#and robert said the words ny husband | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

fanfics-andstuff · 4 years ago

Text

Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf

1755-01-11: Olivia and Alexander Hamilton’s Birth - Olivia and Alexander were born in Charlestown, St. Kitts, and Nevis.

1765-01-16: Hamilton’s Father Left - James Hamilton, Olivia and Alexander Hamilton's father, and a Scottish Laird, left Hamilton and his family, most likely due to the fact, Olivia, Alexander, and James Jr. were his illegitimate children. It was a relief for the children because he would always beat up James Jr. and Olivia, trying to protect their youngest sibling.

1766-02-17: Hamilton’s Mother Dies - Rachel Faucette Buck, Hamilton's mother, died on February 19, 1768. Cause of death: Yellow Fever. After her death, Alexander and Olivia moved to live with their cousin for a year. Before she died, she gave Olivia the Hamilton ring (gold ring, amethyst pearl-shaped center, and small emerald cut emeralds) that was said to be passed down from generation to generation and a navy blue and dark purple diary, she gave Alexander her necklace from George (5 sapphire petals, a red ruby center, and a thin gold chain).

1766-02-20: Hamiltons In Court - John Lavien (Rachel’s husband) arrived wanting a divorce decree. He wanted the court to reward the entire estate to his son, Peter because the twins were illegitimate. Alexander and Olivia had their uncle, James Lytton, sign a false birth year for court documents that had them add two years their senior. The only thing they got was books taken from Peter, thanks to their uncle.

1767-02-17: Hamilton’s Cousin Committed Suicide and James Jr. Left to Become a Carpenter- Peter Lytton committed suicide over the death of his wife. Alexander and Olivia are now, with no money and family, or destitute orphans. James Jr had to leave the twins behind to become an apprentice of a carpenter.

1771-01-16: Alexander In Charge Of A Trading Charter - Since girls couldn’t work, Alexander had to. Turns out, that Alexander had the perfect “age” for jobs.

1772-08-31: Hurricane Maria Hits - Hurricane Maria hit St. Croix, where Alexander was working and Olivia was nearby to look out for her younger brother.

1772-09-06: Alexander Writes About Hurricane Maria - Alexander wrote to his father describing the storm and gained the attention of the island’s elite. He “wrote his way out”.

1772-12-01: Olivia Receives a Letter That Alexander Died - Somewhere between these months, Olivia gets a letter that the ship Alexander was on sunk and there were no survivors. She was then sold to a family in Setauket, Long Island as a slave, where she meets Benjamin Tallmadge, Anna Smith, Abraham Woodhull, and Caleb Brewster.

1776-09-15: Olivia Gets Freed - Thankfully Olivia was considered white, so she was taught how to improve her grammar, writing, healing, cooking, etc. She still had her Nevis accent, but Olivia could play it off by saying Spanish was her native language. Speaking of languages, Olivia was fluent in French, Latin, Greek, Italian, Danish, and Hebrew. 4 or so years later, Olivia was a free woman.

1777-04-27: Olivia Reunites With Alexander - Olivia gets assigned as a spy for the continental army. The rest of the army gets word that she had the same last name as Alexander’s. After being reintroduced to each other, Olivia forces Alexander to take more care of himself (eating, sleeping).

1777-09-11: Olivia gets shot in the side during the Battle of Brandywine.

1777-10-18: Olivia And Alexander Presumed Dead - Both Hamilton twins jumped in the Schuylkill River and swam deeper, hoping the British Cavalry presumed them dead. They were washed down miles going with the current of the river. Alexander carried her unconscious body to the Patriot camp. Hercules Mulligan found the twins and helped them get to their destination quicker.

1777-10-19: Washington Finds Out The Twins Are His - Olivia woke first and told Washington to read her diary for answers because she was too tired. He found out about Olivia’s life story and found out Olivia Rachel and Alexander James Hamilton were his biological children. Washington then found out about the Hamilton family ring and Rachel’s flower necklace. Olivia and Washington swore to never tell this to Alexander and to any human being (not a certain diary written in code that no one, but Olivia and Alexander can understand).

1777-10-20: Olivia sneaks off to the Battle of Paoli, instead of resting.

1777-10-21: The Locket - Washington gave Olivia a gold locket engraved with ‘Together In Mount Vernon, Virginia’ complete with a gold chain. Inside was a portrait of the Hamilsiblings (Alex, Olivia, Ben, and Laf) on the right and a portrait of the Washington couple on the left.

1778-05-25: Olivia Comes Back - After disguising herself as a black-haired, Dutch woman, named Denise Melody, she returned to Washington about the British army. Olivia resigned as a spy because she didn’t want to come back to England ever again. But mostly, she was afraid that King George III would force her to marry him.

1778-05-26: Olivia Becomes The First Woman General - After listening from every soldier in the Continental Army, General George Washington makes Olivia a General. The only difference is that she would be traveling with the main camp because she doesn't have enough experience to lead her own army. She helped train the under-trained soldiers, sewed clothes for those who were practically naked, negotiated with wealthy families to give the army food, helped with the battle plans because of her knowledge as a spy, and her overall kindness and empathy to everyone helped her rise to the top to not only the soldiers but to the rest of the people in the Colonies.

1778-06-28: The Battle of Monmouth - Olivia saves Benjamin Tallmadge from William Bradford when Charles Lee ordered him to. The rest of the army arrives behind Washington. Olivia participates in the Battle of Monmouth.

1778-09-15: Olivia And Lafayette’s Relationship - In Olivia’s diary, she didn’t specify the date because she wrote “I believe it is the 15th of September 1778”. In the entry, she wrote about her and Lafayette’s relationship began as platonic but over time, it became romantic.

1778-11-01: Olivia Joins The Culper Ring - After begging and pleading to her father and Commander in Chief, Olivia joins the Culper Spy Ring with the rest of the members: Benjamin Tallmadge, Caleb Brewster, Anna Strong, Abigail, Abraham Woodhull, and Robert Townsend. Olivia gets a golden band from Apollo that helps disguise her appearance with the use of the mist, she gives the other rings to the other members. They created a cover that the golden rings were from their deceased family member. In reality, they used it to signal the others when they need help or have information about the British.

1778-12-15: Olivia As a Maid - Olivia disguises herself as a beaten and branded girl as a Caribbean slave, even though she was white by the Continental Army to John André's home to spy on him. She later resigns from her post before her next battle.

1779-07-16: Stony Point - Olivia helps capture Stony Point, New York with the army.

1779-11-17: Olivia And John Get Married - To keep the relationship between John and Alexander less suspicious, Olivia proposed a marriage proposal to John’s father; Henry, who knew about their secret relationship, agreed. Even though both adults were married, they had no love for the other than familial love. They agreed that their marriage was only public and behind closed doors, they would seek out their paramour (John-Alexander and Olivia-Lafayette).

1780-06-17: Olivia’s Quadruplets - 9 months later, Olivia gave birth to 4 children: Rachel Olivia, Alexander John, George Benjamin, and Elizabeth Gilberta Laurens from oldest to youngest. The godparents of each child were Olivia-Martha Washington, Alexander-George Washington, George-Benjamin Tallmadge, and Elizabeth-Lafayette. Because of this, Olivia took a break from the army for a while.

1780-09-23: Caleb Brewster and Olivia Find Out Arnold's A Traitor - After talking with Anna Strong, Brewster and Olivia ride full speed towards West Point, NY to deliver the message to George Washington. Ben and Olivia tried to shoot Arnold, but due to their closeness, they couldn't.

1780-10-02: John André Hanged - André was born a child of Athena and knew about the Greek Gods. He knew that Olivia was spying on him, but didn't comment on it until they were in private before his execution. The Fates had cut his string in front of him when Olivia posed as a maid and had demigod dreams of his death. John knew that Olivia was a legacy of Apollo and Athena, he didn't want to hurt his family.

1780-12-14: Alexander and Eliza Get Married - Eliza accepted John’s relationship with her husband as long as Alexander doesn’t cheat on her with other women.

1780-12-15: Olivia Boards L'Hermione - Olivia joins Lafayette to bring down turncoat Benedict Arnold. They join 1, 200 troops and sail south to Virginia.

1781-05-20: Abraham Boards L'Hermione - Abraham gets captured by the French and gave information to Lafayette, but before anything else happens, the ship gets attacked by cannons. When Brewster and Olivia identify Abraham as a spy for the Culper Ring named Samuel Culper Sr, they sail to Yorktown, Virginia.

1781-09-28: The Battle Of Yorktown - Olivia gets shot 3 times during the battle but recovered soon after. Lafayette soon bid Olivia farewell to sail back to France. Olivia gives him her very long lock of braided hair inside a portrait locket necklace of her for him to remember her by. He also gives her a braided lock of his hair and a portrait locket of himself.

1782-01-22: Olivia Becomes An Aunt - Phillip Hamilton was born.

1782-08-27: John Laurens Dies - Olivia, Alexander, Hercules, and Lafayette get letters from Henry Laurens that John died in South Carolina. In her letter, Olivia receives her husband’s wedding ring. Heartbroken, Olivia vows to never marry again.

1782-09-01: Olivia And Alexander Return To New York - Olivia gets a house in Harlem near her brother and his family. She led a quiet life with her children, unlike Alexander, for a while.

1783-01-01: Olivia Bids Angelica Farewell - Over the course of the years, Olivia and Angelica became best friends. She hated the fact that Angelica and her family would go back to the same country they fought for years.

1783-06-20: Pennsylvania Mutiny - Olivia watches the 10 leaders of the Pennsylvania Mutiny be gunned down by their own men beside Alexander and Ben.

1783-09-03: The End Of The Revolution - The Treaty of Paris was finally signed which negotiated between America and Great Britain, ended the revolution, and recognized America as an independent.

1787-10-?: Alexander Asks Olivia To Co-Write The Federalist Papers - Sometime before the writing of the Federalist Papers, Alexander asks Olivia to co-write it with John Jay, James Madison, and himself. Olivia politely declined because she believed that the three men could do it without her.

1787-05-25: The Twins Go To The Constitutional Convention - Olivia Hamilton Laurens and Alexander Hamilton were one-half of the New York delegates. The former was the only woman to go to the Constitutional Convention. Though the twins did little in writing the Constitution, they signed the paper anyway.

1789-02-04: Olivia Becomes The First Woman Vice President - Olivia ran for President all in good fun. The results were unanimous because she was one of the contributing factors that helped America become independent, only second to George Washington, and became the Vice President of the United States.

1790-03-22: Olivia Meets Thomas Jefferson - When Jefferson and Olivia met, let’s just say that they will forever be enemies. This is partly the reason why Alexander and Jefferson were also enemies.

1790-06-20: Olivia Refuses To Go To The Jefferson Dinner - Olivia doesn’t go to the dinner with Jefferson, Madison, Alexander, and a few others saying she had other things to do. But she doesn’t go because she didn’t want to be caught in the middle of a verbal fight between Alexander and Jefferson, again.

1791-07-05: Olivia Finds Out About Alexander’s Affair - Alexander needed to speak to someone about his affair with Maria Reynolds, so he went to Olivia (naturally). Olivia slaps him and tells him about his promise to Eliza when he married her. She tells him if her husband finds out and tells/writes you to give him money to keep the affair a secret, he himself would pay entirely.

1792-?-?: Olivia Receives Word About Lafayette’s Capture - Historians would never know the date when Olivia gets a letter that Lafayette fled from France and in prison because she only wrote the year and stopped writing in her diary for the rest of that year. They figured that she was extremely heartbroken to write.

1793-02-25: Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf - Olivia was poisoned by a loyalist named Micheal Key. Thankfully the poison was expired and went on to sit in Mount Vernon for hours talking about the establishment of the first U.S. bank. But due to Olivia’s frail and weak body for not eating and sleeping at the correct times, she became gravely ill. She sent her four children to Setauket with Abraham Woodhull. the week before. The four mentioned people came to her room in Mount Vernon. minutes before Olivia died. She gave Washington the locket he gave her all those years ago, gave Benjamin her sun hair comb he gave her when the war was over and her golden spy ring, gave Eliza her and John’s wedding rings and gave Alexander the Hamilton family ring and her diary (she instructed him to only read the entry about their true heritage when he is on his deathbed). She then instructed Ben to give Lafayette, her one true love, to give the gift he gave her when they started their relationship, a sapphire bracelet when he visits America once more. Olivia told the three to forgive her for leaving too early, she remembered the time she gave Washington piano lessons (which failed), the time where she forced Alexander to eat and sleep more regularly, and the time where she helped Eliza with her pregnancy with Phillip and her other children. She sang, “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf,” which she does when she tries to reassure those around her. Olivia’s last words were, “I’ll see all of you on the other side, John, my love, I’m coming.” She was buried in Trinity Church Cemetery with a large monument. When the States learned of her death, the nation stopped working for days. Everyone who knew her (which was a lot) attended the funeral ceremony. Washington placed a bronze statue of Olivia depicting her holding a gun in her right hand and her diary in her left hand with the four rings on her fingers to show that women too, can be powerful.

1793-02-26: Micheal Key Hanged - Because he assassinated the Vice President, Micheal John Key was hanged the next day at noon.

1867-01-11: Olivia On Currency - In memory of Olivia, they put her face on the $20 on her birthday. However, in 1928, she was briefly replaced by Andrew Jackson but quickly regained her place after much controversy.

1999-12-15: Olivia Becomes Lyria - Olivia Rachel Hamilton Laurens, rebirthed to Lyria Eclair Graham de Vanily, the most powerful demigoddess of her century.

#oliviarachelhamilton #Olivia Hamilton #Alexander Hamilton #turn amc #turn: washington's spies #I finally figured out how to do the read more link

9 notes · View notes

blackkudos · 5 years ago

Text

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953) is an American artist who works with text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation video, and is best known for her work in the field of photography. Her award-winning photographs, films, and videos have been displayed in over 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism, sexism, politics, and personal identity.

She said, "Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in the country." More recently however, she expressed that "Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion ... is the real point."

Early life and education

Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953, the second of seven children to Carrie Polk and Myrlie Weems. She began participating in dance and street theater in 1965. At the age of 16 she gave birth to her first and only child, a daughter named Faith C. Weems. Later that year she moved out of her parents’ home and soon relocated to San Francisco to study modern dance with Anna Halprin at a workshop Halprin had started with several other dancers, as well as the artists John Cage and Robert Morris. She decided to continue her arts schooling and attended the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, graduating at the age of 28 with her B.A. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Weems also participated in the folklore graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley.

While in her early twenties, Carrie Mae Weems was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her first camera, which she received as a birthday gift, was used for this work before being used for artistic purposes. She was inspired to pursue photography after she came across The Black Photography Annual, a book of images by African-American photographers including Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, Anthony Barboza, Ming Smith, Adger Cowans, and Roy DeCarava, who Weems found inspiring. This led her to New York City, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she began to meet other artists and photographers such as Coreen Simpson and Frank Stewart, and they began to form a community. In 1976 Weems took a photography class at the Museum taught by Dawoud Bey. She returned to San Francisco, but lived bi-coastally and was invited by Janet Henry to teach at the Studio Museum and a community of photographers in New York.

Career and work

In 1983, Carrie Mae Weems completed her first collection of photographs, text, and spoken word, called Family Pictures and Stories. The images told the story of her family, and she has said that in this project she was trying to explore the movement of black families out of the South and into the North, using her family as a model for the larger theme. Her next series, called Ain't Jokin', was completed in 1988. It focused on racial jokes and internalized racism. Another series called American Icons, completed in 1989, also focused on racism. Weems has said that throughout the 1980s she was turning away from the documentary photography genre, instead "creating representations that appeared to be documents but were in fact staged" and also "incorporating text, using multiples images, diptychs and triptychs, and constructing narratives." Sexism was the next focal point for her. It was the topic of one of her most well known collections called The Kitchen Table series which was completed in over a two year period, 1989 to 1990 and has Weems cast as the central character in the photographs. About Kitchen Table and Family Pictures and Stories, Weems has said: "I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women—underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves." She has expressed disbelief and concern about the exclusion of images of the black community, particularly black women, from the popular media, and she aims to represent these excluded subjects and speak to their experience through her work. These photographs created space for other black female artists to further create art. Weems has also reflected on the themes and inspirations of her work as a whole, saying,

... from the very beginning, I've been interested in the idea of power and the consequences of power; relationships are made and articulated through power. Another thing that's interesting about the early work is that even though I've been engaged in the idea of autobiography, other ideas have been more important: the role of narrative, the social levels of humor, the deconstruction of documentary, the construction of history, the use of text, storytelling, performance, and the role of memory have all been more central to my thinking than autobiography.

Other series created by Weems include: the Sea Island Series (1991–92), the Africa Series (1993), From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96), Who What When Where (1998), Ritual & Revolution (1998), the Louisiana Project (2003), Roaming (2006), and the Museum Series, which she began in 2007. Her most recent project, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, is a multimedia performance that explores "the role of grace in the pursuit of democracy."

In her almost 30-year career, Carrie Mae Weems has won numerous awards. She was named Photographer of the Year by the Friends of Photography. In 2005, she was awarded the Distinguished Photographer's Award in recognition of her significant contributions to the world of photography. Her talents have also been recognized by numerous colleges, including Harvard University and Wellesley College, with fellowships, artist-in-residence and visiting professor positions. She taught photography at Hampshire College in the late 1980s. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2013. In 2015 Weems was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow. In September 2015, the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research presented her with the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal.

The first comprehensive retrospective of her work opened in September 2012 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, as a part of the center's exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. Curated by Katie Delmez, the exhibition ran until January 13, 2013, and later traveled to Portland Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts. The 30-year retrospective exhibition opened in January 2014 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. This was the first time an "African-American woman [was] ever given a solo exhibition" at the Guggenheim. Weems' work returned to the Frist in October 2013 as a part of the center's 30 Americans gallery, alongside black artists ranging from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Kehinde Wiley.

Weems' work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Tate Museum in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008.

A full-color, visual book, titled Carrie Mae Weems, was published by Yale University Press in October 2012. The book offers the first major survey of Weems' career and includes a collection of essays from leading and emerging scholars in addition to over 200 of Weems' most important works.

Weems lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone. She continues to produce art that provides social commentary on the experiences of people of color, especially black women, in America.

Weems is one of six artist-curators who made selections for Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from May 24, 2019, through January 12, 2020.

Select exhibitions

Presentations of her work have included exhibitions at:

Women in Photography, Cityscape Photo Gallery, Pasadena, CA, 1981

Multi-Cultural Focus, Barnsdall Art gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 1981

Family Pictures and Stories, Multi-Cultural Gallery, San Diego, CA, 1984

People Close Up, Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 1986

Social Concerns, Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD, 1986

Past, Present, Future, The New Museum, New York, NY, 1986

Visible Differences, Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego, CA, 1987

The Other, The Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX, 1988

A Century of Protest, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, 1989

Black Women Photographers, Ten.8, London, England, 1990

Who Counts?, Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1990

Biological Factors, Nexus Gallery, Atlanta, GA, 1990

Trouble in Paradise, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, MA, 1990

Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 1991

Of Light and Language, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA, 1991

Pleasures and terrors of Domestic Comfort, MOMA, New York, NY, 1991

Calling Out My Name, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY (traveled to PPOW gallery, New York, NY), 1991

Disclosing the Myth of Family, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1992

Schwarze Kunst: Konzepte zur Politik und Identitat, Neue Gesellschaft fur dingende Kunst, Berlin, Germany, 1992

Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine, Whitney Museum of American Art, at Equitable Center, New York, NY, 1992

Art, Politics, and Community, William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Mansfield, CT (traveled to Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA), 1992

Mis/Taken identities, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA (traveled to Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria; Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen im Forum Langenstraße, Germany; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA), 1992–1994

Photography: Expanding the Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 1992–1994

Sea Island, The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, PA, 1993

Carrie Mae Weems (traveling exhibition), The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, 1993

And 22 Million Very Tired and very Angry People, Walter/McBean gallery, San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco, CA, 1993

Enlightenment, Revolution, A Gallery Project, Ferndale, MI, 1993

Fictions of the Self: The Portrait in Contemporary Photography, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 1993–1994

The Theatre of Refusal: Black Art and the Mainstream Criticism, Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, CA (traveled to University of California, Davis, CA; and University of California, Riverside, CA), 1993–1994

Women's Representation of Women, Sapporo American Center Gallery, Sapporo, Japan (traveled to Aka Renga Cultural Center, Fukuoka City, Japan; Kyoto International Community House, Kyoto, Japan; Aichi Prefectural Arts Center, Nagoya, Japan; Osaka Prefectural Contemporary Arts Center, Japan; Spiral Arts Center, Tokyo, Japan), 1994

Imagining Families: Images and Voices, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1994–1995

Black Male, Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, and The Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA, 1994–1995

Carrie Mae Weems Reacts to Hidden Witness, J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, Malibu, CA, 1995

Projects 52, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1995

StoryLand: Narrative Vision and Social Space, Walter Phillips gallery, The Banff Center for the Arts, Banff, Canada, 1995

Embedded Metaphor, Traveling exhibit, curated by Nina Felshin, 1996

Inside the Visible, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., international traveling exhibition, 1996

Gender - Beyond Memory, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan, 1996

2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Africus Institute for Contemporary Art, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1997

Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African-American Artists, traveling exhibition, 1998

Taboo: Repression and Revolt in Modern Art, Gallery St. Etienne, New York, NY, 1998

Tell me a Story: Narration in Contemporary Painting and Photography, Center National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble, France, 1998

Recent Work: Carrie Mae Weems 1992–98, Everson Art Museum, Syracuse, NY, 1998–1999

Who, What, When, and Where, Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris, New York, NY, 1998–1999

Ritual & Revolution, DAK'ART 98: Biennale of Contemporary Art, Galerie National d'Art, Dakar, Senegal, 1998–1999

It's Only Rock and Roll, traveling exhibition, 1999

Claustrophobia: Disturbing the Domestic in Contemporary Art, traveling exhibition, 1999

Histories (Re)membered, The Bronx Museum of Art, New York, NY, 1999

Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, 2000–2003

Looking Forward, Looking Back, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, 2000

Material and Matter: Loans to and Selections from the Studio Museum Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 2000

The View From Here: Issues of Cultural Identity and Perspective in Contemporary Russian and American Art, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, 2000

Strength and Diversity: A Celebration of African-American Artists, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2000

Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present, Smithsonian Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and culture, Washington, DC, 2000

History Now, touring exhibition beginning at the Liljevalchs Konsthall and Riksutstallningar, Stockholm, Sweden, 2002

Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More... On Collecting, traveling exhibition curated by Independent curators International, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2002

The Louisiana Project, Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 2003

Cuba on the Verge, International Center of Photography, New York, NY, 2003

Crimes and Misdemeanors: Politics in U.S. Art of the 1980s, Lois & Richard Rosenthal center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, OH, 2003

Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX, 2004

Beyond Compare: Women Photographers on Beauty, BCE, Toronto (traveling exhibit), 2004

African American Art - Photographs from the Collection, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO, 2005

Figuratively Speaking, Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL, 2005

The Whole World is Rotten, Jack Shainman gallery, New York, NY, 2005

Common Ground: Discovering Community in 150 Years of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2005

Out of Time: A Contemporary View, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 2006

Black Alphabet: Contexts of Contemporary African-American Art, Zacheta national gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, 2006

Hidden in Plain Sight, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 2007

Embracing Eatonville, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI, 2007

The 21st century, The Feminine Century, and the century of Diversity and Hope, 2009 International Incheon Women Artists' Biennial, Incheon, South Korea, 2009–2010

Colour Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, Tate Liverpool, UK, 2009–2010

Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool, UK, 2009–2010

From Then to Now: Masterworks of Contemporary African American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, 2009–2010

Carrie Mae Weems: Estudios Sociales, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain, 2010

Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 2010

Slow Fade to Black, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY, 2010

The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum, Durham, NC, 2010

Myth, Manners and Memory: Photographers of the American South, De La Warr Pavilion, East Sussex, UK, 2010

Off the Wall: Part 1 – Thirty Performative Actions, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, 2010

The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973–1991, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, Purchase, New York, NY, 2010

Posing Beauty: African American Images From the 1890s to the Present, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, 2010

Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation with 21 Contemporary Artists, Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY, 2010

Unsettled: Photography and Politics in Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2010

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, 2012

This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 2012

La Triennale: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2012

Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba, 2012

The Maddening Crowd (video installation), McNay Art Museum, Sa Antonio, TX, 2012

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford, CA, 2013

Feminist And..., The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, 2013

Seven Sisters, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2013

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York, NY, 2014

P.3 Prospect New Orleans, The McKenna Museum, New Orleans, LA, 2014

Color: Real and Imagined, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, England, 2014

Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, 2014

Wide Angle: American Photographs, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2014

The Memory of Time, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2015

Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy, 2015

Winter in America, The School (Jack Shainman Gallery), 2015

An Exhibition of African American Photographers from the Daguerreian to the Digital Eras, Marshall Fine Arts Center at Haveford College, Haveford, PA, 2015

Represent: 200 years of African American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2015

Under Color of Law, The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art and Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA, 2015

30 Americans, Detroit Institute of Arts, 2015

Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, Spoleto Festival, Spoleto, Italy, 2016

The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art. Cambridge, MA, 2016

Viewpoints, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (February 18–June 18, 2017)

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (April 21–September 17, 2017)

Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (June 9–October 7, 2017)

Matera Imagined: Photography and a Southern Italian Town, American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy (2017)

...And the People, Maruani Mercer, Knokke, Belgium (August 5–September 4, 2017)

Medium, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA (August 29–December 3, 2017)

Carrie Mae Weems: Ritual and Revolution, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (September 12–December 10, 2017)

Dimensions of Black, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA (September 17–December 28, 2017)

Posing Beauty in African American Culture, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL (October 6, 2016 – January 21, 2018)

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (October 13, 2017 – January 14, 2018)

Edward Hopper Citation of Merit in the Visual Arts Recipient Exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: Beacon, Nyack, NY (November 10, 2017 – February 25, 2018)

Making Home: Contemporary Works From the DIA, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI (December 1, 2017 – June 6, 2018)

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (June 27–September 30, 2018)

Be Strong and Do Not Betray Your Soul: Selections from the Light Work Collection, Light Work, Syracuse, NY (August 27–October 18, 2018)

Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Boston, MA (September 10–December 13, 2018)

Family Pictures, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI (September 14, 2018 – January 20, 2019)

Heave, 2018 Cornell University Biennial, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (September 20, 2018–November 5, 2018)

Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA (January 13, 2019–May 5, 2019)

Carrie Mae Weems II Over Time, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (September 7, 2019–October 5, 2019)

Awards

2005: Distinguished Photographers Award

2007: Anonymous Was A Woman Award

2013: Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award

2013: MacArthur Fellow, "Genius" Award

2014: BET Visual Arts Award

2014: Lucie Award

2015: ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography.

2015: Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow

2015: W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University

2015: Honorary Doctorate from the School of Visual Arts

2016: National Artist Award, Anderson Ranch Arts Center

2016: Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theatre

2016: College Arts Association

2016: DeFINE ART

2016: Art of Change Fellow, Ford Foundation

2017: Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University

2017: Inga Maren Otto Fellowship, The Watermill Center

2019: Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, Bristol.

Publications

Carrie Mae Weems : The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.), 1995.

Carrie Mae Weems : Image Maker, 1995.

Carrie Mae Weems : Recent Work, 1992––1998, 1998.

Carrie Mae Weems: In Louisiana Project, 2004.

Carrie Mae Weems: Constructing History, 2008.

Carrie Mae Weems : Social Studies, 2010.

Carrie Mae Weems : Three Decades of Photography and Video, 2012.

Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series, 2016.

#04/20

6 notes · View notes

jq37 · 5 years ago

Note

May we have a recap, please? :)

**spoilers for panic at the art show and home for the holidays**

OK people. I actually don’t have a ton of commentary on these two so I’m gonna try and keep it (relatively) short and sweet [Edit from Future Me: Failed Step 1].

Also, iirc, this is the week Dropout starts streaming new Fantasy High eps on Wednesdays which is very dope and I am very excited for. I probably won’t do full on recaps like I do for normal eps because, lbr, I don’t strictly have the time to be recapping these eps at all and it’s pure stubbornness that keeps me from making wiser time management decisions. But, rest assured, if I have an Opinion, you will hear it whether you want to or not.

Anyway, on with the show.

Last recap, I mentioned that this ep was giving me Aelwen house party vibes and now it reminds me of that ep in another way: Everyone rolled like TRASH almost the entire ep. It was so frustrating! They barely got any hits in until like halfway through the ep.

(Aw man, I just realized I’m gonna have to remember which spelling of Aelwen is correct again now that FH is coming back.)

I love how Murph is immediately like, “I need to make sure my wife doesn’t die during this fight avenging her fictional husband.”

Isabella also has Aelwen’s trick of poofing around the battlefield which is annoying as hell (ha) for the group.

Siobhan hilariously casts fear on Priya just to be spiteful. I thought she was doing it to help the evac process but no. It was a purely spiteful action. Bless.

When Kug turns into an ape he, of course, turns into *the* NY ape, King Kong.

“I roll a nat 20 on an epic shit.”

When Brennan was describing Kingston’s spectral New Yorker Guardians I was already thinking about that one part of Spiderman 2 (the OG Toby Mac version) and then he straight up said, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” and I lost it.

“Deny the stairs the pleasure of my feet.” Emily is a poet.

I want to know what makes a pigeon spicy more than anything.

The fact that Brennan killed Ox AGAIN and then immediately looked into the camera and let the audience know the dog was fine because he clearly Oracle stared into the future between eps and saw the entire internet sharpening their pitchforks was so funny.

About midway through the ep, Pete tries and fails to send Isabella back to hell and Isabella starts monologing about her plans and connection with Robert Moses (she stole the list from Santa and is/was gonna marry Moses apparently). I wonder if Brennan was like, “These players are for sure gonna murder her without getting any useful info out of her unless she goes full Bond Villain right now.”

And, proving my point, Emily immediately does 56 points of damage, royally f-ing Isabella up.

This is a really civilian heavy fight which feels weird in a way the FH fights never did. Like, these aren’t even civilians who live in an adventuring town in a fantasy world. These are just normal ass civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Pete fails a wild magic roll after failing to teleport into the building and then gets a choice of getting really strong (which prob would have let him bust down the door) or to teleport in (which is what he does and exactly what he wanted). Very clutch when the dice rolls play into the story like that.

Kingston lightning bolts Isabella’s hair off which is just malicious but also totally called for.

On her next turn, Sophie gets hurt on purpose to get low enough to activate her ring, lets her hair burn for long enough to shorten it to a cute bob, insults Isabella, then knocks her tf out.

I love that Emily took one of her teeth (a seemingly crazy move) and when called out by Lou was like, “It’s a link to Robert Moses” (a completely reasonable answer). That’s the Axford one-two punch.

I didn’t mention it before but, Willie the golem is here, first immobile but then brought back by Misty. Post fight, he says he was somehow brought here by one of the evil factions of the city and says they’ll talk about it later. Also, Misty makes out with him (DON’T KINKSHAME HER).

With a high insight roll, Kingston is able to deduce that the group was ambushed (though not by Priya) and that their victory was a really important one for the fate of the city.

(Sidenote: The amount that Pete is Over Priya in this ep is so funny.)

Back at Wally’s (which is where Kug is now staying) Wally has gotten Kug a dog bed to sleep in and fancy charcuterie cheese because he and Ricky are the only pure-hearted people in NYC.

At the same time, Pete and Kingston have a very sweet heart to heart and then settle down at Kingston’s place to chill and listen to jazz. Idk how else we expected this to resolve, considering this is a Brennan Lee Mulligan DM’d show where the sacred pillars are Teamwork, Friendship, Communication, and Making up an NPC on the Fly Because One of Your PC’s Decided to do an Insane Thing.

Next up is the Christmas ep and Brennan, Emily, and Zac are in sweaters for the occasion.

Well,actually it’s the 21st and Emily immediately clocks that that’s the solstice.

Are cookies the good carb?/Absolutely not. But have fun with your life. (I love Ricky’s soft jock energy.)

“I run deliveries,” Pete says to Kingston’s parents, not technically lying but also not being completely truthful. Misty would be proud.

Going over to Misty, it seems pretty clear at this point (and it’s confirmed in the promo for next ep) that Misty’s fairy business is some kind of de-aging/reincarnation for herself. I wonder how many of these she’s done so far. She said she’s been around for, what? 200, 300 years? Assuming she’s been doing then reincarnations at about 65-70 years old and she reincarnates to around 25? Maybe 6 times? Idk. Just spitballing.

Saucer of milk to keep the faeries from stealing her (non-existing) children. Faerie lore is wild y'all.

Did you take another level of warlock?/Yeah bitch.

The fact that since Sophie has joined a monastery, she’s only taken Warlock levels and no Monk levels is very funny from a story perspective. It’s like, she finally comes to this sacred place to be trained to her full potential and she’s just spending what should be her sparring time playing with her cat in exchange for spells. Wild.

Emily’s cat-like, self-satisfied grin when Brennan is like, “So you just jerry-rigged yourself clairvoyance powers, huh?” is so good.

And she did it on the fly because Emily Axford is winning D&D. There are no points but she’s winning.

So, uh, Emily does, two things, very in character right after the other:

Thing number one: She send her unseen servant to spy on her family. Her dad seems hardline, “F, Dale. Whatever. Family first. She needs to get over it.” On the other side of the spectrum is her mom who is very upset about the whole affair with her siblings falling in the middle.

The second thing she does, very casually I might add, is have her unseen servant BURN DOWN HER HOUSE SO SHE CAN COMMIT INSURANCE FRAUD.

EMILY

Everyone loses their minds and rightfully so. What a wild-ass swing that no one could have seen coming. I love it.

“I look in my backpack which is now my home[…]"

I almost forgot that Ricky was a fire fighter who would not abide that nonsense until Brennan decided to cut to him.

Ricky just dolphin swims across the Hudson in 2.5 mins to go put out the fire that Sophie set. Amazing.

Ally mocking Emily/Sophie: Truthfully, I don’t know what happened.

"I love John McClane, because he loves his wife.” WALLY

Wally: Oh we’re gonna tell a lie on Christmas.

“This is what winning looks like.”

I would really like to know what trace stuff what on the drugs Pete got from 7 but Ally rolled too low to figure it out.

“I disassociate fully."

Well it took him a long ass time but glad to have Pete on the selling drugs to kids is bad train. Choo-choo, dude.

7 saying you can hack in real life in reference to his AK-47 has the same energy as Hardison using the word hack in literally any semi-weird episode of Leverage.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS VOLUNTARY PANOPTICON

So Kug goes with Wally to David’s house disguised as a dog and, despite that, blurts out that he’s his dad immediately. Well, he tries to. The Umbral Arcana stops him, unfortunately.

"I lick my son’s face.” KUUUUG.

Sophie showing up with a raw goose and hellish rebuking it is so metal and it’s a shame no one got to appreciate it.

Me when Sophie’s Mom changes into black top in solidarity for Sophie’s mourning: F EVERY OTHER NON-SOPHIE BICICLETA. I RESPECT YOU.

Kingston is hustling very hard to get his man Pete a job which is a very Kingston move. That’s how guys like that show affection.

Didn’t mention it before but Kingston’s parents and Mom specifically adopting Pete is very cute.

Sidenote: Idk what 7 was talking about Pete trying to stay low profile. He wears a cowboy hat (now a ZEBRA STRIPED one, courtesy of Kingston). I think the subtlety train has sailed my guy.

Esther shows up at the firehouse, carrying presents for her mom and grandma and looking for Ricky. The says that she’s kinda dealing with something and it feels good to be around him (beat) magically speaking. Sure. I’m gonna keep my Hercules soundtrack on hand just in case anyway.

I think Ricky is the only person who, with no pretense, could give his crush a sexy calendar featuring him.

Anyway, turns out Esther’s mom and grandma are the furies of Tompkins Square and she’s fated to join them or something.

Esther causally: I defy you, I defy the prophecy.

The fury thing would explain why Esther’s mom would have cursed Kug. They are famously magical punishers.

Ricky is a magically certified Good Boy but we been knew.

Zac’s restraint to respect Esther’s personal boundaries in lieu of getting a lore drop to stay true to Ricky’s character is amazing. Mad props.

So we slide over to Misty’s Christmas party which Stephen Sondhein is attending and him having a character card kinda killed me.

There’s a post on tumblr somewhere about playing faerie incapability for impoliteness against a vampires need to be invited in and that’s what I thought about when Moses and his vamp friends showed up at Misty’s house.

Robert tries to talk Misty into striking a deal with him for protection from Titania. She’s very much not having it.

“You know Robert, I love a comedy and I love a farce. I’d like to remind you of who it is that started this and it’s not me and it’s not my friends but I can assure you Robert Moses that we will be the ones to end it if you do not. Do you understand me?” Damn. That’s a mic drop from Misty.

[As I’m editing this, I’m realizing I somehow lost a BIG chunk of text. I’m not gonna write it all up again but the Cliffnotes are as follows:

Between the Solstice and Christmas, the gang goes Grand Central Station to see the clockwork gnomes that live there because trouble is apparently afoot. Some size changing nonsense happens and Pete shoots a dog (with mini bullets, the dog is fine). Lou is enchanted even though Kingston is not (a common theme with him). Ally and Emily are on the same nonsense wavelength (as usual).

There are dope magical dragon trains under Grand Central Station that go to the shadow realm which is a place I’d like to know about. Kingston has never seen these trains before even though you’d really think he would have.

Murph says Gnome Rights which is wild if you know what Naddpod is like.

Anyway, the high priestess of the gnomes passed out the other day and they figure out it was due to pixie magic which is suspicious. They also know they pixies have access to a “time stone” which leads me to believe that it’s Brennan and not Aguefort who thinks that Chronomancy is the most powerful magic of all.

Sophie and Jackson go to Dale’s grave on Christmas. Jackson explains that the Order of the Concrete Fist is basically a literal school of hard knocks. A counterbalance to all the reach for the stars dreaminess that comes with NYC.

Dale was their chosen one who was supposed to stop the monastery from falling when some unspecified badness crossed over to this side, but when he went to the place where he was supposed to get guidance, there was no one there (clearly tying in to what Dale said to Sophie last time they talked. I wonder what she needs to get to the top of? Empire State maybe?).

Watching Murph watching Emily, his real life spouse, play at grief for her fictional husband and do some truly insane things is so funny because you can clearly see him thinking, “I am married to this woman,” which, in fairness, is probably the main thing he’s thinking when he’s playing D&D with Emily.

I’m probably missing something but that’s all I remember. Back to post-Christmas!]

So it’s opening night at Misty’s show and, somehow, Ricky’s first show ever.

I love that Don Confetti is there because of Siobhan’s offhanded comment for a handful of eps ago about him being a supporter of the arts.

Anyway, everything is going great until the second act when Titania busts in through the mirror which is *not* is storage as Misty requested but on stage. It’s a theater fight, y'all! And not the West Side Story kind although if that doesn’t come up I will be very surprised.

“Let’s kill Titania!” –Misty in the promo

Just going straight to 11, huh Misty?

See y'all then!

#dimension 20 #the unsleeping city #d20 #asks #kickmuncher3

36 notes · View notes

newagesispage · 6 years ago

Text

FEBRUARY 2019

PAGE RIB

***** I am over the moon at the suggestion of a biopic of Dave Letterman starring Michael Shannon. Will somebody think about really putting this into production??? Please??

***** Criminal Minds will wrap it up after this next and 15th season. The season 14 finale on Feb.6 will have Rossi’s wedding. They will spend the last season chasing after ‘a worthy adversary’ rumored to be played by Harold Perrineau as they jump ahead in time.

***** I am so touched by shows like Grace and Frankie and Schitt’s Creek that look right past the usually discussed issues for interracial and same sex couples . Gee, just think, it’s like we are all the same.

***** If you haven’t seen Michael Bennet and his senate floor speech about Ted Cruz, government shutdowns and Trump, run to C-span and catch it. These things make me proud to be in a DEMOCRACY!

***** Can this be true?? The constitution of Texas states that one can’t hold public office unless they believe in a supreme being??

***** Julian Castro is running for President.

***** Kamala Harris is running for President.

***** Cory Booker is running for President.

***** HGTV is apparently working on a huge publicity stunt and ratings grabber. They have purchased the home whose exterior was used in the Brady Bunch. A show will reunite the cast, bring in some famous fane and remodel the inside to look like the Brady set. At the end they may give the house away.

***** Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald will team up to revive Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune on Broadway.

***** Rashida Jones and Bill Murray will star in Sofia Coppola’s’ On the Rocks.’

***** Why isn’t extreme ironing a bigger sport by now??** And can we make Petanque a bigger thing while we’re at it?

***** Craig Ferguson is selling his LA compound.

***** China has landed on the far side of the moon!!!

***** NASA’s New Horizons has went further than anyone has gone before for our first image of Ultima Thule.

***** Kentucky has introduced a bill to ban abortion in the state.

***** Told to a reporter: “It’s your job to speak truthfully and precisely, not mine.” –Kellyanne Conway** The new book, Team of Vipers, suggests that The Conways are working in concert. It is thought that she is valuable to Trump because she has no qualms about saying anything.

***** Super bowl LIII will host Maroon 5, Travis Scott and Big Boi. They will have no pre- concert interview. It is said that many artists turned down the gig because of the controversy. Maroon 5 has gotten some shit for performing but they caution us to just watch.** Roger Waters has asked Maroon 5 to take a knee during the show.

***** Natasha Lyonne is getting raves for her new show, Russian Doll.

***** Tom Sizemore was arrested for drug possession.

***** 6 NFL coaches were fired in one week!!!

***** Pentagon chief of staff, rear admiral Kevin Sweeney is out.

***** Rod Rosenstein is on the way out.

***** Jaymo’s, a Peoria company is suing Wendy’s over the use of their S’Awesome sauce.

***** We should enact the stop the stupidity act.

***** Why does it seem every other show on the air is sort of an entire season of a Twilight Zone episode?

***** There are more people in the Kremlin than in Washington who know what Trump said to Putin. – Tom Nichols

***** Members of congress can retire at full pay after 1 term. Children of congress members don’t have to pay back student loans. Is that true?? Can this be right??

***** Dupont is laying off workers.

***** Check out love your brain.com.

***** The Golden Globes were held and were hosted by Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh. My best dressed was Isla Fisher, Elizabeth Moss. Danai Gurira, Julia Roberts, Carol Burnett, Emily Blunt, Lupita Nyong’o, Patricia Clarkson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jameela Jamil, Rosamund Pike, Jim Carrey, Alison Brie, Gemma Chan and Bradley Cooper. Worst dressed goes to Rachel Weisz, Julianne Moore, Layra Dern, Anne Hathaway, Maya Rudolph, Rami Mlek, Molly Sims and Heidi Klum. I was so happy for winners like The Americans (highlight of the evening!!!), Regina King, Lady Gaga, Mahershala Ali, Patricia Clarkson, Darren Criss, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek, Olivia Colman and Green Book. The Cecil B. DeMille award went to Jeff Bridges. The new Carol Burnett award started off with Carol herself. I was saddened that Bill Hader, Henry Winkler, Kieran Culkin, Keri Russell and Sacha Baron Cohen went home empty handed. The Fiji water girl got most of the press and gave much free advertising to her product. Some of the stars did not like her getting in their shots to push a product without their knowledge, both a clever and sad state of affairs.

***** The Kominsky Method will be back for season 2.

***** The Sag awards had their big night and gave the lifetime achievement to Alan Alda. Winners included Emily Blunt, Darren Criss, Black Panther, Rami Malek and Glenn Close. I was especially thrilled with some love goingto Jason Bateman and Patricia Arquette. Best dressed were Amy Adams, Yara Shahidi, Brian Tyree Henry, Sydelle Noel, Eddie Griffin, Holly Taylor, Sofia Hubitz, Emma Stone, Emily Blunt, Darren Criss, Laverne Cox, Timothee Chalamet, Robin Wright, Lily Tomlin, Chadwick Boseman, Matthew Rhys, Keri Russell, and Catherine Zeta Jones. The WTF award goes to Alison Brie.

***** The Oscar race is on. Best picture could go to Blank Panther, Blackkklansman, Roma, The Favourite, Green Book, Vice, Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star is born. Black Panther also got some love for music and costume design. Fingers crossed for Isle of Dogs in the animated category. Actor nods had a few surprises. Willem Dafoe and Rami Malek , Lady Gaga and Melissa McCarthy are up for leads and supporting mentions are for Mahershala Ali, Regina King, Adam Driver and Sam Elliott. I am so hopeful for Spike Lee and I want to hear that speech.

***** If you haven’t seen Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, you gotta check it out. He and Sarah Silverman should go on a tour of teaching acceptance for their fellow man.

***** So.. Fox news said that Ruth Bader Ginsberg was dead??

***** In sexual harassment news: Harvey Weinstein is hiring new lawyers.** Les Moonves is seeking arbitration with CBS.

***** Cher has sold her Beverly Hills cottage.

***** Cindy Crawford and Randy Gerber’s daughter, Presley was arrested for DUI.

***** CBS news has named its first female President, Susan Zirinsky.

***** What is happening to the butterflies?

***** Illinois has refused a concert permit to R Kelly and Sony has dropped him. The pressure is finally starting to pay off??

***** Get ready for biopics about Harriet Tubman, Elton John and Ted Bundy.

***** NY mayor Bill De Blasio has given healthcare to every resident of NY city.

***** 25% of Russians do not have indoor toilets. Putin and his buddies have about $1trillion tucked away from London to Miami.

***** Days alert: I wonder if Leo’s real name ‘Matthew Cooper’ is a nod to out actor Chad Allen from Dr. Quinn??!! It is also fun to see Judith Chapman take on the role of Leo’s Mama, Diana. The pair played Mother and son previously on The Young and the Restless. Is she really Diana Colville from John’s past??** So Stefan has been played by Tyler Christopher who asked for some time off and a sub was put in place who will take over in March. Since Christopher left, he has since decided that he will leave permanently so things are up in the air. Will Stefan and Gabi hook up? Days has been renewed for season 55. HOORAY!!!! Ratings are up 4%. **Loved the line when Chloe told Rex he should wear a cup. **Leo and Xander’s playful “lust” was so sassy!!

***** Happy Valentine’s Day!

***** Steve Buscemi will play God on tv’s Miracle Workers.

***** So, the new Conan format has ups and downs. I miss the band and the desk but I am Loving the fade in and fade out at commercials. I have always hated the, “We’ll be right back “ nonsense. I was sad to lose a half hour at first but Conan and Andy do seem refreshed.

***** Still waiting for the release of Apple Seed which is written, directed and starring Michael Worth. It is one of the final films of Rance Howard who stars with his son, Clint, Adrienne Barbeau and the other Father and son team of Robby and Zephyr Benson.

***** The January Bob Segar concert in Illinois at the Peoria Civic Center is the top selling concert ever at this venue. Old rock acts take note.

***** Bob Costas is out at NBC after 40 years.

***** Trial and Error has been cancelled. BOO!!!

***** Steve Carell will star in Space Force which he is co-creating with The Office showrunner Greg Daniels.

***** Despite some people I admire that are giving Alexandria Ocasio Cortez a talking to like she’s a child, I say ‘Give ‘em Hell!’ She could well be President so fight girl!!

***** Word is that Karen Pence is now teaching at the Immanuel School in Virginia. The school refuses admission to students who participate in or condone homosexual activity. The application for the school states that misconduct includes heterosexual activity outside of marriage, homosexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity and use of pornographic websites. The application goes on to state that ‘a wife must submit to her husband’ and a pledge must be signed to that effect.

***** There is controversy over the bill to give people a day off for Election Day. Many people will still have to work, the country never completely shuts down. How many fucking times do I have to say it: VOTE BY MAIL!!!!!!!!!!!

***** So, Scary clown told us Mexico would pay for ‘the wall’. During the campaign he gave actual ideas for that like Mexico giving us a one time payout or else he would not allow Mexican immigrants to western union money back to Mexico. Another idea was that there would be a great ta on that Western union money. It does not seem like they tried any of that and just decided we would pay for the stupid ‘wall.’ How about the money he makes off Trump merch which his website and hotels still sell to pay for it?? How about the $35 million that Trump sold in real estate in 2018? The ‘Wall’ go fund me did not reach its $1billion goal so the $20 million they did collect is being offered for refunds. Some of those people still want that money to go for its purpose so Trump is creating a non- profit. Can’t we use that money to help the border patrol agents and get the backlog in immigration court moving?? That we are still talking about this ridiculous wall and that it had a go fund me page is enough to boggle the normal brain.** I think Kimmel said it best when he suggested that Trump just tell the red hats that the wall has been built. They believe everything he says so why wouldn’t they believe that?? It would save the country a lot of headaches. ** What the Hell is with his new “wheels and walls” mantra??** Russia caused Brexit too? Putin is a menace.** Another sink hole appeared the White House. WTF?

***** The congressional budget office says the shut down cost the U.S. 11 billion

***** Trump is talking to Herman Cain about a job on the Federal Reserve Board.

***** The GOP is selling fake bricks that cost about 50 cents for $20 each to send to Senate Dems. Some have said that the Dems should sign them and sell them and give the money to government workers. ** Why are Russian jets fucking around on the North American coastline??

***** Roger Stone has been indicted on 5 counts of false statements, 1 count of obstruction and 1 count of witness tampering. The FBI officers who arrested him were part of the shut down and they still did their job!! He publically and privately claimed to have communicated with Russia. Predictions are that many more indictments are coming down the pike that involve many familiar faces.** Roger Stone has a Nixon tattoo on his back. I feel sorry for his cell mate.-Bill Maher

***** Bill Maher got some flak for comments after Stan Lee died. He wasn’t slamming Lee, but wondered about comic book fans putting away childish things. I suppose that could include weed but point taken.

***** Jared Kushner along with 30 other White House staff was denied top secret clearance but Trump advisor Carl Kline overruled that decision and gave it to them anyway. This has never been done before, this is a job for intelligent agencies.

***** Empire star Jussie Smollett was attacked in Chicago in what cops are saying was a possible hate crime. The attackers were yelling that this was MAGA country, poured bleach on him and put a rope around his neck. The actor was previously sent a letter full of homophobic and racist slurs which he FBI had been looking into.

***** Ellen page gave us some memorable, powerful words to chew on with her appearance on Stephen Colbert. I am sure she gave courage to many who suffer because of our hate filled administration.

***** Gwyneth Paltrow is being sued from a 2016 ski incident for 3 mil.

***** I gain more and more respect for Seth Meyers. I did not really understand the choice of him as host in the beginning. His notice of local stations, choice of guests and revolving drummers makes for a great show.

***** A Dutch company may have invented a small device that converts heat into cold and Forbes is saying, ‘it could save the planet.’

***** So looking forward to Ryan Murphy’s The Politician which will star Jessica Lange, Gwyneth Paltrow and January Jones.

***** I know that is has happened little by little and we go thru times in our history when things get worse and then things get better but… When did this country get so fucking corrupt?? I mean seriously.. Why is Brendan Dassey still in prison and why is there no real justice for Teresa Halbach? ** Why is Trump still in the White House?**Why are government workers being told to work for nothing?? Why is R Kelly still living it up?? Why are some states going backward in time when it comes to women’s health?? Why do many corporations care more about their own pockets than the children of their employees or the environment around them??** Why does our justice system so often punish big for small infractions and allow the powerful to do anything they want?? **Why is a wall a better idea than infrastructure or warm beds for the homeless or food for our children and why are so many children in cages??

***** How can it be that we are still in a world where people are not allowed to reach their full potential?? Why do so many selfish humans actually fight to live in a world where they actively hold others back? Shouldn’t we all be concerned about the greater good? We should all be allowed to see a Doctor when we are ill. We should all be able to excel in education if we choose .We should all be able to get a job to fit our skills and work ethic. Opportunities and the pursuit of happiness should be available to all. Why is this so fucking hard for so many to grasp in this world? Imagine!

***** Sundance premiered the new flick, Big time adolescence with Griffin Gluck and Pete Davidson. Pete has since made no bones about filming in Syracuse. He hated it.

***** Jeff Flake will join CBS news as a contributor.

***** Tom Brokaw is in a bit of trouble for saying Hispanics should work harder at assimilation.

***** The Tom Hanks/ Matthew Rhys film, A beautiful day in the neighborhood has pushed back its release date to Nov. 22.

***** People are illogical and self- centered. Love them anyway. -Hedy Lemarr

*****R.I.P. Bob Einstein, Millie Wiesehan, victims of the Torrance. Ca. bowling alley shooting, Captain Darryl Dragon, Jo Andres, Lamin Sanneh, Carol Channing, Sandra Harmon, Bradley Bolke, the victims of Mediterranean shipwreck, Lorna Doom, victims of the Florida bank shooting, Kaye Ballard, Willie York , Barbara Claman , victims of the mining dam collapse in Brazil and James Frawley.

2 notes · View notes

bulletandsophia · 7 years ago

Text

Some more thoughts, meta, and a little bit of criticism after watching the leaked GoT episode 6. Spoilers again under the cut.

First of all, I love it simply because the North finally takes the limelight. While it’s finally the fruition of (in my opinion) the not-so-thought-out wight hunt, episode 6 brought the intrigue GoT is just known for since it opened up four plot lines I’m sure we should watch out in the next episode and in the next season:

1. Issue on succession/children

2. Sansa and Arya playing games possibly on each other.

3. Jon and D*ny’s relationship

4. Honor/heroism

Children and succession have been brought up one too many times this episode. First was during Tyrion and D*ny’s conversation about “making sure the wheel stays broken”, second was during Jorah and Jon’s scene of passing on Longclaw’s to Jon’s children, third was Tormund dreaming of having kids with Brienne and in which he believes, could take on the world; and lastly, during Jon and D*ny’s scene on the boat where she said her dragons are the only children she’ll ever have.

Note that D*ny and Jon are involved in this flow of thought and I can see why most are predicting a Targbaby coming our way next season after the boatbang. That’s a possibility at this point. Not to mention, as we’ve found out previously, Cersei’s pregnant too and the seemingly strong affinity of Gendry as Robert’s son most likely assumes that he’d like to continue or at least uphold the Baratheon legacy too.

So at this point in time, all Houses are definitely thinking of heirs or continuity, what with the death of House Martell and House Tyrell.

But curiously though, this is happening for all except for one: House Stark.

Since Bran has outright declined the title of Lord of Winterfell, this affirms Sansa’s position as Lady of Winterfell. And if we follow this certain plot flow for the Great Houses, how then can Sansa, a female leader and would likely take her future’s husband name once she marries (i.e. Lady Lannister, Lady Bolton), could continue on the legacy? With Rickon and Uncle Benjen dead, technically, there’s no other man that carries the Stark name. So for House Stark to continue, we all know of these three possible routes: either she makes her future husband take her name, she legitimizes Jon (still unsure if Robb’s will will make an appearance again), or do both. Any which way, House Stark gets to have a move on.

Importantly, this “succession” thought flow as it opens the Targbaby possibility and the death of the Stark name, is another heavy factor Jon has to face in the future and this I believe so fully. As the audience, we know he is both Stark and Targaryen. But until he finds out about this, Jon is still in the safety of being a bastard (Snow). And with his kingship as something he does not want in the first place, succession is basically not his priority for as I see it, he uses his power for the purpose of defeating the WW. So it would be very interesting to see how this would play out for him once the truth is finally revealed. Because more than the crown, this is Jon choosing his identity. And if the revelation of R+L=J next season prevails, then let’s not forget too of how then would D feel about it? Would we see Targbowl? Would D make Jon her heir instead? What about the North? Would Jon leave Winterfell to rule Westeros with D? Would Jon return to Sansa carrying his Targbaby the same way Ned carried him back for Cat to see?

With these loopholes consistently presenting themselves and all the more while J and D get together, I am pretty sure it’s not going to be pretty smooth sailing for them.

Going into this episode, I also already knew about the heartaches of some of my fellow Jonsa shippers.There were indeed tender J/D moments and D has finally seen Jon’s wounds to prove Davos’ “stab to the heart” speech. But I’m still sticking to my previous meta that while J/D is happening, it is happening based on the superficial, soap opera-ish notions and tones. These are two people situated in a life-and-death, fantastical scenario that leaves their emotions running high. Again, desperation can make or break a man.

There was an attempt too in the boat scene to create angst as D pulls her hand away from Jon’s hold. This denial has done its work because interestingly, Tyrion has pointed out this attraction between the two earlier in the episode as D*ny complained about the “hero-tendencies” of people like Drogo, Jorah, Daario and “this Jon Snow” and in which Tyrion emphasized: “All these men has fallen in love with you.” D denies and excludes Jon in that list but Tyrion ignores this. So almost into a confirmation, J/D is happening. But again like I said before, not without the bitterness. As I see here, D is finally (or seemingly) humbled by Jon and of the truth he has been saying all along. Probably, this is her changing her demeanor to fall into Jon’s principles as her attraction to him is far more evident than his. I also would not deny Jon that moment of tenderness because finally, he succeeded in catching a wight and convincing D. He also empathizes with the death of her dragon (another reason for D’s vulnerability on this scene) and into which he blames himself because of said (idiotic) wight-hunt. But on this scene, what truly was the most surprising part is Jon giving away the North (”I’d bend the knee but…”–gesturing to his bedridden form) not when D has first agreed to help him. This and just after we saw him deliberately said in the previous episode, “I am King.”

So is Jon doing a Robb? Helplessly and haplessly falling in love with D? Is Jon not caring about honor anymore, especially after Tormund reiterates the number of people that died because of Mance’s pride, almost echoing Tyrion’s first pleas to Jon to bend the knee at Dragonstone? Is this Jon’s big gesture and character shift? Another great point to make here, for the sake of the undercover Jon theory, is that during LF and Sansa’s conversation in this episode, she mentioned about not having any contact with Jon for weeks. With how fast Gendry and Davos were able to send that raven to Dragonstone, curious that they never send word to the North, Jon’s very own kingdom.

So, I believe it is safe to assume no one in Winterfell knows what he is up to. They truly are waiting, just like Ghost. And the big question now is, why should it be so?

But going outside the formalistic view here, is this simply the writers’ ploy to finally get this J/D plot running to finally make way for something bigger and unpredictable in the next season? Targbowl, Starkcest? It pretty much makes a more compelling storyline compared to this CGI-filled, action-packed, and quite stagnantly plotted season 7. Remember, this is GoT. They time and again flip, break, and destroy plots so cookie-cut and so blatantly displayed. At this point in the story, J/D is the one blatantly displayed. And with this evident (and quite forced) “romance”, it’s very easy to forget the previous episodes where it says to us otherwise (angry Jon, cloakcest, unnecessary hand-holding, multiple parallels, Sansa giving Jon purpose after his resurrection!, “The North is Yours.”, “Jon is king.”, etc.) All very subtle, all ingeniously scattered since season 6.

Again, I’ll stick with my meta that J/D is the Rhaegar and Lyanna to Jon and Sansa’s Ned and Cat. J/D is the fulfillment of Jon’s prophecy while Jonsa is the embodiment of Jon’s dreams–both of which are seemingly sailing at the same time.

Also, more than anything else, it’s Sansa and Arya’s plot lines back in Winterfell that worries me the most. Both are very much unpredictable with where they want to go. Arya, with all the strength and bravery that she has, still carries with her the issues of past conflicts and mistrusts. Her anger is deeply rooted in Season 1 conflicts that triggers Sansa to also go back to her Season 1 insecurities. I’ve already read some criticisms here and I can see where the arguments and the slight anger is coming from. While this Starkbowl makes a painful scenario, this ties up the loose ends of their relationship during the time they parted. Sansa puts it nicely, “I don’t know her [anymore].” the same way Arya does not know Sansa any longer. Whether the sisters will work together or against each other, is something we have to see in the next episode. I only wish BRAN gets to be involved in this too. But keeping my fingers crossed that Sansa’s Ned speech is her and Arya fighting together, as a pack.

~~One episode left guys and GoT is running this in full steam. Some of the showrunners’ decisions are definitely questionable for I believe Ned, Robb, Cat, Oberyn, and Hodor did not die for some piece of sub-par writing–and only to benefit Jon and D’s narrative. While I believe they will have that final battle, I surely hope the device to make that happen is not at the expense and deterioration of the other great, great characters already overshadowed by these prophetical Targs. I feel so sad by the way about how Tyrion is basically just on the sidelines now. With the rushed pacing of season 7, I can’t help but feel that this season is only the filler season to establish the Targ conflict and then for a much more intense season 8, where subplots and characters can finally come together, and where loyalties and drastic decisions has to be fulfilled.

I’m keeping my faith that GoT won’t (continue) to lose its genius after this season. And Jonsa is endgame. :)

#jonsa #jon x sansa #meta #spoilers #jon and sansa #tinfoil #actuallyjonsa

75 notes · View notes

newstfionline · 7 years ago

Text

Zimbabwe’s New Leader Stirs Fears That He Resembles the Old One

By Norimitsu Onishi and Jeffrey Moyo, NY Times, Nov. 24, 2017

HARARE, Zimbabwe--When Robert Mugabe stepped down as president this week, Mevion Gambiza, 28, quickly joined the throng of people celebrating the sudden end of his 37-year rule. Mr. Gambiza jumped on the roof of a taxi and rode around as the driver honked through the streets of the capital.

But by Friday morning, Mr. Gambiza, like many other Zimbabweans, had sobered up. By the time he came to the National Sport Stadium to watch the swearing-in of the new president--Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mr. Mugabe’s longtime right-hand man--it was more to witness history than from any enthusiasm.

“Nothing will change; poverty and suffering will continue,” said Mr. Gambiza, a graduate of the University of Zimbabwe. The only difference now, he said, was that one faction of the governing party had “outcompeted its rival, and now Mnangagwa’s bootlickers will have their full turn to loot from the state coffers.”

Mr. Mnangagwa, who fled into a brief exile after losing a power struggle less than three weeks ago, became Zimbabwe’s new president on Friday, succeeding Mr. Mugabe, 93, the leader he had backed for decades before helping to oust him last week.

It was a rapid reversal of fortunes that abruptly ended Mr. Mugabe’s rule--one of the longest reigns in Africa’s post-colonial history--and set off a complex mix of exhilaration, hope and deep skepticism among Zimbabweans.

In his address, Mr. Mnangagwa (pronounced muh-nahn-GAHG-wah) said that the country’s domestic politics had “become poisoned and rancorous and polarizing,” apparently referring to the factional fighting inside the governing party, ZANU-PF.

“We should never remain hostages of our past,” Mr. Mnangagwa said, adding that his compatriots should “let bygones be bygones, readily embracing each other in defining a new destiny in our beloved Zimbabwe.”

The tens of thousands present in the stadium--most of them ZANU-PF die-hards who had been bused into the capital, Harare, from distant towns and villages in the party’s rural strongholds--loudly cheered Mr. Mnangagwa and hailed him as a “hero” and “liberator.”

Emerson Zinyera, 54, a retired police officer, said: “Today is true independence day. The one that was there was false. Today is independence that everyone, every Zimbabwean, can enjoy, not independence enjoyed by two people, Mugabe and his wife, Grace.”

But even as Mr. Mnangagwa promised a new era of democracy, the new leader, who was long known as Mr. Mugabe’s ruthless enforcer, faced a far more doubtful nation.

As the euphoria over the end of the Mugabe era began to subside, many opposition politicians, rights activists, ordinary citizens and even some party members were expressing concerns about entrusting a new Zimbabwe to a leader so closely tied to the old.

The victory of Mr. Mnangagwa and the military--over a ZANU-PF faction led by Mr. Mugabe’s 52-year-old wife, Grace, and younger politicians with no experience in the nation’s war of liberation--underscored the old guard’s enduring grip on power, not only in Zimbabwe but also in nations like Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa.

In all those countries, former liberation movements have held uninterrupted power over decades through a combination of patronage, coercion and, in some cases, outright military force.

In his 37-minute speech, Mr. Mnangagwa emphasized rebuilding the country’s economy by, in part, re-engaging with Western nations that cut off most ties with Zimbabwe after the seizure of white-owned farms starting in 2000. Mr. Mnangagwa said that compensation would be offered to those who had lost their properties, signaling his commitment to a process that had begun fitfully in recent years.

Mr. Mnangagwa reached out to rivals, though only in general terms. He praised the man he had helped topple by saying that “history will grant him his proper place and accord him his deserved stature as one of the founding fathers and leaders of our nation.”

“To me personally, he remains a father, mentor, comrade in arms and my leader,” he said of Mr. Mugabe, who did not attend the inauguration.

But whether his conciliatory words translate to action remains to be seen. Local and international organizations have said that several leaders of the losing faction were arrested and detained by the army, which is not authorized to do so. Some are still missing, their homes have been ransacked and their relatives beaten, human rights groups say.

For years, Mr. Mnangagwa, who served as Mr. Mugabe’s personal assistant and bodyguard during the war of liberation, had seemed a natural heir. As one of Mr. Mugabe’s top lieutenants, he has been accused of spearheading Mr. Mugabe’s most ruthless policies--including the massacre of thousands of civilians in the early 1980s, the invasion of white-owned farms in 2000 and the violent rigging of polls during the 2008 election.

But on Nov. 6, Mr. Mnangagwa was fired as vice president by Mr. Mugabe after losing a political battle against the faction led by Mrs. Mugabe, who had vowed to succeed her husband. Mr. Mnangagwa, who said he feared for his life, fled Zimbabwe, crossing the border into neighboring Mozambique on foot, and eventually arriving in South Africa.

Then, last week, the army put the Mugabes under house arrest after the former president attempted to arrest Mr. Mnangagwa’s close ally, Gen. Constantino Chiwenga, Zimbabwe’s top military commander. Mr. Mnangagwa’s military allies, as well as his supporters inside the party, quickly maneuvered Mr. Mugabe out of power.

In Africa Unity Square, the capital’s main public area, thousands celebrated Mr. Mugabe’s resignation on Tuesday, partying late into the evening. On Friday, a few hours after the new president’s address, the mood was subdued.

Remind Mugumba, 36, a wedding photographer, had watched Mr. Mnangagwa’s address in a bar.

“I was at Africa Unity Square on Tuesday celebrating when news broke out that Mugabe had resigned,” he said. “But I’m sure really there is nothing much to celebrate because this is just another ZANU-PF person coming to lead us, and really not much change will come from him.”

#Zimbabwe #Robert Mugabe #Emmerson Mnangagwa

2 notes · View notes

binsofchaos · 5 years ago

Photo

‘I Believe in Love’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Final Year, In Her Own Words

Introduction by Garance Franke-Ruta. Jump to the start of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay here.

The late Elizabeth Wurtzel was best known for her memoirs and essays, especially Prozac Nation and Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, but after attending Yale Law School in her late 30s she also enjoyed having a voice in the political arena. She was as much an original there as everywhere else, and between 2010 and 2012 she wrote a series of pieces for me at The Atlantic.

A feminist and a New Yorker who had really lived, she looked at the world in a different way from all the boys on the bus in Washington. And she was funny. She would send long text messages written on her smartphone while she was walking through Washington Square Park, an emissary from a more vivid and creative world than the boxy K Street buildings I would pass en route to my office in the Watergate. Sometimes her stories would come in like that too, texted in graf by graf, and I’d knit the passages together in what seemed like the right order and ask for some connective language. The thoughts were always razor-sharp; the understanding of human nature acute.

Over time our editing relationship moved into a long-distance friendship. We met for dinner at a restaurant in Chelsea, outside of course so her dog could be nestled at her feet. She had somehow managed to find a lipstick with my name on it — Guerlain’s Garance — and purchased us two tubes encased in elegant silver that sat heavy in the hand. She wore hers to dinner, and when I went to the restroom, I changed my color too, making us lipstick twins. It was how she was and in many ways the secret to her success: In addition to being wildly talented, she overcompensated for being so difficult and never totally in control by being astonishingly thoughtful, and kind, and, well, seductive. She was a seductive personality; hard not to love even as she could be hard to be close to.

When I started working at GEN this fall and living in New York full time, I reached out to her. “I’m in remission!” she’d said brightly when we first reconnected, three years after last seeing each other and nearly five years after she first learned she had the BRCA gene and breast cancer. We drank red wine on her balcony overlooking a giant earthen pit in the ground: The future NY offices of Netflix. We went to dinner at Il Buco on Bond Street (her suggestion); I could feel she was lonely. She and her husband Jim Freed had separated and were in the process of divorcing, a not so happy ending to the happily ever after story she had been astonished to stumble into in 2015, and something she was still figuring out how to write about. She started sending me things she had written as we talked about her writing a piece about Gen X politics and the 2020 race.

“I am intimate with the dirt,” she wrote of the Netflix pit. “It has infiltrated everything. It is all over me and under me. It is Love Canal, sewage from the Mississippi, cigarette butts, marijuana ash, slave remains, rats, mice, Three Mile Island, Mount Etna, Mount Saint Helen, Dust Bowl, Adam, Eve, serpent, Satan, Chernobyl, Berlin Wall, acid rain, asbestos, uranium, geraniums, 9/11, 7/11, Donner Party, bird beaks, pigeon claws, squirrel tails, gerbil puke, hamster wheels, insulation, Saran Wrap, Mason Pearson bristles, dental floss, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Mafia hits washed up from the East River, syringes, works, the residue at the bottom of the empty bag of dope, coal waste, cookie crumbs, broken bottles, rusty nails, Bataan Death March, Manila massacre, Boston Tea Party, frog legs, goldfish, mutant ninja turtles, alligators from Florida, red algae, yellow fever, Agent Orange, bubonic plague, gold teeth, silver spoons, copper wires, iron ore, Crest with fluoride, whitening strips, stripper tips, dollar bills, twenties laced with cocaine, subway tokens, expired MetroCards with unused fare, tickets to see Star Wars in 1976, bicentennial souvenirs, gutta-percha, cat guts, doll parts, golf balls, tennis racket strings, cashmere socks, polyester, rayon, pylon, nylon, Mylar, warped vinyl, scratched CDs, crispy leaves, shredded lettuce, tarnished keys, queen bees, xerox paper, pepper spray, Prozac pills, poppers, pooper scoopers, hula hoops, leis, fecal matter, aborted fetuses, snot, rot, cots, bots, shot glass shards, broken windows, chimney smoke, dice, playing cards, poker chips, lollipop sticks, toothpicks, used tissues, dirty handkerchiefs, bandanna threads, kite pine needles, kite strings, toilet water, wolf fangs, sunburn peel, hangnails, cavities, skin, scabs, split ends, fur balls, chicken bones, dissected cadavers, wisdom teeth, crash test dummies, Big Bang, Little Miss Muffet, Humpty Dumpty, Rip Van Winkle, bog wood, petrified forest, oyster shells, freshwater pearls, blood diamonds, Star rubies, asteroids, primordial ooze, love letters, promises kept and broken.”

Very soon the piece she’d wanted to write about Gen X politics started to slip. The cancer was back. There were so many tests and scans to undergo. I told her not to worry about writing it and was surprised when she filed. She said it was a good distraction from having cancer. She badly wanted to interview Beto O’Rourke, but by the time he arrived in New York City where they might have had a face-to-face — the Gen X skate-punk candidate and the Gen X icon — he was already getting ready to drop out of the race.

She sent me a long piece about her past year, about her impending divorce and her marriage and her mother and Donald Trump. It was from something longer she was working on, she said.

We talked about her writing an additional passage when she recovered from brain surgery and running the piece on Medium. “I suppose I have to add something about this, since so much of the piece is about cancer,” she texted. “You know, of all my failures of imagination, I never wondered what a brain tumor is like. So I could not have guessed it was this atrocious, the dizziness and the pain.”

Her recoveries from the relentless march of the disease during her final, dreadful month would prove to be brief.

After her first brain surgery — she had two to cope with her metastatic breast cancer and subsequent complications — which she described as a “brain resection,” she was astonishingly herself. She was funny and poetic and articulate and in good spirits. Still dizzy and unstable — the tumor had impacted her balance center and left her clutching the furniture as she walked during her last night in her own home — but also still herself. She laughed with her mother, who took video and pictures of her in the hospital and helped coordinate, along with Jim and some of her oldest friends from college, a parade of sun-up to way past winter sundown visitors so that she would never feel alone.

And the night before the surgery, Jim was the one she stayed with. He was the one who took care of Alistair, her dog, and her black cat, Arabella. When I saw him in the hospital, he was entirely attuned to her and what she might need so that she could recover and have, in the unspoken best-case scenario, another year.

“I can’t get over how great my husband has been with this. He has made it possible for me to get better and not worry about anything,” she wrote in mid-December, after the surgery. “He loves you so much it’s clear,” I texted back, thinking of how attentive he had been, how he was arranging visits with so many people, that look on his face that you cannot fake. “I think so,” she texted back. “It’s good you see. I love him so much.”

But the past year had been a hard one. This is what she had written about it. She had shown it to Jim too, and he agreed, as did a number of her oldest friends, that she’d want it published. She loved to be published.

I Believe in Love

By Elizabeth Wurtzel

Greetings from the chaotic land of marriage come undone.

The caravansary is dismantling, toothpicks flying everywhere, the bubblegum that held it together is unstuck.

Everything is falling.

My husband moved out at the end of December [2018], as the calendar flipped from last year to this [2019], while I was in Miami Beach, strolling the walkways in the shocking morning sun and under the nighttime Van Gogh sky, away from it all.

I knew he was moving out, but still: I was surprised.

I did not see that the game was over. I did not know the clock was running. I never lose, but I do run out of time. It turns out this was basketball and not baseball.

While I looked away, my marriage fell apart.

I fell off my keel. I lost my kilter. I was a kite without a string.

Maybe it’s better.

It is a peaceful purple without him here. But psychedelic with disarray.

Marriage is an organizing principle. It is flow. It is coffee in the morning. It is who walks the dog. It is HBO at night.

And love. Don’t forget that.

Now I am an ombré mess of a person. I am missed appointments and canceled meetings. I am the thing I forgot to do. I am hanging on by a strand of Drybar dry-shampooed hair.

All day long I have to ask people to forgive me, I am flailing and failing at it all. Forgive me, I beg, as I hope my untweezed eyebrows will. Maybe soon, I will even tug at a few strays.

Or maybe wild is the way.

🖤🖤🖤

I still think of Jim as this sweet person I married. He is my trust fall. He is my emergency contact. He is my next of kin. He is my valentine. He is my birthday dinner. He is my secret sharer. He is my husband.

I do not know him anymore so I do not know myself. Who are my friends? Where is my family? I have fallen into a crevasse of nobody nowhere.

I am estranged and strange, strangled up in blue.

I do not want to feel this way. I am going through the five stages of grief all at once, which Reddit strings have no doubt turned into 523. They are a collision course, a Robert Moses plan, a metropolitan traffic system of figuring it out.

I feel bad and mad and sad.

Is this a festival of insight or a clusterfuck of stupid? I change my mind all the time about this and about everything else.

I got married because I was done with crazy. But here it is, back again, the revenant I cannot shake. I feel like it’s 1993, when my heart had a black eye all the time.

26 is a boxing match of the soul.

I did not expect bruises at 52.

🖤🖤🖤

I have blamed myself. I have blamed my husband. I have blamed cancer. I have blamed marijuana. I have blamed sexism. I have blamed Charlottesville. I have blamed my in-laws. I have blamed several men named David. I have blamed my mother who lied to me my whole life about who my father is.

Who would I be if I did not blame Donald Trump?

I am angry all the time since the election of 2016, like it happened to me, like I was gang-raped by Michigan. I don’t want to be angry, but so there, I am.

Who don’t I hate?

Who won’t I blame?

If you are standing there, I blame you.

It is not conservative against liberal.

It is everybody against everyone. Here we are, in it together, alone.

The problem is not arguments I have with people who voted for Trump, who I don’t know anyway. The trouble is the way all of us who agree about everything are bickering. Oh, the narcissism of small differences.

I remember not that long ago when the world was not political. I was part of landmark litigation that was all about a team of Republicans and Democrats working together. I loved everybody. We were all on the same side.

What Alamo did I not forgive? What Masada did I not get over?

Now there is no microaggression too small for me to scream about so the next four neighborhoods can hear.

My husband does something and I am affronted like it matters.

I am sure he does not know how I feel.

And maybe he doesn’t.

But what does any of this have to do with why we got married? We got married to be in it together. Polarization has even invaded love.

I have anger fatigue. I am sick of sick. Like everyone.

The emotional toll of the world we live in is going to do all of us in.

But politics is not about conflict.

Politics is about making the world a better place.

🖤🖤🖤

How could my mother keep a secret for 50 years? What makes someone do that?

She buried herself in it. She grew a wild Victorian garden with thorny bushes of rose and purple larkspur and red snapdragon. There was a lush meadow of lavender that gave a whiff of Aix-en-Provence en été. The dandelions ran rampant and the daffodils glowed yellow like Big Bird.

But underneath it all, beneath the lilies of the valley and the rows of geranium, there is dirt.

There is a secret.

I am a bastard. I am her bastard daughter.

There are things that come along that are a shock.

I believed something for nearly half a century. It was a lie.

I was conned.

I was wrong about myself.

I did not know who I am.

My mother told no one.

It was a lie she told for so long it became true and the secret faded to no-memory. She misremembered who my father was. She did not think it mattered.

When it all came out in 2016, not long after I got married, just after my real father died, my mother could not see what my hysteria was about. She did not understand why I was stunned.

All the while I was trying not to feel the worst way ever, trying not to be overwhelmed by the explosion, my mother could not figure out what was bothering me.

After all, she is the nuclear physicist.

My mother is like everyone else. She thinks she is normal. She is sure her behavior makes sense. She believes she does the right thing. Since she cannot imagine that this is not the case, she is surprised to find out that, yes, she makes bombs.

I scream at my mother, “What’s wrong with you?!”

I do that and she does not know what I mean.

She says, “Oh get over it.”

Her eyes widen until they look like goggles on an herbivore. She is put upon. She cannot believe we have to discuss this yet again.

“Omigod yet again!”

When will I quit badgering her?

I say, “You lied to me.”

She says, “It wasn’t a lie.”

“Then what?”

“It was a decision!”

Any relationship founded on a lie is doomed. Or not a lie, according to her, which is another lie, a lie about a lie.

That is how it is between us. We are living in the doom.

And yet, we are still at it. My mother and I refuse to give up. She is my only parent. She is all I have.

She made sure of that.

This is the most painful thing ever.

She has made so many inexplicable decisions over the years that I know about, and now I see the ones I did not know.

And yet I love her more than anyone else in the world.

She is it for me. She is in the way of everything. I should be interested in my husband, but how can he compete with how much I want to figure out the Once that started all that is upon a time?

🖤🖤🖤

I was a welter of emotions.

I was so emotional.

When I found out that my father is not my father, that my mother lied to me my whole life, that there was so much I did not know, a bomb dropped in my life. Bombs, really, aerial bombardment. It was the Battle of Manila: bazookas, flamethrowers, grenades, tanks, cannons, howitzers, banzai charges, kamikaze tactics, I was shocked and stunned with feeling.

I did not know what to do.

I became a raging lunatic.

I was a mettle of rage.

My rage is my retinue. My rage is a filthy velveteen train I drag around with me, carelessly. It is my ruby tiara. It is my rainbow and my pot of gold.

My rage is cream. It makes Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee that my grandmother brewed in a percolator on the breakfront in the dining room taste not half bad.

It is the coloratura harmony to my singsong days.

My rage is my conscience. I insist on my right to feel.

But I got caught in a Möbius strip of emotion. I was gone round the bend of scream.

It was stuplimity.

🖤🖤🖤

My marriage is crushed beneath the weight of so much. It is delicate, like all relationships. It is not one of those fine elms that blows with the gusts and does not snap.

We are a scattering of branches on the lawn. We are deadwood.

Oh, there is a lot that holds us together, the love and the hours. We got married during chemotherapy. We are bound.

But my husband is not who he was.

Yes, I know: It is always like that. The sorrow of unraveling is the stranger you are facing. What happened? I want to scream. Where did you go?

My husband had a softness. I will not compare it to the feel of cotton balls or the touch of silk charmeuse, because it is better. He was new to love. I could tell. I could see. He was surprised. He did not see me coming. He did not know I was interested. He was alone in a room. His life was small. He had the same six friends he always had. He was shy. He was not brave. He had no expectations.

He was lovely.

The beginning is always like honey, liquid and sweet.

But he was open.

He was not wounded by a million heartaches.

He had not been through it all.

He did not have a wretched past.

He was 34, which is not young. Younger than I was, but a lot could have happened by then.

It had not.

He was fresh.

There was nothing I would not do for him.

There was nothing I did not want for him.

We met in October and got engaged in May.

We knew.

And now he knows he has had enough.

It has been too much.

🖤🖤🖤

Most of all, it is not easy to be married to someone with cancer.

I feel for my husband.

Cancer is so big. Everyone is prostrate before its deadly enormity. It is the answer to every question. It is the reason why. Is it an excuse or is it real? Who is anyone to argue? Cancer is a bully. It is an elephantine disease of body, mind, soul. My husband moved a half a mile away from it. I would love to do the same.

I am stuck until the end.

I do not know what he expected when he married me when I was ill. I am sorry that it has not been what he wanted. I am sorry that I hurt him.

After I got cancer, I was not the same.

I wanted to be.

I wanted my life to go back to what it was.

I was so lively. I was so lovely.

I was so busy. I was so social.

But I could not do it.

No surprise, I changed.

I was withdrawn during chemotherapy and my world became small. It contracted like starvation. It is hard to get back what is lost. It is more difficult still to begin anew.

I tried. So hard. I called. I emailed. I texted. I showed up.

But there was a diminishment.

Cancer is an ecosystem. It is a crime spree.

Things broke. My radius. My fibula. My tibia. My spirit.

My cancer came back a year after it went away.

You think people are nice about it? No.

Cancer is misunderstood.

Everyone says the wrong thing. Which is what they do so much anyway.

Then I say the wrong thing back.

There we are, bumper cars of mismatched words.

I can’t believe the stupid things people tell me in an effort to be kind, about something hard they had to deal with that is not the same as having cancer.

The worst thing anyone can do is tell me they are sorry about my cancer.

I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me. About anything. Don’t apologize unless you have done something wrong. It is nasty to feel sorry for anyone for any reason because it pushes her away.

Mostly sorry is just a thing to say. Anything else would be better, including I don’t know what to say.

It is always people who are the problem. What else? Our suffering is small compared to our misunderstandings with others, how they fail to give us a break, know what it’s like, judge us fairly, see the world the way we do. It is not even cancer or especially cancer. It is especially this and even that. If you are looking for absolution, you are going to have to forgive yourself.

I have chainmail from years of frustrating conversations, of people who think something bad has happened to me.

I don’t see it that way.

You could tell me everything that’s bad about cancer, like that it’s cancer, but you could not convince me that cancer has been bad for me.

Cancer has made me optimistic.

These are the days of miracles and wonders, of biopharma fireworks, of immunotherapy wow.

I have been saved.

I am miraculous me.

I will skate figure eights into infinity.

I am all claws I am all fangs.

I am not afraid of cancer. I think cancer should be afraid of me.

This past October [2018], I had a tumor in my shoulder bone that was 5 inches: big! It was threatening to break it.

And worse.

My cancer antigens were at 205, when 25 is as high as the level can go.

I had meetings in the World Trade Center while all this was going on. I hate it down there. Skyscrapers as grave markers. It is an ominous place.

When I went for help in Philadelphia at the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania, only Alistair, my service dog, was with me.

My husband said he had to work.

My marriage had already come undone.

I had stereotactic radiation at Memorial Sloan Kettering. It took only three sessions to zap the tumor away. The treatment saved me, but I have a five-inch hole in my bone that looks like a cave in the Thai jungle.

When my husband moved out, I was still healing. I have a rotator cuff tear and pain from the long way home.

🖤🖤🖤

This is a love story.

Every marriage is a love story.

People who run off to Vegas after knowing each other for 10 days and find a drunk outside the Sands casino to be their witness — they really mean it. Marriage is a big gesture. There is no reason to do it except: love.

It is effusive.

I am sorry I failed.

I am sorry for this confederacy of catastrophe.

I am sorry for it all.

I think that my husband can’t believe I hurt. I know what I’m like: I have a powerful personality, it’s true. But he got me.

He made a vow to love me in sickness and in health.

There was great love between us.

And love is hard to stop.

We made a commitment for when we could not remember why we did.

He decided enough.

I am a monotheist. I am in it for life. I am in everything for life. If you don’t stop me, I will not stop myself. I have the kind of faith that you can only have if you have talked your way out of trouble all along.

I feel so much and too much. Deep in my radiated bones.

I cannot believe it is like this with my husband and not like it was that long ago on Halloween, our first date, which he did not know was a date, maybe it was maybe it wasn’t, he showed up at my door not knowing anything at all.

We were resting on our future arms, we were like people who have never read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, have never seen City of God, have never heard Exile In Guyville, oh what lay ahead.

I remember my husband in the beginning, I know the man I married, I insist he is still there somewhere.

I keep peeling for the pentimento.

Or has this all been a fraud?

Love gone wrong feels like a confidence crime.

That is the worst of it.

Do I have an electron microscope or am I blinded? Do I see more clearly now or is this a distortion? I could ask that about the whole wide world.

Sex and race look different since Trump was elected. We know all the things that we never knew. We were living in a world of trust, we believed we were on a righteous path, that things were incrementally improving, so we did not look so hard into sunlight.

All anything ever is is another way of seeing.

I thought my husband was on my side.

I thought I knew him.

I did.

I don’t.

He changed.

I do not know how to help him.

I do not know how to reach him.

Anything is possible.

I believe in so much.

I am just that way.

I believe in love.

What matters more in this crazy world?

Shame on Casablanca’s ending! I will take the hill of beans.

(This is Garance again.)

Love. Sometimes in our lives when we feel most bereft it turns out that we are not alone at all. It is the kind of cloying Disney sentiment Lizzie might have scoffed at, but it was also the truth with her. She affected a toughness that was both real and a coping mechanism, but which also led her to downplay how sick she was. Even as she was telling me she was in remission in September, spots of cancer had already returned, I have since learned.

“The people who know us when we are not our best selves — what would we do without them? I am so grateful right now for even my mother coming through for me,” she wrote after her first surgery in December. Her mother Lynne Winters and she had a famously complicated relationship, but it was Lynne who took her home to recover both times she was released from the hospital, and who had the difficult burden of having to bring her back, and who sobbed in the sparkling clean MSKCC neuro ward hallway where other parents of too-young-to-die adult children paced forlornly.

“Jim has been the best,” Lizzie texted after the surgery. “I wish you a great first husband. That might be all you need.”

They had, in fact, not divorced. The papers were signed, but not filed. He was her husband until the end, during the final days after it was clear no further interventions would work, when she lay still in bed in what was by then her at least fifth different hospital room, for all the world the image of a big-eyed Renaissance pieta looking heavenward.

“Neurology takes a positive view toward god and prayer,” she had texted after the first surgery. “And relinquishing, which is what god and prayer is about. It is always turning your will over to a higher power and letting the will of the world and not your extraordinary manipulations lead you to your desired result. I always say that, it is my constant prayer: god, if you are out there, watch over me and your will, not mine, be done. That is what will happen anyway, but I pray for release from the dreadful fight.”

She spent her whole life fighting — fighting her parents, society, the patriarchy, social conventions, addiction, depression. But man, did she live big. She had a gift for building love into her life and at the end, her friends built a cocoon of love around her.

And on the morning of January 7, 2020, she was, as she had prayed, released.

#Elizabeth Wurtzel #i believe in love #love #garance franke-ruta #medium #writing

0 notes

samwpmarleau · 8 years ago

Text

pas de deux

in which arthur wins the tourney at harrenhal and crowns elia like a responsible adult and no one is offended except rhaegar

He’s not going to crown her. He’ll win the joust, because of course he will, but he won’t crown her. Of little else is she so certain.

His eye has wandered, to put it delicately, and he has not been subtle about it either. It was innocent, at first, when the girl had wept at his song, and then turned into something much different. He’s enraptured by her for a reason that Elia has tried and failed to comprehend.

Lyanna Stark is pretty enough, she supposes, in a wild, coltish kind of way, but she’s still half a child, a wolf pup barely out of its den. Only Robert Baratheon seems to be as taken with her as Rhaegar, which, as her betrothed, is at least understandable. But Rhaegar…him Elia has no explanation for.

The final set of jousters comes as a surprise to no one: Rhaegar, Ser Arthur, Ser Barristan, Leo Tyrell. Ser Barristan beats Tyrell handily, leaving Rhaegar against Ser Arthur. It’s far from an unfamiliar set, they having battled many times over the years. The last time she’d seen one such bout was Lord Robert’s tourney three years ago held in the memory of Lord Steffon and Lady Cassana. Arthur had nearly won then, battling Rhaegar through a dozen rounds before conceding defeat.

Even now, she wonders whether he had truly been bested, or whether he’d done it on purpose. It’s a common rumor, that the Kingsguard don’t often try their hardest lest they injure their future sovereign. She knows Rhaegar is a consummate jouster, but she’d also seen Arthur in countless tourneys in Dorne, and he’d gone undefeated in them all despite going up against plenty of consummate jousters there, too.

It’s irrelevant, really. Whether legitimately or on purpose, he would be on the losing end today, she has no doubt, and she gets the honor of being jilted in front of half the world. Rhaegar’s looking at the girl now, too, atop his black mount, and Elia clasps her hands in her lap so tightly her fingers turn purple. Not even Ashara’s soothing touch does anything to mitigate her simmering anger.

At the sound of the herald’s trumpet, destrier and sand steed come together round after round. While the matchup had not surprised her, this longevity does. At Lord Robert’s tourney, the joust had had more of a frolicking atmosphere, two friends competing in good humor.

This, though…the hits are harder, Arthur’s posture is rigid, tension drenches the combatants like a pall. She can see their faces through the slits in their helms, a kind of confusion in Rhaegar’s and conviction in Arthur’s. What the reason might be for it, however, she can’t fathom. To her knowledge, there’s been nothing to put them at odds, so why would there be discord now?

The sixth round is what sends the crowd to frenzied whispers. Rhaegar’s lance is a hair off-kilter, a weakness Arthur pounces on: a resounding crack, a grunt of pain, then Rhaegar is flung from his saddle. With that, the herald announces that the final contest will consist of the realm’s two most revered warriors, Kingsguard against Kingsguard.

Arthur removes his helm and dismounts to help Rhaegar up, sunlight glinting off the silver sword-and-star on his surcoat. They don’t exchange any words, but there’s no time to dwell on it for Rhaegar briskly leaves his horse with the stablehand and his squire hops to in divesting him of his armor.

Half an hour passes as Arthur and Ser Barristan prepare, and Rhaegar takes his seat beside her, blatantly discontented. A good wife would placate him, say there’s no disgrace in losing to an opponent such as Arthur, but all she has to do is remember how he’d looked at Lady Lyanna, and her mouth stays firmly shut.

The champion’s tilt requires one more lance than Rhaegar’s had, but ultimately Ser Barristan is unhorsed just as decisively. Ashara abandons all dignity, jumping to her feet and wildly cheering for her brother. Though Elia’s applause is less ostentatious, happiness swells within her—a victory for Arthur is a victory for their homeland, after all.

She remembers the day he had arrived in Sunspear to squire for her uncle, brimming with excitement and fastidious in his training. To see him emerge triumphant in front of so many she feels is a well-deserved accomplishment. Ashara would receive a crown as pretty as she is, and Elia can think of no one more worthy of wearing it.

Lord Whent slides the blue winter roses onto Arthur’s lance, and he directs his horse toward the royal stands as she’d anticipated. Except he doesn’t stop in front of his sister—he stops in front of her. He places the crown into her lap, and she gapes at him, nothing short of stunned.

“For the future queen,” he declares, voice ringing out across the lists. It could be a trick of the light, but for a moment she thinks she sees his eyes flash over to Rhaegar, almost in challenge, before darting back to her. “Your beauty and grace put the very sun to shame.”

She knows surely this must simply be out of respect, not in earnest, but nevertheless a smile grows. Though she may not honestly believe his words, he has publicly recognized her above all the more winsome women in attendance. The Starks clap respectfully at the display, Lady Lyanna animated as she talks with the littlest wolf, and what ill will she’d been feeling towards the girl fades.

“Thank you,” she says to Arthur. She hands her circlet of yellow sapphires to Ashara and replaces it with the wreath of roses.

He flashes her a rare smile, then gallops off toward the stables. She can’t help but stare after him, his ivory armor and Ny Sar’s gleaming white coat just this side of blinding.

When purples and oranges begin to flood the sky, the guests file into the great hall for supper, and Elia takes her place on the dais next to a lukewarm Rhaegar. As ever, Arthur is diligently standing off to the side, scrutinizing the gentry for any potential threats.

Once everyone has settled, Lord Whent addresses the room. “Thank you to all who have voyaged to attend this tourney, most especially to our esteemed and gracious king. We are each of us humbled by your presence,” he announces, glancing nervously at Aerys with every other word. “Without further delay, the traditional dance will start our supper. Your Graces, if you will?”

The heady scent of roses from the crown she still wears reminds her that she has a card to play. “Begging your pardon, my lord,” she says, “but is it not customary for the Queen of Love and Beauty to select her own partner?”

A hush falls, her statement plainly startling Lord Whent. “Oh, well, yes, naturally,” he stutters, “but I’d assumed—”

Elia cuts him off with a serene smile and gets to her feet. Resolute, she strides past Rhaegar and approaches Arthur instead. “Ser, do you care to join me?”

Something akin to panic crosses his face—perhaps he’s recalling how atrocious of a dancer he was in their youth—but nevertheless he allows her to take his hand.

For once, the murmurs that run through the crowd give her vindictive satisfaction.

If she’d been hoping the matter could be forgotten, she doesn’t get her wish. Later, while finessing out countless hairpins, Ashara comments, “People have been talking.”

“People are always talking. What is it for this time?”

“You know full well what for. Your dance, it—”

“It was nothing.” And it was. It was.

“It wasn’t nothing. It was Arthur beating Rhaegar, it was him crowning you in front of everyone, it was you choosing to dance with him over your husband. I’m not accusing you of anything,” she hurries on at Elia’s scowl, “that’s just what people are saying. You know how they live for their gossip.”

“They’re vermin.” She shakes out her hair, grateful to finally rid it of its complicated ensnarement. “Though I confess I didn’t expect they’d drag Arthur into it. Ridiculing me is one thing, but I’d have thought they’d have more respect for your brother.”

“Arthur looked…” Ashara hesitates. “Elia, my brother is a wonderful man,” she says carefully, “but a man all the same.”

“Don’t be absurd. He gave me the crown because he wanted to prevent me from suffering insult, that’s it. He said so himself.”

But that hadn’t been the only thing he told her, had it? I did not crown you false, princess, he’d said, his hand warm on her back, his voice too low to be heard by anyone but her. You are indeed a beautiful woman.

She hadn’t known what to say to that. She’d wanted to call his bluff, but he was so sincere that it was hard not to believe him. And once she’d done so, she’d begun to…well, notice him. The years had done him well, giving him handsomeness where once he’d been ordinary, breadth and height where once he’d been gangly and short, an evenly shadowed jaw where once it’d been patchy, a few scars where once there’d been none. She’d realized then that he’s not just a Kingsguard, but a hotblooded Dornishman of four-and-twenty, same as her.

And then afterwards, he’d seemed almost…

“Ash, there have been enough ill-done entanglements at this tourney without you inventing another.”

The name Brandon Stark lingers between them, and a bright red blush colors Ashara’s cheeks. “Yes, my lady. But I didn’t invent anything,” she says. “It’s the oldest tale, isn’t it? A princess and a white knight?”

#elia martell #arthur dayne #arthur x elia #asoiaf #gotfic #my fic #compliance: canon au

446 notes · View notes

artiswear · 8 years ago

Photo

Louise Bourgeois Show Notes

· Born: December 25, 1911, Paris, France

· Died: May 31, 2010, Manhattan, New York City, NY

· Follow up after our podcast with Nestor Zarragoitia, who talked about a secret door in a stair case piece by an artist named Louise Bourgeois - who is a very famous artist and an icon of feminist success in the arts

o Most people know her giant spider statues, which are usually public works, but tower above the viewer and the leg count isn’t always accurate. These giant spiders are one of the pieces of modern art Vanessa gets asked about regularly.

o Has a lot in common with Louise Nevelson, in that she was born early in the 19th century, was an immigrant to the USA, and didn’t gain fame until later in her life. this artist deals with sex and female sexuality, the squeamish and super young may wish to avert their ears. Sorry. WE promise all artists aren’t perverts, it’s just the vast majority.

o Born in Paris to a middle class family (Irony that last name is Bourgeois-means middle class roughly-what middle class is, because Vanessa isn’t sure it exists anymore.) who restored medieval and renaissance tapestries and made a good living at it.

· Like Pablo Picasso learning to paint and draw from his artist father, Bourgeois learns to draw and think about art spatially from helping her parents reconstruct these tapestries. She said she mostly drew arms and legs, and that this visual understanding of dismemberment came to influence her later art.

· Louise’s (I would keep calling her Bourgeois, but this is a clumsy word for the American mouth, just like we murder the heck out of Louise.) father was a huge influence on her work. She didn’t talk about this influence much later in life, and denied his role at first.

o Women with Daddy issues is kinda an art school cliché. So is women making art about their daddy issues. It can be done well, but isn’t always.

o Her father wanted a son, and named her Louise after his Louis because of his disappointment at having a daughter. Though he later had a son, Louise actually became his favorite child.

· He didn’t always get along with her father and had a violent temper, which shades some of the art work. He also either hired his mistress as Louise’s tutor, or started sleeping with Louise’s tutor...I’m not real sure on this… but either way his mistress was living with the family and he had no qualms about the fact he was done sleeping with Louise’s mother. This fragrant disregard for social norms upset Louise a great deal and alienated her at a young age from their father. It also began her mental exploration of the roles men and women serve as sexual beings and how other’s sex can affect our idea of intercourse.

· she also cites a fantasy that children have of dismembering their parents, particularly the one of the opposite sex. (Do people? Really? Idk. I didn’t as a kid.) This does play into Jung’s idea that to mature as an adult you have to (Symbolically) kill your parents.

o her father and her do eventually develop a healthy relationship where they see each other more as equals and he ends up living with her in America. This in Vanessa’s mind shows how the role your parents play matures as you do. There is this point in your life where you see a living parent as a human being and gain enough life experience to sympathize with their foibles and mistakes, even if you struggle with acceptance. This may be some of the playing Louise does in her artworks, as it is easier to look back on these times with criticism and understanding.

o Another thing to think of is the role of the father, especially to someone born in 1910, as the first person to define a woman’s sexuality and demonstrate the power of the patriarchy on that sexuality. THis is another time, where the man was seen as the head of the family and his indiscretions normally ignored, whereas female sexuality was a closeted thing that was even widely believed to be non-existent (See the Stuff You Missed In History Class on Boston Marriages). So as the first male who exists in your life, the father at this time takes a rigid role in how the female defines herself and if she is allowed to exist in the public as a person with her own autonomy. For example, he denounces and refuses to pay for her education at the Sorbonne because he hates “modern art” in an attempt to force her into a more acceptable female role. While parents still do this, the issue would have probably been less pronounced if she were male (She did continue at the Sorbonne, working as a translator for English speaking students in exchange for paid tuition), and he did help fund her opening a print business next to his after she graduated.

· In 1938, while working in a print shop, an art historian named Robert Goldwater walked in, and according to Louise "In between talks about surrealism and the latest trends, we got married."

· Louise sales with Goldwater to the USA shortly after her marriage and towards the end of her life felt she needed to be defined as an American artist, because she lives the majority of her life as an American and her work matures and is influenced by the free American spirit.

· Like Nevelson, Louise doesn’t thrive during the 40’s or 50’s. Her work has far more to do with Surrealism than the super manly Ab Ex movement that goes on in NYC under Peggy Guggenheim and Clement Greenburg’s curatorial gaze. She shows during this time, but is not taken as seriously as this infamous “boys club”, and even her obit has to include a paragraph of unnecessary gushing about how prominent these famous dudes were...which annoyed Vanessa, if only because they obscured more than they helped and that only needs to be pointed out so much.

· Louise’s husband does pass in the 1970’s while in his 60’s, and was a prominent art historian, but she remained both wistful and critical of him. THey had a good marriage, but she found his academics dull.

· In the 1940’s and 1950’s she adopts one child and gives birth to two. This results in a sculpture series in Balsa wood, which could be constructed without waking up sleeping children. This also stops her career for a decade, and is a common theme with many female artists...especially from this time...the financial, social issues, and time needed to raise children is so demanding it is hard to get a show, let alone have free time to spend as you like… so the story of a lot of women artists picks up after they either abandon their children, or reach a stable point in their lives where they no longer have to put a family before their own sanity or well being. Vanessa says this with a good deal of criticism, because even today a lot of men are allowed their “Dreams” while women struggle in the background, forced into a role of nurturing even if they don’t want it. Vanessa cant’ think of an instance where a male creative “Stopped making art to raise a family.” Please send her exceptions.

· 1950, property of the Moma.

From Bourgeois’ Obit: Then, in 1966, the critic Lucy Lippard, who, like so many New Yorkers, had known her effectively as Goldwater's appendage, saw her work, was astonished by it, and included it in a show she was organizing called Eccentric Abstraction, at the Fischbach Gallery.

· Installation view

· Cumul, 1968.

· Destruction of the Father, 1974

· NO EXIT 1991 (Covered in NEZ Podcast)

· Cell VII 1991

· Maman

"She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver... spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother." - about her spiders, called Maman, French for Mother...so they were about mothers and the process of making art

#Louise bourgeois #artist #art is wear #podcast #art i swear #show notes #modern artist #art #art history

1 note · View note

networkingdefinition · 5 years ago

Text

Bikers Quotes

Official Website: Bikers Quotes

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

• A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling. – Stephen Fry

• And what makes me happy now has changed as well… Its one thing to play in a bar or at a biker festival, and hear a guy who’s been drinking beer all day come up and tell you how good you are. For a long time in your life that will make you happy. – Rick Derringer

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Biker', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_biker').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_biker img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Biker chicks want the bad boy. – Theo Rossi • Bikers, in general, have just been so attractive to people. Photographers would follow them because there’s this weird warrior gravitas that comes with it. The bikes are loud, they have tattoos, they have artwork that they all wear on their jackets. – Ryan Hurst • Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar . . . They keep telling the downstairs neighbors to keep down the noise, people are trying to sleep. – Dustin Hoffman • First you buy me a mocha. Then you let me help you hide a body. Now you take me to a biker clubhouse. Best. Day. Ever. – Kelley Armstrong • For about three years I was performing at one bar in East Los Angeles that was like a mean dive bar. You’re in there performing for drunks or bikers, not the most flattering people. I think it helped build my confidence, because you have to get their attention, then make them laugh. – Gabriel Iglesias • Grandma Mazur stood two feet back from my mother. “I gotta get me a pair if those,” she said, eyeballing my shorts. “I’ve still got pretty good legs, you know.” She raised her skirt and looked down at her knees. “What do you think? You think I’d look good in them biker things?” Grandma Mazur had knees like doorknobs. – Janet Evanovich • Guys are so predictable. They can’t seem to separate fantasy from reality, so I get a lot of bikers and race car drivers hitting on me. They’re all just playboys, so they don’t interest me. – Michelle Rodriguez • I don’t believe any sort of traveler does a better job than any other sort of traveler at obeying traffic safety laws. It’s difficult to foresee a camera program that can be used with bikers and walkers. – Robert James Thomson • I have a lot of respect for the bikers, which I’ve always had. – Emilio Rivera • I like raunchiness, not like in a biker-chick sort of a way, but like the girl can’t help it. Little bruises, a few hairs out of place, a little stain here and there. – Anton Szandor LaVey • I never went to camp as a kid. I couldn’t get into an Ivy League school. I wouldn’t join a biker club. – Bob Saget • I think it’s particularly a distinctively American concept that resonates with American culture through biker culture. A motorcycle is an independent thing. You’re like, ‘I don’t want to ride in a car with this person. I want to be independent and ride by myself. But, let’s ride in a group. Let’s be independent, together.’ – Ryan Hurst • I’d love to be on ‘Glee.’ I’d love to play a rebel. Be a real biker chick in leather and covered in tattoos. – Leona Lewis • If you see a biker chick hanging out with a group of bikers and associated with them, stay away. You’ll know right away if a biker chick is free; if she’s with someone, she’s right by his side. Getting with somebody’s old lady is a big no-no. That’s more serious than anything in that world. – Theo Rossi • I’m a menace to society, But girls in biker shorts are so fly to me. After the date, I’mma want to do the wild thing… You’re talkin’ lobster? I’m thinkin’ Burger King. – Ice Cube • I’m continuing to do research into biker culture. – Ron Perlman • I’m definitely never going to be a biker. I’m scared of cars so the idea of riding a motorcycle is just never going to be something that I’m into. – Kristen Stewart • I’m not keen on cars and motorbikes. I tried to be a biker, but it wasn’t me – I bought a Harley-Davidson and dumped it. – Colin Farrell • In ‘Hell Ride,’ I play a biker – it’s about the bikers. It’s with Dennis Hopper and Michael Madsen, Larry Bishop and myself. We’re bikers, and I play Billy Wings; I’ve got all sorts of wings, and you have to watch the movie to find out what the wings are about. – Vinnie Jones • It’s not impressive to get in a fight, but if one does happen, you’ve gotta be ready to handle it. Every girl, not just biker chicks, knows what kind of guy can. – Theo Rossi • I’ve been a biker, I’ve been a convict, I’ve been a husband, father, and son. – Duane Chapman • Messengers and mountain bikers share a common chromosome. – James Bethea • Nick was dressed in jeans, a dark green sweater, and bomber jacket–the perfect image of a rich college student. Talon looked like a biker who had just left Sanctuary, New Orleans’s premier biker bar. Acheron looked like a refugee from the Dungeon–the local underground goth hangout. Valerius was the professional contingent, and Zarek…Zarek just looked like he was ready to kill something.’ (Talon) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • One of the important things is that a lot of people forget that a biker club is a secret society. – Ryan Hurst • Only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Really good mountain bikers are lousy judges of trail difficulty. We haven’t a clue, we just ride. – John Olsen • Sure, my childhood was unusual. All these eccentric, wild people frequented our home: rock stars, drag queens, models, bikers, freaks. But I was not this little rich girl. My mom and I lived in an apartment. – Liv Tyler • Tattoo. What a loaded word it is, rife with associations to goons, goofs, bikers, tribal warriors, carnival artists, drunken sailors and floozies. – Jon Anderson • The White Horse video which was directed by Marco Ovando started off with a biker theme. Once Ava Sanjurjo came in as stylist along with Marco & I it really took it’s own shape. It was all very improvised but wound up paying homage to NY and night life. People say it reminds them of a Guess ad which I love! – Nomi Ruiz • There was this kind of mildly annoying mythology about conductor Like biker should riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, and wearing a sort of a leather suit. – Esa-Pekka Salonen • Um, Dr. Alexander, there’s a couple out here who say they’re related to you. They…um…they’re biker people. (Nurse) Hey, Julian. Tell Attila the Hun here that we’re okay so we can come and ooh and aah over the babies. (Eros) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • We get crazy when we can’t make things be like the world tells us they are”. She looked back out the window. “It was that way for me and your brother, I think. I mean, how could I have loved him that last year? I didn’t even know who he was. He was way more attracted to drugs and bikers and that whole lifestyle than he was to me. But somebody told me that if you really loved somebody,you stayed with him no matter what. You had to fight for him.” She laughe. “Hell, I was convinced. – Chris Crutcher • When I ran for governor, I told all the bikers, “You don’t need to worry about me bringing in a helmet law. It’s your option because you as a motorcycle rider that’s your option. It doesn’t come with the bike.” – Jesse Ventura • Why did I adopt kids? I dunno. Let me look at my family: religious weirdo, gun nut, biker, boozer, dead tooth, too many cats, the guy who talks to his truck. Hmm. Maybe I adopted because genetically my balls are full of poison. – Dana Gould • With a face like this, there aren’t a lot of lawyers or priest roles coming my way. I’ve gotta face that was meant for a mug shot and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past thirty years. If I play a cop, it’s always a racist cop, or a trigger-happy cop or a crooked cop – but by and large I play cowboys, bikers, and convicts. – M. C. Gainey • Yeah? Can you draw a skeleton riding a motorcycle with flames coming out of it? And I want a pirate hat on the skeleton. And a parrot on his shoulder. A skeleton parrot. Or maybe a ninja skeleton parrot? No, that would be overkill. But it’d be cool if the biker skeleton could be shooting some ninja throwing stars. That are on fire. – Richelle Mead • You could say that the Hell’s Angels have a bad reputation, then you talk to a biker, and he’s trying to join it. It just depends upon who you’re talking to about reputation. – Anton Newcombe • You ready? I have gold teeth, I have braids, I’m wearing Rick Owens moon boots, I have rips in my denim, a biker vest, I love artsy girls, my favourite artists are Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. I’m obsessed with being different. – ASAP Rocky • You wouldn’t believe that I still have the bikers with the caps to the side at my door, ringing the doorbell. – Tina Turner [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'e', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_e').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_e img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

1 note · View note

equitiesstocks · 5 years ago

Text

Bikers Quotes

Official Website: Bikers Quotes

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

• A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling. – Stephen Fry

0 notes

metawitches · 5 years ago

Text

Emergence is my favorite of the four new dramas I watched this week (also Prodigal Son, Stumptown and Evil). It has a compelling mystery with its own twist, characters I already care about who aren’t dark and cynical and a diverse, gender-balanced cast.

I really like the philosophy the show exhibited in the pilot. It’s not overly sweet or dark, but there’s a certain warmth and optimism. I get the sense that Piper is the main clue to a larger mystery, not a unique magical child who’s meant to save the world by herself. Hopefully the characters and mystery plot will stay in the forefront, while shoot outs and gore will be kept to a minimum.

And I love this new mother-daughter team of soft-hearted, unlikely bad*sses, who are part of a family of flawed but caring people. Real moms with good judgement for the win. I was so proud of Jo for being the one with the gun who could protect her family when an intruder broke into their beachhouse, but also for getting the family out without firing a shot. She put the safety of her family and solving crimes and mysteries first, as she should.

Recap

Emergence begins late at night in the sleepy Long Island, NY town of Southold, when there’s a town-wide power outage at the same time that a plane crashes on the beach. Police chief Jo Evans (Allison Tolman) is awakened by the outage. She and her family go outside to see what’s going on and notice an ionized glow, similar to the Aurora Borealis, rising from the site of the plane crash. Jo gets a call about the crash and says she’ll be right there. She tells her young teen daughter, Mia (Ashley Aufderheide), and her father, Ed Sawyer (Clancy Brown), that she’s leaving and sends them back to bed.

The beach surrounding the plane is crowded with first responders. Jo is met by Officer Chris Minetto (Robert Bailey Jr.), who explains that it was a mid size private jet that held about ten people. So far they haven’t been able to identify the flight or the source of the power and cell phone outage. Jo tells Chris to set up a perimeter and canvas for witnesses.

With the situation under control, she walks back toward her car, but sees someone duck down behind a small sand dune out of the way of action on the beach. Jo uses a flashlight to check behind the dune and finds a young girl (Alexa Swinton) hiding. The girl won’t talk to Jo, so she tries to connect to her through the Toy Story t-shirt the girl is wearing, explaining that she’s a sheriff, like Woody. Officer Chris comes over to check on the situation and the girl jumps into Jo’s arms. Jo gives the girl her police jacket to keep her warm on the windy beach.

Jo asks for paramedics to check on the girl, but she won’t let go of Jo. Chris agrees to continue to handle the crash site and the NTSB, who have just arrived and want the site cleared out, while Jo deals with the mysterious girl.

Once the girl has been examined at the hospital, Jo’s friend Dr Abby Frasier (Zabryna Guevara) explains that she’s fine physically but doesn’t remember anything. Abby thinks the girl has dissociative amnesia, caused by the brain’s need to protect itself after trauma. Abby doesn’t think the girl was in the plane crash, since she doesn’t have any injuries, but she doesn’t know what the trauma might have been. She hopes the girl’s memory will return in a day or two.

The girl is feeling fine now and wants to go home with Jo. Abby suggests that Jo stay in the hospital with her until she falls asleep instead. Jo shares a box of candy and a guessing game with her first.

Jo goes into the hall to investigate when they hear Abby having a loud argument. Three men who say they’re from the NTSB have arrived to take the girl and her files. They jumped to making threats as soon as Abby hesitated. Jo points out that they don’t have the authority to arrest anyone, but she does.

Abby discovers that during the argument the girl has done missing from her room, so Jo sends out everyone she can spare to search everywhere the girl could be. Then Chris calls to tell her that the real NTSB has arrived at the crash site. The other guys were impersonating the government agency.

It begins pouring rain outside. Jo sees a black SUV drive away from the hospital, so she rushes out to her police truck to follow them. For a moment, her car won’t start, then the rain runs sideways across her windshield. There’s a flash and crackle in the truck, and it starts running on its own. Also, the girl is now in the truck. She says, “Don’t be mad.”

Did she just transport into the truck or did we not notice her there in the dark?

Ed is still up when Jo and the girl get back to the house. When Jo tells him he shouldn’t have waited up, Ed says that he doesn’t sleep. She gets her visitor settled into bed, then fills her dad in on her night. Ed pushes Jo to report the girl to Family Services, but Jo thinks it’s too big a risk with the fake NTSB looking for her. He tells her she did the right thing by keeping the girl safe tonight and they can figure out the rest in the morning.

Yay for supportive dads.

In the morning, Jo comes down to the kitchen to find that Mia and the girl are already fast friends. Mia is trying to decide on a name for their visitor, since she can’t remember her real name. Jo suggests Piper, which was her second choice for Mia, so that’s what they choose.

Jo needs to drive Mia to school and check on the crash site, so she asks Ed and Piper if they’ll be okay together at home for a while. Jo and Piper are already having silent mother-daughter conversations and Piper is still wearing Jo’s police chief jacket from the night before. She looks scared for a second, but decides to be brave for her new mom.

Ed is fine with watching the kid, but Jo is worried about his health. He reminds her that the doctor said he should resume normal activities, so he should be able to handle a few chores and babysitting a ten year old. Jo asks him to keep Piper in the house for their own safety.

On the way out the door, Jo thanks Mia for being so good with Piper. Mia says she wants Piper to be her little sister. Now that her parents aren’t together, she thinks it’s the only way she’ll get a sibling.

A sinister black truck drives by the house and slows down to get a good look. They’re already being watched.

Ed counts out his medications for the week into daily pill boxes while Piper watches. He explains that the medications are to treat the cancer he developed due to toxins he was exposed to as a firefighter. He tells Piper that the meds are making him better. She says that they aren’t. He asks if she knows how to install a garbage disposal and they move on to their chores.

One of Piper’s powers must be some kind of scanning ability, maybe something similar to an MRI, since she has electromagnetic abilities.

When Ed goes to the basement for a tool, the TV turns itself on and shows a lined pattern in the center of the screen. Piper walks to the TV and is about to touch it when Ed returns. The pattern disappears and he turns the TV off. He asks Piper to come back to the kitchen. She’s pocketed a boxcutter from his tool box.

Was that an incoming communication from someone else like her? A sign that someone was using the TV to search for her?

The evidence of the plane crash has been completely cleared from the beach and that section has been reopened to the public. Jo is surprised when she arrives, because an investigation into a plane crash would normally take much longer.

The only one on the beach is a reporter named Benny Gallagher (Owain Yeoman) who’s taking photographs. Jo tries to get rid of him. He tries to convince her that they should work together, because he’s seen cases like this before. He predicts that the report will say that the vehicle that crashed was an unmanned drone that was involved in a routine activity like monitoring pollution or mapping forrests.

He tells Jo that he has sources that she doesn’t, so they should share information. For instance, he knows that the plane took off from Plum Island, three miles to the north, which is a Homeland Security research facility.

They say those last four words in unison. They’re obviously meant to do great things together.

He doesn’t have proof for anything he’s told her, so Jo decides to ignore him for now, Benny tells her that law enforcement officers usually really like him. She’ll be back.

Jo gets home a little late that evening. Her ex-husband, Alex (Donald Faison), is already there waiting for her. It’s his weekend with Mia, but she’s decided that it would be too traumatic for Piper if she left now. Mia reminds her parents that all children need security and consistency, and they’ve failed dismally at giving it to her lately, but she’s not going to fail her new little sister. And she brings her therapist’s advice into it.

Alex decides to cooperate, even though he’s a bit miffed because they’ve only had this schedule for two months. They work out an alternative plan, and Mia assumes that Piper will be visiting Alex with her from now on. Ed invites him to stay for dinner, but that’s one step too far. He doesn’t want to rejoin the family. He also disapproves of the way Jo’s unofficially taken in Piper, but there are still sparks between the exes.

Maybe once he finds out he’s got competition from Benny he’ll be more willing to work on their issues. Or maybe Jo needs someone like Benny, who’s more flexible about life.

Later, Piper plays with Mia and Jo’s old dollhouse before bed. They talk about how generous Mia is being with Piper. When Jo asks if Piper has remembered anything about her life, Piper changes the subject. Jo brings it back up and asks if Piper might be afraid of remembering. Piper doesn’t know, but she suggests that she might not ever remember her previous life.

Jo tells Piper about how scary it was when her mom left home forever when Jo was young. Jo held all of her feelings about it inside for a long time, but it didn’t help. She thinks that it helps to talk about scary and sad things because then you know you’re not alone. Piper asks if she can stay with Jo even if she remembers who she is. Jo says Piper won’t get rid of them that easily.

Just as Jo is telling Piper that it’s time to go to sleep, Chris calls to inform her that a couple are at the station who say they’re her parents. Jo goes alone to check them out. Chris says their names are Freddie and Caitlyn Martin. They claim that their daughter Olivia wandered away from their campsite last night.

Jo has Chris bring the Martins each a cup of coffee while she looks over their IDs and listens to their story. She notes that they were camping on a school night. They claim that they didn’t report Olivia missing earlier because they didn’t have cell service.

Mind, it’s been about 18-20 hours. They could have been at the police station by dawn from any campsite on Long Island, so what did they do all day while their ten year old daughter was missing?

Freddie shows Jo his phone to prove that it still doesn’t have reception. Jo asks about the phone’s camera and if she can see their pictures of Olivia. They refuse to show her photos and demand to see their daughter. Jo says something conciliatory and takes their coffee cups to get refills.

She hands the cups to Chris and tells him to run the fingerprints. While she’s talking to him, the lights dim and the Martins escape. Jo calls Alex to ask him to get her dad and the girls and bring them to a secret location. She says to take them to the place where they set the kitchen on fire, to leave his cell phone behind and not to say anything else. He agrees.

They meet up at a beach cabin. Jo brings Alex a burner phone so they can talk without being traced. She tells the family what happened and promises Piper that she’ll keep her safe. Piper promises to try harder to remember, so they can figure out why people are hunting her.

They decide they’ll all sleep in the living room rather than separating. Alex pulls Jo aside to tell her that he’s worried she’s either gotten herself in over her head or she’s paranoid and losing her mind.

Wow, he can leave now. Or as soon as they find somewhere else to sleep tonight. He came through for her when she needed him, but this kind of undermining isn’t worth the trouble.

She gives him a little more information about Piper and the case and he decides he can keep helping her. It seems like the fact that she’s the chief of police ought to be enough for him.

Loud banging sounds indicate they’ve been found. Jo pulls out her gun and searches for the intruder. Whoever it is enters the house upstairs while the family escapes through a basement window. Once they break the window the intruder tries to follow them into the basement by breaking down a locked door. Piper gets scared, causing the electrical and metal tools in the basement go haywire. They shake, fly and operate on their own.

The inanimate objects settle down as soon as the escape route is clear and Piper settles down a little. Outside, she gets separated from the others and grabbed by the intruders. By the time Jo gets outside, the black truck from earlier is driving away with Piper in it. Jo jumps in her own police truck and follows in pursuit. She calls for backup as she drives.

Just as she catches up to the other car, it suddenly flips up into the air as if it hit some obstacle at high speed, then crashes down to the pavement, upside down and with pieces breaking off. It’s kind of a Stranger Things moment. Jo is stunned.

She gets out and slowly approaches the other vehicle, where the driver appears to be dead, but Piper is okay. She crawls out and goes over to Jo, who hugs her and asks how this is possible. Piper says she doesn’t know.

In the morning, Chris tells her that the Martins’ IDs were fake and their fingerprints didn’t match any on file. He offers to run their DNA, but he figures that will also be a dead end.

OMG, it will show they’re aliens though!

He hands Jo a strange card that’s looks like a passkey made out of metal and paper. There’s no circuitry and nothing magnetic on it. He says no one can figure out what it is or what it’s for. The driver was carrying it.

The NTSB checked in to say the plane was an unmanned drone mapping forest coverage for the National Science Foundation. Chris confirms with Jo that they both actually saw a plane on the beach and the NTSB is lying. He asks what she thinks is going on. Jo tells him she thinks it has something to do with Piper, so she’s going to keep the girl with her and out of the system. She asks Chris if he’ll go along with it, even though it’s not legal. He agrees, without hesitation.

Jo meets Benny at a local restaurant. She knew where to find him because she’s been having him followed since they met. She tells him that she wouldn’t normally consider working with him, because she doesn’t know if she can trust him, but right now she doesn’t know who she can trust.

He thinks she’s smart to be cautious about trusting people, and offers up some new information. The fake NTSB agents recovered the black box and human remains from the plane. Jo wonders why he hasn’t published this information. He says he’s waiting until he has the whole story. She gives him the card that was found on the driver who kidnapped Piper and asks him to find out what he can about it. He says he’ll get back to her.

Jo gets home late and finds both girls in her bed. Piper is still wearing her police jacket and still scared. Jo promises that the people who tried to take her are gone. Piper asks if Jo thinks she caused the plane crash. Jo tells her no, she doesn’t think it was Piper’s fault.

Piper totally crashed the plane, but she was forced into it by circumstances, so it’s not her fault.

Jo sends her to the bathroom to brush her teeth with her brand new toothbrush. Piper turns on the water and looks in the mirror, then strange things happen. Reality alters in some way and Piper isn’t quite the same human girl we’ve been watching throughout the episode. She goes through a few filters of different looks before she snaps out of her trance.

There’s a new awareness in her eyes as she feels her skin behind her ear, then reaches for the box cutter she pocketed earlier. She clicks the blade into place, pulls the skin behind her ear taut, then makes a small slice. She gasps in surprise at the sensation when she cuts herself, then gets back to business. She feels inside the cut until she finds a small button sized object that’s lit up with the same pattern that was on the TV that morning. She pulls it out, looks at it, then puts it down the sink drain. Once it’s gone, Piper cleans up the mess she’s made and covers the cut with her long hair, as if nothing happened.

She smiles at herself in the mirror.

It was definitely a tracker. But what else was in that button? Was getting rid of it the equivalent of running away from home or was it part of the plan?

Commentary

Emergence begins with a series of TV tropes and events we’ve seen before. A plane crashes on a beach, a magical child appears, a family of good people who have drifted apart take her in, and mysterious, relentless pursuers put the magical child and her new family in danger. We’ve seen variations on this theme in shows such as Manifest, The Crossing, Lost, Once Upon a Time, Extant- the list seems endless. It’s a fairy tale scenario that’s deeply embedded in our culture.

Emergence works because it has a talented, charming cast who have effortless chemistry together, the way families in the most emotionally believable shows do. They find the magic in the script and bring it out in their characters, without forcing anything. Most especially, the relationship between the two leads, Police Chief Jo Evans, played by Alison Tolman, and mystery child Piper, played by Alexa Swinton, is warm and heartfelt from the moment the two first meet. In some ways, it doesn’t really matter how the rest of the mystery is solved, as long as Piper is adopted in Jo’s family forever and the two keep working together to solve it.

The success of the family aspect of the show, outside of the mystery aspect, might help save it when it comes to renewal time. At least so far, this show has that sense of kismet between the characters that makes you want to visit with them every week and catch up on their lives, separate from the mystery plot. So far, none of the many one or two and done canceled supernatural shows have managed that.

The pilot barely scratches the surface of Alexa’s real story, so we’ll have to give it a few more episodes before judging whether the scifi aspect is equal to the character aspect of the show.

But Terry O’Quinn shows up in episode 2, and that’s always a good sign.

The two shows this reminds me of the most are Manifest and Extant, both scifi with happy, warm, if slightly broken, families that you want to spend time with even without the science fiction aspect of the shows. Extant had a robot child, an alien pregnancy, an astronaut mom and a robotics scientist dad. I think its issue was that it tried to do too much at once, but it was fun while it lasted. Manifest has a missing and returned plane, and pasengers who manifest supernatural abilities. The magical child has the strongest abilities and is the key to the mystery. It’s not quite as visually interesting and well done as Emergence is and Extant was, but it does have its share of pseudoscience.

(Pause to grieve the dearly departed The Crossing, 2018’s version of this concept. Emergence feels better executed already, if only because it didn’t begin with hundreds of dead bodies on the beach. And it doesn’t start with a wildly traumatized family, the way Manifest did. I’m all for avoiding excessive death and trauma.)

Southold is the kind of picturesque little town that has a lighthouse, where every house could be on a postcard. You know nothing really bad has ever happened there before. It’s just asking for trouble. If it wasn’t an alien child, it would have been great white sharks, or, worse, a Sharknado, so Piper’s actually doing them a favor.

Just before the lights go out in the beginning of the episode, a safety pin on Jo’s nightstand flies over to the wall and the LEDs in her bedside clock make a strange pattern. Was Piper nearby? Did she ride to the crash site with Jo? The big question is, who are the people chasing her? Others of her kind, or people from the Homeland Security research facility who were experimenting on her? Both? Is she powerful enough to take out the lights and cell phones in the entire town by herself?

youtube

Images courtesy of ABC.

Emergence Season 1 Episode 1: Pilot Recap-I love this new mother-daughter team of soft-hearted, unlikely bad*sses, who are part of a flawed but caring family. Real moms & police chiefs with good judgement for the win. #Emergence Emergence is my favorite of the four new dramas I watched this week (also Prodigal Son…

#ABC #Alexa Skye Swinton #Alexa Swinton #Allison Tolman #Clancy Brown #Emergence #metacrone #Mystery #recaps #review #suspense thriller

0 notes

newstfionline · 7 years ago

Text

Behind Mugabe’s Rapid Fall: A Firing, a Feud and a First Lady

By Norimitsu Onishi, NY Times, Nov. 19, 2017

HARARE, Zimbabwe--The rapid fall of Zimbabwe’s president, whose legendary guile and ruthlessness helped him outmaneuver countless adversaries over nearly four decades, probably has surprised no one more than Robert Mugabe himself.

For years, he was so confident of his safety--and his potency--that he took monthlong vacations away from Zimbabwe after Christmas, never facing any threat during his long, predictable absences. Even at 93, his tight grip on the country’s ruling party and his control over the military made his power seem impervious to question.

But in just a matter of days, Mr. Mugabe, who ruled his nation since independence in 1980, was largely stripped of his authority, even as he still clung to the presidency.

In a much-anticipated speech on Sunday night, Mr. Mugabe, instead of announcing his resignation as most of the country had expected, stunned Zimbabwe by refusing to say he was stepping down. While he conceded that his country was “going through a difficult patch,” he gave no sign that he recognized, or accepted, how severely the ground had shifted under him in such a short time.

Earlier in the day, the governing ZANU-PF party, over which he had always exercised total domination, expelled Mr. Mugabe as leader, with cheers and dancing erupting after the vote. He was given a deadline of noon on Monday to resign or face impeachment by Parliament.

Just days earlier, on Wednesday, soldiers put him under house arrest, and his 52-year-old wife, Grace Mugabe, whose ambition to succeed him contributed to his downfall, has not been seen in public since.

But in his speech, Mr. Mugabe even declared that he would preside over his governing party’s congress in a few weeks. After 37 years in control of the nation, he was refusing to let go easily.

The chain of events leading to Mr. Mugabe’s downfall started on Nov. 6, when he fired his vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a close ally of the military, and then tried to arrest the nation’s top military commander a few days later. Mr. Mugabe had finally come down against the military and its political allies in a long-running feud inside the governing party.

“He crossed the red line, and we couldn’t allow that to continue,” said Douglas Mahiya, a leader of the war veterans’ association, a group that has acted as the military’s proxy in the country’s political battles while allowing uniformed generals to remain publicly neutral.

A few hours after he was fired, Mr. Mnangagwa, fearing arrest, fled with a son into neighboring Mozambique, where he has strong military ties. He eventually made his way to South Africa, allies said.

July Moyo, a close ally of Mr. Mnangagwa, said the vice president had prepared himself for the possibility of being fired. “He accepted that things can turn very bad, so he had conditioned himself,” Mr. Moyo said.

Several hours before the vice president escaped to Mozambique, Christopher Mutsvangwa, the head of the war veterans’ association and one of Mr. Mnangagwa’s closest allies, had boarded a plane to South Africa.

Over the following days, Mr. Mutsvangwa met with South African intelligence officers, he said, warning them of a possible military intervention in Zimbabwe. He said he had tried to persuade South African officials not to describe any intervention as a “coup”--an important concession to get from South Africa, the regional power.

Though this account could not be verified with South African officials on Sunday, the South African government did not mention the word “coup” in its official statement after the military intervention occurred on Wednesday.

While Mr. Mutsvangwa worked on South African officials, Zimbabwe’s longtime top military commander, Gen. Constantino Chiwenga, was in China on an official trip. He was tipped off while abroad that Mr. Mugabe had ordered him arrested upon his return home, according to several people close to the military. The police were going to grab the general as soon as his plane touched down, on Nov. 12.

But as General Chiwenga prepared to land, soldiers loyal to him infiltrated the airport. His troops--wearing the uniforms of baggage handlers--surprised and quickly overwhelmed the police. Before departing, the general is said to have told the police officers that he would “deal” with their commander, a Mugabe loyalist.

Within just a couple of days, tanks had rumbled into the capital and soldiers had effectively deposed Mr. Mugabe.

The president’s decision to fire his vice president and arrest the general was the culmination of a long--and increasingly vicious and personal--battle inside ZANU-PF, the party that has controlled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. The so-called Lacoste faction was led by Mr. Mnangagwa, whose nickname is the Crocodile, and was backed by the military and war veterans.

The rival faction was led by the president’s wife and supported by the police, whose loyalty Mr. Mugabe had ensured by, among other moves, naming a nephew to a top command. This faction included mostly younger politicians with no experience in the war of liberation and was christened Generation 40, or G-40, by Jonathan Moyo, a fearless, extremely ambitious politician widely regarded as the mastermind behind this group.

As Lacoste and G-40 fought each other to eventually succeed Mr. Mugabe, the president did not give either side his declaration of support. To both factions, the biggest factor was Mr. Mugabe’s age and increasingly visible frailty. It was only a matter of time before “nature will take its course” and “the old man goes,” as the political class said.

Time was on Lacoste’s side. Once nature did take its course, power would naturally slip to Mr. Mnangagwa and his military backers, they believed.

Mr. Mnangagwa remained largely quiet, refraining from responding to attacks, and treated Mr. Mugabe with extreme deference. Whenever Mr. Mugabe flew home from a trip, state media invariably showed Mr. Mnangagwa greeting the president on the tarmac, displaying an almost obsequious smile and body language.

To the younger members in G-40, time was against them. Their biggest asset, Mrs. Mugabe, would lose all value once her husband died. So they were in a rush to get a transfer of power while Mr. Mugabe was still alive.

Just a few months ago, Mr. Moyo confided in a friend that he was “less than confident” about G-40’s standing with the president. Despite his efforts to win over the president through Mrs. Mugabe, Mr. Moyo still remained unsure about the “old man’s standing vis-à-vis Mnangagwa and Chiwenga,” said the friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversation had been private.

Mr. Mugabe’s downfall was rooted in his wife’s decision to become a political force in mid-2014, most politicians and experts believe.

“Mrs. Mugabe’s entry into politics caused elite rupture in Zimbabwe,” said Tendai Biti, a lawyer, opposition politician and former finance minister in a coalition government a few years ago. “This coup was the result of a disagreement between people eating at the same table, whereas most coups in Africa are done by people eating under the table and receiving crumbs.”

Why Mrs. Mugabe, now 52, suddenly dove into politics is not exactly clear. Married for decades to Mr. Mugabe, she had been known as “Gucci Grace,” someone interested in shopping and leading a lavish lifestyle. She was a typist in the presidential pool when she and Mr. Mugabe began an affair while the president’s first wife, Sally, was dying of cancer. Unlike the much-beloved first wife, the second Mrs. Mugabe was widely disliked among Zimbabweans.

Some politicians and experts point to the hand of Mr. Moyo, the originator of the G-40 name, for Mrs. Mugabe’s political intentions.

In ZANU-PF’s ever-shifting alliances, Mr. Moyo had a checkered past. In 2004, he was expelled from the party after planning a power play with--critically--none other than Mr. Mnangagwa himself, who managed to escape politically unscathed. Feeling betrayed by Mr. Mnangagwa, Mr. Moyo vowed never to work with him again, setting off a decade-long feud that fed into the recent military takeover.

Mr. Moyo, reportedly admired by Mr. Mugabe for his intelligence, was rehabilitated, rejoined the party and was given ministerial positions in the cabinet.

But in June 2014, Mr. Moyo was again on the outs. At a funeral for a party stalwart at National Heroes Acre, a burial ground and national monument in Harare, the capital, Mr. Mugabe criticized Mr. Moyo for causing dissension in the party. The president referred to him as a “weevil”--an insect that eats corn, Zimbabwe’s staple food, from the inside.

“Even in Zanu-PF, we have the weevils,” the president said. “But should we keep them? No.”

To secure his survival, Mr. Moyo urged Mrs. Mugabe to enter politics, according to politicians, friends and analysts.

“He preyed on her fears,” said Dewa Mavhinga, a Zimbabwe researcher for Human Rights Watch, referring to Mr. Moyo. “You’re a young wife with an old husband in his sunset moments. You have to guarantee your future. You need people who are loyal to you. And who better to protect your interests than yourself.”

Very rapidly, Mrs. Mugabe and her allies orchestrated the removal of rivals, including Joice Mujuru, a vice president, as well as Mr. Mutsvangwa, who had been Mr. Mugabe’s minister of war veterans affairs.

But even as the president’s medical trips to Singapore were getting increasingly frequent, he was not making a final decision on his succession.

Time was running out.

And so, Mr. Moyo, shortly after expressing his growing frustrations to his friend, appeared to go for broke. In July, in a meeting of party leaders, he launched a direct attack on Mr. Mnangagwa, presenting a 72-minute video said to show his rival’s duplicity and desire to topple the president.

At the same time, Mrs. Mugabe intensified her faction’s attacks, describing Mr. Mnangagwa as a “coward” and “coup plotter.”

At a rally in the city of Bulawayo early this month, some youths, presumably from the rival Lacoste faction, began heckling Mrs. Mugabe, calling her a “thief.”

The heckling visibly angered Mr. Mugabe, who immediately accused Mr. Mnangagwa of being behind it.

“Did I err in appointing Mr. Mnangagwa as my deputy?” the president said. “If I erred, I will drop him even tomorrow.”

Two days later, he fired Mr. Mnangagwa, opening the path for Mrs. Mugabe to become vice president and, once nature took its course, her husband’s successor.

Mrs. Mugabe and her allies had finally won. But the victory would soon prove Pyrrhic.

As the Lacoste faction solidified the takedown of Mr. Mugabe, party officials on Sunday removed Mrs. Mugabe as head of the ZANU-PF Women’s League and barred her from the party for life. Mr. Moyo, too, was barred forever. Mr. Mugabe’s second vice president, Phelekezela Mphoko, who had served for three years, was fired.

The ending was much sweeter for Mr. Mnangagwa: On Sunday, the party named him as its new leader.

#Zimbabwe #Robert Mugabe #Grace Mugabe #Emmerson Mnangagwa #Zimbabwe coup

0 notes