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coffee-n-bagels-comic-universe · 4 years ago

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Inside Jokes and References in the Full Bios

Mainly for @spacelizardtrashboys and @kuruumiya

Also: Any time strikethrough text is used it's because it's meant to be secret information, for example on the small bios any time 'Lucifarian' truly isn't their last name their is strikethrough test after saying that it's not their real name. This is to say that no matter what is written or if it's strikethrough text or not, it is there for a reason.

Damien - Bio In-Jokes and References:

The Quote for him refers back to his 'King of Hell' gimmick, as does his middle name, Rex means king.

He's protective, like a dad, but also way too overprotective over the gimmicks for the girls. He's an old, old school guy so he enjoys card games with the boys.

He's supposed to sound like a young Hugh Laurie, mainly because if I heard a young Hugh Laurie say Damien's bio quote I wouldn't be able to take him seriously.

His main finisher (Seventh Circle) refers back to (a) him being the king of hell and (b) the seventh circle is for violence, and well, he's a wrestler, that's a pretty violent job.

He calls fans both 'peasants' and his 'loyal subjects' because he's like an asshole-ish king who'd quickly be dethroned if they rebelled.

Vickie - Bio In-Jokes and References:

The Quote for her refers back to her gimmick along with the old saying 'pride comes before the fall'.

She's called 'Victoria' because of both (a) it meaning victory and (b) the fact that Queen Victoria ruled back when Britain had an empire, then the empire fell (as in pride [Vickie] before a fall)

Both Her and Damien are born in August and are the only two to share a birth month as they are Father and Daughter (non-kayfabe, as in they share DNA)

She's raised Christian as back when she was growing up England was a lot more Christian than when she became an adult so she got lax in her beliefs

Her personality is supposed to make her come across as a vain, rich, arse of a person, yet deep down she's still redeemable, she's got a long way to go before she actually redeems herself though

She's the type of person who makes sure EVERY little detail of her matches and promos are PERFECT to the point that she will control what other people do or say, down to the moment it's said/done and the way it's said/done

She only likes the other D.O.D (Daughters of Darkness) members because she has only made enemies in the short while they've been in the company, she especially dislikes George 'The Animal' Steele because of his very messy style going against her 'everything should be perfect' views

She's the leader, the brain and the mouth because of her control over the group, if she let them have more control, there might be less arguments about her amount of control

Her named moves are also references to both her gimmick and other things. Beheader is named because of the Tudor monarchs of England having kind of a thing for killing people in this way (ex. Henry VIII).

Lineage Ender is named that because if she ever botches that one specific move (it'll make sense in context/ she does it during a training scene) it could end either her own Lineage or the person she's doing it to.

Lion's den is called that because she traps them in a near-inescapable crucifix pin, and normally if someone goes into a den of Lions, they aren't escaping in one piece.

Family Pride is named that because not only is her gimmick the sin of pride, but she's got pride in her family and she's her dad's 'pride and joy' because she's his only child.

Wish for this (her main finishing move) is called that because it's an inside joke of "you're gonna 'wish for this' to be over soon"

As she's Damien's blood daughter, a 'prodigal son' joke seemed somewhat appropriate.

Billie - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is a reference to the Guerreros and the whole 'Latin lover' trope

She was born in February because of Valentine's day, hence why her birthday is two days before the 14th

She's 1/2 Cuban (just in general - both Mexican and Cuban culture is interesting to me) But she's 1/2 Cuban in case I ever need to write for Razor Ramon, I can get away with making the joke of 'my Cuban accent's better than yours'.

Her casual style is 'Suggestive' because how else is Lust supposed to dress.

She dislikes Hulk Hogan because she finds him incredibly annoying and she dislikes Jesse Ventura because she dislikes his fashion choices.

I imagine her uncle Hugo looks like Luis Guzman and her dad's like Raul Julia. Try to imagine those two wrestling as a luchador tag team.

Her mother was basically a valet to her dad, which was usually Billie's role before she was part of the D.O.D.

Her move name references are all song references: Love me Tender - Elvis' song of the same name, Personal Aphrodite - a reference to / joke on 'Personal Jesus', Sexual Healing - Marvin Gaye's song of the same name.

Also, I hope to eventually use the joke 'The Babe, the babe with the power,' 'What power?' 'Power of voodoo' 'Who do?' 'You do' 'Do what?' 'Remind me of the babe' because of one of her commentary nicknames being 'The Babe'

P.G - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is in reference to her being greed and (right at the start of the story) her thoughts on money actually being able to buy her happiness

her surname 'Voronin' means crow, and well, crows like shiny things, like money

she wears 'fancy but simple' clothing because if she bought designer clothes she'd be in debt, but she still wants to look like she has more money than everyone else

she's cowardly in a Jimmy Hart way, she'll piss someone off during a promo and run away once she feels like she's in danger

she's a showman because she's more show than work, meaning she works exceptionally quick matches.

Her moves are basically jokes on the fact that she is greed, such as Gold-digger and Diamond Ring. However, Money Maker is also a joke on the fact that it's a facebuster and usually an actor's face is called their 'money maker'

She hates Hulk Hogan and Sgt slaughter because of how patriotic they are

Kirby - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is a reference to (a) the fact that she's Gluttony, (b) her being the only one who wears a mask constantly and (c) her basically being the group's scare tactic against people who think they can push them around.

I am planning on eventually making her a part of the machines, maybe as a valet, maybe as a wrestler, not 100% sure as of right now

Her mother is the Norwegian-Scottish one and her father is the Irish-Welsh one

She is the tallest (not the heaviest, that's Damien) but she's still 9 inches shorter than André.

She's willing to bleed hardway, but hates blading

She hates Big John Studd because of his disrespect, she hates Hulk Hogan because she thinks he's obnoxiously 'American', she dislikes Lord Alfred Hayes and Dynamite Kid because they are so insistent on calling her '1/4 Icelandic' whenever she talks about being 1/4 Norwegian. She hates Brutus Beefcake because he's just 'so, so much' energy-wise.

She's always been tall, always shorter than André though, she was 5'6" when she was 12, which is still taller than Sam, P.G and Eli.

Kirby's the best at using folk tales and mythology references in her promos and still keeping them dark and scary.

Her speaking voice is Jessica Hynes, but I imagine her singing voice (which will be important later) to be that of Deee-lite's Lady Miss Kier. On that note, I will be putting up a post on this part of the fic's canon.

Feeding Frenzy is meant to look similar to Roddy's wild punches, hence the 'frenzy' part of the name.

Organ grinder is named because it's meant to look really hard (like she's putting all her force and weight into it) as if she's grinding her opponents organs

Hungry for Blood is an in-joke of during her toughest matches she seems hungry to give the fans the sight of blood

Consummation is a joke of 'the match will soon be over, the match will soon be concluded, or consummated' not the sex-based meaning of that word.

Number of the beast, which is 666, is a reference to the 619, and is a modified 619 basically.

Vampire's Bite is a reference to her sitout jawbreaker looking like she could possibly bite someone's neck, like a vampire, as she performs the move

I didn't want to call her chops, chops, so I made a joke of 'oh it's chopping, like a butcher's knife'

Overfeeding is another basic gluttony reference. Cheshire Grin is a facelock-based joke. Let Them Eat Cake is a butt=cake joke

The ogress is a thinly-veiled way of the commentary team calling her ugly, because why else would she be the only one in a mask

Holly - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is written that way because I always wanted her to sound like she comes from New Jersey

She's very cuddly towards the rest of the D.O.D and thus gets called a teddy bear by the others

She's Pansexual because she doesn't care what your gender is, she loves people just being themselves

She's the only ginger because I've never seen a ginger wrestler from New Jersey

She was raised Catholic but lost her faith upon realising how bad gay people are treated by the church (Holly literally just goes "Y'all it is 1984, how are y'all gonna reject people based on who they love?")

Holly's very much the person who'll ask permission to cut a promo on someone but won't tell them how harsh she's going to be

She's the group's mom friend (mum friend?)

Before she started travelling with another member of the group (Holly travels with Sam a lot) she would accidentally no-show events

She does accidentally give incredibly stiff shots

Holly likes Gorilla Monsoon because their friendship is very much a weird pseudo-dad-daughter friendship, so basically, she's using him as her new dad

Her voice is Angie Harmon because I think Harmon sounds like a badass from New Jersey

Naptime, Dirt Nap and Lullaby are jokes of 'I'm gonna knock you out'

Eli - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is a joke of 'this is why she doesn't do a lot of promos'

She's the most likely to be on one of those 'too hot for TV' blooper reels from her promos

Both she and Sam hate people taller than them

Sam - Bio In-Jokes and References:

Her quote is a reference to the fact that her tattoos are her 'masterpiece'

she dresses athletically because she's always ready for a fight, especially because she's usually the one picking fights

She likes Lou because he's like a crazy uncle to her and she likes George Steele because, unlike Vickie, she likes the wild man side of his gimmick

She's voiced by Melissa Etheridge because she's still feminine but is the most masculine sounding

#Lucifarians #Wrestling Family #wrestling fic #original character

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smokeybrand · 3 years ago

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Mutiny

I’m not a fan of Joe Rogen. I find a lot of what he says to be problematic as f*ck but the way he says it, is FAR more damaging. Dude pushes some wild, dangerous, nonsense under the guise of “free speech”, disingenuous “debate”, and insidiously leading questions. Rogen is the Frat Boy version of Tucker Carlson in a lot of ways and that sh*t just doesn’t appeal to me. Beta males who think too highly of themselves listen to this due and take him seriously. These are people who are not self-actualized, who’s entire personality is based on their car or their sneakers or some other superficial bullsh*t they confuse for a personality, and that’s what Rogen’s entire show is; Superficial bullsh*t. So when he pushes dumb-f*ckery like “Don’t get the shot if you’re young and healthy”, these idiots who are either teenagers or have the mentality of teenagers, f*cking listen and we have a spike in cases. Because Joe Rogen said so.

The other day, this asshole bought into that whole “White Fear” sh*t, talking about how the Straight White Male is the most persecuted demo in America and i just groaned. This is the same exact sh*t Carlson does on his show, verbatim, just slightly less racist. It’s the current strategy of what is fast becoming the American Fascist Party, Republicans. It’s hypocritical f*cking nonsense and i hate it. How the f*ck would Joe Rogen, a Straight White Male with a whole ass podcast, be silenced or censored or persecuted/ He’s a multi-millionaire with one of the most popular platforms on f*cking Spotify. How the f*ck would any White person, especially Straight White Males, get silenced in the US? The bones of this country are built to uphold a very specific form of White Supremacy. Hell, cats talk about all these rights and liberties but, in the very beginning, those rights were only extended to White Male Landowners; basically Rich White Men, and guess who the f*ck Joe Rogen is? The constitution had to be amended to include every one else which means this country was designed to be a haven for objective White Supremacy. The fact that they replaced Straight with Rich is just a misnomer used to broaden that division and you have assholes with real audiences buying into that dangerous bullsh*t, disseminating that poison to their followers. And they just drink that persecution complex kool-aid, up. It’s f*cking absurd.

The irony in all of this is the fact that the country is getting younger and browner. Statistically, by the time Gen Z’s kids come of age, we’ll outnumber White people. The margin will be slight but they’ll be the overall minority in this country and that’s why we have all of this fear-mongering and treasonous tantrums. That system the Founding Fathers built to protect their power, is falling apart. It's all a matter of time. Why do you think they're fighting so hard to keep DC and Puerto Rico from becoming actual States? I can guarantee those cats who signed the Constitution never anticipated the influx of melanated people over the years, interbreeding with their lily White sensibilities, or the homogeneity desegregation would bring to society or the way Black culture ended up shaping the entire American zeitgeist or how the Internet just blew the doors off any illusion US citizens had about our true status in the world at large. I was born in 1984. Ten years before i existed, the South was still heavily segregated. My generation, the Millennials, were the very first to be completely free from the social consequences of the Civil Rights Movement. We were far enough removed from that to just see people, not race. I was exposed to so many more cultures, religions, and people, as a kid, than my ma had been when she was young. It wasn’t like, all of a sudden, we were singing kumbaya together, but it was definitely a start, one that has only gained more and more momentum as the Generations who came after mine, started coming of age in a world whose borders are just ceremonial at this point because of the Tech age.

I met my chick and made friends across the globe in a chatroom. One of my closest friends lives in New Zealand. Another stays in Finland. My birthday twin lives in England. She’s a year older than i am and has a beautiful family. My Puerto Rican sister met her dude around the same time i met my chick. He’s from Alabama. She moved from the island to be with him and they've settled down in Georgia where they share a beautiful daughter. My best friend became so close with an Asian girl from Australia, that he adopted her as his own sister. They spoke at least twice a week for the next fifteen years, all the way up until he passed away. The world is much smaller, much clearer, than it has ever been before, and it turns out that it’s full of color. Color these Straight White Men are, apparently, terrified of. That’s got to be it. That’s got to be why they’re throwing these big ass tantrums and constantly fear-mongering about it. I don’t understand. When Brie Larson said what she said, it was the truth. There are THOUSANDS of films about White dudes you can watch. The entirety of film history is Straight White Males. What is so bad abut getting some chicks or People of Color or some LBGTQ representation in a few leads? Why can't we have strong Black performances in movies where we don't play the “magical Negro” or f*cking Slave? Why can't we have an all Asian cast when the principals aren't constantly fetishized? What is so terrible about giving a role to a Muslim that isn't linked to some ridiculous terrorist trope? Who’s really offended by this and why are they so goddamn fervent about it? Straight White Males, bud.

It’s because their grip on the reins is slipping. The power and the privilege they’ve had for so long, too long, is started to tip in the other direction. The playing field is, ever so slowly, evening out and these Straight White Males are losing their sh*t. They’ll talk about “being racist against white people” and “it's fine to interview everyone but hire cats who are qualified” with one breath but then absolutely savage voting rights directly focused on crippling the Black vote and desperately cling to the idea that 45 still deserves to be president, even though a steady stream of his criminal incompetence has been flowing out of the the White House since he’s left. The level cognitive dissonance is f*cking hilarious. It’s as bad as the GOP complaining about “cancel culture” while literally silencing Liz Cheney. Are you f*cking kidding me? I gotta sit here and listen to a very vocal minority complain about the direction of the MCU because they’ve decided to add a plethora of female and POC roles going forward into Phase Four. They keep asking “who's this for?” and it's obvious it's for everyone, not just Straight White Males. That, to them, means it's going to be bad. Just because the focus has shifted from three White dudes in leading roles, suddenly the MCU has lost it's way. It’s like, all of a sudden, just because the MCU wants to represent their audience as a whole, not just a narrow and shrinking part of it, we’re not supposed to trust in Feige anymore. Are you kidding me? The Green Knight is slated to be another massive hit for A24. The cat who wrote that film was bounced from studio to studio because he created that story specifically as a vehicle for Dev Patel and no major studio wanted to make it with him in the lead. Dev Patel is a f*cking Oscar winner and a brilliant actor but this movie, draped in surreal and beautiful imagery, driven by a visceral, bloody, focus, wasn’t going to get made because the lead this plot was specifically written for, happens to be brown. But Straight White Males are the ones being silenced? Okay, bud.

Joe Rogen is a symptom of a greater problem and it’s the problem of White Fragility. White Fragility fuels the worst of our society. It's the genesis of racism and bigotry. It drives Nationalism and is fertile ground for cults of personality which blossom into whole ass dictatorships. These motherf*ckers are in they’re feelings and will burn this country to the ground if it means they will stop getting their way. Brie Larson calls out the ridiculousness of the race bias in Hollywood? They attack. Arizona flips Blue because Indigenous people and Black folks come out to vote in droves? Voter fraud and four recounts, one months after the election has been called and Biden has already taken office. Jordan Peele says, out loud, to the entire country, that he’s not interested in telling stories with White people in the lead? Shadow banned from Hollywood. Dude was the toast of Hollywood after Get Out and Us. He said what he said and cat's been trapped behind the camera as a Producer ever since. It’s nuts because these people complaining about how hard it is to be and how unfair the current social climate is to Straight White Males, have called Twatter NPCs whiny, SJW, children, for years. Bro,you’re the same, just racist! You are the Trump to their Obama. You are the thermodynamic reaction to their Civil action. You assholes are arguing the same merit, just on the opposite ends of the spectrum so, if they’re whiny assholes, wouldn’t you have to be, too? The only difference is that the Twatter assholes have a zeal for inclusion while you Rogen Bros have a penchant for White Supremacy and, given the choice, I'd have to agree with the Blue Checkmarks in this regard.

Straight White Males have had the run of this country since before it was a country and look what they’ve done with it. Look where we are, right now, in the year of our lord, 2021. This is as far as we have come under their stewardship. It’s time for a new captain, i think. Sorry if that hard truth hurts your feelings. Now please steer us away from those very obvious rocks. I’d rather not violently crash into that reef and sink into a watery grave before we can get our hands on the wheel to right this ship, all because you assholes are in your feelings, thank you.

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thesethingsofours · 4 years ago

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Nina Simone, Duende & Pastel Blues

Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues is a true embodiment of duende — the rare depth and darkness that impels her work.

1969 © Jack Robinson / Hulton Archive

Her distinctive warble permeates thousands of movie soundtracks, hip hop samples and advertisements, let alone the countless personal moments by which people demarcate their lives. This omnipresence allows us to forget who Nina Simone was, and the outright value of her music. For the streaming generation, knowledge of such an artist is limited to “top hits”; on some Spotify, Sunday Mood playlist. Or worse, the songs will only wriggle into the brain from various attempts to sell Coca-Cola, Seat Atecas, Renault Clios, Volvo XC90s, Fords, Apple Watches, Chanel №5, Warehouse discount clothes, Virgin Flights, HTC Phones, Jockey underwear and Behr Paint.

Most egregious among these is the Muller Light yoghurt advert, inescapable for anyone sentient in early 2000s UK. It uses her 1968 song I Ain’t Got No, I Got Life, but only the second, I Got Life half; carving it off entirely from its I Ain’t Got No essence. In its truncated form, the song sounds like a free-wheeling celebration of life and limb: Got my hair, got my head / Got my brains, got my ears / Got my eyes, got my nose / Got my mouth, I got my smile. Yet the missing section is a lengthy condemnation of segregated American society, where disenfranchised black people had been given nothing to cling to: Ain’t got no mother, ain’t got no culture / Ain’t got no friends, ain’t got no schoolin’ / Ain’t got no love, ain’t got no name /…Ain’t got no god / Hey, what have I got? / Why am I alive, anyway?

Yes, the song contains positivity in tune and verse, but stripping the darkness from Simone’s work also strips away its incandescent light. It would be like taking Rodin’s Gates of Hell and shrouding everything except the seemingly peaceful thinker at the centre; or cutting the lightbulb from the top of Picasso’s Guernica and presenting it as a bright, merry, representative segment. Or a millionaire DJ taking Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech and turning it into a dance track during race protests and a global pandemic. But surely not even David Guetta would do that.

The reduction of such a deliberate and profound artist to commercialised snippets is saddening. In Simone’s case this is particularly true because of the highly unusual, powerful darkness that clutches her music. She has something rare. In Spanish, it is known as duende.

Duende

Rooted in Iberian cultures, duende derives from “duen de casa”, meaning “possessor of a house”. Originally the superstition of a dark, goblin-like spirit, it is now the concept of impassioned, death-endorsing, creative invention; typically associated with the performative aspects of Flamenco. In that context, poet and playwright Federico García Lorca describes its contemporary meaning (in his 1933 Buenos Aries lecture, Theory and Play of the Duende), as the “buried spirit of saddened Spain”.

As a guitar maestro explained to him, “the duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet”. Lorca quotes others, one, after listening to Paganini’s violin, identified it as, “a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained”; or another, upon hearing Manuel de Falla perform Nocturno, proposed that, “all that has dark sounds has duende”. In Lorca’s own words:

For every man, every artist called Nietzsche or Cézanne, every step that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of the struggle that he undergoes with his duende. Not with an angel, as is often said, nor with his Muse…

…With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work.

Nina Simone embodies duende.

1968 © Hulton Archive

It exists not only within her more explicit protest songs, born of the Civil Rights movement, but is present in everything she did — a ferocity, fragility, sadness and authenticity that claws its way up her throat and flings itself from her open mouth. It’s an otherworldly channelling of something very few can access, but which audiences pray to feel. With music so steeped in darkness, using it to gleefully sell products is a comedy — a joke on the shamelessness naivety of consumers and marketeers — as well as a tragedy.

A Brief History

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 and raised in Jim Crow-era North Carolina, Simone was ambitiously desirous of becoming a concert pianist — an uncommon career path for a young black girl at the time. Despite obtaining the ability to do so, she was instead funnelled into performing a mixture of jazz, gospel, soul and folk. And blues, in every shade. Her voice — ostensibly untrained — was burnished in the fire of necessity: if she wanted to earn money in the clubs, she had to sing as well as play piano. She electrified audiences, but remained persistently dissatisfied with how she was received and perceived:

It’s only normal to want acceptance from one’s own country for one’s gifts God has given you. I’m tired of begging for it. It took me 20 years of playing in clubs, in nightclubs, on the concert stage doing all these records to get a decent, real accurate review of my gifts by the New York Times… It was the first time I had been compared to Maria Callas as a diva. All before that I had been labelled a jazz singer, a blues singer, High Priestess of Soul, which… I am not sure what that is. I have studied piano 18 years! So yes I’m tired. I’m too old to keep asking for love from the industry. (Nina Simone, 1984)

Elevated by activists and aficionados alike, yet shunned by the industry at the height of her popularity after vigorously speaking out for black rights (see: Mississippi Goddam), she evolved as an artist in parallel with the revolution of television; first appearing in grainy monochrome and then in saturated technicolour. In the 12-year period between 1959 and 1971, she released 16 studio albums. In the years that followed, before her death in 2003, she released just four more.

Pastel Blues

These days, the idea of albums is virtually defunct, Drakefied to an incoherent heap of songs occasionally “dropped” like laundry, to be worn or discarded at the listeners behest. But as with other great artists, if the extent of Simone’s depth and duende is to be appreciated, it is essential to listen to her albums — the home of her authorship.

Pastel Blues is a nine track, 36-minute LP, mainly of covers and blues standards. It was released in October 1965, eight months after Malcolm X was assassinated, seven months after Bloody Sunday in Selma, and two months after the Voting Rights Act became law. Arguably, it arrived at the height of the movement. Nina Simone was 32. Just imagine.

Although the title suggests something soft and light, underneath the label, the substance is preternatural. As you listen, watch the image on the cover transform from a gentle gaze into a pointed glare; a stare in stereo. Altogether, it is a marvellous enunciation of Nina Simone’s darkness, with which she writhed in body, mind, and soul to give us some of the most memorable artworks of the 20th century. Pastel Blues gives her duende its due.

Listen to Pastel Blues on Apple Music

Listen to Pastel Blues on Spotify (1965 Live Version)

Listen to Pastel Blues on YouTube

Track-By-Track

Be My Husband

It opens with Be My Husband, featuring lyrics incidentally written by Simone’s own husband (and manager), Andrew Stroud. Slightly off-kilter, echoey, four-beat stamping and clapping, heightened by the tight splash of a high-hat, introduces a languid, yet driving pace. With purity of purpose, Simone’s voice drawls intensely into her opening repeated demand: Be my husband and I’ll be your wife / Love and honour you the rest of your life.

It suggests a woman pleading for the hand of her lover, committing to do all he would expect of a wife: If you want me to cook and sew / Outside of you there is no place to go. In return, she asks him only to curb his wandering eye: Stick the promise man you made me / That you stay away from Rosalie, yeah. This is presumably the intended (somewhat biased) perspective of the lyricist. But the way Simone sings it, with improvised shrieks dropping into deep, bassy groans, something quite different is suggested.

Nina Simone & Andrew Stroud, photographer unknown.

At this point, Simone was four years into an emotionally and physically abusive marriage with Stroud. Knowing this, it has far more resonance to picture her in a kitchen, staring down a boorish, unsatisfactory, and unsatisfying man; stomping on a linoleum floor, and throwing him a powerful, sacred ultimatum — give me what you promised. To imagine it otherwise is to imagine how Ed Sheeran might perform it — with the frivolousness of a millennial wedding on a sunny day in Surrey, and all the stamping, clapping vigour of a gaggle of giggling, inebriated aunts.

Furthermore, Be My Husband is effectively a re-worked chain gang song from the segregated south — a version of Rosie by the Inmates of Parchman Farm Penitentiary recorded in 1947 Mississippi by ethnomusicologist, Alan Lomax (and notoriously sampled by… well, well, well… hello again, David Guetta). The original lyrics ring out: Be my woman, gal, I’ll be your man… Stick to the promise girl that you made me / Won’t got married til’ I go free. Even aside from Simone’s interpretation, its genesis as a song of imprisonment immediately gives it a grimmer tone.

Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out

As it bows to track two, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, the heavy opening of the album is extended. A blues standard written in 1923, it was popularised by Bessie Smith’s 1929 recording and re-introduced to a new audience by Eric Clapton, who performed it throughout his career. Sam Cooke, Otis Reading, Janis Joplin, Bobby Womack, John Lennon, Derek and the Dominos and Duane & Gregg Allman all put their spin on it, with wildly varying degrees of quality, duende and notoriety.

It begins deceptively upbeat: Well once I lived the life of a millionaire / spending my money I didn’t care / Taking my friends out for a mighty good time. Simone’s version is no different as she lightly pads major key piano chords, but what immediately sets her rendition apart is the tremble in her voice. It sounds like she is singing through tears, not least when the song reaches its sobering bridge: Nobody wants you / Nobody needs you.

In Simone’s case, the song became painfully prescient. Following her fall from grace within the music industry, she left for Barbados in 1970, where she had an affair with then Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. Her subsequent divorce from Stroud limited access to her income, which he, as her manager, controlled. Also, due to an arrest warrant for taxes she withheld in protest at the Vietnam War, Simone was unable to return to the US, so ended up first in Liberia, then living across Europe. With little money to live from and few relationships to speak of, for a time, she came to epitomise the song.

End of the Line

The first fully original song on the album, End of the Line is initially carried by another deception of positiveness, this time through its melody; romantic and light despite the lyrics: This is the end of the line / I’ve clearly read every sign / The way you glance at me / Indifferently / And take your hand from mine. Such is the flowing nostalgia of the tune, it is plausible to imagine the same song with all words made positive (e.g. The way you glance at me / So happily / And place your hand in mine).

Divisible into two parts, the first has the feel of Simone sipping a martini in a Rogers & Hammerstein bar (perhaps offering some musical theatrical hope of salvation). The second, however, gives way to resigned sorrow, over a steady, rumba beat. Aside from showcasing Simone’s prodigious classical piano-playing ability — albeit only through twinkling, floral runs — the richness of her vocal tone spills forth, smoothly and lusciously, particularly in the second half. While lyrically it lacks the forcefulness of other tracks, its simplicity opens the door to Simone’s abundant musicality.

Trouble in Mind

Written in 1924, Trouble in Mind is another blues standard, but given its title, after three tracks of despair, it surprisingly brings a degree of levity.

The original lyrics (as sung by Dinah Washington, Janis Joplin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ella Fitzgerald, Marianne Faithful, Johnny Cash and original recording artist Thelma La Vizzo) are far darker than this version. Typically, the singer, wrestling with the irrepressible demons of their psyche, contemplates suicide by train: I’m gonna lay my head / On some lonesome railroad line / Let the 2:19 train / Ease my troubled mind. Yet on Pastel Blues, it never gets that far.

While refrain of the song always concludes: I won’t be blue always / ‘Cause the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday, Simone’s version leans more heavily on those lyrics than others’ versions; giving it a more hopeful perspective. She also dresses the music with a quicker, cheerier pace. Furthermore, instead of seeking the certainty and finality of a gruesome suicide, she resolves only that: I’m going down to the river / Gonna get me a rocking chair / If the Lord don’t help me / I’m gonna rock away from here.

Given she was be known to perform the full lyrics on other occasions, it is an interesting choice to uplift them on Pastel Blues. In terms of the album’s full narrative, however, it makes sense to offer a moment of optimism, keeping us on an undulating journey of emotion, rather than wallowing solely in melancholy.

Tell Me More and More and Then Some

The dynamic changes once again in Tell Me More and More and Then Some, as Simone hints towards her unapologetic, simmering, sexuality. Sex is known to have often enthralled her — as she wrote in her diary, “My attitude toward sex was that we should be having it all the time.”

Originally recorded in 1940 by Billie Holiday, Simone tweaks the lyrics to make the titular line more demanding, more desirous: I want more, more and then some. Accompanied by quivering, raunchy harmonica and clanging, insistent piano chords, Simone’s phrasing and emphasis draws lustfulness from the lyrics: You know how I love that stuff / Whisper from now on / To doomsday / But I never no no no no, ooh / I never, no I never, will get enough. It’s an erotic elaboration on Holiday’s already sultry interpretation, loading the request for whispered sweet nothings with a throbbing, sexual overtone.

Chilly Winds Don’t Blow

Chilly Winds Don’t Blow acts as a natural, also largely optimistic companion to Trouble in Mind, making Tell Me More and More and Then Some the bawdy, thick-cut meat between two, forward-looking slices of bread. That said, the song was previously released by Simone as single in 1959, as an even more upbeat spiritual, with denser orchestration and less of her signature vocal style.

On Pastel Blues, however, it is likely sung from a position of matured disappointment towards the unending hostility experienced by black Americans. With a sparser arrangement and greater vocal freedom, the new context is pointedly conveyed: There will be red roses round my door / I’m going where they’ll welcome me for sure, oh baby / Where the chilly winds, they don’t blow. Notably, as her piano rumbles, mimicking the sound of a rolling, cold wind, Simone also refers to her own maturity, as a woman. In this new version, she no longer wants to go where her father waits for her. Instead, it’s her daddy who will be waiting.

1968 © David Redfern

Ain’t No Use

Recorded in 1959 by Joe Williams and Count Basie, Ain’t No Use manifested as a break-up song. In that bright, brassy version, Williams croons at the opening: Ain’t no use of hanging round / Ain’t no use I put you down / There’s no love left / In my heart for you. In Simone’s rendition, the subject of the warning is much more ambiguous. When considered alongside Chilly Winds Don’t Blow and the tracks that follow, Simone instead implies a sense of exasperation, perhaps a desire to withdraw from broken American society, or the increasingly hostile music industry. She opens not with fallen love but accusation and fatigue: Ain’t no use baby / I’m leaving the scene / Ain’t no use baby / You’re too doggone mean / Yes I’m tired of paying dues / Having the blues / Hitting bad news.

To this point, Pastel Blues is a solid, often special, blues album, but here it really begins to soar; marking it apart. The underlying anguish of the blues is of course ingrained in the genre, but with Simone, her duende, fraught personal life, and civil rights activism, a dramatic narrative acceleration begins to emerge in the gap between Ain’t No Use and Strange Fruit (and again between Strange Fruit and Sinnerman). Without realising, tracks one to eight have been quietly coaxing you towards the edge of a cliff. The final two rip through you, forcing you over the edge before you can pull back. Amidst the silence between the songs, everything that preceded becomes re-contextualised with a deeper, darker tone. Embrace the fall.

Strange Fruit

The majesty of Strange Fruit is well documented — in 1999, Time named it the best song of the century. It was written by Abel Meeropol — a white, Jewish sometime Communist, and real-life MacGuffin, who intersects with numerous historically important features of 20th century America, but never appears at their forefront.

As a student and then teacher at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he crossed paths with a young James Baldwin and numerous other luminaries of American culture. After seeing a photograph of a lynching, he felt compelled to write; originally penning the words as an anti-lynching poem. Published in a teacher’s union publication, it concisely described the horror he had seen through the sinister metaphor of a seemingly innocuous fruit tree. He later set it to music and presented it to Billie Holiday, who recorded her socially and sonically remarkable version in 1937. In 1945, he gave up teaching to become a full-time songwriter under the pen name Lewis Allen (the first names of his two, tragically stillborn sons), most famously writing Frank Sinatra’s Oscar winning, patriotic short film and accompanying song, The House I Live in. Not only that, but in 1953 he adopted the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — a Jewish couple famously executed for spying on America for the Soviet Union.

Abel Meeropol with sons Michael and Robert Meeropol in 1954, via Robert Meeropol

As for the song itself, if Holiday’s recording is classical — a regretful, tender jazz lament — Simone’s is something more modern, more openly enraged; a cutting, resonant howl; transcending genre. The arrangement is minimal and masterful at once, with often dissonant piano chords treading like distressed steps through fallen leaves towards the horrifying tree at the agonising conclusion. It climaxes with a literal wail as the end nears: Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck / For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck / For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop / Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Its intensity lent itself perfectly to the sample on Kanye West’s scorching rebuke of destructive celebrity relationships, Blood On the Leaves.

Sinnerman

Simone’s Sinnerman is virtually unrecognisable from the first, folky version recorded by the Les Baxter Orchestra in 1956. Baxter adapted (read: plagiarised) the song from On the Judgement Day, by the Sensational Nightingales, which in turn takes elements from the 1924 No Hiding Place Down Here, by the Old South Quartette. But much like Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s similarly spiritual Hallelujah, Simone’s version remains, and will forever remain, the definitive iteration; the most copied, covered, celebrated and recognised; never bettered beyond that point.

As her Sinnerman evolves, it reveals the preceding short, eight tracks to have been little more than an (excellent) overture to this — the epic, operatic finale. At ten and a half minutes, it makes up nearly a third of the entire album. Brace yourself.

After the silent gap following Strange Fruit — another inhale between urgent roars — the first few bars are timeless, perhaps some of the most familiar notes ever recorded. Piano keys clamber over one another, skipping like a broken record. A foot taps out a light beat in the background. The percussion joins: a double-time, racing, hi-hat heart rate, yielding only to the occasional heavy, melodious thump of a double bass. Simone enters, Oh, Sinnerman, where you gonna run to? / Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

1967 © Tony Gale

After Strange Fruit, the question takes on new meaning. Picture Simone in a deep purple Cadillac Deville n hot pursuit of a fleeing lynch mob; hood down, foot down, brow furrowed, engine roaring, steering on the edge of control. This toying with tumbling gives the song its energy. Like running down a steep slope, with the slightest misstep, all would be lost. As the beats impatiently trip over the piano notes, it feels like it’s constantly accelerating; never settling into a regimented pace.

After erupting into a minute-long call and response of: Power!, Sinnerman changes gear. A jangling, twanging guitar breathes heavily in contemplation of the next charge. The music fades, leaving only intimidating clapping, until the piano returns most wonderfully with a couple of pleasingly apparent (yet well-intended) mistakes; three or four notes missed, misplaced, or hesitated over as the tune searches again for its order among the tumult. When found, it resurges with renewed purpose; Simone audibly hyperventilating in anxious anticipation: So I run to the river, it was boiling / I run to the sea, it was boiling / All on that day. Judgement Day has arrived, and the devil is everywhere.

(Should this masterpiece really ever be used to sell hatchbacks?)

It ends with a pleading prayer, agitated piano chords and chaotic drums: Don’t you know, I need you Lord?, Simone cries. Whether the prayer is answered, we’ll never know, but as the percussion takes over and batters us into a final, frenzied submission, it feels too late.

Exhausted and exhilarated, Pastel Blues is at its end. But within it, Nina Simone’s duende forever persists.

#music #women #art #nina simone #album #race #civil rights #duende #1960s music #jazz #soul

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wikipediaredoengl199fa20 · 4 years ago

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Kyleigh Burns

Prof. Audrey Golden

ENGL 199

8 December 2020

Wikipedia REDO! Diana, Princess of Wales

Their engagement became official on 24 February 1981.[19] Diana was able to select her own engagement ring.[19] Following the engagement, Diana left her occupation as a nursery teacher's assistant and lived for a short period at Clarence House, which was the home of the Queen Mother.[37] She then lived at Buckingham Palace until the wedding.[37] Ingrid Seward, who wrote a biography on Diana, described the time before the wedding as “lonely” for the princess.[38] Diana was the first Englishwoman to marry the first in line to the throne since Anne Hyde married the future James II over 300 years earlier, and she was also the first royal bride to have a paying job before her engagement.[22][19] She made her first public appearance with Prince Charles in a charity ball in March 1981 at Goldsmiths' Hall, where she met Grace, Princess of Monaco.[37]

Twenty-year-old Diana became Princess of Wales when she married Charles on 29 July 1981. The wedding was held at St Paul's Cathedral, which offered more seating than Westminster Abbey, a church that was generally used for royal nuptials.[22][19] The service was widely described as a "fairytale wedding" and was watched by a global television audience of 750 million people while 600,000 spectators lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the couple en route to the ceremony.[19][39] They had notable vows, as Diana swapped Charles’ middle names and they has requested that they would not say they would obey each other.[39] .[40] Diana wore a dress valued at £9,000 (equivalent to £34,750 in 2019) with a 25-foot (7.62-metre) train.[41]

The couple had residences at Kensington Palace and Highgrove House, near Tetbury. On 5 November 1981, Diana's pregnancy was announced.[45] In January 1982 — 12 weeks into the pregnancy — Diana fell down a staircase at Sandringham, and the royal gynaecologistSir George Pinker was summoned from London. He found that although she had suffered severe bruising, the foetus was uninjured.[46]Diana later confessed that she had intentionally thrown herself down the stairs because she was feeling "so inadequate".[47] In February 1982, pictures of a pregnant Diana in bikini while holidaying was published in the media. The Queen subsequently released a statement and called it "the blackest day in the history of British journalism."[48] On 21 June 1982, Diana gave birth to the couple's first son, Prince William.[49] She subsequently suffered from postpartum depression after her first pregnancy and[50] decided to take William on her first major tours of Australia and New Zealand. By her own admission, Diana had not initially intended to take William until Malcolm Fraser, the Australian prime minister, made the suggestion.[51]

A second son, Prince Harry, was born on 15 September 1984.[52] The Princess said she and Charles were closest during her pregnancy with Harry. She was aware their second child was a boy, but did not share the knowledge with anyone else, including Charles.[53]

Diana was an involved mother and gave her children a variety of different experiences while they were growing up. She was firm in her beliefs around parenting and was strong in her role as a mother to William and Harry. Her and Charles worked together to raise them, along with nannies their family hired. Like most parents, she was very interested in their schooling and social lives. She would dress and drive them to school and often scheduled her work in order to spend the most time with them.

Public Image

Diana remains one of the most popular members of the royal family throughout history, and she continues to influence the principles of the royal family and its younger generations.[301][302] She was a major presence on the world stage from her engagement to Prince Charles in 1981 until her death in 1997, and was often described as the "world's most photographed woman".[19][303] She was noted for her compassion,[304] style, charisma, and high-profile charity work, as well as her ill-fated marriage.[157][305] Diana's former private secretary, Patrick Jephson described her as an organised and hardworking person, and pointed out Charles was not able to "reconcile with his wife's extraordinary popularity",[306] a viewpoint supported by biographer Tina Brown.[307] He also said she was a tough boss who was "equally quick to appreciate hard work", but could also be defiant "if she felt she had been the victim of injustice".[306] Diana's mother also defined her as a "loving" figure who could occasionally be "tempestuous".[240] Paul Burrell, who worked as a butler for Diana, remembered her as a "deep thinker" capable of "introspective analysis".[308] She was often described as a devoted mother to her children,[19][309] who are believed to be influenced by her personality and way of life.[310] In the early years, Diana was often noted for her shy nature.[301][311] Journalist Michael Whiteperceived her as being "smart", "shrewd and funny".[302] Those who communicated with her closely describe her as a person who was led by "her heart".[19] In an article for The Guardian, Monica Ali described Diana as a woman with a strong character, who entered the royal family as an inexperienced girl with little education, but could handle their expectations, and overcome the difficulties and sufferings of her marital life. Ali also believed that she "had a lasting influence on the public discourse, particularly in matters of mental health" by discussing her eating disorder publicly.[157] According to Tina Brown, in her early years Diana possessed a "passive power", a quality that in her opinion she shared with the Queen Mother and a trait that would enable her to instinctively use her appeal to achieve her goals.[312] Brown also believed that Diana was capable of charming people with a single glance.[307]

Diana was known for visiting sick and dying patients, and people poor and unwanted who were often seen as outcasts of society. The attention she gave these people increased her popularity with the people, as she was see as being kind and empathetic. [313] She was often thought of as mindful of other people's thoughts and feelings, and later revealed her wish to become a beloved figure among the people, saying in her 1995 interview, that "[She would] like to be a queen of people's hearts, in people's hearts."[311] Known for her easygoing attitude, she reportedly hated formality in her inner circle, asking "people not to jump up every time she enters the room".[314] Diana is often credited with widening the range of charity works carried out by the royal family in a more modern style.[157]Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post wrote in an article that "Diana imbued her role as royal princess with vitality, activism and, above all, glamour."[19] Alicia Carroll of The New York Times described Diana as "a breath of fresh air" who was the main reason the royal family was known in the United States.[315] Anthony Holden, a journalist and fan of Diana, wrote about the ways he thought the period after her divorce was one of relief and growth in a new, more independent life .[147] Despite all the marital issues and scandals, Diana continued to enjoy a high level of popularity in the polls while her husband was suffering from low levels of public approval.[19] Her peak popularity rate in the United Kingdom between 1981 and 2012 was 47%.[316] In Theodore Dalrymple's opinion, her popularity stemmed from "both her extreme difference from common people and her similarity to them". He believed that by going public about her marital issues and bulimia she won the admiration of "of all those who have been unhappy in their marriages" as well as people who suffered from psychological problems.[317]

Diana had become what Prime Minister Tony Blair called the "People's Princess", an iconic national figure. He had reportedly said that she had shown the nation "a new way to be British".[308] Her sudden death brought an unprecedented spasm of grief and mourning,[318] and subsequently a crisis arose in the Royal Household.[319][320][321] Andrew Marr said that by her death she "revived the culture of public sentiment",[157] while The Guardian's Matthew d'Ancona dubbed Diana "the queen of the realm of feeling" and said that "the impassioned aftermath of her death was a bold punctuation mark in a new national narrative that favoured disinhibition, empathy and personal candour."[322] Her brother, the Earl Spencer, captured her role:

Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. All over the world, a standard bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.[323]

In 1997, Diana was one of the runners-up for Time magazine's person of the Year.[324] In 1999, Time magazine named Diana one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.[325] In 2002, Diana ranked third on the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, above the Queen and other British monarchs.[326] In 2003, VH1 ranked her at number nine on its 200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons list, which recognises "the folks that have significantly inspired and impacted American society".[327] In 2006, the Japanese public ranked Diana twelfth in The Top 100 Historical Persons in Japan.[328] In 2018, Diana ranked fifteenth on the BBC History's poll of 100 Women Who Changed the World.[329][330]In 2020, Time magazine included Diana's name on its list of 100 Women of the Year. She was chosen as the Woman of the Year 1987 for her efforts in de-stigmatising the conditions surrounding HIV/AIDS patients.[331]

Despite being regarded as an iconic figure and a popular member of the royal family, Diana was subject to criticism during her life. Patrick Jephson, her private secretary of eight years, wrote in an article in The Daily Telegraph that "[Diana] had an extra quality that frustrated her critics during her lifetime and has done little to soften their disdain since her death".[301] Diana was criticised by philosophy professor Anthony O'Hear who in his notes argued that she was unable to fulfill her duties, her reckless behaviour was damaging the monarchy, and she was "self-indulgent" in her philanthropic efforts.[224] Due to these remarks, the charity organisations that Diana had worked with countered O’Hear’s narrative about her charity work. [224] Further criticism surfaced as she was accused of using her public profile to benefit herself,[107] which in return "demeaned her royal office".[301] Diana's unique type of charity work, which sometimes included physical contact with people affected by serious diseases occasionally had a negative reaction in the media.[301]

Diana's relationship with the press and the paparazzi has been described as "ambivalent". On different occasions she would complain about the way she was being treated by the media, mentioning that their connstant presence in her proximity had made life impossible for her, whereas at other times she would seek their attention and hand information to reporters herself.[332][333] Writing for The Guardian, Journalists like Peter Conrad and Christopher Hitchens analyzed the situation and surmised that Diana was cognizant of the influence the press had on her public standing. She therefore involved herself in public activities, perhaps to her own detriment, and often used them to show her philanthropic work.

Essay

The culture and lore around Princess Diana has been ever evolving despite her death over twenty years ago. Although she remains a steadfast, beloved figure in Western celebrity culture, the narratives and bias surrounding her have shifted her memory farther and farther away from the woman herself. This is understandable and in some ways how the human brain responds to loss - by filling in memories or ideas of who the person might be instead of who they were. Lauded as the “queen of people’s hearts”, she became idolized to the extreme in death by the press, who were once her biggest critics. Thought of as endlessly kind, beautiful, and just an ordinary girl who fell victim to the malicious royal family, much of the dialogue around Diana reflects her idolization and serves to inform it even further. This rhetoric can become harmful because it conflates the idea of a person with who they actually are, which creates false images and unattainable standards.

Throughout her wikipedia entry, the author(s) bias towards Diana as a selfless saint is seen in both explicit and implicit ways. Selective wording and the inclusion of quotes by many different supporters which describe Diana in loving ways, the author paints the same portrait of Diana painted by pop culture. An example of this would be in the section on Diana’s Public Image, when the Wikipedia article quotes Peter Conrad, who wrote an article on Diana for the Guardian, as saying that she “overburdened herself” with the press. The connotations of “overburdened” imply that she didn’t realize what she was doing, and once she did she was unable to escape. The inclusion of this quote paints Diana as unwitting and innocent to the power of the press, even when she was an accomplished public figure who understood how to manipulate the press.

In order to try and reconcile with the bias shown in Princess Diana’s wikipedia article, I rewrote portions of the text to include less biased language and present a clearer image of the person, not the persona. I used more neutral language which carried less implication and connotation in order to paint a more balanced picture of who Diana really was. Through careful diction and paraphrasing instead of direct quotes, I was able to include the same information but presented in a way which allows the reader to draw their own conclusions about the subject. For example, in the passages discussing the way she chose to parent William and Harry, I tried to make the language less aggressive. To think of and speak about Diana in a way that only describes her as a victim or as someone who could do no wrong is not only inaccurate but implies that who she actually was was not enough. The bias’ weaved in throughout the wikipedia article reflects the cultural thought surrounding female celebrities and specifically Diana - although the author(s) are providing an accurate portrayal of her life, they’re approaching the article with pre-formed conclusions in their mind. These conclusions present in the form of bias and influence the reader to think about the subject in a certain tone or light. By approaching this piece with the knowledge that it contained bias language, I was able to identify and correct it in the selected passages.

Bibliography

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Diana, Princess of Wales.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 August 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Diana-princess-of-Wales. Accessed 8 December 2020.

Harris, Daniel. “The Kitschification of Princess Diana.” Salmagundi, no. 118/119, 1998, pp.

279–291. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40549319. Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.

Hobbes, Micheal and Marshall, Sarah. “Princess Diana Part 2: The Wedding”, You’re Wrong About, 5 October 2020, https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Ty4blFiX86hMybf1QSkd9?si=vPAtvf1VSAqizSeVh0frLQ.

Mantel, Hilary. “The Princess Myth: Hilary Mantel on Diana.” The Guardian, 26 August 2017,

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/26/the-princess-myth-hilary-mantel-on-diana

. Accessed 8 December 2020.

Saukko, Paula. “Rereading Media and Eating Disorders: Karen Carpenter, Princess Diana, and the Healthy Female Self.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 23, no. 2, 2006, pp. 152-169. Simmons Library, https://eds-b-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.simmons.edu/eds/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=dde5e9f9-537c-4c92-b738-fa172ed177d8%40pdc-v-sessmgr04&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=ufh&AN=21783111&anchor=AN0021783111-8.

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simpsonsnight · 4 years ago

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Episode #69

WHAT THIS?

Lisa's First Word Season 4 - Episode 10 | December 3, 1992 Oh wow it’s an absolute classic Lisa’s First R-Word! This features copious flashbacks about Bart coming to terms with Lisa’s arrival within the family, as well as some other bits like *BART’S* first word, which is AYE CARUMBA after watching his parents 69, which is why they made this episode #69. No tricks here, baby! This is another firmly-considered-canon flashback episode of the show. Lisa is born in 1984, which is consistent with her age in 1992 of 8-years-old. You see? Even these “classic” flashback episodes used the sliding time scale. It takes place during the Olympics even. This has CAN’T SLEEP CLOWNS WILL EAT ME which I actually remembered from my childhood as a slogan on a Hot Topic tee, and NOT this episode. It wasn’t until much later when I rewatched the series on DVD that I was like “holy shit that came from this”. HUH! Speaking of DVD, for some reason I remembered that the DVD commentary for this episode points out that this episode ran particularly short so they had to stall for time in some bits, which I never realized until they pointed it out. The long couch gag where it turns into a chorus line that reveals various circus acts in the background. Before there was a custom in place to do intentionally-long couch gags, there was this one, which was commonly used when an episode ran short. It was used as late as season 13 just for this reason. The other elongated gags are Bart clutching the clothing line and doing flips. This was meant to be a quick gag, but they turned it into a whole scene by looping the flips a few more times, and then cutting to an alternate shot with newly-created day-for-night tinting to create the superfluous gag of him flipping into the evening. Also the nightmarish heads circling Bart (”HELLO JOE!”) was probably created to kill time, as it loops two full times. This has one of my favorite bits in the series which is the reveal that Grandpa helped Homer buy his house and in a fit of sentimentality Homer asked Grandpa to live with them, only to ship him off to an old folks home after mere weeks. Also: I didn’t cry during the episode but literally started tearing up when I found the still from it! I’m falling apart! THE B-SODE:

Rugrats: "No More Cookies" Season 3 - Episode 24B | May 15, 1994 I chose this because it features Angelica’s first word, which is COOKIE!!!! I couldn’t stomach watching this episode after finding that out; I saw the clip and it sickened me. Why oh why must she be such a cunt

#simpsons #rugrats #season 4

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chpinthestacks · 6 years ago

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In the Stacks with Lara Mimosa Montes: Darrel Ellis

This past March, I visited OSMOS at 50 East 1st Street in Manhattan’s East Village to see some works by the Bronx-born painter and photographer Darrel Ellis. As far as I know, the last time any of Ellis’s works have been shown in New York was over fourteen years ago, in 2005, so it’s something of a big deal to see his work in the real world once again.

When I first began looking a bit more thoughtfully into Ellis’s biography upon recalling that he had been included in the exhibition Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960’s, a basic internet search yielded very few results, especially in comparison to Ellis’s peer group, which includes artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Apart from a short entry about Ellis on Visual AIDS and an exhibition catalog from 1996 published by Art in General to celebrate the posthumous, traveling exhibition which featured seventy of the artist’s works from his estate, there remains very little in print on the subject of Darrel Ellis. Given the works of his that I was able to view online and the little bits that I had been able to glean from his bio, this just didn’t sit right with me. This is an artist whose work needs to be known.

Self-portrait based on Peter Hujar photograph, c. 1990, painting on canvas, 22” × 24”. Courtesy of OSMOS. ⓒ Estate of Darrel Ellis.

Darrel Ellis was born December 5th, 1958. He died April 3rd, 1992, a couple of months before David Wojnarowicz, whose full-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, I saw last fall. Having encountered Wojnarowicz’s presence as a teenager through the fairly obscene underground films of Richard Kern [ie. “Stray Dogs” (1985) and “You Killed Me First” (1985)], it was definitely a trip seeing his work at the Whitney—it was packed to the point that I kind of didn’t want to be there. People love David now, I thought, a little moody.

As I moved through the museum’s galleries, I had to wonder what an artist like Wojnarowicz would think of all this posthumous looking and snapping. I had to ask myself: Why does the art world want to stage its appreciation for an artist like David Wojnarowicz now? Because the fucked up political future he had been observing finally came to pass? And if we are looking at David and the ambitious body of work he assembled during his lifetime and encountering it as emblematic of a certain downtown New York countercultural moment, or an idealized version of some queer, punk sensibility we associate with the ’80s and ’90s, then what else—and who else—in our historicization of that particular time drops out as a result?

I am not exempt from the “we” I speak of here; next to my bed currently sits a newly purchased copy of Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, published by Semiotext(e) just last year. My attention is turned towards David, too, and I suspect, unlike many of the tourists at the Whitney that day who might have been seeing his work for the first time, I had the luxury of living in New York City and participating in the art world in ways that allowed me to encounter his work IRL many times over the years and in several different contexts with varying degrees of politicization. I’ve even been lucky enough during my brief time working at a private arts college to teach and share his work with others. If I have a lot to say about David Wojnarowicz, it’s because I have had years of looking and thinking about his work alongside the many documented accounts of his critics, friends, admirers, and biographers, some of whom were fortunate enough to know him, and live to tell of their experiences (among my favorites of these accounts are those by artist Zoe Leonard, with thanks to Sarah Schulman).

The same, however, cannot be said of Darrel Ellis, so it is still something of an experiment: learning to look at and speak about his work, the impression it leaves on me. As of now, I cannot speculate as to how his art and reputation will fare in the wake of this strangely belated and renewed interest in the art historical ongoings and culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. [1]

Poster for Day Without Art, designed by Danny Tisdale Studio, 1994, offset lithograph on paper; 35” × 25 ⅝”. Courtesy of Visual AIDS. Background image features Darrel Ellis’s Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1989.

When he died in the spring of 1992 of AIDS, Darrel Ellis was the same age as his father, Thomas Ellis: 33 years old. In 1958, Thomas, a postal clerk and aspiring photographer who briefly ran a portrait studio in Harlem with his wife, was killed by the police following an argument with two plainclothes detectives who had blocked his parked car. The injuries sustained from the altercation proved fatal. At the time of Thomas’s death, his wife was pregnant with Darrel. [2] Justice was never served.

These events and the life that preceded them, as documented by the senior Ellis in the many family photographs taken before Darrel was born in parts of the Bronx and Harlem during the 1950s, eventually made their way into Darrel’s work. In 1981, when Ellis was living in the Lower East Side with his then-lover and “unofficially” participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, the artist, writer, and independent curator Allen Frame recalls that Ellis had recently acquired some of his father’s black and white photographs from the 1950s which he was reinterpreting with ink on paper at the time. [3]

In 1983, BOMB magazine published some works from this period. [4]

Left: Darrel Ellis, My Mother and My Sister from My Father’s Photograph, 1982. Right: Thomas Ellis, Picnic NYC, 1953.

The diptych featuring Thomas Ellis’s photograph alongside his son’s interpretation published thirty years later is uncanny. In Darrel’s version, there are outlines, blurs, shadows, and contours. Certain details, like the density of the grass or the striped pattern on the young girl’s shorts fall away in favor of other, more plain facts, like “here’s a family.” The position of the subjects in relation to one another would suggest even without our knowing that these folks are kin. Their togetherness in time is an indisputable fact. Prior to Darrel’s being-in-the-world, Thomas’s photograph establishes the family as existing within a shared visual field: they had a life and their being together—whether it was in a park or at home—appears as a notably carefree aspect of that life.

Ellis continued experimenting with his father’s photographs: the layers of technique and reinterpretation that would distinguish his images from the ones taken by his father would become more pronounced. Allen Frame observes, “Between 1984 and 1986, [Ellis] made a series of photographs of his mother, brother, and sisters, from which he produced a new body of work evolving from screenprint to experimental photograph to painting. The screenprints, made while he was living at his mother’s apartment after breaking up with his boyfriend and coming out to his family, were compiled into a book at the Lower East Side Printshop, with the help of Susan Spencer Crowe.” [5] The book, published by Appearances Press in 1986, reveals various domestic scenes and interior living spaces depicting relatives sitting in the kitchen, around the family table, doing each other’s hair, laying in bed. They are sparse in terms of detail, and resemble studies of the generic and the sublime as they depict the taken for granted scenes from a life. Again, what stands out are not the faces of the individuals pictured, but their relation to one another as suggested by their body language, particularly the casual nature of their closeness. [6]

At some point, while looking at the drawings alongside the later photographs, I remember saying to my new friend, Kyle, who had accompanied me to see the show at OSMOS, “I don’t see how the artist who made these drawings also made these photographs. Or rather, I can’t see that the photographs were made by someone who primarily identified as a painter. . .” Kyle responded, “I can see it. . . Maybe it has to do more with understanding Darrel’s relationship as a painter to the photograph as a surface.”

Kyle was onto something. In an interview, Ellis said of his process, “The idea of putting a photo on any surface other than photo paper gives you a lot of freedom. The process became [one] about animating the photo, about revivification.” [7] Perhaps what was painterly about Ellis’s photographs, particularly those that reinterpreted his father’s negatives, was that he treated the original images as content rather than object. In other words, by projecting the negatives on a wall and then experimenting with both his position as the photographer in relation to the projected image and the dimensionality of the surface onto which the image was projected by creating sculptural forms onto which the projections would appear, Ellis transformed his father’s negatives into surface. The resulting images that we are left with therefore are not really appropriations; they’re the being-with of a trace of a lost object—the trace being the negative, and the lost object, the father. As Ellis reflected of his father’s images, “When I look at those photographs sometimes, all I see is holes.” [8] I will never fail to be moved by those words.

Left: Untitled (Aunt Connie and Uncle Richard), c. 1990, silver gelatin RC Print, 15 ¾” × 19 ¼”. Right: Untitled (Aunt Connie and Uncle Richard), c. 1990, crayon and ink on paper, 10” × 12”. Courtesy of OSMOS. ⓒ Estate of Darrel Ellis.

When Ellis was discovered in a coma by his friends Susan Spencer Crowe and Bruce Dow in the spring of 1992 at his apartment off Franklin Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, “his last self-portrait was sitting on his easel beside his bed, eerily depicting him as he was found: eyes closed, lying on his bed in deep repose.” [9] After spending some time with Ellis’s work at OSMOS, I felt better able to appreciate how complicated the idea of the self-portrait must have been for Ellis if he was so compelled to return to it as a generative mode of inquiry. By adopting different mediums such as drawing, painting, and photography, while sometimes blending all three in the process to create an individual work, I imagine he must have felt provoked, if not also a bit estranged, by all the selves he had discovered through his practice.

Among Ellis’s self-portraits, perhaps the most recognized one is Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe which was featured in the now infamous Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing exhibition at Artists Space in 1989, curated by Nan Goldin. For the show, Ellis contributed two self-portraits, both of which were based on photographs taken of him by Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. The caption in the exhibition catalogue that accompanies Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe reads: “I struggle to resist the frozen images of myself taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar.” I’ve never seen either of the photographs Mapplethorpe or Hujar took of Ellis, but I remain haunted by the decision Ellis made to take back his own image. [10] I suspect that if during this time period, Ellis became that much more aware of his mortality following the discovery of his HIV status, then “the struggle to resist the frozen images” through the creation of the self-portrait forms part of the process by which the artist is able to reassert his right to his body as well as his right to explore acts of self-representation. I imagine then for Ellis: the self-portrait is not a luxury, but a vital necessity.

[1] Thank you to Tiona Nekkia McClodden who, through her continued work, conversations, and writing on Essex Hemphill, Julius Eastman, and Brad Johnson, helped me think the most deeply about some of the contradictions inherent in this renewed interest in queer art from the 1980s and ’90s, and so much more.

[2] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy: Variations in Black and White,” Darrel Ellis (New York: Art in General, 1996), p.13.

[3] Ibid., 14.

[4] Darrel Ellis and Thomas Ellis, "Darrel Ellis, Thomas Ellis" in BOMB, no. 5 (1983): 44. Also see “Two Drawings by Darrel Ellis” in BOMB, No. 8, (1983/1984): 37.

[5] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy,” p. 17.

[6] Thank you to Ricardo Montez who, upon learning about my interest in Darrel, gifted me his copy of the aforementioned book.

[7] David Hirsh, “Darrel Ellis: On the Border of Family and Tribe,” in Disrupted Borders: An Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries, ed. Sunil Gupta (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1993), p.125.

[8] Ibid., 124.

[9] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy,” p.21.

[10] See Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe” (1986) for a more in-depth discussion of the artist’s use of black male bodies.

#lara mimosa montes #chpinthestacks #in the stacks #artist residency #darrel ellis #OSMOS

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carrieellen · 6 years ago

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NYCMidnight Short Story Challenge 2019

First Round: Write and submit a short story of 2,500 words or less in seven days using the following, randomly assigned genre, subject and character.

Genre: Historical fiction

Subject: Pregnancy

Character: An intoxicated person

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

“They’re playing my song!”

The phone cord stretches across the bed as my most fave song ever blasts from the clock-radio on my night stand. I jump on my twin mattress and sing along like I’m performing at the MTV Music Video Awards.

“I come home in the morning light; My mother says when you gonna live your life right?”

“Chill out, April! They play that song like all the time.”

That's my friend, Gracie, on the phone that I’m trying to balance between my shoulder and my ear. Gracie’s been my best friend since Kindergarten, or at least since Christina Jefferson moved away in fourth grade, but her taste in music sucks.

“Not even!” My feet land on my bedroom floor and the impact echoes through the old house. “I've been waiting all day to hear it.”

“Maybe you’ll get the tape for your birthday in April.”

Yeah, my name is April because I was born in April. I know that's lame, but it could have been worse. If I'd been born one day earlier, my birthday would be April Fools Day. I can't imagine anything more tragic than that. Gracie's birthday is in September, which makes her the oldest in our class. She's lucky that way. Plus, she was named after Grace Kelly, who was this gorgeous actress and princess. And Gracie’s hair can really hold a perm. So, yeah, she’s lucky. I wish I was named after Princess Diana. I even wanted to cut my hair like Princess Di but my mom said mine was too thin and I'd look like a boy. At least I finally have boobs.

“Too bad you wasted your money going to Return of the Jedi with Kenneth or you could have bought the tape yourself,” Gracie tells me. “I mean, seriously, who sees the same movie three times?”

“Who sees The Police in concert twice in one summer, Gracie?” I probably sound bitchy, but I'm really just wondering how my hair would look dyed pink.

“That’s totally different, April. Sting is so damn sexy!”

“Gross, Gracie! He's like over thirty.”

“Speaking of sexy, I know someone who might lose her V-card on V-Day.” Her voice has risen to a taunting pitch because she loves dangling information and making me wait for it.

“You mean Valentine's Day? It's like two weeks away, Gracie.”

“Well, I heard Kenneth say that he’s working on a sweet surprise for his sweetheart, if you catch my drift.”

“Are you talking about me?”

“Don't be dense, April! Kenneth wants you guys to go all-the-way and he’s planning it for Valentine's Day.”

“Kenneth and I aren't ready for that, Gracie!” I totally didn’t see that coming.

“Why not? You guys have been going out since like 7th grade and we’re all in High School now. Besides, Kenneth’s not the little nerd who used to lose at Pac Man and watch Thunder Cats with you. He’s got a rockin’ bod since he’s been on the swim team and a lot of girls want it if you don’t.”

“I never said I didn't want it,” I quickly correct her. “And I know how good he looks getting out of the pool.”

“Then why aren’t you psyched about Valentine’s Day? You're the one always saying you want to have fun. Don't you want to do it with Kenneth?”

Gracie's got a point. Kenneth is special. I'd never tell her this, but we still watch Thunder Cats together and we did do a lot of making-out the third time we went to Return of the Jedi. Sometimes it feels like he is my best friend instead of Gracie. Other times, though, I get all hot-and-bothered just sitting next to him. Like, my stomach clenches and breaks apart at the same time and I can't stop looking at him. It's true he has a hot bod now, but it's his light blue eyes that really get to me. I've always liked staring at them, even when he was shorter than me. Plus, he's got these full eyelashes that are so blonde you have to get close to his face to notice them...

“Hello! Earth to April!”

“Sorry, Gracie. What were you saying?”

“You were just fantasizing about going all the way with Kenneth.” She's squealing now. “Weren't you?”

“As if!”

“You totally were! Admit it!”

I'm trying to think of a good come-back when I hear a loud crash from downstairs. It sounds like breaking glass just below my room.

“I gotta go, Gracie. I think something's going on downstairs.”

“You said your folks were at a Reagan rally.”

“Yeah, but Brian got home a while ago.”

“Why didn't you tell me your gorgeous brother was there so I could come over?”

“Maybe because he's a senior with a girlfriend.”

“I can still look...”

I hang up before she tells me again how my brother is so cute. I already hear enough about how awesome he is. Brian’s been leading the basketball team to glory since he was just a sophomore and, apparently, he’s a real stud. He's smart too! He's probably going to play for UCLA in the fall. At least, that's the dream, but he won't hear about the scholarship for another month.

Just as I reach the stairs, I hear the singing start.

“Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her awaaaay...” Brian's voice is in-the-rafters high as he screeches the words.

“Are you making fun of my song, butthead!?”

I bolt down the stairs and find him sitting on the living room floor with broken glass scattered around him. He's trying to lift a bottle to his lips while knocking the back of his head against the wall, repeatedly. He eventually gives up and starts singing again.

“Girls just wanna have fun. Giiirrrlllls!”

“Brian!” I find my voice as I gape at my intoxicated brother.

He stops singing and manages to put the bottle to his mouth, taking two gulps. He sputters and coughs a little, but then looks at me with a goofy grin. “Hey, April!” His eyes are red, and he keeps blinking them. “I was just singing your song!”

I read the bottle's label and gasp. “You're drinking dad's bourbon? Are you crazy?!”

“No. I'm not crazy,” he tells me, totally serious. “I drank all the beer first.”

The whole room reeks of alcohol. Did he spill as much as he swallowed?

“You drank all of the beer, Brian? Like, all six cans in the fridge?” I step on a shard of glass and realize he’s smashed one of the clear panels in the breakfront cabinet where Dad keeps the hard liquor. “Holy smokes, Mom and Dad are gonna kill you!” I shriek. “Like, seriously kill you dead, Brian! Your life is totally over!”

The grin melts from his face like it was formed out of wax. “My life is already over, sis.” He pulls his knees to his chest and starts to cry.

Five years ago, my Aunt Jill died in a car accident. She was my mom's baby sister and she used to take us to the beach when we were little. Brian was thirteen but he still cried at her funeral. I haven't seen him cry since. But now he's crying drunken sobs into his faded jeans and I wonder what could be as bad as Aunt Jill dying.

“What do you mean your life is over? You shouldn't say things like that.” I tell him as if not saying it keeps it from being true. “That's the bourbon talking. And the six beers. You're gonna have one gnarly headache in a couple hours.”

Brian just finishes the bourbon in one long swig and rolls the empty bottle across the floor. The phone rings in the kitchen which makes him laugh abruptly and start to sing again. “The phone rings in the middle of the night, my father yells...”

“Stop it!” I step closer and glass crunches under my Nikes. “You'd better clean up this mess and start figuring out what to say to Mom and Dad, or you're gonna be grounded for infinity.”

“What to say to Mom and Dad? OK, how does this sound?” Brian slurs his words but at least tries to make eye contact with me. “Mom. Dad. You two are going to be grandparents because I got Julia knocked-up. Oh, and we need more beer.”

I stand there in silence.

Brian tries to pull himself up and his palm pushes into the glass. I can see red on the broken pieces dusting the floor and I know he's cut himself.

“Yeah, I'm in deep shit.” He wavers on his feet but remains standing. “No UCLA now. Life over before it starts.”

“Huh?” I can’t believe that’s all I say.

“She's pregnant, April.” The blood trickles through the lines across his hand. “And when you get your girlfriend pregnant in High School it fucks up your plans. Unless you plan to be the only Mr. and Mrs. in the 1984 graduating class.”

“You're going to get married?!” It's weird that I react to this first.

“Don’t you get it? We’re going to have a kid!” He leans against the wall like the room is spinning.

“Why can't it be someone else's kid? Can't you give it to someone else to raise? Like some adults who are already married?”

“Julia doesn't want to put the baby up for adoption because apparently she can't go through life knowing our child is out there without us.”

“So, she just expects you to marry her?”

“Probably.” Brian starts to walk towards the kitchen but loses his balance and ends up on the couch. “I mean, she just told me this morning. It's not like we’ve shopped for rings.”

The phone rings from the kitchen again and I walk towards the noise out of habit. “Hello?” I answer automatically.

“Is Brian there?” I recognize the soft, polite voice.

“Yeah, he's here, Julia. Hang on.” I put the receiver down on the countertop and return to the living room to find Brian already shaking his head no. “Sorry, he's busy,” I say when I pick up the phone again.

“Please, April. I just need to tell him something.”

“I’ll ask him to call you later. OK?”

“Forget it,” her voice quivers like she’s trying not to cry. “Maybe it's better if he doesn't.”

I've always liked Julia. She's nice, even though she's pretty and popular. She could have easily been a cheerleader, but she has a beautiful voice and likes theater instead. I used to wonder if she'd end up a movie star if she followed Brian to UCLA. Guess that won't be happening now.

“She sounds sad.” I say when I'm back in front of the couch.

Brian's eyes are closed. “Why? She's getting what she wants.”

I want to tell him that’s harsh but decide not to. I mean, I'm not thrilled with Julia's resistance to adoption either since it will ruin my brother's life too. But I doubt she wants this.

“Why did this happen, Brian? Everyone else has sex just for fun and it’s not happening to them.”

“Sex is about more than just fun, April.” He sounds as sad as Julia.

I flop down beside him. “Did you always love her when you guys had sex?” I ask but, when he doesn't respond, I decide I don't want to know. “So, you’re really doing the whole ring, proposal, wedding thing? Live together and all that?”

“What else should I do, sis? Leave Julia here? Go play basketball in California and occasionally send her some money?”

No, I can’t see him doing that. And I can’t think of anything else to suggest.

“So, Julia sounded really sad?” Brian asks into silence.

“Yeah. She sounded broken.”

He looks up at me and his eyes seem clearer. “I never want her broken. I love her.”

“I’m glad. At least it's not like you have to marry a stranger or some girl you don't even like.”

“I do want to marry Julia,” he explains and I'm not sure if it's to me or himself. “I guess we have to do it a lot sooner now, but I'd want to marry her someday anyway.”

I hear a spark of hope in his voice and I’m so relieved that I smile. “It'll work out, Brian.” I bump his shoulder with mine. “And I'm gonna be one bitchin aunt to your kid!”

Miraculously, Brian smiles too.

“It's will be an awesome kid!” he declares. “I've been such a dick. I gotta call Julia.”

He moves from the couch to the kitchen, seeming to have sobered up a lot. I follow behind to eavesdrop.

“Hello, Mrs.... Yeah, this is Brian.” He's pacing anxiously as he presses the receiver to his ear. “I know. But I need to talk to her.” He opens his mouth a few times like he wants to say more. Then the pacing stops and he's not moving at all. He's just standing still with his mouth open. Then he hangs up.

“You didn’t talk to Julia?” I ask.

“No. Just her mom.” He won't look at me. “Her mom said Julia went to the clinic early this afternoon. She had an abortion.”

Nothing in my fifteen years has taught me what to say right now.

Is it weird that I feel upset? Should I be relieved? Disappointed?

Brian walks away before I find any empty words to offer. I watch his back as he exits the kitchen and listen to the front door slam. I pray he doesn't have his keys.

I'm not sure how long I stand there without a clue of what to do next, but the sun is almost down when the phone rings again. I guess I answer it because I'm suddenly hearing Kenneth's happy voice in my ear.

“Hey, are you listening, April?” he asked excitedly. “I said I've got a surprise so please tell me you can go out on Valentine's Day.”

I feel guilty that Kenneth's words are making me sick right now. “I don't know,” I tell him with a knot in my stomach instead of butterflies. “Do we have to?”

“Are you OK, April?” he asks sweetly. “It's a good surprise.”

“You'd better just tell me, then.”

“OK, sure! I got us passes to a Star Wars marathon that night! My folks said they would drive us and pick us up, but we can stay for all three movies. So, do you want to go?”

I really don't know why I start to cry, but I work hard to keep it quiet because I don't think Kenneth will realize that these aren't bad tears.

“I'd love to go!” I gush to him.

“Awesome! I heard that people even dress in costumes and I thought we could be like Han and Leia for Valentine's Day. Doesn't that sound like fun?”

“Yeah, that sounds exactly like fun.”

THE END

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contentgreenearth · 2 years ago

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TYPING IN PRACTICE POST #12: MADONNA

Continuing with the theme of Detroit area "local legends " and "hometown heroes", I am now going to show how I typed Madonna. She was another "local legend" of my era, although she started in music 2 decades after the Supremes did.

Madonna was born in Bay City, MI. That's at the base of Michigan's "thumb", for those who don't know. Her family moved to the Detroit area when she was very young, and she grew up in the suburbs of Pontiac, Auburn Hills and Rochester Hills. Her mother died from cancer at some point, and the family moved to Rochester Hills, because that's where Madonna's stepmother (her dad remarried) already had a home. She had many siblings, biological and through marriage, but one of her favorite siblings was her biological brother Chris. I read an autobiography/biography a while back that Madonna and Chris wrote together. I also have a second-cousin who graduated from Rochester Adams High School, which is also Madonna's alma mater. I asked her if they ever mentioned anything about Madonna attending there. My second-cousin said that yes, and not only do they mention that, but they make a big deal about it. I have never tried typing Madonna until now.

Just a little more background before we get started after her high school graduation, she went to New York to study dance, and dance with dance troupes. Around 1980, she decided she had had enough of just dancing, and she wanted to sing. While her dance troupe was in France, a scout for a record label heard her sing, and wanted to sign her to a recording contract. She turned it down, and told Casey Kasum in 1988, that it was because it was an easy ticket for her to get fame and fortune, but she didn't want it that easy. She wanted to *work hard* to get her contract. So she returned to the US, worked hard, and 2 years later, got a recording contract, that she *worked* for.

Now, I think that's enough background. On to the typing we go. Historically, Madonna has proved to be hard for many typologists to type. I even had a hard time typing her myself. There are a few reasons for that. The first is, in my typing, I found out Madonna has 3 conscious functions. She also is, what Vendrah would call, in this article, "more than one type":

Second, because of being more than one type, it is very hard to figure out, for the typologists who use the Berens Communication Styles or Kiersey temperaments, which one she actually is. I've seen typologists agree that she's ES, but after that, there's always disagreement as to whether she's T or F, J or P. The most common type I see listed for her is ESTP. Close, folks, but no cigar. 😉🤫

Step 1: I typed Madonna using 5 different interview videos. I will post some of them at the end. 2 were from 1984, when Madonna was 26 years old. The others were from more recent years. I watched the videos through several times, carrying out different typing procedures as I went

Step 2: the first time through, I looked for the essentials, such as DISC quadrant and function related themes. In one of the videos I used, Madonna was talking about her friendship with Michael Jackson. She was talking about dominating Michael Jackson and imposing her will on him. In one of her 26 year old interviews, she talks about how she is in music for the fame and fortune, and how she wants to conquer the world. These are just a few examples of things I saw that would place her in the D (Dominance) quadrant of DISC, so that is where I put her. As far as themes, I saw 3. Tasks, objects and people. The tasks and objects were in large amounts. The people was small by comparison. Madonna mentioned relationships and ethics between 5-10 times between the 5 videos. There was no mention at all of ideas. Well, we know she's definitely not an intuitive 😂🤣😆 Because of the 3 themes I was able to narrow down her DISC and SOJT type to either a non wheeled result D=I (-), which correlates with the SOJT type Se preferring T>F ; or Slot 21 on the DISC wheel which is the SOJT type Te-s/Se-f. As far as letters, we have ESTx.

Step 3: the third time through I did a Jungian function analysis on Madonna's instances of thinking and decision making. This is actually what I did to discover my lovely dream people's SOJT types. I wrote out instances of them thinking and deciding, and determined what functions were involved in those thoughts/decisions. Granted, I didn't have to write down Madonna's thoughts and decisions, because they were provided to me in the videos, but otherwise, I executed the procedure exactly the same. The result was Te-s/Se-f.

Step 4: I watched the videos yet again, and this time, looked for facets of DISC. I couldn't slot her, however, I could definitely place her in the D/C profile.

Step 5: Who gets Te-s/Se-f as a SOJT type and the D/C profile? The "more than one type" ESTJ. There are 2 dream people who have this SOJT type: a man named Ariel who we read about in True Types post #30, and a woman named Callie. The commonalities between Madonna and Ariel, and especially Madonna and Callie, since the were the same gender, were absolutely crazy, and made me laugh, they had so much in common 🤣 😂 😆

So anyway, with that, we have a type identification: although Madonna does not fit a type perfectly, I have identified her SOJT type as Te-s/Se-f, and the MBTI type most resonant is ESTJ

Here are the 2 interviews I cited above. I'm only posting the ones I cited:

youtube

And here's more information about the SOJT type Te-s/Se-f, in my "mock interview " with Ariel:

#typology #mbti #jungian typology #mistypes #estj #madonna #Youtube

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In 1924, the British scientist J. B. S. Haldane coined the term “ectogenesis” to describe how human pregnancy would one day give way to artificial wombs. “It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child,” Haldane wrote, imagining how an earnest college student of the future would describe the phenomenon. “Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 percent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.” By the year 2074, Haldane imagined, ectogenesis had become a popular technique — with “less than 30 percent of children... now born of woman.” Writing at a time when debates over contraception and eugenics raged on both sides of the Atlantic, his prediction was an understandable outgrowth of these new efforts to control fertility. “Had it not been for ectogenesis,” Haldane prophesied, “there can be little doubt that civilization would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.”

Today, we have inched slightly — but only slightly — closer to perfecting the technology that would realize Haldane’s vision, albeit for reasons other than the eugenic improvement of the race. A small knot of scientists in the United States and Japan are experimenting with both live animals and human cells to mimic the functioning of the womb. And while their work is in its early stages, it is worth exploring the scientific prospects and ethical implications of research on artificial wombs.

Haldane’s chosen title — Daedalus — is perhaps telling. In Greek mythology, Daedalus, “the cunning worker,” was an ingenious practitioner of the mechanical arts, a figure whose inventions proved, at best, ambiguous contributions to humanity. His most famous invention — wings crafted from bird feathers, wax, and string, built to escape with his son Icarus from the clutches of King Minos — became the tool of his son’s destruction, when “the boy, exulting in his career, began to leave the guidance of his companion and soar upward as if to reach heaven.” The hot sun promptly melted the wax wings, Icarus plunged to his death, and Daedalus was left “bitterly lamenting his own arts.”

…

The question is whether these different avenues of research — at the beginning of pregnancy and the end of pregnancy — will one day converge. “I’ve talked to researchers who are doing research on partial ectogenesis — interventions for premature births, mainly — and I’ve talked to in vitro fertilization researchers who are trying to extend the period of time an embryo can live outside the womb,” says Scott Gelfand, Director of the Ethics Center at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, who organized a conference on artificial wombs in 2002. “Put the two together and eventually we’re going to be able to do this.” Of course, many scientific and biological hurdles remain, and physicians who work with assisted reproductive technologies are hesitant to predict the future. “The uterus is a complex organism,” says Dr. David Adamson, Director of Fertility Physicians of Northern California and past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. “There are still issues related to immunology and cardiovascular development that are extremely complicated and not very well understood. In terms of putting together all of these and having a clinically successful artificial womb,” he says, “my personal perspective is that it is decades away.”

…

Artificial wombs are just the kind of technological prospect that radical ethicists love to celebrate. In 1985, philosopher Peter Singer gave them a ringing endorsement: “I think women will be helped, rather than harmed, by the development of a technology that makes it possible for them to have children without being pregnant,” he said. Singer’s vision echoed that of feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone, who made a similar argument in 1970 in The Dialectic of Sex. Once the “freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology” occurred, she said, they could finally reach full equality with men. Viewed this way, artificial wombs are merely another step in the ongoing advance of human reproductive technologies and women’s social equality. They would both expand the range of reproductive choices and make the differences between men and women matters of technological convention rather than biological nature.

…

But many ethicists are not so sure. “I think artificial wombs could lead to a commodification of the whole process of pregnancy,” says Rosemarie Tong, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and a leading scholar in feminist bioethics. “To the extent that we externalize an experience like pregnancy, it may lead to a view of the growing child as a ‘thing.’” The further we erode the mystery of the development of human life, the more appealing it becomes to think about improving upon it, or demanding greater control over it. Even given developments in fetal surgery, the human womb still insists that we not breach its protections too often. But with artificial wombs, the transparency of the technology itself would invite greater intervention.

At stake in this debate is the very meaning of human pregnancy: the meaning of the mother-child relationship, the nature of the female body, and the significance of being born, not “made.” Let’s say, for example, that scientists perfect the artificial womb to the point where it becomes a “healthier” environment than the old-fashioned human version. Artificial wombs, after all, wouldn’t be threatened by irresponsible introductions of alcohol or illegal drugs. They could have precisely regulated sources of temperature and nutrition and ongoing monitoring by expert technicians in incubation clinics. Like genetic testing of unborn fetuses, which is fast becoming a medical norm rather than a choice, people might begin to ask: Why take the risk of gestating my child in an old-fashioned womb? With an eye to avoiding costs and complications, insurance companies might begin to insist that we don’t. (Imagine “expectant mothers” stopping by the incubation clinic once a week to check up on their “unborn” child.)

In the near term, most women would almost certainly gestate their children the old-fashioned way, even if they had the choice. “Relatively few people, with tons of money, who are unusual, would use artificial wombs,” says Tong. But even the option of artificial wombs might change the way we view pregnancy, and perhaps the way we view women. Feminist critics of science, particularly those who embrace an “essentialist” view of women, have long claimed that artificial reproductive technologies threaten women’s social status. Australian sociologist Robyn Rowland has argued that the creation of artificial wombs would spell the end of women’s innate power. “We may find ourselves without a product of any kind with which to bargain,” she writes. “We have to ask, if that last power is taken and controlled by men, what role is envisaged for women in the new world? Will women become obsolete?” Rowland and other feminist critics are hardly shrinking violets; they called their 1984 conference on the subject “The Death of the Female.” They view the medical establishment as irredeemably male — a monolithic, misogynistic institution that views women who are not pregnant as, literally, idle machines.

More thoughtful feminist critics note that even without the possibility of manipulation by the medical establishment, artificial wombs would create serious disruptions in our relationships with our children. “It would weaken the mother-child bond,” says Tong. “Indeed, I think it would weaken the bonds between parents and children in general. On the whole, I think the physicality and embodied nature of pregnancy is a real and material way for one generation to connect to the next... Without that rootedness in the body, relationships between the generations become more abstract, less feeling-filled.”

…

There has always been an incalculable mystery surrounding the womb, as religion and folk wisdom attest. “As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all,” says Ecclesiastes. In the Hebrew Bible, interventions in the womb were considered to be solely the province of God, not man. In the story of Rachel and Jacob, when the barren Rachel says, “Give me children, or else I die,” Jacob responds in anger, saying “Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?” For centuries, folk tales warned pregnant women against walking in graveyards, looking at deformed people, witnessing a solar eclipse, or even strolling around after dark, lest they damage the developing child.

Our feelings of awe and curiosity about the womb are a reaction both to its physiological function and its potent status as a symbol of fertility, procreation, and the continuation of the species. It is not quite an organ, although it can be donated and transplanted; and it is more mysterious than the heart or the lungs, which both men and women share. It is freighted with meaning because it is the site, or the potential site, of such a fundamental and in many ways still deeply mysterious thing — the emergence and development of a new human life.

In an essay written just before he died, the philosopher Hans Jonas observed that “natality,” as he called it, “is as essential an attribute of the human condition as is mortality. It denotes the fact that we all have been born, which means that each of us had a beginning when others already had long been there, and it ensures that there will always be such that see the world for the first time, see things with new eyes, wonder where others are dulled by habit, start out from where they had arrived.” In the end, artificial wombs are different from current technologies like IVF and modern arrangements like surrogacy, because they represent the final severing of reproduction from the human body. There is something about being born of a human being — rather than a cow or an incubator — that fundamentally makes us human. Whether it is the sound of a human voice, the beating of a human heart, the temperature and rhythms of the human body, or some combination of all of these things that makes it so, it is difficult to imagine that science will ever find a way to truly mimic them. We should remember this truth as we expand the reach of our powers over the very origins of human life, lest we give birth to a technology we will live to regret.

#christine rosen #the new atlantis #artificial wombs #feminism #bioethics

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luckythecog · 5 years ago

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A Modern Fairy Tale - Part II

As I descended the steps of the Greyhound on that hot July day in 1981, my eyes meeting Kim’s, the butterflies swarming in my stomach were the size of Mothra from the Godzilla movie. My heartbeat was pulsating in my ears and my entire face felt like it was in flame. I felt like the schoolgirl finally being asked to go steady from the beau she’d had a crush on.

I had never had this feeling before, and I could imagine a life of bliss at the bottom of those stairs. As I took the last step from the bus onto the pavement, my legs felt like elastic strips and my head was swimming and all of a sudden, I was scared. What if this was a mistake? I had just spent the last 40 hours on a bus to embark on a life with someone I really knew very little about, but here I stood and the only thing I could do now was put one foot in front of the other.

Joei, who had taken to Kim immediately over the summer, yelled his name and jumped off the last step and plowed into his legs with a big bear hug. Kim scooped him up in his arms and gave him quick little kisses all over his face.

Here was a twenty-two-year-old guy who accepted Joei as his own. This wasn’t an act, as I had carefully watched the interaction between the two during the early part of the summer. Kim’s feelings were genuine, and he had an air to him that few people have. The kind of individual that seems to have a spotlight on them when they walk into a room, and everyone wants to be around. He was just magnetic.

He embraced me with the same gusto he had shown Jo, and his embrace was tight, enveloping and warm. I felt shielded and safe from my teen years that had been filled with so much pain and desperation.

In late August, Joei’s dad wanted him to live with him on the other side of the state, explaining to me the emptiness he felt without his boy, that the daycare and pre-schools in his area were top-notch and, his folks sorely missed their grandson. I agreed, and we settled on a visitation plan. The gap of his absence left a bit of awkwardness as it does when a child has been the center of conversation and observation between two people. It was as if we were experiencing empty nest syndrome at such an early age.

To our surprise, there was no awkwardness after he left. With Jo now living with his dad, we began to learn more about one another, and there was an uncanny ease to doing so. It was comfortable, effortless and familiar. We shifted into enjoying what was left of summer, which was full of laughs, loves and wonders. Every day seemed like a vacation and the mundane wasn’t ordinary at all. This was the first time in my memory that I looked forward to getting out of bed each morning.

One afternoon, as Kim and I were standing behind our humble little shack, or, if we want to be real here, migrant housing, that sat on several acres of apple orchards his mother Dot owned. We were looking at the flower bed below the kitchen window and talking about how well the flowers had grown over the summer. I looked up to the eves and the pitch of the roof and then slowly turned my face toward Kim’s. I was hit with the strongest case of Déjà Vu I had ever experienced, and it must have shown on my face. I explained to Kim that several years prior I had dreamt of this very scenario, except I couldn’t identify the man in my dream. “It was you” I said. “This whole thing, looking at the flowers and up at the roof, it was with you”. He then told me that the next time we went to his mom’s house, that she had a story that would knock my socks off, and boy, did it ever.

As Dot sat in her stool at the kitchen counter, she recounted a story when Kim was six years old. She was outside hanging laundry on the clothesline and Kim was playing in the yard. Suddenly, a face, plain as day, came across her field of vision. It frightened her so badly that she left the laundry in the basket, scooped up Kim and ran in the house. Her eyes met mine and she uttered “It was your face I saw that day”.

A million tiny needles filled my arms and legs, and my heart jumped into my throat. Dot’s story on top of my dream was a bit too eerie, even for me, but at the same time, confirmed what I had felt deep in my heart about this man. He was my soulmate.

Our days were filled with barbecues and horseshoes with plenty of friends. Evenings were occasionally spent at parties listening as friends played guitars and harmonicas while everyone huddled next to bonfires. Laughter and talk were abundant.

That year, Kim taught me how to play cribbage and pinochle, and many hours were spent at the kitchen table, just he and I, playing cards with good tunes wafting from the stereo. It was the best times of our lives, and the love that was building inside of me was growing exponentially by the day. I had never felt real love before, and it was amazing, but at the same time completely unsettling. I could feel the safety net surrounding the walls that guarded my heart begin to fall away, and that left me feeling vulnerable. Because of my childhood and teen years, I had built quite a wall around myself, and a part of me was very nervous to let it fall.

We married in November of 1981, at Dot’s home with just a few family members and friends. After the ceremony, we arrived home to a party that was well underway. Before we even pulled into the driveway, we could hear bass thumping from the stereo, and as soon as we walked through the door, cigarette and pot smoke was as thick as fog with everyone shouting and laughing over the tunes. There were a lot of bets taken that night about how long this marriage would last. I think the longest bet was two years, and Kim and I have had a good laugh many times over the years, wishing we could find everyone that placed those bets, because we would own an eighty-foot yacht on the Mediterranean by now.

Our first child came to us in October of 1982, a son, who I wanted to name after Kim. He put his foot down explaining to me that having a name like that in school brought out the bullies, so we chose Nathan. It seemed to fit our little guy to a T. When Nathan was six months old, I had a flashback of a dream I had when I was newly pregnant. The little six-month old tot I was on the floor playing with, was the same child in my dream. Same round face and deep brown eyes. So, that made three. Three eerie predictions in the lives of two people.

The 80’s were a crazy time. Music was blossoming into several genres not heard before, drugs were prevalent, and it seemed like the entire area was a party zone. Kim and I adopted the belief that if we were to die tomorrow, we were going to get as much living as we could fit in, today. It proved to be a most destructive path.

Cocaine was plentiful in the 1980’s, and it seemed everyone in the valley was using it and we were no exception. We had become best friends with another couple, Jay and Dani, who had a daughter Nathan’s age, and the four of us would stay up sometimes two or three days straight, playing cards, snorting coke and taking turns watching the kiddies.

In 1984, I became pregnant again and all partying came to a halt. Dot proposed that we purchase the tract of orchard we were living on, along with another plot of acreage. Kim had been managing both orchards for the last few years and an agreement was made. One of the stipulations from our loan company, FHA, was the shack would have to go. It was to be replaced with either a home or double-wide mobile home. Kim and I were both excited but saddened by this. This little shack was home. It was comfort.

By March of 1984, our humble little home had been torn down and replaced by a brand new double wide. It looked as though a new life was unrolling right in front of us. In June, we welcomed our daughter Erin into the world, and she rounded out our little family perfectly. Nathan absolutely doted on his little sister, playing with her constantly and acting every bit the big brother. Even when I was pregnant, he would giggle wildly when he felt her move in my tummy. I knew they weren’t just going to be siblings; they were going to be best friends. We now owned a home and apple orchards and had two beautiful children. It was idyllic.

In August of that year, despite how well everything was going, we jumped back into the party scene. We were selling massive amounts of cocaine, staying up for 24 hours several times a week and receiving red-carpet treatment at many bars and restaurants, due to the owners being customers of ours. It seemed the kids spent more time with Jay and Dani than they did with us, but we were completely snow blinded.

I remember one night, there was an altercation at the house when an acquaintance of ours, Vicki, showed us a .38 pistol she had just bought. We were in the back office and Kim excused himself to go to the bathroom, which adjoined the office.

Vicki raised the gun and pointed it towards the bathroom and to my shock, pulled the trigger. I couldn’t believe she would bring a loaded gun into the house. At the same time the gun went off, Kim ran out of the bathroom, his eyes as wide as dinner plates and before we could yell at her for being such an idiot, Vicki ran out of the house double time in complete embarrassment. We never saw her again.

Oddly, the sound of the gun didn’t wake the kids, and Kim and I walked into the bathroom to access the damage. The bullet had gone through the wall, chest level, exactly where Kim would have been standing just seconds before. It went through the opposite wall into the living room and lodged in the stove pipe of our wood stove.

I’d like to add here that Kim was born almost three months premature. At the time, they gave Dot a fifty percent survival rate and Kim, zero. In his teens, he jumped off a twenty-foot high wall of an area they don’t allow diving any longer for obvious reasons and hit a boulder straight on with his head. There was also the time in his late teens, while getting quite inebriated in a local tavern, a Marine punched him in the face throwing him headlong into a pool table, which he moved two or three inches. This was either the luckiest guy on the planet or he had reinforced steel for a skull and an army of Guardian Angels by his side 24/7.

One night in the autumn of 1987, after we had already been up for 24 hours and were working on the second 24, we were out on our deck. We both spotted what looked like the glow from a cigarette in the orchard. Kim and I ran down the deck steps into the pitch-black and as we were running like madmen through the rows, we thought we heard someone running several yards in front of us. After about ten minutes, we gave up, panting and out of breath and went back to the house. I can’t speak for Kim, but I felt like I was just way too high and the whole thing was a figment of my imagination, and I felt embarrassed because I’d gotten so out of control. If someone would have looked in our eyes that night, they’d have tossed us in the loonie bin.

The next morning, I wanted to look in the orchard in the light of day, to see if someone really had been out there. As I neared the area, I spotted a piece of paper on the ground that turned out to be a receipt from one of the local stores dated for the previous day. I also saw three perfect circles evenly spaced in the dirt near the receipt. As I studied it, it came to me that it was the footprint of a camera tripod. I ran as fast as my feet could carry me and bounded up the stairs of the deck and blew into the house to tell Kim. My heart was pounding wildly in my ears and I was sure it was going to blow right through my chest.

In the backs of our minds, we knew that by selling coke, we could become a target with the Sheriff’s department. But, as it happens when you’re young, you don’t really think anything bad will happen to you and unfortunately, when you’re using drugs, you just don’t care. Seeing those tripod marks gave us a glimpse of reality, albeit hazy. It is extremely difficult to sort out reality and paranoia when drugs are involved. You try to shake the cobwebs loose, but you still tell yourself it’s not really real, that there just has to be some other explanation. Anything but the stark-naked truth of it.

There had been rumors floating around town for several months about upcoming drug busts. There were a lot of paranoid people out there and they would be more than happy to bend your ear if you’d let them. There hadn’t been any arrests, and other than seeing the receipt and tripod marks, we wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

Using illegal substances is a funny business. You know the difference between right and wrong but when you are in the throes of getting high, you seem to toss your moral compass right out the window and damn the consequences.

I remember at one point; we owed our dealer roughly a thousand dollars. My wedding ring had been custom made by a local jeweler, using a diamond from my grandmother’s engagement ring, and I offered it to Jose to hold until we could pay him. We were now using up our profits and it was unlikely I would ever see my ring again.

On an early autumn morning in 1987, a gentleman who introduced himself as Arnie, along with his Golden Retriever Red, arrived at the house. He explained he was working with the local sheriff’s department, heading up a drug task force. We learned that we had been on the watch list for quite some time, and we were currently second on that list for arrest. We also learned that Red wasn’t your garden variety Retriever. He was a drug sniffing canine. Arnie explained that our arrests could mean twenty years in prison for each of us, and most likely foster care for the kids if a family member was unable to care for them. When we mentioned the receipt and marks in the orchard, he verified they were indeed real, that we had been under surveillance for several weeks and plenty of photos had been taken.

To this day, I’m still unsure why he gave us forewarning, but he told us that he was there as a courtesy because he said, “You two have a family and seem like good folks who got caught up in a bad situation”. He was giving us the chance to get our shit together and keep our family intact.

Kim and I took to Arnie right away and we met again several times. There was something likable about him. He was one of those warm individuals that you just felt comfortable around and trusted instinctively. We told him we planned to get sober and put our lives back on track once again and put all the nonsense behind us. Arnie let us know that time was of the essence and we needed to take care of things right away because drug raids were in the starting gates and once that bell rung, it would be too late. We had already tried two treatment programs to sober up, but it didn’t take long to get right back into the life again once we got out. This time, we just absolutely had to make it work. This was as serious as it got.

During that time, we also received a visit from a woman from the Department of Social and Health Services, who told us that the kids were in danger of being placed in foster care due to our drug use. She knew Arnie, and together they were doing their best to give us the benefit of the doubt. She told us if a family member wanted to, they could apply for a foster care license to avoid our babies going into the court system. Kim’s sister Trudi and her husband Ron did just that. They applied for an emergency foster license and Nate and Erin were placed with them. It was a horrible situation we were in, but the only positive in it was that the kids would be with family in a warm, loving and stable environment during the time it took Kim and I to get our act together.

Because we had been so detached from reality, loan payments on the orchards hadn’t been made in close to a year. Shortly after our initial visits with Arnie and DSHS, the bank took the orchards back. Our mobile home, household items, vehicles and our boat were sold with the proceeds being applied toward the loan. It barely made a dent. Once on top of the world, we’d now been stripped of everything. It’s just you and me against the world Honey.

We loaded our last remaining car, a 1968 Mercury Cougar, with some blankets and a few clothes and stayed with a friend in Chelan for a couple of weeks. We spent those two weeks doing the Pity Party Last Waltz. I think we partied harder in that two weeks than we possibly had in the last three years. We were doing our best not to remember how badly we fucked up. The arrangement with DSHS dictated that we were not allowed to see the kids until we could prove we were off the drugs and could provide a stable home environment. In my opinion, there is no experience worse than losing your children. Material things come and go and don’t mean a thing in the grand scheme, but losing your babies is agonizing.

When we were good and done with our pity party, we began the long walk back to civilization and normalcy. Dot provided us with a single wide trailer in a local trailer park. We moved in and began new jobs on a road construction crew across the lake. We had no furniture of any kind any longer, so we hit yard sales and second-hand stores when we could afford it, and Dot helped a tremendous amount. After two months, we got Nate and Erin back, and it just can’t be expressed enough, the heavy heart that lifted the first time we were able to visit them. Having them back in our fold was euphoric. This was the first time we had truly been sober in over four years and it felt wonderful. The only black spot was realizing what we’d lost. Not so much in terms of stuff but Kim’s family orchards. His dad died in the spring of 1977 and I know losing those orchards hit Kim particularly hard. I believe he felt he let his father down.

One afternoon there was a knock on our door and when I looked outside, I saw it was our old drug dealer Jose. Kim and I let him and his wife in, and as we talked and explained to him that we were out of the life, I noticed my ring on his pinky finger. I felt a hole open up in my stomach. I couldn’t take my eyes off it and I wanted to say something in the worst way but, what could I say? We still owed him over a thousand dollars and realistically, I couldn’t see getting him paid any time soon. This wasn’t just a ring, it was the diamond from my grandmothers engagement ring that made it special. It meant everything to me. I guess this was one material piece I didn’t want to see go.

Despite us still owing Jose the money, he and his wife were genuinely happy to hear we were on the up and up, and they shared that they were also out of the life, and after a half an hour or so, they left. As I watched them get into their car, the pang of regret hit hard. It would be the first of many to come. A few minutes later, there was another knock on the door. Jose had returned, and as he came in, he told us again how happy he was for us and slipped the ring off his pinkie and handed it to me. I could feel the sting of tears welling up in my eyes and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to say anything without completely losing it.

If you’re out there Jose, thank you.

We’ve made roughly fifteen moves in the last 30 years, with the longest stretch living in the Columbia Basin. While visiting very good friends of ours who lived there, we told each other that we would absolutely never live in the area. We were there nearly thirteen years. Go figure.

Ours has been neither a life of ease nor regularity. We have learned to adapt to virtually every kind of situation and have stood by one another through it all, except for the few times I climbed aboard the crazy train and opted to flake out momentarily. Despite that, my husband took me back in his arms and loved me as if nothing happened. For those of you reading this that know Kim, you know the kind of man he is. People are just drawn to him because there is just a genuineness that is rarely seen anymore.

We’ve had money and been so broke that we counted quarters to get milk. We have both been overweight and rail thin, but one thing that has always remained is the love we have for each other. I’ve only been in love with one man so I have no idea about another couple’s relationship mechanics, but I can tell you the number of times that we have had the same thought at the exact same moment, are too numerous to count.

As a footnote, I’d like to add to the “eerie” dreams, premonitions and other weird stuff; In 2007, Erin was playing around on Ancestry.com and found that my great grandfather and Kim’s great grandfather not only served in the service at the same time, but were in the same regiment. Now, for a girl who moved to Washington State from California to meet her husband, who was born and raised in North Central Washington, thinks that’s the cherry on top of this sundae.

38 years ago, as we sat on the porch steps of that little shack, we’d laugh about the thought of the two of us old and gray, sitting in rocking chairs.

Okay Honey, here we sit, and my love for you is a thousand times more now than it was then. Here’s to the next 38.

#amwriting #writerslife

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blake-noble · 5 years ago

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Hey, WaPo Express, Maybe Y’all Should’ve Picked Up Your Stinkin’ Phones, Too

Perhaps bidding the world the most bitter of adieus, The Washington Post’s free daily tabloid — the Express — ran the following headline last week on its final cover: “Hope you enjoy your stinkin’ phones.”

Those who chose to set their stinkin’ phone down, pick up a copy of the final Express and turn to the Eye Openers section of the publication were also met with the following:

“In news that scandalized a nation, The Washington Post Express abruptly shut down Thursday, citing falling readership and insufficient revenue. Apparently everyone riding the D.C. Metro now looks at their phones instead of reading print newspapers. Express editors will miss the newspaper and its readers very much. It has been a pleasure and an honor to provide commuters with this daily dose of odd news.”

Uh, wow? Someone needs to order up a large fry, stat, for the WaPo Express crew. (Or, rather, its survivors, considering.) They’re going to need something else to pour their giant mountain of salt over besides miserable D.C. subway passengers.

But honestly, really, it all begs the question: Why didn’t they get with the program, pick up their stinkin’ phones and start doing things the 2019 way? I can only think of one reason why.

So let’s get this out of the way first: Although I once might have aspired to work in journalism, and maintain a great respect for the profession, I also find I’m easily annoyed by publications (and their teams) that choose to whine and complain about Lord Internet, The Great Disruptor and his buddy Prophet Messiah Stinkin’ Smartphone, instead of choosing to adapt to them.

It shouldn't come as any shock, then, that I don’t have any sympathy for the Express’s moaning and bellyaching. My pity well is bone dry.

The simple fact of the matter is this: The Express had a chance to go digital. It could have decided to relaunch as a blog (which — hey! — can be managed from a stinkin’ phone) or at least grabbed its own section on the Post’s website. Instead, it appears it chose to bitterly and foolishly be a print-only affair.

It’s currently September 2019. We’re staring 2020 dead in the eyes now. Love it or hate it, the internet has been around forever now and is here to stay (barring some catastrophic nuclear war or something). Surely the team of journalists, writers and editors working at the Express could see the writing on the wall a great distance away before the decision was made to shut things down.

Why they didn’t choose to transition into another format almost baffles me, almost. See, I also think I might know the reason why they foolishly chose to hang on to their print-only format until their ship sank into the icy Atlantic beyond a penchant for troglodytism. (That’s a fancy way of saying, “Holdin’ on to them good ole days when folks got their news from buying a paper for a whole got-danged nickel.”) If you’ve read this blog before, you should also know by now the reason I’m about to suggest, so get ready for it...

Money.

To explain, I think that at some point the Express indeed knew it had a choice to make when it came to the matter of digitizing itself. And so, like any big-name publication part of a bigger publication, it had one of its accounting bureaucrats sit down and crunch the numbers for doing so. What that accountant came back with probably wasn’t promising.

Ad revenue, the accountant’s findings would have pointed out, for an online-only Express probably would have suffered compared to the print version. Despite the fact readership would have been higher, online ad space goes for less than print ad space. (The Houston Chronicle, for example, points out that one print ad costs around $100 while online ad space can be purchased for half of that per month.) And because online ads also charge per click, advertisers do tend to see them as less valuable than print because reach can be highly variable. (According to Stanley Baran on page 87 of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture, anyway.)

It all spells out this: A hypothetical online-only Express could have been, in theory, not much more or maybe even less profitable than the print version.

Now, to be clear, I don’t have a source that proves my little theory beyond the basic facts I shared on how online advertising works versus print advertising. (Which, as we all know, advertising is how an outlet keeps the lights on and its staff paid.) But, still, everything considered, I can see that scenario unfolding so easily that I would be just as surprised to hear it didn’t happen.

Moving on, while I see how a WaPo Express blog could have been less profitable, I still say it would have been better long-term than staying print-only and going the way of free tabloid newspapers for D.C. Metro riders.

Also, you know, considering how the Express seemed to have a taste for snark going by that last cover, maybe it could have also repositioned itself as cooler alternative to the WaPo and expanded beyond D.C. Metro riders to appeal to younger readers. If successful, that could also have helped its finances. In the end, I still say it still had a choice to go digital and have a future.

John Kelly, in a recent op-ed for WaPo, also wrote about the Express’s demise where he whined and moaned about smartphones taking the place of newspapers. Yeah. Know what I gotta say to that?

I mean, if you want me to be brutally honest, that entire piece didn't have much more substance than one of those “back in my day, we drank from a hose and didn’t wear seatbelts” posts you see your Uncle Darryl sharing on Facebook. All I could hear was someone in their late 50s* complaining about how they thought new technology was ruining the world by making things more convenient, and that grates on my nerves just as much as a newspaper crying, well, about the same thing, really.

(*Kelly claims on his Facebook page to have graduated college in 1984, so assuming he was in his early 20s when he graduated, that means he was born sometime in the early 1960s. Anyway, moving on.)

Thinking about it, I’m also sure that if you asked John Kelly to take his phone out of his pocket, it probably wouldn't be the dumbphone he mentions he had about a decade ago in the op-ed. You know, I’d almost bet good money it would be a stinkin’ smartphone.

Sources: The Washington Post, The Washington Post (again), The Houston Chronicle, Twitter, Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture by Stanley J. Baran.

Lede Image Credit: The Washington Post (...again)

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