#and then recalling the intense discomfort I have at being photographed

[dirt-goth]

Staring at old photos is so insane because I know for a fact 90% of those I didn't want taken and I dodged hundreds more than exist. I hated the way I looked. I hated the idea of being perceived. I hated my stupid smile and dorky laugh and I STILL feel that way most of the time but like maybe I shouldn't. Maybe me in a few years will feel the same seeing me now as I do seeing me then

[dcwnthercbbithcle]

📷 + OPHELIA AND/OR RUBEDO IF MUN SO CHOOSES! <3

Send 📷 to have a picture taken of your muse with SCP-978 || ACCEPTING

🐇 || ooc. Rubedo got another ask of his own so he’ll be done there!

Subject: SCP-8713-B

Initial photo activity: Subject was photographed from the waist up while standing before a white wall while smiling for the camera and with neutral pose.

Result: Undetermined, Subject destroyed photograph before the details of its contents could be transcribed. Assistant Researcher ████ Mason who had taken the photograph and viewed it prior to destruction recalls the image taking place in a kitchen which appeared consistent with the 1930s. The photo to Mason's recollection contained 6 humanoid figures in some manner of leisure and play, a further two humanoid individuals can be seen outside a window and seemed to be speaking with one another. None of the contents of the photograph where graphic or explicit in any nature.

Comment: It seems that some manner of the contents appeared to trigger SCP-8713-B to experience an episode of brief and intense discomfort and paranoia. SCP-8713-B, following its destruction of the photograph was found to have returned to its containment cell of its own volition and refused to discuss either the contents of the photograph or its reaction to it when prompted. SCP-8713-B did not emerge from its containment chamber for the duration of its shift. SCP-8713-B, for reasons unknown, did not write of the events or contents of the photograph within its journal during its evening entry.

It was remarkably, no, even comically simple for Mason to get a photo of 8713-B, or Ophelia as he had come to know her. He remembered hearing tales of juniors having to run beside her as she insisted on continuing her work in the clinic rather than heeding their request for interview, or better, the tales of researchers, bright eyed and bushy tailed being severely instructed to make themselves useful or to leave, and walking dejected from the clinic.

Mason snickered to himself at the thought of that, he’d been working with Ophelia for what? Three years and she was nothing if not dedicated and no nonsense. He once mused that had she a mean bone in her body, she’d make a fine drill instructor. But for the topic at hand, he had been pleasantly surprised to find her agreeable as he pulled her off to the side.

Initially, when he had approached her, her voice held reluctance, like a dog pulling on its lead— though her task had thankfully been moving fresh bed linens to empty rooms, she hated to leave a job unfinished and hated worse to be distracted on the job. But she listened, Mason was a friendly face, she trusted him enough to think he would not waste her time, and when he posed to her the question of being a willing participant to a ‘new form of photography,’ her eyes lit up with curiosity and interest. Perhaps she could step away, just this once, for learning! They were not busy after all!

Standing with her back against the plain white wall, a broad smile worn across her face as proudly as a necklace of diamonds. She stared at the camera held aloft in Mason’s hands, only briefly blinking and flinching at the flash, before turning her attention back to him and opening her mouth to speak as the internal printer churned to lift and began humming as it printed her picture into Mason’s waiting hand.

Ophelia asked him, voice still bubbling with restrained girlish excitement about what they did now, as he laid the photo facedown on a cart, and he responded with a smile that they’d wait, and wait they did. Standing there in an awkward silence, waiting for the photo to develop. Minutes ticked by, passing like gallstones as the two waited, trepidation dragging every second on as though it were an hour.

After ten minutes, whether through frustration or confidence, he couldn’t tell himself. Mason threw up his hands and responded in the affirmative, whether or not it was truly done be damned, as he didn't want to wait an instant longer, and reached for the photo. Moving close, Ophelia peered over the Mason's shoulder, waiting to get the first glimpse at the image. However, as he turned the image around, Ophelia's blood ran cold and she froze in place, stuttering and stammering over her words as she asking, no, instructed Mason to drop the photo, before lunging forward and snatching the film from his grasp before he had even taken its contents to memory.

He had been about to complain and tell her to return it when he noticed the change in her demeanor and appearance, though still herself, her eyes were wild and her body tense and defensive- like a rat cornered by a cat, she stared at him and him her in complete silence, before he watched in horror as she not only ripped the photo to shreds as though it were nothing more than damp tissue shoved the remains into her mouth and ate it. After that, and with no further word, Ophelia ran off, leaving Mason in shock and awe and abject confusion. What the hell was that about?

[softinkshadows]

running into adultrio for the first time (x female reader) (3/3)

disclaimer: this is a feels fic CHROLLO The melodic sounds of pop rock from the speakers are louder this evening, over the clink of beer bottles and rowdy conversation. Propping your chin with one arm on the pub counter, you scan the sparse crowd - sure enough, business is slow today. Even the cigarette smoke which usually cling obstinately to the walls feels more distant. As expected of the Halich festivities, where most people in Saherta would be home with their families. For a small establishment like yours, in a town just on the eastern outskirts of the Gordeau desert, this means an early closing day. You are itching to get some rest tonight after handling the merrymakers in the past week leading up to the festive season. It is almost 6pm, you note, your eyes wandering across the pub. There is just a table of three regulars, and a man sitting alone in the far right corner near the windows. He looks slightly out of sorts, dressed in a long purple coat, his black hair combed back but slightly tousled. You can’t see his face properly now, but you recall the unusual cross tattoo on his forehead and the way he came in earlier, silent with the tell-tale shuffle of a worn traveler. You were a bit annoyed that he only asked for a glass of water before taking his seat, not budging an inch. Strangely, he seems preoccupied with the decorations on the wall, in particular the large and fading world map placed amongst photographs and notes from customers.  “Sweetheart! The tab please!” You hear a familiar yell that jolts you out of your thoughts. You stride over to the table of the three, late middle-aged men who are already slightly tipsy from all the drinks. “Hope you gentlemen enjoyed,” you hum cheerfully, collecting the cash. As you bend forward to clear the bottles, you feel a hand on your lower back moving down to pat your bum cheekily through your skirt. Internally, you roll your eyes. You immediately brandish the dagger sheathed in your belt and stab it right between the fingers of his other hand resting on the table. You move so fast that no one has the time to react, but you sense the man in the purple coat look up and glance your way. “How many fingers do you want to lose this time, Hanz? Shouldn’t you be getting back to Lina now?” you retort teasingly, used to your regular’s drunk antics. The table breaks out into hearty laughter as Hanz turns sheepish, and they shuffle out of the pub to return to their families for the night. You gather up the empty bottles and bring them to the counter, before turning down the music. Now it is just you, the yellow glow of evening light slanting through the dusty windows, and the strange traveler in the corner. “Hey,” you say as you walk over, wiping your hands on your shirt, “I’m closing up. You don’t need to pay for the water, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” You notice the slightest shift in his eyes to the sheathed dagger around your waist. Then, he looks up and you meet his gaze for the first time. He is extremely good-looking for a traveler, and the light scuff marks around his cheek somehow accentuate his attractiveness. His dark grey eyes are undeniably beautiful, but something about their intensity catches you off guard. His eyes are alluring, almost calculative, but they harbour a flicker of vacant sadness. It’s the latter that stirs something in you, and against your better judgement, you ask, “Do you... need help with anything?” “I am just travelling through the area, but I am looking for a place to stay the night,” he explains pleasantly, smiling slightly. His tone is friendly and warm, you’d dare say even charismatic, but your gut tells you that something is off. You spend a few seconds wondering about sending this dangerous-looking man out into town, rapping on the doors of houses filled with elderly and young children for the holidays... Here, it was just you. You could probably handle him. And it’s been many years since you had company on an occasion like this. You sigh deeply. “If you don’t mind sleeping on a couch, you can stay at my place. It’s just upstairs. Every other home will be packed today.”  ---- “Here you go. There’s nothing much,” you say as your swing open the door to your apartment. Thankfully you didn’t make much of a mess, save for some books left open on the sofa. The deepening orange glow of the sunset filters through the glass doors to the balcony, and your apartment appears cosy. The simple furnishings, the small table near the open kitchen, and the few cutlery by the sink only serve as an indicator that you live alone, and coming home to this sight every day always tugs at your heart slightly. You hear the click of the door closing shut behind you, and you wonder why the man hasn’t as much as said a word.  You walk to the kitchen counter, intending on offering him a drink, when you register a sudden flash of movement. You feel the dagger in your belt being pulled out swiftly, so quick that the hair on your neck stands on end, so quick that you don’t even have the time to feel shocked, as it is immediately followed by the telling rush of air as the blade swings down above your hea- your instincts kick in, and you turn around rapidly, missing the blade by a few inches, ducking fast before pinning the man to the kitchen table with his arm twisted behind his back. All is silent except for the clattering of the dagger to the floor.  “Listen, you piece of shit,” you growl fiercely. “I didn’t bring you up here so you could kill me. Here, you’re my guest, and I am your host. So you better start treating me like one.” You’re not sure why you’re hesitant to finish him off, but you release him. He turns to face you, rubbing his wrists, and in his dark eyes you notice a glint of intrigue. Somehow, he looks impressed. “I apologize for my rudeness,” he says with an amused chuckle, his previous innocent demeanour falling away. From this short interaction you can tell he is incredibly powerful, but you are not going to let it faze you. You pick up the dagger and place it back in your belt, giving him a glare.  “The least you can do now is help me with dinner. You haven’t had anything to eat didn’t you?” The man looks at you stunned for a brief second, a puzzled look crossing his face, before he relaxes. “Alright,” he relents, removing his coat and draping it over a chair.  You find yourself trying to stifle a laugh as you pan fry some meat, watching the man clumsily washing vegetables at the kitchen sink, his long fingers peeling and prodding the lettuce leaves without much experience. He doesn’t speak much, you realize, but you notice his eyes wander to the meat cleaver on the counter. “Don’t even think about it,” you snap, and you see a smile tug the corner of his lips. Later, you have dinner outside on the balcony, overlooking the glimmering lighted windows of other homes in the town. Beyond it the large rolling sandy hills of the desert. On most days you’d feel a crushing sadness being on this balcony as the past creeps back upon you. But tonight, it feels bearable. Your look to your side at the man eating in silence, looking out to the view occasionally, his eyes glazed with pensiveness and slight discomfort. He catches you looking at him. “The food is not to your liking?” you asked, preparing to be offended. “No, it’s just... this is new to me,” he replies. “What is? Eating?” you snort derisively. “Being taken care of,” he replies so softly you think you must have misheard. Your cheeks feel warm, and you grumble in your own awkwardness as you collect the plates and head back inside.  “Earlier on, why did you let me stay?” he asks, following you. You let the water from the tap run over your fingers absentmindedly before falling to rinse the dishes below. “Even after I tried to kill you? Aren’t you afraid not knowing what I could do?” You hear his voice coming closer, now a shade darker. “Who knows...” You turn off the tap, sighing, then turning around. “What more can you possibly d-” He grips your wrists firmly and pushes you against the counter, his knees between your legs pushing them slightly apart, making you lean back to maintain your balance. His face presses close to you, lips almost touching. The suddenness of intimacy sends a shiver up your spine, and for a while, you’re speechless and confused, searching his gaze for answers. “I could take you, like this, right now,” he murmurs, his warmth breath fanning your face, and for a moment you feel your desperate loneliness rush into your chest, lightheaded and heavy with want. You could kiss him now and not care what happens later. You could let him ravish you without a thought, graze your body with his lips and hands in places you’ve long craved for...Then you notice his eyes, lidded, sultry, but beneath it a pained undercurrent of emptiness. The rippling desire in you begins to fade, and you understand. “I’m a killer and a thief. Yet you still help me, and you don’t even know my name.” He whispers, his hands not letting go of yours. “You never asked for mine,” you reply, looking straight into his eyes. You both stay like this for a while, in silence, though it feels like he’s on the brink of saying something more. Then, he pulls away. For the rest of the night, you and him barely talk. He spends some time checking his phone, reading the books you left on the sofa, while you clean the dishes, shower and make some preparations for the pub tomorrow. Every now and then he gets up to help you wiping the dishes, or carry the laundry to the balcony.  When it is time for bed, you watch as he removes his shirt swiftly, before lying down on the sofa.  “Goodnight,” you say softly, turning into your bedroom. “Goodnight,” he replies, not looking back.  The events of the day and the past week catch up to you, and exhausted, you fall asleep almost instantly. You don’t notice when he comes into your room in the early hours of the morning. It is still dark, and his footsteps are quiet so as not to wake you up. You don’t notice as he bends over at your sleeping figure, gazing with fondness. “It’s Chrollo,” he whispers. He leans in closer, and cups his hand around your face. You shift and mumble a little in your sleep. He smiles to himself before placing a kiss on your forehead. He knows you aren’t listening, but says it anyway. “Wait for me.” Then he pulls on his coat and heads out the door, leaving soundlessly into the cold, dark morning as the first slivers of light begin to break across the sky.

[noahser]

How do we treat game(no preaching, Using details and emotions)-- to put out your view on games

hold on for 3 secondsDon’t push yourself to answer this. I hope in the next few minutes, i can make you fell more confident when you are playing games.Background: games industries start to get boom steadily

Game companies start to recruit more people and headhunt talented people from other industries. salary in most game corporations gets their boost bit by bit.“ Shanghai claims itself as a global E-games city with the most considerable salary jump and heated recruiting. The biggest occupation demand gap is the producer of a game, TA(technology art), and engineering. In some shanghai companies, some graduates can get 500 thousand yuan a year, which is pretty considerable. Some scarce jobs’ salary can get double by job-hopping from another city”, cited from Times Zhoubao reporter named Jason.Some Chinese companies also make some excellent games possible: Forged In Shadow Torch, Tales of immortal, The Scroll of Taiwu, Dyson Sphere Program, Genshin Impact, and so on.▼Posters of gamesBut since not a single game company in China has made it through the game industrialization transformation process, we still can not forge a game that can be on a par with other foreign 3A games and get a long way to go. But, we are moving forward.Status Quo: People’s attitudes towards games have begun to change, and more and more people have started to pay attention to games. E-sports or live broadcasting are rapidly developing, and people have gradually adopted a more positive attitude towards games.Many games have also acted as social tools (Honor of Kings, Game For Peace, Mole’s World, Harry Potter), in games, people experience virtual worlds. Games are even changing the real world, and the influence of games is becoming more and more noticeable.The game has become a tool for connecting feelings among roommates in the dormitoryGames became a time killer for boys in the back row of college classesThe game has become a useful tool to alleviate the embarrassment when people are waiting for food at the table or the follow-up supplement activities after a meal when there is nothing to do in your mind.Do games seem to be needed by more people? Is the game really being treated fairly by more and more people?But wait, it doesn't seem right. These are something we are evading. Why do we choose to play games in these scenarios?You said that the dormitory relationship is not easy to handle. Finding some time to play games together could enhance our relationships.You said that you are socializing and your friends are all playing this game. If you don't play it, I could be regarded as withdrawn.You said that are there that many things to talk about when you hold an event together? Play a game together to relieve boredom. Isn't it good?You say that this is the ninth art. I am leveling up my aesthetic taste and experiencing different life experiences.▼An art form other than (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry (literature), dance, drama, film)You said that I was so tired in class or work, I want to relax in the game.Wait, are we evading something? Do you need so many reasons for playing games? Can games only be used as tools? Games, can not they just be games?Let me tell my story. When I was in elementary school, I lived in my grandmother’s village. After school, what should we do after we have nothing to do? Of course, it was having fun. We go to play glass balls, play cards, throw sandbags, play top toys on ice, and use BB guns to shoot birds, which made me feel really regretful till now.At that time, the plastic bullet did not grant BB guns great power. The bird would fall off at most when it hits, and it could not fly temporarily cause it still hurts. At this time, we would happily rush over to catch the bird. Of course, birds were useless for us if we keep it. So we would release the birds afterward. But once, we hit a bird with a bullet, it fell off suddenly. I rushed over happily, only to find that the eye was hit with blood flowing. It was the first time we encountered this situation. I suddenly felt regretful. That was the first time I felt heartache for a bird. I held it up and put it under the alpine grass outside the yard to let it rest and prevent others from catching it. (Actually, I don’t know what to do). After a while, when I

went to check again, I found it disappeared. I don't know what fate it faced afterward. I blamed myself for a while and never used a BB gun to aim at birds again. After having such an experience, I began to understand "Whether it is a human or a small animal, the pain will make those who experience it feel intense discomfort whether you are the hurt one or not." When I picked up the BB gun, I didn't even think about what I could get from it. All of this may be an unexpected gain.Later, I get to know video games from a friend. A small game computer can be connected to the TV to play a variety of cool games just by plugging in a ROM cartridge. It really refreshed my cognition about games at the time. So, I spent all the pocket money I had saved for a long time on a family computer called Subor - a game console in the store, which is apparently a private version. But i knew that way later on. I was ecstatic and take it home. Whenever there was just me at home, I turned on the TV and browse a set of games on my “Subor”—— Mario, Contra, Nunchaku, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and other games, even these simple interaction logic of these games can make me fascinated. Later, on the basis of these games, I also came into contact with more excellent works, such as Mortal, Streets of Rage, King of Fighters, Street Fighter, and so on. . . Subsequently, the Internet swept up, and web games emerged, QQ Tang, QQ Pet, QQ Speed, CF, and CS Online showed on the desktop of my computer. Although I had been reprimanded for playing games, these games gave me a better understanding of games. I came to figure out that” wow, games can be like this”. Recalling now, did I want to get anything when I played the game? No, all of this may still be unexpected gains.Why, when we talk about playing games, we never admit that we are playing, and we always feel that we need to pursue meaning in order to justify our behavior of playing games.Looking back at the emergence of many things, when French photographers Louis Lumiere and Auguste Lumiere brothers put their invented "event projector" in a cafe, and when they played their films, did they mull the meanings from this thing that can bring to us? I'm afraid not. But we all know what the movie has achieved today."Today I have been busy, nothing can be done, I suddenly missed all the women of that day. After careful examination one by one, I found that their behavior and knowledge are all above me. Don't protect yourself because of my dissatisfaction, and also make them annihilate." This is Cao Xueqin's original intention to explain her creation in the first chapter of "A Dream of Red Mansions". Literature may not think about the meaning, but it captures the beautiful and subtle emotions that could not be written in words before and creates a world of New. For example, light enters a dark room, which is dark for a hundred thousand years, and it can be enlightened at once. , So we can see the “Bullet screen” like "Thousand-year dark room, a light bright the dark all", "Although it can't come, my heart yearns for it" "After that, if there is no torch, I will be the only light", not just "Olygi" at the ends of some high-energy videosSo, where is the meaning of playing games? I want to say: it can be meaningless. If it can bring me unexpected gains, of course, it is better, but if it doesn't, it doesn't matter.When we let go of the idea of ​binding the game to other meanings, we can really play the game.Stop deceiving yourself by saying that I play games to socialize, I play games to feel the ninth art, and I play games to relax my brain for better learning. stop! I play games because I like games, nothing else, just to play games. Because a game can only be a game.

[hollenius]

Talking Heads: Are These Guys Trying To Give Rock A Bad Name?

Having fun trawling the internet for more old interviews and things with different bands & musicians. Here’s a Talking Heads one from 1977.

Talking Heads: Are These Guys Trying To Give Rock A Bad Name?

Nick Kent, New Musical Express, 25 June 1977

TALKING HEADS: it's a term they use up in the high-rise skyscrapers that house all the cogs in the corporate machinery cranking out network television for the American people.

The big-wigs in the boardroom – the William Holdens and Robert Duvalls of Network land – have a name for the lowest common-denominator programme non-personalities – the newscaster, weather-reporters, and other old warhorses who sit head and shoulders directly on camera mouthing out their obligatory tasks. These are the "talking heads" of American TV land; utterly boring, but necessary.

Talking heads with greying hair, dabs of make-up and dandruff removed from the shoulders of their suit-jackets, they sit austerely informing the public of the nation's daily occurences – the rapes and murders, the military campaigns abroad, the latest government manouevres. No opinions, no subjective slant to their reports – they simply precis it down, feed it out to those millions of tubes and when it's over they go away, back to the bar or to the suburban home, wife and kids.

David Byrne, guitarist and singer for the Talking Heads, an American rock group, has a song that he wrote and performs entitled 'Don't Worry About The Government'. It usually gets played early on in the set, with no prefacing explanation – just Byrne's reedy high-pitched voice almost stammering "This next song is called..."

And every time he introduced it to an audience in England, certain factions would snigger or boo or howl derisively because Talking Heads after all are a NEW WAVE group and if you are a New Wave group you must write direct anti-status quo, sloganeering songs of dissent. Just like The Clash or Chelsea or...

But Byrne's song isn't like that at all.

It's about an ordinary man who owns an apartment in some American suburb and who lives a quiet, fairly inconsequential existence, going to work in the morning and returning in the evening, who gains pleasure from life simply through drinking wine with friends or reading a book. There is no hint of moral castigation, no hint of cynicism, Byrne just places himself in his character's psyche and explains himself through his song.

It's a rare talent this, something much closer to the art of the very best short-story writers, a talent that only Ray Davies and Randy Newman before him, out of all the thousands of post-war song-writers, have bothered to identify with and explore perceptively.

"I just thought," said Byrne, "that lyrics could be used to strip down conversations, just normal day-to-day converstions and dialogues, and strip away all the phoney embellishments and posturing right down to essentials so that they would actually say something directly, without having to throw in all the 'Oh yeah, baby' or 'Hey, bitch I'm coming to get ya right now' or...

"Pa-a-arty," chips in Jerry Harrison, the Talking Heads' keyboard player.

Everybody laughs.

NOT AN easy band to write about, these Talking Heads. They mystify arid confuse simply because they so patently lack any dint of the arch brand of mystique that forms a patented cloak for the rock star enigma. Four intelligent, straightforward individuals, the very straightforward nature of their music and their image is somehow unique to the genre they have chosen to work within.

Not that the press haven't attempted time and time again to write about them, almost always in flattering terms.

They emerged as a live attraction in the hot summer of 1975 when Manhattan's CBGB's had suddenly been designated the centre-point of all new-wave rock activity, and were immediately slotted in with the likes of Television, Patti Smith, The Ramones, and Heartbreakers as the pace-setters right there at the vanguard of this brave new scene. Convenient tags like 'punk' and 'art-rock' found themselves strange bed-fellows in numerous articles consummated by the inevitable bandying of the term 'minimalism'.

New York rock critics, having witnessed the ugly death of the New York Dolls brand of gashed-up rock, latched on fast to this new austerely dressed-down form of the music, and the Talking Heads, suddenly caught in the swell, found themselves holding down the cover of the prestigious Village Voice with a photograph taken at only their third gig. Inside was a rave-review of said show with an extensive article.

Since then, coverage has been as extensive as it has been perplexingly unforthcoming in regard to mere bottom line info on what the band were actually all about.

What was disclosed was that the band was a trio then, led by the angular, neurotic-looking Byrne who carried all guitar, vocal and composing chores, while the bass-player was a slight blonde-haired girl called Tina Weymouth whose basic feminist features were undermined by a slightly asexual manner. Drummer Chris Frantz was baby-faced and pleasantly effeminate.

Their music, though, seemed incapable of being pigeon-holed and continually presented reviewers with a daunting problem.

Having witnessed the band on four separate occasions over this last highly successful European tour, it became at once apparent that the care of Talking Heads' repertoire – principally Byrne's songs – is not something that casual acquaintance can unveil. At first, they intrigue as much as they bemuse, but the deeper you dig the more you uncover. Like Television, Talking Heads must be divorced from pigeon-holed surroundings because there is nothing currently existing in the rock context that they can be favourably compared to.

Byrne's melodies are so insidious that they often totally by-pass the conventional quarters that rock music usually attempts to stimulate, instead going deeper, often lodging themselves in your subconscious. One song, after I'd witnessed the band only once at the Rock Garden, somehow kept manifesting itself in my dreams – this strange, utterly disarming descending chord motif would haunt me until I'd wake up desperately trying to recall it. It was only later that I even got to learn the song's title, 'The Book I Read'.

THIS IS how the band's music works – in a way that transcends conventional avenues of 'rock criticism' where parallels to established musical forms become redundant and trite. When one has finally achieved some intimacy and contact with the repertoire, the music alone is overwhelming at times. One song – Byrne's 'I'm Not In Love' – twists and turns, its twined guitar rhythms chattering and spitting like snap-dragons with sudden unsettling changes, its chorus brash and pointedly announced – before it charges off, climaxing in a devastating one chord richochet of sound. Each song takes on a personality of its own as one becomes more and more acquainted – the jagged paranoid thrashings of 'What Is It?' full of technical malevolence, the richly textured abrasive changes of 'No Compassion', that utterly disarming motif to 'The Book I Read'.

Similarly the lyrics make themselves apparent in this same insidious fashion, via sudden dazzling couplets or single lines that grab you as Byrne's introvert-gone-psychotic delivery tortuously builds up and up, eyes reeling like wild horses in a flood, his pitching often totally awry but his sheer intensity galvanising because this man is truly grabbing hold of his songs, each and every utterance, like a drowning man grabbing straws.

Byrne's performance is, in fact, full of the tortured passion and gut-commitment that many of us were hoping for and found so disappointingly lacking in Tom Verlaine's recent shows in Britain. Like Verlaine, Byrne is totally the master of his chosen medium, yet there is an edge to Byrne that is so much more human.

Where Verlaine is oh-so calculatingly distant, Byrne's thrashing desperate need to communicate his songs grants his music a whole other dimension of sheer humanity and warmth a million light years removed from the cold arch-romanticism of Television's guiding light.

OFF-STAGE, sitting with his cohorts in Talking Heads, Byrne exudes all the cooped-up mannerisms of a caged bird. He seems to be suffering from some arch nervous defect that would need a constant ingestion of valium to assuage. Twitching almost, he sits hunched up in a chair, ungainly like a parody of look-alike Tony Perkins. When he talks, his voice is weak and reedy and often his attempts to explain certain facets of his songs – particularly his lyrics – lead him into weird tangential awkward ramblings that cause other members of the band, Tina Weymouth in particular, to open displays of ridicule which make him even more edgy. He looks embarrassed and bows his head slightly.

Observing him, I can't help feeling concerned for his obvious discomfort, as if any form of socializing causes the man to undergo real psychic pain. He later admits to the gross discomfort of what is really just a fairly casual conversation, and claims that performing affords him infinite more relaxation.

"I can express parts of my personality on stage that I would never dare do in any other context."

Byrne's past remains obscured by the haziness of his own recollections. He talks about working in art galleries in the past, though he didn't in fact paint, while he claims his previous vocation while in college was to write up detailed questionnaires, until song-writing became an infinitely more agreeable pastime.

In contrast, the other three members of Talking Heads carry themselves in this social set-up with an ease and general open-ness.

Tina Weymouth appears fairly disinterested at first, more concerned with scanning the pages of the latest Oui, but is suddenly forthcoming when a question is either directed her way or else grabs her attention. Chris Frantz seems perfectly in sync with the whole interview routine, lavishing over most of his answers with great and entertainingly 'camp' detail.

And then there is Jerry Harrison, the newest member in the group, a veteran of only six months or less, but who has already obviously orientated himself into the consortium with great alacrity. Harrison is the most locquacious of the band and, with Frantz, the most forthcoming. His history as a musician is already full of worthy fodder for discourse, since he started his career as an integral founding force with Jonathon Richman in the Modern Lovers, about whom his reminiscences are nothing if not extremely witty.

"Well, you probably know that we started the Modern Lovers as a real cause – y'know, we were anti-drugs for a start, due to the fact that at that time in the States all the kids were just oohing themselves on quaaludes. So we'd go onstage and start our sets with this number called 'I'm Straight' which would immediately cause all the audience to start throwing things – oh, rotten fruit, bottles, cans, anything – at us."

The Lovers' history was short due firstly to their corporate snooty attitude to playing clubs of the ilk of Max's Kansas City – "We didn't want to be associated with the N.Y. Dolls or this or that...so we never played anywhere" – plus the traumas that followed the band being signed by John Cale to Warner Bros, who after financing an album (produced by Cale – it was finally released last year by Beserkley) decided to drop the band, leaving them penniless in Los Angeles.

Even when the album was being made, Harrison claims there were problems.

"Well this was around the time when Jonathan was starting to want to write and sing only happy songs (laughs). So there'd be continual arguments between Cale and him over how we should sing certain numbers. Cale would be saying 'Now, Jonathon, I want you to sing this in a mean way. And Jonathon would just look at him, y'know – 'Mean? I won't sing mean! I don't feel mean!"

"And he (Richman) kept going through changes of direction. Like one time he'd be totally into the Velvet Underground and early Stooges, and then he was suddenly enamoured with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and he'd want to alter his whole style. Also he's a total astrology freak. You know that song, 'Astral Plane'? Well he was always having these visions – or so he said – and writing songs about them. Things like....oh God (he starts laughing again) 'I saw you by, the waterway, the waterway, the waterway' – just on and on. We'd have to tell him to forget it."

After the Modern Lovers broke up, Richman briefly went onstage backed only by a bunch of kids beating rolled-up newspapers in time to his songs, before disappearing altogether for a long spell to (according to John Cale) lock himself in his bedroom.

When Harrison is asked whether he feels more comfortable being in Talking Heads than Richman's motley crew he simply sighs, "Infinitely."

MUCH OF the conversation is taken up with the subject of the British New Wave and how the remarkably civilised T. Heads have found themselves having to cope with the more agressive elements at their concerts, particularly as they've been supporting the head-banger's friend, The Ramones.

Seems the atmosphere has never actually soured and that circumstances have been pretty agreeable all the way along.

From the other new wave bands of this country, T. Heads claim not to have incurred any particular animosity.

"Only Rat Scabies has caused a scene," claims Weymouth. "He appeared backstage at the Greyhound in Croydon and tried to get one of us to fight him. When we showed ourselves to be totally disinterested in that course of action, he contented himself with spitting on the floor and walking out. I felt rather sorry for him."

Meanwhile back in New York, the band have yet to break out of the New York club circuit set-up they've been working in for at least the last two years.

A record deal with Sire (whose head, Seymour Stein, is the only executive to have fully committed himself to the New Wave, having also inked The Ramones, Richard Hell, and now, apparently, The Dead Boys, – a Cleveland pastiche of England's punk excesses) has produced the single 'Love Goes To Building On Fire', an addictive though comparatively slight song from the band's repertoire.

A Talking Heads album however is scheduled for September release produced by Tony Bongiovi and with five backing tracks already in the can. Ten tracks are scheduled – all Byrne originals including 'Pyschokiller', 'The Book I Read', 'No Compassion', 'Happy Day', and 'I'm Not In Love', the only unfortunate matter being the probable exclusion of the band's brilliantly terse rendering of Al Green's 'Take Me To The River'.

The band are still a guaranteed sell-out at C.B.G.B.'s on any given night, a not inconsiderable feat as many other similarly prestigious local bands are unable apparently to do the same – and on their own minor league waterfront they've gauged a strong cult audience.

But then there is something extremely addictive about this band's music – potent enough to make Byrne an object of paranoid fear in the eyes of Tom Verlaine (who according to Weymouth is very nervous of Byrne's status on the New York scene – as perverted a compliment as anything that can be divined from Verlaine's psyche one supposes). Meanwhile Byrne is also considered the most singularly brilliant new songwriter currently in the States by John Cale, and even Lou Reed has lent a sizeable quota of suspiciously paternal advice.

Weymouth: "Yeah, I'd say he was actually genuinely trying to help us. I wouldn't say he was trying to rip us off, for example."

Byrne: "That's not true."

Weymouth: "How can you say that, David? I mean..."

Byrne: "Because he told me he ripped some of my ideas off. Not that I'm angry or anything."

How did the...uh gentleman go about this paternal business then?

"God...he'd invite us round to his apartment and insult us for a solid hour, particularly me. He'd always insult the clothes I was wearing, or my shoes. Then after that, he'd start to be more reasonable and actually have an agreeable conversation with us."

Byrne goes silent for a minute and then, for the first time, he seems calm and relaxed.

"Do you want to know...I'll tell you how much we've come on in the last two years, the real symbol of progress in Talking Heads, Now I can go round to Lou Reed's apartment and I can be rude to him!"

[sagebodisattva]

The Hyperreality of Mind Over Matter - Part One

So when we talk about reality being a creation of the mind, and how it is beneficial for us to take an active interest in increasing lucidity, what we are ultimately trying to establish is putting the mind over matter. This is a re-ordering process of awareness, consisting of establishing a new existential methodology which prioritizes the attention towards clear seeing, and deemphasizes the attention away from distractions.

The implications of mind over matter have been discussed at great lengths over the course of time, and has even been seen demonstrated to a certain degrees. A prime example of such is certain individuals having the capacity to shut off pain. Whether it be walking on hot coals, lying on a bed of nails, putting pins, needles and knives through various parts of the body, humans have the capacity to manage pain without taking drugs. Now how could that be possible? Well, most of us would say it's impossible, right? It must be a parlor trick. There can just be no way to shut off pain. You know, a lot of times, introspective science knows things well in advance of physical science, and quite often the physical science ends up confirming what the introspective science already knew, often thousands of years before. And now physical science has possibly stumbled across a potential way to do the unimaginable: to shut off pain.

“But wait, isn't that impossible?”

Not so fast; scientists have been tinkering around with rodents and found a way to block a pain pathway in rats with chronic neuropathic pain due to nerve damage. They did this by switching on a receptor, known as A3, in the rodent's brain and spinal cord to counteract intense feelings of discomfort. And it won't be long till they figure out a way to apply this to humans.

So you see? There always a literal way to address the particulars of physicality, but this is only necessary when the matter is above the mind. When matter is above the mind, doctors have to cut into your body to add and remove parts, as opposed to YOU healing them yourself with the mind.

“Wait, healing them ourselves with the mind? That's just utterly inconceivable! How could such a preposterous proposal even be plausible, right?”

Well, it has to do with the very potent and unlimited powers of what we call the "subconscious mind."

The subconscious mind is the agency that is more appropriately called “THE”, mind, or awareness; whereas, what's referred to as the "conscious mind", is more apt to be identified as “YOUR”, mind, or the consciousness. Don't confuse consciousness with awareness. Awareness is the primary agency. Consciousness is part of the illusory persona. Consciousness deals with the seen, while awareness is concerned with the seeing. The power of the subconscious mind has been explored through hypnosis and we've really only scratched the surface of the tip of this iceberg. Mankind's exploration into the subconscious is still in it's infancy.

“Really Sage? Hasn't man been exploring the subconscious for decades and learned everything there is to know about it?”

Again, INFANCY.

Yes, for thousands and thousands of years it has been examined, and we're still in the dawn of discovering it's possibilities. So, no, we have not even learned 10% of what we could potentially uncover.

I mentioned hypnosis, because this is another area where the power of the subconscious has been demonstrated. The power of hypnotic suggestion has given us a glimpse into the subconscious mind's great untapped potential. Photographic recall, varying feats of physicality, pain reduction, extrasensory perception, and access into the collective subconscious, aka the universal mind, are just a few examples of the possibilities. Possibilities that have also been stumbled across in deep meditation, sensory deprivation, and psychedelic experiences. So why do these altered states all seem to connect us to mysterious aspects of ourselves that we cannot normally access? Or a better question would be, why are we so disconnected from these possibilities in our day to day lives?

Well, the primary reason would seem to be, that's it's all the result of a conditioning. A conditioning that has been instilled in us, which started very early in our lives, when were still just mere infants. A description of reality that was shaped, molded and then solidified into our current grounded positional perception of reality. What we have done thus far is understandable. We found ourselves projected into our own creation with a fresh case of amnesia, grasping at straws in the wild. One cannot redirect the attention to where it needs to be when all one's attention is wrapped up with negotiating with is survival. And the raw indifferent discriminating ways of nature are brutal, and without mercy, and certainly could be said to have left consciousness with a case of post traumatic stress.

So, in response, attachments have been established, which enabled us to get our feet planted firmly on the ground, and were fortified with the advent of routines, rituals, traditions, and cultures, which gave rise to further reinforcements of theologies, ideologies, mythologies and philosophies, which, in turn, led us to where we are today; cemented neatly in a modern world, where certainty seems to have been found, and very little seems to be left to doubt. Perhaps we have gotten a leg up on survival, but at what cost? So we survive just for the sake of survival? Is that the goal? To just survive by any means necessary, even in declined states of quality? To be continually sustained in a constricted, dependent, and disempowered mode of being, tightly confined to a narrow set of parameters? Is this where we want to be?

And if not, then how would we break out of it? Well, with all this in mind, you can now understand the reasoning behind why you are trying to stop yourself from doing this. You are far too comfortable. You are far too complacent. And you have carved out nice little niches where you can indulge your desires, which leaves little interest left to uncover what you have buried. Yes, “uncover.” What you think you seek, is not going to be found somewhere externally, in an objectified state. This isn't a search that entails following a path to a destination. It isn't a undertaking that will become open and easy after the ego undergoes some kind of transformative process. What you think you need to search and find is already right there before you, hiding in plain sight, just below the surface. So, take off your hiking boots and instead just grab a shovel; and start clearing away all of the layers of attachments, projections, distractions, and overcomplications, that you have deluged onto the pure mind, and start to create some space, flexibility and freedom, from the over-encumbered persona

[orbemnews]

In Crises, Vaccines Can Be Stretched, However Not Simply In determined instances, there are a lot of methods to stretch vaccines and velocity up inoculation campaigns, in accordance with consultants who’ve accomplished it. Splitting doses, delaying second photographs, injecting into the pores and skin as a substitute of the muscle and using roving vaccination groups have all saved lives — when the circumstances have been proper. Throughout cholera outbreaks in battle zones, Medical doctors With out Borders has even used “takeaway” vaccination, during which the recipient is given the primary dose on the spot and handed the second to self-administer later. Sadly, consultants mentioned, it might be troublesome to strive most of these methods in the USA proper now, regardless that vaccines in opposition to the coronavirus are rolling out way more slowly than had been hoped. These novel methods have labored with vaccines in opposition to yellow fever, polio, measles, cholera and Ebola; most of these vaccines have been invented many years in the past or are simpler to manage as a result of they’re oral or could be saved in a typical fridge. The brand new mRNA-based coronavirus vaccines authorised to date are too fragile, consultants mentioned, and too little is thought about how a lot immunity they confer. The incoming Biden administration ought to give attention to dashing up the manufacturing of extra sturdy vaccines “somewhat than taking part in card methods” with present ones, mentioned Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the Nationwide Faculty of Tropical Drugs on the Baylor Faculty of Drugs in Houston and the inventor of a coronavirus vaccine. There are two methods that may work with the present vaccines, however every is controversial. The primary is being tried in Britain. In December, confronted with shortages and an explosive outbreak, the nation’s chief medical officers mentioned they might roll out all the vaccine that they had, giving modest safety to as many Britons as attainable. Second doses, they mentioned, could be delayed by as much as 12 weeks and would possibly be of a unique vaccine. There may be some proof for the thought: Early knowledge from the primary 600,000 injections in Israel counsel that even one dose of the Pfizer vaccine reduce the danger of an infection by about 50 p.c. Nonetheless, some British virologists have been outraged, saying single doses may result in vaccine-resistant strains. The Meals and Drug Administration and lots of American vaccinologists additionally oppose the thought. Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Pace, raised a unique objection to the British plan. Single doses, he warned, would possibly inadequately “prime” the immune system; then, if these vaccine recipients have been later contaminated, some would possibly do worse than if that they had not been vaccinated in any respect. He recalled a Sixties incident during which a weak new vaccine in opposition to respiratory syncytial virus, a reason behind childhood pneumonia, backfired. Some youngsters who acquired it and later turned contaminated fell sicker than unvaccinated youngsters, and two toddlers died. “It could be just one in 1,000 who get insufficient priming, nevertheless it’s a priority,” Dr. Slaoui mentioned. As a substitute — the second technique for stretching the vaccines — he proposed utilizing half-doses of the Moderna vaccine. There may be robust proof for doing that, he mentioned in a phone interview. Throughout Moderna’s early trials, the 50-microgram vaccine dose produced an immune response just about equivalent to the 100-microgram one. Moderna selected the upper dose as its commonplace partly to be further certain it might work; firm scientists on the time had no concept that their product would show 95 p.c efficient. The upper dose would even have an extended shelf life. However the vaccine works higher than anticipated, and shelf life just isn’t a problem, so Dr. Slaoui steered utilizing the decrease dose. “The sweetness is, you inject half and get the equivalent immune response,” he mentioned. “We hope that, in a pandemic scenario, the F.D.A. could merely settle for it somewhat than asking for a brand new trial.” Covid-19 Vaccines › Solutions to Your Vaccine Questions If I stay within the U.S., when can I get the vaccine? Whereas the precise order of vaccine recipients could fluctuate by state, most will seemingly put medical staff and residents of long-term care amenities first. If you wish to perceive how this choice is getting made, this text will assist. When can I return to regular life after being vaccinated? Life will return to regular solely when society as an entire beneficial properties sufficient safety in opposition to the coronavirus. As soon as nations authorize a vaccine, they’ll solely be capable of vaccinate a couple of p.c of their residents at most within the first couple months. The unvaccinated majority will nonetheless stay susceptible to getting contaminated. A rising variety of coronavirus vaccines are displaying sturdy safety in opposition to turning into sick. However it’s additionally attainable for folks to unfold the virus with out even figuring out they’re contaminated as a result of they expertise solely gentle signs or none in any respect. Scientists don’t but know if the vaccines additionally block the transmission of the coronavirus. So in the interim, even vaccinated folks might want to put on masks, keep away from indoor crowds, and so forth. As soon as sufficient folks get vaccinated, it’s going to grow to be very troublesome for the coronavirus to seek out susceptible folks to contaminate. Relying on how shortly we as a society obtain that purpose, life would possibly begin approaching one thing like regular by the autumn 2021. If I’ve been vaccinated, do I nonetheless have to put on a masks? Sure, however not perpetually. The 2 vaccines that can probably get licensed this month clearly shield folks from getting sick with Covid-19. However the scientific trials that delivered these outcomes weren’t designed to find out whether or not vaccinated folks may nonetheless unfold the coronavirus with out growing signs. That continues to be a risk. We all know that people who find themselves naturally contaminated by the coronavirus can unfold it whereas they’re not experiencing any cough or different signs. Researchers will likely be intensely learning this query because the vaccines roll out. Within the meantime, even vaccinated folks might want to consider themselves as attainable spreaders. Will it damage? What are the uncomfortable side effects? The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered as a shot within the arm, like different typical vaccines. The injection gained’t be any totally different from ones you’ve gotten earlier than. Tens of 1000’s of individuals have already acquired the vaccines, and none of them have reported any critical well being issues. However a few of them have felt short-lived discomfort, together with aches and flu-like signs that usually final a day. It’s attainable that folks could have to plan to take a break day work or college after the second shot. Whereas these experiences aren’t nice, they’re a great signal: they’re the results of your personal immune system encountering the vaccine and mounting a potent response that can present long-lasting immunity. Will mRNA vaccines change my genes? No. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer use a genetic molecule to prime the immune system. That molecule, generally known as mRNA, is finally destroyed by the physique. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that may fuse to a cell, permitting the molecule to slide in. The cell makes use of the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which might stimulate the immune system. At any second, every of our cells could comprise a whole bunch of 1000’s of mRNA molecules, which they produce so as to make proteins of their very own. As soon as these proteins are made, our cells then shred the mRNA with particular enzymes. The mRNA molecules our cells make can solely survive a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to resist the cell’s enzymes a bit longer, in order that the cells could make further virus proteins and immediate a stronger immune response. However the mRNA can solely final for a couple of days at most earlier than they’re destroyed. Many consultants disagreed with the thought, together with Dr. Walter A. Orenstein, affiliate director of the Emory Vaccine Heart in Atlanta. “We have to know extra earlier than we are able to really feel comfy doing that,” he mentioned. “Let’s persist with the science,” added Dr. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Schooling Heart at Kids’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “There are not any efficacy knowledge on a partial dose.” Though, like Dr. Slaoui, Dr. Offit opposed delaying second doses, he expressed doubt that doing so, because the British have, would increase the danger of worse outcomes within the partially vaccinated. Trials during which monkeys or different animals have been vaccinated after which “challenged” with a deliberate an infection didn’t trigger enhanced illness, he famous. Additionally, the 4 coronaviruses that trigger widespread colds don’t trigger worse illness when folks get them once more. And individuals who have Covid-19 don’t worsen once they obtain antibody therapies; usually, they get higher. When much less is extra As is usually the case, consultants disagree about how and what a brand new vaccine will do. Some level to arduous proof that each fractional doses and delayed doses have labored when medical doctors have tried them out of desperation. For instance, yellow fever outbreaks in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo have been stymied by campaigns utilizing as little as 20 p.c of a dose. One shot of yellow fever vaccine, invented within the Thirties, offers lifelong safety. However a one-fifth dose can shield for a yr or extra, mentioned Miriam Alia, a vaccination knowledgeable for Medical doctors With out Borders. In 2018, nearly 25 million Brazilians, together with these in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, confronted a fast-moving outbreak at a time when there have been fewer than six million photographs within the world provide. The Brazilian authorities switched to one-fifth doses and despatched cellular groups into the slums urging everybody they met to take them, and filling out minimal paperwork. It labored: By 2019, the risk had pale. The tactic has additionally been used in opposition to polio. Since 2016, there was a world scarcity of the injectable polio vaccine, which many nations use at the side of the stay oral one. The World Well being Group has overseen trials of various methods to stretch present provides. India first tried half-doses, mentioned Deepak Kapur, chairman of Rotary Worldwide’s polio eradication efforts in that nation. Later research confirmed that it was attainable to drop to as little as one-fifth of a dose so long as it was injected slightly below the pores and skin somewhat than into the muscle, mentioned Dr. Tunji Funsho, chief of polio eradication for Rotary Worldwide’s Nigeria chapter. “That method, one vial for 10 can attain 50 folks,” Dr. Funsho mentioned. Pores and skin injections work higher than muscle ones as a result of the pores and skin comprises way more cells that acknowledge invaders and since sub-skin layers drain into lymph nodes, that are a part of the immune system, mentioned Mark R. Prausnitz, a bioengineer at Georgia Tech who makes a speciality of intradermal injection methods. “The pores and skin is our interface with the skin world,” Dr. Prausnitz mentioned. “It’s the place the physique expects to seek out pathogens.” Intradermal injection is used for vaccines in opposition to rabies and tuberculosis. Ten years in the past, Sanofi launched an intradermal flu vaccine, “however the public didn’t settle for it,” Dr. Prausnitz mentioned. Intradermal injection has disadvantages, nevertheless. It takes extra coaching to do appropriately. Injectors with needle-angling units, super-short needles or arrays of a number of needles exist, Dr. Prausnitz mentioned, however are unusual. Finally, he favors micro-needle patches infused with dissolving vaccine. “It will actually be useful if we may simply mail these to folks’s properties and allow them to do it themselves,” he mentioned. A much bigger drawback, Dr. Slaoui, is that intradermal injection produces robust immune reactions. These could be painful, and may bleed a bit after which scab over and go away a scar, as smallpox injections usually did earlier than the USA deserted them in 1972. The lipid nanoparticles within the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could be notably liable to that impact, he mentioned. “It’s not harmful,” he added. “However it’s not interesting and never sensible.” Boots on the bottom What the USA can and should do now, well being consultants mentioned, is practice extra vaccinators, coordinate everybody delivering photographs and get higher at logistics. Due to battles in opposition to polio, measles and Ebola, among the world’s poorest nations routinely do higher vaccination drives than the USA is now managing to do, mentioned Emily Bancroft, president of Village Attain, a logistics and communications contractor working in Mozambique, Malawi and the Democratic Republic of Congo and likewise helping Seattle’s coronavirus vaccine drive. “You want a military of vaccinators, individuals who know how you can run campaigns, detailed micro-plans and good knowledge monitoring,” she mentioned. “Hospitals right here don’t even know what they’ve on their cabinets. For routine immunization, getting info as soon as a month is OK. In an epidemic, it’s not OK.” In 2017, the United Nations Kids’s Fund recruited 190,000 vaccinators to offer polio vaccines to 116 million youngsters in a single week. In the identical yr, Nigeria injected measles vaccine into nearly 5 million youngsters in every week. In rural Africa, group well being staff with little formal training delivered injectable contraceptives like Depo-Provera. The fundamentals could be taught in a single to a few days, Ms. Bancroft mentioned. Coaching could be accomplished on “injection pads” that resemble human arms. And knowledge assortment should be arrange so that each workforce can report on a cellphone and all of it flows to a nationwide dashboard, as occurs now within the poorest nations. Supply hyperlink #Crises #Easily #Stretched #Vaccines

[batterymonster2021]

The price of shame | Monica Lewinsky

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/the-price-of-shame-monica-lewinsky-7/

The price of shame | Monica Lewinsky

You’re watching at a girl who was publicly silent for a decade. Obviously, that is transformed, but most effective not too long ago. It used to be several months ago that I gave my very first principal public talk on the Forbes 30 beneath 30 summit: 1,500 exceptional humans, all underneath the age of 30. That supposed that in 1998, the oldest among the many staff have been only 14, and the youngest, simply 4. I joked with them that some could simplest have heard of me from rap songs. Yes, i am in rap songs. Almost 40 rap songs. (Laughter) however the night time of my speech, a stunning thing happened.On the age of 41, I was once hit on through a 27-12 months-ancient guy. I do know, correct? He was once charming and i was flattered, and i declined. You already know what his unsuccessful pickup line used to be? He would make me think 22 once more. (Laughter) (Applause) i noticed later that night, i’m ordinarily the only person over 40 who does now not wish to be 22 again. (Laughter) (Applause) on the age of twenty-two, I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of 24, I realized the devastating consequences. Am i able to see a exhibit of fingers of anyone here who failed to make a mistake or do whatever they regretted at 22? Yep.That is what I suggestion. So like me, at 22, a couple of of you could have additionally taken flawed turns and fallen in love with the unsuitable person, possibly even your boss. Unlike me, though, your boss by and large wasn’t the president of the united states of america. Of path, existence is filled with surprises. Not a day goes by using that i’m not reminded of my mistake, and that i remorse that mistake deeply. In 1998, after having been swept up into an unbelievable romance, I was once then swept up into the attention of a political, authorized and media maelstrom like we had not ever obvious before. Take into account, only some years earlier, information used to be consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, paying attention to the radio, or watching television. That was once it. However that wasn’t my destiny. As an alternative, this scandal was once brought to you via the digital revolution.That meant we could entry all the information we wanted, once we wanted it, each time, wherever, and when the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. It used to be the first time the normal information used to be usurped through the web for a foremost news story, a click on that reverberated all over the world. What that meant for me personally was that overnight I went from being a utterly private determine to a publicly humiliated one international.I used to be patient zero of dropping a private repute on a world scale nearly immediately. This rush to judgment, enabled by using science, resulted in mobs of virtual stone-throwers. Granted, it used to be earlier than social media, but men and women would still remark online, e-mail stories, and, of path, electronic mail merciless jokes. News sources plastered pictures of me far and wide to sell newspapers, banner advertisements on-line, and to hold persons tuned to the tv. Do you recall a exact photograph of me, say, sporting a beret? Now, I admit I made errors, certainly sporting that beret. However the awareness and judgment that I acquired, not the story, but that I individually received, used to be unparalleled.I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, that lady. I was seen by way of many however surely known via few. And that i get it: it was once effortless to put out of your mind that that woman used to be dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken. When this occurred to me 17 years ago, there was once no identify for it. Now we call it cyberbullying and on-line harassment. Today, I need to share a few of my experience with you, speak about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how i’m hoping my prior expertise can lead to a transformation that outcome in much less suffering for others. In 1998, I misplaced my status and my dignity. I lost just about everything, and i virtually lost my life. Let me paint a photo for you. It’s September of 1998. I’m sitting in a windowless place of business room inside the office of the independent suggestions underneath buzzing fluorescent lights. I am listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped mobile calls that a supposed buddy had made the year earlier than. I am here due to the fact i’ve been legally required to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped dialog.For the earlier eight months, the mysterious content material of those tapes has hung like the Sword of Damocles over my head. I mean, who can don’t forget what they mentioned a year in the past? Scared and mortified, I pay attention, hear as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day; hear as I confess my love for the president, and, of direction, my heartbreak; take heed to my routinely catty, normally churlish, sometimes silly self being merciless, unforgiving, uncouth; hear, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self i do not even appreciate.A few days later, the Starr report is launched to Congress, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen phrases, kind a part of it. That persons can learn the transcripts is horrific enough, however a few weeks later, the audio tapes are aired on tv, and big parts made on hand on-line. The public humiliation was once excruciating. Lifestyles was just about unbearable. This was once no longer something that occurred with regularity back then in 1998, and via this, I imply the stealing of individuals’s personal words, actions, conversations or graphics, and then making them public — public without consent, public without context, and public with out compassion.Fast ahead 12 years to 2010, and now social media has been born. The panorama has alas become way more populated with situations like mine, whether or not someone virtually make a mistake, and now it can be for both public and exclusive individuals. The penalties for some have turn out to be dire, very dire. I was once on the cell with my mom in September of 2010, and we had been speakme concerning the information of a young school freshman from Rutgers university named Tyler Clementi. Sweet, touchy, ingenious Tyler was secretly webcammed by using his roommate at the same time being intimate with an additional man. When the online world realized of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. Just a few days later, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his loss of life. He was once 18. My mother was beside herself about what occurred to Tyler and his household, and she or he was once gutted with affliction in a way that I just couldn’t really recognize, and then eventually i spotted she used to be reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat via my mattress each night time, reliving a time when she made me bathe with the lavatory door open, and reliving a time when both of my father and mother feared that i would be humiliated to demise, actually.Today, too many mother and father have not had the hazard to step in and rescue their cherished ones. Too many have learned of their baby’s suffering and humiliation after it was too late. Tyler’s tragic, senseless death was once a turning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences, and i then began to appear on the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see some thing distinctive. In 1998, we had no approach of figuring out where this brave new technological know-how referred to as the web would take us. On account that then, it has related individuals in unattainable approaches, becoming a member of misplaced siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions, however the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I skilled had mushroomed. Daily on-line, persons, in particular younger folks who are usually not developmentally organized to manage this, are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day to come, and some, tragically, don’t, and there may be nothing digital about that.ChildLine, a U.Okay. Nonprofit that is enthusiastic about serving to young humans on more than a few problems, launched a striking statistic late final year: From 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percentage increase in calls and emails regarding cyberbullying. A meta-analysis executed out of the Netherlands showed that for the primary time, cyberbullying used to be main to suicidal ideations more drastically than offline bullying. And what stunned me, despite the fact that it do not have, was once different research final yr that determined humiliation used to be a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger.Cruelty to others is nothing new, however on-line, technologically improved shaming is amplified, uncontained, and completely available. The echo of embarrassment used to prolong best as far as your loved ones, village, institution or community, but now it is the web neighborhood too. Hundreds of thousands of people, traditionally anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that’s a lot of discomfort, and there are not any perimeters round what number of individuals can publicly notice you and put you in a public stockade. There’s a very personal price to public humiliation, and the progress of the internet has jacked up that price. For close to two a long time now, we now have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline.Gossip web pages, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, information retailers and sometimes hackers all site visitors in shame. It is led to desensitization and a permissive environment on-line which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privateness, and cyberbullying. This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls a culture of humiliation. Do not forget just a few distinguished examples simply from the past six months on my own. Snapchat, the service which is used in general by way of more youthful generations and claims that its messages only have the lifespan of some seconds. That you may imagine the range of content that that will get. A third-social gathering app which Snapchatters use to maintain the lifespan of the messages was once hacked, and a hundred,000 private conversations, portraits, and movies were leaked online to now have a lifespan of without end. Jennifer Lawrence and a number of different actors had their iCloud debts hacked, and confidential, intimate, nude graphics were plastered across the internet without their permission. One gossip internet site had over 5 million hits for this one story. And what concerning the Sony photographs cyberhacking? The documents which bought probably the most concentration were confidential emails that had highest public embarrassment value.However in this culture of humiliation, there is an extra form of price tag connected to public shaming. The price does now not measure the rate to the victim, which Tyler and too many others, in particular ladies, minorities, and contributors of the LGBTQ community have paid, however the price measures the profit of individuals who prey on them. This invasion of others is a uncooked fabric, effectually and ruthlessly mined, packaged and bought at a revenue. A marketplace has emerged the place public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry.How is the cash made? Clicks. The extra disgrace, the more clicks. The extra clicks, the extra advertising bucks. We’re in a harmful cycle. The extra we click on this kind of gossip, the extra numb we get to the human lives at the back of it, and the extra numb we get, the more we click on. The entire even as, anyone is being profitable off of the back of anyone else’s suffering. With every click on, we make a choice. The extra we saturate our culture with public shaming, the more authorised it is, the more we will see habits like cyberbullying, trolling, some varieties of hacking, and online harassment. Why? Because all of them have humiliation at their cores. This conduct is a symptom of the culture now we have created. Simply suppose about it. Changing behavior starts offevolved with evolving beliefs. Now we have visible that to be proper with racism, homophobia, and plenty of other biases, today and in the past. As we have now transformed beliefs about equal-intercourse marriage, more men and women were furnished equal freedoms. When we started valuing sustainability, more people started to recycle. So so far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we want is a cultural revolution.Public shaming as a blood game has to stop, and it can be time for an intervention on the net and in our tradition. The shift starts offevolved with anything easy, but it surely’s now not easy. We must return to an extended-held price of compassion — compassion and empathy. Online, we have received a compassion deficit, an empathy drawback. Researcher Bren Brown mentioned, and i quote, "disgrace cannot survive empathy." disgrace cannot live on empathy. I’ve obvious some very dark days in my lifestyles, and it was once the compassion and empathy from my family, buddies, experts, and usually even strangers that saved me. Even empathy from one individual could make a difference. The idea of minority influence, proposed through social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there may be consistency over time, trade can happen. In the online world, we can foster minority impact by becoming upstanders. To turn out to be an upstander way as an alternative of bystander apathy, we will submit a confident remark for any individual or document a bullying quandary. Trust me, compassionate comments support abate the negativity. We are able to also counteract the culture through supporting firms that deal with these types of disorders, like the Tyler Clementi foundation in the U.S., in the U.Ok., there’s Anti-Bullying professional, and in Australia, there is undertaking Rockit.We talk so much about our right to freedom of expression, but we need to speak extra about our accountability to freedom of expression. We all wish to be heard, however let’s acknowledge the change between talking up with intention and speakme up for concentration. The web is the superhighway for the identity, but online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps create a safer and better world. We have to keep in touch on-line with compassion, consume information with compassion, and click on with compassion. Simply think running a mile in any individual else’s headline. I’d like to end on a individual note. In the past nine months, the question i have been asked essentially the most is why. Why now? Why was I sticking my head above the parapet? Which you can learn between the strains in those questions, and the reply has nothing to do with politics. The highest word answer was and is considering that it’s time: time to discontinue tip-toeing round my prior; time to stop residing a life of opprobrium; and time to take back my narrative.It is also now not just about saving myself. Anyone who’s affected by shame and public humiliation wants to understand one factor: that you could live to tell the tale it. I realize it’s rough. It might not be painless, quick or easy, however you could insist on yet another ending to your story. Have compassion for your self. All of us deserve compassion, and to are living both online and off in a more compassionate world. Thank you for listening. (Applause) .

[upshotre]

COZA Pastor Bidoun Fatoyinbo raped me- Timi Dakolo's wife, Busola says in shocking new interview

Wife of singer, Timi Dakolo, Busola, has accused controversial clergyman and founder of the CommonWealth of Zion Assembly COZA, Biodun Fatoyinbo, of sexually assaulting her when she was much younger. Speaking during an explosive Y TV interview with Chude Jideonwo, the founder of Joy Inc, Busola, a photographer and a mother of three, recounted how the clergyman who has been embroiled in a number of sexual assault related cases, Ese Walter being the most prominent, allegedly raped her in her mother's house while she was still in secondary school. In her interview, Busola recounted how the clergyman also allegedly tried having sex with her inside his matrimonial home when she came in to help his wife, Modele, when she had their first child. Recall that Timi Dakolo recently launched an attack on the clergyman, anonymously. He called out the pastor, accusing him of taking advantage of women in his ministry and leaving them broken emotionally. Read hereand here. Read the interview as reported by YNaija below and watch the full interview below ON MEETING BIODUN FATOYINBO FOR THE FIRST TIME Busola Dakolo was born and lived most of her early life in Ilorin. The first time she left Ilorin was for secondary school at Suleja and that time away allowed her really find her Christianity. She joined and rose to become the vice-president of the Gifted School Academy Suleja’s fellowship and embraced a conservative approach to Christianity, growing to become distrustful of churches and fellowships that tried to copy worldly trends as a way to reach people outside the church. She returned home for the holidays to find that her sisters had started attending a non-denominational ‘youth club’ that embraced all kinds of people and focused on worship and fellowship over doctrine and legalism. It took a while but her sisters convinced her to go by telling her she needed to meet different kinds of people, especially former prostitutes and cultists that have given their lives to Christ. Busola reluctantly joined her sisters for the youth club, but she wasn’t comfortable there, partly because of the way they worshipped and because I was the youngest person there. After the service, there was a first timers call, and Busola stood up and introduced herself, explaining her initial skepticism and how their worship had changed her mind. After the service, the pastor of the club, a much younger Biodun Fatoyinbo came looking for her after the service. Pastor Biodun wasn’t yet married ( though he was engaged to his current wife) and the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly (COZA) wasn’t yet a church, it was called Divine Delight Club. He expressed his surprise at how bold she was for someone so young and encouraged her to keep speaking up for herself. He also managed to convince her to sing at their next meeting before she left back for school. To sell this idea, he offered to personally rehearse with her, mentioning that he played the keyboard. This was before mobile phones and internet, so Busola’s sister had to take her to Fatoyinbo, who was living with his parents at the time. Though Busola remembers the song they rehearsed, their rehearsal was uneventful, and at the next meeting she performed, her performance moving enough that a former cultist who was attending the club public renounced his past and embraced Christianity. After, the members of the club affirmed her and Fatoyinbo convinced her through gifts of books and cassette tapes to keep attending their club when she was back home from school. Returning to school and the more conservative worship environment she was used to was harder than she had anticipated. For the rest of her secondary school year, she struggled with guilt, shuffling between her role in the conservative Fellowship of Christian Students (FCS) and the more liberal world of Fatoyinbo’s COZA. She felt she was living a dual life. Eventually she graduated and returned home to find that Divine Delight Club had grown into a church headed by Fatoyinbo, and her sisters had convinced her family to join the church. It felt like the only option she had to join as well. A YEARNING FOR UNDERSTANDING LEADS TO RAPE Busola had embraced conservatism because she’d grown up in a polygamous family and she wanted some control over her own life in service of something bigger than herself. Her father was largely absent in her life and her mother had tried to shield them from the financial difficulty that came with parenting her and her sisters alone but she saw and it affected her deeply. Conservative Christianity gave her purpose and the structure she desperately craved. She joined the choir at COZA as a way to integrate into the church and rid herself of the discomfort she felt towards the church. Being in the choir made her visible and eventually Fatoyinbo would take an interest in her, inviting himself to her home under the guise of getting to know her better. The first time he visited, he asked if she’d join him on an errand run. Her mother was concerned but didn’t really push when Busola insisted that she wanted to go. They drove in his white Mercedes Benz and finally spoke for the first time. Though she was normally guarded around men, Fatoyinbo was charming, using his knowledge of her family and the absence of her father to gain her trust. Before long, he was visiting the house regularly, engaging her in ways her unavoidably distant sisters weren’t. Fatoyinbo showed up at her house unannounced. It was a Monday morning early enough that Busola Dakolo was still in her nightgown. Her mother had traveled with her sisters and were absent at service the previous sunday. He didn’t say a word, forcing her onto a chair, speaking only to command her to do as he said. It took Busola a while to come to terms with what was about to happen, and it was why she didn’t struggle or make a fuss when he pulled down her underwear and raped her. She remembers he didn’t say anything after, left to his car, returned with a bottle of Krest and forced her to drink it, probably as some crude contraceptive. She remembers him saying. “You should be happy that a man of God did this to you.” At this time, his wife had just given birth to their first child, Oluwashindara. AFFLICTION STRIKES A SECOND TIME Busola spoke up because her husband, the singer Timi Dakolo put up a social media post on Instagram accusing Nigerian clergy of condoning rape and sexual assault. People had approached him anonymously about Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo targeting underage girls for sexual relationships and he felt obligated to publicly speak up on their behalf. His posts had created intense backlash and support and sparked rumours about who the subject of his post was and who the victims were. This wasn’t the first time Timi Dakolo had spoken up about sexual assault and he was aware of what had happened to her from the beginning of their relationship. What motivated her to speak up about her rape was a social media post from an anonymous account that had insinuated that she had been promiscuous as a teenager and had affairs with pastors when she lived in Ilorin and questioned the paternity of her children. The reality was, rather than the fabricated promiscuous teenager, Busola Dakolo was an isolated girl, terrified of Fatoyinbo whose salvation story heavily featured his past as a cult member. She was too terrified to tell her sisters or mother about his violence, stewing in silence for a week. Her sisters were active in the church, and to avoid suspicion she followed them to church the next Sunday. She remembers he spoke about grace during the service and after, Modele Fatoyinbo asks that she come to help her with her new baby, something she had never done before. It was normal for church members to come serve at the pastor’s house so her sisters allayed her protests. Feeling she had no options, she went to her pastor’s house, Fatoyinbo tried to isolate her later that night from his wife and their daughter by insisting she slept in the family’s guest room. She managed to thwart his plans, appealing to the pastor’s wife to let her sleep in their master bedroom. “No one ignores me.” He would tell her this the next morning, smacking her butt. It was an ominous enough statement that Busola became apprehensive and tried to leave for her house once it was past twilight. It was the first of many threats she would get from the flamboyant pastor. Fatoyinbo would insist on dropping her off at home, even though she protested several times. Instead of dropping her off at the junction as he had promised, he detoured, driving her away from safety and towards a secluded spot. He threatened her the entire drive, making proclamations about how he owned her and how he was angry that he had thwarted her the night before. He opened the car, pulled her out of the passenger seat and raped her a second time in the space of a week. First behind the car, then moving her to the bonnet for ease of access. She didn’t fight, she had lost all her will to. She’d protected her virginity for so long that having it forcefully taken this way broke her. He guided back into the car when he was done, and told her he loved her, speaking of how he’d told his pastors that men of God raped women, that there was nothing special about what he did. He dropped her off outside her home as though everything was normal. She bathed immediately after and didn’t leave her room for three days, but while her siblings were worried about her, no one made any connections between her sudden mood and her married pastor. Busola’s family was a ‘church family’, a family so involved in church activities that their home was routinely used as a hostel for visiting ministers and guests of the church. Fatoyinbo had exploited that, and did it again when he showed up the next Sunday, to ask why she hadn’t gone to church that Sunday. She was afraid of drawing attention to herself, so she went to church the next Sunday, and kept going, even though she left the choir and began to voice her dissent towards Fatoyinbo. THE BEGINNING OF RELIEF A dream was the catalyst for Busola opening up for the first time about Fatoyinbo raping her. Her elder sister had relocated to Lagos, and she pleaded to visit, drained from avoiding the pastor. In Lagos, her sister who she believes has the Sight, told her about a dream she had had, where she’d seen Busola crying, blood on a chair and Fatoyinbo smiling. She asked her pointedly, breaking months of silence and starting a flood of admissions about the rape and everything that had happened. Her sister convinced her to return to Ilorin and together they told her other sisters and her brother, who was studying at the University of Ilorin. Her brother flew into a rage, grabbing a pocket knife and taking her to Fatoyinbo’s house. He was able to intercept them before they reached his house, and together with Wole Soetan, who she suggests is now the pastor of the COZA Portharcourt branch, convince them to return home and that Fatoyinbo would follow. The pastor and two of his church members would eventually come to pacify her family, blaming the devil and Soetan even promising to leave the church to show how little tolerance he had for promiscuity. After Soetan would confide in Busola that he couldn’t leave the church because he felt Fatoyinbo was ‘weak’ and needed spiritual guidance and support. He convinced her siblings to keep the rape and assault from her mother. Numb to all emotion, Busola pretended to concede and after two weeks of constant visitation from the pastors and the unspoken implication that Fatoyinbo was an alleged reformed cultist with a lot to lose if news of her rape went public, she returned to the church to protect her family and project normalcy. It was clear to her at this point that she would never feel comfortable within organized religion. Fatoyinbo continued to target Busola in the intervening months, organizing prayer sessions and specialized deliverance sessions with guest pastors to help ‘repair’ her ‘bondage’ and suggesting to her that the violence he had meted towards her was a problem they both had in common and needed communal deliverance, Busola would find out that Fatoyinbo had been telling church members that she wasn’t ready for a relationship when the pastor’s cousin befriended her. Their time would eventually develop into a relationship and she would confide in him about what had happened to her. With his help, she would leave the church and join another congregation. Read the full article

[amirdawar]

London Flashback | Self para.

Because Amir’s family is insane, too...just in a different way. Based in London just before he and Revati returned to Porto Velho.

Under a read more because it’s a bit long, and also trash.

“Where was this picture taken?”

“It’s still Belize. Just off the coast. I hired a yacht, and we spent an afternoon and most of the night out there.”

Amir and his mother had been swiping through photographs from his recent vacation for almost half an hour. He was sure recalling the memories could never become tedious, but seeing her smile grow brighter with each new insight into their time away made an enjoyable task that much more so.

“You had dinner out on the water, too?”

“I’m trying to work on my cooking, remember?” Amir reminded, grinning to himself. “I think she liked it, but she might’ve given me a free pass as a ‘thank you’ for the holiday. I didn’t kill her, at least. That’s the main thing.”

“You cooked for her?” Fatima clutched a hand over her heart. The gesture was gentle—far less dramatic than was expected of her—and the pride very much genuine. “Of course she liked it. Look at that smile…”

It was hard not to smile himself as his mother regarded the photograph with such awe. No longer overwhelmed by their surroundings like he had been at the time, it was much easier to appreciate how happy Revi looked; beaming up at the camera with the same beautiful grin that had drawn him to her the very first time they’d met. Revati was a best friend that he probably didn’t deserve, but for as long as she stuck around, Amir vowed that he would make sure she never ran out of reasons to smile like that.

“You look happy when she’s with you, my love.”

Amir’s expression faltered slightly.

“I’m always happy, ammi.”

Fatima looked at him and shook her head. His chest tightened. “Not like this.”

If there was only one thing in life his mother was bad at, it was subtlety. Then again—often so painfully obvious about things she had no business being obvious about—Amir couldn’t help but wonder whether it was her intention to be subtle at all.

Whenever she talked about his happiness in relation to Revati, it was clear she didn’t mean it platonically. Fatima’s heart had been set on the woman since the moment they’d first met. Honestly, despite his best efforts, Amir couldn’t blame her for it. How could she not fall in love with her? None of his bitterness stemmed from his mother’s adoration of Revati, though. It was the fact that she refused to give anyone else a chance that bothered him. Lara aside; he was sure he could bring the most well-educated, successful, beautiful, Muslim Pakistani woman into their home, and still suffer his mother’s disapproval at the fact it wasn’t her standing at his side.

Until now, it never occurred to Amir that she pushed so hard because she’d seen something change in him, too.

“Oh, doesn’t she look just beautiful in that dress?”

Amir closed his eyes and let out a silent sigh. As much as he loved bringing Revati home to see his family, his mother made him suffer for it so intensely that it could only be deliberate. Fatima knew that the things she said left him questioning himself and his choices. She was good at it. It was the point.

Changing the subject seemed like the only way to stop things escalating to the point of Fatima’s upset.

Reaching out, he took the iPad from her hands, and got to his feet so it was out of her reach.

“So, tell me,” he started, cutting off her attempt at a protest immediately, “where am I taking us to eat tonight?”

For a moment, he wondered whether she’d ignore him for taking away her opportunity to talk more about Revati, but thankfully, to his surprise, she conceded.

“You’re not taking us anywhere,” the woman informed him, smoothing out her intricately designed kameez. “I’m going to cook for us this evening.”

“You’re going to cook?”

She glared. “Don’t sound so surprised.”

Fatima was still a busy woman, despite pushing into her mid-sixties. It was rare that she found the time to cook. Even during the kind of family gatherings that required a personal touch, she usually delegated orders to her staff, rather than getting her hands dirty.

“What’s the occasion?” Amir asked tentatively. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

She’d probably invited the entire damn family around to meet his ‘future wife’…

He’d almost found amusement in the thought, until he realized it was absolutely something she’d do.

“The two of you are here, together, Mash’Allah. Do I need more of a reason than that?”

Seeing his mother happy was not supposed to cause him discomfort. Yet, as she desperately clung to the joy of her false hope, he felt his heart plummet. Amir worried for her. How long would it take her to realize that just because she wanted something, didn’t mean that either of them felt the same way?

“Did the girls mention what time they would be back?”

“Well, she’s shopping with Faiza, so I’d hazard a guess that it won’t be until at least 2024.”

“What are they shopping for?”

“Strangely enough, mum, I didn’t ask,” Amir said sarcastically. “Revi could be picking up a few things to take to Birmingham, maybe.”

“I assume she’s going to pay a visit to her family whilst she’s here, yes?”

“I hope so...” Amir frowned slightly, slipping his hands into his suit pockets. Truth be told, he’d had to push a little harder for her to agree to that particular visit than he’d been expecting. No, he didn’t live under the illusion that everybody shared the same pleasant home life that he did, but he couldn’t help but feel concerned for his friend’s lack of drive to visit them of her own accord. “I left a couple of days for us to spend in Birmingham before we fly back to Porto Velho.”

“Wait, are you going with her?” Fatima raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Will you meet her family? They must be good people to have raised Revati. Perhaps, one day, God willing, I will be able to thank them for blessing us with such a beautiful woman; especially one that makes my son so happy.”

Amir paused. The look on her face made it clear the conversation was about to head back into uncomfortable territory. He immediately regretted bringing it up; as was so often the case when it came to anything regarding himself and Revati.

“I don’t know…” Well, it wasn’t a lie. Until the topic piqued his mother’s interest, he honestly hadn’t thought about it too much. As for the rest of what she’d said, Amir reasoned that it was better left ignored. “If Revi wants me to meet them, then I suppose so.”

Fatima appeared to be attempting to restrain her excitement for the first time in her life.

His mother reached out and took a hold of his wrist from her seated position. Squeezing it gently, she beamed up at her son, swelling with pride once more. “That’s a big step for you two.”

Whilst it wasn’t a ‘big step’ in the same sense that his mother was thinking, his determination to steer her away from the mindset was dwindling rapidly as each moment passed.

Was it wrong to find talking to her so exhausting?

Whether or not they were in a romantic relationship, meeting Revati’s parents would still be a monumental point for them. The woman had become a part of his family almost immediately. What if things didn’t go as smoothly the other way around? What if she had great expectations of him, given how his family had embraced her, and he disappointed them on every level?

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

Fuck.

Why hadn’t he contemplated this possibility sooner?

He wasn’t prepared. At all.

Amir had never been good at hiding nervous hesitations from his mother.

“It’s her birthday,” he reasoned, looking across the room at her, in search of any shred of reassurance she had to offer. “Surely, she’d want to keep it a personal thing? It’s not like she gets to see them very often. It’d be an intrusion.”

Fatima smiled softly.

“You’ll be fine, Amir,” she assured him, voice so soothing he felt like a child again. “You’re polite and you’re kind. You’re generous, and intelligent, and handsome...” Fatima looked at him, her expression the sort of serious that was daring anyone to disagree with her. Was she ever not the epitome of a proud mother? “Most importantly of all, you love their daughter. Tell me: How could they possibly not love you in return?”

[melajade]

The Labour That Was... And Why It Was Not What We'd Expected

Upon checking into the slightly darker and more foreboding Antenatal Ward James and I were shown our room, number 20, which was a double room but we had luckily arrived at a quiet time and were the only ones there. This meant that James could stay the night! Luckily we had a sweet midwife, Maddy, who said that it was no problem for James to stay and dragged in an armchair that would fold out to a single bed of incredibly uncomfortable proportions. I was just so happy that James was allowed to stay! This would be my first night ever in hospital (apart from when I was born in the 1980’s and a mandatory 10 day hospital stay for mums and bubs was standard) and I was nervous to say the least.

Once I knew James was allowed to stay and (this being the part I was most grateful for!) that he actually wanted to, I could relax and enjoy my first hospital meal… A strange rice concoction that wasn’t part of the gluten free menu but contained no gluten so I could eat it. After this I regretted asking for the gluten free option as it was inevitably more bland and unappetising than what everyone else was getting but perhaps a little more nutritious. The meals for gluten free patients were variations on a meat and three veg theme, sometimes with a thin, dehydrated slice of beef, sometimes chicken, sometimes with actual boiled potato, sometimes with mysterious round balls of a potato-ish substance. Luckily no food was served to James so he had a good excuse to go out and buy other things to sometimes bring back to me to enrich this strange hospital diet. How anyone is supposed to recover from illness or injury on a diet of hospital food is beyond me! Little did I know this would be the first of many hospital meals to come.

At some point before or after dinner (or during) a different midwife came in and explained the induction of labour process to me. It all sounded pretty brutal, especially the archaic “Cook’s Catheter” which was a favourite of this particular hospital but most other hospitals nowadays by-pass its part in the process (probably because it is painful and scary). The first part didn’t sound too bad though. I would have a small tampon-like pessary inserted that would rest on the cervix and release prostaglandins that would hopefully start to ripen and soften it. This was done without too much drama and we were told to take it easy for the rest of the evening and that I may start to experience some cramping and/or light contractions. I soon started to feel these little “tightenings” but they weren’t too uncomfortable. I asked for one of the reassuring - sounding heat packs and was presented with a browny-beige envelope of fabric and Velcro with a teeny hot plastic slab inside it. If these were what they offered women in hardcore labour for pain relief, I was in for a hell of a ride if I wanted to remain free of medical relief! After paying $10 to get access to one, perhaps two random channels on the hospital TV (one definitely seemed to play Antiques Roadshow 24/7) James and I fell asleep, him on his little, uncomfortable cot and me in my high up, princess hospital bed. It all felt very surreal and I didn’t sleep well due to the cramps and the assured ordeal looming before me. The next morning was probably one of the lowest points in the whole hospital experience. A pretty but angry-looking little doctor came to get us at around 7am. She had been assigned to examine my cervix and see if it had dilated, then decide on the next step in the induction process. She rushed us to a room a couple of doors down with a large chair/bed apparatus in the corner. I awkwardly placed myself on the chair, which was difficult as, by this stage, getting up and down was really uncomfortable with the increasing swelling and pre-labour cramping. She unceremoniously shoved her fingers in to see how my cervix was doing; “This may cause a little discomfort”… Understatement of the year! She frustratedly removed her hand and stated that nothing had happened and that I would need the terrifying “Cook’s Catheter”! She began to prepare for this, explaining it as Mary, our first doctor, had done as an apparatus that is inserted into the vagina with two “balloons” that sit either side of the cervix. They are gradually inflated with water until they start to open the cervix. So scary… She went about beginning this procedure in much the same way that she had begun the cervical examination. Rough and ready. No happy gas was offered, not even a moment to catch my breath and try to relax the muscles that would be pried apart to get this thing done. It hurt just as much as I’d anticipated and after about three goes, the little, angry doctor gave up, stating that she “couldn’t get it in” and that we’d just have to use the Prostin gel. This was placed on my cervix (way less painful) and she left us to it, leaving me feeling as if I had failed her because the Cook’s didn’t work. We were given vague instructions to go for a walk and get the gel moving around the cervix. That day was actually quite pleasant and I must have been buzzing with enough Oxytocin to not be too anxious about the gradually intensifying contractions or stubbornly closed cervix. James and I were visited by a little angel in the form of our friend CC who happened to be working at Women and Babies as a social worker. She made us her special case and delivered trashy magazines and pastries to our room then visited us for reassuring talks later. We were also visited by an older lady, I think her name was Caroline, from the Catholic crew, who sat with us for a while and said a prayer with us which, despite his lack of trust in religion, brought James to tears. I guess it highlighted how much was still unknown about what the outcome of this process would be and made us appreciate any prayers that could be offered. We needed God’s protection. I felt a bit guilty however as, despite being Catholic, I’m not devout but, it’s surprising how the spiritualist in you comes to the fore in situations like this. I’m sure I had Caroline fooled. I just wanted to get this baby out safely.

Later that day we discovered that there was a little market out the front of the hospital which happens on the third Thursday of every month (or something) and we happened to be here at the right time. By this stage the pre-labour or stage 1 labour contractions were causing me to pause and occasionally buckle over a bit. Despite this I took a walk around the markets with James, chatting to a stall keeper who told me her blood pressure remained high after pregnancy, and running into CC who had ventured out to get some sushi for a friend. I bought Robyn, my mother in law, a scarf with little cats on it. James and I then discovered that you could see the museum of old hospital days in the old Women and Babies hospital building if you went up a few floors in the amazing Art Deco building. We ascended to this level (I can’t recall if we took the stairs all the way up. I’m pretty sure we did as I was determined to move as much as possible) and were greeted by an iron lung chamber. We were drawn in by photographs of the nurses’ residences. It seemed in those days being a nurse was a nun-like commitment. Unfortunately the main part of the museum was closed so we began our descent. 

That evening my mum came to see how everything was going. It was great to see her. An unseasonably warm evening, we wandered around the border between the hospital and university, pausing as each contraction hit. It was still tolerable however and we had a nice chat. I did feel nervous about how things would progress but the pregnancy hormones were still doing their job of keeping that anxiousness down to a dull roar. Eventually we went back to our room and tried to eat some dinner. At some point we tuned into “The Wedding Singer” on the daggy hospital TV, which seemed to only be able to tune into Antiques Roadshow at any other time of the day or night. We’d struck gold with this film in comparison! I went to the bathroom for a final wee before trying to get some sleep. As I stood up I felt what could only be described as a ‘clunk’, a very bony one. I mentioned it to James as he helped me climb up into my hospital bed (I still hadn’t figured out that I could lift and lower the bed to make this easier…) and felt a “pop” between my legs as my waters broke. This seemed like a small victory in this medically influenced labour! My waters’ had broken naturally, no “ARM” process needed! Finally, something my body could do on its own. We called the midwife and told her the grand news as the fluid gushed onto the floor. It was such a relief, after all the swelling, to feel such huge amounts of fluid leaving my body. Maddy, the midwife on that evening, was less excited at this event however she helped clean up and get it under control. She told us that Delivery Ward was full so we’d have to just wait it out. She came back with a shot of morphine for me and another heat pack and told me to try and get some rest. The contractions were coming at regular intervals now, fairly close together but tolerable. I figured I’d be able to snooze in the breaks in between. I did manage to do that, with James’ help, throughout the night. I think I managed to get more rest than he did! He jumped up from his “cot” every time I expressed the intense pain that each new contraction brought and held my hand or let me hug him until it was over. 

By the next morning, the intensity of the contractions made it difficult for me to walk or think about packing up to go from this room to Delivery Ward. It’s funny, but nobody can really help you with your “stuff”, what to wear into the Delivery Ward, whether to leave jewellery on etc… I was also surprised that I still needed to go to the toilet for wees but each time a contraction would hit and I’d get waylaid and have to sit there, grasping onto that handle they have in hospital toilets, until it passed. Thankfully they brought me down to Delivery Ward in a wheelchair and our stuff somehow made it down too. At some point around the time we arrived at Delivery Ward (probably 10/11:00am) my mother arrived and gave James some much needed respite from being the amazing labour support person he was. 

During the next couple of hours I experienced what a normal labour might be like but had the irritating addition of the Syntocinon drip so couldn’t exactly move about freely. Movement was a lot harder than I had expected when I’d envisaged what labour would be like anyway. This was due to my swollen extremities and the downward force of the contractions through the pelvis. It felt like my body was trying to turn itself inside out. The Syntocinon made contractions come more frequently too, so there was little respite from this intensity. During our first hour in the Delivery Ward I was introduced to a number of people. There was a young midwife called Emma, Cheryl, a young Asian registrar and an English Obstetrician called Neil Campbell. He was on standby for complicated labours like mine. I felt like there was a good team surrounding me and tried to relax. Emma did her best to make this part of the birth experience a bit more like how I’d imagined it would be in the Birth Centre. She suggested a shower which was easier said than done. The water didn’t do much to ease the pain and the most difficult things seemed to be the transitions from sitting to standing, on and off the toilet, on and off the bed and so forth. Mum, Emma and James set me up on a chair with Mum running the hot water over my back. I can’t remember if I was still dressed? Perhaps I had a hospital gown on which got drenched? I’m pretty sure I wasn’t completely naked! After that I managed to return to the room and sit on the fit ball. After some wiggling around painfully I found a good position leaning from a seated position on the ball over the bed with Mum rubbing my back and the happy gas mask in my hand to suck on during contractions. I went on like this for a while, once or twice offering James some gas… “Here! It’s really good, have some”. Eventually I ended up back on the bed so they could have a look at the cervical dilation. After the pain and intensity of the contractions I’d been experiencing for quite a few hours I was hoping to hear that it was a bit more than just 4cm dilated. This was when I decided to ask for an epidural as Cheryl told me it would be quite a while before anything else happened. I felt like I was running out of stamina and that I needed something to help me rest so I could build up the energy to push when the time came. I couldn’t even imagine being active in second stage of labour at this point, I had nothing left to give. In the typical manner of hospital staff they made me beg for the epidural… Well, not exactly beg but there was a definite strategy of “I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear that request for an epidural or I’ll pretend it just slipped my mind and see if she asks again.” being employed by my midwife. Eventually, after several more asks, she got the anaesthetist to come and administer the epidural. She was a dry-humoured Canadian girl who made no secret of the struggle she was having to “get it in”. I used all my powers of physical discipline to sit still despite the frequent, body-wracking contractions, so she could get the epidural happening. I knew there was no backing out, I just needed some respite from the intensity of the contractions. Ultimately she succeeded in inserting the needle into my spine that would administer the amazing serum that would provide almost instant relief. I was done being a hero and lay back to enjoy the peace the epidural bought with it. It is true what women say about drugs in labour... They do, do DO make it so much more enjoyable! I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the amount of anaesthetic administered was so precise, it blocked the pain of the contractions but still allowed me to move my legs and feel other sensations. I drifted into a dreamlike state and mum urged James to head out and take a break. Later he told me this break was actually more of a "breakdown"... Tears and emotional exhaustion kicked in. He'd never been so worried about me, and now the other imminent member of our little family, before. 

I drifted in and out of sleep but remained aware of the heart rate monitor that was keeping track of my little friend's wellbeing. At some point the regular beep seemed to increase to quite a contrasting tempo and I mentioned it to mum. She had noticed it too and was concerned. Neither of us had to do anything however as, at that precise moment, Emma rushed back in and slammed on the big, red emergency button. Before we knew it the delivery suite was once again filled with medical staff. Apparently as my epidural had kicked in they had increased the amount of hormone in the Syntocinon drip to intensify the contractions, which is standard procedure but it still seems a little forceful to me. Of course, after some time having to deal with these intense contractions, the little person on his way to greet us started to freak out, his heart rate indicating a high level of distress. I was so sad to hear this as I really didn't want his entrance to this world to be so upsetting. He had been an absolute trooper up until now, dealing with all the complications in a calm and collected way, never indicating any stress. I felt like his heart rate increasing was an urgent message, "Please get me out of here now mummy! I've had enough.". Cheryl suggested we monitor him using a more invasive method (a clip that goes into the baby's scalp?!) and progress with the "natural" (hahaha) birth but I wasn't too convinced. Neither was mum, who by this stage had called James back to the delivery ward. He was white as a ghost and willing to go along with whatever the doctors were suggesting. Mum and I had one word in mind... Caesar! Thankfully, just after I'd politely declined Cheryl's offer of putting a monitoring device into my unborn child's scull, Dr Campbell returned to the suite. He pretty much cleared the flurry of lovely but strangely inert female staff and made the decision for us. "Right, this has gone on long enough. Let's get this baby out." Or something along those lines was said in his matter-of-fact British accent. I was relieved... And excited! The relief came, I think, from finally being absolved of responsibility for this birth. It hadn't worked out the way we'd hoped and I had heard so many stories similar to my own. I didn't want to muck around anymore. I just wanted to get my little boy out of that tight spot and into the beautiful world without subjecting him to any more trauma. From that point on the atmosphere very quickly changed from one of fear and apprehension to happy anticipation. A C-Section would have to be one of the most uplifting surgeries around! It brings a new life into the world and I am so grateful that this can be done for women like me with such a minimum of pain and fuss today. Due to the epidural already being in, and probably the trickiest part of the process, all that needed to be done was to increase the amount of anaesthetic to the point where the surgery could be performed. I waited outside the theatre with James by my side, both of us actually smiling and feeling a bit elated already. James was given a bright red shower cap to wear in contrast to the blue ones the medical staff were wearing. Mum didn’t attend the surgery, I can’t recall whether this was because there were no more people allowed into theatre or whether she simply opted out. Later she told me she had called Robyn, my mother-in-law, and urged her to get to the hospital asap. James had been alluding to us trying to continue with the birth when Cheryl had given us the option to, I guess his head was spinning and he was still thinking of our original birth wishes. Robyn heard of this uncertainty and apparently said “You tell my son to get the caesarian!”. I’m pretty sure he feels now it was one of the best decisions we’ve made together.

I lay on the operating table while Neil went through the process with his students and set me up by disinfecting the lower abdominal area, raising a curtain and pointing out my swelling as a major indicator of preeclampsia. A bespectacled older surgeon seemed to be there to simply join the party and asked James if he had a phone or camera. Luckily we had my phone on hand so he grabbed it and took a series of excellently timed shots of the anticipation (and exhaustion) on our faces and, eventually, our baby boy as he popped out of the perfectly placed incision into the world.

The first time I saw Oberon his face was plastered in a grimace and his lower lip was quivering but no sound was emanating from his mouth. I was struck by his perfect anatomy, neatly crossed legs and arms gradually extending out to embrace the new space surrounding them. He was a gorgeous, tiny Buddha with a dramatically slanted forehead that had clearly been stuck in my unaccommodating birth canal a bit too long. James got to touch him first, going over to the little bed where they check bubs over immediately following a C- section (oh, and he got to cut the cord) and letting our little one grasp his finger. Finally he was brought over to me and placed on my bare chest. Immediately I was filled with a strong desire to reassure this tiny person that the place he’d arrived at was good and that he would be looked after. His grimace faded and he relaxed onto me, spreading his little hands across my chest, somehow knowing that he was home but it was a bit different to before. 

In recovery I got to see my family (I think! Maybe it was right after) as in my younger brother and sister, mum and dad and dad’s partner Juanita as well as Robyn. CC had arranged for us to have our own room, the little angel of the labour ward she was, so we got to see everyone in it. There were lots of flowers and it was actually fairly close to dinner time so they had kindly gotten us some Thai food. I really wanted to eat it, thinking that I’d devour it, but could only manage a couple of mouthfuls. A little anxiety had started to bubble up through the haze of drugs and hormones I was swamped in as I started to sense the extraordinary new responsibility that had befallen us. James felt it too and soon everyone had left. The most poignant things were my brother and sister giving me little gifts, as they always would, and me realising that it actually wasn’t about me anymore and not knowing if I’d actually get to appreciate these little frivolities. I had this strong sense of not just being a sister, daughter or partner. I was now a mother and for some mysterious, scary yet blessed reason this overrode all the other roles. I simultaneously had an unshakable belief that I could provide my baby with everything he needed yet no idea how I would do this. I needed to learn and that learning would begin immediately with our beautiful Oberon soon waking from his post birth slumber. This heralded the beginning of “feeding”. My boobs were not ready for this at all and James was also trembling in his boots as he realised he didn’t know what to do, I still couldn’t move and everyone had gone home, seemingly all medical staff too. We were both desperate to sleep and were so relieved when our first designated post natal midwife bustled in and began teaching us the art of looking after a small, slightly underweight 37 week-old newborn, our son Oberon Frederick Findlay born August 21 2015 at 4:20pm. 

[newssplashy]

CASTROVILLE, Texas — In the three years since Donald Trump began his presidential bid by maligning Mexican immigrants, Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican in a Democratic-leaning district, has faced voters of all stripes who were angry about Trump’s divisive style.

But Hurd, who represents a heavily Hispanic region that stretches across 800 miles of the Mexican border, could not recall a moment when people were as appalled as they were over the images of anguished children separated from their migrant parents.

“All the calls and emails I’ve gotten in my office are from constituents saying: ‘Why are we doing this, this is against our values,'” Hurd said. The president’s policy had damaged the Republican brand, he said, because “nobody understands why you would take children out of their parents’ hands.”

Yet many rank-and-file Republican voters in border states see it differently, creating another kind of pressure for lawmakers like Hurd. Whatever sympathy these voters feel for the children is complicated, they say, by their intense frustration over the flow of migrants from Mexico.

In interviews across the Southwest and Florida on Wednesday, many Republicans said that they appreciated Trump’s emphasis on “zero tolerance” for illegal border crossings and wished there were as much furor over those immigrants as there was over the separation of parents and children — an administration policy that Trump reversed under pressure from Republicans like Hurd.

“You don’t ever want to be separating families, but at least the president focused attention on all the people crossing the border illegally,” said Helen Delavan, 79, a retired school secretary in Castroville and a supporter of both Trump and Hurd.

Marcella Lagleder, 65, a retired software developer who runs an arts and crafts shop in Castroville, said the political turmoil over migrant families left her wondering “why we’re still being so open to the illegals.”

“I don’t think we’re mistreating them,” Lagleder said. “It’d be different if they were put in a doghouse or something like that.”

From Arizona and New Mexico to Texas and Florida, conservative-leaning voters were divided over how to handle the families and on immigration policy more broadly, a reflection of the Republican fissures that have stymied immigration legislation for over a decade.

Interviews with these voters in some of the most hotly contested, heavily Hispanic states and congressional districts illustrate the bind Republicans find themselves in: They need to retain support from voters who have little sympathy for unauthorized immigrants and also win over more moderate voters horrified by Trump’s remarks about Hispanics.

Republican lawmakers and strategists said the president’s “zero tolerance” policy had created a political crisis for the party at a time when Republicans badly want to be taking credit for the improving economy. Instead of talking about the second-quarter economic growth that could near 5 percent, Republicans worry they are handing Democrats a potent line of attack for the midterms.

Yet while the searing photographs of children locked in cages left many Democrats and independents deeply dismayed, many Republicans were less sympathetic about the plight of migrants who knowingly broke the law.

Julio Martinez, 74, who headed Trump’s Miami-area campaign, defended the president’s hard-line approach.

“It hurts my heart to see it, but the culpable ones are the parents who subject their children to crossing the border or who send them by themselves,” Martinez said. “If we start breaking laws ourselves, what is this country going to become? All of those multimillionaires who live in Hollywood, why don’t they let all those illegals live in their houses?”

But Michelle Garcia, 42, a cafe owner in Los Lunas, New Mexico, where there is an open House seat in a district that is majority-Hispanic and likely to be highly competitive, said the family separations had been “merciless and counterproductive.”

“I’m a conservative, and I don’t believe that this is the solution,” she said.

But what is especially worrisome for Republicans in states like Florida, where there are hard-fought races for governor, Senate and a handful of House seats this year, is that the president is not just alienating voters with his policies. Equally troubling is his use of harsh and demagogic language when describing Latinos, a tone he seemed to amplify in a series of tweets and speeches as pressure on him grew this week.

Trump’s claim that unauthorized migrants “infest our country,” for example, has left some Hispanic Republicans angry and concerned that he’s driving away up-for-grabs voters.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a veteran Florida Republican who is of Cuban descent. “That kind of divisive language hurts us.”

Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., who is locked in a highly competitive re-election fight, said Trump’s warnings about the threat of migrants had “been dehumanizing.”

There are few House Republicans who are as frustrated with the Trump administration over immigration as Curbelo, who represents one of the most Democratic-leaning districts of any Republican in the country and has been working for months on a compromise for Dreamers, the term generally used for those brought to the country illegally as children.

In an interview, he complained that the family separation policy was “a unilateral decision by Jeff Sessions,” adding that the hard-line attorney general has “freelanced on a number of issues.”

What is clear from the interviews with voters, however, is that Trump’s warnings about the peril presented by immigrants are being heard — and echoed by some of his supporters.

“The last thing I want is this place to end up like Germany or Europe, where they’re blowing up stuff and knife attacks and things like that,” said Ryan Farnsworth, 44, who works in the construction industry in Phoenix and voted for the president.

Farnsworth was sounding the same note Trump did this week, when he falsely claimed that crime in Germany had spiked and said Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition was at risk because of permissive refugee policies.

Standing next to a bank of Spanish-language newspapers outside the Maricopa County Courthouse, Farnsworth said that he saw the president’s family separation policy as an unfortunate but practical deterrent that could have helped secure the borders.

“Do I like seeing families pulled apart? Absolutely not,” he said, just as a Hispanic woman and her young son scooted by, hand in hand. “But it is no different than if I were to go commit a crime, I went to jail, I’d lose my children, too; they’d be stripped from me.”

It is voters like Farnsworth who have created pressure on Republican politicians like Rep. Martha McSally, who is running for Senate in Arizona and trying to accommodate the hard-liners who dominate the GOP’s overwhelmingly white base there without offending the broader, more racially diverse electorate.

And the challenge is even more acute on the border, where Lea Márquez-Peterson is running for McSally’s seat in a district that includes both staunch border hawks and recent immigrants.

“It’s a very split district,” said Márquez-Peterson, a Republican who previously ran the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “We should have passed a comprehensive immigration bill years ago.”

In New Mexico — which has the highest percentage of citizens with Hispanic ancestry in the country — voters more frequently expressed discomfort with the separation policy.

“It’s sad,” said Andrew Baca, 28, a Belen, New Mexico, barber and former soldier who is Latino. “We’re all immigrants, bro. America is made of immigrants.”

But the challenge for Democrats in this sprawling and heavily rural New Mexico district held by Rep. Steve Pearce, a Republican, is that voters who may not like Trump’s immigration policies are uneasy with the liberal line on guns and abortion rights.

“My vote wouldn’t necessarily change because of the separation only,” Baca said.

Back in Hurd’s district — which includes the Tornillo holding facility where some of the children have been detained — his Democratic opponent, Gina Ortiz Jones, suggested the incumbent’s outrage was inspired by his re-election bid.

“It took kids in cages for him to speak up,” said Ortiz Jones, a former Air Force officer, arguing that the Republican’s voting record suggested fidelity to Trump.

But the good news for Hurd, a former CIA officer who survived 2016 even as Hillary Clinton carried the district, is that many voters here say they intend to support him, no matter their view on the separation of children from their parents.

Robert Belitz, a Democrat selling melons from the back of his truck on the main road cutting through Castroville, expressed disgust at the policy.

“This isn’t some authoritarian state,” he said, before adding he would still back Hurd, whom he deemed “a good man who delivers on what he says.”

For Hurd to win again along the Rio Grande, he would need such voters to remain in his corner — and for Trump to not make that task more difficult.

“Whenever we’re not able to talk about how the economy is doing well, how unemployment is low, and instead we’re talking about taking babies from their mothers — that’s not an environment that’s going to be helpful,” Hurd said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Simon Romero and Jonathan Martin © 2018 The New York Times

via NewsSplashy - Latest Nigerian News Online,World Newspaper

[elenagalbusera]

Project Evaluation - Wall, Page and Screen

Name: Elena Galbusera

Electronic Journal link/password: https://elenagalbusera.tumblr.com

Word Count: 1017

Project Evaluation 

Use the headings below as a guide and feel free to add to this and include images if you wish.

Project Title How did this develop and what was involved in the decision making process?

I began to keep a record of the titles of the materials which related to my subject matter. I noted words which came to my mind while observing my photobook, once finished on InDesign. I intended to find the appropriate combination -a noun and adjective- that evoked the photobook’s content. Most terms were formal and vague, delineation, for example, implied the concept of outlines although did not necessarily recall the boldness of the design, aberration looked uncomfortable, and peculiarity banal. Omnipresent was somehow efficient as it could have suggested that Brutalism emerged worldwide but hinted an association with religion and God. The title of my photobook is archistructural brutalisation. While archistructural gives an insight of such Modern architectonical style, brutalisation refers to a process that inevitably happened within Brutalist Architecture, a relentless revolution that changed society since the 1950s. Concerning the design, this title fitted well the cover’s space and its geometrical letters enriched the aesthetics of the artwork.

Subject Reflect on the subject matter of your project.

My project developed throughout a process of intensive inquiry into the historical, political and economic circumstances within the emerging of Brutalism. Since the 1950s this post-war architectural movement marked the first time in history when architecture aimed at producing ethical structures rather than complying with the standard aesthetical canons. In contrary to the ideals of Renaissance or Classicism, the fascine of concrete buildings stays in their functionality, versatility, efficiency, cheap and rapid construction. Whereas the years of Brutalism coincides with a period of political corruption, and its utilitarian complexes are often associated with ugliness, there’s much to the core than it seems. Brutalism, in fact, is the result of a sophisticated engineering and theoretical maths, which established the foundations of our modernised society. In light of this, the public owes to this style further attentiveness, especially in the present-day, considering all actions aimed at demolishing such cultural heritage.

Visual Research Reflect on how key photographers / visual artists who are relevant to your project research have impacted upon the development of your project? Explain how they influenced your approach and what you learned from them.

Considering the roots Brutalism guided me to come across Le Corbusier[1]’s most loyal photographer, Hungarian born Lucien Hervé, whose chiaroscuro techniques inspired my practice. Relating to Hervé was crucial as his works present a geometry that influenced the imagery of my photobook. A variety of sources, including photobooks, images, illustrations and architectural sketches, enabled me to mature a sophisticated insight of the topic. The primary research at the RIBA[2] helped me to select Brutalist constructions and to discover materials which cannot be found online. The documentary Bunkers Brutalism and Bloody-mindedness[3]and the essay Ethics and Aesthetics: Photographic Approached to Brutalism [4] accompanied me in the contextual research, while the film Helvetica[5] nurtured my appeal for modernity and typography. By examining the typeface Helvetica, I developed my own aesthetic sensibility and distinctive style, characterised by strong cuts, shapes and significance of forms.  

Aims, Objectives, Concept Discuss your aims and objectives and the main concept for your project and evaluate how successfully these have been resolved.

archistructural brutalisation, as discussed in its editor’s note, aims at raising awareness of Brutalism’s overall extraordinariness. Its objective is to expand and disrupt the most common attributes associated with the subject. These notions have been carried out in the photobook through the adoption of a design that differs from the usual graphic of volumes concerning the topic. To elaborate on this, instead of solely presenting black and white photos of the complexes my project combines architectural illustrations with photographic prints and tailored designs. By considering the phenomenon from a different angle, these techniques incite the viewers to rethink their feelings towards Brutalism, as much as Brutalism itself stimulated post-war architects to rethink utterly architecture. The ultimate objective of archistructural brutalisation is to project an individual ideology of Modern architecture, to push the audience to confront their beliefs with mine, thus developing further considerations, rather than to deliver a universal outlook.

Production Reflect on the specific production methods you have been exploring and how these approaches and visual strategies have affected your project development.

Scanning images from books allowed me to showcase exemplary instances of Brutalist architecture on an International scale. I downloaded vectors of abstract shapes which served as a foundation to create the design. By placing them on top of the InDesign document pages, I either reduced or increased them in size, flipped or rotated them, to follow a sequence of patterns while drawing forms with the pen tool. The use of white text onto yellow backgrounds helped me to paradoxically create a compelling aesthetics and transmit a disturbing sensation, as the juxtaposition of both colours triggers a ‘pleasant’ discomfort in the reading process. Such is similar to the feeling that generates in the encountering of Brutalist structures. Using Oswald as a typeface conveys modernity to the design. Employing the black and yellow incorporates a sense of danger and recalls the viewers’ attention in a similar way of caution signs.

Presentation How effectively have you communicated your ideas in relation to your identified audience and context?

Increasing the size of my photobook enabled me to reinforce my point, as a smaller artwork wouldn’t have valued the imposingness of Brutalist architecture. Shifting from the size of 160x220mm to 240x300mm helped me to highlight upon our unavoidable exposure to Modern Architecture. Inspired by the techniques of the exhibition Concrete Works[6], I opted for the thickest pages that perfect binding permits, so that I could evoke the heaviness of Brutalist structures. The imagery of the design encourages the public to individuate the force of Brutalist forms so that the rhythmic structuralisms of the style is seen from a captivating perspective. Besides, the editor’s note and foreword of archistructural brutalisation are tailored in their substance rather being excessively long.

Evaluation Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your project and what you might do to improve it in the future?

archistructural brutalisation challenges the traditional perspectives claimed with Modernist approaches via embracing photo manipulation for ‘ethical’ purposes. The unconventional crops of the photographs, their position in the different spaces of the pages and the dominant design follow a coherent. The excluding of pages’ numbers and excessive text brings the viewers to focus on Brutalism’s distinctive traits. Nonetheless, the artwork lacks some contextual and historical writing. For example, I could have given further information about some of the buildings, their construction’s procedures, techniques, methods and purposes. Additionally, to improve my project in the future, I would plan out time more cleverly, use better quality prints and choose the technique of Coptic binding. The use of a hard or cardboard cover would resemble the raw sensation of the concrete whilst weighting upon its texture. Also, the pages would be thicker than perfect binding allows, and this would help me evoking the heaviness of Brutalist structures.

Notes:

[1]The Swiss-French Architect, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

[2]Royal Institute of British Architects

[3]Meades, J. (2014). Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloody-mindedness: Concrete Poetry (BBC4).

[4]Jankov, S. (2018, forthcoming). Ethics and Aesthetics: Photographic Approaches to Brutalism, in Metlić, D., Photography as a Method for Visual Research.

[5]Hustwit, G. (2007). Helvetica.

[6]Concrete Works, Aedes am Pffefferberg, Berlin, Dec 2009 - Jan 2010

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

ART & DESIGN Bowie, Bach and Bebop: How Music Powered Basquiat By EKOW ESHUNSEPT. 22, 2017 Continue reading the main storyShare This Page Share Tweet Pin Email More Save Photo Jean-Michel Basquiat, pictured in 1981, sold his first painting that year to Debbie Harry of Blondie for $200. Credit Edo Bertoglio, via Maripol/Artestar, New York LONDON — In 1979, at 19, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat moved into an abandoned apartment on East 12th Street in Manhattan with his girlfriend at the time, Alexis Adler. The home, a sixth-floor walk-up, was run-down and sparsely furnished. Basquiat, broke and unable to afford canvases, painted with abandon on the walls and floor, even on Ms. Adler’s clothes. The one item that remained undisturbed was Ms. Adler’s stereo, which had pride of place on a shelf scavenged from the street. “The main thing for us was having big speakers and a blasting stereo. That was the only furniture I purchased myself,” said Ms. Adler, who still lives in the apartment. When Basquiat was around, she recalled, “music was playing all the time.” On Thursday, the exhibition “Basquiat: Boom for Real” opened at the Barbican Center in London. The show focuses on the artist’s relationship to music, text, film and television. But it is jazz — the musical style that made up the bulk of Basquiat’s huge record collection — that looms largest as a source of personal inspiration to him and as a subject matter. The first major retrospective of his work in Britain, it is a kind of homecoming for Basquiat’s art: In 1984, the first institutional show of his work opened at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, and then traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In a satisfying closing of a circle, a large drawing that Basquiat made in London for the institute’s exhibition, but that ended up not being shown there, will go on display at the Barbican. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Basquiat’s tastes were eclectic: Curtis Mayfield, Donna Summer, Bach, Beethoven, David Byrne, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Public Image Ltd.’s “Metal Box” album. “And he had his favorite tracks that he would just play and play,” Ms. Adler said. “Bowie’s ‘Low,’ definitely. And the second side of ‘Heroes.’ The influence of music was huge.” Basquiat eventually amassed a collection of more than 3,000 albums. It spanned blues, classical, soul, disco and even zydeco, a type of popular music from southern Louisiana. He also made his own music: as the leader of Gray, an experimental art noise quartet; as the producer of the single “Beat Bop”; and as a D.J. at venues like the scene-setting Mudd Club in TriBeCa. Photo “King Zulu” (1986) represents the trumpeters Bix Beiderbecke, Bunk Johnson and Howard McGhee, and a face inspired by Louis Armstrong disguised as a Zulu king at Mardi Gras in 1949. Credit The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Basquiat made frequent references in his work to the musicians he most admired. He paid homage to Parker, whose nickname was Bird, in paintings such as “Bird on Money,” “Charles the First” and “CPRKR.” “Max Roach” was a nod to the vision and style of the jazz drummer of that name. And in “King Zulu,” a masterly painting inspired by the history of early jazz that occupies a prominent place at the Barbican, Basquiat summoned the memory of the trumpeters Bix Beiderbecke, Bunk Johnson and Howard McGhee. In the center of the painting’s intense blue background, a face in minstrel makeup stares out, the image culled from a photograph of Louis Armstrong disguised as a Zulu king at Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1949. Basquiat was especially devoted to bebop, the restlessly inventive genre typified by the likes of Parker, Davis, Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk. Basquiat’s love of bebop fueled his art, said Eleanor Nairne, co-curator of “Boom for Real.” Photo The exhibition at the Barbican in London is the first major British retrospective of Basquiat’s work. Credit Tristan Fewings/Getty Images “Bebop was quite an intellectual movement,” she said. “It was also quite iconoclastic in wanting to break away from these older jazz harmonies. That idea of a kind of rupture, and of these musicians who were very young, vibrant powerful forces; there were lots of parallels he found with his own work and life.” Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose at 27, attained dizzying heights during his short career. His first sale, the painting “Cadillac Moon,” was to Debbie Harry, the frontwoman of Blondie, in 1981. She paid $200. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Within months, his works were selling for tens of thousands of dollars. By his early 20s, he had made his first million. Yet Basquiat was discomforted by success. He was acutely conscious of his place as one of very few African-Americans in a predominantly white art world, where he was regarded by some as little more than an interloper. The eclectic taste of Jean-Michel Basquiat The American art critic Hilton Kramer once described Basquiat as “a talentless hustler, street-smart but otherwise invincibly ignorant, who used his youth, his looks, his skin color and his abundant sex appeal” to win fame. According to Ms. Nairne, Basquiat was “hugely, uncomfortably, constantly aware of the racist ways he was constantly being pigeonholed.” And he found a telling parallel between his position and that of his jazz heroes. “These are musicians who are, in one sphere of their lives, incredibly celebrated,” Ms. Nairne said. “And in other aspects, on a daily basis and in the most banal terms, consistently reduced to the color of their skins. They are literally having to use the back entrance of clubs. There’s no way you can divorce their music from their treatment in society. There was a lot of identification in there.” Ultimately, Basquiat felt more at home in downtown New York. He had first come to prominence in the late ’70s as a graffiti artist with a “SAMO” tag, scrawling the streets of Lower Manhattan with sardonic and elusively poetic maxims: “SAMO for the so-called avant-garde”; “Samo as an end 2 the neon fantasy called ‘life.’ ” Photo Basquiat dancing at the Mudd Club in 1979. Credit Nicholas Taylor The downtown scene was a famously antic fusion of emergent art trends, street style, graffiti, trendsetting nightspots like the Mudd Club and Area, and upstart musical genres like New Wave and hip-hop. Its flourishing took place against a wider backdrop of MTV, sampling, scratching, semiotics and postmodernist theory; a time when the creation and dissemination of culture seemed an increasingly fluid, boundary-free process. “It was all merging,” Ms. Adler said. For Basquiat, “it was a period of discovery.” "I wanna go back," by Gray. Video by BLASPHEMER4711 The multifaceted nature of the scene gave Basquiat license to crisscross artistic forms on the way to developing his own style. He performed poetry onstage and produced the a mesmeric hip-hop “Beat Bop,” by the graffiti artist Rammellzee and the rapper K-Rob, that remains a genre classic. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story In the band Gray, he played the synthesizer and the clarinet, and made Steve Reich-style sound experiments, looping snatches of audio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The group performed only sporadically but drew admirers including Mr. Byrne and the hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy. An Interview Magazine review described them as “an easy listening bebop industrial sound effects lounge ensemble.” Basquiat pulled out of Gray in 1981, when painting started to command his attention in a serious way. But music still remained a significant marker of his creative achievement. David Bowie, writing after Basquiat’s death, hailed him as a kindred spirit whose sensibility belonged as much to rock as to art. “His work relates to rock in ways that very few other visual artists get near,” the musician noted. “He seemed to digest the frenetic flow of passing image and experience, put them through some kind of internal reorganization and dress the canvas with this resultant network of chance.” Basquiat himself was less forthcoming. “I don’t know how to describe my work,” he once reflected. “It’s like asking Miles, ‘How does your horn sound?’” A version of this article appears in print on September 23, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Name That Tune. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe Continue reading the main story

[vishgt]

151115 | Musings of a Time Collector

Chapter 1: Prologue  There is this vivid memory of a younger self, standing on his toes, peering over a hot metal railing, scanning the slow-moving traffic underneath. The bass drone of our window AC perched inside the balcony drowned a rich and colourful soundscape that an eight year old would have otherwise been doused in. Engulfed in warm, comforting air expelled by the machine, I now recall that moment as my first memory of being “lost”. “Lost” to me, unlike its popular connotation, was a moment I felt thoroughly dissolved in, paying little attention to any subject or emotion. Everything I recall and bring to focus today, like Virginia Woolf once wrote, is an expansion of raw data collected at that moment – a product of being truly ‘out of focus’. “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” — Virginia Woolf

It is the present that we shrink with our conceptions that fails to expand in the future. This is perhaps why I recall, more vividly and intensely, a meaningless minute on a sultry balcony than, say, a much celebrated and documented birthday party.

Several summers later, I found myself in a similar sensorial nonchalance, bouncing on the back seat of a bus bolting down a tattered highway. Briefly reflecting upon my past as a whole, it was alarming how little of it I was able to recall as pure time. How little of it I had lived out of focus, untouched by my impressions and prejudices. The mind had selectively narrowed, expanded and distorted time into convenient editions of a raw and awkward past. Something about this threw me off my seat; way further than any pothole could have that afternoon.

I wondered if the universe maintained a record of its happenings, unadulterated by the very elements that constituted it? A CCTV that recorded all of time, the way religion speaks of a book in which all is written. Where might one find access to such a book?  A memory bank that preserved every moment of time as it was. Realising such spurious speculation was to lead me nowhere; I took matters into my own hands. At that very moment I pulled out my camera, a 3.2-megapixel digital artefact and started laying the foundation for a peculiar library.

The concept of collecting, quantifying and storing time was peculiar at first. My first thoughts were towards building something as versatile as the music library on an iPod, scrolling on its click wheel; effortlessly flipping between different time periods in an instant. The efforts to document were crude and desperate at first. It didn’t matter. The aim was to collect time as information; data that would stay consistent whenever recalled.

PRAXIS

Unaccustomed to the camera’s presence, the lens upfront wasn’t a pleasant sight to most I encountered. Like a puppet in the hands of a ventriloquist, the artefact cultivated a persona of its own. A silent spectator passively liaising with a community uncertain of a newcomer’s behaviour. Taking advantage of this, I concealed the device whenever possible, holding it at waist height or stationing it close by; the purpose being to add an extra pair of eyes from a third perspective. My hand in the process evolved into some form of bionic hybrid that grew unaware of this plastic projection.

While many didn’t mind, a few found it absurd. This unease was coupled with frequent efforts to smash the camera to smithereens.  Moments where the device was welcome, such as ‘memorable events’ were easier to document while thrusting the lens in avenues not perceived before such as a locker room or personal confrontation received severe backlash.

Meanwhile behind the lens, conscious of my words and actions, I was beginning to grow stiff and uncomfortable. In an effort to reduce this resistance and document moments candidly, I briefly used hidden microphones that were turned on throughout the day, with the hope that I might grow unconscious of their presence with time. To the contrary, for reasons not too hard to understand, this hidden accessory drove me paranoid.

Apart from recorded data, one of the few triggers that did prove useful in recollecting a moment was music. Over the period of a week I would only listen to one music album or distinct playlist and switch to something absolutely different once the week was over, essentially using those songs as a subconscious bookmark for that time period. So in the future, much like Marcel Proust’s tea soaked madeleine, a song would in a very abstract and involuntary way, remind me of the week it was played in. Unanticipated details, people and activities rushed to the mind with surprising accuracy.

REMORSE

By virtue of being inanimate, food on my plate was one of the few subjects that presented little resistance to the camera. Every meal was offered to the hovering lens; which ritualistically devoured the meal in one chiming fraction of a second. An activity I never anticipated years later to trend on social media.

After the first month or so, merely looking at pictures of food had little impact on my capacity to recall flavour. Like research and experience suggested, it was a mélange of taste and smell that constructed the complete flavour of food. Both of which were hard to retain or code as data. Taking the phrase rather literally, I even attempted to freeze a few food samples. Most of which to my dismay grew stale and had very few traces of their aroma when re-heated.

Although seemingly effortless, these daily encounters with food were perhaps the hardest to get past. During the first year, overcome by an unusual remorse and feeling of helplessness, I was unable to eat the meal laid out before me. I caught deep whiffs of the aroma, admired it like a painting, took several photographs and left it alone.

REPRIEVE

Over the span of three years (Feb 2008 – 11), with an arsenal of five digital cameras (three compact and two SLR), six lenses, two phones, one microphone, nineteen memory cards, I had collected a few terabytes of raw footage, archived meticulously by time and subject, in several hard drives.

Despite being an emotional trip from the beginning, as the volumes grew, there were a few attempts to transform the stash into a meaningful and accessible body of work. One such noteworthy attempt was to build a virtual 3D environment with access to any piece of time that I was part of, the way a character in a game would explore and unlock levels. The idea was to not only map the recorded data linearly but also with other inherent data it carried; such as people and location. The data intensive project could unfortunately not be completed due to the evident shortcomings of a primitive internet.

Towards the latter half of the process however, I was beginning to sense loss, an incomprehensible form of it. Not quite aware of the cause, there was an acute discomfort when I looked through the viewfinder. My senses had perhaps involuntarily shut down. In spite of participating actively (with great difficulty), I was being dragged through every task and experience like a body hanging limp.  Aware of the physical backup, I believe my brain had started shelving memories carelessly, if not shut down the whole memory itself.

Then one evening, as abruptly as I had begun the journey, I stopped. The alarm had been set off. For the first time in three years, I stepped out without an electronic appendage. Running alongside the edges of a lake, my feet striking the cool damp earth, I realised I hadn’t any shoes on and more importantly; I had broken free of the shackles, rather theatrically.  

Months later, I made feeble attempts to take a step back and understand this journey, the mechanism of mind and memory, forcing my behaviours and experiences to match researched archetypes. I was only left with bits and pieces of a futile post-mortem that hoped to justify the several hard drives gathering dust at home. Having seldom browsed through this footage up until recently, some believe I may have in reality ‘lived’ very little of those three years and perhaps actually now have the opportunity to re-live them, not once again, but for the first time.

Originally published in the Carton magazine, November 2015

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: As Palestinian #DignityStrike Passes One-Month Mark, New York Artists Illuminate the Struggle

Poster of artist contributions to the Dignity Strike after 30 days, designed by Kyle Goen/Decolonize This Place, “Tadamoun” (2017) (all images courtesy Decolonize This Place unless otherwise noted)

Today, the historic hunger strike by 1,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails reaches its 31-day mark, coinciding with the commemoration on Monday of the 69th anniversary of the Nakba (disaster), the name given to the violent displacement of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes that accompanied the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. As Vijay Prashad has recently pointed out, the Palestinian hunger strike has now gone on longer than than the famous strikes of Gandhi during the Indian independence struggle (the longest of which lasted 21 days). Despite media offensives against the strike by Israel and punitive acts of  psychological warfare against the strikers themselves, the prisoner’s movement appears steadfast in pressing their immediate demands concerning issues like visitation rights, legal services, and administrative detention. Yet beyond prison walls, the strike has also had the effect of galvanizing Palestinian civil society across sectarian divides, with imprisonment itself being taken up as a metaphor for the condition of all Palestinians living under a colonial occupation that is widely seen as being facilitated by the Palestinian Authority itself. Mobilizations of all kinds are taking place across the West Bank and Gaza, raising the specter of a new intifada. Hunger strikes are being undertaken by the mothers of several prisoners; solidarity tents have sprung up throughout cities as hubs of information, organizing, and mutual aid; boycotts, strikes, rallies, and marches are happening constantly, intensifying on “days of rage” that have seen clashes with settlers and the IDF (during which 20-year old Saba Nidal Obaid was killed by soldiers last week). Woven throughout all of the above has been a proliferation of art forms — installations, posters, chants, music, and performative actions of all kinds, like the couple who recently were married inside a make-shift jail cell erected at one of the solidarity camps — that are in turn re-mediated through global solidarity networks as photographs, videos, and memes (such as the “salt water challenge“) via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Decolonize This Place/Illuminator projection, New York City Hall, on Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Political action, the making of art, and the intersection of the two can involve many senses of time, from rapid-response tactics measured in hours, to drawn-out campaigns over the course of years and generations. These must be woven together at different scales, rhythms, and horizons to remain both flexible and enduring in the face of deep-seated structures of oppression.

The question of time imposes itself with special intensity in the case of Visibility Sustains the Struggle, a participatory initiative launched last month by the artist-organizers of Decolonize This Place in solidarity with the hunger strike and the Palestinian freedom movement more generally.

Working in-between the streets and social media platforms over the past month, Visibility Sustains the Struggle has involved an open invitation to artists and activists around the world to submit videos, images, writings, songs, and actions to a circulating archive of that continues to grow as the strike enters its second month.

Among the images adopted by those supporting the strike both in Palestine and across the world is a row of hand-drawn tally marks, organized into groups of five with the fifth mark as a diagonal strike. This simple image hauntingly evokes the walls of a prison cell and the most elementary form of marking the time of incarceration: one day after another, a testimony to the both misery of imprisonment, but also a persistent will to endure. Since the strike commenced on April 17th, a single mark has been added to the image every day, an indicator of both determination but also the ever-inscreasing physical debilitation of the prisoners themselves (over the past week, 76 strikers have been hospitalized, and Israel has still shown no willingness to negotiate).

Decolonize This Place/Illuminator projection at building housing the offices of Artis, May 9, 2017

With the major exception of an editorial published in the New York Times on the first day of the strike by Marwan Barghouti — which pro-Israeli media monitors forced the paper to retroactively qualify with a Zionist version of Barghouti’s biography, which characterized him as a terrorist — the strike has been largely ignored by liberal US media, whose track record on Palestine is dubious to the say the least to begin with. In turn, despite the historic nature of the strike and its potential ramifications for the region, it has barely registered among most self-described progressive activists and intellectuals in the US, for whom Palestine continues to either be politically remote or a point of explicit discomfort and reaction (hence the acronym PEP — progressive except Palestine).

Shining through this media blackout, it was quite remarkable to witness last Tuesday, May 9th evening the iconic tally-marks of the prisoners’ movement projected by the Illuminator at a gigantic scale on buildings throughout Manhattan, transposing  the wall of the prison cell to a network of sites involved in variously funding, supporting, and whitewashing Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism. These included the New York headquarters of Leumi Bank, the Israeli Development Bank, the pro-Israel arts nonprofit Artis, and finally City Hall, where liberal councilmembers and indeed the mayor himself have consistently taken every opportunity to blindly lend unwavering moral and political support to Israel. An especially powerful projection was that aimed at the neo-classical facade of City Hall (a structure, it should be remembered, that was built using slave labor in the early nineteenth century on stolen Native American land). Here, the row of rough hewn tally-marks were set off like prison bars against the soaring verticality of the Corinthian columns and the timeless values of democracy they are meant to communicate. Bringing the occupation home, the building was thus transformed into what Illuminator operator Kyle Depew calls a temporary “counter-monument” to Palestinian resistance, one that now survives and circulates as a media image within the larger assemblage of the campaign.

Images of Dignity Strike-related protest in the West Bank city of Ramallah

In each of its iterations, the tally-marks were supplemented with the phrase “Dignity Strike,” which has also been the primary hashtag of the Visibility Sustains the Struggle initiative. As artist and organizer Amin Husain explains, “Hunger strike is the tactic and the immediate demands concerning the conditions of the prisoners are quite precise; but the prisoners movement has continuously emphasized that it is dignity and freedom of all Palestinians that are at stake. This strike has broad ramifications at a moment when Oslo and the two-state solution are dead, the resistance is jailed, neoliberalism runs rampant, and the PA is a petty-bourgeois adjunct to the occupation in the manner identified by Frantz Fanon long ago. Israel is intent on showing that resistance is futile, that Palestinians must roll over and accept their fate. The prisoners and their bodies are at the threshold of this attack on the Palestinian capacity to resist at all.”

It is seen against this background that the specific demands of the strike such as an end to administrative detention and solitary confinement, improved visitation and communication rights (including the simple right to physically touch family members), and expanded access to legal, medical, and education services ultimately take on the status of a more general assertion of human dignity that is radically defiant to the psychological warfare that is essential to the occupation overall.

(Top) Demonstration in Ramallah, May 5, 2017; (Bottom) Graffitti in Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem.

Along with the tally-marks, other graphics and messages were projected as well over the course of this psychogeographic mapping of the city, each dynamically interacting site-specifically with the various architectural surfaces in a manner recalling the Illuminator’s art-historical predecessor, Kyrzytof Wodiszcko. In one graphic, the lower half of a man’s face with its mouth bound shut (an icon widely used by the prisoner’s movement) is projected in such a way as to uncannily anthropomorphize the facade of the building itself; in another, a silhouetted outline of Palestine appears bisected by the shape of a contracted stomach, thus transforming the territory into a kind of collective national body. In yet another, the movement declaration “Our Chains Will Be Broken Before We Are” projected in white against a vertical black rectangle decorated at either end by the latticework of the Palestinian keffiyeh. This image brought to architectural scale a sticker with the same design that has been appearing on surfaces throughout the city for the past month, and the same motif was also used in an actual 25-foot Dignity Strike banner unfurled by demonstrators at the various sites alongside the projections. The aesthetics of the banner echoed those designed by the Direct Action Front For Palestine over the past few years, including a series of 11 Black Lives Matter banners deployed during protests following the failure to indict the NYPD murderer of Eric Garner (11 alluding to the number of times Garner uttered “I Can’t Breathe” as he was choked to death).

“Decolonize this Place” stenciled on the West Bank Barrier (aka Apartheid wall) in Bethlehem

This was but one connection between the #dignitystrike projections and the broader network of artists and organizers that developed under the rubric of Decolonize This Place over the past year, including the three-month residency at the alternative arts venue Artists Space last fall. More than a show of political art, Decolonize this Place transformed the gallery into a round-the-clock movement hub facilitating linkages between struggles including de-gentrification, global wage workers, Black liberation, Standing Rock, Puerto Rican debt-resistance, and Free Palestine, among others. Palestine has been essential part of the work of Decolonize This Place. As Kyle Goen — an artist involved in creating much of the graphic repertoire for the project — explains, “Far from an isolated and remote struggle, the occupation of Palestine and the movement against it bears deep affinities with decolonial movements in the United States, from the water protectors of Standing Rock to the anti-displacement activists in Bronx.” These were among the places that were name-checked in the projections on Tuesday night, reminding us that the grammatical shifter “this” in “Decolonize This Place” is an mobile imperative linking together different sites and histories depending on where it is uttered.

As photographer and organizer Andres Rodriguez of the Comite Boricua en la Disapora put it while documenting the projections on Tuesday, “The Palestinian and Puerto Rican struggles are both anchored in an acknowledgment of settler colonialism, in our case for hundreds of years: domination through monopolizing violence, illegal debts and economic extraction, criminalizing resistance: in such shared conditions we find the bases of potential unity and collective liberation as oppressed peoples. Even through small acts of resistance and solidarity we build our self-determination and preserve our dignity.”

Young men gather after the funeral of Saba Nidal Obaid in Nabi Saleh, North of Ramallah, May 12

Also on site was filmmaker Aiko Maya Roudette, who added, “In the United States we are all implicated in a toxic relationship between the white supremacist settler-colonial power within which we live, and that of Israel — a relationship which has already grown stronger with Trump, who is set to make his first visit to Israel in two weeks.” This point was implicitly driven home in the Tuesday projections as well when the phrase  “Financing Fascism” appeared between US and Israeli flags flanking the entrance to the Bank of Israel in midtown, challenging the comfortable use of the term “fascism” by many PEPs when describing Trump while ignoring the ethnocidal project of one of the US’ closest military allies.

This complicity is as true in the art system as it is in US society more broadly. Among the actions undertaken in the fall by Decolonize this Place was a campaign targeting Artis, the non-profit arts organization that works to promote Brand Israel in the United States, effectively artwashing the Occupation. Artis makes a point of refusing direct funding from Israeli government, thus putting it technically beyond the purview of the BDS movement even as it still happily does the job of forging connections and legitimacy between the global art scene and Israel.

Solidarity banner by striking Puerto Rican students, May 5, 2017 (Image courtesy of Comite Boricua En La Diaspora)

It was thus especially significant that Visibility Sustains the Struggle returned on Tuesday night to the offices of Artis, now reciprocally reframing the earlier action in light of the Dignity Strike and vice-versa. On the one hand, this demonstrated that the meta-demand for Palestinian dignity was always already at stake in the BDS action, and that BDS per se is “the floor not the ceiling” as signs at the action had announced, a limited tactic rather than a goal in of itself. On the other hand, it also reminded us that BDS remains one of the few concrete tools available to people in the US for effectively increasing the economic and moral costs for Israel of the occupation.

Whether in Northern Ireland, South Africa, or the United States, prison hunger strikes use the most elemental weapon available to prisoners — control over their own bodies — to interrupt business as usual in the carceral system. The tactic forces jailers into a decision dilemma in which they have no good options. In some cases this means the jailers being forced into negotiations, while in others it results in even more brutal measures against strikers, such as force-feeding (a technique currently being considered by Israel, despite a refusal to comply by doctors), or, in extreme cases, allowing prisoners to expire — an option that Israel has indeed overtly invoked in the past. In any event, the determination of the prisoners — and the calculus of the jailers — is deeply impacted by the extent to which the strike is seen and heard beyond prison walls.

Decolonize This Place/Illuminator projections, Leumi Bank and Israeli Development Bank, Midtown Manhattan, May 9, 2017

A sense of helplessness or even anesthesia can easily set in when we consider the monolithic support of Israel by even our supposedly progressive representatives like New York Mayor de Blasio and US Senator Bernie Sanders, not to mention Israel’s longstanding imperviousness to international censure. Were projections like those on Tuesday night feel-good but otherwise futile gestures of solidarity? No, says Marz Saffore of Decolonize This Place, who has been working to coordinate the expansive social media campaign over the past month including videos, images, writings, and and actions contributed by artists and activists all over the world.  “With Visibility Sustains the Struggle, we are operating in a time-horizon of decolonization, with art understood as a training in the practice of freedom that takes place over years and decades,” Saffore says. “Each action, each image, each strike, each relationship built in turns creates space and time for further movement in undoing the entrenched systems of white supremacy and settler-colonialism. Visibility Sustains the Struggle is first a foremost a contribution to the global upsurge in support and visibility for the hunger strikers; but it is also a call to recognize the essential importance of prisoner’s struggles around the world, including those of black freedom movement in the United States. This initiative concerns Palestine, and by extension, how we organize here and what is at stake in our own day-to-day work of liberation. The Palestinian and Black struggles are not only structurally linked, but they require one another to flourish.”

Day after day, the tally-marks of the Dignity Strike banner will continue to grow — until they stop. How and when those marks come to a stop will depend, in part, of the extent to which the spiritual resolve and bodily endurance of the strikers continue to reach the eyes and ears of the world. However things unfold, images like those produced on Tuesday and within the Visbility Sustains the Struggle intiative more broadly will testify to an unending struggle for dignity that cannot be contained by the shackles of prison or the fetters of occupation.

The post As Palestinian #DignityStrike Passes One-Month Mark, New York Artists Illuminate the Struggle appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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