#but also the person who made her publically anti Church teaching

[butterflies-and-bumble-bees]

.

[movienotesbyzawmer]

April 26: Rocky V

(previous notes: Rocky IV)

A fifth Rocky movie if you can believe it! I saw this in the theater when it came out in 1990. My movie appreciation had become exponentially more sophisticated since the previous movie, but I remember thinking that they were going for something less formulaic when they came out with this. They even brought back the Oscar-winning director of the original Rocky, John Avildson. And surely this character was way too old to still be able to win fights against professional boxers, right? I must say, I don't remember what the story of this movie is.

The intro does a brief throwback to the original name-scroll-plus-fanfare, but now we're showing a recap of the previous movie's final fight during the credits, which promise an appearance by no less than Burgess Meredith.

Do you think there was a conversation where Sylvester Stallone condescendingly told Avildson, "hey, trust me, start the movie with three and a half minutes that is just the end of the last picture, easy money baby, cha-ching ya know?"

The story begins immediately after the Battle of Cold War Symbolism, and we see that he is experiencing physical trauma as a result of Soviet Boxing Technology.

Then we see that they had the idea to introduce a Don King-type character, a really irritating boxing promoter blindsiding him in public to get on his case about a new challenger. Do you think the promoter character will have a nuanced arc.

After a chill father-son catch-up chat, there's an awkwardly-blocked expository scene about how Paulie made some stupid mistake and got tricked into signing away millions of Rocky dollars to a sinister accountant. And then he goes to the doctor who tells him he has irreversible punch damage and can't fight any more. Conflict is looking dire. Do you think Robot Character will arrive soon to cheer us all up.

After selling all of their possessions at an auction, Rocky goes to his old hangouts. He leaves the corner bar looking defeated. They don't show how he was defeated in the bar, but that bar clearly humiliated him.

Then he goes to the old gym, and here's where we have a flashback scene of Burgess Meredith giving him a pep talk. It's kinda nice. But it still feels like we're at the point in the story right before the tide turns and suddenly Rocky is inspired to become supernaturally good at boxing once again. But that's not gonna happen; we're just twenty minutes into the movie.

Rocky has to move back into his old neighborhood. It's dirty and run down, and people gawk.

0:32:00 - For the third time in this movie, Rocky tries to charm his family with a LOOK WHAT I PULLED OUT OF YOUR EAR gag. The characters are barely charmed by this gag. We, the audience, are way way way less charmed.

Fake Don King is buzzing around a lot. He is a dick and he is annoying to every single person alive. It's effective at driving the conflict because he is so persistent at needling Rocky into maybe fighting. But the acting is cringey. Kinda the point, though, right?

Just like that, the old gym where we saw the flashback, which was abandoned and run down, is open for business and full of people. How did that happen?

0:43:30 - Okay now it is me - Zawmer! - who is about to be an unappealing bad guy because I must now report how little tolerance I have for this scene with two child actors. Rocky's son, who got bullied at school earlier, is having his first maybe-we-fancy-each-other conversation with a girl. The dialogue has no chemistry with these kid actors.

I should mention that there is a character named Tommy Gunn. He is a spirited young boxer who has found Rocky and wants Rocky to help him. He is bemulleted and earnest and good-punch-y.

Rocky is going to manage Tommy, but his son wants some attention. Feels like an artificially manufactured conflict. Plus the dumb bullies at school beat him up again. It is hard being the newly-poor child of Rocky Balboa.

0:53:25 - I probably wouldn't have caught this if I hadn't watched the first movie kind of recently, but we cut to a fight, Tommy is fighting someone and it's in the same church that started the first movie. He wins that fight and it becomes a montage of Tommy becoming increasingly successful under Rocky's coaching, plus there is evidence that Rocky's son is trying to get his dad's attention by using some of the gym equipment.

It does seem like it would be fun to make boxing-improvement montages.

Oh, the kid learning boxing was so he could get back at the bullies. Mission accomplished but he clearly thinks his dad was supposed to be even nicer about that, even though he was kind of nice. But he was in the middle of something with Tommy, I mean, come on!

Ooh, and that was just a brief interruption in the boxing-improvement montage, it keeps going. This movie is pretty generous with fun montages.

The falling out scene between Rocky and Kid is not better than a similar scene in an after school special. And it's way worse than that one anti-drugs commercial we all remember, "I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU"

Oh, but then Kid runs away and starts hanging out with Ivan Drago! Drago starts teaching him how to beat up his dad, and says something about "If he die, he die". No. No he doesn't. That doesn't happen. I was just getting a little bored there. What's true here, what's actually true, is that Kid's increasingly rebellious personality has yielded a very, very stupid looking ear chain. It is an earring… with a chain hanging off it at the exact perfect length for no human being to think it looks good. The length of that chain is the chain-length equivalent of the amount of time that Talia Shire closes her eyes that one time.

A new conflict emerges where Tommy is going to sign with Fake Don King. It turns out Rocky had no interest in making any money. You can't blame him really. Rocky's all "don't sell out". But. Dude.

Okay so Tommy Gunn, having divorced Rocky and married Fake Don King, wins the title fight and becomes the new champion. The crowd boos, and they also cheer "Rocky". Rocky is not there. Rocky is watching the fight on TV in the basement and also punching a thing because he can't help it, but the crowd at the fight is like "Rocky" and "boo". I don't quite get it.

This press conference is kind of clearing it up, see, no one thinks it was a legitimate fight, it seemed fakey. There is pandemonium and insultation! It is clearly building to some silly insistence that he, Tommy, should fight Rocky.

Tommy shows up at the bar and he's hopping mad because he ain't nobody's robot and will you accept my challenge Rocky! Fake Don King thought this would turn into an actual arena event, but it's turning into just a back-alley fight like in that Fight-y movie about that Club.

It escalates thusly. As Rocky endures cinematically beautiful flashbacks to fights from earlier movies, they punch each other beneath rumbling trains. I sound mocking but some of it is pretty visually interesting.

Interesting enough to serve as an abstract explanation for how, once again, Rocky is supernaturally good at punch-game. It may be a street brawl this time, and we may have to do without Adrian closing her eyes Just So, but once again the Rocky movie ends with him winning the fight and everyone being very very excited about that. He punches Fake Don King because of how smarmy he is, and even the priest is delighted.

There is a denouement of Rocky and Kid bonding genially by the famous steps, and then the credits roll in front of touching stills from all five movies, and an Elton John song that didn't have as much cultural impact as some other songs we've heard recently.

I guess I like the montages and the quick cinematic choices that are to be found here and there in these movies, but mostly when I think back on them it seems like they are arrangements of familiar modules. In this one, the modules were held together with more flimsy material. I was wrong to think that this movie would be less formulaic. Soon I am done with this project. Soon. SOON.

[corkcitylibraries]

National Heritage Week | Frank O’Connor – Librarian

by Jim McKeon

Writer, Frank O’Connor, was just twenty years of age when he was released from Gormanstown Interment Camp. Cork had been badly hit by the Civil War. It was still a smouldering ruin. Because the city and county had been the focal point of much of the bloodiest fighting the turmoil of the Civil War lingered there longer than it did elsewhere in the country. In the spring of 1924, the city was still edgy. O’Connor had no money and no job. Under the new government all teachers were required to learn the Irish language. For a few months he taught Irish to the teachers at the Protestant school in St Luke’s Cross, near his home. He was paid a few shillings a week for this. He struggled by, a twenty-year old in his father’s patched up, old hand-me-down trousers teaching middle-aged teachers how to speak the Irish language. It was frustrating, especially if you were on the losing side in the Civil War. MacCurtain and MacSwiney had tragically died but he still met Corkery and Seán O’Faoláin regularly. As so often before Daniel Corkery, forever in O’Connor’s background, stepped in and arranged an interview for a job. Cork dramatist, Lennox Robison, who was secretary of the Carnegie Library, was organising rural libraries and he was looking for young men and women to train as librarians. After a tough interview O’Connor got the job. His mother packed his little cardboard suitcase, including a big holy picture of the Sacred Heart, and he set off for Sligo.

 Bust of Frank O’Connor - on display in the City Library, Grand Parade

At last he had enough books to read. Even for 1924, the wages were poor, thirty shillings a week. His lodgings were twenty-seven and sixpence. He had a half-crown (12.5 cent) left for cigarettes and drink. He posted his dirty laundry on to Cork every week. His mother washed it, with unconditional love, and posted it back, and sometimes included five shillings for her son. As a librarian he was all hands. His boss said he was untrainable. He kept busy by reading poetry books and getting them off by heart. He was blessed with a phenomenal memory. The only thing of note in Sligo was that he celebrated his twenty-first birthday far from home. After six months he was sent to Wicklow, where a new library was to be opened.

 When he arrived a local priest wanted to close down the library. Lennox Robinson had just been heavily criticised and fired from his library position because of a controversial story he wrote about a pregnant girl who felt she had mysterious visit by the Holy Ghost. O’Connor’s boss was Geoffrey Phibbs, an influential fellow poet with controversial opinions on many aspects of life. The two young poets became great friends.  Phibbs escorted O’Connor to Dublin and introduced him to Lady Gregory, George Russell (AE) and Yeats. AE was editor of the Irish Statesman and encouraged O’Connor to send him on something for publication. He sent a verse translation of Suibne Geilt Aspires and when AE published it 14 March 1924, it carried for the first time the pseudonym Frank O’Connor. It must be remembered that he was a young civil servant and he may have been contemplating on keeping his job by using a pen name ever since Lennox Robinson’s enforced resignation. He chose his confirmation name, Francis, and his mother’s maiden name, O’Connor. The prominence AE and the Irish Statesman gave him thrust him into literary view. Yeats had great time for O’Connor and said that he did for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia. But the young librarian missed home and his mother. A vacancy came up in Cork. AE tried to talk him out of it and warned him he’d be miserable back in Cork. It never occurred to O’Connor that he would not return home. Like his father he was, at that stage, a one-town man..

 Notwithstanding AE’s forebodings, he accepted the job of Cork’s first county librarian in December 1925. He was just twenty-two years of age. His salary of five pounds a week was more than anyone in Harrington’s Square had ever dreamed of earning. The library was at twenty-five Patrick Street which was still in the process of being rebuilt.  Minnie was happy that her son was back home again and his father, Big Mick, was impressed that a pension went with his son’s new job. The city was still in a poor condition. The foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 augured a period of new confidence in Cork. But in 1924 a public inquiry found: 

  …limited progress had been made on rebuilding Cork’s city centre since it had been burned down in 1920. Criticism was made of the poor quality of maintenance of the city streets, many of which were still paved with timber blocks. Part of Anderson’s Quay had fallen into the river. The public water supply was of poor quality…There was virtually no building in progress in the city.  

  In the burning of Cork not alone had many of the character and physical structures of the city been lost, but so also had thousands of jobs and many peoples’ homes. The Cork Examiner reported that thousands were rendered idle by the destruction. The rebuilding was tediously slow mainly because of the shortage of funding. Britain’s refusal to accept blame and pay compensation didn’t help. The Civil War itself and the post-war political divide were also major factors in delaying the building progress. This was another chapter in Frank O’Connor’s Cork, a damaged city struggling to survive. He opened his library over a shop near the corner of Winthrop Street. It was five years since the burning yet major buildings, just yards away, like Roches Stores and Cash & Co, were still rubble. Rebuilding had not yet started in these two well-known shops. In January 1927, Roches Stores finally re-opened for business. Summing up, the burning of Cork had a unifying effect on a people that had been collectively damaged by the event. It also exposed divisions in Cork society at the time. A Church/political divide came to the surface during this traumatic time. It was demonstrated through criticism by councillors of Bishop Coholan for his refusal to condemn the burning. Many republicans were unhappy because they felt the clerical comments were often selective. Frank O’Connor had a huge responsibility for a young and inexperienced man. He was given a cheque for three thousand pounds to set up and stock his library. He made his first mistake. At that time an anti-Catholic bias still lingered in commerce. He naively lodged the cheque in the nearby and more practical catholic bank when the accepted practice was to use the protestant bank. This innocent action caused a major committee dispute and O’Connor was accused of having a personal and ulterior motive. Then, when he insured the building, the insurance company gave him a cheque as a personal thank you. He didn’t want it and kept it for years but never cashed it. He sums up this whole chaotic scenario: 

  By the time the Cork County Council had done with organizing my sub-committee it consisted of a hundred and ten members, and anyone who has ever had to deal with a public body will realize the chaos this involved. Finally I managed to get my committee together in one of the large council rooms, and by a majority it approved my choice of bankers. There was, I admit, a great deal of heat. Some of the councillors felt I had acted in a very high-handed way, and one protested against my appearing in a green shirt – a thing which, he said, he would not tolerate from anybody. 

  When he finally got his stock of books together and organised his new library, he decided that he should have closer contact with the rural community. If they couldn’t come to him then he’d go to them. He bought a van, packed it with boxes of books, and drove all over the county. After six months this affected his health. He was exhausted from working long hours driving all over West Cork and he wrote almost every night. In a letter to old Wicklow colleague, Phibbs, he wrote, I’m working like a brute beast. He became ill and had to have a serious operation in the Bon Secours Hospital. He spent two weeks in hospital and six weeks convalescing. It shows his stubbornness when he shocked the nuns in the hospital by refusing to receive the sacraments before the operation. 

           Cork had a long tradition of theatre and a critical play-going audience, but in 1927 there was only one drama group in the city, the newly formed Cork Shakespearian Company. Daniel Corkery’s little theatre had closed in 1913 and groups like Munster Players, Leeside Players and Father Matthew Players were also defunct. On 8 August 1927 Micheál MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards brought their touring company to Cork. They performed The High Steppers’in the Pavillion Theatre in Patrick Street. This venue later became a cinema and is presently HMV music shop. After the opening night there was a party at Seán and Geraldene Neeson’s home. Geraldene was Terence MacSwiney’s bridesmaid when he married in England. MacLiammoir encouraged O’Connor to revive drama in Cork. O’Connor was inspired and was instrumental in forming the Cork Drama League. Although he knew nothing about drama he threw himself headlong at the project. Old friend, Seán Hendrick, recalls: 

  That Michael knew nothing about producing plays and I knew nothing about stage-managing them did not trouble us at all…The producer was to be given a free hand in the choice of both plays and cast and members were bound to accept the parts allotted them. There were to be no stars and an all-round uniformity of performance was to be aimed at. 

  Undaunted, Frank O’Connor tore into their new venture. Lennox Robinson’s play, The Round Table, was to be the first production. It was its first appearance in Cork and there were some slight adjustments to suit the local audience. The curtain-raiser was Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Typically, O’Connor wrote the programme notes, directed The Round Table, and appeared in both plays. The Round Table was a difficult play to produce. It had fourteen characters. Many of them doubled up and played two roles. They had trouble trying to cast the part of Daisy Drennan, but one night Geraldine Neeson brought along a pretty young girl to audition. Although she had a terrible stammer she was a natural actress. Not alone did she get the part but that night O’Connor walked her home. From then on Nancy McCarthy became his leading lady and for years to come she was to flit in and out of his life. The company’s first play opened on 28 February 1928 in Gregg Hall in the South Mall, a theatre venue no longer used in Cork. They got high praise all round especially Nancy McCarthy. They immediately started rehearsing for their second venture, The Cherry Orchard. Cork City was now back on its feet and completely rebuilt and people were getting used to a new freedom and sense of safety. Theatre was a hugely popular event.  Plays at that time generally had an Irish theme and written by the likes of Yeats, Synge, Robinson and T. C. Murray. That had been the custom and they were very popular with Cork audiences. But the young Frank O’Connor had other ideas. He was into French and German and Russian theatre and he wanted to offer the Cork public something different. 

  English drama, no matter how significant it may be in its own setting can have no beneficial effect upon a country which is subjected to cultural influences only from one source. The Cork Drama League proposes to give the best of American and continental theatre, of Chekhov, of Martine Sierra, of Eugene O’Neill and those other dramatists whose work, as a result of the dominating influence of the English theatre, is quite unknown in Cork.  

  That was a more than subtle dig at Fr, O’Flynn, a local priest, who had founded the Cork Shakespearian Company in 1924. The two men did not get on. From 20 December to 30 December1927 they exchanged four letters in the Cork Examiner trading insults. Fr, O’Flynn signed his letters The Producer while O’Connor used his name in Irish. Seán Hendrick joined in the attack calling himself Spectator. Everyone in Cork knew who both men were. Ironically, they were more alike than they cared to admit; they were two proud Cork men, they both loved Shakespeare and they both loved Irish. Two more plays were produced, The Cherry Orchard and A Doll’s House. Both got fine reviews, but the audiences were poor. Maybe the Cork Drama League was going too far too soon, and Cork wasn’t ready for them. By now O’Connor was spending most of his time with Nancy McCarthy. Nancy was a religious girl from a well-known Cork family. He brought her home to see his mother and the couple went on a three-week holiday to Donegal. They stayed in houses three miles apart. They met every day for a year outside of St, Peter and Paul’s church after mass. They were engaged for a while but it did not work out. She would not marry him. He would not marry in a Catholic church and there was no way Nancy would marry outside the Church. She was one of ten siblings and he was an only child. She felt he was spoiled. This was quite true. By now he was being regularly published in the Irish Statesman. He had a poem dedicated to Nancy published 9 May 1928. The last two lines are filled with melodrama: 

  That even within this darkness of our body keeps  

Communion with the brightness of a world we dream  

  Frank O’Connor was beginning to feel that AE was right. He should never have left Dublin. He was no longer enjoying his years in Cork. It was no longer the place he had known. O’Faoláin was in America and recently he had found it difficult to talk to Corkery. He made it plain that he was taking sides and that O’Connor was on the wrong side. O’Connor was restless and felt that Cork was threatening to suffocate him. He missed Wicklow where he could talk literature and art to Phibbs and go on to Dublin to meet AE and Yeats. AE would give him all the latest books and gossip, and Sunday evening he could go to the Abbey Theatre and see a series of continental plays, Chekhov, Strindberg and contemporary German plays. Eventually, getting frustrated with the parochialism of Cork and his lack of success with Nancy McCarthy, he applied for the job as municipal librarian in Ballsbridge. On Saturday 1 December 1928 he packed his case and left for Dublin. He still felt it was only a temporary move. Nothing could cure him of the notion that Cork needed him and he needed Cork. Nothing but death could ever cure him of this. 

Jim McKeon’s book Frank O’Connor: A Life is available to borrow from Cork City Libraries 

Jim McKeon has been involved in theatre all his life and has many film scripts, plays and books to his name. His best-known work is probably the biography of Frank O'Connor. He also toured Ireland and the US with his one-man-show on the writer's life. Jim is also an award-winning theatre director and poet.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

I have a silly Napoleon ask for you: if he suddenly woke up in the present day what do you think he would a)like most about it b) like least about it c)get unreasonably addicted to d)decide to do for a living

hahah I’ve answered a similar one before here and here. 

Most Like About It: A lot, I think. Central heating. Guys, he’d fucking love central heating.

In general, he’d love most technological advances. Cars, planes, trains etc. like he’d be very into that. “Bertrand we’re going to ride the TGV all day every day. Look at how fast we are going! This is genius.” 

“Bertrand WE ARE IN THE SKY. This is AMAZING. We are going from Paris to Rome in a matter of HOURS. HOURS BERTRAND. WE DON’T HAVE TO CROSS MOUNTAINS.” (sorry just assuming this is exile Napoleon who woke up in modern day.) 

Public transit in general - the metro, buses - anything that makes life more efficient for people. Dishwasher, washers/dryers, modern electricity, laptops, printers, ball point pens etc. 

I suspect he’d be a big supporter of public health care and all the advances made on vaccines and medicine in general. 100% would hate anti-vaxxers. Pro-modern glasses (he’d get himself a pair asap. Then they’d explain contacts to him and I think he’d be like “WAIT NO, I WANT THOSE.” He would not be into lasik, I suspect). 

Modern hygiene! Razors, tooth brushes, floss, moisturizer - general daily body care he’d probably be keen on. (All that stuff we take for granted.) Though maybe not all of it, he was quite traditional in certain things (his penchant for older fashion, par exemple). Maybe he’d keep the old straight razor shaving approach. But modern dentistry would be a huge improvement and I can’t see him being against it. Especially as someone who had a tooth extracted in the early 19th century. 

‘Oh they give you pain killers now? Fantastic.’ 

‘Sir, we just numb the area where we are doing the work.’ 

‘So it doesn’t impede my awareness? Amazing. Please, fix all my teeth right now.’ 

He’d also support the greater access to education that exists, especially compared to his day. Also, streaming services. He would binge so many things. ‘Bertrand we are watching every thing this very soothing sounding British naturalist made about planet earth. Holy shit look at that they’re under water! They’re at the bottom of the ocean! Bertrand look at this. if only Josephine were here. She’d be so excited.’ 

Pro-zoom/Microsoft teams/facetime etc. 100%. ‘If I had this instead of people relying on my bad handwriting ...’ 

Oh, he’d like the EU as a concept. Except he would be very disappointed that France wasn’t at the helm. I think France’s position globally would disappoint him, overall. But yeah, the broad principles espoused by the concept of the European Union would appeal to him. 

Brexit though. Lol. I think he’d enjoy watching England shoot itself in the foot. But if you asked him for his opinion, as in “do you think the UK should do this” he would answer no. They should remain. 

He would like globalization, trade agreements, things like NAFTA, CETA etc. Supporter of big government. Reduction of religion in public sphere. Though would he be pro-banning visual manifestations of faith? (i.e. Hijab etc.) I don’t know. I doubt it. Simply because he was very focused on religion in government, so if churches aren’t involved in decision making, what citizens get up to on their own is their business (so long as you don’t cause problems). But I don’t know, he might be pro-it, because he was also into assimilation and creating a broad sense of a French culture. I could see him really going either way on it. It’d probably come down to whatever he thought would garner the most public support as a political move (since a lot of his more liberal moves as a leader were tied to understanding that marginalized communities would gun hard for him if he helped them). 

He would be pro-mask wearing for COVID because he wasn’t a fucking idiot and lived in a time when pandemics were still a real going concern. 

He would also probably like how comfortable modern clothing is. I don’t think he’d like how cheap and made-to-wear-out that most brands are, but he’d like the over all philosophy. Like Napoleon would dig t-shirts. Lounge wear. The fact that jeans have some stretch in them. That sort of thing. 

-- 

Least Like: I think he’d be very wary of the internet. For many reasons. For the lack of government control (Napoleon “What is a free press? never heard of her” Bonaparte). But also, because of the misinformation problems. The side effects many of us are now bearing witness to, and experiencing the ramifications of. 

He would dislike the whole fake news nonsense. Oh this man was a master spin-doctor, very good at twisting a narrative around to suit him, but he still did have respect for and a firm belief in basic facts. Especially fake news that usurped the sound advise of scientists and doctors (i.e. COVID nonsense). 

Free press, I think he would be wary of it. Mostly from a government control perspective. Like as a day-to-day citizen, since he wouldn’t be anyone in power in this hypothetical, I think he’d value it. He would do that disassocative thing he did when he talked about things in the abstract. That cold, calculating way he would position himself in a situation and be like “Ah yes, these are the things that need to be tamped down if you want control of a populace as a monarch”. Then he had his more liberal, call-back-to-that-misspent-jacobin-youth moments where his views shifted. 

I suppose it would also depend what age this hypothetical Napoleon is. He softened a lot in retirement exile. Napoleon at the height of his power, thirty-odd years old, different man to fifty year old Napoleon. 

Would not be into women in politics. He’d be like ‘Why is there a woman in charge of Germany? Also what happened to the Habsburgs? Where’s Prussia? Silesia? What the FuCk is happening in the Balkans? I’m very confused about Europe’s current geographic layout. ...Corsica...still doing you, I see.’ 

He’d dislike Trump and his cronies. As I wrote before: “ I think Napoleon would find Trump disgusting on a personal level. Uneducated, incapable of holding a real conversation, gauche, anti-intellectual, anti-fact-based discussion, anti-science, anti-art etc. He’d also feel that Trump is disgracing the position of President and that he is unworthy of leadership. Napoleon would also find Trump physically repulsive as he could be a wee bit shallow in some of his assessments (though, very early modern to 19th century to assume your physical appearance is a manifestation of your interiority).” 

Steve Bannon’s fiddling with finances? Napoleon would find that repulsive. Mitch Mcconnell disgracing his office by fucking around with constitutional loop holes? Napoleon would think it a disgrace. 

He had a lot of respect for America’s experiment with democracy. Like, quite a lot of respect. So I think he’d be vastly disappointed in not only the person occupying the white house, but also a lot of the apathy in voting that is going around. (Yes, this coming from a [mostly] absolutest monarch, too.) But Napoleon valued and respected the notion of civic duty. If you live in a democracy, you have a duty to participate. To opt out is to shirk that duty which he would find insulting and distasteful. Because, I would argue, he was very much a believer in people doing right by their fellow citizens. 

--

Get unreasonably addicted to: MODERN BATHS. HE WOULD NEVER LEAVE THE BATHTUB. THEY CAN HAVE JETS AND EVERYTHING BERTRAND THIS IS GREAT. 

Also central heating. Saunas. Jacuzzis. He was like a wee lizard seeking warmth at all times. 

I think he’d be into driving. I don’t know if he would be good at it. Don’t let Napoleon take the wheel, guys. But if someone else was driving he’d be that person “go faster. you’re driving like my grandmother.” And gods, he’d do dumb shit like drive like a maniac around the arc de triumph six times in a row because he’s an adrenaline junkie and a risk-taker (it’s that bored ADD brain of his). The autobahn would be his dream. 

I think he’d be super into epic fantasy series. Like the big sweeping ones like Lord of the Rings. I think less so GRRM because GRRM is unrealistic and Napoleon is pedantic. Especially about politics and war. Exhibit A: consider Napoleon’s very detailed nitpicking of Virgil on his inaccurate rendition of Troy from a military perspective. Therefore, I suspect GRRM’s lack of accuracy in how society works, how war works, how politics works, all the plot holes and illogical character decisions, would drive him up the wall. Napoleon liked Homer because he could tell Homer had been to war. And you can tell Tolkien has been to war. Also LOTR hits all those notes of high-hearted emotion and big sweeping scenes that Napoleon so liked in Ossian and the Illiad etc.

All this to say, overall, as a genre, I think those big, sweeping fantasies with lots of plot, politics, intrigue, soaring battles, great heights of emotion - he’d love that. It would hit all of his buttons for what he liked in fiction. Lots of emotion, lots of action, lots of big scenes, lots of crazy shenanigans. This can also be applied to Sci-fi. I think he’d be a big nerd on that too. But the science would have to make sense. 

I think he’d be into Star Trek, particularly Picard, if only for the philosophical aspects of it. He liked those sorts of questions and hypotheticals. So I think he’d binge all of The Next Generation (among other seasons). 

--

Do for a living: Teach? God knows. This is Napoleon from 18-something who just woke up? He could be paid for consultant work for historians and film crews and the like, I guess. Just to tell them how accurate stuff is. Of course, be wary, this is Napoleon I Am A Spin Doctor Bonaparte. 

I think he could lean into writing histories - particularly the classics, early French and European history - that sort of thing, where he already has a strong background in it and it wouldn’t require him basically learning an entirely new trade. Like, will Napoleon ever fully be a natural with computers and cell phones? Probably not. Could he be like your old school Professor emeritus who still churns out papers and does 90% of it the old fashioned by-hand way? Yes. And Napoleon had a bunch of histories planned on St. Helena that he wanted to write, so I think he could do that. 

As this is literally Napoleon Bonaparte he’d get a book deal in seconds. There’d be a bidding war over it. 

--

Thank you for the ask! This was very amusing :D 

[revlyncox]

Superhero Values (2021)

Whether we have great powers or simply great responsibilities, we return to our values to guide our actions. This talk was revised and expanded for the Washington Ethical Society, February 21, 2021. 

Earlier, you gave some advice to “Human Person” (a fictional superhero who “visited” earlier in the Platform) about compassion, understanding, and commitment, which are easier words to say than to practice. It helps to have role models, even if their stories didn’t happen exactly in the way they are told. It seems to me that mythology, fiction, and maybe even history can supply us with examples of values we can agree on. Stories that have captured our imaginations in the past may remind us of the people we hope to become.

When I was a kid, Batman was the lead character in some of those stories. He showed up in comic books and Pez dispensers, but the most influential form of Batman from my childhood was the Adam West character on television. When I was six or seven years old, the other kids who went to my babysitter and I used to run around the yard chasing super villains, pretending the basement steps were the Bat Cave, and generally doing our part for the good of Gotham City. We all traded roles as the heroes, heroines, and the various arch-nemeses.

I learned a couple of things from the Bat-team. I learned that superheroes have origin stories, events that changed the direction of their lives. You might not be able to tell from looking at them, especially in their secret identities, but every superhero has a past. The Bat-team also taught me that superheroes struggle with power. Whether the super skills come from hard work, cool gadgets, or another planet, heroes have to figure out the most effective and responsible way to use those skills. Finally, I learned that superheroes form coalitions. Batman and Robin and Batgirl worked together, not to mention Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara. Even an independent vigilante needs other people for the toughest problems.

Come to think of it, those same things are true for all of us. Each of us has to decide how to respond to the past. Individually and as a group, we are faced with questions of power and responsibility. Teaming up with other people is a source of strength, in spite of and perhaps because of our differences. I think these characteristics of superheroes call attention to WES’s future as a community.

Heroes Have Origins

First, superheroes have origin stories. Some event from the past sparked the character’s discovery of talents and passions, leading to a new sense of identity and purpose. Those events might be associated with death or separation from a loved one, or with the loss of the character’s pre-heroic dreams.

Superman’s powers come from his extra-planetary birth, but his ideas about truth, justice, and the American way come from Martha and Jonathan Kent. There is some speculation that Superman’s creators (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) modeled him after Moses, a baby whose people faced destruction, and was carried in a small vessel to a land where his birth identity had to be concealed.

There is a category of stories in which the characters have qualities that were typical in their place of origin, but something called them to help people in a world similar to our own, where their profound difference turned out to be a gift. Wonder Woman, Black Panther, AquaMan, and Valkyrie fall into this category.

On the other hand, some superheroes start off with an event of pain or trauma, like Peter Parker’s radioactive spider bite to become Spiderman. Batman’s path is a response to trauma. In the Watchmen mini-series on HBO, one of the characters’ commitment to justice came from being a survivor of the 1921 white supremacist attack on Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan is mainly in this category, having gained her powers during an unusual event.

Whatever the story, most extra-human comic book characters have faced a life-changing event that seems to isolate them from important people in their lives. Often, the character will acquire or discover or place new value on a gift or a talent they have during that experience. Picking up these pieces of loss, loneliness, and strength, the character eventually forges a new sense of purpose.

Michael Servetus (Miguel Serveto) is someone from history whose story follows this pattern a bit. He wasn’t always brave, and he wasn’t known for being kind, but he did set himself apart and commit his life to the truth as he saw it. I wouldn’t necessarily call him a Humanist, but he was a free thinker in that he defied the orthodoxy of his time, and his sacrifices made it possible for the people who came after him to do even more questioning of creeds, dogmas, and oppressive religious organizations.

When Servetus read the Bible for himself for the first time as a young student in the 1520s, he was shocked to discover no evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1531, he published a tract, De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity), seemingly convinced that people would see it his way if only they would listen. That’s not what happened. He was run out of town, his books were confiscated, and the Supreme Council of the Inquisition started looking for him.

This is where the secret identity comes in. Servetus fled to Paris and assumed the name of Michel de Villeneuve. He had a varied career as de Villeneuve, first as an editor and publisher, then as a doctor. He worked on a seven-volume edition of the Bible, adding insightful footnotes. He was the first European to publish about the link between the pulmonary and respiratory systems.

During his time as the personal physician for the Archbishop of Vienne, he secretly worked on his next theological treatise, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity). He also struck up a correspondence with his old classmate, John Calvin. Servetus was not diplomatic in his criticisms of Calvin’s writing, and Calvin broke off correspondence. Servetus seemed to think that their exchange was illuminating, because he included copies of the letters when he sent an advance copy of the Restitutio to Geneva.  

The publication of the Restitutio in 1553 marked the end of Servetus’ secret identity. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities pursued him as a dangerous heretic. He was burned at the stake on October 27, 1553, by the order of The Council of Geneva. Reportedly, he maintained his beliefs until the end, shouting heretical prayers from the flames. The Catholic Inquisition in France burned Servetus in effigy a few months later. There were a lot of people who didn’t want his ideas to be heard. Luckily for us, a few copies of his books were preserved, and went on to generate new ideas among religious reformers for over 450 years.

Now, I’m not saying Michael Servetus was a superhero. It might be hard to identify with him in some ways. Though he had ideas that were called Unitarian at the time, Unitarian Universalists oday would disagree with most of what he wrote, as would most Ethical Culturists. His creeds don’t match most of our beliefs; though some of his deeds, such as challenging authority and being a medical provider, might resonate. Nevertheless, we can see how a turning point in someone’s life can bring isolation, energy, purpose, abilities, and vulnerabilities, all at the same time. His origins were more like Spiderman than Superman: Being in the right place at the right time, Servetus was bitten by the free thinking bug. He had to adopt an alter ego, but the bug also afforded him the drive and the insight to make great contributions to scholarship and religious freedom.

How often is it the same for those of us who are regular folks? The events that make us who we are may bring a sense of loss or loneliness. These same events may bring a chance for us to develop new talents, or personal connection to the work we aspire to do. Passion and vulnerability can come from a single point in time.

The thing that sets a superhero origin story apart from a villain origin story is how the character translates their past into a future of meaning and purpose. Most of us are not consistently villains or heroes; we have to choose in every moment how to draw from our past to make choices in the present. We can’t control the historical facts of our origin stories. Even if our own choices led to the turning points in our lives, they are in the past now. What we can do is bring our values to the way we understand those turning points, and to our decisions about what to do with the gifts we have now. Let’s do our best to choose to use our origins well.

Heroes Form Coalitions

The very first appearance of Spiderman (in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962) saw the teenage Peter Parker misusing his new powers, only to have his negligence contribute to the death of his Uncle Ben, one of his adoptive parents. Peter’s understanding of Ben’s teaching that “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!” shaped his character from then on. The spider counterparts from other universes, heroes like Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales, also have turning points on that theme.

Superhero characters struggling with power and responsibility would have benefitted from reading about James Luther Adams, who was a professor at Harvard during the 1950s and 1960s. Adams had a great deal to say about power and what that meant for the responsibilities of movements for liberation.

Between 1927 and the late 1930s, Adams made several trips to Germany, a country that was renowned for philosophical scholarship. He spoke with religious and academic leaders, was detained for questioning by the Gestapo, and developed a sense of urgency about the political, cultural, moral, and spiritual crisis that went along with the rise of the Nazi party. While Adams developed great respect for the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement, he noticed that Germany’s churches as a whole were not pushing back against the crisis.

Adams said that individual and organized philosophy should be “examined.” There must be a path for critique, self-correction, and development. Adams wrote, “the achievement of freedom in community requires the power of organization and the organization of power.”

In that same period when Adams was noticing trends of power, organization, and responsibility in Germany, Humanists in the United States were also teaming up. The roots of some of these relationships went back to the Free Religious Association, which was the group where Felix Adler hung around with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. The FRA led to another trend called the “Ethical Basis” group within Unitarianism.

I’m drawing here from The Humanist Way: An Introduction to Ethical Humanist Religion, a book by former WES Senior Leader Ed Ericson. Ericson writes that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Ethical Basis bloc had successfully advocated that inclusion as either a member or a clergy person in Unitarian congregations be purely on an ethical basis rather than having any doctrinal basis. Ericson continues:

They resisted all attempts to impose any theological requirement, however broadly such a test might be construed. Like Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture, the Ethical Basis Unitarians regarded the dedicated ethical life to be inherently religious without any necessary underpinning of theological belief. This concurrence of views resulted in a close working relationship between the leaders of the Ethical Societies of Chicago and St. Louis and their ministerial counterparts in the Western Unitarian Conference.

(Ericson, The Humanist Way, p. 46-47)

Ericson goes on to say that, while this cohort was concentrated in the midwest, Octavius Brooks Frothingham in New York also largely shared Adler’s philosophy. Ericson also points out that the Ethical Basis cohort provided “a seedbed where organized religious Humanism, under that name, would first put down roots in American soil,” making this development of interest to Ethical Humanism. So, already at the turn of the century, there is some superhero teaming up going on. It gets better!

In 1913, the Unitarian minister John H. Dietrich began using the term “Humanism” to identify his non-theistic philosophy of religion. Dietrich said that he first encountered the term as a religious designation in the text of a lecture delivered to the London Ethical Society (Ericson, p. 61). Ericson writes that “the Ethical Union in Britain had described their movement by the turn of the century.” Ethical Culture in the United States started identifying more closely as a unique expression within the broader Humanist movement a little later, not until after Adler’s death in 1933. At that point, they found a whole league’s worth of Humanists to team up with.

But back to Dietrich, who discovered that his colleague Curtis Reese in Chicago was writing about the same kind of philosophy. Having found each other, they attracted others to the growing Humanist movement. By 1927, they had connected with scientists, philosophers, and journalists, who collectively were turning out what Ericson describes as “a torrent of books, articles, sermons and lectures” (p. 67) that established Humanism as a significant force in American society. In 1933, thirty-four of these prominent figures signed on to The Humanist Manifesto.

Later groups wrote the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973 and the Humanist Manifesto III of 2003. The original 1933 document set a historic precedent, bringing together people from a variety of perspectives and settings. Unitarian and Universalist ministers were well represented, along with V.T. Thayer, Director of the Ethical Culture Schools of New York, plus A. Eustace Haydon and Lester Mondale, who later became Ethical leaders (Ericson, p. 70).

I would suggest that the Washington Ethical Society, by affiliating with both the Unitarian Universalist Association and the American Ethical Union, is living out the spirit of cooperation that has powered the Humanist movement in the United States from its inception. Ethical Humanism is a unique expression and tradition within the larger Humanist movement, and yet that larger movement remains important for understanding who we are and what we are here to do. We come to a deeper understanding of identity and mission when we team up.

In fiction, superheroes seem to gravitate to one another. From the X-Men to the Avengers to the Teen Titans, collections of lead characters become ensembles. They have very different abilities and outlooks. Teaming up isn’t always easy, and it can be risky. Household squabbles may become epic battles if super abilities get out of hand. However, when they combine their gifts in the same direction, they can tackle complex problems that none of them would be able to handle alone.

This is why we form coalitions, too. WES is a community of people who have many differences in your individual lives. Diversity in creed and unity in deed, WES members are able to learn together, make music together, serve the community, and witness for justice, without worrying too much about who is an atheist or an agnostic or a theist or a polytheist. Whether among members, or in coalition with our neighbors across religious or geographic lines, we are able to put differences aside as we work for the benefit of our shared community. It does happen, though, that human beings forget, or retreat into what we think is a bubble of sameness, or narrow our scope of what seems possible.

Let’s build on what is already going well as we resist the shrinking of our horizons. There may be partners in our community that we have yet to meet. There may be institutes for exceptional heroes, or halls of justice, that we have to overcome our internalized hurdles of classism and racism before we can join.

At the very least, we can ensure that we’re making the most of our super team here at WES. Like the superheroes, we can do more and support each other when we come together.

Conclusion

There is a lot that WES has in common with an assembly of superheroes. Each one of us has an origin story, a set of events that shaped our talents, passions, and vulnerabilities. Each one of us has the opportunity to shape that story into a life of meaning and purpose. Like superheroes, it is incumbent on us to come to terms with power. Our collective abilities and assets make us a force to be reckoned with, and it is up to us to do the moral discernment to make sure we’re doing a good job wielding that power. Our honesty with each other and practicing all of our shared values and commitments will help. Like the best superheroes, we form alliances. Within the WES community, we share our specialized powers and support one another to accomplish goals none of us could handle alone. In our coalitions with other groups, we build bridges that support compassion. May all that has been divided be made whole.

May it be so.

[ofpeachez]

task 001: character introduction.

(admin tangerine, 21, est) ☼ who’s that hottie, standing outside the love hotel? it’s VERONICA LOMBARDI, a BISEXUAL CISFEMALE, who looks a lot like LEA MICHELE! NIKKI’s insta bio says SHE is an INFLUENCER and is looking for a fun time this summer. SHE is into DADDY/MOMMY KINK & GROUP SEX, but not into SCAT & BLOOD PLAY. by the way, SHE reminds me of TIGHT YOGA PANTS & COLORFUL SUNSETS.

quick infos:

full name: veronica eleanor rosemary lombardi

dob: august 23rd 1988 (she’ll turn 31 this year)

pob: las vegas, nevada.

kinks: daddy***/mommy kink, mild roughness,  group sex, public sex, receiving oral (eat her out good and she’ll marry you... too soon) although she enjoys giving oral to girls and/or strap-ons/dildos, mutual masturbation, nipple play, hair pulling squirting, spanking, consensual somnophilia.

anti kinks: blood play, wax play, electric stimulation, bondage, very rough sex, scat, foot play, humiliation & extreme anal (fingering and butt plugs are fine, but there will be very rare anal sex).

3 favorite things: dancing naked at 2am to some electronic music or old rock songs, italian gelato (she’d give you a handjob for a raspberry gelato) & puppies videos on instagram.

3 things she hates: spiders or bugs of any sorts (excluding spider man or ant man or black widow wink wink), people who lack of respect & compassion, bad hair days.

+2 positive traits: easygoing & compassionate

-2 negative traits: gullible & jealous

wanted connections:

TAKEN BY LINCOLN LEWIS & HIGHLY WANTED! ex-husband: idk where i’m going with this, but i have a feeling this would be so interesting if he’d come back to the hotel and they’d reconnect after a few years of being apart and not speaking. bonus points for high sexual tension and cute stuff! suggested fcs: chris hemsworth, jamie dornan, tom hiddleston, john stamos, nick jonas or darren criss.

daddy and/or mommy: just that “caring, loving but also can please all your needs” vibe. spoiler alert, she won’t be the mommy, she’s too much of a sub for that (usually). keanu reeves, bradley cooper, jeremy renner, joel kinnaman / natalie dormer, amy adams, jessica chastain, priyanka chopra, gal gadot, olivia munn, anna hathaway.

TAKEN BY GABRIELLA PEREZ femme fatale: just a woman, preferably younger whom nikki just can’t resist. someone with dominant tendencies. or someone around her age too! suggested fcs: dianna agron, ana de armas, margot robbie, gal gadot.

friends with benefits: GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS no suggested fcs, i just want girls.

sexual tension: it says it all. all fcs! 

headcanons

childhood + teenage years:

only child of a loving family of restaurant owners, veronica inherited the best conditions to become a typical italian girl from a just as typical italian family. she was loved by her parents, she loved them. she learned to cook at a very young age and had a noticeable talent. she was the preppy girl from the picture perfect family. she had a dog, alfredo, that she rescued from the streets and who became her only friend for most of her childhood.

in high school, she bonded with a pair of twin siblings who came from a completely different background. from what she knew, their parents were big gamblers and lost most of their savings in casino nights. these people had that edge and gave that down to earth vibe nikki admired yet could not completely comprehend. they were a dynamic trio that balanced one another perfectly. jack (npc) was a total artist who encouraged nikki to express herself, valerie (npc) was very analytical and had a talent at reading through nikki while nikki herself was that sweet figure who was easy to please and could easily please everyone.

when they graduated, valerie confessed she had no idea what she would be doing with her future with no money at all. they were sitting in nikki’s family restaurant and drinking beer in cask with nostalgia and a part of sadness. jack had big plans, he found an apartment in san francisco and wanted to become a graphic designer. nikki, however, was torn between taking over the family business or making a living of her own. that was when valerie drunkenly suggested to work at one of the newly opened strip clubs nearby their neighborhood.

so she did.

twenties:

she turned 18 when she realized she had lost so many years to living in a mold she no longer fit in. she was more than just preppy church outfits and cooking sundays with her mother, she was more than a daddy’s girl who washed tables when the restaurant was closed. what did adults always say? a good education promised a good future, so, veronica applied to the college of southern nevada for a degree in communications with a minor in women’s studies. she had no idea where she was heading, but it was a start.

her parents contributed by driving from class to home every day, they paid her more adult looking clothing and they finally gave her the freedom she never knew she needed until she reached majority.

although jack disappeared from her life, valerie remained very present. they did as they agreed and found a job at a high end strip club in vegas. they made good money instantly without having to do nasty stuff nikki had never been introduced to. within a few months, they saved enough to get matching tattoos, new jewelry and pay for valerie’s apartment. the club provided a living area a few blocks away, but valerie felt better living on her own. nikki tried to mingle and fit in with the other girls, but they were too different. maybe it was the education, maybe it was the background, but the trashy side of this job did not interest the italian girl more than that.

veronica worked as a stripper during college until she graduated with a degree that would soon become irrelevant and useless. with contribution from her parents who never even judged her for her job (it was true nikki did tell them it was just a dancing studio) and with her savings, veronica moved out of nevada and headed to california. she found a small place and joined a community business that organized all kinds of social and sport activities. she became a pro at all yoga, zumba, meditation and dancing activities. she loved to work with the kids, the families and the older people who were just searching for a fun time.

while she was working there, nikki started to get active on social media. she would most dance choreographies to massive songs, making hundreds of thousands of views on youtube. she liked the attention she was getting, but she still preferred her real job the most. 

mid-twenties

so she met someone. randomly. they hooked up with no after thoughts, then hooked up again and again and again... it felt like love to them. everything escalated so quickly, but it felt like she was finally meeting her parents’ expectations so nikki went with it. LINCOLN  proposed only a couple of months in the relationship, and they got married soon after that. he was smart, attractive, perfect, almost too good to be true. she never thought she would deserve someone like him. they lived together, and their love became very intense. marriage was not about dealing with every issues by fucking all over the place. she loved it, of course, but something was off between them. maybe they were falling out of love, maybe they did not take the time to evaluate their future together, maybe they were not made to be together. or maybe they were, just not at that moment.

they divorced a couple of years later like a couple who noticed they were better off as friends, the thing was they did not remain friends and decided to live life on their own. there was no fighting, plate throwing on the ground, ugly crying and couch sleeping. there were just goodbye kisses and passionate love making for the last time, or so they believed.

after divorce, she decided to quit her job and focused entirely on social medias. 

now:

she has been an influencer and youtuber for the past 2-3 years. she posts about cooking, relaxing, fashion, and does a ton of vlogs.

she loves the sun, the vibes and the people of los angeles. 

she also decided to open her own yoga and lifestyle studio, where she teaches for all ages and all kinds of people. from yoga to the basics of dancing, she loved to be surrounded with people. her well-developped flexibility from dancing served her beautifully. she hired other instructors but still runs the business while focusing on her instagram, which has 900 000 followers.

she has been divorced for the same amount of time without being able to quite erase LINCOLN from her mind. the truth is she never really dated or hooked up for the fun of it. she focused on work and on discovering new hobbies.

she heard about the love hotel through her friend, valerie, who joked about this being exactly what newly divorced nikki needed as a way to spice up her life. on a just as drunken night as the one that brought them to work as strippers, nikki called and reserved a room. it is taking her completely out of her comfort zone, but she has a feeling that this is for the best.

headcanons:

she is more of a receiver than a giver. she rarely decides to take the lead unless she really wants to or feel comfortable with the other person. she crushes and gets attracted very easily but nothing leads to serious relationships. she enjoys threesomes and being the center of attention in them. she is very comfortable in her body and would walk around naked all the time if it was socially accepted, so she does not mind having an audience too much.

outside of kinky stuff, she’s a romantic at heart. she LOVES to be treated with kindness and to be treated like a princess. she is also willing to do that for her partner, because if marriage taught her one thing, it’s that it takes two to tango. nikki’s at a point in her life when she wants to meet new people and have fun. she had plenty of it when she was stripping and dancing, but being rushed into marriage kind of made her lose herself into a world she was not completely ready to enter back then.

she volunteers at animal shelters and helps playing and socializing pets. she has a few scars here and there of times when it did not go that well with an animal. chances are she might be distracted at all times if she sees a cute puppy or kitty.

her instagram and youtube are filled with dancing videos, cooking videos, song covers, general vlogs and thirst traps. there’s a reason she got so famous from doing almost nothing at all and said reason is her perfect peach butt she just loves to show off.  

she’s italian so yeah she’s all about sharing and loving and eating pasta all the time because that is her own definition of a dolce vita. she is kinda close to her parents, but their relationship became a bit rocky when a) she moved out and b) ended her perfect marriage and broke the traditional dream of building a family of her own before she hit thirty. 

[maverixcollective]

DUAL PURPOSE

David Adjaye and A-Cold-Wall’s Samuel Ross on architecture, fashion, Covid-19, anti-racism, and the future of the creative industries

‘Architecture and fashion move away from each other, and then come really close, and then move away again,’ says Sir David Adjaye, on a video call from Accra. He is in conversation with Samuel Ross, stationed in London. It’s mid-summer and the world is in the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic and anti-racism protests. This is a transformative moment for both industries.

The architect behind the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Adjaye was recently commissioned to create Brixton’s Cherry Groce Memorial and Abu Dhabi’s Abrahamic Family House. He continues to work on the landmark Ghana National Cathedral, and champion new African architecture and architects.

Ross, who founded A-Cold-Wall* in 2015, is a rising star of the fashion industry. A natural master of cross-disciplinary collaboration, he has partnered with brands as wide-ranging as Nike (to create emergency blankets upcycled from plastic bottles, with aspirations to make them freely available in parks), Apple, Converse, Diesel, Oakley and Dr Martens, as well as recently establishing a grant fund for Black creatives.

Their discussion covered the impact of technology, localised production, the politicisation of architecture and fashion, anti-racism, the effects of pandemic, and the future of creative industries. Right after, they were photographed – Ross in person and Adjaye via video call – by Liz Johnson Artur, who has dedicated her three-decade career to documenting people of African descent.

Adjaye Associates’ design for the Abrahamic Family House on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, comprising a mosque, a synagogue and a church.

Collaboration has long been key to Adjaye’s work. Artist Chris Ofili’s Within Reach, the British Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, designed with Adjaye and engineered by Charles Walker, Arup, featuring a glass sculpture titled Afro Kaleidoscope above the main gallery space.

Wallpaper*: How does the responsibility of creating lasting works – as opposed to ephemeral ideas –influence your designs and process?

DA: There’s a bit of a myth with this idea of permanence, because nothing is really permanent, not even architecture. It all ends up disappearing. Architecture [just] has a larger duration.

SR: It all comes down to having the ability to quantify if a product should exist, which goes back to functionality and use.

W*: As a discipline, architecture can be really slow, whereas fashion feels faster – but that’s not always the case as the after-effects can last a long time.

DA: Fashion seems to be absolutely immediate, but [its] impact might be in the way we look at the bodies of males and females. [Take] for example the work of Yves Saint Laurent: it’s profound, it changes and resonates through generations.

SR: Totally. I kind of look at fashion like a moving slipstream. This idea of [how garments can serve] changes from generation to generation, as times move forwards and as social movements move forwards.

‘I kind of look at fashion like a moving slipstream. This idea of [how garments can serve] changes from generation to generation, as times move forwards and as social movements move forwards.’  — Samuel Ross

W*: How do the materials you use embody the ideas that you want to portray in your work? Does sustainability play into your material choices?

SR: I’ve dabbled with technical and synthetic materials, although I’m moving into more sustainable materials. There is a movement happening within big tech that needs to be integrated into fabrication, which can then define fashion as a whole for the 21st century. Fashion should mean smart materials and patented weaves that are antibacterial, that cling and mould to the body, versus just being about a point of expression.

DA: In the built environment, we spent the 20th century industrialising, making very efficient materials that will get things done fast. With speed came excess and pollution and degradation and destruction. Now we are asking, how do we build responsibly? In architecture, we are talking about microbial issues and creating healthy environments. That’s become much more heightened with Covid-19. We have to look at the things that destroy the planet – pandemics and ecological collapses – and really be responsive. I’m working with communities here [in Accra] and discovering that compressed mud has incredible properties that we totally underestimated. We just assumed that it was primitive, but actually it’s one of the best performing and most abundant materials on the planet.

W*: How much of your work is about educating people in your respective professions, to push your industries forwards?

DA: With all design there is a kind of public role, especially if you’re interested in pushing the limits of your industry. You deliver things to the public, so the public needs to be able to hold you accountable. I taught for about a decade and then I stopped, because I was teaching in elite schools to kids who are already very privileged. Instead, now I mentor and I’m interested in finding emerging voices that are not getting attention, trying to support them or to help them think about their businesses in the early stages.

‘I chose architecture because it was part of a language that I felt was very much under-represented from the position of a person of colour within the global discourse. I felt that I had a lot to say and I wanted to be part of that conversation about how we make the contemporary world.’ — David Adjaye

A look from A-Cold-Wall’s pre-S/S21 collection.

Ross’ Beacon 1, presented at Serpentine Galleries as part of the 2019 Hublot Design Prize exhibition.

W*: How important has the role of mentor or mentee been in your career? When you started out, could you identify Black creatives you related to?

DA: A real hero for me when I started was Joe Casely-Hayford. He was simply a man of colour doing really excellent work. And I thought, ‘Why don’t we have that in other places?’ It actually drove me to want to do it. I have a stubborn disposition. To be faced with ‘You can’t do this because…’, well, the ‘because’ better be damn good! It made me angry when I was younger. I’m much more chilled out these days.

SR: Mentors have been seminal to my journey. I shifted my direction [from product and graphic design] towards fashion to be a little more expressive. At that time, Virgil [Abloh] and Kanye West happened to come across my work, and I started working underneath the two of them. They were great mentors, able to articulate between Western European and North American ideologies, whilst having an intrinsically Black imprint on the work they were producing. They took these references to an industry, cross-referenced them through channels of mass communication, and built a new language and discourse that a lot of designers of my generation now operate within. From these two mentors, I learned how to communicate ideas and to have this ‘scatter diagram’ approach to zig-zagging across industries.

‘For me, the act, the statement, the building, is always political, it’s always making a statement about the world that we are in, it’s always positioning an ideal of some sort. The building isn’t mute, it speaks volumes about a certain world value and morality.’ — David Adjaye

W*: In terms of communication, is fashion more inherently attuned to marketing, whereas architecture is built on letting the work speak for itself?

DA: Absolutely. There’s a desire to depoliticise architecture continually, and I fight against that all the time. For me, the act, the statement, the building, is always political, it’s always making a statement about the world that we are in, it’s always positioning an ideal of some sort. The building isn’t mute, it speaks volumes about a certain world value and morality.

SR: The work I showed at Serpentine Galleries [Ross won the 2019 Hublot Design Prize], and the work I’m soon to do with Marc Benda from Friedman Benda gallery, is about that. I’m pivoting towards the long form conversation, and how we stabilise and re-chisel the playing field for the next generation.

W*: How does collaboration enrich your work?

DA: When I left the Royal College of Art I missed not being in a campus environment. I would collaborate across disciplines, with a scientist or a musician. When I did the Venice Biennale with Chris Ofili in 2003, we flipped roles – I said, ‘you design and I’ll do the visuals’. It was amazing to see my now dear friend talking about architecture, to learn what was interesting to him. It teaches you different ways of seeing the world.

SR: I’m a moderately sized brand, so collaboration offers access to tooling and technology. It’s also about having an opportunity to push forwards a social consciousness. I’m thinking how I can carry as much information through a macro partner, let’s say Nike, without being too cumbersome: can I hijack a community to a certain degree and fix the attention?

Moving forward, the idea of showing collections needs to be completely rearticulated.’ — Samuel Ross

W*: Practically, has Covid-19 affected your business?

DA: I moved to Accra as I’m doing a lot of work in West Africa right now. This decade feels like the decade of Africa to me. This pandemic has unleashed this new connectivity that I’m very grateful for. I have three offices on different continents, and most of my time was spent moving between those. And now it’s become very technologically based. What’s kind of amazing is that it all works! Apart from the amazing aromas that you miss, I love the aroma of construction sites!

SR: We’ve decided not to do two shows a year any more. This idea of a continuous critique to an open market every six months when you’re building and growing didn’t necessarily sit right with me in the first place, but I was willing to participate and spar and win in that arena to show a more intellectual Black approach within fashion design. But moving forward, the idea of showing collections needs to be completely rearticulated. We are looking at more personable presentations, which almost feeds back into the early days, when counter-cultural movements actually began to swirl and churn around fashion brands. I’m becoming a bit more hands on with discourse with consumers. We’ve been able to compress and condense down the modelling of the company. And be more emotive and sensitive to market needs. And take a lot more risk. I’m hoping that it will kick start a few other contemporaries in a similar situation to ourselves. 

[blackkudos]

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left upon his death.

Early life

Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at 407 East First Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap, on March 1, 1913. He was the second of three sons; firstborn Alfred died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice (or Millsap) was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died in 1916, after an operation to cure internal wounds suffered after shards from a 100-lb ice block penetrated his abdomen, when it was dropped while being loaded into a hopper. The elder Ellison loved literature, and doted on his children, Ralph discovering as an adult that his father had hoped he would grow up to be a poet.

In 1921, Ellison's mother and her children moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother. According to Ellison, his mother felt that "my brother and I would have a better chance of reaching manhood if we grew up in the north." When she did not find a job and her brother lost his, the family returned to Oklahoma, where Ellison worked as a busboy, a shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, and a dentist's assistant. From the father of a neighborhood friend, he received free lessons for playing trumpet and alto saxophone, and would go on to become the school bandmaster.

Ida remarried three times after Lewis died. However, the family life was precarious, and Ralph worked various jobs during his youth and teens to assist with family support. While attending Douglass High School, he also found time to play on the school's football team. He graduated from high school in 1931. He worked for a year, and found the money to make a down payment on a trumpet, using it to play with local musicians, and to take further music lessons. At Douglass, he was influenced by principal Inman E. Page and his daughter, music teacher Zelia N. Breaux.

At Tuskegee Institute

Ellison applied twice for admission to Tuskegee Institute, the prestigious all-black university in Alabama founded by Booker T. Washington. He was finally admitted in 1933 for lack of a trumpet player in its orchestra. Ellison hopped freight trains to get to Alabama, and was soon to find out that the institution was no less class-conscious than white institutions generally were.

Ellison's outsider position at Tuskegee "sharpened his satirical lens," critic Hilton Als believes: "Standing apart from the university's air of sanctimonious Negritude enabled him to write about it." In passages of Invisible Man, "he looks back with scorn and despair on the snivelling ethos that ruled at Tuskegee."

Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by composer William L. Dawson. Ellison also was guided by the department's piano instructor, Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent his free time in the library with modernist classics. He cited reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a major awakening moment. In 1934, he began to work as a desk clerk at the university library, where he read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Librarian Walter Bowie Williams enthusiastically let Ellison share in his knowledge.

A major influence upon Ellison was English teacher Morteza Drezel Sprague, to whom Ellison later dedicated his essay collection Shadow and Act. He opened Ellison's eyes to "the possibilities of literature as a living art" and to "the glamour he would always associate with the literary life." Through Sprague Ellison became familiar with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, identifying with the "brilliant, tortured anti-heroes" of those works.

As a child, Ellison evidenced what would become a lifelong interest in audio technology, starting by taking apart and rebuilding radios, and later moved on to constructing and customizing elaborate hi-fi stereo systems as an adult. He discussed this passion in a December 1955 essay, "Living With Music," in High Fidelity magazine. Ellison scholar John S. Wright contends that this deftness with the ins-and-outs of electronic devices went on to inform Ellison's approach to writing and the novel form. Ellison remained at Tuskegee until 1936, and decided to leave before completing the requirements for a degree.

In New York

Desiring to study sculpture, he moved to New York City on 5 July 1936 and found lodging at a YMCA on 135th Street in Harlem, then "the culture capital of black America." He met Langston Hughes, "Harlem's unofficial diplomat" of the Depression era, and one—as one of the country's celebrity black authors—who could live from his writing. Hughes introduced him to the black literary establishment with Communist sympathies.

He met several artists who would influence his later life, including the artist Romare Bearden and the author Richard Wright (with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship). After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged him to write fiction as a career. His first published story was "Hymie's Bull," inspired by Ellison's 1933 hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, Ellison had over 20 book reviews, as well as short stories and articles, published in magazines such as New Challenge and The New Masses.

Wright was then openly associated with the Communist Party, and Ellison was publishing and editing for communist publications, although his "affiliation was quieter," according to historian Carol Polsgrove in Divided Minds. Both Wright and Ellison lost their faith in the Communist Party during World War II, when they felt the party had betrayed African Americans and replaced Marxist class politics with social reformism. In a letter to Wright, dated August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. ... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." In the wake of this disillusion, Ellison began writing Invisible Man, a novel that was, in part, his response to the party's betrayal.

In 1938 Ellison met Rosa Araminta Poindexter, a woman two years his senior. They were married in late 1938. Rose was a stage actress, and continued her career after their marriage. In biographer Arnold Rampersad's assessment of Ellison's taste in women, he was searching for one "physically attractive and smart who would love, honor, and obey him--but not challenge his intellect." At first they lived at 312 West 122nd Street, Rose's apartment, but moved to 453 West 140th Street after her income shrank. In 1941 he briefly had an affair with Sanora Babb, which he confessed to his wife afterward, and in 1943 the marriage was over.

At the start of World War II, Ellison was classed 1A by the local Selective Service System, and thus eligible for the draft. However, he was not drafted. Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in the United States Merchant Marine. In 1946, he married Fanny McConnell, an accomplished person in her own right: a scholarship graduate of the University of Iowa who was a founder of the Negro People's Theater in Chicago and a writer for The Chicago Defender. She helped support Ellison financially while he wrote Invisible Man by working for American Medical Center for Burma Frontiers (the charity supporting Gordon S. Seagrave's medical missionary work). From 1947 to 1951, he earned some money writing book reviews but spent most of his time working on Invisible Man. Fanny also helped type Ellison's longhand text and assisted him in editing the typescript as it progressed.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of man's search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African American man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel also contains taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism.

Later years

In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Bard College, Rutgers University and Yale University, while continuing to work on his novel. The following year, a Book Week poll of 200 critics, authors, and editors was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War II.

In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel" and, despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book. Ellison ultimately wrote more than 2,000 pages of this second novel but never finished it.

Ellison died on April 16, 1994 of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.

Awards and recognition

Invisible Man won the 1953 US National Book Award for Fiction.

The award was his ticket into the American literary establishment. He eventually was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received two President's Medals (from Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan) and a State Medal from France. He was the first African-American admitted to the Century Association and was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Harvard University. Disillusioned by his experience with the Communist Party, he used his new fame to speak out for literature as a moral instrument. In 1955 he traveled to Europe, visiting and lecturing, settling for a time in Rome, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a 1957 Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest. Robert Penn Warren was in Rome during the same period, and the two writers became close friends. Later, Warren would interview Ellison about his thoughts on race, history, and the Civil Rights Movement for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? In 1958, Ellison returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth. During the 1950s, he corresponded with his lifelong friend, the writer Albert Murray. In their letters they commented on the development of their careers, the Civil Rights Movement, and other common interests including jazz. Much of this material was published in the collection Trading Twelves (2000).

Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, serving from 1970 to 1980.

In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1986, his Going to the Territory was published; this is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison's friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.

In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards; his artistic achievements included work as a sculptor, musician, photographer, and college professor as well as his writing output. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Legacy and posthumous publications

After Ellison's death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home and Other Stories in 1996. In 1999 his second novel, Juneteenth, was published under the editorship of John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor. It was a 368-page condensation of more than 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of 40 years. All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively on January 26, 2010, by Modern Library, under the title Three Days Before the Shooting...

On February 18, 2014, the USPS issued a 91¢ stamp honoring Ralph Ellison in its Literary Arts series.

A park on 150th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem (near 730 Riverside Drive, Ellison's principal residence from the early 1950s until his death) was dedicated to Ellison on May 1, 2003. In the park stands a 15 by 8-foot bronze slab with a "cut-out man figure" inspired by his book, "Invisible Man."

Bibliography

Invisible Man (Random House, 1952). ISBN 0-679-60139-2

Flying Home and Other Stories (Random House, 1996). ISBN 0-679-45704-6; includes the short story "A Party Down at the Square"

Juneteenth (Random House, 1999). ISBN 0-394-46457-5

Three Days Before the Shooting... (Modern Library, 2010). ISBN 978-0-375-75953-6

Essay collections

Shadow and Act (Random House, 1964). ISBN 0-679-76000-8

Going to the Territory (Random House, 1986). ISBN 0-394-54050-6

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995). ISBN 0-679-60176-7

Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (Modern Library, 2002). ISBN 0-375-76023-7

Letters

Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (Modern Library, 2000). ISBN 0-375-50367-6

[ruminativerabbi]

Sri Lanka, Paris

Passover and Easter are unrelated festivals that derive from different traditions, but that’s not how it seems to many in the Christian world. That most of the world calls Easter by a name related to Pesach (cf. French “Pâques” or Danish “Påske”) is part of it. As surely also is the assumption, widely believed yet almost definitely not historically correct, that the Last Supper described in the Gospels was a Passover seder or some version of a seder. (For an exhaustive consideration of every aspect of that issue, which apparently remains a delicate one even today in some circles, click here.) Even the use of the word “passion” to describe the suffering of Jesus provided some fuel for this particular fire, at least in antiquity, since the Greek word for “to suffer,” pascho, is phonically almost identical to Pascha, the name for Passover in the spoken Aramaic of ancient Jewish times.

Given the proximity of the festivals this year and in light of the above, I would like to write this week specifically about two events that have befallen the Christian world just recently and explain how they appear to someone reading the news through Jewish eyeglasses.

First, Sri Lanka. The numbers keep rising. First, “more than 100” dead, then “more than 200,” now, as I write on Wednesday, a minimal figure of 321—minimal in the sense that many of those hurt in the explosions—more than 500 in their own right—are not expected to survive and only haven’t succumbed to their wounds yet. It’s far away. It’s not a country Americans think of daily. No one on the radio, including the BBC World Service, seems to know whether the first word in the country’s name is pronounced “shree,” or “sree.”  (In all fairness to the Brits, when they seized the place and unilaterally made it part of their empire, they called it Ceylon, which name everybody knew how to pronounce.) And yet…the sense of familiarity and shared humanity that incidents like this bring in their terrible wake seemed to overwhelm the rest of the details. Most Americans, I’m sure, couldn’t even say easily what language they speak in Sri Lanka or what the capital city is, let alone whether a majority of the citizens are Buddhist, Hindu, or something else entirely. Indeed, it felt at first like a terribly bad thing that had happened to other people. But then, just as the extent of the carnage was becoming known came the even more startling detail that the attacks on the three churches and four hotels were apparently planned as a kind of response to the assault on the two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the course of which fifty Muslim worshipers were murdered. And with that single detail everything changed.

The single ideational concept that justifies terrorism in the mind of the terrorist is the ultimate fungibility of human life. Since I’ve been dealing in SAT words these last few weeks, I’ll add another: fungibility is the principle according to which things are deemed solely to have ascribed, not intrinsic, value. Paper money is the easiest example to seize: if I lend you five dollars on Monday and you come back on Tuesday to return the five dollars to me, I can’t sue you in court because the five-dollar bill you returned to me is not the same five-dollar bill I lent to you. But this is not so because it would make no sense to borrow money you were not planning to spend. It’s true because money in our culture is deemed fully fungible and, as a result, the paper bills we use as currency are supposed to have as their sole value the sum they represent, the sum ascribed to them by law. As a result every single five-dollar bill is deemed the equivalent of every other one and you can’t complain if you deposit a fiver in the bank one day and then receive a different bill from the bank the next day when you show up to withdraw your money.

This principle also applies to the eggs you borrow from a neighbor or the cup of sugar, but ethical people would never apply it to human life. To justify terror, however, is to do exactly that and willingly to ignore the fact that none of those people in church on Easter morning in Sri Lanka was responsible for the massacre in New Zealand and thus to feel justified in opening fire because you consider Christians to be as fungible as five-dollar bills and the shooter in Christchurch was presumed at least in some sense to have been a Christian. And that underlying notion makes it a humanitarian issue, not a Sri Lankan one or even a Christian one. This perverse line of logic is not unknown to Americans and it is certainly not unknown to Israelis: when someone is irritated by some or another Israeli policy and chooses to express that pique by blowing up a discotheque despite the fact that none of the young people on the dance floor was responsible for the policy in question—that too is an example of treating human life fungibly.

As a result, attempting to wave away events like this weekend’s horror in Sri Lanka as nothing more than the violent crime of an insane person is to miss the point: if the government is right to consider credible the statement by the Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency tying the Sri Lankan bombings to the shooting in Christchurch, then the principled effort to eradicate terrorist groups and to banish their nation-state sponsors from the forum of nations is not only a practical response, but a deeply moral one. There are, of course, crazy people in the world who do crazy things. We Americans have had lots of examples of that in these last several decades! But terror is not craziness at all: by resting on the ideational foundation that considers all human life truly to be fungible and thus devoid of intrinsic value, terrorism comes to represent the ultimate devaluation of God’s greatest gift. As we approach the end of Passover and prepare to commemorate the destruction of Pharaoh’s armies in the sea, we should all take a moment to reflect on a deep, if unsettling, scriptural truth: violence undertaken to dominate or to oppress is wrong and fully sinful, but acting forcefully to combat evil is both ethically justifiable and, speaking morally, wholly right. Americans know this. Israelis certainly know it and so do New Zealanders. And now Sri Lankans have had the same lesson brutally brought to their own doorstep.

I brought a whole different set of emotions to my contemplation of the fire that destroyed such a significant part of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. It is, arguably, one of the most stunning pieces of Gothic architecture in the world and is surely one of the world’s truly great cathedrals. It took a hundred years to build. (Work was undertaken in 1160, but the project only drew to its conclusion a full century later in 1260.) There’s no reason for that specific detail to confound—work on St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue began in 1892 and the project still isn’t anywhere near finished—yet it somehow feels challenging nevertheless to think of a project spanning that much time and involving that many people. And all of it happening so long ago, and in an age without power tools, bulldozers, or electricity! For Jewish onlookers, on the other hand, the cathedral shimmers in a slightly different light.

For the Jews of France, the twelfth century was a terrible time. When work on the cathedral was still in its third decade, King Philip II expelled the Jews of France from his territory, apparently without the slightest interest in knowing or caring where they went once they left. When work on the cathedral was about halfway done, a council convened by Pope Innocent III—called the Third Lateran Council because it met at Rome’s Lateran Palace—disqualified Jews across Europe from holding public office, required Jews (and Muslims too) to wear distinctive dress so that they could not be mistaken in the street for Christians, and banned Jews from almost every profitable profession except pawnbroking and the sale of old clothes. But it wasn’t solely their economic lives that were under attack, but their intellectual lives as well: on March 3, 1240, when Notre Dame was a mere twenty years away from completion, church officials burst into synagogues across France—March 3 was a Shabbat in 1240—and carted off entire Jewish libraries. Eventually the king of France, Louis IX—who is recognized as a saint both in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and who is the St. Louis after whom the city in Missouri is named—insisted that the Talmud itself be put on trial. The ancient work was defended by a quartet of able rabbis, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion and then, on a day that lives on in infamy as one of the pre-Shoah world’s most outrageous acts of violent anti-Semitism, twenty-four cartloads of books—some 10,000 volumes, including irreplaceable works that would be considered of inestimable value today—all twenty-four cartloads of books were burnt in public on the Place de Grève, now called the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, just across the river from…Notre Dame de Paris.

Notre Dame itself features one of the most hateful of all anti-Semitic symbols on its front façade, where are depicted Synagoga and Ecclesia (“Church”) as a pair of very different women, the one (Synagoga, of course) dressed in rags, a snake covering her eyes, a broken scepter in her hand, and the tablets of the law slipping from her grasp, and the other, Ecclesia, depicted as a proud, attractive woman standing fully erect while carrying a wine chalice in one hand and a staff with a cross at its top in the other. The insult couldn’t be more clearly put. Nor has it lost its punch over the centuries: even though the statues were destroyed during the Revolution, they were both were restored and replaced during the nineteenth century. They’re still there too, inviting any eagle-eyed visitor to learn the lesson they were set in place to teach: that Judaism is defunct, dead, and disgraced, whereas Christianity is triumphantly and gloriously dominant.

So when I look at Notre Dame and feel the same pang of regret all civilized people surely do when a world-class work of architecture is damaged, I also recall the world that gave birth to Notre Dame and its harshness, its cruelty, its violence and its deeply engrained prejudice against Jews and against Judaism. And I think of poor Synagoga as well, and wonder what she would have to say if she were somehow able to shove the serpent aside and open her stony eyes onto the world. Would the fact that she’s still on display all these centuries later surprise her? And what would she have to say to the thirteen million visitors who walk by her on their way into France’s most famous cathedral? Would the resurgence of anti-Semitism in France surprise her? Would the existence of an independent Israel? Would anything? Those are the questions that the fire at Notre Dame prompts me to ponder on these coming final days of Pesach. 

[the-queer-way]

So this is something I’ve struggled with for a while. I was raised Catholic and in a Latin American country. My family was very toxic and bad (not to say all Latin Americans are) and I accepted it. I had never known any different. My parents are two incredibly loving and caring people. My dad comes from a conservative southern family, so on both sides they had a lot of negative ideas.Yet they decided to make their own opinions about people.

I started to meet a more accepting community through a friend and Instagram. I kinda realized there’s really no proof in God. So I stopped being Catholic. Then I was told that men sometimes love men (thanks Rick Riordan) and it blew my frickin world. It took me a while to welcome other types of people, like lesbians and bisexuals. No one around me was lgbtqia+, everything I knew came from the internet.

This made me even more anti-God. I figured if God really was real and all about love, why would he let his children be prosecuted for loving who they want? So I started on the warpath. I did my research and found out about the history of people who went against Christian beliefs. Funny enough, being pro-lgbtq made me pro to more things like being environmentally friendly and speaking out against racism.

Then I moved to the US and enrolled in a public school. I started meeting the people I had been defending and I was so happy. I surrounded myself with kids who shared my same beliefs. I had educated talks and debates with them. My parents would keep asking me if I was gay, seeing as how loudly I was defending them. I always said no. I had felt attractions towards guys before, so no way.

And then I had my first crush on a girl. Honestly you guys, you should try it. She was so beautiful and just simply good. Just a good and hilarious person. I loved being around her. So I figured maybe I’m bi, idk.

Because of my intense anxiety and fear of crowds, I decided to to to a private catholic school. The priest came one day to talk to us about gay people. And I was so happy, I thought that maybe he would teach an entire school how if there is a God, he loves everyone. I quickly realized this was not the case. He even made me doubt my own attractions. And I got angrier and angrier at them for teaching this. The kids all said they were ok with the lgbtqia+ community, but they would make comments out of habit that showed how they really were not. I came out to my dad as questioning, and he accepted me. He told me that God would accept everyone too. His message was love, not anti-gay. So this is where I am now. This is what I think:

If there is a God, I think he would be ashamed of how the world has turned out. He gave us this planet to take care of, to nurture, and now we’re 12 years away from permanently destroying it. He taught about love and compassion, yet I don’t see many churches displaying this message. I’m starting to believe in God. But I don’t, and probably will never, believe in the Catholic Church or any other religious institution. A lot of lgbtqia+ people do, and all the respect to you, I sincerely admire you. But the church has not been kind to me, or to people like me. Also I am 1000% pansexual. Oh how the tables have turned.

I know this was long, but thanks for coming to my TedTalk lol.

[josiemaxinegallows]

LIFE BEGINS AT CUM Sermon #1 of the SUNDAY SATANISM series by Josie M. Gallows

Life begins at cum. Cum doesn’t have a heartbeat but it can travel. Cum is alive. When a cumshot is killed we call it “spermicide.” When an egg dies that’s called “ovicide.”

The abortion debate is a moral stopwatch. When is life alive? Choose your philosophy. The intrepid sperm is alive. The egg, also. Both have potential to become Bible believing patriots. Inshallah. Certain extremists take these factoids deadly serious. The anti-masturbators of the past are the great-grandpappies of today’s anti-abortion sharia.

Zygotes and blastocysts are living. But they’re unthinking. Devoid of personality. No stake in the world of human affairs. No history, with thousands of man hours invested. Unlike the mother, the fetus is alive but has no life that can be halted, delayed, or destroyed. Nobody relies on the unwanted fetus. The fetal heartbeat can’t be heartbroken. It knows nothing about itself. The fetus is the most innocent thing in all the world, because it’s a non-person.

Pregnancy effects the woman more than abortion effects the unborn. Abortion isn’t a care free decision but the scales have been miscalibrated. Intentionally.

It’s political theater. The Christians who rule value the cumshot more than the woman. They legitimize their rule by appealing to ignorant sentimentality. Observe the very same men, and their dutiful wives, dispassionate towards every other example of innocent life. It’s assured these men are unsympathetic to strange fetuses. They bother because of theater, simple and plain. Their own misogynistic superstition plays a role, and takes its toll, but whatever the motivation, the damage is the same.

Dysfunctional Christian strongholds such as Georgia and Alabama are threatening the state’s violence against women who might need an abortion. I’m sure, the Mega Churches blame loose moral values for the “murder of babies.” They indict everything but Christianity for the sorry state of family values. But they don’t get off the hook. Christianity is the loose moral value.

The state of family life is botched by religions like Christianity. The church is why the proletariat struggles to find its footing. Place your hopes and your values in the unreal and a barren harvest is a sure thing. The Satanic Age can’t be faulted. The church can be blamed for Girls Gone Stupid. I blame the peer pressure of good Christian morality for every teenage girl who stunts her future by the wretchedly sentimental act of becoming a teen mom, in this day and age; if she has any choice. Chances are, she doesn’t have a choice. I don’t blame sexual promiscuity.

Without the church, abortion and dysfunction wouldn’t occur at the rate they do. If the Satanic Age, an age of meaningful liberty, were allowed to flourish and take its final shape – and sooner rather than later, it will – only the most necessary of abortions would take place. Anton LaVey himself commented on this in Satan Speaks!, where he suggested compulsory sterilization. Read for yourself, The Third Side: The Uncomfortable Alternative, pages 30-31. With everything we’ve learned since then, perhaps it’s time to elaborate.

The Christian types have resisted, corrupted, or destroyed efforts to create a more responsible public, better fit for parenting and less likely to abort. The Christian resists education as a natural predator, because it challenges the primacy of The Holy Bible as the sole source of public wisdom. But it’s sexual education he truly rails against. Private neurosis becomes a civilization wide crisis.

As much as possible, the public’s kept in the dark about their own bodies, practically bereft of deeper knowledge about birth control and relationships. Resistance is met with an unhinged freak-out, each and every time. Ignorance, not family, is the public institution.

Forthcoming generations will be deprived of choice through sheer ignorance. The mutation is already taking hold. What good is a public, today, where only the therapist and the educator are compelled to learn about child psychology and child education? This is a profound loss to the species because Mega Church Christians are hysterical, in need of a 72-hour psych hold, that gays might be included, that women wouldn’t be beasts of burden by default. The unreality of porn is the greatest source of sex ed for boys. Good going, Jesus.

There is a gaping hole where adult values have been effectively sledge hammered out of the wall between order and chaos. The most basic of instruction is morally troubled. The young won’t learn the folkways and traditions that made life effective in the old world. The third world can do more with less. The western kiddo is deprived, because the girl might be oppressed and the boy might be sissified by wearing an apron. They aren’t taught to cook, clean, build, organize, mend, hunt, or study for anything but a standardized test. They don’t learn to grow, preserve, take inventory, or balance an account. They certainly won’t learn to be effective parents, parents on purpose, able to delegate roles, and capable of discipline without abuse. Their own parents won’t be around to teach these things in full because, thanks to Protestant austerity, both parents are entrenched in the workforce. Seeing as the churches on every street corner don’t pay their taxes, to subsidize the results of their own fuck-up failures, it wouldn’t be affordable to institute these solutions anyway. Let me make it Satanically clear, the zygote has little to look forward to.

Let’s no longer pretend Christian hyperbole isn’t to blame, please and thank you. It’s time to skewer the bastards. They’ve had US Surgeon Generals fired in disgrace for trying to turn the tide. It’s not hypothetical. Our botched republics are at least one part theocracy, right now. Each of us have a vested interest in dismantling Christendom.

The Christian man can’t get a clue. After millennia of accrued evidence that hormones are stronger than scripture, he persists in his delusional pipe-dream that abstinence will save the soul of the nation. Of the 2 billion odd Christians, the majority of them are Catholic. The Catholic is well known to teach the poor, destitute, or insane, to forego contraceptives. The missionaries of Christ are plague rats who journey to regions frequented by famine, drought, and genocide. In their wake, they leave behind the building blocks of ignorance. Be fruitful and multiply, and should the babes die of dehydration, God bless. If abortion is murder, are missionaries enacting crimes against humanity? If we’re talking results, let’s talk negligent manslaughter. Can we try the Pope in Nuremberg? Every Mega Church pastor, too? And why not? Lately, they love the idea of threatening us with the state’s violence. Tit for fucking tat.

I suspect the degeneracy and misery they sow is coincidentally of great benefit to Christendom. If a child is born with his hands outstretched for alms then he’s a vassal to whoever controls the collection plate. The destitute and dysfunctional are most in need of the mad hope of spiritual religion. The more dysfunction at play the better, with less help to go around the desperation can only deepen, creating ever more loyal subservience. This is why the junkie, the convict, and the lunatic, are often the most devout believers. Look to the worst human settlements and you’ll find the most religion. It sure looks that way. It’s coincidental, but all the same.

Christian men don’t lead. They force. They penalize. Ironically, it’s not we Satanists who love a human sacrifice. It’s the Christian type, the Muslim type, who make burnt offerings of suffering women and children. The stench is pleasing to the nostrils of Allah. Here’s a secret: killing a woman isn’t necessary to sacrifice her to God. Remember that.

We do need a program of family planning. A real institution. A revolution of prevention would provide all the family values we’d ever need. What do we get instead? Pale face sharia.

The frauen of the church want the children of rape born into this world. The morally unsatisfied Christian man wants a mother’s trauma relived at every milestone of development. Allahu Ackbar. Children of incest would skinny dip in our gene pool, protecting and defending the purity of southern heritage. Christians want their own nightmarish conjuring of “family values, with no compromise and no revision. The Handmaid’s Tale feels less like speculative fiction and more like a plausible threat under the right working conditions. Christian family values reduce women into beasts of burden. Breeding stock. If it means killing our mothers, sisters, and daughters, then praise be. They would rescind the right to terminate a high risk pregnancy. In Jesus name, hands to the sky. A family should lose its matriarch for the sake of one doomed pregnancy.

The mother’s heartbeat is a chicken heart, to the Christian – she exists for her eggs. Her own heartbeat is a petty concern. Her body is meant to warm the nest and receive the cock. Nothing more. Thy Kingdom Cum.

By the sign of the cross, the bodies of women are livestock to be tortured, not respected. Should her fetus be nonviable, this Peckerwood Caliphate would have her carry the miscarriage to term, wrecking her mental and physical health in the process. If an accident should happen, should contraceptives fail, should a bright and talented woman be impregnated against her will, the saints would have her follow through. Carry the mistake to the very bitter end. Nevermind the repercussions to herself, to her family, or to her society. God is good. “Live with your mistakes,” she’s told. “Take responsibility.” Yet abortion is often the most responsible choice possible.

Under His Eye, a profoundly deformed fetus would be denied a merciful death in the comfort of the womb. The family home would become a hospice care for the irreparably broken. Christians fancy using adjectives like “unnatural” and “abomination.” Their tongues can’t taste the irony. There couldn’t be a more apt description of permissive, degenerate behavior, than rooting for the legally required birth of genetic tragedies. And yet, they’d deny women, at every opportunity, to choose health over deformity, to choose success over pointless drudgery. Foundering horses get more mercy at the hands of the farmer.

Since these Christians can’t send us to hell themselves, they seem bent on making the Earth as miserable as possible. And with what they’re pushing, they’re getting the job done as best they can.

What might be the Satanic alternative? The third side? “Of course, whenever an issue becomes more important than a solution, don’t expect to stumble over a third side.” Dok LaVey was right. And I don’t suspect any real solution, proposed by any Satanist, stands a chance of becoming the mainstream institution. Flying the banner of Satan over an issue would probably be detrimental, anyway. Though what could we do, individually, to fight back?

We need to knock the crucifix off the flag pole. We need education, to start with. Miseducation is the church’s lifeblood. With so much agitation about the pay of teachers, there’s not much talk about the usefulness of what they’re allowed to teach. The program must be fixed, from K to 12, from Associates to Bachelors. If the public infrastructure is rendered obsolete by moral trouble, then rational, secular, wealthy individuals with a stake in the future, might consider building an alternative – freely available. Perhaps. A revival of classic education and training, strengthened by the lessons we’ve learned in the last century, could be useful. Sex ed, and what comes after birth, would have its place.

Up next, accountability. I know it sounds feminist – and I know that puts it in the bargain bin of ideology for a great many of this “congregation” – but men aren’t taking nearly responsibility they could. The burdens of sexuality and care of the young still fall, mainly, to women. Should we stay 2,000 years backwards, also?

If not, it’s time to talk about the vasectomy. The vasectomy is the most effective, lowest risk, cost effective, least detrimental form of birth control on the market. It has no effect on hormones. It poses no risk of blood clot or mood instability. The vas differens, the small tube that makes ejaculate fertile, provides around 2% of the total volume in a cumshot. If a spectator were genuflecting for her facial, she could never tell the difference. It’s reliable and reversible. Some 80% of American men are circumcised so there should be no squeamishness involved here. Unlike circumcision, the vasectomy doesn’t decrease sexual pleasure. It’s not outwardly visible.

If it’s such a man’s world, where’s the man’s choice in conception?

How many parasitic industries would collapse in a generation were the vasectomy as common as the circumcision? If the vasectomy were incentivized, normalized, and subsidized as the responsible choice it is, Christianity would spring another leak in its gas tank. And we could start to say “Good riddance.” Where Satan is no longer an effective spook to lure in the masses, abortion picks up the slack. Take away abortion and we deprive the church of its holocaust propaganda.

The courts would lose their cut of the child support racket. Ghettos would flourish. With more to go around, and less waste, what would become of the welfare state? And in turn, the nanny state?

Schools would no longer be overcrowded brainwash laundromats, where thanks to inherited hardship we still separate our whites from our colors. Missionaries could dig wells while doctors without borders could perform vasectomies. The global population could start to shrink, reduced to only the most wanted, most loved, best cared for generations of children.

Tract housing wouldn’t scar the earth and wildlife could return, ecosystems restored. With so much concern for global warming and the clear cutting of rain forests, isn’t any sensible environmental policy one that reduces the human population and human consumption together? With so many human rights violations, wouldn’t a smaller, better educated, better prepared generation, be less susceptible to tyranny? By virtue of there being fewer people, each person would matter all the more. That sounds like pro-life to me.

Is my speculation so far fetched? Could the proliferation of schooling and the all-but-compulsory vasectomy get so much accomplished? Look to their absence. Look to a Christian Nation, as forced as it is. Look everywhere ignorance and theocracy hold hands.

The outrage will have its way. A woman’s choice vs. a woman’s jail time. And for all the sorrow caused by unplanned, unmitigated, uneducated parenthood, solutions will go ignored. Remember this, the uncomfortable third side is so uncomfortable because nobody gets to feel like a messiah, and somebody has to do an honest day’s work.

HAIL SATAN! Josie Maxine Gallows Kali Yuga

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are not THE Satanic view on abortion. But they are MY Satanic views on abortion. Cross-posted from my official website. Want more? Become a member of The Kali Yuga by subscribing to my content on PATREON. www.patreon.com/josiemaxinegallows

[livmoose]

Va, Tosca!

I’ve been fascinated by ‘Tosca’ since three years ago, when I first heard it in Kiev opera. What motivated me to dig deeper was the stubborn anti-Puccini bias of music critics that started with the opera’s (nay, it's antecedent play’s) premiere and didn’t really cease by this day. Which I cannot understand at all: ‘Tosca’ is literally one of the most popular operas in the world, outperformed only by such eminent names as Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’, Mozart’s ‘Die Zauberflöte’, Puccini’s own ‘La Boheme’ and Bizet’s ‘Carmen’. So what gives?

‘Tosca’, original poster, 1899

The premise of this 3-act opera by Giacomo Puccini is rather simple: a villain wants a girl who loves a boy who loves her back and also helps revolutionaries. And also it’s a tragedy, like in a Shakespearean Everybody Dies kind of tragedy. You can pretty much guess the plot from there.

What I personally like about this opera is the combination of lightning-fast plot (the action takes place within several hours on June 17-18, 1800), finely developed character portraits, and music that explains and foreshadows everything you need to know.

Naturally, I don’t take the vague criticisms of ‘Tosca’ all that well.

Ha più forte sapore [bits of history and background]

Puccini’s opera is based on a 1887 5-act play ‘La Tosca’ by Victorien Sardou.

Puccini had seen La Tosca at least twice, in Milan and Turin. On 7 May 1889 he wrote to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, begging him to get Sardou’s permission for the work to be made into an opera: ‘I see in this Tosca the opera I need, with no overblown proportions, no elaborate spectacle, nor will it call for the usual excessive amount of music.’

M.J. Philips-Matz ‘Puccini: A Biography’

I found this quote, and it instantly clicked: it’s exactly why I like ‘Tosca’.

In contrast to Sardou’s initial work, Puccini’s opera is much more succinct and direct. It has almost zero overblown dialogues and soliloquies that don’t promote the plot or develop characters (well, maybe there is this one lyric soprano-tenor duetto ‘Amaro sol per te m’era il morire’ [‘Only for you did death taste bitter for me’] in act III that’s a bit too long for my taste, but even this slow moment is essential because it gives the audience an opportunity to breathe as the final shockwave looms closer). But the rest of it is actually interesting to see and hear.

For me, ‘Tosca’ is one of the very few operas that are targeted at people who are not fifteen and overly dramatic adult audiences who don’t need same things repeated at them all the time and who can catch what is happening without seeing each and every small detail. Puccini squeezed Sardou’s acts II, III and IV into a single second act, and it works. We as an audience don’t need to see the whole scene at Cavaradossi’s house to understand what happened there. We can use our imagination to paint the rest of the picture.

Looks like the critics do not agree with me on this one.

Perché, perché, Signore [criticisms galore]

The infuriating part about the critical landscape of ‘Tosca’ is that the critics don’t seem to agree on a single point of reproof. Some complain that the opera is too wordy; others, conversely, are not satisfied with the plot rushness (the view that both librettists of ‘Tosca’, Illica and Giacosa shared). Critics called the opera ‘three hours of noise’ that lacks style and cohesion. Julian Budden [opera scholar] faulted the ‘inept handling of the political element’ while commending ‘a triumph of pure theatre’. Burton Fisher [opera writer] described the sensuous love duet ‘Qual’occhio’ as ‘an almost erotic lyricism’ and ‘pornophony’.

Is it just me, or do the critics dislike ‘Tosca’ precisely for the nuances I love about it: coherence of the plot, acute and restrained drama, absence of excessive political speculations (it was not meant to be goddamn ‘Les Miserables’) and, well, musical puns? More on that later.

Not to say ‘Tosca’ didn’t receive its share of praise. Charles Osborne [music critic] believed the plot of ‘Tosca’ was taut and effective while the characters had enough opportunities to shine both in terms of dramatic development and musical elaborateness. Some also praised the richness of Puccini’s score:

[Puccini] finds in his palette all colours, all shades; in his hands, the instrumental texture becomes completely supple, the gradations of sonority are innumerable, the blend unfailingly grateful to the ear.

Ippolito Valetta [music critic] ‘Rassegna Musicale’ in ‘Nuova Antologia’

The aspect of criticism that I did find explainable was based on ‘disconcerting vulgarities’ as put by Gabriel Fauré [composer]. To be honest, the opera really does not lack in violence: Tosca undergoes sexual assault, is broken by the need to defend her chastity with murder and by the death of a beloved, and finally commits suicide. For the public back in 1900 such developments truly could be regarded as a bit too much.

For modern audiences, however, the events are nothing to be shied away from. The opera aged exceedingly well, not losing a bit of its attractiveness in romantic and dramatic sense. Even more so, the criticism that ‘Tosca’ still receives today makes little sense. Joseph Kerman’s [musicologist] remark on ‘Tosca’ as a ‘shabby little shocker’ from the middle of the century, well after the actual real-life shock of two world wars and the brusque shift of public morale, was way off the mark. Thomas Beecham [conductor] bitingly responded that anything Kerman said about Puccini could ‘safely be ignored’ (it almost makes one thing something personal’s involved).

Besides, some modern scholars share my perception of ‘Tosca’s treatment:

Scholarly presses and journals still deeming [Puccini’s] operas too popular to be worthy of serious study continue to shoot themselves in their collective foot.

Deborah Burton ‘Tosca’s Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective (review)’

By Burton, Puccini was often simply ‘snubbed by the musicological establishment’. The fun part? Puccini put on his Scarpia persona to cynically and kind of affectionately if you ask me describe ‘Tosca’ as ‘zibaldone’ [‘hodgepodge’]. He referred to it as ‘a vile opera’ and ‘quella putana di Roma’ [‘that Roman whore’]. If this isn’t love.

Già, mi dicon venal [quick glance at the initial play]

Similar criticism of abundance of violence was applied to Sardou’s play. Tosca’s behavior was deemed ‘unchaste’, and the brutality disturbed both critics and theatre fans. Jules Favre [statesman] even called it ‘cette pièce vulgaire, sans intrigue, sans caractères, sans moeurs’ [‘vulgar piece, without intrigue, without characters, without morals’].

The most offensive part of the play was, apparently, Cavaradossi’s torture. Even off-stage, his screams prodded the critics to warn women against seeing ‘La Tosca’ as the play could ‘inflict irreparable injury on persons yet unborn’.

Despite this, the play was an immediate success. It toured around the world, and even the harshest critics couldn’t ignore its dramatic effect:

As to the play itself, I will only add that it is offensive in its morals, corrupt in its teaching, and revolting in its brutality, and yet everyone who admires acting is bound to see it.

Cecil Howard [theatre critic] ‘La Tosca’, ‘The Theatre’

So. Let’s see what threw people in such a dismay, shall we.

Io de’ sospiri [plot and why it’s good]

Sylvester Feodosiyevich Shchedrin ‘New Rome. Castel Sant’Angelo’, oil on canvas, 1823

It all starts with Roman ex-consul Angelotti escaping the clutches of tyrannical justice. The fugitive runs into Mario Cavaradossi, painter and Bonapartist who agrees to help him. Two men are interrupted by Mario’s passionate lover and Roman opera celebrity, Floria Tosca. After a fit of jealousy she leaves the church, and Cavaradossi leads Angelotti away from the city to hide in his villa. Right afterwards, Baron Scarpia, chief of police and the embodiment of tyranny emerges on stage and, when Tosca returns, devises to use her jealousy to lead him to Mario and Angelotti.

Second act is all about torturing Cavaradossi (off-stage) and Tosca’s gradual breakdown. Scarpia demands the location of Angelotti, which she surrenders to save Mario from suffering. Then Scarpia tries to force Tosca to give herself to him, which she agrees in exchange for her lover’s life - only to stab unsuspecting Scarpia with a knife.

The rest of the main cast dies during the third act. Mario’s ‘staged’ execution appears to be not so fake as Scarpia promised. Tosca, inconsolable and heartbroken, jumps to her death as the soldiers, who discovered Scarpia’s body, corner her on the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo.

The plot pretty much follows Sardou’s play, although the action was tightened (mostly by avoiding obvious plot turns) and the list of characters sharply compressed.

Sardou’s act III features a scene that is not present in Puccini’s opera: Cavaradossi’s villa, the painter, Angelotti, and later Tosca and Scarpia. One of the things I liked about the opera is that it doesn’t have this scene. It’s excessive and basically tells nothing that audience couldn’t have picked up from the unobtrusive operatic dialogue in act II. Puccini - Sardou 1:0.

Obviously, Mario’s execution was not fake. In the play, Spoletta reveals this fact to Tosca. In the opera, he at first misunderstands Scarpia’s order (hilariously so, as he nearly confesses the whole thing to Tosca), which allows the audience to guess their scheme. 2:0 for subtlety.

In act II, Scarpia questions Mario with the backdrop of Tosca’s cantata performance off-stage, in the depths of Palazzo Farnese. 3:0, this whole piece is just gorgeous.

Puccini wanted ‘La Tosca’s plot stripped of everything excessive (which is, lamentably, a rare practice for operatic genre):

[Puccini] cut Tosca to the bone, leaving three strong characters trapped in an airless, violent, tightly wound melodrama that had little room for lyricism.

M.J. Philips-Matz ‘Puccini: A Biography’

Ignoring criticisms, Puccini also persevered in his clear vision of how the ending should be - by the way, nearly the single thing he and Sardou agreed upon. A good thing undoubtedly; I’d hate for this to happen:

Puccini’s librettists also disliked the suicide, and an alternate ending for the opera was (briefly) considered: rather than leap, Tosca would go mad, collapse, and die on the body of her lover (presumably of Sudden Operatic Death Syndrome).

Susan Vandiver Nicassio ‘Ten Things You Didn’t Know about Tosca’

Pure gold of a remark. Thank you, Susan.

‘Tosca’ is a very tight, succinct work, beautifully paced. I like how the acts are structured and developed. Act I, the longest one, was clearly meant to be expositional. Also, it’s the melodramatic one, with inclusion of comedic motifs that significantly lighten the mood (think the character of the Sacristan and continuous good-hearted mocking of Tosca by her lover).

Act II is unexpectedly macabre: there’s not a trace of the lightheartedness of act I. A real drama ensues, with torture, violence and grim ending (Tosca murders Scarpia in cold blood, which I, as a cynic, viciously enjoy every time). This act is also shorter while it still has enough room for Scarpia’s intricate manipulation and blooming deconstruction of Tosca. The characters are well-developed and nicely motivated (at least in part Sardou’s merit).

Act III is the shortest (just over 20 minutes), and it’s a full-on tragedy. The final plot twist was hardly intended as one. This act is an emotional roller-coaster. Combining hope and death, it is based on fragmented pieces, which makes the whole thing feel real, not operatic. The opera ends strong and loud, and it’s perfect that way. The audience is left with the sense of tragedy that is not undermined by unnecessary lyricism of long pre-death arias (like in Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’, I absolutely hate the last act). With the rush of events, the delay at this point would be unendurable.

‘Tosca’ is chaotic in its final scene, just as it should be. Tosca the character makes the (suicide) decision in a blink of an eye, and I absolutely love the impression that she makes it out of egotistical motives: she is to be captured by the soldiers - not because Mario is dead. This is the kind of nuance that defines the difference between real living people and operatic character embryos. When the opera ends, I always find myself speechless and anguished not irritated at how annoyingly long it takes for the characters to die (looking at you, Verdi).

E lucevan le stelle [characters breakdown]

Palazzo Farnese, 2018. Now French Embassy in Rome

First and strongest impression about the characters of ‘Tosca’: gosh, they are not dumb! So it is possible.

One of the major appeals of ‘Tosca’ is that the characters feel like real people instead of archetypal damsel in distress, knight in shining armor and flat cardboard villain. Although Scarpia bends a bit in that direction, being completely satisfied with his villainous villainy, he acknowledges it, giving off the air of a ‘connoisseur of evil’ instead. William Ashbrook [musicologist] recognized Puccini as a portraitist who honed lifelike characters. Even the smaller characters like the Sacristan (‘an avaricious hypocrite’), Angelotti (exhausted but proud-spirited escapee) and Spoletta (when Scarpia says ‘jump’ he asks how high a perfect minion) are miniature studies of human nature. ‘Tosca’, in his opinion, is a portrait gallery of real-life people.

Floria Tosca [soprano]

For some unfathomable reason, ‘Tosca’ is defined as a melodrama, which is totally different from how it feels with its darkness and the fact that everybody of significance dies in the end. Wiki says melodrama is ‘a dramatic work in which the plot, which is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions’ - basically, plot over characters. Instead, [scenic] tragedy (defined by Google) is ‘a play dealing with tragic events and having an unhappy ending, especially one concerning the downfall of the main character’.

The latter is literally the plot of ‘Tosca’, especially as the title character undergoes a whole set of the most traumatic experiences (concessions to conscience, attempted rape, murder in defense, witnessing torture and execution of a loved one) in a span of just several hours. This set of experiences naturally draws a basis for her downfall (literally): under stress and with no opportunity to think thoroughly, it is not surprising that Tosca commits suicide.

She is strong-willed and passionate, pure-hearted (which is probably why she doesn’t see through Scarpia’s schemes) but not stupid, loyal but also jealous. More out of habit, if we to believe Julian Budden [opera scholar]:

[Cavaradossi, act I, scene 5] Mia gelosa! [My jealous [Tosca]!]

[Tosca] Si, lo sento, ti tormento, senza posa. [Yes, I feel it, I torment you unceasingly.]

All in all, she is a harmonious character in dire circumstances, and it’s a true delight to observe how Tosca, despite how broken and devastated she is, finds the power to oppose her offender. This is the real plot twist (character twist?) of the opera - and I assume the reason that ‘Vissi d’arte’, Tosca’s major aria (an emotional plea of a character who is about to betray her very self) is so well-known and recognized.

Mario Cavaradossi [tenor]

In comparison with Tosca, Cavaradossi is a deceptive character. At first glance he might appear rather flat: nothing more than a loyal lover and a proud revolutionary. Upon closer inspection, however, the audience discovers liveliness and realism many male operatic characters severely lack: he jokes with Tosca instead of oh-so-common sickeningly sweet sighs of love. He knows her flaw of being prone to jealousy - but doesn’t take it too close to heart. He listens to her without interruption as she tells him about Scarpia’s advances (for sure, I was waiting for a hateful scene where he would scream ‘how could you’ at his lover and bang his head against a wall). And he actually knows how to appreciate that she willingly sacrificed her purity for his sake (and he sings an aria about it, too: ‘O dolci mani’ [‘Oh, sweet hands’]).

Besides the believable romance with Tosca, Cavaradossi has excellent dynamics with Scarpia. As the news of Napoleon’s victory arrive, Mario - once tortured - cannot resist the urge to relish in how stars turned for his nemesis:

[Cavaradossi, act II, scene 4] Vittoria! Vittoria! L’alba vindice appar che fa gli empi tremar! Libertà sorge, crollan tirannidi! [Victory! Victory! The avenging dawn now rises to make the wicked tremble! And liberty returns, the scourge of tyrants!]

Tosca tries to stop his prideful speech, aware of how this flows right into Scarpia’s intention to lock revolutionary Cavaradossi up. But Mario is lost in his surging emotions and forgets both himself and his lover at this moment - truly a detail each of us can relate to.

And also Cavaradossi seems to know that his death is not going to be faked - a twist that no one but pure-hearted Tosca is fooled by. He doesn’t believe in Scarpia’s generosity for a moment, and so he doesn’t even try to pretend he is surprised but ironically ridicules the mere idea of a magnanimous villain:

[Cavaradossi, act III, scene 3] Scarpia che cede? La prima sua grazia è questa… [Scarpia yields? This is his first act of clemency…]

Unbelieving but relieved by Tosca’s appearance and intoxicated by her hopeful rambling, Mario chooses to spend his last moments languishing in her presence: he doesn’t want to spoil this time for neither of them. Beniamino Gigli [opera singer, performed as Cavaradossi] wrote in his autobiography that ‘[Mario] is certain that these are their last moments together on earth, and that he is about to die’.

This interpretation of the character is common among the opera singers:

Unlike Floria, Cavaradossi knows that Scarpia never yields, though he pretends to believe in order to delay the pain for Tosca.

Tito Gobbi [opera singer and director]

However, instead of displaying understandable despair, Cavaradossi falls back to his original optimistic self and starts to subtly mock Tosca’s attempts to teach him how to die theatrically. She replies with ‘non ridere’ [‘you mustn’t laugh’], and he softly reassures her. They’re just so sweet together without the usual operatic mawkishness.

(I suspect Tosca is not entirely convinced of their unscathed escape from the clutches of now-dead Scarpia, as well. No wonder she feels uncomfortable at the prolonged preparations.)

Baron Scarpia [baritone]

The villain of this story was actually the first among the main cast to catch my attention. Scarpia is just so explicitly entertaining in his sardonic wickedness. Still, I can see how he could be interpreted as the least 3-dimensional of the three.

Scarpia is a clever interrogator and a talented manipulator. He knows where to hit and when to push to get the answers he needs. Pressing Tosca more and more, he breaks through her defenses until she is frustrated and annoyed to the point of losing her self-control:

[Scarpia, act II, scene 4] L’Attavanti non era dunque alla villa? [So, the Attavanti was not at the villa?]

[Tosca] No, egli era solo. [No, he was alone.]

[Scarpia] Solo? Ne siete ben sicura? [Alone? Are you quite sure?]

[Tosca] Nulla sfugge ai gelosi. Solo! Solo! [Nothing escapes a jealous eye. Alone. Alone!]

[Scarpia] Davver? [Indeed!]

[Tosca] Solo, sì! [Yes. Alone!]

[Scarpia] Quanto fuoco! Par che abbiate paura di tradirvi. [You protest too much! Perhaps you fear you may betray yourself.]

Tosca, with her passionate, fiery temperament, explodes - Scarpia knows about this peculiarity all too well and is able to use her outburst as a clue in his investigation. He continues the pressure all through act II: Mario is tortured, and Tosca is forced to listen to his agony. She eventually crumbles, unable to persevere in keeping Mario’s secret:

[Tosca, act II, scene 4] Nel pozzo… nel giardino… [In the well… in the garden…]

This confession is so succinct, just like the rest of the dialogue in this opera. Tosca doesn’t say ‘wait, I’ll tell you everything’, doesn’t try to play for time; she just betrays the whole thing in two short phrases, without specifying what she means. There’s no need: they’re on the same page.

And then Scarpia goes one step beyond and acknowledges his villainous ways, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but makes him a bit more caricature. Delightfully so, but still. While Tosca nurtures released Cavaradossi to conscience, Baron cunningly waits for the opportune moment, and strikes, ordering Spoletta to bring in Angelotti. He gloats at Cavaradossi, smugness dripping off of him: see, she betrayed your trust! Mario, tortured, exhausted, half-conscious, falls for it, throwing Tosca’s hands away:

[Scarpia, act II, scene 4] Nel pozzo… del giardino. Va, Spoletta. [In the well… In the garden. Get him, Spoletta.]

[Cavaradossi] Ah! M’hai tradito! [Ah, you have betrayed me!]

Cavaradossi picks this up from the dialogue between Scarpia and Spoletta - again, no one clarifies anything. Like you do in real life. Subtlety y’all.

Now that the villain has Cavaradossi locked up and preparations for his execution in progress, he is one step away from getting what he wanted from the start. Tosca consents to sleep with him but still cannot conceal her hatred, unavoidable ‘you can have my body but not my heart’ trope, which doesn’t stop his lust in the least - on the contrary, inflames him more:

[Scarpia, act II, scene 5] Che importa? Spasimi d’ira, spasimi d’amore! [What does it matter? Spasms of wrath or spasms of passion…]

Naturally, when Scarpia is finally killed by Tosca, the audience is bound to feel satisfaction and not regret. Even Floria, the established virtuous character, has no shame as she recognizes Scarpia as the ultimate threat:

[Tosca, act II, scene 5] Ti soffoca il sangue? Muori dannato! Muori! Muori! Muori! È morto! Or gli perdono! E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma! [Is your blood choking you? Die accursed! Die! Die! Die! He is dead! And now I pardon him! All Rome trembled before him!]

But Scarpia is a disillusioned aristocrat rather than a one-dimensional villain. What lets him gain more flesh is his motivations - get rid of the rebels (for power rather than ideological considerations) and get the girl (personal gain), - his backstory and notoriety among the revolutionaries, working relationships with other characters and the fact that he continues to live through his actions (arguably the main theme of the opera). Even when dead, Scarpia continues to serve as a villain of the story: Mario dies, and Tosca shouts her curses at him:

[Tosca, act III, scene 4] O Scarpia, avanti a Dio! [Oh, Scarpia, [we meet] before God!]

This gives weight to the character as Baron doesn’t disappear as soon as he dies. His life and death both have consequences. His actions have lasting power - a feature that fictional villains far too commonly neglect.

Even though Scarpia possesses some cartoonish features, he is far from being as simple as Wile E. Coyote. Meep meep.

Vissi d’arte [finally, let’s talk music]

Riccardo Manci ‘Mario Cavaradossi singing ‘E lucevan le stelle’, inspired by the tenor Giancarlo Monsalve’, 2014

William Ashbrook described Puccini’s music as ‘telegraphic’ and ‘highly charged’. The reason behind such an impression is the combination of several major leitmotifs that interact, evolve and explain the story. Fugitive motif, love of Tosca and Mario, Scarpia’s theme, torture motif, Tosca’s theme and Cavaradossi’s farewell to life are used as a patchwork that tells the story. These leitmotifs - what Edward Greenfield [music critic] calls ‘Grand Tune’ concept - are memorable and unique, as well as quite distinct from their musical surroundings:

Puccini does not develop or modify his motifs, nor weave them into the music symphonically, but uses them to refer to characters, objects and ideas, and as reminders within the narrative.

Burton Fisher ‘Tosca: Opera Study Guide and Libretto’

Torture motif is one succinct example of how a single simple melody is used to pump up the mood. It first appears as a foreshadowing with Scarpia’s forming intention as he learns Cavaradossi was taken into custody:

[Scarpia, act II, scene 2] Meno male! [Not bad, not bad!]

It grows more and more pronounced as Cavaradossi is questioned - threatening but not quite powerful yet. On the backdrop, Tosca’s cantata also gains volume and solemnity - pure delight mixed with anticipation of terror:

[Scarpia, act II, scene 3] Questo è luogo di lagrime! Badate! Or basta! Rispondete! [Beware! This is a place for tears! Enough now. Answer me!]

And the theme finally loses its careful insinuative tone and thunders at full volume when Scarpia orders Mario into the torture chamber, right before Tosca’s eyes:

[Scarpia, act II, scene 4] Mario Cavaradossi, qual testimone il Giudice vi aspetta. [Mario Cavaradossi, the judge awaits your testimony.]

The melody elaborates with Mario’s torture heard from off-stage, reaching its breaking point as Tosca breaks and reveals Angelotti’s hiding. It repeats again after Mario is released - slow and woeful, intertwined with Tosca’s and Mario’s love theme that is now devoid of its previous light hopefulness.

Statue of Michael the Archangel, Castel Sant'Angelo, 2018

I love how music acts as a separate character in the opera. It talks to the characters, responds to them, inquires and leads the conversation. In act I, while Cavaradossi sings about his love to Tosca, the Sacristan reprovingly grumbles about obscene youth on the background. Besides, here lies the great benefit of veristic [realistic] opera that allows the characters to have duologues - Mario and Floria sing their lines separately in a conversational form rather than a boring duet.

Music gives the opportunities of quieter moments, to talk in phrases but also in gestures. During act II, Tosca uses gestures a number of times to answer Scarpia: a nod of the head, a wave; subtle yet expressive. They nearly don’t talk while Scarpia writes her a letter of safe passage. This quiet scene also allows Tosca’s character to unfold, her decision to feel earned. She sees the knife, she hesitates a moment; then she grabs it and hides behind her back: the decision is made. No words necessary; the score allows the characters to be silent while it tells and develops their story.

And it also allows the characters to talk all at once, without listening to each other. By the middle of Act II, as they learn about the battle of Marengo, Mario starts to shout about victory, Tosca tries to shut him up, and Scarpia reels about hanging the revolutionary. They clamor; chaos ensues, and music supports the flurry of eddying noises by playing disparate motifs. The best part about this scene is that it delivers the message loud and clear, on both levels of plot and emotions.

Talking about Puccini’s score, it’s impossible to ignore the musical cohesion and integrity: each of the three main characters has their theme and their own designated aria that allows them to shine. Moreover, as each of their arias happen once per act, I enjoy the interpretation of their dominance: Scarpia in act I, Tosca in act II, Cavaradossi in act III.

Act I. Scarpia’s ‘Te Deum’: lust, menace, church bells

The theme of the villain is played out in contrasts that reflect his character: cunning and smart - but ruthless and just on this side of crazy. Scarpia is also a figure of power, both literally and figuratively, and he is foreshadowed in the score long before the actual appearance of the character on stage. As Baron is first mentioned in the conversation of Angelotti and Cavaradossi, his dark theme abruptly breaks through the much less strident music:

[Angelotti, act I, scene 6] Tutto ella ha osato onde sottrarmi a Scarpia scellerato! [She has dared all to save me from that scoundrel Scarpia!]

Immediately, this menacing ascending theme is associated with the villain. Later, as he enters the stage, no one calls him by his name, yet the audience immediately recognizes him as Scarpia as he is accompanied by that same simple motif.

The appearance of Baron sobers and darkens the mood instantly, his leitmotif invading other themes unscrupulously. Establishing yet another contrast, his conversation with Tosca is escorted by the tolling of bells that lasts till the end of act I. Scarpia raves about his poison spreading through Tosca’s thoughts, and his unnerving, acrid soliloquy transforms into the solemn Adagio religioso in ‘Te Deum’.

This superposition of profane lust of a ferocious man and sacred sublimity of the Catholic chant is what makes the audience shudder. The final ‘Te aeternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur’ [‘Everlasting Father, all the earth worships thee’] should be the solemn virtuous hymn to God but instead the act ends with Scarpia’s theme reiterated in thunderous chords - an ominous admonition of impending threat. Brilliant. Act I definitely belongs to Scarpia.

Act II. Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte’: plea of a broken soul

Second act is all about tempo. The action rushes forward non-stop. Scarpia gives Tosca less and less time to think, to estimate her situation, pushing her to her into the abyss (count how many falling jokes I make through this post). However, he misjudges Tosca’s limits and pushes her just a bit too far.

The point of no return for Tosca is her aria where she asks God why she has to endure all this suffering.

[Tosca, act II, scene 5] Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore, non feci mai male ad anima viva! […] Nell’ora del dolore perché, perché, Signore, perché me ne rimuneri cosi? [I lived for art, I lived for love: never did I harm a living creature! [...] In this hour of pain, why, why, oh Lord, why dost Thou repay me thus?]

The score is lyrical, slow and wailing as Tosca mourns her faith. The aria ends with a low sob that is nearly spoken with raw emotion instead of sang. (Fun fact: while today the opera is probably most well-known for this aria, Puccini didn’t really like it and wanted to cut it out of the opera altogether; in all honesty, it does lack the musical potency of ‘Te Deum’ and ‘E lucevan le stelle’ even though it’s a palatable piece that delivers the idea of character deconstruction rather well.)

Tosca is left completely broken. Modern sopranos commonly fall to their knees while performing this aria, and there’s a good reason: when Tosca finally finds the power to stand up, she is a different woman. For me, this is when the main plot twist happens: usually, heroines in operas are meek and hesitant instead of decisive and offensive. Tosca breaks the pattern and shoves the knife through her offender’s ribcage. She owns act II.

Act III. Cavaradossi’s ‘E lucevan le stelle’: I die in despair

This aria is so renown even people who dislike opera have heard it at some point. It starts with a subtle, tender clarinet solo (possibly the most well-known operatic clarinet theme of all times). The melody is forced up but then sags, losing its power. It’s the pace of destiny, dragging and sorrowful, measuring what little time Cavaradossi has left. This is Andante lento composed in minor key and slow tempo - something that Mosco Carner [musicologist and conductor] calls ‘Puccinian lament, reserved for a character in an extreme situation - death or suicide’. Perfect to denote present anguished dolor.

Mario meditatively recites the first two lines, which feels like an improvisation. The audience witnesses an extremely intimate although fragmentary memory that ends in a grieving ‘muoio disperato’ [‘I die in despair’]:

Puccini insisted on the inclusion of these words, and later stated that admirers of the aria had treble cause to be grateful to him: for composing the music, for having the lyrics written, and ‘for declining expert advice to throw the result in the waste-paper basket’.

William Ashbrook ‘The Operas of Puccini’

Bravo, maestro!

I dislike the currently popular hysterical sobbing at the end of the aria that can be heard from modern tenors (e.g, in staging of ‘Tosca’ at La Scala). It sounds as a ‘hoquet tragique’ [‘tragic hiccup’] that jumps out too much and is slightly out of character - such rendering is more appropriate for Tosca’s character not Cavaradossi’s.

Still, this is arguably the most beautiful, heart-wrenching lyrical aria I’ve ever heard; I’m literally still not over it, after 3 whole years of listening to it, sometimes on repeat. Also, Placido Domingo is the best  Cavaradossi, shut up I’m not wrong (1976 film starring him and Raina Kabaivanska is wildly enjoyable).

As a bonus, act III (specifically its beginning and ending) deserve an honorable mention. Despite where the plot says the most dramatic moment of the plot is, for me, it’s the beginning of act III. Here’s the pinnacle of the opera: the contrast between the serene aria of a shepherd boy accompanied by the love motif - and the grim, heavy, shuddering theme of Cavaradossi’s farewell that the orchestra splashes on you as if it is a bucket of ice cold water. The music swells - you wait for the volume to stop growing, but instead it just tears through your eardrums.

The timpani are impossibly good for this piece. Intruding the peaceful, pastoral Roman morning full of hopeful dreams and the colors of sunrise, they suddenly throw the audience into the pit of pure unadulterated horror. Trembling and vibrating on low frequencies, they gift you with the feeling of earth opening under your feet, sucking you into the dark depths you’ll never get out of to see light - say farewell to life.

Similarly, the ending is extremely powerful. The drums start slowly at first, setting the rhythm. Before Cavaradossi’s execution, the orchestra is subtle and insinuating; it accrues and thickens in its vicious predictions. After the shots, as Tosca discovers Mario’s death, the tempo breaks through the roof. The music is desperately, deafeningly loud, it screams of tragedy. And, well, I am aware of the plot of the opera by now, but I’m caught off guard every time. I blame this on music. It just so perfectly reflects the mood of the events; it’s pure gorgeousness that gets to my very core every time.

There’s another point of criticism I need to mention in regard to the final theme that ends the opera: against logic, it is Cavaradossi’s farewell instead of more fitting love theme or, even more appropriately, Scarpia’s motif. This I cannot disagree with as, plot-wise, using this theme would provide the dramatic closure for the opera. However, given my love for theme of farewell, I cannot find the heart to dislike Puccini’s choice after all. Act III is largely focused on Cavaradossi, and the finale acknowledges this.

...Undoubtedly, Puccini was a genius. It’s not easy to comprehend the mastery with which he weaved a handful of simple motifs into a powerful story I cannot stop listening to. But also, there’s this:

Puccini’s sense of humor was often of the schoolboy variety, and he found risqué musical puns irresistible. In Act II of the opera, after Spoletta has assured Scarpia that ‘everything is ready’ for the execution of Cavaradossi, the Chief of Police turns to Tosca and softly asks, ‘Ebbene?’—’Well?’ She says nothing, and the score tells us that she indicates her submission by nodding her head. But at her silent reply the orchestra, anticipating the two-note theme of the ‘execution’ motif, plays the two-note phrase, A and C, or in Italian solfeggio, La and Do. The syllables, in addition to being musical symbols, also happen to be words in Italian: the words ‘La do’ mean ‘I'm giving it,’ and it is the usual way for women to say, I'm ready to give ‘it’ (to you).

Susan Vandiver Nicassio ‘Ten Things You Didn’t Know about Tosca’

It is quite possible there’s more of such minutiae. I’m not sure how to feel about a piece that simultaneously cracks me up and throws me into a pit of despair. But I definitely like it - that much I know.

Castel Sant’Angelo, 2018

Recondita armonia [some fun trivia]

The tone of the dialogue was elevated quite a bit. Get this: comforting Cavaradossi after he was tortured, Tosca says ‘Ma il giusto Iddio lo punirá’ [‘But a just God will punish [Scarpia]’]. The initial line was ‘Ma il sozzo sbirro lo pagherà’ [‘But the filthy cop will pay for it’]. Far less distinguished, my dear.

Puccini visited Rome specifically to mimic the early morning bells. Kudos for authenticity. Also, initially, the composer spent an ungodly amount of money to cast the bells he needed for the performance of ‘Tosca’. The orchestras till today have difficulties satisfying the composer’s vision.

Sarah Bernhardt, an actress who became the prototype for Tosca in Sardou’s play, while performing in Rio de Janeiro in 1905, injured her leg in the final scene when jumping from the rampart. As a result of poor treatment, she lost her leg ten years later. Gory.

Two of the most famous opera singers chose this opera as their farewell: Maria Callas as Tosca gave her last performance in 1965, and Luciano Pavarotti as Mario Cavaradossi in 2004.

In one of the performances with Placido Domingo as Mario Cavaradossi, his son was featured as a shepherd boy.

Before Puccini got to write ‘Tosca’, Giuseppe Verdi expressed his interest. He didn’t like the ending though and wanted it changed - I think we’ve barely avoided another ‘La Traviata’ there, oof.

Oscar Wilde saw ‘La Tosca’ and believed the torture scene was great as it showed how far people can go (no wonder; he was working on ‘Salome’ that evoked indignant discontent of the critics in a similar fashion). George Bernard Shaw also saw the play and, while disliking it utterly, still predicted it would be great as an opera.

In Sardou’s play, Cavaradossi gained a reputation of a Bonapartist in large part because of his mustache. That’s the conclusion I’ve made after seeing these two quotes: ‘Even his mustache was suspect’ and ‘Tosca’s confessor told her it marked him as a revolutionary’. This is gold.

[troybeecham]

Today the Church remembers St. John Chrysostom (c. AD 349 – 14 September 407), Archbishop of Constantinople, Early Church Father.

Ora pro nobis.

He is known for his preaching and public speaking, his denunciation of abuse of authority by both ecclesiastical and political leaders, the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, and his ascetic sensibilities. The epithet Chrysostomos means "golden-mouthed" in Greek and denotes his celebrated eloquence. Chrysostom was among the most prolific authors in the early Christian Church, exceeded only by Augustine of Hippo in the quantity of his surviving writings.

John was born in Antioch in AD 349 to Greek parents from Syria. Different scholars describe his mother Anthusa as a pagan or as a Christian, and his father was a high-ranking military officer. John's father died soon after his birth and he was raised by his mother. He was baptised in AD 368 or 373 and tonsured as a reader (one of the minor orders of the Church).

As a result of his mother's influential connections in the city, John began his education under the pagan teacher Libanius. From Libanius, John acquired the skills for a career in rhetoric, as well as a love of the Greek language and literature.

As he grew older, however, John became more deeply committed to Christianity and went on to study theology under Diodore of Tarsus, founder of the re-constituted School of Antioch. According to the Christian historian Sozomen, Libanius was supposed to have said on his deathbed that John would have been his successor "if the Christians had not taken him from us".

John lived in extreme asceticism and became a hermit in about AD 375; he spent the next two years continually standing, scarcely sleeping, and committing the Bible to memory. As a consequence of these practices, his stomach and kidneys were permanently damaged and poor health forced him to return to Antioch.

John was ordained as a deacon in AD 381 by Saint Meletius of Antioch who was not then in communion with Alexandria and Rome. After the death of Meletius, John separated himself from the followers of Meletius, without joining Paulinus, the rival of Meletius for the bishopric of Antioch. But after the death of Paulinus he was ordained a presbyter (priest) in AD 386 by Evagrius, the successor of Paulinus.He was destined later to bring about reconciliation between Flavian I of Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, thus bringing those three sees into communion for the first time in nearly seventy years.

In Antioch, over the course of twelve years (386–397), John gained popularity because of the eloquence of his public speaking at the Golden Church, Antioch's cathedral, especially his insightful expositions of Bible passages and moral teaching. The most valuable of his works from this period are his Homilies on various books of the Bible. He emphasised charitable giving and was concerned with the spiritual and temporal needs of the poor. He spoke against abuse of wealth and personal property:

“Do you wish to honour the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect him outside where he is cold and ill-clad. He who said: "This is my body" is the same who said: "You saw me hungry and you gave me no food", and "Whatever you did to the least of my brothers you did also to me"... What good is it if the Eucharistic table is overloaded with golden chalices when your brother is dying of hunger? Start by satisfying his hunger and then with what is left you may adorn the altar as well.”

His straightforward understanding of the Scriptures – in contrast to the Alexandrian tendency towards allegorical interpretation – meant that the themes of his talks were practical, explaining the Bible's application to everyday life. Such straightforward preaching helped Chrysostom to garner popular support. He founded a series of hospitals in Constantinople to care for the poor.

One incident that happened during his service in Antioch illustrates the influence of his homilies. When Chrysostom arrived in Antioch, Flavian, the bishop of the city, had to intervene with Emperor Theodosius I on behalf of citizens who had gone on a rampage mutilating statues of the Emperor and his family. During the weeks of Lent in AD 387, John preached more than twenty homilies in which he entreated the people to see the error of their ways. These made a lasting impression on the general population of the city: many pagans converted to Christianity as a result of the homilies. As a result, Theodosius' vengeance was not as severe as it might have been.

In the autumn of AD 397, John was appointed Archbishop of Constantinople, after having been nominated without his knowledge by the eunuch Eutropius. He had to leave Antioch in secret due to fears that the departure of such a popular figure would cause civil unrest. During his time as Archbishop he adamantly refused to host lavish social gatherings, which made him popular with the common people, but unpopular with wealthy citizens and the clergy. His reforms of the clergy were also unpopular. He told visiting regional preachers to return to the churches they were meant to be serving—without any payout.

His time in Constantinople was more tumultuous than his time in Antioch. Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, wanted to bring Constantinople under his sway and opposed John's appointment to Constantinople. Theophilus had disciplined four Egyptian monks (known as "the Tall Brothers") over their support of Origen's teachings. They fled to John and were welcomed by him. Theophilus therefore accused John of being too partial to the teaching of Origen. He made another enemy in Aelia Eudoxia, wife of Emperor Arcadius, who assumed that John's denunciations of extravagance in feminine dress were aimed at her. Eudoxia, Theophilus and other of his enemies held a synod in AD 403 (the Synod of the Oak) to charge John, in which his connection to Origen was used against him. It resulted in his deposition and banishment. He was called back by Arcadius almost immediately, as the people became "tumultuous" over his departure, even threatening to burn the royal palace. There was an earthquake the night of his arrest, which Eudoxia took for a sign of God's anger, prompting her to ask Arcadius for John's reinstatement.

Peace was short-lived. A silver statue of Eudoxia was erected in the Augustaion, near his cathedral. John denounced the dedication ceremonies as pagan and spoke against the Empress in harsh terms:

"Again Herodias raves; again she is troubled; she dances again; and again desires to receive John's head in a charger", an allusion to the events surrounding the death of John the Baptist. Once again he was banished, this time to the Caucasus in Abkhazia. Around AD 405, John began to lend moral and financial support to Christian monks who were enforcing the emperors' anti-Pagan laws, by destroying temples and shrines in Phoenicia and nearby regions.

The causes of John's exile are not clear, though Jennifer Barry suggests that they have to do with his connections to Arianism. Other historians, including Wendy Mayer and Geoffrey Dunn, have argued that "the surplus of evidence reveals a struggle between Johannite and anti-Johannite camps in Constantinople soon after John's departure and for a few years after his death". Faced with exile, John Chrysostom wrote an appeal for help to three churchmen: Pope Innocent I, Venerius the Bishop of Milan, and the third to Chromatius, the Bishop of Aquileia.

In 1872, church historian William Stephens wrote:

The Patriarch of the Eastern Rome appeals to the great bishops of the West, as the champions of an ecclesiastical discipline which he confesses himself unable to enforce, or to see any prospect of establishing. No jealousy is entertained of the Patriarch of the Old Rome by the Patriarch of the New Rome. The interference of Innocent is courted, a certain primacy is accorded him, but at the same time he is not addressed as a supreme arbitrator; assistance and sympathy are solicited from him as from an elder brother, and two other prelates of Italy are joint recipients with him of the appeal.

Pope Innocent I protested John's banishment from Constantinople to the town of Cucusus in Cappadocia, but to no avail. Innocent sent a delegation to intercede on behalf of John in AD 405. It was led by Gaudentius of Brescia; Gaudentius and his companions, two bishops, encountered many difficulties and never reached their goal of entering Constantinople.

John wrote letters which still held great influence in Constantinople. As a result of this, he was further exiled from Cucusus (where he stayed from 404 to 407) to Pitiunt (Pityus) (in modern Georgia) where his tomb is a shrine for pilgrims. He never reached this destination, as he died at Comana Pontica on AD 14 September 407 during the journey. His last words are said to have been "δόξα τῷ θεῷ πάντων ἕνεκεν" (Glory be to God for all things).

John came to be venerated as a saint soon after his death. Almost immediately after, an anonymous supporter of John (known as pseudo-Martyrius) wrote a funeral oration to reclaim John as a symbol of Christian orthodoxy. But three decades later, some of his adherents in Constantinople remained in schism. Saint Proclus, Patriarch of Constantinople (AD 434–446), hoping to bring about the reconciliation of the Johannites, preached a homily praising his predecessor in the Church of Hagia Sophia. He said, "O John, your life was filled with sorrow, but your death was glorious. Your grave is blessed and reward is great, by the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ O graced one, having conquered the bounds of time and place! Love has conquered space, unforgetting memory has annihilated the limits, and place does not hinder the miracles of the saint."

These homilies helped to mobilize public opinion, and the patriarch received permission from the emperor to return Chrysostom's relics to Constantinople, where they were enshrined in the Church of the Holy Apostles on AD 28 January 438. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him as a "Great Ecumenical Teacher", with Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian. These three saints, in addition to having their own individual commemorations throughout the year, are commemorated together on 30 January, a feast known as the Synaxis of the Three Hierarchs.

O God, you gave your servant John Chrysostom grace eloquently to proclaim your righteousness in the great congregation, and fearlessly to bear reproach for the honor of your Name: Mercifully grant to all bishops and pastors such excellence in preaching, and faithfulness in ministering your Word, that your people may be partakers with them of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

[acuppellarp]

Welcome to A Cup-pella, Ally! We’re excited to have you and Dani Harper in the game! Please go through the checklist to make sure you’re ready to go and send in your account within the next 24 hours. 

OOC INFO

Name + pronouns: Ally/she/her Age: 27 Timezone: EST Ships: Dani/chemistry, Dani/happiness, Dani/love Anti-Ships: Dani/forced

IC INFO

Full Name: Danielle “Dani” Harper Face Claim: Demi Lovato Age/Birthday: January 10, 1990, 28 Occupation: Musician, barista at A Cup-pella, member of the Pamela Lansbury Personality: Chill, Passionate, Independent, free spirited, loyal Hometown: Miami, FL Bio: Conservative would be the way to describe Dani’s childhood growing up. Her father was Irish American while her mother was Mexican, and they both placed a high importance on religion growing up. When Dani was little none of it really bothered her. She went to a Catholic school in Little Havana, embraced the hispanic culture that was at every turn, and was happy to dress up in the frilly dresses her Mama and abuela would buy for her. Her family was the center of her universe, and Sundays at her abuela’s house were the highlight of her week.

When she start fourth grade, her school started auditioning girls for the church choir. At first Dani was nervous because she had never sang for anyone other than her dad, but after weeks of persistence from the nuns at her school she gave in. Her voice blew people away which only made her family thrilled. Not only had their daughter found a hobby she was so interested in, but it was one that was closely connected to the church. She had to attend every mass which took up most of her weekends. That was fine though since not many nine and ten year olds had grand plans anyway.

Dani stayed the course until high school which was when things began to get a little murky. Her parents couldn’t afford to send her to a private Catholic school anymore when she got older, so she went to the public high school Coral Gables. Dani would never agree with her parents’ outlandish accusations of the school tainting her or teaching her the devil’s beliefs. It was simply just a more well rounded experience. Her school had people from all types of ethnicities, cultures, beliefs, and economic backgrounds which allowed her to pop the naive bubble her parents kept her in for so long. From the outside looking in she could see how it looked like she was going down a path that led to trouble when she got older, but back then, all she cared about was learning music. The friends that she made taught her how to play the guitar and read music that weren’t just hymns praising the Lord. Her parents at first didn’t mind the new music. They thought the addition of the guitar was wonderful as long as she also learned how to play music from her Mexican heritage which she was happy to do. Her thirst for knowledge when it came to music was limitless. Any genre, culture, or sound she could get her hands on to absorb she was interested in.

The problems didn’t start until her junior year in high school when Izzy walked into her life. Isabella was a beautiful girl who played the drums and was a part of the band Dani and her friends decided to try. For months Danielle went through hell because the feelings she was having toward the other girl wasn’t normal. Half the time she felt like a bipolar patient because there were days she wanted to spend as much time with the drummer as possible, and then others where she couldn’t get away far enough. The smallest of touches would cause her to jump, and all she would receive in return from Izzy was a smile. The smile annoyed her most of all because it always seemed like the other girl knew a secret Dani didn’t. Of course, Dani wouldn’t find out just what her friend knew until nearly a year later. When she was a sophomore they were playing at a party when Isabella got drunk. As Danielle was taking care of her because she couldn’t for the life of her leave her with all the boys that were practically drooling at the mouth, her friend did the unthinkable and kissed her. However, what was even more unfathomable was how Dani didn’t push her away. In that moment that one drunk, slightly sloppy kiss was better than the ones she had shared with her previous long term boyfriend. That kiss led to sober kisses and trying to be careful even though there was no such thing when someone had a mother who was like a blood hound. When Dani’s mother caught them kissing goodbye the day of their graduation outside of the house, the older woman went ballistic. Within minutes her whole family was called and everyone was fighting more than Danielle had ever seen. Blame was being thrown everywhere along with ideas for possible “cures,” but Dani wanted nothing of it. Her parents had told her point blank that they wouldn’t accept her how she was, so she left.

That night wasn’t one that Danielle liked to talk about. The moment she got the tattoo of birds on her forearm symbolizing that she was free she let go of that negativity as much as she could and got on with her life. Eventually she hopped a Greyhound to New York City. She definitely wouldn’t recommend that from Florida to anyone because it was long as shit, but it was cheap. Now, eight years later Dani was doing pretty good. She had a job with a boss who was a little nutty but loved her employees like her own kids. Plus, it helped her pay her part of the rent and bills, so she was happy. Her roommate was one of her best friends and band mates, and she got to practice music whenever she has free time. To most it wouldn’t be a lot, but Dani never needed much. As long as she had her guitar, her voice, and a place to lay her head at night, she was happy.

Pets: None

EXTRA INFO

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@fyeahdaniharps: I pat myself on the back every day for moving to a city with good cafe con leche. 🙌#hispanicproblems #crack @ fyeahdaniharps: Can someone tell me how Tequila can always make me feel attacked by my own culture the morning after a good time? #hangoverstruggle @fyeahdaniharps: I seriously need to stop being amazed by Trader Joe’s stuff and just accept all of their food is awesome. #unexpectedcheddarcheese @fyeahdaniharps: Just finished another sick rehearsal with @PamelaLansbury, and let me tell you this weekend is going to rock! 🤘 @fyeahdaniharps: Whenever I’ve got the blues, the sunrise always knows how to wash it all away. #earlymorningreflections

[dipulb3]

Opinion: Why I'm going to church for Easter

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/opinion-why-im-going-to-church-for-easter/

Opinion: Why I'm going to church for Easter

That’s a question I’ve been asked by bewildered friends my entire adult life. As a gay man who advocates for social justice, I get why some people look askance when I mention what my Sunday plans entail.

“Yes, I do.” Sunday is Easter and I will be at church to celebrate this sign of God’s solidarity with the oppressed. But I’m not about to bemoan all those who aren’t going to church today.

Fewer and fewer Americans, especially young Americans, identify as Christians. While there are a number of factors impacting this trend, one stands out to me this Holy Week: The impact of the Christian right’s political prominence in driving progressive Christians away from the faith. A recent study by two political scientists found that the rise of Americans who identify as “nonreligious” has resulted, in part, from backlash against the Christian right.

Consternation about church decline and the secularization of America reached a fever pitch this Holy Week when Gallup released a new poll that found a majority of Americans do not belong to church, synagogue or mosque. This was the first time the membership percentage fell below a majority since Gallup first started asking the question in 1937.

These findings are troubling to many. “This is perhaps the most distressing graph related to the future of America,” Eric Sammons, editor-in-chief of the conservative Catholic Crisis Magazine wrote on Twitter, adding, “We are officially living in a pagan nation.”

And it’s not just conservative Christians. Shadi Hamid, a Brookings Institution scholar who is Muslim, expressed concern that Christianity is being replaced by “Wokeism” in an interview with the Washington Post about the Gallup poll and in an essay for the Atlantic. Without Christianity, he wrote, our country will “no longer have a common culture upon which to fall back.”

Yet seeing this poll released during Holy Week made me think about what it means as a Christian to reflect deeply on church decline. Jesus called on his followers not to live in fear, so I cannot in good faith lament church decline. Instead, I’m hopeful for a resurrection of social justice-focused Christianity in America that lives up to the teachings of Jesus.

This Easter, I hope my fellow Christians who deeply care about the future of our movement to spread the Gospel of love will recommit ourselves to build a movement that more people want to join. We must contest the popular depiction of what it means to be a Christian today. Church decline is not a rejection of our message of love, it’s a rejection of our movement’s failure to model that message for the world.

Since this poll has received so much attention, it’s important to point out a few things. First, Christians, Jews, and Muslims are distinct religious groups with their own traditions and dynamics with regards to the membership at play. They collectively also don’t represent all religious Americans. And membership is only one metric — some Americans participate in or attend houses of worship without claiming formal membership.

We should also be careful not to equate membership with religious belonging or belief in God. Practicing faith does not always happen under the auspices of a house of worship; nor does maintaining a membership in one guarantee religious conviction. Some members remain because for them, it is the socially respectable thing to do, separate from beliefs or spirituality.

There are problems with paying too much attention to any specific individual indicator of religious trends — for instance, decline in church membership doesn’t necessarily mean society overall has grown more secularized — but there is a host of recent research that points towards declining membership, attendance and reported importance of religion in Americans’ lives.

Polling from the Public Religion Research Institute and Pew Research Center mirror the new poll findings from Gallup. A 2019 survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute shed light on several reasons why Americans, especially young Americans, are leaving religion. One finding stuck out to me: “Nearly six in 10 (59 percent) young people say religious people are generally less tolerant, while only 34 percent of seniors agree.”

In my book “Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity,” I examine the question of how perceptions of Christianity at-large are shaped by the media. I call the media’s focus on the more outrageous expressions of our faith the Westboro Baptist Church Effect. The church is virulently anti-LGBTQ and offensive, but get vastly more attention than the small size of their congregation deserves. In the past year, we’ve seen this with the media’s obsession about White evangelicals during the 2020 election. Will they or will they not turn out for Trump? My question was a different one: Who are the faith-based backers of the devoutly Catholic candidate for president? During the pandemic, almost all churches heeded public health guidance and moved away from in-person services. Yet we’ve paid more attention to the few churches opposed to Covid-19 orders than the churches who faithfully saved lives by moving to digital gathering spaces.

It’s understandable why some people are leaving church when these are the stories we hear about Christians. They just sound nothing like the stories about Jesus we read in the Gospels.

In Luke’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and other women visit the tomb of Jesus only to realize it is empty. They are told, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Likewise, we as Christians should not look for the living Jesus movement among the dead remains of conservative Christian hate that looks nothing like the love Jesus embodied. Instead, we should look forward to a resurrection of Christianity that fights system oppression and stands in solidarity with the most vulnerable.

We should look for the living of the Gospel among America’s youth today. Alongside their relative lack of formal religious devotion, today’s young Americans are known for their commitment to social justice. Two surveys from Pew Research Center illustrate this dynamic. While disaffiliation from religion is rising fastest among young Americans, researchers also found that majorities of the Generation Z and the millennial generations are more approving of the country’s increasing racial and ethnic diversity, as well as interracial and same-sex marriage, than older generations. Millennials are born between roughly 1981 and 1996 and followed by Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2010. According to the CIRCLE/Tisch College 2020 Youth Survey, 27% of Americans ages 18-24 say they have attended a march or demonstration.

They are the generation whose stereotype most resembles what Christians should be known for: restless for a better world and refusing to comply when their elders tell them to obey the rules. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, the #MeToo movement, the fight for boldly overhauling our democracy and economy. These are the same causes Jesus championed in the Gospels.

Imagine if American Christianity at-large were known to share the concerns of young progressive leaders today like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is vocal about how her own Catholic faith has shaped her concerns for social justice. Thankfully, Ocasio-Cortez is just one of the progressive Christians who are speaking up in the political sphere where so much harm has been perpetrated by conservative Christianity. There’s also newly elected US Sen. Raphael Warnock and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Sen. Warnock spoke about faith and voting rights during his first speech on the floor of the US Senate and Buttigieg spoke about being a gay Christian during his presidential run. They each embody the mission of Jesus followers to work for social justice.

While Ocasio-Cortez, Warnock, and Buttigieg are three of the most vocal progressive Christians living out their faith in the public square, they are the latest in a long history of activism. “The progressive wing of Christianity is not, of course, new,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently wrote, highlighting several other examples of progressive Christian activism. “It began with Jesus.”

For Christians celebrating today, Easter means that God’s love is more powerful than the systems of oppression that crucified Jesus. It’s our responsibility as followers of Jesus to join in the work of fighting those systems of oppression — alongside such powerful leaders today like the Rev. Dr. William Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign and Sister Simone Campbell of Nuns on the Bus.

As I head to (online) church this Easter, I respect how people may not feel inclined to identify as Christians or join a church for good reasons. There’s no reason to bemoan that reality. Instead, let’s make the church actually live up to its calling. Only then, God willing, will I be interested in what the church membership numbers report.

[blackkudos]

Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931), more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, feminist, Georgist, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells lost her parents and a sibling in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic at a young age. She went to work and, with her grandmother, kept the rest of the family intact. She moved with some of her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee, finding pay better for teachers.

Later as an activist, Wells documented lynching in the United States in the 1890s, showing that it was often used in the South as a way to control or punish Black people who competed with whites, rather than being based on criminal acts by black people, as was usually claimed by whites. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician and traveled internationally on lecture tours.

Early life and education

Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, several months before United States President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in Confederate-held territory. Her parents James Wells and Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Warrenton) Wells, were both enslaved by Spires Bolling, an architect. She was one of eight children. The family resided at Bolling's house, now named the Bolling-Gatewood House, where Lizzie Wells was a cook.

Ida's father was a master at carpentry; after the Civil War and emancipation, he was known as a "race man" who worked for the advancement of black people. He was very interested in politics and became a member of the Loyal League. He attended Shaw University in Holly Springs (now Rust College), but he dropped out to help his family. He also attended public speeches and campaigned for local black candidates but never ran for office himself. A religious woman, Elizabeth Wells was very strict with her children. Both of Ida's parents were active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction.

Ida attended Shaw like her father, but she was expelled for rebellious behavior after confronting the college president. While visiting her grandmother in the Mississippi Valley in 1878, Ida, then aged 16, received word that Holly Springs had suffered a yellow fever epidemic. Both of her parents and her infant brother (Stanley) died during that event, leaving her and her five other siblings orphaned. Wells would find a number of men who served as father figures later in her life, particularly Alfred Froman, Theodore W. Lott, and Josiah T. Settle (with whom she boarded in 1886 and 1887).

Early career

Following the funerals of her parents and brother, friends and relatives decided that the six remaining Wells children should be split up and sent to various foster homes. Wells resisted this solution. To keep her younger siblings together as a family, she found work as a teacher in a black elementary school. Her paternal grandmother, Peggy Wells, along with other friends and relatives, stayed with her siblings and cared for them during the week while Wells was away teaching. Without this help, she would have not been able to keep her siblings together. Wells resented that in the segregated school system, white teachers were paid $80 a month and she was paid only $30 a month. This discrimination made her more interested in the politics of race and improving the education of black people.

In 1883, Wells took three of her younger siblings to Memphis, Tennessee, to live with her aunt and to be closer to other family members. She also learned that she could earn higher wages there as a teacher than in Mississippi. Soon after moving, she was hired in Woodstock for the Shelby County school system. During her summer vacations she attended summer sessions at Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville. She also attended LeMoyne. She held strong political opinions and provoked many people with her views on women's rights. At 24, she wrote, "I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge."

On May 4, 1884, a train conductor with the Memphis and Charleston Railroad ordered Wells to give up her seat in the first-class ladies car and move to the smoking car, which was already crowded with other passengers. The year before, the Supreme Court had ruled against the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 (which had banned racial discrimination in public accommodations). This verdict supported railroad companies that chose to racially segregate their passengers.

Wells refused to give up her seat. The conductor and two men dragged Wells out of the car. When she returned to Memphis, she hired an African-American attorney to sue the railroad. Wells gained publicity in Memphis when she wrote a newspaper article for The Living Way, a black church weekly, about her treatment on the train. When her lawyer was paid off by the railroad, she hired a white attorney. She won her case on December 24, 1884, when the local circuit court granted her a $500 award.

The railroad company appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court's ruling in 1887. It concluded, "We think it is evident that the purpose of the defendant in error was to harass with a view to this suit, and that her persistence was not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for the short ride." Wells was ordered to pay court costs. Wells' reaction to the higher court's decision expressed her strong convictions on civil rights and religious faith, as she responded: "I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people...O God, is there no...justice in this land for us?"

While teaching elementary school, Wells was offered an editorial position for the Evening Star in Washington, DC. She also wrote weekly articles for The Living Way weekly newspaper under the pen name "Iola," gaining a reputation for writing about the race issue. In 1889, she became co-owner and editor of Free Speech and Headlight, an anti-segregation newspaper that was started by the Reverend Taylor Nightingale and was based at the Beale Street Baptist Church in Memphis. It published articles about racial injustice. In 1891, Wells was dismissed from her teaching post by the Memphis Board of Education due to her articles that criticized conditions in the colored schools of the region. Wells was devastated but undaunted, and concentrated her energy on writing articles for the The Living Way and the Free Speech and Headlight.

In 1889 Thomas Moss, a friend of Wells, opened the Peoples Grocery in the "Curve," a black neighborhood just outside the Memphis city limits. It did well and competed with a white-owned grocery store across the street. While Wells was out of town in Natchez, Mississippi, a white mob invaded her friends' store. During the altercation, three white men were shot and injured. Moss and two other black men, named McDowell and Stewart, were arrested and jailed pending trial. A large white lynch mob stormed the jail and killed the three men.

After the lynching of her friends, Wells wrote in Free Speech and Headlight, urging blacks to leave Memphis altogether:

There is, therefore, only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.

Wells emphasized the public spectacle of the lynching. More than 6,000 black people did leave Memphis; others organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. After being threatened with violence, she bought a pistol. She later wrote, "They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth."

Investigative journalism

The murder of her friends drove Wells to research and document lynchings and their causes. She began investigative journalism by looking at the charges given for the murders, which officially started her anti-lynching campaign. She spoke on the issue at various black women's clubs, and raised more than $500 to investigate lynchings and publish her results. Wells found that black people were lynched for such social control reasons as failing to pay debts, not appearing to give way to whites, competing with whites economically, and being drunk in public. She found little basis for the frequent claim that black men were lynched because they had sexually abused or attacked white women. This alibi seemed to have partly accounted for white America's collective acceptance or silence on lynching, as well as its acceptance by many in the educated African-American community. Before her friends were lynched and she conducted research, Wells had concluded that "although lynching was…contrary to law and order…it was the terrible crime of rape [that] led to the lynching; [and] that perhaps…the mob was justified in taking his [the rapist's] life".

She published her findings in a pamphlet entitled "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases." She followed this with an editorial that suggested that, unlike the myth that white women were sexually at risk of attacks by black men, most liaisons between black men and white women were consensual. After the editorial was published, Wells left Memphis for a short trip to New England, to cover another story for the newspaper. Her editorial enraged white men in Memphis. Their responses in two leading white newspapers, The Daily Commercial and The Evening Scimitar, were brimming with hatred; "the fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome…calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of southern whites. But we have had enough of it". On May 27, 1892, while she was away in Philadelphia, a white mob destroyed the offices of the Free Speech and Headlight.

Numerous other studies have supported Wells' findings of lynching as a form of community control and analyzed variables that affect lynching. Beck and Tolnay's influential 1990 study found that economics played a major role, with the rate of lynchings higher when marginal whites were under threat because of uncertain economic conditions. They concluded the following:

...[L]ynchings were more frequent in years when the "constant dollar" price of cotton was declining and inflationary pressure was increasing. Relative size of the black population was also positively related to lynching. We conclude that mob violence against southern black people responded to economic conditions affecting the financial fortunes of southern whites—especially marginal white farmers.

According to scholar Oliver C. Cox in his 1945 article "Lynching and the Status Quo," the definition of lynching is "an act of homicidal aggression committed by one people against another through mob action…for the purpose of suppressing…[or] subjugating them further".

In an effort to raise awareness and opposition to lynching, Wells spoke to groups in New York City, where her audiences included many leading African-American women. On October 5, 1892, a testimonial dinner held at Lyric Hall, organized by political activists and clubwomen, Victoria Earle Matthews and Maritcha Remond Lyons, raised significant funds for Wells' anti-lynching campaign. The Women's Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn was formed to organize black women as an interest group who could act politically.

Because of the threats to her life, Wells left Memphis altogether and moved to Chicago. She continued to wage her anti-lynching campaign and to write columns attacking Southern injustices. Her articles were published in The New York Age newspaper. She continued to investigate lynching incidents and the ostensible causes in the cases.

Together with Frederick Douglass and other black leaders, she organized a black boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, for its failure to collaborate with the black community on exhibits to represent African-American life. Wells, Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Well's future husband Ferdinand Lee Barnett wrote sections of a pamphlet to be distributed there: "Reasons Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition." It detailed the progress of blacks since their arrival in America and also exposed the basis of Southern lynchings. Wells later reported to Albion W. Tourgée that copies of the pamphlet had been distributed to more than 20,000 people at the fair. After the World's Fair in Chicago, Wells decided to stay in the city instead of returning to New York. That year she started work with the Chicago Conservator, the oldest African-American newspaper in the city.

Also in 1893, Wells contemplated a libel suit against two black Memphis attorneys. She turned to Tourgée, who had trained and practiced as a lawyer and judge, for possible free legal help. Deeply in debt, Tourgée could not afford to help but asked his friend Ferdinand Barnett for his aid. Born in Alabama, Barnett had become the editor of the Chicago Conservator in 1878. He served as an assistant state attorney for 14 years. Barnett accepted the pro bono job.

Personal life

Wells kept track of her life through diaries; in them, she writes few personal things. Before she was married, Wells said that she would date only those men in whom she had "little romantic interest," because she did not want romance to be the center of the relationship. She wanted it based on her and her partner's mental and personal interaction, rather than physical attraction. Wells acknowledged such flaws as being very quick to criticize and use harsh words toward another. Because she recorded all of her purchases, her diaries revealed that she bought items which she really could not afford.

In 1895, Wells married attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett, a widower with two sons, Ferdinand and Albert. She was one of the first married American women to keep her own last name as well as taking her husband's.

The couple had four more children: Charles, Herman, Ida, and Alfreda. In the chapter of her Crusade For Justice autobiography, called A Divided Duty, Wells described the difficulty she had splitting her time between her family and her work. She continued to work after the birth of her first child, traveling and bringing the infant Charles with her. Although she tried to balance her world, she could not be as active in her work. Susan B. Anthony said she seemed "distracted". After having her second child, Wells stepped out of her touring and public life for a time.

European tours

Wells took two tours to Europe in her campaign for justice, the first in 1893 and the second in 1894. In 1893, Wells went to Great Britain at the invitation of Catherine Impey, a British Quaker. An opponent of imperialism and proponent of racial equality, Impey wanted to ensure that the British public learned about the problem of lynching in the US. Wells rallied a moral crusade among the British. Wells accompanied her speeches with a photograph of a white mob and grinning white children posing near a hanged black man; her talks created a sensation, but some in the audiences remained doubtful of her accounts. Wells intended to raise money and expose the US lynching violence, but received so little funds that she had difficulty covering her travel expenses.

In 1894 before leaving the US for her second visit to Great Britain, Wells called on William Penn Nixon, the editor of Daily Inter-Ocean, a Republican newspaper in Chicago. It was the only major white paper that persistently denounced lynching. After she told Nixon about her planned tour, he asked her to write for the newspaper while in England. She was the first African-American woman to be a paid correspondent for a mainstream white newspaper. (Tourgée had been writing a column for the same paper.)

Her article "In Pembroke Chapel" recounted the mental journey that an English minister had shared with her. C. F. Aked had invited Wells to speak. He told her he had found it difficult to accept the level of violence she recounted in her earlier accounts of lynching. He had traveled to the US for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and while there, read in local papers about the Miller lynching in Bardwell, Kentucky. He realized that Wells' accounts were accurate.

Wells was highly effective in speaking to European audiences, who were shocked to learn about the rate of violence against black people in the U.S. Her two tours in Europe helped gain support for her cause. She called for the formation of groups to formally protest the lynchings. Wells helped catalyze anti-lynching groups in Europe, which tried to press the U.S. government to guarantee the safety of blacks in the South.

Willard controversy

By the late 19th century, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a predominantly white women's organization, had branches in every state and a membership of more than 200,000. Part of the progressive movement, it attracted some women to political activity who considered the suffrage movement as too radical. Other women were active in both movements. Frances Willard was president of the Temperance Union from 1879 to 1898.

Willard was touring England on behalf of temperance when Wells was conducting her anti-lynching campaign there. As Wells described American lynchings, British liberals were incredulous that white American leaders such as Willard, whom the English press had described as the "Uncrowned Queen of American Democracy," would turn a blind eye to such violence. Wells accused Willard of being silent on the issue of lynchings, and of making racial comments that added to mob violence. Wells referred to an interview of Willard during her tour of the American South, in which she had blamed black behavior for the defeat of temperance legislation. "The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt," she had said, and "the grog shop is its center of power... The safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities."

In response, Willard and her supporter Lady Somerset attempted to use their influence to keep Wells' comments at lectures out of the press. Wells said that, despite Willard's having abolitionist forebears and black friends, she would allow black women to join the WCTU's segregated southern branches.

The dispute between Wells and Willard in England intensified the campaign against Wells in the American press. Though The New York Times had reported on Wells' visit to Britain without much commentary, the paper published an opinion piece in August 1894 that suggested that black men were prone to rape and described Wells as a "slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress" who was looking for more "income" than "outcome." Such attacks in the US press swayed many Britons to support Wells' cause. "It is idle for men to say that the conditions which Miss Wells describes do not exist," a British editor wrote. "Whites of America may not think so; British Christianity does and all the scurrility of the American press won't alter the facts."

Wells also dedicated a chapter of A Red Record to juxtapose the different positions that she and Willard held. The chapter was titled “Miss Willard’s Attitude”. It condemned Willard for using rhetoric that Wells thought promoted violence and other crimes against African Americans in America.

Wells' British tour ultimately led to the formation of the British Anti-Lynching Committee, which included prominent members such as the Duke of Argyll, the Archbishop of Canterbury, members of Parliament, and the editors of The Manchester Guardian.

Southern Horrors and The Red Record

In 1892 Wells published a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Having examined many accounts of lynchings due to the alleged "rape of white women," she concluded that Southerners cried rape as an excuse to hide their real reasons for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened white Southerners with competition, and white ideas of enforcing black second-class status in the society. Black economic progress was a contemporary issue in the South, and in many states whites worked to suppress black progress. In this period at the turn of the century, southern states starting with Mississippi in 1890, passed laws and/or new constitutions to disenfranchise most black people and many poor white people through use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other devices.

Wells-Barnett recommended that black people use arms to defend against lynching:

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honour in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.

Wells-Barnett published The Red Record (1895), a 100-page pamphlet describing lynching in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It also covered black peoples' struggles in the South since the Civil War. The Red Record explored the alarmingly high rates of lynching in the United States (which was at a peak from 1880 to 1930). Wells-Barnett said that during Reconstruction, most Americans outside the South did not realize the growing rate of violence against black people in the South. She believed that during slavery, white people had not committed as many attacks because of the economic labour value of slaves. Wells noted that, since slavery time, "ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution."

Frederick Douglass had written an article noting three eras of "Southern barbarism," and the excuses which whites claimed in each period.

Wells-Barnett explored these in detail in her The Red Record.

During slavery time, she noted that whites worked to "repress and stamp out alleged 'race riots.'" or suspected slave rebellions, usually killing black people in far higher proportions than any white casualties. Once the Civil War ended, white people feared black people, who were in the majority in many areas. White people acted to control them and suppress them by violence.

During the Reconstruction Era white people lynched black people as part of mob efforts to suppress black political activity and re-establish white supremacy after the war. They feared "Negro Domination" through voting and taking office. Wells-Barnett urged black people in high-risk areas to move away to protect their families.

She noted that whites frequently claimed that black men had "to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women." She noted that white people assumed that any relationship between a white woman and a black man was a result of rape. But, given power relationships, it was much more common for white men to take sexual advantage of poor black women. She stated: "Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that black men rape white women." Wells connected lynching to sexual violence showing how the myth of the black man’s lust for white women led to murder of African American men.

Wells-Barnett gave 14 pages of statistics related to lynching cases committed from 1892 to 1895; she also included pages of graphic accounts detailing specific lynchings. She notes that her data was taken from articles by white correspondents, white press bureaus, and white newspapers. The Red Record was a huge pamphlet, and had far-reaching influence in the debate about lynching. The Southern Horrors:Lynch Law in All Its’ Phases and The Red Record’s accounts of these lynches grabbed the attention of Northerns who knew little about lynching or accepted the common explanation that black men deserved this fate. Generally southern states and white juries refused to indict any perpetrators for lynching, although they were frequently known and sometimes shown in the photographs being made more frequently of such events.

Despite Wells-Barnett's attempt to garner support among white Americans against lynching, she believed that her campaign could not overturn the economic interests whites had in using lynching as an instrument to maintain Southern order and discourage Black economic ventures. Ultimately, Wells-Barnett concluded that appealing to reason and compassion would not succeed in gaining criminalization of lynching by Southern whites.

Wells-Barnett concluded that perhaps armed resistance was the Nubian's only defense against lynching. Meanwhile, she extended her efforts to gain support of such powerful white nations as Britain to shame and sanction the racist practices of America.

Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois

Wells often encountered and sometimes collaborated with scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Both condemned lynching. They also competed for attention. They differed in accounts for why Wells' name was excluded from the original list of founders of the NAACP. In his autobiography, Du Bois implied that Wells chose not to be included. But, in her autobiography, Wells stated that Du Bois deliberately excluded her from the list.

Later public career

In 1894, Wells helped form a Republican Women's Club in Illinois in response to women being granted the right to vote for a state elective office and the right to hold elective office as Trustee of the University of Illinois. The club organized to support the nomination by the Republican Party of Lucy L. Flower to that position, and Flower was eventually elected.

Wells received much support from other social activists and her fellow club women. Frederick Douglass praised her work: "You have done your people and mine a service...What a revelation of existing conditions your writing has been for me." Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to Europe with the help of many supporters. Trying to organize African-American groups across the United States, in 1896, Wells founded the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs and the National Afro-American Council.

In 1898, Wells was struggling to manage her busy family life and career, but she was still a fierce campaigner in the anti-lynching circle. That year the National Association of Colored Women's club met in Chicago but did not invite Wells to take part. When she confronted Mary Church Terrell, the president of the club, Wells was told that the women of Chicago had said that, if Wells were to take part in the club, they would no longer aid the association. Wells later learned that Terrell's own competitiveness played a part in excluding her.

After settling in Chicago, Wells worked to improve conditions for its rapidly growing African-American population. They were leaving the rural South in the Great Migration to northern industrial cities. Competition for jobs and housing caused a rise in social tensions; at the same time, there was increased immigration from Europe, and earlier ethnic whites, such as the Irish Americans, worked to defend their own power and territory in the city. Black American migrants had to compete for jobs and housing with millions of immigrants from rural eastern and southern Europe.

Wells worked on urban reform in Chicago during the last thirty years of her life. She also raised her family. After her retirement, Wells began writing her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928). She never finished it; she died of uremia (kidney failure) in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68. She was buried in the Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. (The cemetery was later integrated by the city.)

Legacy and honors

Since Wells' death and with the rise of the mid-century civil rights activism, interest in her life and legacy has grown.

In 1941, the Public Works Administration (PWA) built a Chicago Housing Authority public housing project in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the south side in Chicago; it was named the Ida B. Wells Homes in her honor. The buildings were demolished in August 2011 due to changing demographics and ideas about such housing.

On February 1, 1990, the United States Postal Service issued a 25-cent postage stamp in her honor.

In 2002, Molefi Kete Asante listed Wells on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi, there is an Ida B.Wells-Barnett Museum in her honor that acts as a cultural center of African American history.

Awards have been established in Wells’s name by the National Association of Black Journalists, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, the Investigative Fund, the University of Louisville, and the New York County Lawyers Association, among many others. In 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School commissioned a portrait of Wells. The Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation and the Ida B. Wells Museum has been established to protect, preserve and promote Wells’s legacy.

Representation in other media

In 1995, the play In Pursuit of Justice: A One-Woman Play About Ida B. Wells, written by Wendy Jones and starring Janice Jenkins, was produced. It is drawn from historical incidents and speeches from Ida B. Wells-Barnett's autobiography, and features fictional letters to a friend. It won four awards from the AUDELCO (Audience Development Committee Inc.), an organization that honors black theatre.

Her life is the subject of Constant Star (2006), a musical drama by Tazewell Thompson. It has been widely performed. The play explores her as "a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America."

In 2016's Dinesh D'Souza's Hillary's America book and film, Carol Swain, a black law professor at Vanderbilt University, who is a scholar of the Democratic Party's history of "plantation politics," tells Wells' story of fighting lynchings and challenging U.S. President Woodrow Wilson over his administration's racial resegregation of the federal work force.

Influence on black feminist activism

In her book, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, Joy James characterized the work of black militant feminists such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett as a kind of "limbo" dance. This analogy is an embodied characterization of political work and brings movement into the realm of the political and the performative. Often, militant political activist work is not positioned in relation to an embodied practice such as dance, but if one looks closely at all of the feats of "bending backward" that activists such as Wells-Barnett had to engage in, there would be no doubt that these women were the political acrobats of their time. Joy James describes her theorization of "limbo" in the following passage:

Limbos are ideal spaces for witnessing and generating movements to address the inadequacies of linear liberation theories that offer little resistance to the complexity of dominance that manifests over time in multiple, intersecting layers and sites. In the limbos of social movements, the past, present, and future coexist and overlap. Time is nonlinear. Space and community are expansive. In their progressive forward movement, contemporary black feminisms often bend backward toward historical protofeminist ancestors like abolitionist Maria W. Stewart, Ida B. Wells, and Ella Baker. In so doing these feminisms routinely retrieve from the sidelines of conventional political memory important ancestral leaders for current considerations and political struggles. Political amnesia, the gray area surrounding political agency, partly stems from the erasure of historical figures—particularly those female ancestors who militantly fought as racial and gender outsiders for democracy, only to be marginalized later from 'respectable' political community.

While researching Wells-Barnett's life, this "bending backward" or "limbo" dancing that James theorizes manifests through a larger vision to build a black feminist movement that included black men, white women and white men. Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching campaign superseded the suffragists and racial uplift movements of her time due to her ability to call everyone to the proverbial table and ask for their accountability. Although not a feminist writer herself, Wells-Barnett tried to explain that the defense of white woman’s honor allowed Southern white men to get away with murder by projecting their own dark history of sexual violence onto black men. Her call for all races and genders to be accountable for their actions showed African American women that they can speak out and fight for their rights. By portraying the horrors of lynching, she worked to show that racial and gender discrimination are linked, furthering the black feminist cause.

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