesn’t have to be about his celebrity. As we were sitting at Mean-Eyed Cat, Kitsch told me about turning down a role recently. It was a “little rom-com for five days’ work,” he said, and it was “stupid money.” He would have made more on that movie than he did on Waco, Only the Brave, and three Normal Hearts combined—“for five days’ work,” he said again. I asked him why he’d said no. He did the voice-over work for Ram Trucks commercials, after all. First he answered like an actor. “It’s just not where I want to be, it’s not the story I want to tell,” he said. Then he added a caveat that was pure Taylor Kitsch. “I mean, I’m for sale,” he said, a big smile breaking out over his face. “If you want to give me $20 million for something and my mom never has to work again and my family’s good for the rest of their life, yes, I’m going to do it—don’t care who you are. I come from nothing, so to give my mom that call would just be awesome. I mean, I wouldn’t do porn, but, you know?”

#taylor kitsch #waco #austin texas #interview

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johnchiarello · 6 years ago

Text

Sunday sermon

Sunday sermon 7-1-18 [video made 6-24-18]

Sunday sermon videos- [filmed at Cole Park amphitheater]

https://youtu.be/0caw5o3CgX4

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15FGYgXdxJGeaZrAv9hN_rsZiJQYOx4OD/view?usp=sharing

NOTE- To my friends on Medium- you will see this post today- Sunday 7-1-18- being I just re-joined Medium again- I will be posting my past studies the next few days. So that’s why there have been so many new posts the past few days- as soon as I get those studies up- I will be only posting about 3- 4 times a week- Later today I will try and post the video I make today ‘Real Time’- always look for the date- because eventually I will ‘re-post’ videos that will say ‘Real Time’- but the date says it all- Thanks, John.

VAN UPDATE- https://youtu.be/2Be__VAlfb8

UPDATE ON WHTIE VAN- All is ok- the vehicle was being used for a legitimate reason. I will remove the pictures from facebook- but it is impossible to take all the other posts down. John.

ON VIDEO [Links to all my sites at the bottom of this post]

.Here’s the video I mentioned on today’s video https://youtu.be/glNc1nASC88

Sadly- this is my most popular video- 1.7 K views! I think the title had something to do with it

.John the Baptist

.What is the single best bible chapter that covers the whole history of the bible?

.Paul preaches Christ

.Fulfilling your course

.Then comes the break thru

.Silent until the time of the promise

.Don’t seek a venue to speak until your prepared for the task

.Learn to serve in silence first

.Magnificat

.Web site stuff too

.The boy who was shot dead- by his wife on youtube

.He was trying to go viral as a stunt person

.Should this even be allowed?

.Be disciplined in fulfilling your mission

NEW [Other videos below]

This Sunday I spoke on the verses from the Mass- I didn’t realize that it was the Catholic [Orthodox?] Sunday where they recognize the birth of John the Baptist- and the other post I ‘posted’ earlier in the day had that as the top verses- [see here- https://ccoutreach87.com/2018/06/24/sunday-sermon-6-24-18/ ]

From Isaiah we read-

Isaiah 49:1 Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me FROM THE WOMB; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name.

Isaiah 49:2 And he hath made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand hath he hid me, and made me a polished shaft; in his quiver hath he hid me;

Isaiah 49:3 And said unto me, Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified.

Isaiah 49:4 Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and my work with my God.

Isaiah 49:5 And now, saith the LORD that formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him, Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the LORD, and my God shall be my strength.

Isaiah 49:6 And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.

The first verse speaks about a calling- from birth- named from the mothers womb.

There are other prophets who had this type of calling as well [Jeremiah] and in the birth of John the Baptist the angel named John before he was born-

Luke 1:13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.

In the next reading from the gospel [it’s long I’ll past the whole passage below- or just read Luke 1]

we saw how the angel Gabriel appeared to John’s father when he was serving the Lord as a priest-

He told Zechariah that his wife would have a son- and that his prayers were answered-

Luke 1:13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy PRAYER is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.

Luke 1:14 And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth.

Luke 1:15 For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb.

Luke 1:16 And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God.

Luke 1:17 And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

Yet something strange happens- even though Zechariah was praying for a child- he still doubted the word- from an angel!

Luke 1:18 And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.

Luke 1:19 And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.

Luke 1:20 And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season.

Because of his doubt- he will not be able to speak until the word comes to pass.

Then Elizabeth has the child- and names him John- as the angel spoke-

Luke 1:57 Now Elisabeth's full time came that she should be delivered; and she brought forth a son.

Luke 1:58 And her neighbours and her cousins heard how the Lord had shewed great mercy upon her; and they rejoiced with her.

Luke 1:59 And it came to pass, that on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child; and they called him Zacharias, after the name of his father.

Luke 1:60 And his mother answered and said, Not so; but he shall be called John.

John was indeed called and named from the womb- a name that God put on the child.

I also taught how Jesus said John was the greatest of the prophets- and there are multiple prophecies that speak of John as the forerunner.

The reading from Acts 13 also mentioned John-

Acts 13:24 When John had first preached before his coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel.

Acts 13:25 And as John fulfilled HIS COURSE, he said, Whom think ye that I am? I am not he. But, behold, there cometh one after me, whose shoes of his feet I am not worthy to loose.

I taught mostly from Luke 1- and spoke about being faithful to the calling of God on your life.

Some times we as believers are waiting for the miracle moment- and yes- there are indeed times when God comes thru in a clutch- the ‘miracle breakthrough’ if you will.

But in the case of Zechariah- his miracle happened as he was already fulfilling the purpose of God for his life- he was ‘on course’- just like the above speaks about his son- being ON COURSE-

Luke 1:8 And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office before God in the order of HIS COURSE,

.As a matter of fact- he was so determined to do the will of God- whether or not his prayer was answered- that when the angel himself brought the word about the ‘breakthrough’- Zechariah doubted it!

I think we can learn a lesson about being faithful- even when we don’t get the miracle.

Most ministry- service- is actually a labour of love.

But love is indeed defined as action in the bible-

John 15:13 [Full Chapter]

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

If we love God- we will love our brother- and in doing so- we keep the commandment of God-

John 5:2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments.

John 5:3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.- 1st John

To love- to serve- is something all of us can do- all the time.

It might not be in the public sphere- often it is not- yet if we are dedicated to the calling- we will simply serve the Lord in ‘our course’.

And then yes- maybe the thing you have prayed for will happen one day- maybe it will come to you in a way you never expected-

Just remember- when the Gabriel moment occurs- don’t doubt the word-

Because you will indeed have something to proclaim- as long as you still have your voice.

[I think I quoted this verse on the video [Haven’t reviewed the video yet]

Psalm 50:23

Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me: and to him that ordereth his conversation aright will I shew the salvation of God.

[it speaks about order- the theme I mentioned above]

OTHER VIDEOS [These are the videos I upload nightly to my various sites- links to those sites are at the bottom of this post- PAST POSTS below]

6-26-18 Real Time teaching- Bible, God, Church history- Jerome- Latin Vulgate- Trent [o]- Dead Sea scrolls- Canon- https://youtu.be/6sASGxM30tc

6-27-18 Real time update- teaching too https://youtu.be/epjp0F_o7TA

https://www.facebook.com/john.chiarello.5/videos/10204507902975794/

Teaching in San Antonio https://youtu.be/vggHyWfH9dA

Did cop kill himself? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JQwNbjepgqVGmXS-VUpz7PLkQ-30PP2B/view?usp=sharing

Sunday sermon https://youtu.be/i-AKdBI0W14

Homeless Vet- Bil Hagan talks about his father- a vet too https://flic.kr/p/JSJQEH

The man of sin https://youtu.be/Xf9hAQ_PmCE

Christian- Muslim dialogue https://youtu.be/1ksSWXUCYXU

Sunday sermon https://1drv.ms/v/s!Aocp2PkNEAGMgWNZTm6FVQM1tu5l

Teaching- real Time https://flic.kr/p/JUCD7n

Teaching- https://youtu.be/HTDjNzEXUJA

Galatians 5 https://youtu.be/fQPd3_3lc9k

Acts 1 https://drive.google.com/file/d/10R6Xs6DfskAaE2w5niqSp6twiOX1iCnm/view?usp=sharing

Sunday sermon https://flic.kr/p/28AnuNg

Snake on a pole https://youtu.be/uxWcr1WcRcw

Ephesians 4 https://youtu.be/xBL-TFowy-Q

Sunday sermon 2 https://flic.kr/p/JYHokK

Plane take off from Newark- New Jersey back to Texas https://1drv.ms/v/s!Aocp2PkNEAGMgWSAqQap21v8iYUS

Texas friends- Burger King in Corpus Christi https://youtu.be/R0ZNzDkvphc

Acts 2 https://youtu.be/pATGG_kk42g

Jonah 4 https://www.facebook.com/john.chiarello.5/videos/10204515533806560/

Caller Times- teaching too https://flic.kr/p/28ErktH

PAST POSTS [These are links and parts of my past teachings that relate in some way to today’s post- Verses below]

https://ccoutreach87.com/acts-links/

https://ccoutreach87.com/romans-updated-2015/

https://ccoutreach87.com/john-complete-links-added/

ROMANS 10 [On the video I give a broad overview of the doctrine ‘the salvation of the righteous’. I cover many verses not in the post].

.DOES THE BIBLE TEACH ‘A SINNERS PRAYER”?

.DOES THIS CHAPTER SAY ‘THOSE WHO CALLED/ASKED- DID NOT GET IT?

.IS THEIR A ‘RIGHTEOUS MAN’S PRAYER’ THAT BRINGS SALVATION?

. PLEASE- LETS STOP DIVIDING OVER SMALL STUFF-

(854)ROMANS 10: 1-13 Many years ago I referenced all the back up scriptures for this chapter [and book!]. The study was intense because I saw a fundamental ‘fault line’ that ran thru many in the Evangelical church [the revivalist tradition]. The ‘fault line’ was reading this chapter as in if it were saying ‘ask Jesus into your heart, or you won’t be saved’. Now, I have no problem with those who trace their conversion to an experience like this. But I want to give you my understanding of this chapter, based on the exhaustive study I did years ago. Also, I will probably quote some verses and you will have to find them later [I forget where they all are]. Paul begins with his desire for ‘all Israel to be saved’. I taught in chapter one how come the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. Because all who believe ‘become righteous’. After 9 chapters of Romans, we have seen that when Paul refers to ‘justification by faith’ this is synonymous with ‘believing with the heart unto righteousness’. Here Paul’s desire is for Israel to experience ‘all facets of salvation’ [present and future] to ‘be saved’. Now, he will say ‘Christ is the end of the law to all who believe’ Israel did not attain unto ‘righteousness’ because they sought after it by trying to keep the law. But it comes only by faith. Then Paul quotes a kind of obscure verse from Deuteronomy saying ‘Moses says the righteousness which is by faith’ [note- this whole description that follows is describing ‘the righteousness that comes by faith’] and says ‘the word is near thee, in thy mouth and heart’. Paul then says ‘whoever calls on the Lord will be saved, with the heart a man believes and becomes righteous [which according to Paul means ‘justified’] and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation’. In this text, Paul once again is ‘dividing’ the common understanding of ‘salvation’ meaning ‘getting initially saved’- which is ‘believing and being justified’. And simply saying ‘believers will inevitably call and be saved’ [in a generic sense]. Why would he do this? In the context of his argument, he is simply showing the ‘righteousness which is from the law’ [the man under the law is described as ‘doing something’ continuing under the load and strain of law] versus the ‘righteousness which is by faith’ [described as a person who believes and speaks, as opposed to ‘does stuff’]. It is not inconsistent for Paul to use the term ‘confessing and being saved’ as speaking of something different than meaning ‘accepting Christ into your heart’. Paul is simply giving a description of those who believe ‘all who believe will call’. And yes, they will and do experience ‘salvation’. It’s just in this example Paul is not saying ‘they are saved initially upon confession, calling’. At least not ‘saved’ in the sense of ‘getting justified by faith’. Why? Because the rest of the chapter doesn’t make a whole lotta sense if he were saying this. ‘How can they call on him in whom they have not believed’? He already showed us that ‘believers are justified’. The very argument Paul makes distinguishes between ‘believing unto righteousness, and calling unto salvation’. You can see it like this, there is a verse I stumbled across years ago. It is in one of the prophets [Old Testament] and it says ‘Gods wrath will come upon all them WHO HAVE NOT CALLED UPON HIM’. In this context Paul can be saying ‘whoever calls upon God will never enter judgment/wrath’ [a description of a particular lifestyle, remember Paul said Gods Spirit makes us cry ‘Abba Father’] in this light Paul can be saying ‘all who call [both Jew and Gentile- simply making an argument for inclusion. God accepts ‘all who call’] will not come under future [or present!] wrath’. This would be in keeping with Peters scathing sermon in Act’s where he quotes the Prophet Joel and says ‘whosoever calls upon the Lord shall be saved’. If you go back and read Joel you will see that in context he is saying ‘at the future time of God’s revealed judgment, those who cry for deliverance will be spared’. Peter quotes it in this context as well. He shows Gods future time of judgment and ends with ‘all who call will be saved’. How do we know that Peter was not quoting Joel for some type of ‘sinner’s prayer’ thing? Because after the Jews say ‘what should we do’? He doesn’t lead them in a sinners Prayer! I don’t want to be picky, I simply want you to see context. Paul has already established multiple times thru out this letter how righteousness comes to those who believe. One of the descriptions of ‘those who believe’ are they ‘call upon God’. They even call upon God ‘to save them’. In this chapter the reason Paul uses ‘whosoever calls upon the lord will be saved’ is to simply show God will deliver both Jews and Gentiles. His promise of salvation is ‘to all’. When he uses ‘believing and being made righteous’ along with ‘calling and being saved’ he obviously can not be speaking about the same thing! He even states it this way in his argument. ‘How can they call unless they already believe’? He was simply giving a description of ‘those who believe’. This ‘calling for salvation’ that ‘all who believe’ partake of can speak both of a ‘present tense’ being saved, that is from any and all types of bad things, and a ‘future tense’ deliverance from wrath. Even when Paul quoted David in Roman’s 4, he is ‘describing the blessedness of the man unto whom God will not impute sin’ [Psalms 32] if you go back and read that psalm David says ‘for this shall EVERY ONE THAT IS GODLY PRAY UNTO THEE’. David uses this in the context of his confession of his sin. So the ‘everyone that is Godly’ describes ‘the righteous’ and they WILL CALL! Also in 2nd Corinthians Paul quotes Isaiah ‘now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation’ in the context of ‘God heard you and saved you’. Why would Paul use this in 2nd Corinthians? They need not be told ‘pray and get saved’. In context he used it to encourage them to return back into full communion and fellowship after their restoration and reproof he gave them in the first letter. He is saying ‘I rebuked you guys harshly, you repented and asked for forgiveness. God ‘heard you’ in his acceptable time, now get over it and ‘be restored’. Salvation to them came by ‘calling’ but it was not describing an initial conversion experience. Well, I didn’t realize I would go so long, but this is a good example of having a ‘holistic view’ of scripture. You try and take all the quotes the writers are using, put them in context of the broad themes of scripture. Add that to the immediate context of the letter [Romans] and then come to a deeper understanding of truth. I am not against those who see this chapter thru an evangelistic lens, I just think the way I taught it is more faithful to the text. [NOTE- Thru out this site I have taught the doctrine of ‘the salvation of the righteous’. I mentioned it earlier in Romans and have spoken on it before. If you can find these entries they will add some insight to this chapter. NOTE- verse 20 actually has Paul quoting Isaiah ‘I was found by them who did not ask for me’. This would sure seem strange to say in the same chapter that taught a concept of ‘all who ask for me will enter the kingdom’. It is quite possible to ask and pray and confess everything ‘just right’ and still not find him. And according to this verse, the ones who did ‘find him’ [Gentiles] did not ask! After years of coming to the above understanding I read a church council [Council of Orange?] and I was surprised to see how they actually dealt with the issue of believing versus ‘calling upon God’. They quoted some of these texts to show that before a person could call upon the Lord, he first needed faith. They used this example to show Gods sovereignty in salvation. I though it interesting that they came to the very same conclusions that I did. They even used the same examples! This shows you how the corporate mind of the church is manifestly expressed thru out the ages. I think the council was in the 8thor 9th century?

(855)ROMANS 10:14-21 [Just a note for the previous entry. In the conversions recorded in scripture [Acts] do you know how many times there is a reference to ‘calling upon the Lord’ during the conversion? Surprisingly one time. The conversion of Saul [Paul]! During one of the ‘re-tellings’ of his own story he says ‘I was told to arise, and be baptized. Washing away my sins while calling upon the Lord’. Wow, could we have arguments over this one! Do you identify the ‘washing away of sins’ with baptism or the ‘prayer’? I actually previously taught [somewhere on this long blog!] how in the 1st century Jewish mindset ‘washing from uncleanness’ and water were related. I taught it in a way that did not teach ‘baptismal regeneration’ but more along the lines of ‘discipleship’ you might find the entry under ‘my statement of faith’. The point I want to make here is Paul spent 3 days after the Lord appeared to him before he actually got baptized and made an open confession of faith. Paul’s reputation was so bad [he killed Christians!] that his conversion and confession needed to have all the weight possible. Others needed to know that he now ‘confessed Christ’. Most commentators will look to the appearance of Jesus to Paul on the Damascus road as his conversion. The point I want to make is in the book of Acts, the main ‘altar call’ was actually baptism. This was the normal means to identify with the believing community. We also see the fact that once people believed, they then were baptized. The same distinction can be made with ‘confessing’. Neither can take place until one believes. I would assume that Paul said something like this at his baptism ‘O Jesus, please forgive me for what I have done. I killed your people and have committed a terrible crime’. There obviously were some serious things he needed to confess! But the overall view of conversion in Acts does not show a ‘sinner’s prayer’ type conversion.] Paul indicts Israel ‘The word did come to you, you didn’t believe’. He also quotes Moses ‘God said he would provoke you to jealousy by a nation who were “no people”’. We are beginning a portion of Romans where Paul will try and explain the dynamic of Gods purpose for Israel, and his ‘use’ of the Gentile nations to ‘make them jealous’. When we studied the parables we saw this dynamic at work. Israel was offended that God [Messiah] was offering equal access to the promises of Israel thru Jesus. Israel was jealous of this free grace. Paul shows them that Moses prophesied that this day would come. You also see this in Stephens sermon in Acts chapter 7 ‘Moses said the Lord would raise up a prophet like me [Jesus!]’ and then Stephen shows how Israel also did not recognize that Moses was the intended deliverer of the people. So likewise 1stcentury Israel also did not recognize their Messiah [the first time around!]. God’s acceptance of the Gentiles was difficult for Israel to embrace. It took a divine vision for Peter, and he still ‘fell back’ into a caste system mentality. God is not finished with these dealings [Paul will say in the next few chapters] and he will make every effort to show both Jews and Gentiles that they are both important pieces to this ‘divine puzzle’. He will even warn the Gentiles ‘don’t get proud, if God cut off the true branches to graft you in, watch out! He might do the same with you.’ Paul is striving for both Jew and Gentile to live in harmony as much as possible, he did not want to come off as a defender of the Gentiles only. He was ‘defending the gospel’.

(857)ROMANS- Let me overview a little. This entry goes along with the last one [#856- those of you reading this straight from the Romans study will need to find it under one of the ‘teaching’ sections]. Paul deals with the issue of ‘being provoked by/to jealousy’. Many times believers remain divided because of pride and jealousy. We often do not want to accept the fact that God actually is working thru other camps, groups of Christians who are ‘not like us’. It challenges our very identity at times! We feel like ‘well, my whole experience with God has been one of coming out of [name the group- for many it’s Catholicism] and I KNOW that I have found and experienced God by leaving mistaken concepts about God. Therefore any other ‘defender’ of Catholics is challenging my core experience’. I myself attribute my conversion to ‘leaving religious ideas’ and reading the bible for the first time. Though I had various believers witnessing to me, it was the actual reading of Johns gospel [and the whole New Testament] that clinched it for me. The reality of ‘whoever believes’ as opposed to religion. But my own experience should not limit [in my mind] the reality of others who also embraced the Cross without ‘leaving’ their former church. It is quite possible that other ‘Catholics’ arrived at a serious level of commitment to the Cross, while remaining faithful to their church. Now I realize this in itself can become an issue of contention, all I want to show you is we should not limit the power of the gospel to our own personal experience. During the recent controversy [2008] over certain Pentecostal expressions of ‘revival’ some old time churches simply made a case against all the Charisms [gifts] of the Spirit. The fact is most theologians accept the gifts of the Spirit as being for all ages of the church. Sure, there have been problems with them, even early on [the Montanists] but the fact is there has always been some type of Charismatic expression of Christianity thru out the church age. But the more Reformed brother’s sound [and are often!] more ‘biblical’ than some of the crazy stuff that happens under the banner of ‘Pentecostal/Charismatic’. So the divisions exist. In this chapter [Romans 11] Paul is dealing with a very real dynamic that says ‘I find my whole identity in the way God has worked with me for centuries [Judaism]. The fact that he began a new thing with other groups who I detest [Gentiles] has offended me to the point where I can’t even experience God any more’. Israel could not see past her own experience with God. The fact that God was ‘being experienced’ by other groups in ways that seemed highly ‘unorthodox’ did not mean that their former experience was illegitimate. It simply meant that Gods experience with them was always intended to ‘break out’ into the broader community of mankind. They lost this original intent and used their ‘orthodoxy’ as a means of self identification. An ‘elite’ religious class, if you will. I find many of these same dynamics being present in the modern church. We should stand strong for orthodoxy, we also need to expose and correct error when it gets to a point where many believers are being led astray. But we also need to be able to see God at work in other groups, we should not use our own experience with God [no matter how legitimate it is!] as the criterion of what’s right or wrong.

CATECHISM of the Catholic Church-

1963 According to Christian tradition, the Law is holy, spiritual, and good,14 yet still imperfect. Like a tutor15 it shows what must be done, but does not of itself give the strength, the grace of the Spirit, to fulfill it. Because of sin, which it cannot remove, it remains a law of bondage. According to St. Paul, its special function is to denounce and disclose sin, which constitutes a “law of concupiscence” in the human heart.16 However, the Law remains the first stage on the way to the kingdom. It prepares and disposes the chosen people and each Christian for conversion and faith in the Savior God. It provides a teaching which endures for ever, like the Word of God. (1610, 2542, 2515)

1964 The Old Law is a preparation for the Gospel. “The Law is a pedagogy and a prophecy of things to come.”17 It prophesies and presages the work of liberation from sin which will be fulfilled in Christ: it provides the New Testament with images, “types,” and symbols for expressing the life according to the Spirit. Finally, the Law is completed by the teaching of the sapiential books and the prophets which set its course toward the New Covenant and the Kingdom of heaven. (122, 1828)

1977 Christ is the end of the law (cf. Rom 10:4); only he teaches and bestows the justice of God.

1982 The Old Law is a preparation for the Gospel.

1983 The New Law is the grace of the Holy Spirit received by faith in Christ, operating through charity. It finds expression above all in the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount and uses the sacraments to communicate grace to us.

I TALKED ABOUT THESE VIRTUES ON THE VIDEO-

I. The Human Virtues

1804 Human virtues are firm attitudes, stable dispositions, habitual perfections of intellect and will that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our conduct according to reason and faith. They make possible ease, self-mastery, and joy in leading a morally good life. The virtuous man is he who freely practices the good. (2500, 1827)

The moral virtues are acquired by human effort. They are the fruit and seed of morally good acts; they dispose all the powers of the human being for communion with divine love.

The cardinal virtues

1805 Four virtues play a pivotal role and accordingly are called “cardinal”; all the others are grouped around them. They are: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. “If anyone loves righteousness, [Wisdom’s] labors are virtues; for she teaches temperance and prudence, justice, and courage.”64 These virtues are praised under other names in many passages of Scripture.

1806 Prudence is the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it; “the prudent man looks where he is going.”65 “Keep sane and sober for your prayers.”66 Prudence is “right reason in action,” writes St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle.67 It is not to be confused with timidity or fear, nor with duplicity or dissimulation. It is called auriga virtutum (the charioteer of the virtues); it guides the other virtues by setting rule and measure. It is prudence that immediately guides the judgment of conscience. The prudent man determines and directs his conduct in accordance with this judgment. With the help of this virtue we apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid. (1788, 1780)

1807 Justice is the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor. Justice toward God is called the “virtue of religion.” Justice toward men disposes one to respect the rights of each and to establish in human relationships the harmony that promotes equity with regard to persons and to the common good. The just man, often mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures, is distinguished by habitual right thinking and the uprightness of his conduct toward his neighbor. “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.”68 “Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.”69 (2095, 2401)

1808 Fortitude is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause. “The Lord is my strength and my song.”70 “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”71 (2848, 2473)

1809 Temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable. The temperate person directs the sensitive appetites toward what is good and maintains a healthy discretion: “Do not follow your inclination and strength, walking according to the desires of your heart.”72Temperance is often praised in the Old Testament: “Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites.”73 In the New Testament it is called “moderation” or “sobriety.” We ought “to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world.”74 (2341, 2517)

Down the road I hope to teach a bit more about the Catholic teaching of ‘the working of the work’- meaning the Church teaches that the Sacraments ‘work’ regardless of the holiness/faith of those administering them. It’s a controversy that dates back to the early centuries of the Church [the Donatist controversy]. The point I want to make here is the bible teaches that there are things we can train ourselves to do- acts of prayer- fasting- etc.- that over time will train the mind to think Godly thoughts [these practices of discipline work over time- regardless of the way you feel]. I think one of the drawbacks from the Protestant Reformation was the neglect of ‘works’- the role that good works play in the Christian life. Paul [in Romans] says ‘as you have yielded your parts as instruments of unrighteousness to sin- so now yield them as instruments of righteousness unto God’. I added this section about Virtues because I felt it covered this theme well.

Proverbs 9:1 Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars:

Proverbs 9:2 She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table.

Proverbs 9:3 She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city,

Proverbs 9:4 Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him,

Proverbs 9:5 Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled.

Proverbs 9:6 Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.

POSTED BY CCOUTREACH87 ⋅ JUNE 21, 2016 ⋅ LEAVE A COMMENT

THE FLOOD- Amos 9:5 And the Lord GOD of hosts is he that toucheth the land, and it shall melt, and all that dwell therein shall mourn: and it shall rise up wholly like a flood; and shall be drowned, as by the flood of Egypt. https://youtu.be/BLELo-v0rRc The flood https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/6-18-16-the-flood.zip MY LINKS- https://ccoutreach87.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/brief-history-of-egypt/ https://ccoutreach87.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/church-unlimited-outline/ https://ccoutreach87.wordpress.com/house-of-prayer-or-den-of-thieves/ https://ccoutreach87.wordpress.com/further-talks-on-church-and-ministry/ ON VIDEO- .Russia bombs ‘our fighters’- while we stand by and watch .50 diplomats rebuke Obama .Cyber influence is just as real as ‘going to the building’ [Harvard- Cambridge- etc.] .The U.S. govt. still uses Floppy disks to save info .Maybe we are behind the times when we say ‘The radicals are not ‘REALLY’ terrorists- because there is no connection’. In Today’s world [one without floppy disks] you can be trained by the top universities in the world- without actually ‘being there’. .Syria- Russia .Ukraine .Guccifer .They even hacked Hillary’s campaign! .Crimea voted to go back to Russia- by over 90 % of the vote- John Kerry and the U.S. said ‘we will not honor it’. Hmm? I thought we were for Democracy? .Hillary ‘Trumps a birther’ [meaning- he questioned if Obama was born in the U.S.] .The media found out who actually started the birther movement. http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/09/26/washington-post-confirms-hillary-clinton-started-the-birther-movement/ [see note below- BIRTHER?] .The Hillary Clinton campaign- when she was running against Obama the first time- were the ones who floated that actual story- yes folks- no lie .Who said ‘Obama is the biggest joke going- he should be serving us coffee instead of running for president- he is playing the race card on us’? Bill Clinton .Whose starting the wildfires? .ISIS .Personification of wisdom .Proverbs and John’s gospel .How much money did it take? .Pastors- don’t be ‘building centric’ .Is a hurricane on the way to Corpus Christi- this year? BIRTHER? As an avid news reader- I remember when the newspaper [Washington Post? Or Times?] Did the full story on how IT WAS INDEED the political campaign of Hillary- around 2007-8- that spread the rumor that Obama ‘might’ not have been born in the USA. As I looked earlier for the link- ahh- there’s about 20 google searches for ‘did Hillary start the birther movement’ [SHE DID] But- they link to actual articles- and admit- as they researched it- IT CAME FROM HER PEOPLE. But you know the media- as they progress thru the story- they conclude that ‘it’s not true’! Huh? They admit that it started with her campaign- and then say ‘but we could not trace a direct link to Hillary’. In the famous words of Bill Clinton ‘I DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH THAT WOMAN- Miss Lewinsky’ I mean he was very believable. That’s if you don’t count oral sex in the Oval office- as sex. As you see- I’m not political- and to all my readers who are voting for Hillary- I love you all. I even pray for you daily- that you will be delivered from a spirit of delusion! [I still love you anyway]

https://youtu.be/BLELo-v0rRc The flood Ok- on today’s video- once you get past my political ranting- there is actually some stuff of value- here it is in short. Remember when Jesus told Nicodemus- unless you are born from above- ‘you cannot see the kingdom’? Then he tells him ‘the Son of man [Jesus] is in heaven’ [verses below] How was Jesus ‘in heaven’ and yet- on earth? You could say it this way ‘I am walking in the kingdom of heaven right now- but only those who follow me can see this kingdom and function in its mysteries’. I also talk about the principle in Proverbs- how a wise man builds the house [structure] he prepares the table- and sends out the food- thru the maidens. In a nutshell- this is how Jesus built the church- he wasn’t about building temples or synagogues- though he preached there at times. But he was building his community of men- he shared the bread- word of God with them- and he sent them out with the great message. The whole process was repeated in the book of Acts- and it took no huge funding campaign. It was the wisdom of God that accomplished the establishing of the church- simple and organic in nature- and indebted to no man. We too can follow this simple pattern- if we operate in the gift of wisdom. Remember- the people you are communicating to- are the house. The word of God is the bread on the table. And the maidens are the tools of spreading the word- thru the people themselves- running with the message- thru their writings as well- or in our day- their Re-tweets and stuff like that. The power of kingdom building is in the word- but not just in the speaking of it- but in power. It being demonstrated with signs and wonders. But you must walk in holiness- free from the lust of the flesh- or your words will simply be that- just words. BREXIT- I talk about media manipulation a lot. It matters in the ‘big things’ more than some of the little stuff. In a few days Britain will vote on whether or not to leave the E.U. The markets are rising and falling on this- like other things [whether the fed will raise interest rates]. What would happen if Britain did the ‘Brexit’? They might have financial waves- that would spread from Europe- around the globe. What kind of waves? Maybe regional countries facing near bankruptcy- or even Asian economies slowing down. And that eventually will come to the U.S. Yet- ALL OF THAT- and more- has been happening for the past 2 years [Greece- China and Japan- etc.] So the game is ‘let’s look for any reason to pump billions into the over ‘pumped’ world economies’. If the Brexit never happened- or did happen. It really makes no difference- the real dangers have been going on already- Germany having to bail out other struggling economies in the E.U- Greece still never solving its ongoing crisis- and that’s not to mention Syria and other real global instability. Our jobs numbers for the previous month were around 38 thousand- a real sign that the current global slowdown is indeed already happening. But because of the Casino mindset that I’ve spoken about- it takes one possible ‘good’ note- and millions- billions of dollars go up or down. Whether or not the Brexit happens- makes absolutely no difference- we are in a global downturn already- and we have not been able to stop it- whether you realize it or not.

VERSES- John 1:50 Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these. John 1:51 And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. John 3:8 The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. John 3:9 Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be? John 3:10 Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things? John 3:11 Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness. John 3:12 If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? John 3:13 And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.

Amos 9:1 I saw the LORD standing upon the altar: and he said, Smite the lintel of the door, that the posts may shake: and cut them in the head, all of them; and I will slay the last of them with the sword: he that fleeth of them shall not flee away, and he that escapeth of them shall not be delivered. Amos 9:2 Though they dig into hell, thence shall mine hand take them; though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down: Amos 9:3 And though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence; and though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them: Amos 9:4 And though they go into captivity before their enemies, thence will I command the sword, and it shall slay them: and I will set mine eyes upon them for evil, and not for good. Amos 9:5 And the Lord GOD of hosts is he that toucheth the land, and it shall melt, and all that dwell therein shall mourn: and it shall rise up wholly like a flood; and shall be drowned, as by the flood of Egypt. Amos 9:6 It is he that buildeth his stories in the heaven, and hath founded his troop in the earth; he that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name. Amos 9:7 Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir? Amos 9:8 Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the LORD. Amos 9:9 For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. Amos 9:10 All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, which say, The evil shall not overtake nor prevent us. Amos 9:11 In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old: Amos 9:12 That they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen, which are called by my name, saith the LORD that doeth this. Amos 9:13 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. Amos 9:14 And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. Amos 9:15 And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God. ________________________________________ Proverbs 9:1 Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: Proverbs 9:2 She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table. Proverbs 9:3 She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city,

NOTE- As I make this note [6-20-16] the White House changed course- and will release the entire 911 transcript from the Orlando shooter. So- you see how at first they did not want to- then there was pressure [they initially said it was dangerous to release it] – but more than likely it’s because of what I said- politically motivated. Proof? Then why release it now- See?

NEWS LINKS- http://www.kztv10.com/story/32264030/man-shot-while-selling-key-chains-in-parking-lot http://www.kztv10.com/story/32263633/ccpd-felon-found-with-loaded-gun-and-brass-knuckles http://www.kztv10.com/story/32263196/fathers-day-celebration-leads-to-stabbing http://www.kiiitv.com/story/32257817/westside-party-leads-to-stabbing-victim-in-critical http://www.kztv10.com/story/32262037/high-ranking-nyc-police-officials-charged-in-corruption-case http://www.kztv10.com/story/32258888/recovery-schools-for-addicted-teens-on-the-rise http://www.caller.com/news/national/383640491.xhtml http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/20/asia/us-military-base-protests-okinawa/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/19/us/oakland-police-scandals/index.html Notice in this story [above] she can’t- BY LAW- tell you about the actual crimes the cops committed. The average person has no idea how civilian departments cover up every crime under the book- by their own guys- it’s utterly amazing. http://www.kristv.com/story/32267579/911-transcript-orlando-gunman-said-he-was-islamic-soldier http://www.kristv.com/story/32267328/apnewsbreak-report-assails-nyc-jails-sex-abuse-response http://www.kztv10.com/story/32265588/driscoll-police-chief-placed-on-administrative-leave http://www.kztv10.com/story/32265161/cops-investigating-a-possible-homicide-at-an-apartment-complex http://www.kztv10.com/story/32264030/man-shot-while-selling-key-chains-in-parking-lot http://www.kztv10.com/story/32263633/ccpd-felon-found-with-loaded-gun-and-brass-knuckles

http://www.corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com facebook.com/john.chiarello.5 https://ccoutreach87.wordpress.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ4GsqTEVWRm0HxQTLsifvg

https://plus.google.com/108013627259688810902/posts Note- Please do me a favor, those who read/like the posts- re-post them on other sites as well as the site you read them on. I deal with issues at times that it would be beneficial for some of you to download and save the file from the Word Press link. This creates a permanent record. The on-line videos are only good if sites are not hacked- which has happened in the past. Thanks- John.#

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ACTS 7 Before I teach ‘the bible’ later- you know- the book that tells us about justice- and how to do it. I want to make a brief note. The past 2 weeks I mentioned on video how I was going to get sworn testimony from 3 friends about cop abuse. I got a text last night- they just found one of them- dead. https://youtu.be/r4cPQHcshCI Acts 7 https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/3-30-17-acts-7.zip Acts 7:6 And God spake on this wise, That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years. Acts 7:7 And the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, said God: and after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place. News link- http://www.caller.com/story/news/crime/2017/04/04/taft-police-chief-indicted-oppression-charge/100021574/ ON VIDEO .Local and Federal court .Temple served as ‘county court’ also [1st Century Rome] .Abraham homeless? .Refugio case .Abrahamic covenant- People and land .Joseph’s story .Moses fled .Bush burns .Stephen quotes Oral Tradition [which words of Jesus did he remember?] .Saul saw the whole thing

PAST TEACHING [Verses below] These are my past teachings that relate in some way to today’s post ‘Acts 7’- https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/18/acts-1/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/26/acts-2/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/02/acts-3/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/09/acts-4/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/23/acts-5/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/31/acts-6/ https://ccoutreach87.com/galatians-links/ https://ccoutreach87.com/romans-updated-2015/ https://ccoutreach87.com/genesis/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/31/another-day-2/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/30/keepers-of-the-law/ (739) ACTS 7- At the end of chapter 6 we saw the accusation against Stephen ‘he teaches the temple will be torn down and that Jesus will change the laws and customs of Moses’. There are a few key chapters In Acts, this is one of them! Up until this point we have seen Peters message of the Messiah thru the lens of repentance and baptism. You will notice Peter is very strong on ‘you guys need to repent and show it’. Strong word indeed! Peter also introduced the scripture ‘the Lord your God will raise up a prophet like unto me [Moses speaking of Christ] whoever doesn’t listen to him will be destroyed’. But Stephen is the first one to teach publicly the passing away of the law and the temple and the new ‘house of God’ to be the people. It’s the beginnings of Pauline theology. Now I have read how this chapter was questioned and doubted as to why Stephen was teaching this. Some theologians thought the chapter was questionable as canon because of it’s seeming to be so out of context. These are the times where I do agree with the ‘seminary as being a cemetery’! This chapter is absolutely brilliant! I don’t want you to miss the main point. Stephen traces the history of Israel and uses the verse from Moses ‘the Lord will raise up a PROPHET LIKE ME’. Stephen explains that when Moses first showed up on the scene to deliver his people, that the people said ‘man, who do you think you are! Who made you the boss’? Then Stephen says ‘yet this Moses, who the people refused. He was actually the ruler and deliverer that they refused’. Stephen is showing them that the prophets actually prophesied of the first century reality of Israel rejecting Jesus because Moses said they would! Don’t miss this point. This is the main point of Stephens message. He is telling the religious leaders ‘you simply fulfilled prophecy by rejecting the Messiah’. He even compares the miracles and great works that were done by Moses to the great miracles Jesus did. Stephen ends the chapter by also tracing Jewish history to David’s son Solomon and how the future temple that he would build was simply a shadow of the New Testament house of God. He quotes David in Psalms ‘God will not dwell in temples made with hands’. Now, this has nothing to do with ‘church buildings’. This has everything to do with Stephen’s insight into the theological truths contained in Jesus teachings about the destruction of the temple. In today’s ‘church world’ we have a very unbalanced view of temple rebuilding and the significance of the passages in Matthew that prophesy of its destruction. In Stephen’s mind the future destruction [that is future from his time. A.D. 70!] showed the passing away of the old law and its entire system of worship. The first century Apostles and teachers saw the eschatological portions of scripture from a redemptive lens. Peter earlier said ‘repent and be baptized… so your sins will be blotted out at the return of the Lord’ ‘whom the heavens must receive until the times of restitution of all things’. He couched individual salvation in with Gods ‘full world’ purpose of redemption [Romans]. They saw it from a wider angle than just ‘me and Jesus’. Now Stephen is doing the same. The whole Apostolic tradition concerning the destruction of the temple showed the purpose of God in ending the old concept of law and ‘limited kingship’ [from Jerusalem’s throne] and how God raised up his Son and placed him at his right hand and made him Lord and Christ. The passing away of the temple and Stephens preaching on ‘the customs being changed’ was right on! When I taught Hebrews I tried to bring this out. I realize that some teachers say Paul didn’t write Hebrews. I attribute it to him simply because no one else had the revelation he had in these areas. But I wouldn’t argue with saying Stephen might have penned it [depending on the dates!] Now we end the chapter with Stephens’s famous martyrdom and him saying ‘lay not this sin to their charge’. Saul [Paul] is a witness to this killing, he will become the greatest advocate for grace versus law that the church will ever know. NOTE- I forgot to mention that Stephen even compares the mass killing of babies at the time of Moses with the mass killing done under Herod during Jesus time. He shows how Moses and Jesus were alike in many ways.

VERSES- Acts 7:1 Then said the high priest, Are these things so? Acts 7:2 And he said, Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken; The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, Acts 7:3 And said unto him, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee. Acts 7:4 Then came he out of the land of the Chaldaeans, and dwelt in Charran: and from thence, when his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein ye now dwell. Acts 7:5 And he gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet he promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child. Acts 7:6 And God spake on this wise, That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years. Acts 7:7 And the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, said God: and after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place. Acts 7:8 And he gave him the covenant of circumcision: and so Abraham begat Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat the twelve patriarchs. Acts 7:9 And the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but God was with him, Acts 7:10 And delivered him out of all his afflictions, and gave him favour and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and he made him governor over Egypt and all his house. Acts 7:11 Now there came a dearth over all the land of Egypt and Chanaan, and great affliction: and our fathers found no sustenance. Acts 7:12 But when Jacob heard that there was corn in Egypt, he sent out our fathers first. Acts 7:13 And at the second time Joseph was made known to his brethren; and Joseph’s kindred was made known unto Pharaoh. Acts 7:14 Then sent Joseph, and called his father Jacob to him, and all his kindred, threescore and fifteen souls. Acts 7:15 So Jacob went down into Egypt, and died, he, and our fathers, Acts 7:16 And were carried over into Sychem, and laid in the sepulchre that Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Emmor the father of Sychem. Acts 7:17 But when the time of the promise drew nigh, which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt, Acts 7:18 Till another king arose, which knew not Joseph. Acts 7:19 The same dealt subtilly with our kindred, and evil entreated our fathers, so that they cast out their young children, to the end they might not live. Acts 7:20 In which time Moses was born, and was exceeding fair, and nourished up in his father’s house three months: Acts 7:21 And when he was cast out, Pharaoh’s daughter took him up, and nourished him for her own son. Acts 7:22 And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds. Acts 7:23 And when he was full forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brethren the children of Israel. Acts 7:24 And seeing one of them suffer wrong, he defended him, and avenged him that was oppressed, and smote the Egyptian: Acts 7:25 For he supposed his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them: but they understood not. Acts 7:26 And the next day he shewed himself unto them as they strove, and would have set them at one again, saying, Sirs, ye are brethren; why do ye wrong one to another? Acts 7:27 But he that did his neighbour wrong thrust him away, saying, Who made thee a ruler and a judge over us? Acts 7:28 Wilt thou kill me, as thou diddest the Egyptian yesterday? Acts 7:29 Then fled Moses at this saying, and was a stranger in the land of Madian, where he begat two sons. Acts 7:30 And when forty years were expired, there appeared to him in the wilderness of mount Sina an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush. Acts 7:31 When Moses saw it, he wondered at the sight: and as he drew near to behold it, the voice of the LORD came unto him, Acts 7:32 Saying, I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Then Moses trembled, and durst not behold. Acts 7:33 Then said the Lord to him, Put off thy shoes from thy feet: for the place where thou standest is holy ground. Acts 7:34 I have seen, I have seen the affliction of my people which is in Egypt, and I have heard their groaning, and am come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send thee into Egypt. Acts 7:35 This Moses whom they refused, saying, Who made thee a ruler and a judge? the same did God send to be a ruler and a deliverer by the hand of the angel which appeared to him in the bush. Acts 7:36 He brought them out, after that he had shewed wonders and signs in the land of Egypt, and in the Red sea, and in the wilderness forty years. Acts 7:37 This is that Moses, which said unto the children of Israel, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear. Acts 7:38 This is he, that was in the church in the wilderness with the angel which spake to him in the mount Sina, and with our fathers: who received the lively oracles to give unto us: Acts 7:39 To whom our fathers would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned back again into Egypt, Acts 7:40 Saying unto Aaron, Make us gods to go before us: for as for this Moses, which brought us out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. Acts 7:41 And they made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own hands. Acts 7:42 Then God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven; as it is written in the book of the prophets, O ye house of Israel, have ye offered to me slain beasts and sacrifices by the space of forty years in the wilderness? Acts 7:43 Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon. Acts 7:44 Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as he had appointed, speaking unto Moses, that he should make it according to the fashion that he had seen. Acts 7:45 Which also our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles, whom God drave out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David; Acts 7:46 Who found favour before God, and desired to find a tabernacle for the God of Jacob. Acts 7:47 But Solomon built him an house. Acts 7:48 Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Acts 7:49 Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest? Acts 7:50 Hath not my hand made all these things? Acts 7:51 Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Acts 7:52 Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers: Acts 7:53 Who have received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it. Acts 7:54 When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth. Acts 7:55 But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, Acts 7:56 And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Acts 7:57 Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, Acts 7:58 And cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul. Acts 7:59 And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Acts 7:60 And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep. Genesis 12:1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: Genesis 12:2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: Genesis 12:3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

29 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, 30 And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. 31 Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. 32 Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. 33 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? 34 Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: 35 That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. 36 Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation. 37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! 38 Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. 39 For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

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ACTS 13 Acts 13:38 Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins:Acts 13:39 And by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses. https://youtu.be/qwLxk3nbTYQ Acts 13 https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/5-25-17-acts-13.zip https://ccoutreach87.com/5-25-17-acts-13/ ON VIDEO- .Gentile church .Apostles sent out [Missionaries] .5- fold operating .Land and Sea .Demonic showdown .Son of Jesus? .Now your blind! .God’s power= doctrine .Paul’s sermon .Justification by faith- not law .Grace and sovereignty message .Predestination .Son of David .God raised him

PAST POSTS- [Past teaching I did that relates to today’s post- Acts 13- Verses below] https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/05/28/isaiah-42/ https://ccoutreach87.com/galatians-links/ https://ccoutreach87.com/romans-updated-2015/ https://ccoutreach87.com/protestant-reformation-luther/ https://ccoutreach87.com/further-talks-on-church-and-ministry/ https://ccoutreach87.com/judges-ruth-video-links-included/ https://ccoutreach87.com/1st-2nd-samuel/ https://ccoutreach87.com/1st-2nd-corinthians/ https://ccoutreach87.com/john-complete-links-added/ ACTS- https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/18/acts-1/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/26/acts-2/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/02/acts-3/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/09/acts-4/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/23/acts-5/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/31/acts-6/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/04/06/acts-7/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/04/14/acts-8/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/04/18/acts-9/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/05/07/acts-10/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/05/16/acts-11/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/05/22/acts-12/

(739)ACTS 13- The believers at Antioch were praying and fasting and the Holy Spirit said ‘separate me Paul and Barnabas unto the work which I have called them’. Then the whole group laid their hands on them and sent them out. Notice, there was not a singular authority figure who was the overseer of this church [community of believers]. It is important to see this, because when you share the oversight of a body of people with a plural team [Elders/Pastors- the title you use is insignificant] then there is less of a chance of one person becoming too elevated in the minds of the group. There is also a dynamic of the group coming to maturity as they see themselves as being able to ‘ordain-lay hands’ and send out. Now Paul and Barnabas begin their missionary journeys. At Paphos Paul casts blindness on a sorcerer and the chief deputy believes. At Antioch [Pisidia] they preach in the synagogue. Paul does a good Old Testament survey and mentions ‘Saul from the tribe of Benjamin’ as being part of Gods plan. I always wondered if Paul saw himself in this image [Saul from Benjamin]. Jesus did tell Ananias that Paul was a chosen vessel to bear his name. Notice also that Paul’s message saw the promise to David in Psalms ‘the sure mercies of David’ as being fulfilled thru Christ’s resurrection. The theme of the message was not ‘Jesus rule is delayed’ [dispensational teaching] but that thru Jesus the promises to the fathers have come to fruition. While it is true that the Jewish hearers will reject their Messiah as a people, yet this did not mean that the Kingdom was delayed or that the ‘church age’ was a parenthetical time until the ‘Kingdom age’ reconvenes. The whole tenor of Paul’s message is the reality that Jesus resurrection and being seated at Gods right hand is the promise being fulfilled that God made to the fathers. It is important to see his theme all thru out the Apostolic writings. The following week after Paul delivers his message, many gentiles come back to hear the word again. The leaders get jealous and Paul rebukes them. He tells them it was necessary for the Jews to have heard the word first, but then in fulfillment of the prophets, Jesus will be a light to the gentiles also. Paul and Barnabas sail off to Iconium next. An important theme in all the sermons in Acts is how the main message is that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Prophets. Paul tells them that they heard the readings from the prophets [Old Testament] every Sabbath day, but they also fulfilled the prophetic word by not being able to understand what the prophets were saying. So they crucified Jesus because of their blindness to the meaning of scripture. We need to see Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets. The ultimate end of our purpose. To become like him in every way. In today’s church world it is so easy to see the word and ‘church attendance’ as a means to self fulfillment. But we need to re focus on becoming more like him. I am sure it was a shock to Paul when he realized all the time and study he did as a Pharisee was missing the main intent of scripture. It was humiliating to find out that the simple men who became these followers of Christ were closer to the truth than the theological doctors of the day. Jesus said we must become like little children again in order to see Gods kingdom.

VERSES- [These are verses I taught or quoted on today’s video- Acts 13] Acts 13:1 Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. Acts 13:2 As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. Acts 13:3 And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. Acts 13:4 So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed unto Seleucia; and from thence they sailed to Cyprus. Acts 13:5 And when they were at Salamis, they preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews: and they had also John to their minister. Acts 13:6 And when they had gone through the isle unto Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew, whose name was Barjesus: Acts 13:7 Which was with the deputy of the country, Sergius Paulus, a prudent man; who called for Barnabas and Saul, and desired to hear the word of God. Acts 13:8 But Elymas the sorcerer (for so is his name by interpretation) withstood them, seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith. Acts 13:9 Then Saul, (who also is called Paul,) filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him. Acts 13:10 And said, O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? Acts 13:11 And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness; and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand. Acts 13:12 Then the deputy, when he saw what was done, believed, being astonished at the doctrine of the Lord. Acts 13:13 Now when Paul and his company loosed from Paphos, they came to Perga in Pamphylia: and John departing from them returned to Jerusalem. Acts 13:14 But when they departed from Perga, they came to Antioch in Pisidia, and went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and sat down. Acts 13:15 And after the reading of the law and the prophets the rulers of the synagogue sent unto them, saying, Ye men and brethren, if ye have any word of exhortation for the people, say on. Acts 13:16 Then Paul stood up, and beckoning with his hand said, Men of Israel, and ye that fear God, give audience. Acts 13:17 The God of this people of Israel chose our fathers, and exalted the people when they dwelt as strangers in the land of Egypt, and with an high arm brought he them out of it. Acts 13:18 And about the time of forty years suffered he their manners in the wilderness. Acts 13:19 And when he had destroyed seven nations in the land of Chanaan, he divided their land to them by lot. Acts 13:20 And after that he gave unto them judges about the space of four hundred and fifty years, until Samuel the prophet. Acts 13:21 And afterward they desired a king: and God gave unto them Saul the son of Cis, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, by the space of forty years. Acts 13:22 And when he had removed him, he raised up unto them David to be their king; to whom also he gave their testimony, and said, I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will. Acts 13:23 Of this man’s seed hath God according to his promise raised unto Israel a Saviour, Jesus: Acts 13:24 When John had first preached before his coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel. Acts 13:25 And as John fulfilled his course, he said, Whom think ye that I am? I am not he. But, behold, there cometh one after me, whose shoes of his feet I am not worthy to loose. Acts 13:26 Men and brethren, children of the stock of Abraham, and whosoever among you feareth God, to you is the word of this salvation sent. Acts 13:27 For they that dwell at Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they knew him not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath day, they have fulfilled them in condemning him. Acts 13:28 And though they found no cause of death in him, yet desired they Pilate that he should be slain. Acts 13:29 And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre. Acts 13:30 But God raised him from the dead: Acts 13:31 And he was seen many days of them which came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are his witnesses unto the people. Acts 13:32 And we declare unto you glad tidings, how that the promise which was made unto the fathers, Acts 13:33 God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again; as it is also written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee. Acts 13:34 And as concerning that he raised him up from the dead, now no more to return to corruption, he said on this wise, I will give you the sure mercies of David. Acts 13:35 Wherefore he saith also in another psalm, Thou shalt not suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Acts 13:36 For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid unto his fathers, and saw corruption: Acts 13:37 But he, whom God raised again, saw no corruption. Acts 13:38 Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: Acts 13:39 And by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses. Acts 13:40 Beware therefore, lest that come upon you, which is spoken of in the prophets; Acts 13:41 Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish: for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you. Acts 13:42 And when the Jews were gone out of the synagogue, the Gentiles besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath. Acts 13:43 Now when the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas: who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God. Acts 13:44 And the next sabbath day came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God. Acts 13:45 But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming. Acts 13:46 Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. Acts 13:47 For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation unto the ends of the earth. Acts 13:48 And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed. Acts 13:49 And the word of the Lord was published throughout all the region. Acts 13:50 But the Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women, and the chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts. Acts 13:51 But they shook off the dust of their feet against them, and came unto Iconium. Acts 13:52 And the disciples were filled with joy, and with the Holy Ghost. Psalm 2:1 Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? Psalm 2:2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Psalm 2:3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. Psalm 2:4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the LORD shall have them in derision. Psalm 2:5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Psalm 2:6 Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. Psalm 2:7 I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Psalm 2:8 Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Psalm 2:9 Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Psalm 2:10 Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Psalm 2:11 Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Psalm 2:12 Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him. Habakkuk 1:5 Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvelously: for I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you. Revelation 1:5 And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations Psalm 16:1 Preserve me, O God: for in thee do I put my trust. Psalm 16:2 O my soul, thou hast said unto the LORD, Thou art my Lord: my goodness extendeth not to thee; Psalm 16:3 But to the saints that are in the earth, and to the excellent, in whom is all my delight. Psalm 16:4 Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another god: their drink offerings of blood will I not offer, nor take up their names into my lips. Psalm 16:5 The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot. Psalm 16:6 The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. Psalm 16:7 I will bless the LORD, who hath given me counsel: my reins also instruct me in the night seasons. Psalm 16:8 I have set the LORD always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Psalm 16:9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope. Psalm 16:10 For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Psalm 16:11 Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. John 15:16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. 1 Corinthians 1:18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations

VERSES [These are the verses I either quoted or taught from on today’s post]

June 24, 2018 - Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist - Mass during the Day

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Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist - Mass during the Day

Lectionary: 587

Reading 1

IS 49:1-6

Hear me, O coastlands, listen, O distant peoples. The LORD called me from birth, from my mother's womb he gave me my name. He made of me a sharp-edged sword and concealed me in the shadow of his arm. He made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me. You are my servant, he said to me, Israel, through whom I show my glory. Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the LORD, my recompense is with my God. For now the LORD has spoken who formed me as his servant from the womb, that Jacob may be brought back to him and Israel gathered to him; and I am made glorious in the sight of the LORD, and my God is now my strength! It is too little, he says, for you to be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.

Responsorial Psalm

PS 139:1B-3, 13-14AB, 14C-15

R. (14) I praise you, for I am wonderfully made. O LORD, you have probed me, you know me: you know when I sit and when I stand; you understand my thoughts from afar. My journeys and my rest you scrutinize, with all my ways you are familiar. R. I praise you for I am wonderfully made. Truly you have formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother's womb. I give you thanks that I am fearfully, wonderfully made; wonderful are your works. R. I praise you, for I am wonderfully made. My soul also you knew full well; nor was my frame unknown to you When I was made in secret, when I was fashioned in the depths of the earth. R. I praise you, for I am wonderfully made.

Reading 2

ACTS 13:22-26

In those days, Paul said: "God raised up David as king; of him God testified, I have found David, son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will carry out my every wish. From this man's descendants God, according to his promise, has brought to Israel a savior, Jesus. John heralded his coming by proclaiming a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel; and as John was completing his course, he would say, 'What do you suppose that I am? I am not he. Behold, one is coming after me; I am not worthy to unfasten the sandals of his feet.' "My brothers, sons of the family of Abraham, and those others among you who are God-fearing, to us this word of salvation has been sent."

Alleluia

SEE LK 1:76

R. Alleluia, alleluia. You, child, will be called prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way. R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel

LK 1:57-66, 80

When the time arrived for Elizabeth to have her child she gave birth to a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy toward her, and they rejoiced with her. When they came on the eighth day to circumcise the child, they were going to call him Zechariah after his father, but his mother said in reply, "No. He will be called John." But they answered her, "There is no one among your relatives who has this name." So they made signs, asking his father what he wished him to be called. He asked for a tablet and wrote, "John is his name," and all were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened, his tongue freed, and he spoke blessing God. Then fear came upon all their neighbors, and all these matters were discussed throughout the hill country of Judea. All who heard these things took them to heart, saying, "What, then, will this child be?" For surely the hand of the Lord was with him. The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the desert until the day of his manifestation to Israel.

Isaiah 49:1 Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name.

Isaiah 49:2 And he hath made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand hath he hid me, and made me a polished shaft; in his quiver hath he hid me;

Isaiah 49:3 And said unto me, Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified.

Isaiah 49:4 Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and my work with my God.

Isaiah 49:7 Thus saith the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One, to him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, to a servant of rulers, Kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship, because of the LORD that is faithful, and the Holy One of Israel, and he shall choose thee.

Isaiah 49:8 Thus saith the LORD, In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee: and I will preserve thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages;

Isaiah 49:9 That thou mayest say to the prisoners, Go forth; to them that are in darkness, Shew yourselves. They shall feed in the ways, and their pastures shall be in all high places.

Isaiah 49:10 They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun smite them: for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of water shall he guide them.

Isaiah 49:11 And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall be exalted.

Isaiah 49:12 Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.

Isaiah 49:13 Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into singing, O mountains: for the LORD hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted.

Isaiah 49:14 But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.

Isaiah 49:15 Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

Isaiah 49:16 Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.

Isaiah 49:17 Thy children shall make haste; thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee.

Isaiah 49:18 Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold: all these gather themselves together, and come to thee. As I live, saith the LORD, thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all, as with an ornament, and bind them on thee, as a bride doeth.

Isaiah 49:19 For thy waste and thy desolate places, and the land of thy destruction, shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away.

Isaiah 49:20 The children which thou shalt have, after thou hast lost the other, shall say again in thine ears, The place is too strait for me: give place to me that I may dwell.

Isaiah 49:21 Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, and removing to and fro? and who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been?

Isaiah 49:22 Thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people: and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.

Isaiah 49:23 And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers: they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that I am the LORD: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.

Isaiah 49:24 Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered?

Isaiah 49:25 But thus saith the LORD, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children.

Isaiah 49:26 And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.

Luke 1:1 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,

Luke 1:2 Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word;

Luke 1:3 It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus,

Luke 1:4 That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

Luke 1:5 THERE was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth.

Luke 1:6 And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.

Luke 1:7 And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years.

Luke 1:8 And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office before God in the order of his course,

Luke 1:9 According to the custom of the priest's office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord.

Luke 1:10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense.

Luke 1:11 And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.

Luke 1:12 And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.

Luke 1:13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.

Luke 1:14 And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth.

Luke 1:15 For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb.

Luke 1:16 And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God.

Luke 1:18 And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.

Luke 1:19 And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.

Luke 1:20 And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season.

Luke 1:21 And the people waited for Zacharias, and marvelled that he tarried so long in the temple.

Luke 1:22 And when he came out, he could not speak unto them: and they perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple: for he beckoned unto them, and remained speechless.

Luke 1:23 And it came to pass, that, as soon as the days of his ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house.

Luke 1:24 And after those days his wife Elisabeth conceived, and hid herself five months, saying,

Luke 1:25 Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in the days wherein he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.

Luke 1:26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,

Luke 1:27 To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.

Luke 1:28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

Luke 1:29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

Luke 1:30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.

Luke 1:31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.

Luke 1:32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:

Luke 1:33 And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

Luke 1:34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

Luke 1:35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

Luke 1:36 And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.

Luke 1:37 For with God nothing shall be impossible.

Luke 1:38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

Luke 1:39 And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda;

Luke 1:40 And entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth.

Luke 1:41 And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:

Luke 1:42 And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

Luke 1:43 And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

Luke 1:44 For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.

Luke 1:45 And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.

Luke 1:46 And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord,

Luke 1:47 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Luke 1:48 For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

Luke 1:49 For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.

Luke 1:50 And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.

Luke 1:51 He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

Luke 1:52 He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

Luke 1:53 He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Luke 1:54 He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;

Luke 1:55 As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.

Luke 1:56 And Mary abode with her about three months, and returned to her own house.

Luke 1:57 Now Elisabeth's full time came that she should be delivered; and she brought forth a son.

Luke 1:58 And her neighbours and her cousins heard how the Lord had shewed great mercy upon her; and they rejoiced with her.

Luke 1:59 And it came to pass, that on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child; and they called him Zacharias, after the name of his father.

Luke 1:60 And his mother answered and said, Not so; but he shall be called John.

Luke 1:61 And they said unto her, There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name.

Luke 1:62 And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called.

Luke 1:63 And he asked for a writing table, and wrote, saying, His name is John. And they marvelled all.

Luke 1:64 And his mouth was opened immediately, and his tongue loosed, and he spake, and praised God.

Luke 1:65 And fear came on all that dwelt round about them: and all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill country of Judaea.

Luke 1:66 And all they that heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, What manner of child shall this be! And the hand of the Lord was with him.

Luke 1:67 And his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Ghost, and prophesied, saying,

Luke 1:68 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,

Luke 1:69 And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;

Luke 1:70 As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began:

Luke 1:71 That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us;

Luke 1:72 To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant;

Luke 1:73 The oath which he sware to our father Abraham,

Luke 1:74 That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear,

Luke 1:75 In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.

Luke 1:76 And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;

Luke 1:77 To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,

Luke 1:78 Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,

Luke 1:79 To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Luke 1:80 And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel.

Ephesians 2:20

And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone;