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#Wildman Steve
abs0luteb4stard · 9 months
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W A T C H E D
(Over December 20-21 2023)
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krispyweiss · 8 months
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“The World is a Little Darker:” Mojo Nixon Dies at 66
- Singer died following a “blazing show” aboard Outlaw Country Cruise
Mojo Nixon, the brash punkabilly singer who became known as “the loon in the afternoon” on his satellite radio programs, has died.
Nixon, 66, succumbed Feb. 7 to a “cardiac event” after performing a “blazing show” aboard the Outlaw Country Cruise, said a statement from the “Elvis Is Everywhere” singer’s camp.
“How you live is how you should die,” it said. “Mojo Nixon was full-tilt, wide-open, rock-hard, root-hog corner on two wheels and on fire. Passing after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners and a good breakfast with bandmates and friends … is about right and that’s just how he did it.”
“Heaven help us all,” it concluded.
With occasional gigs such as OCC still part of his itinerary, Nixon had in recent years devoted much of his time to hosting radio shows on SiriusXM, where he was known as “the Loon in the Afternoon.”
Elizabeth Cook, Nixon’s “partner in crime” on Outlaw Country, eulogized her fellow deejay and musician: “He was a total maniac, a complete pain in my ass and he will be missed,” she said.
A self-described “cult artist” who specialized in novelty songs such as “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child,” “Don Henley Must Die,” “Burn Down the Malls,” “Jesus at McDonald’s,” “Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin” and others, Nixon once said music “kept me out of prison.”
But for all the irreverent bombast in public, there was another, private side to Nixon, said his friend and collaborator Jello Biafra.
“Beneath all the redneck-wildman veneer, the Mojo I knew was a real gentleman,” the former Dead Kennedy said. “Deep, loving and empathetic as it gets, a true son of Woody Guthrie.”
“The world is a little darker” in the wake of Nixon’s death, said Steve Poltz, who called the “wiseman (and) wiseass” Nixon “my buddy, my hero, my teacher, my spiritual advisor (and) my guru” in a lengthy online remembrance.
“Mojo was a fireball and every time I saw him I always felt better,” Poltz said. “… My God, I just can’t believe he’s passed on.”
2/8/24
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hasbr0mniverse · 6 months
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Reign Of The Dinobots Month! Destiny Of The Dinobots Part One & Two - Credits: Dinosaur consultant/Plot/ Colour Steve White - Plot/Script Steve Alan - Art Andrew Wildman
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remembertheplunge · 9 months
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Caught in the ship wreck between hope and despair.
July 15th 1993
Shakey’s Pizza
1963-1993–30 year anniversary—so said the sign at the McHenery Ave Shakey’s.
 It’s where Dan J, SAO and I ate tonight.
Steve was still all decked out in his lawyer drag…white long sleeved button up shirt and tie. His skin was soft like supple onion skin. His face like fresh spread wet linen. His soul…I dunno…whispering somewhere in the pages of the newspaper before him.
I sat by him. I felt…enough!
Dan J and I transplanted a California native tree from backyard to front by the water irrigation pipes at my house.
We watched the movie “City of Joy”, a delight.
Recall, this is the day my client removed his chains from his legs and was going to beat me for telling him he could get life for his offenses.
I just stood…mute…calm. Go ahead. I got work to do.
Wildman was there and later said “potentially very dangerous, but, everyone remained calm."
Later, I told my client I talk a bit ahead of what I know at times.
City of Joy dialog could fit in Modesto—human life is not of ease…caught in the ship wreck between hope and despair.
End of entry
Note:
Dan Johnson, SAO , Bob Wildman and I were all deputy public defenders at the Stanislaus County Public Defender’s office in July 1993.
City of Joy was a 1992 movie staring Patrick Swayze. He plays a American doctor who went to India deciding he no longer wanted to practice medicine. He gets caught up in class struggle there and joins in the revolt.
I don’t recall the client removing his leg chains and threatening to beat me with them. That’s the beauty of a journal. It remembers for me. The client had been chained up after being brought to court. Practicing criminal law has inherent risks of being assaulted by your client. 
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innervoiceart · 1 month
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Interview: Steve Hunter, guitarist on Lou Reed's 'Rock 'n' Roll Animal' 1973 Live Double Album. Photo: Alessandra Tootsie Tulli
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Lou Reed & guitarist Dick Wagner – Rock n Roll Animal Tour – 1972
Renowned for his extraordinary guitar tone and for his majestic, soulful, melodic and wildman guitar solos, Dick Wagner (along with his dueling guitar partner, Steve Hunter) has been celebrated in GIBSON.com’s Top 50 Guitar Solos of all Time for “Sweet Jane” on Lou Reed’s, Rock n Roll Animal album. Wagner and Hunter were honored along with guitar legends Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Eddie Van Halen.
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dispatchdcu · 3 months
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Scarlett #1 Review
Scarlett #1 Review #GIJoe #scarlett #comics #comicbooks #news #art #info #NCBD #comicbooknews #previews #reviews #IMAGE #Amazon #imagecomics
Writer: Kelly Thompson Artist: Marco Ferrari Colorist: Lee Loughridge Letterer: Rus Wooton Cover Artists: Marco Ferrari & Lee Loughridge; Joëlle Jones; Gleb Melnikov; Steve Epting; Leonardo Romero; Jonboy Meyers; David Mack; Jason Howard & Annalisa Leoni; Jason Howard; Freddie Williams; Laura Braga; Rob Csiki; Deegan Puchkors; Sajah Shah; Andrew Wildman; Junggeun Yoon; Ivan Tao Publisher: Image…
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ussportsradio · 9 months
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Support the show & Get the tunes and swag that show that you rock for the King! @ Apple Music - https://apple.co/3R0qwH4 @ Amazon Music - https://amzn.to/3S6Kcub Your donations are always appreciated. A portion of your donations will be given to Christ-centered ministries and organizations doing the Lord's work in these last days. May God richly bless you! Donate here: https://bit.ly/3RWo4mg It would be an honor to have to have you Like, (Rumble) and Subscribe to this channel. We pray it's an inspiration to you and fam'
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Music video credit: Bloodgood & Whitecross-Versailles, OH Put Bloodgood & Whitecross on your playlist: @ Apple Music - https://apple.co/3Mf2wz9 @ Amazon Music - https://amzn.to/47h8mcm Wildman & Steve @wildmansteve849 https://www.youtube.com/@wildmansteve849
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fictionz · 1 year
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Help! Looking for horror comics from diverse voices
I read a bunch of new-to-me horror stuff every October, including short comics and single issues, but hoo boy is it real research to find horror comics that aren't by white (and mostly American) men. I also try to pick out a comic or two from each decade for as far back as I can find them. I'm going through the process now of selecting this year's comics, and while I'm confident I can find diverse voices and backgrounds for the comics I'll read, I'm interested to see if any horror comic fans out there have recommendations.
So if you know horror comics and have recommendations from diverse creators, whether it's people of color, or based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, or any other diverse background, lemme know! There must be a ton of comic creators right here on Tumblr that I'm missing out on. It can be a single issue, a story in an anthology, a web comic, it's all good. Maybe there's a horror Discord I outta join?!
As a bonus, here's the list of horror comics I checked out last year:
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“The Boar’s Head Beast” by George Wildman, Nicola Cuti, Wayne Howard (1975) “I toyed with forces I couldn’t control.”
This has bits of Lovecraft but it’s mostly an adventure story, and that just reminds me that so much of the adventure stuff I loved as a kid is from the action subgenre of horror.
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“Ill Bred” by Charles Burns (1985) “I realized her muscles were getting larger and more defined.”
The story seems to go full tilt into men’s panic about gender and sexuality norms until it pivots into a Twilight Zoneish wink at the audience as the plot resolves to an acceptable state for the normies. Pretty gnarly body horror stuff.
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“Don’t Go to the Island” by Sfé R. Monster & Kalyna Riis-Phillips (2016) “The skulls at your feet are laughing at you.”
It’s been almost all white American men in my horror comics this month, so I’m pivoting to other creators and eras. Fortunately, the Bones of the Coast anthology has that and also focuses on the Pacific Northwest, undoubtedly my favorite region. It’s a good pairing with the Jackson story. A moody coastal vibe, the gray sky threatening something that doesn’t reveal itself immediately, but instead lingers behind trees and corners, watching and waiting.
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“Some Other Animal’s Meat” by Emily Carroll (2016) “What if inside, it’s somehow the wrong stuff?”
Some inside part is always going to feel like it’s different from yours.
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“Greed” by Becky Cloonan, Jordie Bellaire, Travis Lanham (2013) “Kindly take your place by the dead horse.”
I liked what I read here, but it’s clear it’s not meant to stand alone. It’s too brief and it feels like we’re (rightly) meant to read this entire book and perhaps the series before getting to this point.
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“Goin’ South” by Nancy Collins, David Imhoff, Jeff Butler, Steve Montano, Renée Witterstaetter, Electric Crayon, Simon Bisley (1995) “He has his hate to keep him warm.”
People in the 90s really wanted to see these sorts of bouts between characters from different media properties. There’s an essay in the comic itself that comments on the fascination. Of course, this just presages our modern era of cinematic media universes. As for this first issue in a trilogy, it’s a decent setup, but not much happens since it’s focused on getting the two characters into the same room by the end of a single comic issue. I think a cross-country trip/spree featuring Jason could’ve been cool if it wasn’t so rushed.
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“Winnebago Graveyard #1” by Steve Niles, Stephanie Paitreau, Jordie Bellaire, Jen Bartel, Alison Sampson, Aditya Bidikar, Mingjue Helen Chen, Sarah Horrocks (2017) “Where are the people?”
Ooh good setup here. I’ll return to finish this series for sure. I hope the big bad they introduce here gets a real powerful comeuppance, though it does feel like a setup for torturing some protagonists. Bonus points for a creepy carnival setting.
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“Seed” by Fiona Staples, Jose Villarrubia, Michael Dougherty, Todd Casey, Zach Shields, Marc Andreyko (2015) “For this is not a woman but a demon with no soul to save.”
I remember Trick ‘r Treat being more jokey with its anthology format, but this was just a straightforward historical horror tale. But I liked the sincerity and will certainly return to this book later.
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“Kill Screen” by Lauren Beukes, Dale Halvorsen, Ryan Kelly, Eva de la Cruz, Clem Robins, Bill Sienkiewicz, Rowena Yow, Shelly Bond (2015) “This better not end up in a bathtub full of ice with missing kidneys.”
Some of the writing here is cringey, but the character setup is intriguing. I’ll stick with it and finish the series after October.
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“The Fool of the Web” by Patricia Breen, Roel, Brenda Feikema (1997) “Your belly quakes with laughter even as I tremble in disgust.”
Sometimes you follow the maiden, and sometimes the maiden follows you.
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“Fortune Broken�� by Sandy King, Leonardo Manco, Marianna Sanzone (2015) “Death runs from me, you old witch!”
A simple one, and too abrupt in its conclusion. A bit more time at the end and I might’ve been more into it.
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“The Cemetery” by Franco, Abigail Larson, Wes Abbott, Sara Richard (2022) “Don’t you just want to get this over with?”
How do we learn to navigate the scary stuff? And why do some of us make it while others don’t?
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“The Speed of Pain” by Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino, Dave Stewart, Steve Wands, Will Dennis (2018) “I spent the week cursing God.”
Whoa nelly, this first issue is a great setup. It’s got that urban decay vibe of grungy industrial hellscape movies of the 90s like The Crow, Seven, and Dark City. I’ll definitely be coming back to finish this series.
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“Gestation” by Marguerite Bennett, Jonathan Brandon Sawyer, Doug Garbark, Nic. J. Shaw (2014) “I’ll deal with the corpse, my lady-love.”
It’s very satisfying when men in power are absolutely wrecked by women, so I appreciate the still too-rare opportunity to see it happen. (And you should know that this short comic story was expanded into its own series.)
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“Chemical 13!” by Michael Woods & Saskia Gutekunst (2009) “Everything is fine.”
Comeuppance stories about Nazis getting the wrath they deserve don’t hit the same anymore, not when they are just still around in daily life.
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“Hello, My Name Is…” by Nadia Shammas, Rowan MacColl, Licha Myers, Chris Sanchez (2021) “Workers have names. Management has power.”
What is a name but a tracking system? The means by which to search and destroy.
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“Sea of Souls” by Jenna Lynn Wright, Alvaro Feliu, Juan Francisco Mota, Ricardo Osnaya, Erik Lopera Tamayo, Jorge Cortes, Robby Bevaro, Maxflan Araujo, Walter Pereyra, Taylor Esposito (2022) “This isn’t the face I had when we met.”
The feel of a rushed committee affair, but stitched together adequately enough.
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“Crush” by Janet Hetherington, Ronn Sutton, Becka Kinzie, Zakk Saam (2018) “His eyes are as wild as the sea.”
Aye, that’s a Gothic story alright. The foreword by Jacques Nodell that introduces the anthology was actually a really good breakdown of the Gothic literature genre and its trappings. The ending is pretty gruesome but then I think that’s also a tendency in the scary Gothic romances.
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“The End of All Things” by Natalie Leif & Elaine Well (2014) “I’ll look at the lines myself.”
I wasn’t quite sure of the message here, and it’s probably a sign of a good story that I found it very compelling but wanted more. The ending evokes a sense of inevitable collapse beneath the weight of the world, that we are all inextricably linked to an entity we cannot escape.
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“Swamp Monster” by Basil Wolverton (1953) “You stare in unbelief at what used to be normal hands!”
There’s something appealing about these old, simple morality horror tales. I suppose it’s knowing that someone’s getting a comeuppance, or a rude awakening. So reading these is about knowing they’re gonna get it and enjoying the twisted revelation.
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“The Portrait of Sal Pullman” by Lonnie Nadler & Abby Howard (2019) “You fools, do you not see what this truly is?" 
Abby Howard is the ruler of the kingdom of creepy illustrated faces. Er, maybe the architect. The wizard behind the curtain? Oh, the god, the god.
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“O Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M.R. James & Abby Howard (2019) “If you see any more spooks or beasties, please do let me know." 
I often fantasize about illustrating text stories if I had the skill, just to visualize what’s in the brain. It’s cool to see Howard taking that on with one of these old timey and appropriately spooky stories.
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“Rainbow Sprinkles” by W. Maxwell Prince, Chris O’Halloran, Martín Morazzo, Nimit Malavia (2018) “Arizona like in the movies of our dreams”
My first reaction was this isn’t horror (particularly after a more straightforward horror story in the first issue), but I think this is going to happen many times throughout the month. I’ve made the effort to seek out a more expansive range of voices and backgrounds in my horror selections and it’s going to require a broader acceptance of horror as a genre and medium for storytellers. All that said, this second issue of Ice Cream Man is more tragic and real, and horror fiction is, after all, a reflection of the horrors we face as real people.
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“Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall!” by Jack Davis, et al. (1953) “Why do they scream when they see you?”
First-person perspective in a comic must have been a fresh thing in the fifties, and if you’re going to do it, then you may as well pull from a classic like Frankenstein. I also recognize this sort of amnesiac monster thing from many stories since ‘53, in particular the disturbing “His Silicon Soul” from Batman The Animated Series.
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“The Harvest” by Shannon Campbell & Pam Wishbow (2016) “Just think of blackberry jam." 
Oh fuck yeah, that autumnal folk horror. Much of this sort of thing comes out of places with traditional seasons but I love that this anthology is all about horror from the Pacific Northwest, so here you can feel the gray gloom and green hells of those thickly forested areas. This particular story also gets into the insidious and unknowable machinations of plants. Who knows what they’re thinking…
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“In Each and Every Package” by Reed Crandall, et al. (1954) “I kept thinking of you and that gave me the strength.”
This came up in a list of noteworthy horror comics from the mid-century due to this gnarly cover that got held up as an example of the questionable artistic merits of this sort of stuff at the time. I also doubted the horror qualities of this series since the title itself says it’s crime fiction, but I gave it a shot. It’s crime fiction for sure and I don’t think I’ll read other Crime SuspenStories, but it definitely feels like something I’d see on Tales from the Crypt.
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“Roots in Hell” by Richard Corben (2016) “Have some of this mango. It’s delicious!”
Kind of an abrupt ending but I dig the conceit.
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“Mars Is Heaven!” by Ray Bradbury, Wally Wood, et al. (1953) “And Lustig began to cry." 
Looks like this story hit pretty hard in the fifties, but then the Godliness and paranoia of the nation was more potent then. Now it comes across as quaint.
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“Save the Last Dance for Me!” by Dennis O'Neil & Pat Boyette (1969) “Tin Toes makes the decisions around here!”
So many horror comics of this time are just peeks into the Ironic Punishment Division in hell.
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“Infected” by Bruce Jones, Richard Corben, Steve Oliff (1982) “You drag a shaking claw across your mouth and wipe away the sour smelling bile.“
Whoof. The casual racism is real bad in this one, even if it’s portrayed just to show the shitty attitude and personality of the protagonist. It feels more like some white guys riding the wave of edgy work like Heavy Metal to paint a portrait of “those people” and a cautionary story about getting involved with “them.”
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“Unpleasant Side Effects” by Kerry Gammill, Sam F. Park, Mar Omega (2010) “After I’ve recorded my findings, I’ll take care of this… thing.”
I liked seeing a modern take on the EC Comics comeuppance formula, and in particular an ending where the victims sorta get their due.
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xtruss · 1 year
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What Is a Weed?
The names we call plants say more about us than they do about the greenery that surrounds us.
— By Rivka Galchen | May 26th, 2023
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Illustration by Karlotta Freier
Steve Brill’s first stop was the greenery behind the bike racks. Brill, who is known as Wildman Steve, picked up a weed with heart-shaped seed pods and a small, four-petalled white flower. About thirty of us were gathered for a three-hour foraging tour through Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. The plant was shepherd’s purse, a name that references the seed pods’ resemblance to the containers shepherds used to make from the bladders of sheep. “It’s in the mustard family,” Brill said. “Most all of the flowers in the mustard family are four petals in the shape of a cross.” He encouraged everyone to take a bite, and to tell him what vegetable it tasted like. Someone asked whether we should worry about pesticides. “Don’t worry, they don’t have the money for pesticides,” Brill responded. “And, anyhow, they’re pretty good at Prospect Park. In Central Park—don’t eat anything there.” He was exaggerating; he’s been doing foraging tours off and on in Central Park for some forty years, and was once even arrested there, for eating plants, after which he was brought on David Letterman’s show to make a foraged salad.
The weed tasted like carrot? Like okra? Like broccoli, almost precisely. “Shepherd’s purse is one of the more mild species in the mustard family,” Brill said, and then plucked what looked to me like a dandelion but wasn’t. “Here’s something spicier,” he said. It was another member of the mustard family, called poor man’s pepper. He drew our attention to the serrated leaves. Like shepherd’s purse, poor man’s pepper is an invasive weed, one that came from Europe. “I picked a lot of this in the Rockaways this morning,” he said. He planned to make “poor man’s potatoes”—potatoes (bland) with lots of poor man’s pepper (spicy). The common name dates back to when spices were a luxury import. Besides being tasty, spicy foods are also often a preservative and an antibacterial.
We walked deeper into Prospect Park. In a shady spot, Brill asked everyone to pause again. There was a sweet fragrance. It was the smell of . . . jasmine? Vanilla? “That’s the scent of the black locust tree in bloom,” he stated. But we couldn’t see one. Black locust is considered an invasive species in the Northeast—a big weed, one might say—but it also has flowers that taste good in salads or mixed into pancakes. “There must be one nearby,” he insisted. Someone pointed to a tree with white blooms in the distance. “That’s a dogwood,” Brill said, with a mischievous smile. “You can always recognize dogwood by its bark.”
Another weed eddied us out into history. “This one is delicious and deadly,” Brill explained, holding up an innocent-looking broad-leaved plant, called pokeweed. It’s a plant native to North America. Its poison is water-soluble, and it’s also a tremendous source of Vitamin A, which was once difficult to come by in the fall and winter. It used to be serially boiled—the poison leaches out—and then used as a treatment by Native and not-Native Americans, when the characteristic signs of Vitamin A deficiency, such as skin irritations, infections, and night blindness, would turn up.
Someone brought over a green. “Oh, that’s white snakeroot, also very poisonous,” Brill said. “Also a native plant.” When cows used to be sent to graze in the forest, they sometimes developed what was called milk sickness. The cows might live, but humans who drank their milk often didn’t. Abraham Lincoln’s mother died of milk sickness, and whole communities of settlers would move when there was an outbreak. They didn’t know what caused it. The nineteenth-century physician Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby noticed that it was seasonal, and so deduced that it must be from something the cows were eating. In Illinois, she became friends with a Shawnee medicine woman—we know her only as Pierce did, by the name Aunt Shawnee. Aunt Shawnee had remained behind after her tribe was forced out West; she taught Pierce that the responsible weed was the one with the clusters of small, tender, white flowers. Pierce tested the theory by feeding the flowers to a young calf—which developed symptoms of milk sickness. “Do you think people believed her?” Brill asked. “No, of course not. They said it was fake news, and it was decades before her work was accepted.”
One way to think of weeds is as a plant in a place where it isn’t wanted. Ralph Waldo Emerson described weeds as plants “whose virtues have not yet been discovered,” and even the usually less exuberant Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?” Weeds can also be thought of as taking up the sun and nutrients that other plants—and the insects, birds, and humans that rely on those plants—need. Weeds can be undervalued; weeds can be bullies.
In “Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly,” from 2021, the scientist John Cardina charts the trajectory of certain plants like figures in a Shakespearean play, as they shift from being perceived as nobodies, then as heroically medicinal or nutritious plants, then as villainous weeds, and maybe back and forth again a few times. Or perhaps the closer resonance is to the “Lives of Saints,” with the plants sometimes coercing whole new geographies into spaces devoted to their propagation while nourishing the locals, or saving the soil, or ruining other crops, or doing all these things. Weeds make for fine portraits of ambiguity. Cardina told me, “I try to make a distinction between plants that are invasive in a natural area versus plants that show up and disturb agriculture.”
“Lives of Weeds” is organized around eight plants: dandelion, Florida beggarweed, velvetleaf, nutsedge, mare’s tail, pigweed, ragweed, and foxtail. Consider the story of velvetleaf, a remarkably resilient plant with silky fibres. In the nineteenth century, velvetleaf was called American jute, and it was the hope of the maritime industry in the United States, as it was used to make rope, a key element of national defense. But that hope didn’t pan out; these days, the velvetleaf’s exceptional ability to grow in disturbed soil has made it a weed, plaguing soybean crops. Velvetleaf and soybeans both evolved, originally, in similar ecologies in China. When the Second World War increased demand for domestic sources of oils and fats, soybeans were cultivated, and velvetleaf followed. Herbicides that were developed to knock out velvetleaf led to stronger, herbicide-tolerant varieties; today, it’s among the most troublesome weeds in agriculture, often surviving what farmers sometimes call spray and pray. Cardina ends his chapter on velvetleaf by describing how its ancient seeds were found in a jar, dating to the Neolithic period. The careful collection of the seeds suggests that it must have been a valuable crop.
In conversation, Cardina said, “A peculiar irony is that the methods we have for controlling weeds are more sophisticated and better than ever in a thousand years of agriculture—but the weeds that have survived are more difficult.” Cardina grew up in rural Ohio, served in the Peace Corps, received a Ph.D. in horticulture and crop science, and worked for a time for the United States Department of Agriculture; he has witnessed many shifts in thinking about weeds. He said that once herbicide-resistant weeds began to dominate, “the response was: keep developing the technology.” He sees weeds in agriculture as “a human problem more than a weed problem. We don’t have to have farms get bigger and bigger with fewer and fewer people looking at the landscape and managing the land. It’s more of a social thing than a technological thing.“
One story in the book follows the arc of beggarweed, a member of the legumes family. Cardina describes the weed in the way that a philosophical sheriff might narrate conflicts with an outlaw whom he respects. Early in his career, when employed as a research agronomist for the U.S.D.A., Cardina was working in Georgia, where beggarweed was taking over fields of peanuts. (It was also infesting fields of corn, cotton, and soybeans, but the peanuts were having the hardest time.) A local farmer explained to him that beggarweed had been popping up in peanut fields for years, but it hadn’t been so great a problem until recently.
In the late nineteenth century, beggarweed had been considered a superior forage crop. A letter to the editor in the Southern Cultivator described it as producing “the most delicious hay, thousands of pounds per acre,” with a yield so great that “there never need be another poor milk-cow from the sea-board to the blue ridge.” Beggarweed thrived where other forage crops didn’t, and it didn’t need reseeding. Then, after the nineteen-twenties, as tractors replaced horses and mules on farms, less forage crop was required. At that point, beggarweed might have become a merely ordinary weed. It is a self-pollinator, and therefore has relatively limited capacity for the kind of genetic variation—and rapid adaptability—that often characterizes plants that take over.
But beggarweed benefitted from the wondrous development of herbicides. By the mid-twentieth century, herbicides were becoming more refined, and better at selectively killing. Some herbicides killed grasses but not broad-leaved plants; some killed small-seeded plants but not large-seeded ones. Beggarweed had long been travelling with peanut plants; though they look very different, beggarweed and peanut plants have similar metabolisms. When herbicides started knocking out the grasses and broad-leaved weeds that were pestering the peanut crops, the beggarweed suddenly had a lot less competition.
In 1986, when the billion-dollar American peanut industry had come to rely on an herbicide called Dinoseb for its management of beggarweed, Dinoseb was suddenly made illegal. (It was found to increase the risk of both birth defects in female field workers and sterility in men.) Cardina started getting calls. “Peanut farmers, peanut-butter manufacturers, peanut sales reps, peanut haulers, peanut dryers . . . peanut marketers, peanut-market speculators . . . were irate and bewildered,” he wrote.
What a weed is, and which weeds play the roles of villains, is ever-shifting. Cardina mentioned a species of bedstraw that has recently become a problem in Canada. In North Dakota, flea beetles have been introduced because they feed on leafy spurge, which the nonprofit Weed Science Society of America describes as “a noxious weed that infests more than 800,000 acres of the state.”
I asked Cardina what he thought of the weeds that tend to turn up in abandoned lots and other spaces in cities. “Weedy plants are adapted to disturbance,” he said. “And thank God they’re there—they cover the soil, they start capturing carbon, they decompose and add organic matter to the soil.” But, he added, those urban-lot greens could include poison ivy, or oriental bittersweet, a vine that burdens trees.
In Iceland, Alaskan lupine, an invasive species, covers many fields—and it’s very pretty. Weeds are sometimes seen as a symbol of strength and resilience. In Tanzania, beggarweed goes by a term Cardina says is translated roughly as “spirit plant,” a name that honors its tendency to show up in the most unexpected of places. In Montreal, the greenery that sometimes grows out of sewer grates is called tree-of-heaven. Cardina feels that humans, like many weeds, have great plasticity, and, when he tries to locate a feeling of hope, it is in one’s ability to change and adapt.
Cardina closes his book with an essay on giant foxtail, which “became a major weed only because of remarkable chemical innovations, industrial expansion, a cheap food policy, Cold War rivalry, and confidence in unlimited resource availability.” For a time, he was trying to predict when foxtail would emerge—to offer a “foxtail forecast” so that farmers could use less herbicide, at more wisely determined times, to control it. He did elaborate work trying to understand the weed’s germination, but farmers didn’t feel comfortable risking a new approach to weed control.
Then he had another idea. He spoke to an entomologist friend who had a profound sense of the sequence of natural phenomena, like noticing that “bronze birch borer adults start to emerge just as black locust begins to bloom; egg hatch of pine needle scale coincides with full bloom of common lilac.” Cardina and his friend gathered data to predict foxtail-seedling emergence according to the biological calendar, noting that the appearance of the first red-chokeberry flowers was when foxtails would emerge. Hardly anybody paid attention to his efforts.
When Cardina was studying foxtail, he also paid attention to farms run by the Amish, where little to no pesticides are used, weed management is done with mechanical cultivators, weeds are more diverse, and the crops are rotated on a four-year cycle. He isn’t particularly romantic about the Amish farming practices; instead, he’s a weed scientist who sees poetry in the way that foxtails use the oscillation of oxygen concentration in the soil as part of a mechanism that determines when to sprout. “There’s no moral or ethical difference among foxtails or other mixes of weeds that I’m aware of,” he writes, but notes that, for the Amish, weeds are a nuisance and not an existential threat. It’s a strong model—the crops, the weeds, and the humans he calls “foxtail’s co-evolutionary partners.” ♦
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oldshowbiz · 3 years
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Heavy hitter line up of dirty comedians
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omegaplus · 4 years
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# 3,342
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Dealers Choice label: vinyl label (1978, 1979)
Obligatory gambling post and it’s been a long time. Dealers Choice was Miami’s independent soul-funk label whose label aesthetic (obviously) is a spades card. Calvin Arnold, Eddie Holloway, Michelle Lamb, and Sherman Hunter's vinyl singles receive the spades card vinyl labels. That was until the turn of the decade when the label only released Wildman Steve comedy records.
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redgreenshowcaps · 3 years
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hasbr0mniverse · 6 months
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Reign Of The Dinobots Month! Destiny Of The Dinobots Part Six - Credits: Dinosaur consultant/Plot/ Colour Steve White - Plot/Script Steve Alan - Art Andrew Wildman
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baycitystygian · 3 years
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I would kill to be able to attend a ships & dip cruise
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wine-porn · 2 years
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Fan Faiv
Two of the most boring wines I’ve ever had–I brought the Myglands, the house had the white–same vintage–and expectations abounded. The Aligote not surprising–my mind is just filled with WHY when I see these things. Why. Of all the great inexpensive white wines out there, why drink Aligote? Verdejo. Viognier. Fiano. Sancerre. Pinot Gris. And the looming elephant in the room is of course Petit…
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kentuckwitch · 3 years
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Books That Have Aided Me in the Development of My Craft, & a Reading List
I have to resist foundering in a ‘research and development’ stage in my practice & becoming more of an armchair witch than a practitioner. Do you struggle with that too? That said, I’ve read some amazing books that have in one or way or another helped me become a better witch and helped me do the foundational work we all have to do on our individual paths. Here are some of those, followed by a few I’m planning on reading as soon as I can get my hands on them. Have you read these? What’re your thoughts? I’d love to hear them :) And also, do you feel you sometimes get stuck or intimidated or overwhelmed with all the things we witches can do and be and become? I definitely do, and my resolution for the year is not to read and think less but to DO more.
Books I Recommend
Backwoods Witchcraft, Jake Richards
Folk Witchcraft, Roger Horne
Long Lost Friend, J.G. Gorman
The Witching Herbs, Harold Roth
The Crooked Path, Kelden
Treading the Mill, Nigel Pearson
Weave the Liminal, Laura Tempest Zakroff
Of Blood and Bones, Kate Freuler
Psychic Witch, Mat Auryn
The Witching Way of Hollow Hill, Robin Artisson
The Clovenstone Workings, Robin Artisson
The History of the Devil, R. Lowe Thompson
Mastering Herbalism, Paul Huson
The Earthwise Herbal, Matthew Wood
The Earthwise Herbal Vol. II, Matthew Wood
The Modern Herbal Dispensatory
Southern Folk Medicine, Phyllis Light
Possum Living, Dolly Freed
Shameless, Nadia Bolz-Weber
A Deed Without a Name, Lee Morgan
Besom, Stang and Sword, Orapello & Maguire
The Witch at the Forest’s Edge, Christine Grace
A Broom at Midnight, Roger Horne
Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack
The Poison Path Herbal, Coby Michael
New World Witchery, Cory Thomas Hutcheson
Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland, Lisa Schneidau
Folk Medicine of Southern Appalachia, Anthony Cavender
The Black Book of Isobel Gowdie
A Weedwife’s Remedy, Kiva Rose Hardin
Identifying and Harvesting Edible & Medicinal Herbs, ‘Wildman’ Steve Brill
Reading List for 2022
Jack Tales
Gemma Gary’s bib.
Nigel Pearson’s bib.
Thirteen Pathways of Occult Herbalism, Daniel A. Schulke
Ars Philtron, Daniel A. Schulke
Mastering Witchcraft, Paul Huson
Accounts of the ‘witch trials’ of the Americas & Europe
Books on Appalachian & Kentucky history
The Cherokee Herbal
Michael Howard’s bib.
Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine, Lara Veleda Vesta
Wild Witchcraft: Folk Herbalism, Garden Magic & Foraging for Spells, Rituals & Remedies, Rebecca Beyer
I’ll add to this list as I go back over the bibliographies of my favorites, but I’d love any recommendations you have for books that have enriched your practice. Please share! :)
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