#contemporaneous tragedies

[yourinaudiblename]

Eepy guy

[yourinaudiblename]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH OMGG ITS HER

RAHHHH

fanart for @goldeneclipsee

[thebadtimeskid]

If I can be serious for a second, there's also a fascinating moment in Dune Part Two that I think is worth discussing.

As a series, Dune is about a lot of things, but among them is settler colonialism and resource wars. It was a weird sort of meme when the first one came out with people saying "Is this a commentary about the Middle East?" because as an adaptation, Villeneuve chose to carry over some of the themes that are politically prominent in the 21st Century. The new movie dials that contemporaneity up to eleven, and I can't tell if it's deliberate or coincidental.

There's a scene that kicks off the third act where out of frustration, but mostly abject psychopathy, the Harkonnens start bombarding sietches with artillery, destroying the Fremen tribe's home and forcing them south. There are various ways they show the needless cruelty of the invading force, but chiefly they show the ruins of the city, fleeing refugees, and an orphaned child.

Filming was done by the end of 2022, and was due to be released in October before it was delayed by the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes. so presumably the editing was mostly done by then, if not by the end of the year. I want to know if this sequence is as long as it originally was, or if there were any changes made. It's oblique because bad things happening is part of the story, but it also feels so on the nose because those are tragedies we can easily recognise from countless pictures reported (and more often than not, not reported) in the news coming out of Palestine. There's a lot to be told in the story of the film, and being economical with the audience's time is paramount when you have three hours of movie, but even still it felt very quick, and the lingering shot of an orphaned child felt a setup or resolution.

If it was in the movie like this before October, I have to imagine someone thought of what was in the movie and had to someone (even themselves) keeping it in. If it was changed at all, I desperately need to know what changes were made, and whose decisions they were.

[mywifeleftme]

189: The Haxan Cloak // Excavation

Excavation The Haxan Cloak 2013, Tri Angle (Bandcamp)

Through his work as the Haxan Cloak and as a film composer (notably on a couple of Ari Aster pictures), Bobby Krlic has helped define the modern aesthetics of what we might call Upsetting Music:

Extremely low frequency synthesized bass with a subliminal roar

Slow, deliberate, violent industrial percussion with a ton of reverb

Creepy whirring noises that simultaneously evoke machinery and insects

Staticky, panned whooshing sounds, that suggest rapid movement captured on degraded video tape

Piercing whines, reminiscent of alarms or the shrill violin notes exploited in scores like Psycho

Snippets of higher pitched noises that sound like muffled or glitched recordings of human cries

Unlike traditional symphonic scores or even the kind of throbbing but ultimately melodic progressive electronic stuff used in ‘80s horror scores, this music largely eschews melody in favour of manipulating sounds to provoke a visceral sense of unease as directly as possible. Electronic music made its initial inroads into horror in the late ‘70s largely because it was cheap to produce, but the runaway success of independent/low-budget films with keyboard-heavy scores like John Carpenter’s Halloween made the aesthetic popular. Since then, genre film has continued to evolve alongside the darker strains of electronic music, from schlocky early ‘90s flicks that incorporate techno and horrorcore rap, to the way industrial became de rigueur for a certain variety of desaturated, nihilistic, almost fetishy brand of cheap ‘00s torture flick.

Independent of this history though, I think there’s something specific about recent horror and thriller filmmakers’ embrace of dark ambient/drone music like Krlic’s that links to Western contemporary anxieties and how these audiences experience fear. I remember many years ago (I’m 51) reading an article in a film theory class about how the rise of automation in the early 20th century kicked off a minor craze in the newspapers of the day for grisly stories about bodies being maimed by trams and the like. The author argued that these sorts of accidents were a new form or vector of terror specific to the industrial age, and that there was a corresponding spike in depictions of these tragedies in contemporaneous films, which tended to pull their subject matter and aesthetics from the well of public worries. Genre music has evolved along parallel lines. Traditional orchestral horror scores derive from ominous motifs found in classical music and opera, which reflect older notions of how evil and despair should be depicted—a Christian understanding of evil, with attendant tropes. A world mediated by religion and versed in devotional music (masses, hymnals, Gregorian chant) would naturally imagine Satanic music as its inversion (dark, baroque renditions of the religious cannon) or opposite (“primitive” tribal music).

By the middle of the century a secularized notion that evil might derive from the personal psychoses of individuals, or (as the tram reading suggested) the indifference of technology and institutions, became widespread, and was duly reflected in the cinema. Today, in the West anyway, our bodies are more insulated than ever before from daily exposure to the sorts of violence depicted in horror films, and our fears have become more secularized and more abstracted still. Our most immediate experiences of dread and bodily harm have tended to come from what we witness on our screens, the fear of seeing something troubling. At the same time, filmmakers have realized that the sonically unsettling aspects of ominous symphonic music (extreme high and low frequencies; disharmony; jerky rhythms) could be divorced from the orchestral context, leaving artists with a set of specific tools for physically startling audiences in tandem with the action onscreen.

Krlic’s music is a product of these parallel processes. As noted, much of his work prioritizes psychological and physiological effect above all, pushing these notions (in his Haxan Cloak work especially) about as far as they can be taken outside of extremist genres like harsh noise and powerviolence. When he makes his synths literally growl, our bodies respond to the perceived threat, even though we know what we’re hearing isn’t produced by a living animal. Some of what he’s exploiting, again, is stuff that goes back to our base threat-detecting instincts, but the overtly technological aspect is also the sound of horrible things both real and simulated we’ve seen through media. Staticky screams and the scrape of metal on concrete summon the spectre of snuff films, hostage videos, extreme BDSM porn, war footage, and all of the movies, video games, and music videos that have adapted their imagery to get a rise out of people. It also, especially to a broad subset of “average” moviegoers, sounds like the type of music people who want to rape and murder your family would listen to for kicks.

There is a good deal more going on in Krlic’s music than simple fearmongering though—we can look at Excavation, his second and final LP to date as the Haxan Cloak,as part of a long lineage stretching from ‘60s experimental electronic music like White Noise through Nurse with Wound, Aphex Twin, and Nine Inch Nails among many others. “The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)” eventually reveals a sequence of austere, crystalline guitar-like sounds that post-metallers Agalloch might’ve produced; “Dieu” opens with some subterranean breakbeats and chopped up samples that nearly threaten to look in the direction of a dancefloor before a creepy violin quells the thought; the rain-drenched “The Drop” flashes a bit of a Baths-style emo/downtempo vibe when it isn’t trudging past the sounds of dark satanic mills. Just as some people will hear Excavation as sadistic junkie music, others will no doubt find it an exceedingly warm and plush casket to disappear within, the overwhelming weight of its sounds divorced of violent associations, just signals strobing across the darkened hemispheres.

189/365

[chekovpavelandreievich]

I’m thinking about a feeling I would call historical grief.

I spend a lot of time researching medieval France, especially Arras, reading about the people and their interpersonal dramas. The corrupt bailli, the murdered provost, the altercations in taverns. This summer I got to go there and read their records on thirteenth century scrolls, written in their own handwriting (or that of a contemporaneous clerk). Thirteenth-century Arras and its surrounding environs had a population that peaked around 80,000 people over the course of the century. By the end of the 1200s and the year 1400, half of the population of Artois was dead due to famine or plague.

The Middle Ages were not a nice time. The systems of power were cruel and unfair and people could be brutal. But that’s true today too. And it’s a strange grief to confront the fact that these people, who I’ve gotten to know just a little bit over 700 years later, didn’t know what was coming for them. The squabbles over the price of wheat in 1285 look tragically petty when people were starving by 1316. The systems of charity that managed to keep people comfortable in 1254 could do nothing for victims of the plague of 1349.

This is not to say worse tragedies haven’t happened. Worse tragedies are happening right now. But it’s the time scale that’s hitting me right now for my Arrageois research - the historical grief for people who would have died anyway, plague or famine or not.

[sabakos]

Sabaki Religious historical figure headcanons

Jesus: Alcoholic dissociative sage, religion invented after fall of the Temple based on a Senecan tragedy depicting his life which became the Gospel of Mark.

Paul of Tarsus: Invented by Marcion of Sinope

Muhammad: Mostly a military leader, religion syncretised in afterward. Hadith mostly from other legal codes glossed in. Nothing we know as Islam predates the Abbasids, who all evidence suggests struggled to read the Quran..

David: earliest attested figure by inscription

Abraham: Invented on purpose to legitimize Judean appropriation of the "Northern" kingdom

Jacob: reason Abraham was invented, actually contemporaneous with David as the mythic founder of Israel.

Isaac: some other guy who dug some wells but Cyrus made everyone combine their religions so he had to get tacked on somwhere.

Moses: post-exilic syncretism based on Egyptian elite imitation

Zoroaster: Honestly who cares? Probably not real though.

Buddha: Contemporary of Ashoka

Every single Hindu mythological figure is fake. They are not even trying. Hinduism was invented after the fall of the Mauryan empire, Vedic religion is derivative of Zoroastrianism.

Confucius: Just some guy, didn't say any of that stuff, his followers are the originators of their own respective doctrines, he was invented to syncretize it.

Lao Tzu: Real but the Tao te Ching is not, Taoism was invented after the fall of the Han dynasty

Mo Di: Real, sadly. Mohism's not a religion though.

Shinto: Cmon fam this religion was invented in the 19th century

Joseph Smith: Still alive.

[portnewickmystery]

An excerpt from the chapter ‘The Vanishing,’ taken from journalist Nadine Ames’ controversial book, Vanishing at Port Newick: An Unofficial Account of America’s Most Mysterious National Disaster.

WHILE ESTABLISHING AN EXACT timeline of events leading up to the discovery of the tragedy in Port Newick remains difficult due to lack of information, we are however able to determine an approximate breakdown of events immediately following the discovery. This breakdown, established through witness accounts, contemporaneous press coverage and official police records, offers a small glimpse into the chaos and confusion that ensued in the forty-eight hours following the discovery.

0-6 Hours After Discovery

On the morning of October 21st, 1993, at approximately 6:30am, delivery driver for West Coast Deliveries John Grady arrives in Port Newick to deliver that morning's post. He finds the streets eerily deserted, but no obvious signs of foul play. By 7:00am, with still no signs of anyone and unease setting in, he attempts to hail people by knocking on the doors of several nearby shops, all of which go unanswered. 

At roughly 7:45am, he pays a visit to the Marin County Sheriff's Department to file a report, citing, “something strange” happening in the town of Port Newick.[1]

At approximately 8:30 am, two hours after the initial discovery, Deputies Mark Lester and Frank Mosley, responding to John Grady's report, arrive in Port Newick, finding it, as Deputy Lester would later report to the Marin Independent Journal, “quiet as the grave”. They perform a preliminary lap of Main Street, finding no activity. In mirroring Grady’s response, they begin banging on doors and calling out to any potential nearby locals, all of which go unanswered.

Expanding their search onto Beacon Street, they peer through the windows of several of the houses, finding in many of them signs of sudden departure; television sets still on; plates of half-eaten food. Curiously, upon further inspection they also find several of the houses with their doors standing ajar, indicating whomever had exited had done so in a hurry. 

By 9:00 AM, no doubt realizing the gravity of the situation, Deputy Lester radios for additional units.

As the morning progresses, with word quickly spreading about the town’s fate, the small contingent of first responders grows. Local volunteers, off-duty officers, and eventually more formal search and rescue teams are called in to assist in the investigation. A makeshift command centre is set up at the town's community centre, now serving as a hub for the growing number of concerned relatives and friends gathering, seeking any news of their missing loved ones.

Despite the comprehensive search efforts, by noon, there is still no sign of the town's inhabitants, prompting then-sheriff Thomas Caldwell to officially declare a missing persons emergency for the town. State and federal authorities are contacted and briefed on the situation.

The afternoon brings a flurry of activity as news crews arrive and the story breaks nationally. The initial reports of a deserted town morph into headlines speculating about the cause, from potential gas leaks to more sinister theories. The national spotlight on Port Newick grows, drawing in onlookers, amateur sleuths, and government officials alike.

By evening, the decision is made at higher levels to quarantine Port Newick. Federal authorities, alongside state police, quietly begin the process of cordoning off the town. Official statements prepare the public for the news of a "potential hazardous event," with promises of further information as the situation is assessed. 

6-12 Hours After Discovery

By sundown, Port Newick is no longer just a local concern, but a national enigma. Federal agents alongside biohazard teams arrive under the cover of dusk. The shift from civilian-led searches to military-grade intervention is almost imperceptible to the onlookers gathering beyond the town limits, yet it marks a significant escalation in response.

The roadblocks, initially manned by local police, now lie under control of the National Guard, redirecting traffic and initiating what would soon be known as the quarantine zone. Helicopters hover above, sweeping the town with searchlights, while teams on the ground move methodically from building to building in a coordinated search effort that extends into the early morning hours.

A strict no-fly zone is imposed over Port Newick and the surrounding areas. Media are pushed back to a newly established perimeter, as official communications are limited to terse statements regarding an ongoing investigation. The scarcity of information only fuels wild speculation.

Sheriff Caldwell, in an effort to appease growing public panic, organizes a late-night press conference, asking for calm while they search for answers.

As the night deepens, the quiet despair of the morning turns to a restless unease. Families huddle together in the temporary shelter of the community centre, holding onto hope as the hours pass with no news. Officials filter in and out, offering little in the way of reassurance or answers.

The initial groundwork for what will soon become a longstanding government operation is laid down in these crucial hours. Documentation is scarce, but reports of strange equipment being transported into the town, and the erection of more permanent barriers, solidify the reality that the situation is far from ordinary.[2]

By the end of the 12-hour mark, Port Newick is transformed from a quaint seaside town to a fortified enigma, its story just beginning to unfold. The quarantine zone is now fully enforced, with a strict curfew for the surrounding areas. The government's grip on the situation tightens, as do the hearts of all who watch and wait for any word on the missing residents.

12-24 Hours After Discovery

The dawn of October 22nd brings no reprieve. The once routine activities of the Marin County coastline are halted as the impact of Port Newick's silence ripples outwards, much to the chagrin of many of the locals. The morning's news cycles continue to churn with talk of the situation in Port Newick, but fail to offer any further insight. Citing health and safety concerns, the family members of the missing are relocated from the community centre to another location outside of the quarantine zone.

An emergency meeting is called by the Governor of California, Pete Wilson, addressing the state and the nation, reiterating the need for calm and patience as they await further news.

It is at around this time that the first rumors of a potential disease outbreak begin to surface as a possible cause, but are quickly dismissed by state health officials. Yet, without a credible alternative, the vacuum of information is filled with increasing fear and anxiety.

The day continues with an eerie quietude, the investigation and searches being conducted behind the veil of the quarantine. News reports speak of the CDC and other agencies' involvement, further complicating the public's understanding of events.

At sunset, the families and friends of Port Newick's residents hold a candlelight vigil at the quarantine perimeter line.[3]

By the 24-hour mark, the narrative is no longer controlled by local authorities or the community of Port Newick but has become a matter of national security. 

24-48 Hours After Discovery

As dawn breaks on October 23rd, the mystery of Port Newick's fate remains tightly sealed behind the government-imposed quarantine. The federal response has shifted into a strategic containment and information management operation. The surrounding communities wake to a heightened military presence and the sobering reality of the town's isolation.

Throughout the day, federal officials assert control, emphasizing a potential biological hazard as the focus of their concern. This narrative serves dual purposes: it justifies the stringent quarantine measures and redirects public speculation away from the more troubling and unexplainable aspect of the entire town's sudden vacancy.

Governor Pete Wilson, in coordination with federal agencies, holds a press conference to announce the formation of a specialized task force. The term "biohazard event" is carefully used, framed within the context of precautionary measures rather than confirmed crisis.

In neighboring towns, life is tinged with unease. Schools remain closed, local businesses struggle, and residents are caught between seeking normalcy and grappling with the growing dread of the unknown. The quarantine zone, now fully fortified, stands as a stark reminder of the severity of the situation, with only authorized personnel allowed entry.

Around 2:00pm, attempts by locals to breach the quarantine in search of answers are met with firm resistance, underscoring the government's commitment to maintaining the perimeter at all costs. The incident, though minor, fuels further discontent and suspicion among the public, prompting an official statement from the Incident Public Information Officer. The carefully worded briefing emphasizes ongoing investigations into a "potential health risk" and the importance of public cooperation.[4]

By evening, the narrative of a possible biohazard continues to be disseminated through official channels. Lights within the quarantine zone and the distant sound of activity serve as the only indicators of the ongoing operations. The official stance remains one of caution and control, with assurances of transparency and updates as the situation evolves.

Yet, beneath the surface of these official statements, questions remain unanswered. The absence of any direct mention of the residents' whereabouts, coupled with the vague references to a biohazard, only adds to the public's frustration and fear. Theories proliferate in the absence of concrete information, and the mystery surrounding Port Newick deepens.

As the 48-hour mark since discovery passes, Port Newick has transitioned from a small fishing and trade community to a closely guarded government operation.

By the end of the first week, and in an attempt to quell growing discontent from the public, the federal government announces the establishment of an official inquiry into the events at Port Newick, promising a thorough and transparent investigation into the causes and circumstances surrounding the town's fate.

This inquiry, to be led by a panel of experts from various fields, including epidemiology, disaster response, and environmental science, aims to provide a definitive account of what actually transpired. The government pledges full cooperation with the panel, ensuring access to all relevant data and authority to call upon witnesses as needed.

To some, this move is regarded as a sign of progress. For others, skepticism prevails, with many questioning not only the independence of the panel, but the willingness on the part of the government to provide full disclosure.

As the promise of the inquiry circulates through the news, Port Newick's empty streets remain silent under the watchful eyes of the guards, acting as a haunting reminder of the myriad mysteries that lie just beyond reach.

[1]��A full breakdown of this report can be found at the Marin County Public Records Office.

[2] According to on-site witnesses, this equipment included portable barriers, hazmat containment units, and advanced communications gear. These reports were later corroborated by leaked government emails published as part of the Port Newick WikiLeaks Report in 2008, which detailed the logistical preparations for establishing the quarantine zone.

[3] Footage from this vigil would go on to dominate press coverage of the incident for the next several months, acting as a visual embodiment of the families’ hope for answers.

[4] A copy of the official statement released by the Incident Public Information Officer is available at the Marin County Public Records Office.

[thebreakfastgenie]

#i faded out reading this post#also MASH fans get so much hate 'you're turning a tragedy into funny ship times you creepy teenage girls' @frankandpercy

I didn't mention MASH in this post because MASH was about Korea, not Vietnam, although in the early years there was a belief that it was "really" about Vietnam (the truth is closer to "the writers sometimes used stories about Korea to comment on the current events in Vietnam"). MASH also didn't start until 1972, so it was only contemporaneous with the tail end of the war.

I think there would probably be a lot of discourse about the movie, though, and whether its blend of drama and dark humor was a powerful choice or inappropriate and insensitive.

This is what Vietnam War discourse would actually look like if there was tumblr in the 60s/70s:

That scene in Mad Men where Glenn tells Sally if he doesn't go to Vietnam some poor Black kid will get drafted instead

Draft dodging privilege

Failing the draft board physical on purpose is ableist

Trying to get a psychological deferment is ablesit/sanist

Pretending to be gay to dodge the draft is homophobic

If you're pretending to be gay to dodge the draft you can reclaim slurs

Trigger tags for topics related to Vietnam because it might trigger veterans, people getting screamed at for not using them, discourse about whether they're racist

Can Asian Americans reclaim "Charlie?" (Yes. No. Only if you're Vietnamese. Only if you're literally a member of the Vietcong.)

Lists of celebrities that are canceled for supporting Vietnam ranging from people who actually support the war to people who shared a post about supporting families of POWs

Someone posts about being happy their POW cousin got released, gets anon hate for supporting the war

Excuses not to boycott Dow Chemical, "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism"

Women and people of color get anon hate for talking about misogyny and racism in the anti-war movement

Women shouldn't go to college/law school/med school/grad school because men need those slots so they can get a deferment

The draft proves misandry is real

Anti-electoral leftists opposing the 26th amendment because both sides are the same

"Voting for LBJ is the lesser of two evils!!!!"

"At least Barry Goldwater wanted to end the forever war in Vietnam!"

The students murdered at Kent State get "canceled" for failing some moral purity test

Post about how Jackson State got less attention than Kent State because the students were Black which is actually but in the most bad faith, accusatory tone possible

Feminism and Civil Rights are distractions

Black bloggers get hate for publicly mourning MLK because "thousands are killed in Vietnam every day!!!!"

White American mixes up Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos because they don't know they're three separate countries

Working class people support the war so opposing it is classist actually

"The movement isn't about your fave I hate stan culture!!!!!"

[hzaidan]

Sarah Siddons was a Welsh actress, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic William Hazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified"…

Please follow link for full post

Sarah Siddons,Art,Colorful,fine art,History,Feminine,Zaidan,painting,FOOTNOTES,Biography,Woman,Artists,Thomas Beach,PORTRAIT OF A LADY,

03 works, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Thomas Beach's Portraits of Mrs. Siddons, with Footnotes #229

[yourinaudiblename]

It isn’t your fault

[rauhauser]

Time In A (Klein) Bottle

Starting in 2010 I’ve had fairly regular trouble with right wing hate groups. The most distressing lesson in this was discovering the cozy relationship between neo-Confederates and law enforcement. I keep records on what I do in the same fashion a lawyer would take contemperaneous notes while dealing with a sketchy client. This stuff gets backed up off site and I have a longtime friend who holds an air gapped copy.

That’s the set of events, 2174 of them, during the time I’ve been working on my new project. Almost nothing in there has anything to do with the new material, this is evidence, occasionally civil or criminal for someone else, but mostly exculpatory for me. Those files have at least a YYYY-MM-DD date stamp and a small percentage have YYYY-MM-DD-HH-SS. I used a little awk script to stamp the file modification times based on their names, and then The Timeline Project can ingest the whole directory.

There are a couple other tools with temporal capabilities in my kit.

Elasticsearch started life as a machine data indexing system – for handling consolidated logs of all systems in a data center. It’s grown from there into many areas, and for me it’s been a way to handle large volumes of Twitter data. That all came to a screeching halt back in April, but the historic material lingers. This historic image is the creation date histogram for Elon Musk’s new followers, from the purchase through the end of my API access.

One of my tasks this month is getting temporal data in and out of Sentinel Visualizer, as I described in Conversion Therapy. This is a law enforcement/intel grade link analysis system. I guess I could put my timeline material in there, but I’m much more interested in date/time data that has coordinates. I want to fully exercise its geospatial and temporal capabilities.

There are couple telemetry things I have going around the house. The only one that presents a nice visual output is Fitbit's sleep monitor.

The combination of contemporaneous notes with a sleep monitor are a sledge hammer that will be employed if I face another malicious prosecution attempt.

So that’s work,health, and the side effects thereof; what about the project?

Here’s some time related mood music.

I tried feeding the lyrics pages to the IBM Watson named entity recognition transform in Maltego but none of the top three sites worked. Wikipedia was the only thing that coughed up some names, and this is messy and poor quality.

Wikipedia has a marvelous resource in this area in its 239 pages of band member timelines. That happens to be the members of southern rock titans Lynyrd Skynyrd, one of a number of bands in that genre who've been touched by tragedy.

There are some things in this world that literally are best left to Philomena Cunk ...

Or to a series of related Gallifreyan adventurers.

The point here is that you are probably not going to be able to find a TARDIS in a timely fashion, even if you could afford one. You will need to "tool up" to follow things. You'll need a way to handle discrete events, things that happen over periods of time and ... for the brass ring ... the ability to handle fuzzy time. Things that happened no sooner than or no later than become vital to understand complex flows of events.

I've suggested The Timeline Project and mentioned one other tool, Sentinel Visualizer, that I use, but which would be a frightful expense for someone just following along for fun. The other way to come at this is not intuitive for investigators, but don't laugh ... at novel writing software.

You will encounter people, places, and things - all of which can be modeled as characters. There will be various vignettes - scenes and chapters. You might not have a full understanding of how to order events, but the Snowflake Method applies to sense-making as much as it does to writing fiction.

[edenfenixblogs]

I have a new appreciation for Tisha B’Av this year. For reference, I am also reform and didn’t grow up paying much attention to it.

Despite how difficult these last 10 months have been, I’ve spoken before about how I hate being “the sad Jew.” Judaism is so joyous and I suppose some internalized antisemitism led me to believe that if I acknowledged the breadth of Jewish suffering throughout history, I’d become a stereotype. But aside from that, I never wanted (and still vehemently do not want) Judaism to be associated with tragedy and loss.

It is part of our history and informs our present, sure.

But in order for you to understand why Jewish trauma and tragic histories are so deeply affecting, you must first understand how beautiful it is to be Jewish.

Despite all our people have endured and continue to endure, we remain Jews. Not because it is easy. Not because we like “playing the victim” or “weaponizing our trauma” as many antisemites seem to think (this is wildly racist btw, and people wouldn’t stand for this kind of rhetoric about any other group without challenging it).

No, we remain Jews because we love being Jews.

The love of each other and of our world. The feeling of interconnectedness. The almost tangible feeling of history and nature and culture. It is like a warm blanket. It comforts and envelopes it all.

Tisha B’Av is the Jewish day of disasters.

It marks the anniversary of the destruction of our first temple in 586BCE.

It marks the day 656 years later that our rebuilt temple was destroyed in a calamity that sent us into a diaspora that continues to this day.

In the modern era, the First Crusade began on this day

On this day, in disparate years, Jews were expelled from England, France, and Spain, and Germany entered WWI.

It is even the day that The Holocaust began. Literally. Heinrich Himmler received approval for his plan—“The Final Solution”—which explicitly stated its goal of killing all Jews, everywhere and exterminating us like vermin.

The following year, Jews were evacuated from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka.

This day marks an unimaginably painful series of tragedies for my people. And we remember exactly when and where they happened, because my ancestors and yours wrote them down as they occurred—either to record our pain contemporaneously or to celebrate their victories over us.

But in these tragedies, there is also celebration.

In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye paraphrases an actual Jewish mitzvah: Be happy.

Not in terms of toxic positivity. But to find happiness. Because it is often buried beneath the rubble. But it is there:

“Life has a way of confusing us. / Blessing and bruising us.

…G-d would like us to be joyful / even when our hearts lie / panting on the floor. / How much more can we be joyful / when there’s really something to be joyful for?

…May all your futures be pleasant ones / not like our present ones.

…To us / and our good fortune. / Be happy. / Be healthy. / Long life. / And if our good fortune never comes / here’s to whatever comes.”

This is not just a song in some musical. This is an encapsulation of Jewish thought and the Jewish relationship between joy and sorrow.

I think that, in some ways, no holiday calls on us as a people to embrace this concept more than Tisha B’Av.

When our first temple fell, we rebuilt it—because we loved being Jews so much.

When our second temple fell and we entered diaspora, we brought our culture with us and kept our communities close and developed a modern system of rabbis in order to maintain a community scattered across the world—because we loved being Jewish so much.

When we were expelled repeatedly throughout European history, we found new countries. Some of these places had synagogues already, and we found our people by the familiar Hebrew and mezuzahs on the doors, or we built new communities in which we could thrive for however long we were allowed to exist there—because we loved being Jewish so much.

And during the crusades and the Holocaust and all the other tragedies designed specifically to eradicate us from the earth, we survived and defiantly insisted upon retaining our culture and faith—because we loved being Jewish so much.

In every instance and in every generation, it would have been easier to have stopped being Jewish. It would have been easier to assimilate for our own safety. But we didn’t, because we value each other too much. We value our history to much. We value the Jewish view of the world and humanity too much to even entertain the idea of not being Jewish anymore.

How beautiful is that?

All we have left of our second temple is a remnant of a wall that another building sits atop. And yet, still, we go there to pray. Sometimes we cry over what was lost.

How beautiful is that?

To me, it is indescribably beautiful that the cultural memory of our joy and contentment in that place is so strong that—even now—standing on the outside of its ruins fills us with pride.

Someone recently asked my why we bothered remaining Jewish when so many people have made it so difficult for us and we have no hell to punish us for not being Jewish. At the time, I couldn’t articulate it. But now I think I have at least some of the words I need to convey an answer:

Judaism has never forced anything of us. It is a religion and culture of mutual consent. It asks things of us, but it does not punish us for the things we cannot or are unwilling to do.

Judaism is gentle to us, and it asks us to be gentle to each other.

Judaism carries in it not simply some words in scrolls that we are forced to say—but also the voices of my ancestors and the recipes of the food they ate and the memories of the things they’ve survived and accomplished.

Judaism is a gift that connects the present to our past with a strength like a steel beam. I make matzo on Pesach, and I recall not only the slaves doing so as they flee Egypt—I also feel my mother and grandmother and their mothers and grandmothers inside me. I feel all of our arms and hands moving together in a motion passed down through time. I feel comfort in the knowledge that my foremothers hands moved in the same way mine do. I feel comfort knowing that they felt the dough in the same way, feeling for how soft or dry or wet or tacky the dough feels. I feel comfort imagining they also had trouble getting it flat enough and getting pasty bland dough stuck on their hands. And I feel a sense of humorous peace that, just as with me now, the alien sensations became familiar with the passing years, until they learned to live in my blood and my bones. And one day—G-d willing—my child will feel me in their bones too. They will feel me guiding them through a Jewish life, because it lives inside me. Not because I expect them to be Jewish “or else.” But because being Jewish, despite its many traumas, is a gift.

I am sad on this day which marks the anniversary of so many of our worst tragedies. But, Baruch HaShem, I am joyous too. Because we are still here. We survived those tragedies. Not all of us. Not enough of us. But the whole of us and our culture and our identity. We all remain alive and experiencing Jewishness together. How much easier it must have been when we were all able to be in one place together. How beautiful it is that we are able to do so now even as scattered as we are. How beautiful it is that our ancestors understood the gift they were giving us by refusing to assimilate and for understanding that Judaism would not only endure but mature with age.

Judaism is a story that we are all still writing together. And how beautiful it is that we are still here writing it. What a gift. What a mitzvah. What an honor.

Let us mourn those who are no longer with us, and let us mourn the communities and places and stories we have lost.

Then let us celebrate what remains.

May those who are fasting have a meaningful fast. And to all my fellow Jews, I love you. Thank you for maintaining this beautiful legacy with me. I’m grateful for you. And for the lives of those lost to disaster, I know their memories are blessings. They bless us each day. And for that I am grateful.

i'm a reform jew and i'm more religious now than i've ever been. I never grew up marking Tisha B'Av and probably didn't even know what it was. I can't remember if I fasted last year or not, but I'm going to fast this year. I am also going to refrain from cannabis for the day which I usually struggle with but I think if I'm doing it for am yisrael and hashem i will be able to.

[wutheringmights]

That post with all the quotes about tragedies really makes me think about ctb. I don't think I can explain it, but it does

This post right here, right?

I honestly love this post so much because it taps into why tragedies are so good, especially classic ones like Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. So the fact that you're associating it with CTB has me very Overwhelmed.

Can I try to articulate my thoughts on CTB being a tragedy? It's really presumptuous of me, but I have a degree in literature and I have thought of it. So... indulge me? Okay?

In CTB, the past and the present are simultaneous. Time is only so linear. The past unravels itself at the same rate the future moves in. They are contemporaneous. They are years a part. They are right next to each other. It's the same people repeating their mistakes. It's different people making the same mistakes as each other.

The present day sits us down and says, "Once upon a time, there were three brothers. They did not have a happy ending." The present day tells us what will happen and how we ended up here. The captain was the antagonist, but the past says soon. The engineer will bear a scar on his face, but the past says not yet . They will hate each other. And the child will witness it all, and the past says he already did.

It has already happened. It cannot be changed. But the past is in the present, and we feel like it can be. We want to believe it will. Without the clear barriers of time, we forget that it is all inevitable.

This tragedy has already happened, but it hasn't happened yet. It can't be changed, but it feels like it can be. If the past can't be changed, will our future stay the same? Or is this a cycle that will repeat?

[atlanticcanada]

N.S. shooting inquiry: Children called 911, relayed key details about gunman amid killings

Warning: article contains details some readers may find disturbing.

When a gunman impersonating a Mountie started killing people in Portapique, N.S., on April 18, 2020, four children huddled in a home where they relayed key information about the killer as the tragedy unfolded around them.

Portions of a transcript of that disturbing 911 call were released today by an independent commission of inquiry investigating the worst mass shooting in modern Canadian history, which claimed 22 lives over a 13-hour span.

The phone conversation is recounted in a 90-page document that focuses on the first hour of the killer's rampage. It offers clear evidence that authorities were told about the shooter's identity and his replica police vehicle before he used a back road to evade a police blockade.

Recordings of the 911 calls were not played during the hearings. However, the so-called foundational document provides grim, detailed descriptions of how 13 people were gunned down that night, including Gabriel Wortman's first victims: Greg and Jamie Blair, the parents of two young boys.

Based on statements from residents and the gunman's common-law spouse, the commission has concluded that some time before 10 p.m., the perpetrator assaulted his spouse and set fire to his home and the building where he kept his mock police vehicle — facts previously confirmed by the RCMP through the gradual release of search warrant applications.

Then, at around 10 p.m., the killer approached the Blair home, where he killed Greg Blair on the front deck. Jamie Blair immediately called 911, telling the operator her husband had been shot. She also said there was an RCMP cruiser in her driveway.

"It's decked and labelled RCMP ... but it's not a police officer," she told the operator. "The man is coming back up the deck with a big gun."

At that point, the woman hustled her two boys — ages 11 and 9 — into the back bedroom, where the brothers hid on the floor behind a bed.

Blair identified the killer as "Gabriel" to the 911 operator and she whispered into the phone that he was trying to get into the house.

In a statement to police, the 11-year-old boy — identified as AD — said Wortman shot the family's cat and dog before firing multiple shots through the bedroom door, killing his mother.

On Monday, commission counsel Roger Burrill presented a summary of what happened in Portapique, including the events in the Blair home. "It is essentially a contemporaneous report of murder,” Burrill said, describing Jamie Blair's 911 call. "Jamie Blair was shot at this time through the door of her bedroom, protecting her children.”

The children remained hidden and do not believe that they were seen by the killer, the commission's report says.

About 10 minutes later, the boys fled the home when they realized the killer had set fire to the house before leaving. They sprinted next door to the home of Lisa McCully, who had been fatally shot minutes earlier by the gunman as she walked to the edge of her property to find out what was going on.

The boys did not see her as they made their way to their neighbour's house. Inside, the two Blair boys were met by McCully's children, identified as 12-year-old AB and 10-year-old AC.

Blair's 11-year-old son called 911 at 10:16 p.m., telling the operator about his parents' death and the fact that the killer had driven away in a police car, carrying a "massive gun."

"Just like ... a police car," he said, adding that the mother of the McCully children had left the house earlier and had not returned. At 10:21, the boy confirmed he could hear gunshots going off every thirty seconds.

"The children referenced the perpetrator by his first name," the document says. "They (correctly) advised that he 'works in Halifax as a denture person' .... The children indicated that the perpetrator would blend in with the cops 'because he has a cop car.'"

They also confirmed that the car, correctly identified as a Ford, had emergency lights and proper decals.

At 10:39 p.m., the children reported seeing the replica cruiser on the move. "One of the children exclaimed, 'It's Gabriel!" the report says. As more shots rang out, the children were told to move to the basement, where they stayed until 12:20 a.m., when the Mounties decided it was safe for them to leave.

Burrill told the hearing Monday that he had listened to the entire, two-hour 911 call.

“The children are describing a horrific scene of fire and shooting and no parents," he said. "(But) the children’s poise, presence and capacity to engage with the 911 call taker is simply outstanding. They are calm. They are responsive. They are observant."

According to the commission's research, the RCMP checked on the children three times before the house was evacuated. Some critics have suggested they should have been rescued earlier, given the fact that other residents had been removed for their safety. A separate report on the role of first responders will be released Tuesday.

As for the other victims, the commission's report says all except one were fatally shot in their homes between 10:04 p.m. and 10:45 p.m., though the sequence of events is not always clear, given the lack of witnesses, phone calls and surveillance video.

The report says it appears the last person killed in Portapique was Corrie Ellison, who was in the community that night with his brother to visit their father.

It says Ellison had set off on foot to investigate the fire burning at Wortman's sprawling garage and was shot dead while he took photographs with his cellphone. The time of his last photo, a blurry image that shows nothing, was 10:40 p.m.

Minutes later, Wortman’s escape was spotted by Patricia Zimmerman as she stood outside her home on Portapique Crescent, looking at the eerie glow in the sky created by her neighbours’ burning houses.

She would later tell police that at 10:45 p.m. she noticed a set of headlights travelling "like a bat out of hell" along a rough, private road that ran along the side of a blueberry field east of the rural enclave, toward Highway 2. Zimmerman said she and her sister thought the driver was probably a volunteer firefighter, which is why they didn't alert police.

Another resident, Harlan Rushton, told commission investigators that it was around midnight when he told police at the scene that the killer could have used a back road to escape. Harlan said he told police: “You know, there’s another way out of there, right?” According to Harlan, the officer replied, “Yeah, we know. Just get out of here. Just go.”

The commission's report concludes with a summary of the horrific events in Portapique and a blurry photo from a surveillance camera showing the killer's car speeding past a gas station in nearby Great Village, N.S., at 10:51 p.m. Police say he later parked in an industrial park in Debert, N.S., where he spent the night.

The next day, he fatally shot nine more people — both acquaintances and strangers — as he led police on a chase that spanned more than 100 kilometres.

Wortman was shot dead later that morning by an RCMP officer who spotted him trying to refuel a stolen vehicle at a gas station north of Halifax.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 28, 2022

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/mH3vCO8

[historicalbeauties]

1. 1804 portrait Mrs. Siddons by Sir Thomas Lawrence 2.  Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia in Arthur Murphy's The Grecian Daughter, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1782

Sarah Siddons (née Kemble; 5 July 1755 – 8 June 1831) was a Welsh-born English actress, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic William Hazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified".

 She was most famous for her portrayal of the Shakespearean character, Lady Macbeth, a character she made her own, as well as for fainting at the sight of the Elgin Marbles in London.

The Sarah Siddons Society, founded in 1952, continues to present the Sarah Siddons Award annually in Chicago to a distinguished actress.

Her celebrity status was called "mythical" and "monumental", and by the mid-1780s Siddons had established herself as a cultural icon.

[daisyachain]

Putting on the Shore soundtrack playlist has got me back to Thinking about The Hobbit movies. Boy. Still stand by An Unexpected Journey as a great movie, combines the lighthearted feel of The Hobbit book with the contemporaneous stories, communicates the tragedy of the War of the Dwarves and the Orcs and gets across the essence of Tolkien’s dwarves. The transitions from storybook to mythos are almost seamless except for the one scene at Rivendell. Playing up the dwarf characters and Bilbo’s relationship with them adds another element that aligns the story better with LoTR’s theme of companionship. The heartier score and rich colour palette further pushes the tone from the faded autumn of LoTR to the less degraded world of Bilbo’s youth. All in all, the adaptation pulls off the impossible of lining up LoTR, the Legendarium, and The Hobbit into one coherent whole. And then the other two films happen.