#berkeley's on fire tour

[bluewinnerangel]

FITF Tour exit songs

- NA LEG - Uncasville: Tina Turner - The Best

Gilford: The Smiths - This Charming Man

Laval: Petula Clark - Downtown

Toronto: Bryan Adams - Summer Of '69

Cuyahoga Falls: The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

Sterling Heights: Shed Seven - Chasing Rainbows

Cincinnati: The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

Columbus: R.E.M. - The One I Love

Indianapolis: Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart

Maryland Heights (St. Louis): Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode

Kansas City: Van Morrison - Moondance

Milwaukee: Johnny Nash - I Can See Clearly Now

Chicago: Earth, Wind & Fire - September

Minneapolis: Sinéad O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U

Council Bluffs: Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)

Sioux Falls: Don McLean - American Pie

Seattle: The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

Vancouver: The Police - King Of Pain

Troutdale: Elvis Presley - Always On My Mind

Berkeley: INXS - Never Tear Us Apart

Los Angeles: 2Pac - California Love

Las Vegas: The Killers - Human

Phoenix: Spear Of Destiny - Liberator

Irving: The Doors - Hello, I Love You

Austin: Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag

Houston The Woodlands: The Police - Walking On The Moon

St. Augustine: The Police - Every Breath You Take

Hollywood: Elton John - Your Song

Tampa: Pat Benatar - Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Atlanta: The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want

Nashville: Duran Duran - Hold Back The Rain

Charlotte: Lou Reed - Perfect Day

Raleigh: Van Morrison - Moondance

Columbia: Commodores - Easy

Boston 1: Boston - More Than A Feeling

Boston 2: Pixies - Here Comes Your Man

Philadelphia: Sinéad O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U

Asbury Park: Bruce Springsteen - Dancing In The Dark

New York: Queen - We Are The Champions (dj elf asked a fan to pick between this one and David Bowie - Heroes)

- EU & UK LEG - Hamburg: Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart

Copenhagen: Queen & David Bowie - Under Pressure

Oslo: Green Day - Wake Me Up When September Ends

Stockholm: The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Helsinki: Elvis Presley - Always On My Mind

Tallinn: Smash Mouth - All Star

Riga: AC/DC - Thunderstruck

Kaunas: Elvis Presley - Can't Help Falling in Love

Krakow: Iggy Pop - Lust For Life

Łódź: Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop

Vienna: Oasis - Supersonic

Ljubljana: The Killers - Smile Like You Mean It

Budapest: Bloc Party - Helicopter

Bucharest: Foo Fighters - My Hero

Sofia: Rage Against The Machine - Bombtrack

Bilbao: Pixies - Where Is My Mind

Lisbon: White Lies - Farewell to the Fairground

Madrid: Editors - Munich

Barcelona: At the Drive-In - One Armed Scissor

Turin: Lenny Kravitz - Are You Gonna Go My Way

Bologna: Bloc Party - Helicopter

Luxembourg: Pixies - Where Is My Mind

Antwerp: Queens Of The Stone Age - My God Is The Sun

Paris: Biffy Clyro - Bubbles

Amsterdam: Blur - Song 2

Cologne: The Libertines - Can't Stand Me Now

Prague: Jet - Are You Gonna Be My Girl

Berlin: The Cure - Friday I'm in Love

Munich: Fatboy Slim - Praise You

Zurich: The Strokes - Last Nite

Dublin: Inhaler - These Are The Days

Sheffield: The Killers - Mr. Brightside

Manchester: The Smiths - This Charming Man

Glasgow: The Snuts - Gloria

Brighton: Ramones - I Wanna Be Sedated

Cardiff: T. Rex - 20th Century Boy

London: The Libertines - Can't Stand Me Now

Birmingham: Boyz II Men - End Of The Road

- ASIA & AUS LEG - Jakarta: Iggy Pop - Lust For Life

Melbourne: Jet - Are You Gonna Be My Girl

Brisbane: The Temper Trap - Fader

Sydney: Oasis - Rock 'N' Roll Star

- LATAM LEG - Panama: Hard-Fi - Living for the Weekend

San Juan: Pixies - Where Is My Mind

Rio de Janeiro: Nirvana - Heart-Shaped Box

Like last time the plan is to keep editing this post as tour goes on - 2022 LTWT here

Apple music playlist here

[aboutanancientenquiry]

A review of the book of Sarah Debrew ‘Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity”

“Does Classics Have a Future? On Sarah Derbew’s “Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity”

August 8, 2022   •   By Najee Olya

THE PRESENT INESCAPABLY colors our understanding of the past. As an object lesson, take this high-handled ceramic drinking cup, made in sixth-century BCE Athens, in the shape of two female faces joined at the back of the head. One face is the deep black of slip, a mixture of clay and water; the other is the iron-rich red-orange of Athenian clay itself. One has full lips, a broad nose, and hair made of added pieces of clay to indicate curls and texture; the other, thinly painted lines for eyebrows and a darker red on the lips. Viewed from the side, the two faces appear sharply delineated.

How to make sense of such an object? Museum interpretations often rely on modern racial terminology. In the description of this particular vase, the black-slip face is read as “African” and “black,” the red-orange one as “Greek” and “white.” In ancient Greece, these terms would have been anachronisms. But today, because of the centuries of intellectual baggage that have intervened, the artifacts are often considered visualizations of alterity, with “black” people and women cast as “the other” in contrast to male citizens, without accounting for the nuances of these relationships. Is it possible, however, to understand ancient Greek representations of blackness such as these, along with their literary counterparts, without projecting backward modern constructions of race? Is it possible both to understand the past and find analogues in the present without blurring the distinction between the two?

These questions are at the heart of Sarah Derbew’s ambitious and groundbreaking book, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. Informed by critical race theory and performance studies, Derbew aims to “promot[e] a contextualized, critical approach to representations of black people in Greek antiquity.” To do this, she assembles a range of case studies in ancient Greek literature and art from the fifth century BCE through the fourth century CE, treating each genre discussed “as metatheatrical stages on which performances of blackness occur.” Every chapter also draws parallels with modern subversions of racist tropes and acts of resistance carried out by Black people in daily life.

Derbew takes readers on a tour spanning 900 years of Greek art and literature, in which she identifies “performances of blackness.” The main text begins with a chapter on vases from ancient Athens. One chapter is devoted to Aeschylus’s fifth-century tragedy Suppliants. Others go beyond classical Athens to survey the cultural and chronological variety of the ancient Greek world. These treat the fifth-century BCE historian and protoethnographer Herodotus, an Ionian Greek from the cosmopolitan Asian city of Halicarnassus; the second-century CE satirist Lucian, a Greek-speaking Syrian writing under the Roman Empire; and the third- (or fourth-) century CE novelist Heliodorus, a Greek-speaking Phoenician from Emesa in Syria. Differences in genre allow the author to take a wide-ranging look at how blackness was deployed and manipulated in multiple contexts.

Derbew’s book arrives at a pivotal moment in classical studies. The past years have seen debates on the whiteness of the discipline and calls to burn the field down. The very term “classics” has come under fire for its perceived elitism and opacity, with eminent departments (including Berkeley’s) abandoning the name. Some have criticized the field’s intense focus on ancient Greek and Latin at the expense of archaeology, the ancient Mediterranean outside Greece and Rome, and the interdisciplinarity that forms the foundation of research like Derbew’s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, attempts to broaden the boundaries of the discipline have drawn fire from some quarters. The recent reworking of Princeton’s undergraduate language requirements in classics, for example, has become grist for the culture warrior’s mill. Yet what Sarah Derbew has accomplished is a testament to the kind of innovative work one can do by combining traditional philological rigor with fresh and novel thinking.

Of key importance to Derbew’s investigation is the distinction she makes between lowercase black/blackness and uppercase Black/Blackness. The difference is explained as clearly as possible, but this is where things become a bit tricky, to the extent that Derbew includes a table of terms and definitions before the book’s introduction. She explains that “lowercase ‘black’ denotes people with black skin and phenotypic features including full lips, curly hair, and a broad nose in ancient Greek literature and art,” in contrast to uppercase “Black,” which “refers to a modern, socially constructed group of people whose melanin is merely one of its distinguishing traits.” Ancient blackness, then, refers primarily to people with dark skin that the Greeks called Aithiopes (a compound of the words for “I blaze” and “face”), generally associated with Africa south of Egypt, and sometimes even India.

For Derbew, things are not so neat, however, and people with dark skin are not all Aithiopes. The category of “black people,” for example, is used “as an inclusive term for geographically diffuse peoples with black skin, as they are rendered in ancient Greek literature and art.” As a result, ancient blackness was malleable, and could apply not only to Aithiopes but also to Egyptians and Greeks. In addition, she informs the reader that “undeniable similarities linking ‘black’ people and ‘Black’ people aside, ‘Black’ is not a direct referent for ‘black.’”

Derbew, however, does not claim that there was no such thing as race in ancient Greece. On the contrary, following classicist Denise McCoskey, she understands race in antiquity not through now-discredited biological formulations, but as a socially constructed, “outward-facing category of evaluation.” Helpfully, when Derbew mentions race in the ancient Greek context, she often includes a condensed version of her definition as a parenthetical to remind the reader; for example, “external categorization” is one such descriptor. Accordingly, Derbew borrows Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s idea of racial formation, whereby people label others to strengthen their own self-importance. She also highlights medievalist Geraldine Heng’s and classicist Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s important contributions to the study of socially constructed notions of “premodern race,”as well as the related but distinct concept of identity. Unlike race, identity “refers to people’s self-ascribed conceptualization of themselves.” Together, race and identity “reveal the mixture of social projections and self-declared moments of assertion at play during performances of blackness.”

Although race is not a novel topic for classicists, how scholars approach the subject and the kinds of questions they ask about it have undergone a major transformation. Derbew’s concept of race in ancient Greece advances far beyond Frank M. Snowden Jr.’s influential work. A Harvard-trained Black classicist, Snowden set out to show, beginning in the 1940s, that racism directed at modern Black people had no direct equivalent in Mediterranean antiquity. At the same time, Snowden maintained that race was a biological reality and a transhistorical phenomenon. As ancient historian Christopher Parmenter has recently put it, “Snowden neatly transposes American definitions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ 25 centuries into the past, establishing race as an essential principle of world history. Racism or colour prejudice, on the other hand, were perversions of the modern era.”

Derbew and Snowden’s respective approaches to race, then, are polar opposites. Snowden used race-essentialist physical anthropology to map modern biological race onto the ancient Mediterranean. Derbew’s much more expansive definition of “external categorization” allows her to move beyond skin color as the primary indicator of race. Her definition may be so broad, however, as to fall into a trap. As philosopher of race Adam Hochman points out, “social kind definitions of race inflate the category beyond recognition, allowing too many sorts of groups to count as ‘races.’” While Derbew diverges from Snowden on the issue of race, the two are not so distant when it comes to racism. Snowden contended that “color prejudice,” as he called it, was largely absent in Mediterranean antiquity, and Derbew maintains that ancient Greek attitudes toward foreigners cannot be directly equated to modern anti-Blackness.

The reader first sees Derbew’s methods put into action in her analysis of blackness in ancient artifacts and modern museum descriptions, including the example of the vase with which I began this essay. Performances of blackness using such vases took place in symposia, drinking parties wherein the consumption of wine allowed for conversation on subjects from politics to philosophy, as well as contemplation of self and other. Three-dimensional drinking cups formed in the shape of human faces lent an air of the theatrical. Derbew, following earlier scholarship, argues that the vases serve as both cups and masks, allowing their users to become performers by taking on new identities and decentering the self. The experience was heightened by both the visual and tactile aspects of the cups along with the increasing inebriation of the participants.

Where Derbew differs from earlier interpreters is in her assertion that these performances of blackness were not opportunities to contemplate and dominate the foreign and the exotic. Instead, they “reinforce the jocular atmosphere, in that they invite many performers to the party. Moreover, the interconnected faces circumvent cultural chauvinism.” Yet a key aspect missing from the discussion is that ancient users of the vases were not necessarily Greek. As with much Athenian pottery, the objects often ended up in the graves of Etruscans — a fact that requires recognition that the artifacts had multiple possible meanings depending on the context.

The modern parallel that Derbew offers concerns displays of ancient blackness in museums. Here, the focus is the presentation of Nubian artifacts, often grouped as subsidiary sections of Greco-Roman or Egyptian collections. Derbew details the positives and negatives of the Nubian installations in the British Museum, which at some points place Nubia in a hierarchy subordinate to Egypt, but at others present its importance beyond relations with its northern neighbor. Derbew highlights as a positive example of “critical curation” the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s 2019–20 Ancient Nubia Now exhibition, which situated Nubia within a network of other cultures including Egypt, Greece, and Rome without subordinating it to any of them. Derbew’s emphasis on museums is incredibly important, as these are the interfaces between specialists and the general public, and it behooves curators to present artifacts and the ancient cultures that made them as accurately as possible.

Derbew’s literary analyses display her skill as a classical philologist and her profound command of theory. One example is her treatment of Lucian’s satires, where Derbew’s analysis borrows cultural critic Rey Chow’s concept of the “xenophone” — that is, “the linguistic domain in which nonnative writers of English disrupt the presumed monolingualism of the anglophone archive.” Swapping out English for Greek, Lucian “unsettle[s] the category of ‘foreigner’ (xenos) via the language (phōnē) that he places in the mouth of his characters.” The most interesting case is Lucian’s Anacharsis, set in the sixth century BCE, which relates a conversation between the Scythian traveler Anacharsis and his Athenian friend Solon. The two watch athletes train while discussing issues including physical appearance, dress, and identity. Anacharsis, as a foreigner, is situated within the Athenian xenophone and stages a non-Greek perspective on Greek athletics, including incredulity at the fact that the athletes use mud to protect their skin from the sun. Their mud-darkened skin, then, is, according to Derbew, “a temporary mask. It contributes to the athletes’ physical prowess, which in turn feeds into their successful performance of Greek identity without demanding any permanent bodily alteration.” The men, once stripped of their mask of blackness, are no longer virile but feminine: their complexion is again white like that of elite Greek women, whose activities required that they spend much time indoors.

Derbew also uses the Anacharsis to show how modern ideas about race shape translation, singling out elements of H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler’s 1905 translation. Solon notes that some Greek men, unlike the mud-covered athletes, are “somewhat red to rather black because they have been colored and toughened up by the sun” (in Greek: hyperythroi eis to melanteron hypo tou hēliou kechrōsmenoi). The Fowlers simply gloss this as “sunburnt.” By choosing this term, Derbew rightly points out that they “have catapulted Lucian’s characters out of their literary context and into a modern world in which prolonged exposure to the sun has become synonymous with a painful affliction for people with low levels of melanin.” The discussion ends with a modern parallel to Lucian’s “variable manipulations of blackness” in the form of Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel The Sellout, a satirical take on skin color and modern race. In the novel, the main character is a Black man named Me who “ends up in front of the US Supreme Court charged with human enslavement and violation of the Civil Rights Act.” A stranger in the capital like Anacharsis in Athens, Me offers an outsider’s look, in this case by “mock[ing] the city’s pretensions to emulate ancient Rome.” By describing himself as an “Ethiop,” Me “also signals an unexpected resolution at the intersection of past blackness, through the etymology of ‘Ethiop’ (aithō, ‘I blaze’), and present Blackness, through his lived experience.” Here, Derbew deftly separates blackness from Blackness while showing how the latter aids in understanding the former.

In the end, does Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity accomplish its titular goal? Generally speaking, the answer is yes. Derbew guides readers through the complexities of race and its terminology while offering nuanced interpretations of authors, genres, and artifacts in which she has identified performances of blackness. In drawing attention to modern parallels, Derbew demonstrates how the modern can illuminate the ancient without conflating the two. Even so, this is a difficult needle to thread, despite the effort at terminological and conceptual precision. Ultimately, the book is certain to spark much discussion among scholars, students, and other interested readers, and this itself is a success. Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity is proof that the future of classics is already here. It’s simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.

¤

Najee Olya is a PhD candidate in the Program in Mediterranean Art & Archaeology at the University of Virginia and the incoming Bothmer Fellow (2022–23) in the department of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was previously Bert Hodge Hill Fellow (2019–20) and William Sanders Scarborough Fellow (2021–22) at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.’

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/does-classics-have-a-future-on-sarah-derbews-untangling-blackness-in-greek-antiquity/

Najee Olya

[jazzyinspace]

⌚️

🤝

🔫

⭐️

Thank you! 🥰❤️

(You definitely asked me the toughest questions, which I know you did on purpose 🥹✨️)

⌚️ How old were they when they entered the vault? Were they born in there? Or alternatively, are they from Vault 76 at all? (if not, where are they from and how did they end up in West Virginia?)

Jeff is not from Vault 76, nor is he a vault dweller whatsoever. He was born in West Virginia to parents who were a part of the Appalachian Free States. However, he did experience life underground when he was around 8 years old. 

🤝 Do they have any other CAMP allies? (either in-game or added via headcanon)

Brian 🦩

Jeff met Brian at one of the lowest moments of his life. He was still trying to make sense of everything following his disastrous new beginning, all while trying to stay alive. 

Rather than choosing to live a somewhat peaceful life on the cliffs between Slocum's Joe and Arktos Pharma, Jeff left the safe haven that he built for himself and continued on his adventure.

Wilson Brother's Auto Repair became his temporary home base while on the road. And all was going well enough until the night when scorched hordes surrounded the building. 

Panicked, Jeff grabbed the rifle that he picked up in Berkeley Springs and commanded a lone plastic flamingo to keep an eye on the garage. In the same moment, he gave the flamingo a name: Brian.

Together, Jeff and Brian managed to fight off the scorched and save the garage; but, Jeff wasn't ready to face another horde at this point. So, the pair packed up everything and left, searching for another place to call home. 

Today, Jeff and his best friend Brian are constantly building/rebuilding, helping others, and going on adventures together. Their recent trip to Nuka-World on Tour (pictured below) was so much fun! 

Brian would tell you that along with being Jeff's most powerful ally, he is also the CEO and acting secretary of the Jeff Stone Complaint Department™️

Ralph 👽

One day, Jeff heard a crash from outside his C.A.M.P. and when he looked out the front door, he saw [REDACTED].

[REDACTED]

[REDACTED]

[Jeff is just as clueless, believe me]

Jeff has been on many adventures past and present thanks to his neighbor and good pal, Ralph 💫

🔫 What's their preferred weapon type? Is there a specific weapon they mainly use?

With the exception of his Fixer and Flame-ingo, Jeff is a melee specialist. Chances are, if it's one-handed or two, Jeff has brought it along with him on missions or otherwise. 

💙 Redd-Upper–most used 

💙 Shishkebab–most used in [REDACTED]

💙 Plasma Cutter 

💙 Samurai Machete 

💙 Blue Ridge Branding Iron–uses this during Riding Shotgun + Friendly Fire perk. (Kieran voice: Guard the Brahmin.)

💙 Sheepsquatch Staff 

💙 ProSnap Deluxe Camera–he gets startled sometimes! 

⭐️ The Free States?

Jeff was just a child amidst the growing tension between his extended family and most everyone. He would hear whispers of treachery and scandal and notice the accusatory stares coming from his neighbors. Much of this was beyond him at the time, yet still managed to upset him. 

With said tension and the threat of war becoming more of a reality with each passing day, the Free States sheltered underground. They remained there until it was finally safe to re-emerge and rebuild again. 

Post-war, Jeff was able to experience something that could resemble normalcy. The Free States made their home in Harpers Ferry and offered assistance to other survivors and their factions. Unfortunately, all of their efforts would come to an end with the emergence of scorchbeasts and the plague that ultimately spread throughout The Mire and beyond.

Jeff lost his mother and father, his extended family and friends. He was among few survivors of the scorched attacks and felt tremendous guilt because of it. 

(Not so much related to the Free States, but the following is for you, @jonnyonearth ❤️)

Jeff carried his guilt with him as he traveled across the map in search of folks like himself and safety. It was a difficult journey, but he was able to eventually find both of those things in the Forest–and yet his new beginning almost ended before it even started. 

A vault dweller turned wasteland nurse, Emily, found an unresponsive Jeff next to one of the saddest C.A.M.P. creations she had ever laid eyes on. She saved his life that day as her and another wastelander, a preacher, brought Jeff down to her clinic. Even in the present day, Emily still teases Jeff about the whole ordeal, especially the moment when Jeff realized he was sporting some strange gadget on his wrist. 

Jeff started to understand the Free States through holotapes, notes, and hushed stories shared over drinks. Among his personal belongings are Free States items that he has collected over the years. 💙

[denimbex1986]

'Is anyone else surprised by the popularity of Oppenheimer? The film has triggered a mammoth cultural explosion, igniting topics that range from the dangers of politicizing science, to the hermeneutics of the mushroom cloud, to the intricacies of IMAX, to AI military technology and “our Oppenheimer moment,” to the “subversive” nature of going to a movie theater in the age of streaming. Not to mention the whole “Barbenheimer” phenomenon.

Based on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s 2005 biography, American Prometheus, Oppenheimer charts the brilliant career of its eponymous hero; but the career of director Christopher Nolan has a shimmer all its own. Nolan’s CV is every young filmmaker’s envy: artsy short film (Doodlebug), followed by bargain-basement debut that garners critical attention (Following); then a breakthrough art-house film that makes money (Memento); and finally off to Batman-land, rocketing Nolan from no-budget to mega-budget in just eight years. The rare director seemingly able to have it all, Nolan specializes in box-office blockbusters “pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment,” as Manohla Dargis wrote about The Dark Knight.

Nolan’s core obsessions were laid out in Memento (2000), a flashy neo-noir thriller that gave the term “retro” a whole new meaning. That film consists of short sequences that move forward but are arranged in reverse, tracking backwards in time from a revenge killing in the opening scene to the original crime that incited it. Memento’s devices of narrative uncertainty require some cognitive calisthenics on the part of viewers. In the two decades since, Nolan has returned to this sweet spot with films such as Inception (2010) and Tenet (2020), movies that reflected his abiding urge to drill down into, and manipulate, the fundamental structures of cinematic reality. No wonder a story about theoretical physics would attract him.

A three-hour biopic, Oppenheimer sets up as a bildungsroman, charting physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s education and character formation. We follow his youthful tour of European universities in the 1920s, where he meets science luminaries from Heisenberg to Niels Bohr; his eventual landing at Berkeley, where his ideas catch fire (an artful time-lapse sequence shows rising attendance as his classes become popular); and, finally, the unfolding of the Manhattan Project under his direction at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Well, not finally, in fact. A substantial chunk of the movie consists of layered-in testimony from two postwar political proceedings: a 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing to determine whether Oppenheimer would maintain his security clearance; and the 1959 Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Strauss was the man who hired Oppenheimer to head the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, then subsequently subverted his career, apparently for reasons of personal jealousy and resentment.

It is a lot of ground for a movie to cover, and let me lay my cards on the table: amid near-unanimous critical acclaim for Oppenheimer, I second the dissenting vote of the ever-acerbic New Yorker critic, Richard Brody, who likened it to “a movie-length Wikipedia article.” In contrast with the elusive and profound aura that enwraps Nolan’s storytelling in his best movies, here the director takes a kind of History Channel approach, in which private lives are stapled to a public timeline. Thus, for example, the publication of an important physics paper by Oppenheimer in a science journal on September 1, 1939, is upstaged by a screaming newspaper headline, “War in Europe!” There are history footnotes, as when we briefly meet a Los Alamos physicist named Klaus Fuchs—history buffs will register the future notorious spy. Ethical quandaries arising from the prospect of bombing the Japanese are limned for us in meetings where stakeholders hash it all out, seminar style. “Is there no way to demonstrate it first?” asks one of the physicists. “Oh, we intend to demonstrate it in the most convincing way possible—twice!” barks General Leslie Groves, Los Alamos’s Army overseer. It all feels conspicuously…educational.

As for the character of Oppenheimer, he is supposed to present the tragic paradox of a civilized humanist who lends his talents to the harnessing of a violence that could destroy civilization. By way of characterization, we are given visual gestures that juxtapose his various passions and preoccupations—a look around his office disclosing T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” along with prints of modernist art, followed by hallucinatory visions of cosmic particle-scapes set to thunderous music, followed by Oppenheimer quoting a John Donne sonnet to a baffled General Groves (an enjoyably gruff Matt Damon).

But what kind of man was Oppenheimer, really? A few stray moments in the film, clearly culled from the Bird-Sherwin biography, hint at a driven, impulsive, and eccentric bohemian with a dark side. In an early scene from his student days, he impulsively injects a disliked teacher’s apple with cyanide, and has to rush back later to avert calamity. Cyanide? Such behavior is so out of whack with the film’s portrayal of its protagonist that I found myself saying, “Really?”; and although General Groves calls Oppenheimer “theatrical, egotistical, and unstable,” we don’t see enough of these qualities in action. While Oppenheimer’s ethical dilemmas are laid out with teacherly clarity, his psychological and emotional complexities never really come into focus; oddly for a biopic, Nolan has made his subject less interesting than he was in life.

The one-note intensity of Cillian Murphy’s performance doesn’t help. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema fills the screen with closeups of Murphy’s strangely unearthly face, set in a far-off, suffering gaze. This haunted and passive bearing is at odds with the reality of Oppenheimer’s power, and it is disconcerting to see Murphy’s wraithlike figure striding down Los Alamos’s dusty main street in his fedora like a sheriff in a gunslinging town. “He was founder, mayor and sheriff, all rolled into one,” one visitor recalls. “You are an American Prometheus,” Niels Bohr tells him. But we get almost no sense of any megalomaniacal dimension to his character.

Yet power and its mesmerizing allure lie at the heart of the story. The film scrutinizes the scientists’ justifications for developing a weapon of supreme destructiveness—first and foremost, the fear that the Nazis would get there first. As it turned out, they weren’t particularly close; Hitler mistrusted the science and pursued conventional weapons such as the V-2 rocket, and then the war in Europe was over. But the Manhattan Project had developed an unstoppable momentum, and in Oppenheimer apparently most of all. In Jon Else’s illuminating 1980 documentary, The Day After Trinity, British physicist Freeman Dyson recalls that “the dream somehow got hold of him—to produce a nuclear weapon.” And Hans Bethe, another key player at Los Alamos, adds that Oppenheimer “completely changed to fit the new role.” This change—what it drew on in Oppenheimer, and how it ramified—goes largely missing from Oppenheimer, and its absence vitiates the drama, reducing tragedy to mere chronicle.

The film is three hours long, yet the portrait of its protagonist seems sketchy, and one wonders how Nolan might have allocated time differently. Take, for instance, the decision to showcase the hearings from the 1950s. Presumably, the intention was to dramatize the emerging political dynamic of the Cold War, with its rituals of character assassination. But the resulting “action” is bureaucratic and dense. Nolan’s script takes us deep in the weeds of political infighting surrounding Oppenheimer, his nemesis Strauss (played with cool cynicism by Robert Downey Jr.), and the controversy over the physicist’s security clearance, including extensive testimony about a long-ago conversation with an academic mentor who proposed sharing info on the Manhattan Project with the Soviets, and whether this constituted treason. The director’s attempt to wring drama from all the political maneuvering reaches a bizarre climax when he sets testimony from the hearings to the same tumultuous, thunderous music that he used to dramatize the advent of the bomb itself.

Don’t get me wrong: there are some terrific moments when Oppenheimer succeeds in conveying a sense of awed horror, and of a moral recklessness bordering on the obscene, such as one scene in which the physicists place bets on the likely kilotonnage of the blast (Oppenheimer bets on three kilotons), with Enrico Fermi taking side bets on the likelihood of “atmospheric ignition,” which would incinerate all of New Mexico. And the film’s best moment occurs after the bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war, when Oppenheimer speaks to a jubilant crowd in Los Alamos. To the audience’s thunderously stamping feet and shouts of “Oppy! Oppy!” the physicist starts a conventional victory speech—“the world will remember this day”—but suddenly breaks off. Silent, sweating, he seems to dissociate, as everything around him slides into the surreal: a scream; noiseless applause; a blinding light and a vision of calamity, with people sick and dying and covered in ash. The disorienting power of the scene conveys both the calamity of nuclear war and Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil, his nauseating sense of complicity.

Oppenheimer needs more of this scene’s surreal energy; strangely, for a Christopher Nolan film, it needs more strangeness. But right after that hallucinatory episode, Nolan cuts to a cover of Oppenheimer on Time magazine, and from then on reverts to History Channel mode, dutifully covering the political hearings, as well as a brusque interview with President Truman in which the physicist agonizes about having “blood on my hands” and is scoffingly dismissed.

After watching Oppenheimer, I streamed The Day After Trinity. (“Trinity” refers to Oppenheimer’s name for the bomb test site, inspired by a Donne poem, and the “day after” refers to yet another hearing, in 1965, at which Oppenheimer was asked about talks on halting the spread of nukes, and responded, “It’s twenty years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.”) It may seem paradoxical to suggest that a documentary more acutely conveys the tragedy of Los Alamos than a feature film does. Yet for me at least, it did. In the decades since the Manhattan Project, many commentators seeking to capture the dreadful awe that accompanied the advent of the atomic bomb have invoked Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad Gita—“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”—and Nolan leans heavily on it, using it not once but twice. The documentary pursues the horror more subtly, in a banality-of-evil way. It contains a small but terrible moment, when the Manhattan Project physicist Robert Serber displays a section of a wall removed from a classroom in Nagasaki, bearing the outline of a window sash imprinted on it photographically by the blast. “You see the angle here?” Serber says, holding it up. “That shows you that the bomb went off at exactly the height it was supposed to.” And Serber can’t quite suppress a smile—quickly followed by a look of sickly confusion. All these years later, he still feels pride.

That look does more to evoke the scientists’ moral disarray than does the pose of abject contrition in which the last third of Nolan’s film freezes Robert Oppenheimer. Serber’s smile reveals candor about the thrills of scientific discovery, even as his sickened look betrays an awareness of what resulted when those thrills were channeled into the priorities of what Eisenhower himself would call the military-industrial complex. What does it mean—for science and its practitioners, for civilization itself—when mass death becomes, well, a project?

The enormity of such questions mocked even the formidable intelligence assembled on the team at Los Alamos. Recalling the shocking power of the July 1945 test blast for Else’s documentary, Frank Oppenheimer, who worked on the Manhattan Project along with his older brother, becomes suddenly anxious, repeatedly rubbing his eyes and forehead as he describes being stunned by the heat of the blast, twenty miles away. “It was terrifying,” he recalls.

In the presence of that terror, Else asks, what was the first thing the assembled physicists said to one another? Frank Oppenheimer pauses. “‘It worked,’” he says. And upon learning just three weeks later that the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima? Again Oppenheimer offers that stricken look, and again, candor. “Our first thought,” he recalls, “was, ‘Thank God it wasn’t a dud.’”'

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

Tonight (May 2) I’ll be in Portland at the Cedar Hills Powell’s with Andy Baio for my new novel, Red Team Blues.

On May 5, I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor; and on May 6/7, I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

#10yrsago Why “connecting the dots” is the wrong way to think about stopping terrorism https://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/02/opinion/schneier-boston-bombing/index.html

#10yrsago Homemade laser pops 100 balloons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuceDT2R4f4

#10yrsago OpenWorm: an artificial life sim of an earthworm https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/05/openworm-artificial-life.html

#10yrsago Running on a long, deep pool of ooblek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHlAcASsf6U

#10yrsago Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School Of Medicine’s “White People and the Damage Done” https://memex.craphound.com/2013/05/03/jello-biafra-and-the-guantanamo-school-of-medicines-white-people-and-the-damage-done/

#10yrsago Easy win for publishing: network and systematize PR and marketing https://locusmag.com/2013/05/cory-doctorow-improving-book-publicity-in-the-21st-century/

#5yrsago Mashup Maker: Another entry for the Catalog of Missing Devices https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/mashup-maker-another-entry-catalog-missing-devices-eff-supporter

#5yrsago Facebook has repeatedly fired stalker employees, then covered it up https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjp9zv/facebook-employees-look-at-user-data

#5yrsago Oakland passes groundbreaking municipal law requiring citizen oversight of local surveillance https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/oakland-passes-strongest-surveillance-oversight-law-in-us/

#1yrago The Democrats’ self-immolating fetish for means-testing https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[musesmusingz]

Attention-Grabbers and Cacophany

The October sun is setting at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theater, and the amphitheater is buzzing in anticipation. Hordes of young women in synthetic flower crowns and Dr. Martens pack the floor, pushing and shoving towards the stage. As the sun sets, Lana Del Rey gracefully steps out under pink spotlights. The woman I had idolized since my preteen years was no longer just an image on a screen but was now twenty feet in front of me. She looked angelic in her peasant blouse and skinny jeans. I didn’t know how lucky I was to be there— she would go on hiatus after this tour. Soon she swung over the audience on a flowery swing, holding the microphone out to the adulating masses, smiling as we shouted the lyrics to Video Games.

~

            Taylor Swift has been on the lips and cell phone screens of every American for the last year. Recently her jet-setting, carbon-emitting ways brought her 9,000 miles from Tokyo to Las Vegas to support her boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl. The two were photographed kissing after the Chiefs’ victory. Their intimate moment, surrounded by an army of cameramen, deeply immersed in the crowd, is the 2024 equivalent to Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square. I’m not sure privacy exists anymore.

~

            Deep in the woods, off the Washington coast, the Hoh Rainforest resides inside Olympic National Park. The rain from omnipresent rainstorms trickles down through the Douglas Firs, Western Hemlocks, Sitka Spruces, and Western Red Cedars, like gentle wet sequins, and tickle your nose saturating your clothes. The Hall of Mosses trail isn’t even a mile long, yet its gently inclined mossy loop seems to exist beyond any measures of time and space. Lush canopies and old growth swaddle you into a safe, green embrace, surrounded by undergrowth and banana slugs. The only reminder of the outside world is a plastic placard of Mary Oliver’s When I am Among the Trees staked into the mushy ground. In stillness, on the overgrown forest floor, life buzzes around you in shades of green.

~

            The shooting at the sports bar had everybody shaken up. Every body hit the deck. Let the bodies hit the floor! Drop it like it’s hot! 25 shots fired at 1 AM through the outdoor patio at Jackie’s in Southeast Portland, zero deaths and zero injuries. That should have been the news headline. Is it not snappy enough? Would carnage have made it newsworthy? There was no evidence in the news. Nothing but a Reddit thread asking if any neighbors heard the shots fired. Fifty bodies huddled on the sticky ground, circling the silent DJ booth, debating whether to call their loved ones. But no one died, so it clearly doesn’t matter. Are foliage half walls bulletproof? Where did the security go? Portland isn’t known for its clubbing scene, so why the fuck did I go to the bar?

~

            This year’s Milan Fashion Week was littered with banana peels, candy wrappers, whole eggs, and soda cans on the AVAVAV catwalk. The designer planted haters in the audience—actors armed with artillery loaded with garbage. Models stumbled and fell, slipping and sliding on the trashy runway laid out before them. The designer made a statement on hate and the fashion industry as her runway show descended into filthy chaos. Hateful Instagram comments passively scrolled by on large screens, overwhelming the audience with grimy, hateful text and imagery. The hate was real, but the medieval tomato-throwing was staged. Spectacle and staged anarchy will always be on-trend. 

~

            There’s an urban legend in California that it’s a legal offense to pick a wild, California poppy. The rich orange blooms pop sporadically in road medians and sidewalk cracks, teasing and begging to be picked. Pavement, condominiums, parking garages and urban development in the 20th century killed the abundance of orange that once painted hills with a lush brush and covered meadows with a blanket of wild grasses. Californians are more likely to see a poppy on a postcard than dancing in a dense patch. California is a temperamental muse. She’s plagued with earthquakes, fires, droughts, and the mystique of the Santa Ana Winds, but she’s also blessed with wildflower season and superblooms. The long dormant Arroyo Lupines, Canterbury Bells, Desert Primroses, and California Poppies reemerge, carpeting the rolling hills. The wild poppies reenter the scene, welcoming the spring, and tempting kids to pluck their ripe flowerettes.

[chrisryanspeaks]

Toro y Moi’s Bold New Chapter: Hole Erth Album + Tour Dates

Toro y Moi returns with’Hole Erth’, a striking new album that showcases Chaz Bear’s evolving sound and influence on the modern rap scene. Along with the album release, Bear has dropped two visually captivating, narratively connected music videos for “Madonna” and “Babydaddy,” both directed by Kristie Muller. In “Madonna,” shot with a night vision camera, Toro y Moi captures a lovestruck confession, while “Babydaddy” offers a glimpse into the exotic dancer routines that inspired the track. Together, these songs — the former featuring Don Toliver — highlight *Hole Erth* as the first Toro y Moi album to fully embrace Chaz Bear's impact on the contemporary rap landscape. Across 13 tracks, *Hole Erth* merges anthemic pop-punk with melancholic, autotuned rap, creating a fresh sound that feels timely yet deeply rooted in Bear's musical past. From his early influences in punk and emo to his notable production work for major rap artists, this album serves as both a bold reinvention and a reflection of Toro y Moi’s longstanding musical journey. Chaz Bear himself reflects on this pivotal moment, saying, “ALBUM #8 aka *HOLE ERTH* is now out. Thanks to everyone who's been with Toro through all the many stages and eras. I hope this chapter ignites a fire within, something true and unique to you.” To celebrate the release, Toro y Moi is hitting the road for a North American tour, with stops in Los Angeles, New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, and his biggest headlining show to date at Berkeley’s Greek Theater on October 25th. Stream *Hole Erth* and dive into the new music videos for "Madonna" and "Babydaddy" now (see below), and catch Toro y Moi live in a city near you. Upcoming Live Dates ^ = support from Zack Fox + = support from Kenny Mason 9/20 - Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Forever ^ 9/27-28 Las Vegas, NV - A Big Beautiful Block Party 10/3 - Queens, NY @ The Knockdown Center 10/18 - 10/19 - Miami, FL @ III Points Festival 10/25 - Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre (with Aminé) + Read the full article

[audiofuzz]

Toro y Moi’s Bold New Chapter: Hole Erth Album + Tour Dates

Toro y Moi returns with’Hole Erth’, a striking new album that showcases Chaz Bear’s evolving sound and influence on the modern rap scene. Along with the album release, Bear has dropped two visually captivating, narratively connected music videos for “Madonna” and “Babydaddy,” both directed by Kristie Muller. In “Madonna,” shot with a night vision camera, Toro y Moi captures a lovestruck confession, while “Babydaddy” offers a glimpse into the exotic dancer routines that inspired the track. Together, these songs — the former featuring Don Toliver — highlight *Hole Erth* as the first Toro y Moi album to fully embrace Chaz Bear's impact on the contemporary rap landscape. Across 13 tracks, *Hole Erth* merges anthemic pop-punk with melancholic, autotuned rap, creating a fresh sound that feels timely yet deeply rooted in Bear's musical past. From his early influences in punk and emo to his notable production work for major rap artists, this album serves as both a bold reinvention and a reflection of Toro y Moi’s longstanding musical journey. Chaz Bear himself reflects on this pivotal moment, saying, “ALBUM #8 aka *HOLE ERTH* is now out. Thanks to everyone who's been with Toro through all the many stages and eras. I hope this chapter ignites a fire within, something true and unique to you.” To celebrate the release, Toro y Moi is hitting the road for a North American tour, with stops in Los Angeles, New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, and his biggest headlining show to date at Berkeley’s Greek Theater on October 25th. Stream *Hole Erth* and dive into the new music videos for "Madonna" and "Babydaddy" now (see below), and catch Toro y Moi live in a city near you. Upcoming Live Dates ^ = support from Zack Fox + = support from Kenny Mason 9/20 - Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Forever ^ 9/27-28 Las Vegas, NV - A Big Beautiful Block Party 10/3 - Queens, NY @ The Knockdown Center 10/18 - 10/19 - Miami, FL @ III Points Festival 10/25 - Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre (with Aminé) + Read the full article

[silencedrowns]

so. one pair of my grandparents were both history buffs, so they did a vacation tour of civil war battlefields. as one does when you are a history buff and also a weird artist. they literally found someone with this thing on their porch and asked “how much for the cannon?” and apparently the answer was reasonable because the guy actually sold them a civil war union naval salute cannon. which they got shipped from the east coast all the way back to California somehow. it’s one of the things I inherited and I cherish it greatly, even if moving with it is an absolute bitch and a half because 1) it is a cannon and therefore weighs a fuckton and 2) it is a cannon and therefore a weird shape AND IT PIVOTS. also it took a hell of a lot of legal research when I had to bring it across state lines as to whether or not I can like, actually have it legally let alone cross multiple state borders (the answer to both is yes cause it’s super old).

as far as I know it’s still capable of being fired, although it hasn’t been used since the 1960s when my grandfather somehow bribed the campus or something to let him fire cannon blanks on the UC Berkeley football field

so yeah you just need some WEIRD grandparents in the 1950s who tour battlefields and buy civil war cannons and then leave you their prized cannon because they know you love the thing

did I retweet that last post just so I could leave some cryptic tags about owning a cannon in the tags for other people who look through tags to be puzzled by?

yes I did. and yes I really DO own a cannon. it is 100% legal to own an 1800s salute cannon and have it in your living room as a fun decoration. and since I really do in fact own a cannon that’s exactly what I did with mine.

[fueledbyramen]

SWMRS' US run of their Berkeley's On Fire tour starts today! If you haven't gotten tickets yet, check out THIS Topsify contest for a chance to win your way in! 

[karmic-vibes]

If I Can Dream

25 - While I Can Dream

art credit: @lazylittledragon on tumblr / lazyjunebug on twitter

cw: emotions :’)

a/n: this is the LAST chapter/installment of this fic. i may post more little one-shots to add to the steddie dad multiverse (ie w the new addition of Theo 🥺💕), but for the main story, this is it, folks. i hope you enjoyed the ride!

Year: 2006

“Okay, do you have your phone?” Eddie asked.

“Yes, pops.”

“Your guitar?”

“Yes.”

“Your bedding?”

“Yeah.”

“Your–”

“Eddie! We have been through this list a million times! She has everything!” Steve interjected.

“Jesus, alright… do you have–”

“Edward!”

“Christ, okay, let’s go.”

The family piled into the rented U-Haul and started their journey to UCLA. Bobby had been dreaming of moving out to California for as long as she could remember. She begged and pleaded with her fathers to move, but they told her that they should stay put while she finished school. 

Now that she was college age, the world was her oyster. She initially wanted to go to UC Berkeley, but she was waitlisted, so she had to resort to her safety school: UCLA. “Safety school” was a reach, as both universities had an acceptance rate of less than 30%—the boys were beyond proud, to say the least.

Throughout her rebellious four years of high school, the boys worried about her getting into any colleges at all. But to find out that she was accepted into one of the top universities in the country, they were left speechless.

“I told you she didn’t get any of your bad traits,” Steve teased.

And he was right.

Despite being sneakier than a ninja, and constantly back talking her fathers, Bobby Judas Harrington had impeccable grades, stellar extra curricular activities, and an exceptional entrance essay.

All thanks to Eddie.

Her grades were a result from being able to focus from her ADHD medication and her dad’s unmatched, under appreciated brain (which was used to learn music in an unbelievably short amount of time and write campaigns no one else could’ve dreamed of).

Her extra curriculars, which ranged from marching band, to Hell Fire, to her independent garage band, to being credited as a producer on a Corroded Coffin album, to even working part-time as a waitress at a local restaurant on the weekends. She showed a balance between school, fun, and work like no other.

Then her essay—it was arguably the best UCLA had ever received. While most wrote about rewarding times they had whilst volunteering, or how hard they worked in high school—Bobby wrote about her unconventional upbringing and how it shaped her into the person she became.

How having two dads, one being transgender (and famous) affected her. How both her parents were young when they had her, and how that didn’t stop them from being the best parents they could be. How deeply the two cared about her, more so than most conventional parents cared for their children. How having two godmothers (and no godfathers), two singular grandparents, and a gaggle of aunts and uncles (who weren’t even related to her) helped raise her.

It was touching. It was unique. It was authentically Bobby.

While the last few years were a challenge, raising an angsty teenager in a house with no one who could relate to her—they managed to create the best Munson or Harrington to ever exist. They couldn’t even believe it themselves. How they were unable to do it for themselves, yet they helped raise a daughter who essentially became a genius in secret astounded them.

They were proud, to say the least.

On the long, grueling ride to the campus dorms, the boys cherished every last second they got to spend with their daughter. After all, they wouldn’t be seeing her again until thanksgiving. The three of them were smushed, shoulder to shoulder, in the rental. The boys beaming—Bobby, not so much.

“So, pops,” Bobby started. “You gonna start touring again now that I’m gonna be in college?”

“Possibly,” he sighed. “The rest of the band has kids now, so we’ll have to work around them.”

“Would you come play at my school?”

“If they ask us,” he chuckled.

“Would you guys consider moving out to California?”

“I thought you wanted to be far away from us,” Steve teased.

“I want some independence, sure, but I’m still gonna miss you guys.”

“We’ll miss you too, Bee, but… I dunno if we can leave everyone in Hawkins behind,” Eddie honestly answered. “Especially with Wayne and Pattie being a bit older. I wouldn’t wanna be too far from them.”

“No, I understand,” she sighed. “It’s gonna be so weird being away from everyone.”

“I know. I don’t know what we’re gonna do without you,” Steve smirked. “What did we even do before we had her?”

“Like I’m supposed remember?” Eddie grinned.

“Let’s have a second kid—start fresh. After all, we’re only forty and thirty-nine,” Steve teased.

“Hey!” Bobby laughed.

“If you think I’m doing all that again, then you must be crazier than I thought, Harrington,” Eddie warned. “I’ll consider a dog, though. Possibly a cat.”

“Oh, okay, yeah that’s a good idea.”

“Let’s give it Bobby’s room.”

“Hey!” She giggled. “I’m still right here!”

“We know, bug.” Eddie jokingly nudged her arm. “You could never be replaced. You know that.”

And she did know it. She knew she was irreplaceable. She knew, no matter what—even now that her parents were old and gray—she was their baby.

Their first day of driving was coming to an end in Texas. They booked a crummy hotel room to sleep in for the night and told themselves they’d be back on the road first thing in the morning.

The second day of travel was more or less the same—everyone crammed shoulder to shoulder in the U-Haul, desperately trying not to kill each other. The boys endlessly argued over directions, saying that the GPS didn’t know it’s ass from its elbow, and Steve yelling that it didn’t have either (so, of course, how would it know?).

The day before Bobby was officially dropped off at college, they stayed in a hotel near campus, so they’d be able to sleep in prior to moving day. That evening, Steve was asleep as soon as the sun set, but Eddie and Bobby couldn’t doze off to save their lives.

“Pops,” Bobby whispered.

“Hmm?” he hummed.

“Wanna go outside by the pool? I can’t sleep.”

“Sure,” he shrugged. “I’ll grab a couple beers. You want any?”

“Do you even have to ask?”

“That’s my girl,” he chuckled.

The pair slipped out of the room, making their way outside the hotel. They occupied a few pool chairs, popping open the overpriced bottles of beer.

“You ready for tomorrow?” Eddie asked.

“Are you ready?”

“I mean… yes and no. Yes, because I’m excited to see you grow up and be on your own. No, because… you’re growing up. After tomorrow, dad and I are officially empty nesters. We’re not gonna know what to do with ourselves,” he quietly laughed.

“You’ll figure something out.”

“You’re a good kid, Bee, you know that, right?”

“I try,” She grinned. “Papa?”

“Yeah?”

“What happens if I don’t like UCLA?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I don’t like the school? What if I wanna come home?”

“Then you come home and we find a school that’s right for you,” Eddie shrugged. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“You won’t think I’m a quitter?”

“God, no, pumpkin, of course not. You’re doing something no Munson or Harrington has ever done. That alone is something to be proud of. And if you don’t like it, then you don’t like it.”

“What if this whole thing was a mistake? Moving out here?”

“You know, Bee…” Eddie sighed as he took another sip of his beer. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I’ve sold drugs, I’ve done drugs, I’ve skipped school, I’ve cursed dad out countless times. Hell, I’ve nearly even kicked him out once or twice. I have made so many mistakes. But you? You’ll always be my best one. Not all mistakes are bad, love bug—some just may be the best thing to ever happen to you.”

“I was a mistake?” She teasingly gasped. “Now here I was, thinking I was thoroughly planned.”

“Yeah,” Eddie snickered. “A pair of twenty-one and twenty-two year olds thoroughly planned you. You’re funny.”

“I try,” she giggled. “I’ve only learned from the best.”

“Damn straight.” The two clinked their bottles. “Shit, love bug… you’re a grown up. Where’d all the fuckin’ time go?”

“I’d ask you the same thing.” She weakly smiled, plucking a gray curl from Eddie’s head.

“Ow, you bitch,” he laughed. “God help your father. I don’t believe in Heaven or hell, but if there is one, dad’s going straight to Heaven for putting up with the two of all all these years.”

“We’re not that bad.”

“Bug, we’re the worst.”

The two chatted the night away until the hotel staff told them the pool area was closed. They headed up to bed, still tossing and turning, dreading the morning. When the sun rose, and it was Bobby’s check-in time, the family hauled themselves to UCLA to send their daughter off into adulthood.

They spent several hours moving everything into her cramped freshman dorm, but none of them cared. In the end, it was more time they got to spend together. Once the final box was unpacked, the boys offered to take Bobby out to lunch, to which she happily agreed.

The family gathered together, for what would be the last time for the next few months. Hours passed without any of them realizing—they were together; they were happy. Nothing else mattered.

When the boys dropped Bobby back off at her dorm, they wrapped her in huge tight enough to kill. While they wanted their little one to grow and flourish, they simultaneously couldn’t bear to live life without her. Alas, they broke free, sending their not-so-little girl off to be on her own.

“We love you, pumpkin,” Eddie whispered.

“I love you guys too,” Bobby sobbed.

“Stay safe… say no to drugs,” Steve mumbled into her curly hair.

“Unless you grow them yourself.”

“Edward!”

“Fine, sorry! Don’t do drugs, or whatever.”

“Call us if you need anything. Day or night.”

“I know, daddy.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Bye, love bug.” Eddie reluctantly pulled away from the hug, admiring his little twin.

“Bye, papa.”

“Don’t do anything I would do.”

“I know,” She giggled. “Oh, and uh… here…” Eddie moved his hair out of the way, unclipping his guitar pick necklace. “Take care of this for me, bug.”

“Papa, I… I can’t take this,” She whispered. “Sure you can,” he shrugged. “It’s good luck.”

“Thanks, pops,” She teared up.

“Okay, bye for real, gorgeous girl.”

“See ya guys. Call me when you get home safe.”

“We will…” Steve pouted.

She wrapped each of them in one final hug before running into her dorm building, officially fleeing the Harrington nest. Steve and Eddie clung to each other, silently crying, mourning the closed chapter in their lives.

“Well shit,” Eddie sniffed, “what the fuck do we do now?”

[frankiefellinlove]

12/15/1978 Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA

Acclaimed Springsteen and music photographer, PJay Plutzer, is back to share another concert experience. This time he details the iconic Winterland shows, and shares some classic photos from the concerts:

It was December of 1978, two weeks before the final notes would be played on New Years Eve at Bill Graham’s famed Winterland Ballroom that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band brought the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour to San Francisco.

Graham’s Winterland was a premier music concert ballroom and had witnessed many legendary concerts from the greatest rock and roll bands over the years.

Biographer Dave Marsh wrote in 1987, “The screaming intensity of those ’78 shows are part of rock and roll legend in the same way as Dylan’s 1966 shows with the Band, the Rolling Stones’ tours of 1969 and 1972, and the Who’s Tommy tour of 1969: benchmarks of an era.” Whereas the previous Born to Run tour established Springsteen as one of the top live acts, the Darkness tour blew everything else away, delivering some of his best performances and most legendary full-length concerts, and making him the ‘must-see’ musician of his generation.

I had seen four shows on the Darkness tour, San Jose, two in Berkeley, CA and Madison Sq. Garden, all of which were incredible. But the shows at Winterland would turn out to be the two of the most exciting and memorable concerts of Springsteen and the band that I ever attended.

The Winterland show on the 15th was to be the fifth and last of the shows to be broadcast live on the radio on KSAN-FM, having already broadcast shows from the Roxy in L.A., the Agora in Cleveland, the Capitol Theater in Passaic and the Fox Theater in Atlanta.

“Tonight you are gonna hear the concert of your life”, the radio announcer at KSAN stated to those listening and he was absolutely right! With Bill Graham’s introduction of the band, “The chairman of the board, the great one, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band”, the band started at a fever pitch level with “Badlands” that didn’t stop over the entire 25 song set. On the 16th, Graham’s intro, “Rather than tell you about last night, which was magic, let’s just talk about tonight, on a Saturday night in San Francisco, Mr. Bruce Springsteen”, the band started what would set the tone to the evening and this night's 25 song set, “Good Rockin’ Tonight”. Both nights had so many highlights, including, “Streets of Fire”, “Spirit in the Night”, “Darkness”, Bruce’s ode to his dad, “Independence Day”, the now famous “Prove it All Night” with Springsteen’s incredible guitar intro, “Thunder Road”, “Jungleland”, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” “The Fever”, “Fire” “Because the Night”, “Point Blank”, “She’s the One (with Preacher’s Daughter & Mona) and so many more songs. Erik Flanagan wrote a fantastic essay, “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”, https://www.nugs.net/12-20-2019-bruce-december.html, for NUGS.net about the release of these shows from the Springsteen Live Archives that gives great insight and information about both of these concerts. My experience of these two nights has never left me, they were two of the best shows I have ever seen and they are imbedded forever in my rock and roll memory. We are all very fortunate that both of these shows are available at https://live.brucespringsteen.net/ and NUGS.net to listen to and be able relive the power and the glory of the Bruce and the E Street Band on the Darkness tour in 1978. While for me, the Winterland concerts might have been a bit difficult to photograph, with the crowd being so tight near the front of the stage that at times I couldn’t lift my arms above my shoulders to take pictures, I was thrilled that I did capture many moments of rock and roll magic at these shows of Springsteen and the Legendary E Street Band. Shows that will always be remembered as two of the greatest performances in the band’s history and at the Winterland Ballroom.

Photos by PJay Plutzer, Prisoner of Rock and Roll Photos

www.prisonerofrockandrollphotos.com (website live in January, 2023)

[rock-and-roll-hell]

February 1, 1984

Lick it Up Tour

Berkeley Community Theatre - Berkeley California

- This show was originally booked at the San Francisco Civic Center Auditorium, but was moved to the smaller venue. - the local fire marshal had banned much of the pyro from the venue at the last moment. "Smoke poured from the ceiling, billowing across the stage as the members of KIϟϟ whirled into their first number. Luckily, by this time the sound system had been returned to working order. As the set progressed, each member took his own solo. When Gene Simmons' turn came, smoke covered the stage. Nothing could be seen from the front rows except the occasional glimpse of Gene's evil-eyed face, snake-like tongue flickering. Yet, his solo seemed to keep us mesmerized, eyes never leaving the stage. Paul's was much different. He's fun, dancing all over the stage, teasing the audience and pausing for short moments to hear the fans' screams of approval. At one time, he stopped, hushed the audience, and then pointed to one side, motioning them to yell. Then the other side, and back and forth, faster, faster, faster... The crowd loved every minute of it" (Artist Magazine).

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend!

Today (Apr 23) at noon, I’m on a panel called “Covering Silicon Valley” with Winddance Twine, moderated by Wendy Lee from the LA Times.

On Sun (Apr 24) at 11AM, I’m signing for California Book Club at booth 111. At 12:30, I’m doing a panel called “The Accidental Detective” with Alex Segura, Margot Douaihy and SJ Rozan

==============================

#20yrsago Movable Type launches TypePad https://web.archive.org/web/20030603160143/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,942024,00.html

#20yrsago Rheingold’s “Technology Innovation and Collective Action” at ETCON https://craphound.com/hlretcon2003.txt

#20yrsago Eric Blossom and Matt Ettus’s talk on GNU Radio at ETCON https://craphound.com/gnuradioetcon2003.txt

#20yrsago Notes from Wireless Routing and Multi-Hop Architectures at ETCON https://craphound.com/meshetcon2003.txt

#15yrsago Anti-teen noise-weapon comes to the USA https://web.archive.org/web/20080429232132/https://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/23/teen.be.gone.ap/index.html

#15yrsago EMI: backing up music files online is illegal https://consumerist.com/2008/04/22/emi-says-you-cant-store-your-music-files-online/index.html

#10yrsago Early American tombstone euphemisms for death https://www.vastpublicindifference.com/2008/08/101-ways-to-say-died.html

#10yrsago China Mieville’s turn-it-to-11 high weirdness reboot of “Dial H” https://memex.craphound.com/2013/04/23/china-mievilles-turn-it-to-11-high-weirdness-reboot-of-dial-h/

#5yrsago Colorado Senate Republicans introduce legislation to fire, imprison striking teachers https://www.denver7.com/lifestyle/education/colorado-senate-bill-seeks-to-punish-teachers-with-jail-time-should-they-go-on-strike

#5yrsago The used cars that Europe sends to Nigeria are filled with illegal, toxic e-waste https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:6349/PiP_Report.pdf

#5yrsago The BBC finally admits that MI5 secretly vetted its employees, an open secret for generations https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in San Diego, Burbank, Mountain View, Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[bm2ab]

Arrivals & Departures 12 December 1943 - 08 October 2022 Diane M. Peck

Diane M. Peck passed away peacefully in Greenwich, CT on Saturday, October 8th, with her children and brother by her side.

Diane was born on December 12, 1943, in Port Chester, NY, the daughter of Rudolph and Mildred (Dianis) Hroziencik. Diane was predeceased by her beloved husband of 55 years, T. Carl Peck. She will be greatly missed by her older brothers Rudy Hroziencik Jr. and William Hroziencik, their families, and the many nieces, nephews, and extended family of the Hrozienciks and Pecks.

Diane grew up in Byram, CT, where she was raised as a proud member of the Slovak community and attended St. Paul's Lutheran Church. She attended New Lebanon Elementary School and graduated from Greenwich High School in 1961. Diane went on to earn a degree from Berkeley Secretarial School and worked at IBM for several years before taking time off to raise a family. Upon returning to work, Diane was a Legal Secretary at the law firm of St. John, Park and Scott for many years. Later, she transitioned to the corporate world where she was an Executive Secretary at both AMAX and GE Capital.

On April 23, 1966, Diane married the love of her life, Thomas "Carl" Peck, and moved to Greenwich, CT. Diane was the proud mother to their son Tim (and wife Kelly) of Old Greenwich, and daughter, Karen (and husband Scott) Brady of Morris, CT. Known to almost all who knew her as "Nana", one of Diane's favorite pastimes was sharing stories about her seven beloved grandchildren: Matthew, Riley and Samantha Brady and Tim Jr., Elizabeth, Davies and Emma Peck. She loved to cook them meatloaf, knit them sweaters and blankets and give them treats they weren't allowed at home.

Diane was an avid reader and shared her love of reading with many. She volunteered in town, teaching English as a Second Language, helping many adults learn to read and write. She was also a Reading Champion volunteer with Greenwich Public Schools and thoroughly enjoyed her many hours with the young students at Glenville School.

Diane loved to travel. She toured Europe extensively in her early twenties with her friends. Then, together with her husband Carl, she traveled at every opportunity in her retirement years. They visited all 50 states, much of Canada, and several Caribbean islands. They never found a lazy river they didn't love. They particularly enjoyed discovering as many National Parks as possible in their travels. Even though her directions were often difficult to follow, Carl drove Diane on many wonderful adventures. They were never happier than when they were together.

Diane has truly cherished her life-long friendships. Her weekly lunches with kindergarten, high school, and work friends, shopping trips, and detailed reviews of every Hallmark movie truly comforted and sustained her, particularly in the year since Carl's passing. Diane was a strong, intelligent, and talented woman. She was a devoted "Nana" and will be truly missed by all. Her family takes comfort in the fact that she and Carl are now together again.

The family wishes to thank the amazing Doctors, Nurses, Medical Oncology and Palliative Care Staff at Greenwich Hospital, especially Dr. M. Sung Lee and his team.

A wake will be held Friday evening, October 14th from 4:00-8:00 p.m. at Castiglione's Funeral Home, 544 Old Post Rd #3, Greenwich, CT. There will be a memorial service, also at the funeral home, on Saturday, October 15th at 10:00 a.m. with burial immediately following at Putnam Cemetery, Greenwich, CT.

In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to the Peck Family Fund for Volunteer Firefighter Education and Training, established in Carl and Diane's name, at the Glenville Volunteer Fire Company, 266 Glenville Road, Greenwich, CT 06830. Diane also asked that you please consider donating blood through the American Red Cross if you are able.