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camisoledadparis · 2 months ago

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … October 27

1930 – Larry Townsend (d.2008) was the pseudonymous author (né 'Bud' Bernhardt) of dozens of books including Run Little Leather Boy (1970) and The Leatherman's Handbook (1972) at pioneer erotic presses such as Greenleaf Classics and the Other Traveler imprint of Olympia Press.

Growing up as a teenager of Swiss-German extraction in Los Angeles a few houses from Noël Coward and Irene Dunne, he ate cookies with his neighbor Laura Hope Crews who was Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind.

He attended the prestigious Peddie School, and was stationed as Staff Sergeant in charge of NCOIC Operations of Air Intelligence Squadrons for nearly five years with the US Air Force in Germany (1950-1954).

Completing his tour of duty, he entered into the 1950s underground of the then small LA leather scene where he and Montgomery Clift shared a lover.

With his degree in industrial psychology from UCLA (1957), he worked in the private sector and as a probation officer with the Forestry Service.

He began his pioneering activism in the politics of homophile liberation in the early 1960s. In 1972, as president of the 'Homophile Effort for Legal Protection' which had been founded in 1969 to defend gays during and after arrests, he led a group in founding the H.E.L.P. Newsletter, the forebear of Drummer Magazine (1975). He lived in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, the center of the Los Angeles leather scene (the equivalent of the SoMa neighborhood in San Francisco).

As a writer and photographer, he was an essential eyewitness to the drama and following around Drummer in which his novels were often excerpted. His signature "Leather Notebook" column appeared in Drummer for twelve years beginning in 1980, and continued in Honcho to Spring 2008. His last novel, TimeMasters, was published April 2008. His last writing was Who Lit up the Lit of the Golden Age of Drummer, an introduction to Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer (June 2008).

His partner of 44 years, Fred Yerkes, died in 2006 and Townsend followed in 2008.

1950 – Fran Lebowitz is an American author. Lebowitz is known for her sardonic social commentary on American life as filtered through her New York sensibilities. Some reviewers have called her a modern-day Dorothy Parker.

Lebowitz was born and raised in Morristown, New Jersey, in an "observant" Jewish family. After being expelled from high school and receiving a GED, Lebowitz worked many odd jobs before being hired by Andy Warhol as a columnist for Interview. This was followed by a stint at Mademoiselle. Her first book was a collection of essays titled Metropolitan Life, released in 1978, followed by Social Studies in 1981, both of which are collected (with a new introductory essay) in The Fran Lebowitz Reader.

In her writings she talks about gender, race and gay rights as well as her favorite pet peeves: celebrity culture, smoking bans, tourists and strollers. Lebowitz, herself a heavy smoker, is known for her advocacy of smokers' rights. But despite her openness about being a lesbian, she doesn't address her private life.

She has been famous, in part, for Exterior Signs of Wealth, a long-overdue, unfinished novel, purportedly about rich people who want to be artists, and artists who want to be rich. She also made several appearances on Late Night with David Letterman. She has made recurring appearances as Judge Janice Goldberg on the television drama Law & Order.

Fran Lebowitz on being gay:

Do you think gay marriage is progress? Are you kidding me? This was one of the good things about being gay. I am stunned that the two greatest desires apparently of people involved in the gay rights movement are gay marriage and gays on the military. Really? To me these are the the two most confining institutions on the planet: people used to pretend to be gay to get out of going into the army. ***** When I arrived in New York in 1969, gay bars were illegal, in back rooms, but you could smoke in them. Now gay bars have plate-glass windows, they have valet parking, people sit in the windows, but you have to go outside to smoke.

1951 – (William) Bill N. Eskridge Jr., born in Princeton, West Virginia, is the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. He is one of the most cited law professors in America, ranking sixth overall for the period 2010-2014. He writes primarily on constitutional law, legislation and statutory interpretation, religion, marriage equality, and LGBT rights.

Between 1990 and 1995, Eskridge represented a gay couple seeking a marriage license in Washington, D.C. Like all the other early same-sex marriage cases, this one did not prevail, but for the first time in American history, one judge, John Ferren of the D.C. Court of Appeals, wrote an opinion finding discrimination against same-sex couples to be unconstitutional. Writing in dissent, Judge Ferren was the only judge to agree with Eskridge. The next year, in 1996, a Hawaii trial judge would agree with Eskridge in the case Baeher v. Miike.

In 1996, Eskridge wrote his pathfinding book "The Case for Same-Sex Marriage", which argued that marriage discrimination against LGBT couples violated both their fundamental right to marry and their equal protection right to be free of invidious state discrimination. The book was reviled at the time, with West Virginia U.S. Senator Robert Byrd quoting extensively from it in his speech supporting the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, an overwhelming, bipartisan rebuke to the marriage movement.

Ultimately, many state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court adopted these arguments in favor of gay marriage.

At the same time he was working on marriage rights for LGBT persons, Eskridge was working with Georgetown law professor Nan Hunter on teaching materials for a field they dubbed "Sexuality, Gender, and the Law."Emerging from his work with Hunter, Eskridge published a series of articles on sodomy laws and other discriminatory laws harming gender and sexual minorities. An amicus brief he wrote for the Cato Institute and a law review article titled "Hardwick and Historiography" were cited by the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), where the Supreme Court invalidated consensual sodomy laws. Eskridge wrote an authoritative history of the decline and fall of sodomy laws in "Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003".

1951 – On this date the French postal service issued postage stamps with Gay lovers Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud and Verlaine began a short and torrid affair when Rimbaud was 16 years old. They led a wild, vagabond-like life spiced by absinthe and hashish. Ten years older than Rimbaud, Verlaine abandoned his wife and child and fled to London with Rimbaud. Their love affair was made into a movie "Total Eclipse" featuring Leobardo diCaprio as the young Arthur Rimbaud.

1957 – Peter Marc Jacobson is an American television writer, director and producer, and actor. He is best known as the co-creator of the popular sitcom The Nanny, which he created and wrote with his then wife actress Fran Drescher, who was the star of the series.

Jacobson and Fran Drescher married in 1978, when both were 21 years old. They moved to Los Angeles to launch their careers. In January 1985, two armed robbers broke into Drescher and Jacobson's Los Angeles apartment, where Jacobson was assaulted and forced to watch his wife's rape.

Jacobson and Drescher divorced in 1999, after being separated for a number of years. The couple had no children. He came out as gay to her after their marriage ended. The couple developed the 2011 television series Happily Divorced for TV Land based on their lives.

1971 – Today the film "Some of My Best Friends Are..." was released with the description: "It's Christmas Eve 1971 in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and the regulars of the local gay bar "The Blue Jay" are celebrating. Not much has changed since Stonewall and its not all "Peace on Earth. Good Will to Men" but the times are a changin."

An American International production, the film was written and directed by Mervyn Nelson and starred Fannie Flagg, future Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, and Candy Darling in a rare dramatic role. Gary Sandy (of later "WKRP in Cincinnati" fame) portrays a drugged out, self-loathing closet case who attacks Darling's character and is kicked out of the club by the angered patrons. The film is now regularly shown at Gay film festivals as "The film you love to hate" but at the time it was thought of as a rare portrayal of life in gay bars of the era.

1992 – US Navy radioman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. is brutally murdered by shipmates for being Gay, precipitating first military, then national debate about Gays in the military that resulted in the United States "Don't ask, don't tell" military policy.

Schindler was from a Navy family in Chicago Heights, Illinois and was serving as a radioman on the amphibious assault ship USS Belleau Wood in Sasebo, Japan. According to friends of his, Schindler had complained repeatedly of anti-Gay harassment to his chain of command in March and April 1992, citing incidents such as the gluing-shut of his locker and frequent comments from shipmates like "There's a faggot on this ship and he should die."

While on transport from San Diego to Sasebo, Japan, The Belleu Wood made a brief stop in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Afterwards en route to Japan, Schindler made a personal prank announcement "2-Q-T-2-B-S-T-R-8" on secured lines reaching much of the Pacific Fleet. When he was brought before the disciplinary "captain's mast" for the unauthorized radio message. Schindler requested the hearing be closed. It was open, with two to three hundred people in attendance. Schindler was put on restrictive leave, unable to leave the ship until a few months after arriving to Sasebo and four days before his death.

The captain had been visited by Schindler, who had many times requested to be transferred to another location because he was being threatened by other shipmates for being Gay. The captain denied Schindler's request and kept the man's sexual orientation and his death a secret for months. It was not reported until a special team composed of a psychologist, two lawyers, a counselor, and a corpsman from Yokosuka incidentally met at a bar in Sasebo.

Airman Apprentice Terry M. Helvey who was a member of the Ship's weather department stomped Schindler to death in a toilet in a park in Sasebo, Nagasaki. Schindler had "at least four fatal injuries to the head, chest, and abdomen," his head was crushed, ribs broken, and his penis cut, and he had "sneaker-tread marks stamped on his forehead and chest" destroying "every organ in his body" leaving behind a "nearly-unrecognizable corpse." Schindler was left lying on the bathroom floor until the Shore Patrol and the key witness to the incident (Jonathan W.) carried out Schindler's body to the nearby Albuquerque Bridge. Jonathan W. witnessed the murder while using the restroom. He noticed Helvey jumping on Schindler's body while singing, and blood gushing from Schindler's mouth while he attempted to breathe. The key witness was requested to explain in detail to the military court what the crime scene looked like, but would not because Schindler's mother and sister were present in the courtroom.

After the trial, Helvey was convicted of murder and the captain who kept the incident quiet was demoted and transferred to Florida. Helvey is now serving a life sentence in the military prison at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, although by statute, he is granted a clemency hearing every year. Helvey's accomplice, Charles Vins, was allowed to plea bargain as guilty to three lesser offenses, including failure to report a serious crime, and to testify truthfully against Terry Helvey and served a 78-day sentence before receiving a general discharge from the Navy.

Canadian Military in 2008 Toronto Pride Parade

1992 – A Canadian High Court rules that a policy barring homosexuals from the Canadian military violates the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Military officials said they would fully comply with the federal court decision. "Canadians, regardless of the sexual orientation, will now be able to serve their country in the Canadian Forces without restriction, free from harassment and discrimination," Gen. John de Chastelain said in a statement.

The court issued its ruling on Oct. 27. The case involved Michelle Douglas, a lesbian who was forced to leave the Air Force in 1989. Her challenge was one of five raised by homosexuals over military policies that barred recruiting and also promotion of those already in the services.

Prior to that, due to the the CF Reorganization Act (C-90) of IMay 1967, the Canadian Forces issued Canadian Forces Administrative Order (CFAO) 19-20, Sexual Deviation - Investigation, Medical Investigation and Disposal, which required members of the military suspected of being homosexual to be investigated and then subsequently released.

Consequently, LGBT policy in the Canadian military has changed in the course of the 20th century from being socially repressive to being socially accepted.

In 2004, Jason Stewart was the first member of Canada's military to marry a same-sex partner. In May 2005, Canada's first military gay wedding took place at Nova Scotia's Canadian Forces Base Greenwood. Officials described the ceremony as low-key but touching. Today, the Canadian Forces recognizes same-sex marital and common-law unions, and affords them the same benefits offered to all married or common-law serving members.

During the Divers-Cite Pride parades 1999-2002 in Montreal, a military member and an ex-military member held the banner of the informal grouping MGL, dissolved in 2004 due to the lack of participation of the military community LGBT. During the 2006 Halifax Pride parade, one member of the Canadian Forces marched in the parade, helping to carry the large pride flag. In the 2008 Toronto Pride parade, ten members of the Canadian Forces marched for the first time as a group. One month later, twelve gay and straight members of the Canadian Forces marched in Vancouver's Pride Parade. Lt(N) Steven Churm said, "The message to the public is that the Canadian Forces is an employer of choice."

1999 – During the primaries, the two Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and Bill Bradley promised that if elected they would do everything in their power to ensure equal rights for Gay and Lesbian Americans. The promise was an unprecedented declaration by a candidate for a party's nomination. George W. Bush would win the presidential election promising the absolute opposite position on equal rights for Gay and Lesbian Americans and became the first president to publicly call for a constitutional amendment to explicitly take away rights from a class of people - Gay people.

2007 – Two 16 year-old boyfriends in Davis, California were elected Homecoming "Princes" after a successful write-in campaign at Davis Senior High School. With each boasting a white sash declaring his title as "Prince," the two 16-year-olds, Brandon Raphael and Kiernon Gatewood, rode through the city of Davis in the school's annual homecoming parade.

Said Gatewood, "We were a little surprised, but Davis ..."

Raphael, Gatewood's boyfriend, finished the sentence, "Is a liberal town."

Added Raphael, "Go 10 miles in any other direction and you'll get some other feeling."

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jdgo51 · 1 year ago

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The Platform of Love

Today's inspiration comes from:

The Ins-N-Outs of In-N-Out Burger

by Lynsi Snyder

Editor's note: If you've ever had an In-N-Out burger, you know their dedication to serving really delicious fast food. This year is the 75th anniversary — 75 years of Double Doubles, shakes, and fries... Mmmm! Lynsi Snyder, the owner and President of In-N-Out shares their story in her new book The Ins-N-Outs of In-N-Out Burger. Enjoy this excerpt!

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” — Mark 16:15

"In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He Himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive." — Acts 20:35

"'Customers often notice Bible verses printed on In-N-Out products, and that practice has a history tied to my good memories about Uncle Rich.

Both Dad and Uncle Rich grew up with some faith in their home. As boys, my grandmother told them about God and taught them how to pray. When they were teens and young men, they wandered from their faith. But in the early 1980s, Rich reconnected with God in a much bigger way. He became an active member of Costa Mesa’s Calvary Chapel, led by Pastor Chuck Smith, and dedicated his life to Jesus. Rich didn’t claim to be perfect. But he finally found that the deep need in his heart could only be satisfied by Jesus and by finding his own identity in Him. I remember my uncle telling me once,

“I’m not always a good Christian, but I’m a Christian.”

In 1985, Rich began printing tiny references to Bible verses on In-N-Out paper goods. It was a way for him to express his faith, and he wanted to put that little touch of faith on our brand. In a 1990 episode of BTV, Rich explained, “I quietly did it a few years ago. I’m a Christian. For those who know me, they definitely know that I’m not perfect and neither is In-N-Out. We are trying to serve our communities and do a good job the best we can. I guess the reason [for the verses] is it’s my way of thanking God for helping In-N-Out so much. I took over In-N-Out when I was twenty-four years old, and for me it was kind of tough. I thank God that He helped me.”

Love God and love other people.

To this day, Revelation 3:20 is discreetly printed on hamburger and cheeseburger bags. Nahum 1:7 is on the Double-Double wrappers. Proverbs 3:5 sits underneath milkshake cups, Isaiah 53 is on certain holiday cups, Isaiah 9:6 is on Christmas cups, and John 3:16 is underneath soda cups. That tradition continues to this day. After I became president, I added Proverbs 24:16 to our fry boats, Luke 6:35 to coffee cups, and John 13:34 to the hot cocoa cups... We never try to force our beliefs on anyone, and customers with any faith tradition, or none, are certainly welcome through our doors. We hire and promote associates and managers who don’t share our faith.

God loves all people, and so do we! My family simply wants our faith to take a meaningful place in everything our company does. The verses act as encouragements.

Always, the goal is to love God and to love other people, and we’ve learned the platform of love is huge.

The feedback we get about the Bible verses is almost always positive. Customers don’t always share our faith, but they appreciate that we’re honest about our own faith journey, and that we want it to be part of the integrity of our company. Many commend our efforts to reach out, care for people, and lead with love.

An awareness of the blessings God has given inspires generosity. I think that was Rich’s intention in 1991, when he began sending In-N-Out Cookout Trailers to the missions around Los Angeles to prepare meals for the unhoused. That’s how the In-N-Out Feed the Homeless Program began, as a quiet way of providing delicious meals for the less fortunate.

We currently serve people involved with the Los Angeles Mission, Ventura Rescue Mission, San Diego Rescue Mission, and Long Beach Mission. These initiatives fit beautifully with part three of our mission statement, which states our purpose to help “communities in our marketplace [become] stronger, safer, and better places to live.” We invite other people to serve alongside us too.

It’s better to give than to receive."'

Rich Snyder on BTV, In-N-Out Archives.

Excerpted with permission from The Ins-N-Outs of In-N-Out Burger by Lynsi Snyder, copyright Lynsi Snyder.

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maddie-grove · 3 years ago

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Little Book Review: Devil House

Author: John Darnielle.

Publication Date: 2022.

Genre: Technically a thriller, really literary fiction.

Premise: In the early 2000s, moderately successful true crime writer Gage Chandler buys a rundown house in Milpitas, California. He does this at the behest of his agent, who has found out that the house used to be an adult video store that was the site of a Satanic double murder in the 1980s. Despite his doubts about the gimmick, Gage is eager to start exploring the case; however, it proves to be more complicated than he expected.

(Spoilers below!)

Thoughts: Much like Universal Harvester, the other Darnielle novel I’ve read, Devil House is pleasurably enigmatic. It’s a kind of scrapbook novel, where Chandler’s more or less straightforward narration is interspersed with excerpts from his books, letters, a detour into faux-Arthuriana, and an epilogue from the POV of a seldom-mentioned childhood friend. The ending is rather open and doesn’t explain exactly what happened with Chandler’s manuscript. This is right up my alley; I was one of those kids who loved the conclusion of ASOUE and didn’t get why other fans wanted definite answers.

The book's message is also enigmatic. I saw a review online that called it "an indictment of true crime," but even that review seemed ambivalent once I got past the clickbait-ish headline. At a pivotal point in the novel, Gage gets a long letter from the mother of a murder victim he wrote about in his first book. She shares her memories of her son and the hopes she had for him, as well as the suffering inflicted on them both by her abusive husband; she also condemns Gage for making her son a minor figure in somebody else's story. Gage is chastened, and her words spur him to do something rather unusual with his "Devil House" book.

I don't think this is an indictment of true crime, so much as it is a word of caution about narratives. No story can center everyone it involves; certainly there are few stories where every single figure is written as though the author were their loving mother. And the novel offers other complications, such as:

Gage's first book was about a schoolteacher in the 1970s who killed two teenage boys who were her students; they broke into her apartment, hoping for easy money, and took hold of her when they found her in the kitchen, shucking oysters. Terrified and already holding a knife, she stabbed them both to death and frantically tried to hide the bodies. It was a senseless, tragic situation, but the district attorney decided that she was a predatory Satanist (based on a few books about magic in her apartment). She was found guilty, sent to the electric chair, and made into a sinister legend. Gage's book sought to clear up that narrative. Would it, in fact, have been right to make the story about one of the boys she killed? Or was Gage's portrayal of this boy (as a more or less normal teenager with a tough home life who fell under the sway of a dangerous peer) sufficient under the circumstances?

In his new book, Gage writes about some potential murder suspects in the Devil House case: a straitlaced teenage ex-employee with a key, his severely ADHD friend, a homeless runaway classmate, and a nice artistic girl. They're sweet, fun, and sympathetic as a group, and two of them are in truly heart-wrenching situations. He also writes, more briefly, about the murder victims: a well-known local slumlord and an ambitious out-of-town developer. The slumlord is cruel and grasping to her tenants, routinely using humiliating and unfair business practices, while the developer is a sleazy coke-snorting ignoramus. Gage clearly dislikes the former and drips with contempt for the latter. I won't dispute that such people often do more damage than impulsive teens committing property crimes; however, he's absolutely using them as minor figures in someone else's story, and in a much harsher way than he did in his first book. Is this right, because of the misery they caused? Or is it wrong no matter what?

This isn't even getting into the final twist, whose implications I have yet to sort out.

Hot Goodreads Take: "It should be called the 'Devils Store' as it's not about a house in all honesty." Look, no one said the good folks of Milpitas were great at naming things.

#little book review #devil house #john darnielle

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gstqaobc · 4 years ago

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CBC THE ROYAL FASCINATOR

Friday, April 09, 2021

Hello, royal watchers and all those intrigued by what’s going on inside the House of Windsor. This is your biweekly dose of royal news and analysis. Reading this online? Sign up here to get this delivered to your inbox.

Janet DavisonRoyal Expert

Prince Philip’s life of duty

(Adrian Dennis/Getty Images)

For so many years, Prince Philip was at Queen Elizabeth’s side — or walking just behind — deeply devoted in his duty as consort to the woman who is now the longest-reigning monarch in British history.

But the Duke of Edinburgh, who died this morning aged 99 at Windsor Castle, was seen by many as having his own role in helping an institution steeped in tradition try to find its way toward the future.

Much of that began nearly 70 years ago, after the former sailor who gave up a successful naval career saw his wife ascend the throne.

“What Prince Philip did was help modernize the monarchy in the 1950s,” Michael Jackson, president of the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada, said in an interview this morning.

“It was still a very tradition-bound institution…. We can credit Prince Philip, with the Queen’s full support, of course, with modernizing [its] finances, protocols, how Buckingham Palace was run … its outreach to the Commonwealth.”

Philip pushed to have Elizabeth’s coronation televised in 1953, an idea she did not wholeheartedly welcome at first.

“He was the modern person,” John Fraser, author of The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Affair with Royalty, said in an interview this morning. “He was in touch with real people, non-royal people, and so he always had the instinct to reach out. He understood both the dark side of the media presence as well as the necessity of it.”

Fraser credits Philip’s profoundly unsettled early years, after he was “born in poverty and insecurity,” with how he looked toward the future of the Royal Family, and the monarchy.

“I do think those early years were the single biggest factor in his life and how he approached life,” said Fraser. “I think he never assumed things would last forever because he didn’t make any assumptions like that, and I think he certainly assumed the monarchy wouldn’t survive if it didn’t reach out more to the constituency that it had to serve.”

Fraser met Philip, and recalled him as a man who would revel in asking questions and challenging others.

“He was — charming is not the word I would use — but he was an invigorating person to speak to.”

Jackson, who was Saskatchewan’s chief of protocol from 1980 until 2005, met Philip during four visits to the province — three with the Queen and one on his own — and remembered a man with “a great sense of humour.”

“Sometimes people found him a bit abrasive, a bit abrupt, but that’s the way he was,” said Jackson.

“He was a straight shooter and he complemented the Queen beautifully because the Queen is a very soft-spoken, more laid-back person. Prince Philip really spoke his mind and occasionally made jokes and … put everyone at ease. I found him very refreshing, good to work with.”

With Philip’s death, there is an inevitable sadness for the Queen, and inevitable concern for how she will cope with the passing of her husband of more than 73 years.

Both Fraser and Jackson say the Queen will carry on, with Jackson noting “That’s the way she is. She’s a very strong person” with a deep religious faith that will sustain her.

“She’ll do her duty,” said Fraser. “And I think that’s the big lesson of him. He did his duty.”

For a full obituary of Prince Philip, click here.

For photos from Prince Philip's royal career, click here.

Family dysfunction

When Philip Mountbatten married Princess Elizabeth in 1947, the family he was joining was in marked contrast to the fractured one he had known in his youth. His parents' marriage broke down and offered him nothing like the nuclear family arrangement (mom, dad and two kids) that Elizabeth had known throughout her childhood. "In marrying the Queen, [Philip] gained that sort of stable home life that he didn't have when he was younger," royal author and historian Carolyn Harris has said in an interview. Philip's parents were Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Philip was born a prince of both Greece and Denmark on June 10, 1921, on the dining room table at Mon Repos, a villa that was the summer home for the Greek royals on the island of Corfu. He was the last of five children — his four older siblings were all girls. At the time, he was sixth in line to the Greek throne. But life in Greece didn't last long. His father, a professional soldier, was exiled from Greece in 1922 as his uncle, King Constantine I, was forced to abdicate. Philip's family fled, with the story being that Philip was nestled into an orange box as the family was evacuated from Greece on a Royal Navy ship. They eventually made their way to Paris. Philip's childhood took a "dysfunctional turn," author Sally Bedell Smith wrote in her book, Elizabeth The Queen, when he was sent by his parents at the age of eight to England for boarding school. The family eventually broke down. Philip's mother, who was born deaf, was ill periodically, diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent time in a sanitarium in Switzerland. His father went off with his mistress to Monte Carlo, where he died in 1944. Philip was left to be brought up in the U.K. by his mother's family, shuffled among various relatives and boarding schools throughout his youth. He didn't see or have any word from his mother between the summer of 1932 and the spring of 1937. "It's simply what happened," Philip said matter-of-factly in an excerpt from a book by Philip Eade, Young Prince Philip, Turbulent Early Years, published in the Telegraph. "The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does." As life went on, there really was no father to guide, consult or do anything else a father can do for his child. Several other close relatives died in his early years, including his favourite sister, Cecile, and her family in a plane crash in 1937. The following year, the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, his uncle and guardian, died of bone cancer. That left the marquess's younger brother, Louis Mountbatten, to bring up Philip. His family ties also extended into Germany. Three of his sisters were married to German princes involved in the Nazi party. Cecile and her husband, Don, had just joined the Nazi party before they died. Those family alliances had a visible repercussion when Philip and Elizabeth were married in 1947. "His sisters were not invited to the wedding as they were married to German princes who had been involved in the Nazi party during World War Two," Harris said. Philip's mother, Princess Alice, however, was at the wedding, and in her later years, came to live at Buckingham Palace. Alice had her own moment in the cultural conscience in 2019, as an episode during the third season of the Netflix drama, The Crown, focused on her. "She's just the most extraordinary character," Crown creator Peter Morgan told Vanity Fair. She set up charities for Greek refugees and later established a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns. During the Second World War, while her son was serving with the Royal Navy and her German sons-in-law fought for the Nazis, she was hiding Jews in Athens. As much as there was the distance between Philip and his mother in his younger years, there was a closeness later. Alice came to live at Buckingham Palace in 1967. Alice died at the palace in 1969 and was interred in the royal crypt at Windsor Castle. In 1988, her remains were transferred, as she had wished, to the church of St. Mary Magdalene in east Jerusalem. In a 1994 visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Philip planted a tree in his mother's honour and visited her gravesite. "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special," Philip said during his visit. "She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress."

No stranger to Canada

(Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press)

Prince Philip's last visit to Canada was a short one in 2013 — on his own, without the Queen — to present a ceremonial flag to the Royal Canadian Regiment's 3rd Battalion. It came as something of a surprise. Philip had experienced a few health scares in the 18 months prior. So overseas travel was not necessarily a given for the Duke of Edinburgh at the time. But given Philip's feisty personality, dedication to his role and some of the interests he showed over the years, his return to Canada — he made more than 70 visits or stopovers between 1950 and 2013 — may not really have been a complete surprise. The 2013 trip was billed as a private working visit and was only a few days long. But while he was here, he was finally able to pick up the insignias he had been awarded as companion of the Order of Canada and commander of the Order of Military Merit from David Johnston, then Canada's governor general.

To read more about Philip’s time in Canada, click here.

Royally quotable

“He is someone who doesn't take easily to compliments but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.”

— Queen Elizabeth, publicly acknowledging Prince Philip’s importance to her during a speech on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary in 1997.

To read more on what Philip meant to the Queen, click here.

Remembering Prince Philip

Royal Fascinator readers are welcome to share their thoughts on the passing of Prince Philip, and any memories they may have of meeting him over the years. We’ll include some in the next edition of the newsletter.

I’m always happy to hear from you. Send your ideas, comments, feedback and notes to

[email protected]

. Problems with the newsletter? Please let me know about any typos, errors or glitches.

GSTQAOBC 🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿

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cardstumble · 4 years ago

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https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Year-of-Dangerous-Days/Nicholas-Griffin/9781501191022

police brutality drug crisis immigration white/latin/black tribes

Excerpt

Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1

DECEMBER 1979

By 1979, there were several Miamis that barely lapped against one another, let alone integrated. The county itself was a strange beast, twenty-seven different municipalities with their own mayor, many with their own police departments. But Miami wasn’t divided by municipalities; it was separated into tribes.

There was Anglo Miami, which the city’s boosters were still hawking to white America: beaches, real estate, hotels, and entertainment. Tourists dominated the region. Dade had 1.6 million residents but

2.1 million international visitors a year. Anglo Miami was far from monolithic. There were southerners, migrants, and a large Jewish population that ran some of the most important businesses and institutions in Miami Beach.

Across the causeway in Little Havana and up the coast in Hialeah sat Latin Miami, created by the Cubans who’d fled Fidel Castro’s revolution twenty years before. Whenever there was violence south of the border, Latin America coughed up a new pocket of immigrants. Most recently that meant that the Cuban population in Dade was being watered down by Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Colombians.

Then there was black Miami. It, too, had more divisions than cohesion. There was a strong Bahamian presence, plenty of Jamaicans. Both felt distinct from the African Americans who had moved south from Georgia, and those who were born and bred in Miami. The latest immigrants were only beginning to spill in: a large number of unwelcome Haitians. Arriving on rickety boats, fleeing both political persecution and economic despair, they were docking at a time when not one of Miami’s communities was in the mood to reach out and welcome them.

For all the nuances, if you were black, white, or Latin, you tended to know so little about the other tribes that you regarded them as rigid blocs. Who knew a Jamaican turned his nose up at a Georgia-born black, or that a Puerto Rican couldn’t stand another word from a Cuban, or that a Jew couldn’t walk through the door at the all-white country club at La Gorce? There was enough inequality to go around, but in this one thing, the black community got the most generous helping.

In 1979, if you were black in Dade County, you most likely lived in one of three neighborhoods: Overtown, the Black Grove, or Liberty City. Liberty City was the youngest of the three, dating back to 1937, when President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the first large public housing project in the South. It was Roosevelt’s response to local campaigns for better sanitation. In the ’30s, Liberty City had what most houses in Overtown and the Black Grove did not: running water, modern kitchens, electricity. Overtown remained the center of black life in Miami until the arrival of I-95, the vast stretch of American highway that ran from Maine down the East Coast all the way to Miami. It stomped right through the middle of Miami’s most prominent black neighborhood in 1965, a ravenous millipede with a thousand concrete legs.

Had the 3,000-kilometer highway been halted just 5 kilometers to the north, black Miami might have had a different history. Instead the highway, touted as “slum clearance,” bulldozed through black Miami’s main drags. Gone was much of Overtown’s commercial heart, with its three movie theaters, its

public pool, grocery store, and businesses. Goodbye to clubs that had hosted Ella Fitzgerald, to the Sir John Hotel, which had offered their finest suites to black entertainers banned from staying in whites-only Miami Beach. But more important, goodbye to a neighborhood where parents knew which house every child belonged to. Goodbye to the nighttime games of Moonlight Baby, where kids would use the bottle caps of Cola Nibs to mark the edge of their bodies on the pavement. Goodbye to unarmed

black patrolmen walking black streets.

Overtown had its own all-black police station, with strict rules. Black officers couldn’t carry a weapon home, since “no one wanted to see a black man with a gun.” They could stop whites in Overtown but

had no power of arrest over them. The closest affordable housing for Overtown’s displaced was in and around the Liberty City projects. Block by block it began to turn from white to black, until neighboring white homeowners built a wall

to separate themselves from ever-blacker Liberty City. White housewives in colorful plaids and horn-rimmed glasses carried protest signs: “We want this Nigger moved” and

“Nigger go to Washington.” Someone detonated a stick of dynamite in

an empty apartment leased to blacks. Nothing worked, and by the end of the 1960s the first proud black owners inside Liberty City were joined by many of Overtown’s twenty thousand displaced. As white flight accelerated, house prices declined, local businesses faltered, and unemployment and crime began to rise. By 1968, Liberty City had assumed a new reputation. The CND—the Central-North District—had

earned the nickname “Central Negro District” from both the city and the county police departments.

There was still beauty in Liberty City, still sunrises where the light would smart off the sides of pastel-painted houses, and the dew on the grass would glisten, and churches would fill, and the jitney buses would chug patiently, waiting for the elderly to board. Still schoolchildren in white shirts tightening backpacks to their shoulders and catching as much shade as possible on the way to the school gates. There was still beauty, but you had to squint to see it.

Eighty percent of South Florida homes had air-conditioning in 1980, but in stifling hot Liberty City,

only one in five homes could afford it. It was a neighborhood without a center, few jobs to offer, seventy-two churches but just six banks,

not one of which was black-owned. There were plenty of places to pray for a positive future but few institutions willing to risk investment in one. The fact that a teenager called Arthur McDuffie got out at all was unusual. The fact that he came back, found a good job, earned steadily, and raised a family was rarer still.

Frederica Jones had been Arthur McDuffie’s high school sweetheart at Booker T. Washington, one of Miami’s three segregated schools. They’d met while Frederica was walking home from the local store, where she’d bought a can of peas for her mother. She’d swung her groceries at her side, and McDuffie, who’d been watching her from across the street, fell into step beside her.

After a few moments of banter, McDuffie made a simple declaration. “I like you.” Then he asked for Frederica’s number. That night McDuffie called, and the two talked for an hour. At the end of the conversation McDuffie, two years Frederica’s senior, asked, “Would you go with me?”

“Yes!” she said.

They became inseparable. They were in the Booker T. Washington band together. McDuffie was the baritone horn

and Frederica a majorette. She watched McDuffie win the local swim meets. When McDuffie graduated, he joined the Marine Corps, and for the next three years, they communicated through letters. Then, within two months of his honorable discharge, they married. Two children quickly followed. After which came problems, separation, and, in 1978, divorce. McDuffie had always had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and now he had

a child with another woman to prove it.

Yet toward the end of 1979, the thirty-three-year-old McDuffie was back visiting the house he’d once shared with Frederica. He mowed the lawn, fixed the air conditioners, and trimmed the hedges of their neighbor, the last white family on the block. The warmth in the failed marriage seemed to be returning. The two spent the night of December 15, 1979, together, and McDuffie asked Frederica to join him on a trip to Hawaii—a vacation he’d just won at the office for his performance as the assistant manager at Coastal States Life Insurance.

The following day, Sunday, under bright 80-degree skies, Frederica, a nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital, drove McDuffie back to his home. She parked the car feeling like there was positive momentum.

They’d talked of remarriage in front of their families. The deal was that if McDuffie could make “certain changes” in his life, then they could go ahead and make it official. As they sat in the car, McDuffie kissed his ex-wife goodbye and promised to be back at her place that evening to take care of their children before her shift. Normally, Frederica worked only afternoons, but the hospital was short-staffed over the Christmas period and she’d agreed to work that night at 11:00.

Shortly after 2:00 p.m., McDuffie walked into 1157 NW 111th Street, the home he now shared with his younger sister, Dorothy, a legal clerk. It was a modest building, painted green. Inside there was a record collection and books of music. McDuffie played

five instruments, all horns. There was

an entire white wall “covered with plaques and certificates of achievement,” including his “Most Outstanding”

award from his Marine Corps platoon. He wasn’t a war hero, hadn’t fought in Vietnam, but McDuffie had been faithful to the corps, a military policeman who had done his job impeccably.

A dutiful father, McDuffie had already wrapped Christmas presents for his two daughters and hidden them in a closet in his bedroom. His nine-year-old would get a wagon, a jack-in-the-box, and clothes. His oldest would get a watch, a tape recorder, a radio,

and a pair of roller skates.

He’d saved for months, but it hadn’t been an easy year to make money. Under President Jimmy Carter, the country, most especially the South, had been battered. Unemployment was stubbornly high, and it looked like the president was being swept downstream by the economy. For all Carter’s preaching of forbearance, the reality was that interest rates were up to 17 percent. In thirty years, inflation had never run higher.

Gas prices had doubled in two years. Even hamburger meat was two dollars a pound.

Despite all this, Carter was about to enter an election year in comparatively good standing. Whatever America thought of his ability to steer the country, he retained the people’s sympathy,

with an approval rating of 61 percent. Six weeks before, the Iranian revolution had become very real to the distant United States. The sixty-two hostages captured in the American embassy in Tehran had helped generate a sudden sense of solidarity in the United States. Between that and the following month’s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was an understanding that Carter had a tricky hand to play. He would promise a strong and quick response to both situations. By the end of the year Carter led his presumptive challenger, Ronald Reagan, by

an enormous 24-point margin.

Still, the mood was summed up best by the

Miami Herald

in 1979. It was a year the average American wallet had “barely survived.” The unseen benefit, according to the paper, was that Miamians like McDuffie lived in Florida. They weren’t being hammered on heating oil like the rest of the country.

By Miami standards, the evening of December 16 counted as cold, expected to dip below 70 degrees and then drop below 60 the following day. Miamians traditionally overreacted, digging out winter coats and scarves for a rare outing. McDuffie selected blue jeans, a navy shirt over a baby-blue undershirt,

and a black motorcycle jacket. He searched his house for a hat to wear under his helmet. At 5:00 p.m., he closed the door behind him.

His own car, a 1969 green Grand Prix, wasn’t parked in its usual spot in his driveway. A friend had borrowed it. So he climbed on an orange-and-black 1973 Kawasaki 2100, “a more or less permanent loan” from his cousin. McDuffie turned the key, revved the engine, and drove the motorcycle south to Fifty-Ninth Street, to his friend Lynwood Blackmon’s house. He pulled up at the front door, feet still astride the bike, and talked to Blackmon’s seven- and eight-year-old daughters. He explained to them that he couldn’t help their father tune their car as he’d promised. His tools were in the back of the borrowed Grand Prix. Next he drove to his older brother’s house, his most common stop, and found him washing his car in his driveway. McDuffie grinned, revved the engine, spat up dirt over the clean car, and sped away before his brother could grab him. He raced to the far end of the street, turned, and braked hard.

“You better slow that bike down,” shouted his brother. McDuffie nodded, grinned, and pulled away.

Sometimes on weekends McDuffie moonlighted as a truck driver, making deliveries to Miami Beach. Sometimes he gave up his time to help jobless youngsters, teaching them how to paint houses. Just two years before, he’d painted the Range Funeral Home, where his body would arrive in exactly a week. On this particular Sunday evening, he was going to see Carolyn Battle, the twenty-six-year-old assistant that McDuffie had hired at Coastal Insurance. She was pretty, independent, and stylish, with a preference for dresses and wearing her hair in an Afro. He’d brought a helmet for her.

McDuffie shouldn’t have been driving at all. His license had been suspended months before, and he’d paid his thirty-five-dollar traffic fine with a check that had bounced. He’d told a coworker that he was worried about getting stopped again, but there were no alternatives for

driving back and forth to work. Public transport was pitiful in Miami, and Liberty City—barely serviced—was reliant on independent jitney operators who rarely worked weekends. Not having a car was a self-quarantine.

McDuffie collected Carolyn Battle. They drove fifteen minutes south, to the edge of Miami International Airport, where they watched planes arcing out over the ocean or dropping into landing patterns above the Everglades. Tiring of the airport, McDuffie drove Battle across MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach. When McDuffie was a child, dusk would have found an exodus heading the other way:

black Americans subject to a sunset curfew. But on December 16, on the three lanes that ran east over the bright blue shallows, McDuffie showed off, hitting eighty miles an hour. They walked in the sand, stopped for Pepsi, and then at 9:00 p.m. headed back to Battle’s apartment at 3160 NW Forty-Sixth Street, just

five blocks from the Airport Expressway.

At one in the morning, McDuffie slept in Battle’s bed while she watched television on her couch. At 1:30 she woke him up. “Jesus,” said McDuffie, reaching for his watch. He was far too late to show up at his ex-wife’s house. Frederica would have taken the kids over to a babysitter two hours ago. How was he going to make that up to her? Had he blown it? McDuffie gathered his watch, his wedding ring, his medallion. Still dressed in his blue jeans, two blue shirts, and boots, he put on his knitted cap under his white helmet, tied his knapsack to the back of the Kawasaki, and headed north toward home.

Was it a wheelie, a rolled stop sign, a hand lifted from a handlebar to give the finger that caught the sergeant’s attention? The officer would later offer all three explanations of why he’d first noticed the Kawasaki pass by him. It was 1:51 a.m. The sergeant got on the radio, described McDuffie’s white helmet and the tag number of the motorbike, and flipped on his red light and siren. On a cool night, with the rider in jeans, jacket, and helmet, he couldn’t have known if he was black, Latin, or white.

McDuffie appeared to glance in his mirror and then sped through a red light on NW Sixty-First Street. As the sergeant followed in his white-and-green county squad car, McDuffie blew through another red light and swept around corners,

not even slowing for the stop signs. He’d picked a very quiet night for these traffic infractions. Within sixty seconds of the beginning of the chase, McDuffie was being followed by every available unit within Central District.

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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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7 Zines That Helped People Work through Mental Health Issues

For the uninitiated, a “zine” is often defined as a self-published, small-circulation magazine that documents the happenings of a subculture or a niche topic. But in practice, the art of the zine is governed by “non-rules.” A zine can be consist of 40 pages, or just one. It can be entirely made up of pictures or feature no pictures at all. It can make sense, but it doesn’t have to.

During the 1980s, zine-making often involved taking a pile of collages, poems, essays, images, or doodles; lining them up, just so, over the glass of a Xerox machine; then making copies, and stapling together a series of printed pages like this. Copies might be shared with friends or left in a stack at a local record store. Today, publishing a zine can be as simple as one person creating a web page or as elaborate as a small editorial team collaborating on a printed periodical with a cover star. But the non-rules haven’t changed: If you make it and publish it yourself, and it has text, images, or both, you can probably call it a zine.

Perhaps because of this flexibility, artists and other creatives have found in zines a judgment-free space, and for some, it’s a prime medium for discussing serious, personal issues, like mental health. This point was made late last month when an art exhibition in India, organized by one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, Dr. Vikram Patel, illustrated how zines can help break down the stigma surrounding mental health. To explore the topic further, we share below seven examples of such zines, with insights from their creators on how these creative projects helped them navigate their own experiences with mental health.

For Girls Who Cry Often (2016)

Excerpt from Lina Wu, For Girls Who Cry Often, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Lina Wu, a Toronto-based artist and illustrator, collected stories and testimonies from over 20 contributors to create the 40-page zine For Girls Who Cry Often. “It’s a nice feeling to be a part of something bigger,” she said of the collaborative creation process.

For the zine, Wu focused on exploring mental health through a femme lens and let her own experiences inform her process. “For much of my life, I noticed that ‘getting emotional’ was seen as a girly or feminine thing—meaning it is often dismissed as dramatic and frivolous,” she explained.

Wu created a dreamy pink atmosphere to backdrop the contributors’ candid and sometimes dark confessions. The zine’s adolescent tone is a nod to the fanzines of the 1990s that gave teenage girls a voice. In fact, Wu points out that zines are accessible art objects because people can easily share and buy them (readers buying copies of For Girls Who Cry Often are encouraged to pay what they can afford).

An interdisciplinary artist, Wu experiments with poetry, illustrations, comics, photography, and design in her zines. And while she doesn’t bring For Girls Who Cry Often to zine fairs anymore, she noted that making it has helped her grow as an artist.

Fuck This Life (2005–present)

Excerpt from Dave Sander, Fuck This Life, 2018. Courtesy of 8ball Community.

Today, Dave Sander (a.k.a. “Weirdo Dave”) is a visual artist known for collaborations with Vans and Supreme. But back in 2005, Sander was cramming newspaper and magazine clippings into his desk drawer almost out of habit. “After I got a lot,” Sander said, ��I thought it would be time to make a zine.”

Flipping through the pages of any issue of Fuck This Life is like witnessing the end-of-life montage people describe after a near-death experience. For Sander, zine-making can be an aggressively cathartic process: “You get to kill shit in your own way,” he offered.

Fuck This Life is a stream-of-consciousness compilation of found imagery—like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb or porn stars mid-orgasm—the result of Sander channeling his pain to “create a beautiful, loud, brutal fantasyland.” He refers to the zine ashis deepest, darkest best friend. “It was my reason for living, so I guess it saved me,” he said.

Grief Poems (2017)

Excerpt from Chloe Zelkha, Grief Poems, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Chloe Zelkha describes her father’s death as a “sudden, heartbreaking shock.” Within months, she’d printed out a collection of poems she found in books or discovered through teachers and grieving groups, then spread them out on her kitchen table. There, the Berkeley-based Zelkha began painting onto the pages, cranking out one after another in succession, without drafting or revising. As she found more poems, she created more pages. The result was Grief Poems, a 26-page exercise in letting go.

Zelkha’s introduction to zines was Project NIA’s The Prison Industrial Complex Is… (2010–11), a straightforward explainer zine with minimal text and simple black-and-white illustrations. She sees zines are an inherently raw medium. “That permission that’s kind of baked into the form,” she said, “is liberating.”

Poems by everyone from Kobayashi Issa to W.S. Merwin are coated in Zelkha’s uninhibited brushstrokes. She compared her process with child’s play or dreaming: “If you watch a kid play on their own for long enough, you’ll see lots of fears, feelings, ideas eeking their way into their game, and then transforming in real time. Or when we dream, and different people, places, concerns visit us in weird ways.”

Identity Crisis (2017)

Librarian–slash–zine-maker Poliana Irizarry is probably better known for their autobiographical black-and-white zines, like My Left Foot (2016) and Training Wheels (2013). But with Identity Crisis, the San Jose–based artist seemed the most vulnerable they’ve ever been. “My abuela suffered many miscarriages at the hands of American doctors, and her surviving offspring also struggle with reproductive issues,” Irizarry wrote. “Many Puerto Ricans do.”

Before the birth control pill was approved by the FDA in 1960, nearly 1,500 Puerto Rican women were unknowingly part of one of the earliest human trials for the pill. Between the 1930s and ’70s, nearly one-third of Puerto Rico’s female population of childbearing age had undergone “the operation,” often without being properly educated on its effects.

Irizarry made Identity Crisis,their first full-color art zine,during a South Bay DIY Zine Collective workshop. Personal and family histories intersect across fragmented pictures of succulents and Southwestern landscapes in a half-prose, half-verse journey through Irizarry’s identity. In just a few pages, Irizarry wrestles with intergenerational trauma and their own post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Irizarry speaks directly to their oppressors, defiant and resolute: “I live in spite of you.”

Shit I Made When I Was Sad (a.k.a. sad zine)(2018)

Excerpt from Shit I Made When I Was Sad a.k.a. sad zine, 2018. Courtesy of Malin Rantzer and Anna Persmark.

It started when Swedish friends Malin Rantzer and Anna Persmark were showing each other drawings and writing in journals they’d made while they were feeling low. “I noticed that some of the stuff we’d drawn resembled the other’s drawing,” Malin remembered, “and I think at that point we realized we should make a zine about being sad.” Rantzer turned to social media and put out a “swenglish/svengelska” (Swedish-English) call for submissions.

The then–Sweden-based duo (Persmark has since relocated to Portland, Oregon) made sad zine by cutting out and taping or pasting their artworks onto new pages, then scanning them and folding them into a booklet. Persmark sees zine-making as one of the most intimate ways of sharing her feelings; she goes out in person to share copies with her community.

“Even if all the submitters did not know each other,” Malin explained, “they were all friends’ friends or friends’ friends’ friends, and maybe that also can contribute to an atmosphere where it is safe to be vulnerable.” While making the individual works helped them heal, Persmack noted that the process of compiling the zine proved to be revelatory: “Sadness is both intensely personal and universal,” she said.

Sula Collective Issue 3: Mental Health (2015)

Oyinda Yemi-Omowum, An Emotional Response to Colours, 2015. Excerpt from Sula Collective Issue 3: Mental Health, 2015. Courtesy of Sula Collective.

Sula Collective calls itself an online “[maga]zine for and by people of colour.” Initially an exclusively online zine—different from a blog in name and ethos—it reflected its Gen-Y creators and their new ideas of what a zine could be. It’s one of the more visible new zines, among many, with the purpose of turning an online network into an IRL community. Ever since they founded it in 2015, co-creators Kassandra Piñero and Sophia Yuet See knew they wanted to dedicate an issue to mental health.

Sula Collective Issue 3: Mental Health sheds light on how teenagers of color navigate their parents’ more conservative understanding of mental health issues. “We wanted to discuss the things we kept hidden from our parents or couldn’t talk about with friends,” Piñero and Yuet See explained.

The issue was published in November 2015 and serves as a record of how today’s young artists are taking intersectional approaches to dealing with mental health issues. For example, Oyinda, a then–16-year-old Nigerian girl living in London, submitted a color-coded collage of self-portraits and textures called An Emotional Response to Colours. The literary submissions are paired with original artworks, sourced from Sula Collective’ssubmissions inbox, which range from digital art to watercolors. When asked about what makes zines a unique medium, Piñero and Yuet See answered, simply, “control.”

Shrinks: A Retrospective (2018)

Excerpt from Karla Keffer, Shrinks: A Retrospective, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Shrinks is part of Karla Keffer’s zine series “The Real Ramona,” where she discusses being diagnosed with and treated for PTSD after almost 30 years in therapy. The Mississippi-based artist found a sense of direction for her work, and Shrinks in particular, through learning about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

This phenomenon (which gave daytime television hosts the ratings of their dreams) involved psychologists across America fueling a nationwide hysteria by diagnosing patients with satanic ritual abuse (SRA) and sending them off to tough-love camps.

“Shrinks are human and fallible,” Keffer explained. “I had put a great deal of trust in their infallibility.” In Shrinks, Keffer created profiles of every therapist she’s ever had—like Julie the gaslighter and Jill the racist. Survivors of abuse are often—and paradoxically—burdened with the task of seeing through the abuse and saving themselves. “One of the things I found difficult was sorting out what had happened with each therapist—like, did she/he really say that outlandish thing?” Keffer recalled.

So much of zine-making is about reclaiming—reclaiming the freedom of expression, reclaiming space, reclaiming the past. And, as Keffer put it, “you’ve made your own book, which is not something you experience when you’re writing short stories and sending them to lit mags.” If any one thing can define zines as a medium, it’s the unbridled control it gives artists.

from Artsy News

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aimeesuzara · 6 years ago

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Questions from Maiana Minahal’s Students in English 272, “Filipino Women Writers”...My Responses

Dear students and readers,

I’m honored that you’ve read my work and are interested in these facets of my life and craft as an artist. I love the challenge of being given questions to write about. So, here goes!

1. What is the best thing that writing, performing, creating, etc. provides you? It seems you have many talents, how do each contribute to the person that you are? What do you love about each?

I’ve combined a couple of similar questions here. First, thanks to whomever has said that I have many talents; I’m flattered. I do believe I was blessed with a variety of areas of interest and natural “talent” that I got to explore and develop in different phases of my life. I even felt split about whether to respond to the questions in writing and using my voice and image (because I love storytelling and the voice).

First, what do I love about writing? And perhaps writing, as opposed to performing or creating other kinds of multidisciplinary art (plays, collaborations with dance, music, etc)?

Writing is most private; it’s also a place for confession because in many ways, it’s hidden, is behind a mask. Writing can be on one hand too analytical, but when it’s the most powerful it can also be magic-making, enabling a metaphor to be developed and breathe, an image to vibrate and have scent and color; a scene and characters to come alive with dialogue, backstory, and motivation. It’s a place of invention, slower invention that has no immediate impact except itself on the page - as opposed to live performance which is more of an improvisation and collaboration together with an audience.

Performance, then, is that other thing; I believe performance happens on the page, in that invention, as well, but if we’re talking about performing on the stage or at a microphone, it’s a collaboration among many elements: space (architecture, weather), time, other people / audience, circumstance. It’s also very natural, an ancient throwback to the griots and oral historians and singers and spiritual leaders making incantations...it predates writing. The body is a vessel with so many faculties, and this is the most exciting set of possibilities. Should this line or this word be whispered? Yelled? Projected on the body? Who is my audience when I perform? Are you my audience? Is my audience in the past, present or the future? Am I in the past, present or future? What am I able to bring to life right now, and even co-create with you a new circumstance within the present moment? In theater and in poetry, even if it’s the same exact play or the same poem, each rendering is unique. Did someone laugh at a different part? Did someone cry? Am I feeling the spirit of my grandmother that day? Or my future child? Also, the voice is vibrational. There’s a way in which, when we perform, we are contacting others through the voice, through the heat of our bodies; we share a space and time that never occurs again.

Creating multidisciplinary work - I’ll differentiate as projects that are collaborative, that may involve production elements such as video-poems, dance theater, or collaboration with musicians and filmmakers: this takes the Performance and the Writing to another level. Now, let’s add other people who are experts in their own fields: choreographers, dancers, composers, emcees, filmmakers. I have had the opportunity to work with a variety of these, in making projects such as a “Tiny Fires” poem collaboration (click for excerpt) with San Francisco State University’s Dance Theater, in which my poem was translated into choreography and the dancers learned all of the lines; a recent collaboration with Alayo Dance Theater called “Manos de Mujeres” in which I researched, interviewed and wrote about the lives of Cuban Women and the dance company danced and choreographed to my words; a recent project called “Water and Walls” (click to watch) in which we all wrote verses to music about a shared theme and a filmmaker worked with us to produce a video. These are all exciting ways for the writing to live and breathe and thrive in different ways, through different mediums. When it comes to plays, I do not even perform in the work, but get to see talented actors bring the stories to life, with directors at the helm and production crew helping execute a vision. It’s like giving birth...and seeing someone grow up beyond you, doing things you could not do...

2. What are some influences on your poetry/work? (I reworded this one somewhat; I hope it is still fine!)

I think I’ve answered some of this in the above, in a way. I am influenced by many art forms, and can’t see it any other way. I’ve never sat well with only poetry or only words, which can be limiting, and often, as referenced earlier, can become too cerebral. Words are meant to be released, like songs are meant to be sung. I am influenced by my early exposure to playing piano and dancing ballet, and later playing percussion and dancing West African and Afro-Cuban and Salsa and a slight bit of Filipino movement. I am influenced by the work I love to watch - other theater-makers, poets, dancers. Music influences me deeply, and often I hear poems come to me like strains of music, with melodies and rhythms. The natural world influences me. And history. As you have seen in my book, I can get nearly obsessed with history. The way it was written, the way it omits, the glimpses it gives us into the minds of people. Who is heard and who is not; who is rendered silent in the writing; who needs to be heard, if even in imagination. History excites me and leads me to get possessed. Lastly, change-makers and activists, because I came out of that. I first wrote most fiercely and performed my first spoken word poems because I wanted to tell the story of a little girl, Crizel Valencia, who died at age 6 of leukemia after growing up on a toxic wasteland left by the United States military. I lived in her community and in her home and we drew together. When she died, after making dozens of drawings of herself envisioning her community and her own survival, I felt possessed to write, and speak. So, spirits influence me too.

3. About the book, SOUVENIR: What was the inspiration behind the layout and style of your poems? For example, the use of different fonts and inclusion of outside texts like in your poem "Manifest Destiny 1980." I really liked how you wrote and organized your book by using exhibits (like in the museum, there's a story for each object or subject) I find it very creative. What gave you this idea or how did you think of it?

Each poem definitely has its own inspiration, but I can focus on the one you mentioned, first. In “Manifest Destiny 1980″ I was basically writing parallel realities - one in 1980 (my own personal story of migration across the country) and the one in 1803 of the Lewis and Clark Expedition - both which moved from East to West. In mapping out my own family’s road trip from New Jersey to the small Tri-Cities (Pasco, Kennewick, Richland) towns of the Pacific Northwest, where I remembered growing up with stories about Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, I found that we followed similar route as Lewis and Clark. But, while our trip and our experience was about immigrants and their daughter adjusting and assimilating to White America, Lewis and Clark went to study and exploit the knowledge and resources, and the environment, of Native people. We were subjected to being analyzed and studied and ostracized; they were, as well, but in the end were in the position of power linked to the destruction and removal of local people. The parallel in the layout was meant to enable the two readings (top to bottom) and also one interrupting the other.

As for the exhibits: as you probably know, the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, which followed the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In the 1904 Fair, Filipinos were displayed in living exhibits, forced to re-enact rituals (at far too many intervals, unnaturally, for show and even competition), eat, sit, and interact in the public eye, as the living conquests of the US Imperialists. I realized that so much of our lives was and is performance as well - my parents needing to demonstrate their ability to work and function within the American context; my striving to fit in, disappear, or perform as the rare Filipino girl in often non-diverse environments. Without being too literal, I was interested in how we can see our lives on display, and what is lost or gained in that performance. And objects - what are the objects that are collected as treasures of war - including our own bodies?

4. In the poem, "My Mother's Watch,” did that situation really happen to you? If you do go back to the motherland regularly, does the profiling still happen to you today?

Yes; that poem is actually pretty true to life. I wouldn’t have called it “profiling” in that I think that term carries meanings of power within a racist context such as the United States. In the Philippines, it was more of curiosity, more of realizing that you could never really “go back” in a way that is simply nostalgic or “authentic” -- that once the departure from the homeland, and the living within the United States context occurs, we may appear similar in skin and features, we may be 100% the same as our relatives in some ways, but we are not because we have lost our native tongues, or cultural norms, or gestures. And also - that I felt so much bigger and taller than other Filipinos speaks to the fact that many of our own relatives or people just like us back “home” had access to fewer resources and nutrition, whereas we were able to grow up on milk and in my case, packaged and microwaved foods. Even in our bodies, we are altered forever. There was an article/ interview about this poem here that may be of interest: http://www.lanternreview.com/blog/2011/05/31/process-profile-aimee-suzara-discusses-my-mothers-watch/

5. What was the hardest part of the book to write?

The whole thing was hard to write, but it was actually harder to write the “colonizer”/white man/government/military and scientific voices because they were so emotionless at times, so declaratory, and in many cases, so condescending, if not overtly racist. To dwell in the language in which Filipinos were called “niggers” and “rabbits” and that torture of Filipinos seemed to be so much fun; or that Native and Filipino and Black people’s skulls and genetics were inferior (according to the scientific racism of the time); and also that so much of it seemed to ring true to today. It’s much easier to write personal narrative, lyrical narrative.

6. What do you hope for readers to remember the most?

I hope that readers can see themselves reflected in the glass of the museum exhibits. That regardless of their background, they see how Filipino-American History is American History and not some niche piece of history, but actually demonstrated some of the most egregious cases of scientific racism and exploitation, the epitome at the end of the 19th century, of colonialism and imperialism. I hope readers check out more of the history, and also reflect on themselves and where they come from.

7. What is the most nerve wrecking thing about becoming a mother for the first time? (Congratulations by the way!)

I put this at the end because it feels, in a way, like a bonus question, but also something very relevant to our lives as artists. Becoming a first-time mother involves putting everything aside - my writing, my teaching, my projects - in service of my health and the health and protection of the child I am going to birth. I have birthed many other things: projects, plays and poems, but a human being -- this requires the most sacrifice and faith I’ve ever had to summon. At the same time, I think it’s very important for you, readers, to know that as artists, our lives are our art, just as art is our life. We never stop being one or another (people, mothers, playwrights, performers). If I believed I would stop being an artist, I could despair, but if I were to stop being an artist, what kind of mother would my son have? He deserves my full self. So, while our time becomes more limited and we have to focus on the child, we do not lose ourselves; we simply change.

Thank you for your interest and I hope you’ve enjoyed my answers!

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femmesfollesnebraska · 4 years ago

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Blog at 40, Liza Lou at 40

This is the fourth blog post I’ve written on what (feminist and/or women) artists have done/created during their 40th year during my 40th year. First 3:

1) Judy Chicago

2) Carolee Schneemann

3) Wanda Ewing

I include artworks by myself inspired by and/or in tribute to the artists at end of each post as well.

Today I write about Liza Lou, (born 1969), American visual artist best known for her large scale sculptures using glass beads. Though not currently an artist on the top of my inspiration list, as much of her work leans primarily on the more conceptual side of the spectrum--though not entirely, to be sure--I came across her work the other day as I was researching what contemporary artists are doing in response to the pandemic for an upcoming presentation, and found her Apartogether project.

Screenshot of an Instagram post by Liza Lou announcing the start of Apartogether in response to Covid-19, 2020.

Apartogether is a community art project founded by Liza Lou at the onset of the COVID19 pandemic to foster connection and creativity during a time of social distancing and isolation. Lou encourages IG followers to make work from familiar materials around the house and to tag it with the Instagram handle @apartogether_art and she archives it on her website. What started as an exercise in combatting long-term isolation has grown into a global community of makers eager to share. She also hosts art talks, a “sew-in” and sessions on Zoom to facilitate conversation among the participants. As an accessible, open art project, I completely love this - anyone can participate, and everyone can view and appreciate this project. It’s warm, intimate, personal while also being enormous, inspirational and broadly impactful. I can’t help compare to Judy Chicago’s Honor Quilt from The Dinner Party, a crowdsourced quilt made from patches from people worldwide dedicated to women past to present, famous to non, that traveled with the famous work throughout its international tour in the 1980s, but I digress.

Speaking of Chicago, while doing my current research, I found an Op-ed for the New York Times she wrote about the significance of work with content; she articulated everything about her and feminist art that I love now and always have:

Does art matter when we are facing a global crisis such as the current Covid-19 pandemic?

Obviously, there is a great deal of art that doesn’t matter. This includes the work issuing from those university art programs that every year pump out thousands of graduates, taught only to speak in tongues about formal, conceptual and theoretical issues few people care about or can comprehend. Then there is the art created for a global market that has convinced too many people that a piece’s selling price is more important than the content it conveys.

But when art is meaningful and substantive, viewers can become enlightened, inspired and empowered. And this can lead to change, which we urgently need.

...One might ask what this has to do with the global pandemic afflicting us. The answer lies in art’s power to shed light on the problems we are confronted with at this difficult time.

...Art that raises awareness of the state of our planet can be especially important in today’s world. One example of this is the work of the contemporary artist and illustrator Sue Coe, whose pieces on animal mistreatment have been ignored or, at best, marginalized by an art community that seems to privilege meaninglessness over consequential work...

(I can’t express how much I love Judy Chicago’s adamant voice. It is so assertively, unapologetically and refreshingly personal and feminist. I highlly recommend reading her books and autobiographies - a new combined edition is actually coming out next year. Also, I currently have her book, New Views, which I’m stoked about starting and reviewing...but I digress, again!)

The point in my bringing this quote up around Liza Lou is that her work created during her 40th year, 2009, Book of Days, leans conceptual.

Liza Lou. Book of Days, Paper and glass beads.

I say “leans,” because, to make an obvious (and unfair) comparison: viewing Book of Days, without context, versus viewing this Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a monumental work with 39 place-settings dedicated to women in Western art history (which Chicago debuted her 40th year, read my blog post here), there is clear content beyond the media with the latter, where the former emphasizes the media. Of course, Dinner Party’s media is very important, and Book of Days does have content beyond the media; its just immediate objective response in comparison is content vs. media. Which, is what Chicago was referring to in her editorial.

My preference typically leans towards feminist art with immediate content impact; as evidenced in my posts on Carolee Schneemann and Wanda Ewing. I haven’t thought about Liza Lou in years; in fact, Ewing was the one to introduce me to her work when I made a series of self portraits using beads (see below). Notably Lou is known for this work, which I love, Kitchen:

Liza Lou: Kitchen, 1994 (c) Liza Lou

Kitchen is a full-scaled kitchen Lou covered, over a five year period, with glistening beads. Lou created this piece after researching the lives of 19th women and kitchen design; the made plans, crafted objects out of paper mâché, painted them, and applied the beads in a mosaic of surface pattern. This work, in Lou’s words, “argues for the dignity of labor”—a labor that here manifests as process and subject, and is linked to gender, since crafts and kitchen work are traditionally female domains. Some of the popular branded kitchen products depicted also might comment on American life. Of course I can make a comparison to Chicago’s The Dinner Party, too, using the dinner table/traditional feminine media (ceramics/quilting) to honor these typically deemed inferior media. Or pop art, of course. Lou’s stands on its own--less reverential --more playful, inviting, fun and even personal (Lou did it all herself whereas Chicago had 400+ volunteers; Lou dedicates this to the all-encompassing woman; Chicago to specific though broad reaching women); both with extremely detailed thought, research and planning.

I didn’t mean for this to be a comparison of Chicago to Lou - but, it is how I’ve been thinking these last couple days--because, to bring it back to Lou’s Book of Days, this work can be viewed as more akin to minimalist work--one can guess what it means--a tall, stack of beaded forms depicting paper--beautiful, white, simple--maybe you think of other such minimalist works that make you aware of your environment such as Mary Corse’ White Inner Bands (2000) made of glass microspheres inside acrylic canvas. I imagine as you move around Lou’s stack of beaded objects, the beads sparkler or shimmer, femininizing the perhaps stale environment. Or perhaps think of the intense linework of Edwina Leapman. Like the laborous line-making of Leapman, so is the intricate beadwork of Lou.

As such, Book of Days, like Kitchen, points to labor, containment, and womanhood in a beautiful, perhaps more subtle way. To be sure, Book of Days includes 365 beaded sheets - the days in a year, completed her 40th year. Making literal cognitive and/or physical aging, perhaps? Perhaps....

Back to viewing it as an object - no context on the wall, no intent known. Is such work, sans clear feminist intent, feminist? Or would it just be meaningless work such as that Chicago points to in her article, lacking educational value? It is, in fact, feminist regardless. A woman making work, taking up space, is, in itself, political and a feminist statement. As women have been left off the walls, books and pages of history the majority of time and still are underrepresented (minorities even more), anything a woman (broadly defined) makes and is on view, is feminist in itself, clearly evoking social justice intent, or not.

To be sure - I don’t know, but I think Chicago would agree. To note as well, much of her work has minimalist aesthetics, as her training was such.

Here are a few of my older works, made with beads, inspired by Liza Lou:

Sally Brown Deskins: Babylove, beads and yarn on silk, 2007

Sally Brown Deskins: Self portrait with beads, pastel on black paper, 2008

Sally Brown Deskins: Heidi Clock - beads and yarn on a clock (I wish I had a better photo of this - it was donated and sold at an auction at the Bemis Center in 2008 or 2009; the purchaser told me she thought it was the “most authentic clock in the room” (all of the art was clocks)

-Sally Brown Deskins

IG @sallery_art

Les Femmes Folles is a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world with the online journal, print annuals, exhibitions and events; originally inspired by artist Wanda Ewing and her curated exhibit by the name Les Femmes Folles (Wild Women). LFF was created and is curated by Sally Brown Deskins. LFF Books is a micro-feminist press that publishes 1-2 books per year by the creators of Les Femmes Folles including the award-winning Intimates & Fools (Laura Madeline Wiseman, 2014) , The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Laura Madeline Wiseman/Lauren Rinaldi, 2015 and Mes Predices (catalog of art/writing by Marie Peter Toltz, 2017). Other titles include Les Femmes Folles: The Women 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 available on blurb.com, including art, poetry and interview excerpts from women artists. A portion of the proceeds from LFF books and products benefit the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Wanda Ewing Scholarship Fund.

Submissions always open!

https://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/callforart-writing

#feministart #lizalou #sallybrown

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sleemo · 7 years ago

Audio

Exclusive excerpt: Boba Fett rides again in 'Star Wars' short story

Not many in the Star Wars galaxy have the cool factor of Boba Fett. His Western gunfighter look and mysterious aura, like an armored Clint Eastwood, hooked writer Paul Dini from the start.

"The narrow, T-shaped visor gives him a look of constant scrutiny, as if he's always sizing up a target just before he draws on him," Dini says of the infamous bounty hunter he writes about in the new 40th-anniversary anthology book Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View (Del Rey, out Oct. 3).

"You're always guessing who he really is under the helmet, simply a hired gun for the highest price, or is there something more to him? What's going on inside his head? Do we even want to know?"

It's those questions Dini, a lifelong Star Wars fan, loved exploring doing the Fett tale "Added Muscle" for From a Certain Point of View, featuring 40 tales by 40 different writers. The collection is filled with iconic moments starring sideline players who drift in and out of the original 1977 Star Wars. You can read an exclusive excerpt from Dini's story below or listen to the audio version read by Mad Men's Jon Hamm.

"As Don Draper, Jon excelled at playing a character who was ruthless, cunning, and yet undeniably charismatic. There's a lot of that in Fett," Dini says.

Fett technically first appeared in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back but was later digitally inserted by George Lucas into the 1997 special edition of the original Star Wars.

"Added Muscle" is a "wink to that," Dini says, a day in the life of the galactic bounty hunter that happens to be the same day Luke Skywalker joins forces with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

"Boba is stopping over on Tatooine when he's called on by his old associate Jabba the Hutt to help collect a debt. Naturally this is the money owed to Jabba by Han Solo. The story is a monologue going through Fett's head while he backs up Jabba and stares down Han and Chewie."

Fett shares similarities with another fan-favorite supporting character Dini knows well: Harley Quinn, whom Dini and Bruce Timm introduced in a 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series. "They were both later additions to ongoing pop culture mythologies, yet they each wound up fitting seamlessly into their respective universes," the writer says. "They were also wild cards, not heroes, but maybe not entirely villains either. It's a lot of fun to identify with a character who lives by their own rules."

Read an exclusive excerpt from Paul Dini's "Added Muscle" short story in Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View:

Jabba had said to meet him at Docking Bay 94. Told me it was a collection job and he needed some insurance. One look at the duds he dragged along confirmed this. Not a pro in the lot. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the whispers of surprise when I walked onto the scene. That’s right, boys. Fett’s here. Do me a favor and fall to the side after you’re hit. I really don’t want to trip over your idiot corpses once the shooting starts. Sorry, if the shooting starts. No reason to get excited yet.

Okay, Wook. There are two ways this is going down. One, we have a nice little chat, Jabba gets his money from Solo, and we all leave happy. Two, someone gets anxious, zip zip, Jabba’s rid of one deadbeat, and I get a new scalp for my collection. No guesses which one I prefer.

Originally, I wasn’t supposed to be a part of this. That’s what I get, I guess, sticking around Tatooine to snag some Imperial coin. I was supposed to be off this dust ball yesterday, but I picked up trooper buzz that Vader was looking for a couple of runaway droids. Figured I’d collect the bounty and square myself with the headman at the same time. He’s still got a mad on over those rebel spies I crisped on Coruscant. Idiots came at me with ion disruptors. What, they thought I wouldn’t carry a weapon accelerator? Flash, boom, three tiny ash piles. Tried to collect and Lord “No Disintegrations!” refused to pay without bodies. My word’s not good enough, apparently. Reckoned I’d make up the loss by finding his droids and holding out for twice the reward.

No go on that. Trailed one until its footprints were wiped out by a Jawa sandcrawler. Followed those treads a way until I found someone had wiped out the Jawas, too. “Someone” meaning amateurs trying to fake a Tusken raid. Probably stormtroopers, judging by the random blast shots. Some might call them precise. Me, I say they can’t hit the butt end of a bantha. At least they had brains enough to take out everyone who had seen the droids. Hard luck on the sizzled hicks I found at that torched moisture farm. Had a look-see and discovered there were three settlers living there, not two. Betting the third ran with the droids. I’ll hunt around after I’m done here. Vader may triple the bounty if I bring him the fugitive along with the droids. Yeah, I know, intact corpse, “no disintegrations.”

Till then, here I stand, adding some credibility to the collection of bums and bugs Jabba calls muscle. Figures he’d want us to shake down Solo, the biggest loser in the galaxy. I could just pop him for target practice, but I never work for free.

#boba fett #star wars #sw books #from a certain point of view #jon hamm #paul dini #news #audio #han solo #chewbacca #jabba the hutt #interview

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objectsurfaceword · 5 years ago

Photo

Robert Barry / CONCEPTUAL ART AND TEXT /

(EXCERPTS FROM MY OWN RESEARCH ESSAY)

In the late 1960’s the term Conceptual art became an umbrella providing shelter to more specific labels of idea art, text art and object art. For the artists working at the time, it was a term of liberation, one that allowed them an escape from the traditional boundaries of art; artists began to engage more in theories surrounding the birth and understanding of meaning.

The substance of the everyday came under scrutiny, the gap between art and life under the microscope for investigation. The “artless” object of the everyday was now a valid material of representation which transcended the flat symbolism of the painting or photograph. Language and text became a point of increased interest, the relationship between word, image and object now a well-thumbed page in the book of Conceptual art.

The appearance of word and language in a Fine Art context was a fundamental conceptual shift that allowed for a new directness, the open sincerity of language building fresh space for discourse surrounding shared thought, imagination and the written word as a system of representation.

The use of text as an artistic tool is also something many other contemporary artists have adopted into their practices. Words and language have found their way into traditional art from the earliest times – from the ancient Greeks with their inscribed sculptural works, to the Pop Art movement of the 60s.

In the late 1960’s the dominance of Pop art was challenged and replaced by what we now know as Conceptual art. At the helm of the movement were Joseph Kosuth, Laurence Weiner and Robert Barry who were among others of the time liberating words and language from the confines of the linguistic field, awarding them a donation of new artistic value. By the end of the 1960’s, art had well and truly entered the realm of ideas, and the medium by which to express those ideas was language. The language-based works of the late sixties were consciously minimal, both aesthetically and ideologically.

While revelling in the open and broad artistic field that Conceptualism opened for them, both the neo-conceptualists of the 1980’s and today’s contemporary artists have taken this freedom of practice and disassociated themselves from its’ traditions of objectivity and aesthetic detachment.

I think my practice fits in nicely from the last paragraph above - I take influence from artists such as Weiner and Barry, but my work is alot less about ‘happenings’ and ideas, but more about the aesthetics of information/message distribution both analogue and digital. My text work is also much more emotive in it’s meaning and representations.

I take inspiration from the aesthetics of Barry’s text work - formal, minimal, detached with standardized fonts. I like the way his text book (bottom image) holds aesthetics of the hand-out - inexpensive, low-rest, mass-produced: no element of ‘fine’ art.

I enjoy harnessing this detached, formal, ‘art-less’ aesthetic and injecting a certain polemic into the words I use, very desperate, yearning messages that speak ambiguously of queer cultures and societal frustrations.

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jonathanalumbaugh · 7 years ago

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Weekly Digest

Dec 23, 2017, 4th issue.

A roundup of stuff I consumed this week. Published weekly. All reading is excerpted from the main article unless otherwise noted.

Read

When women are discussed on the main economics discussion forum, the conversation moves from the professional to the personal...

Even with generous subsidies, low-income people are still unlikely to buy health insurance...

Managers are biased negatively against minority workers, and this, in turn, makes the minority workers perform worse...

Living standards may be growing faster than GDP growth...

The World Bank’s $1-a-day poverty line inadequately deals with local context, and a better measure can be derived through more complicated math...

Decriminalizing sex work makes it safer and more common...

Poor kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods do a lot better than poor kids who grow up in poor ones...

Better trained doctors mean fewer opioid related deaths...

After a bad outcome, female surgeon’s referrals went down much more than male surgeons...

The average worker does not value an Uber-like ability to set their own schedule...

Foreign finance has led to more inequality...

Preschool programs targeted at the poor don’t work nearly as well as universal pre-school programs...

Shocks to the economy in certain sectors can have larger effects on the entire economy than previously thought...

— 13 economists on the research that shaped our world in 2017

Comments section: Pilote345 - NO WONDER: Recently, the pilots' pay was less than it was in the 1980's. They might be trying to improve, but for example, I just now found Allegiant Air found pays MD-80 1st Officers $34,440.00, not much more than the $15/hour crowd wants for starting burger flippers.

— Airlines battle growing pilot shortage that could reach crisis levels in a few years

— APOLLO 10 0N BOARD V0ICE TRANSCRIPTION

Under Schmidt’s leadership, Google notched its fair share of not-quite-not-evil missteps. After getting everyone hooked on Gmail and Search, the company started to erode some of its original privacy promises.

— Be Kind of Evil

“People want to cast it as a choice between policy or technology as a solution but those should exist hand-in-hand. We would have never gotten renewable energy prices where they are today without really ambitious public policy. It shows the importance of bold goals,” Brown says.

— California Poised To Hit 50% Renewable Target A Full Decade Ahead Of Schedule

“Keep your phone away from your body,” the state health department writes. “Although the science is still evolving, some laboratory experiments and human health studies have suggested the possibility” that typical long-term cell phone use could be linked to “brain cancer and tumors of the acoustic nerve,” “lower sperm counts,” and “effects on learning and memory.”

— California says the only safe way to talk on your cell phone is to text

Developer infatuation with Chrome is not good — because competition between browsers is good.

— Chrome is Not the Standard

The initial physical deployment of 5G networks alone could pack a major economic punch. A 2017 Accenture report forecasts the cellular communications industry will invest $275 billion in new networks, which will create up to 3 million jobs and add some $500 billion to the United States’ gross domestic product. Longer term, researchers expect the new 5G networks to help stimulate productivity growth to rates not seen since the 1950s.

— The Coming 5G Revolution

In early tests, the company claims the feature helped to reduce ghosting behavior on its service by 25 percent.

— Dating app Hinge rolls out a new feature to reduce ‘ghosting’

Liberated from the diamond and pointing calmly eastward, perhaps a designer’s pure intent is revealed—direction for an otherwise aimless walk in the woods.

— Decoding the Mysterious Markers on the Appalachian Trail

Trade the ginkgo biloba for a bag of spinach during your next stop at the store: Leafy greens may be your best resource for boosting memory... The study involved 960 people, all between 58 and 99 and without dementia. Everyone enrolled in the study was part of the Memory and Aging Project, which has been ongoing since 1979 at the Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University.

— EATING SALAD EVERY DAY KEEPS BRAINS 11 YEARS YOUNGER AND PREVENTS DEMENTIA, STUDY SHOWS

— Edward Snowden on Twitter

Commander Persera swam out into intergalactic space last week, she says in a forum post, piloting a ship called the Jack of Flames. The reason for the trip is simply to go further from Sol than anyone else (a previous record was set by one Commander Deluvian, who travelled 65,652 lightyears from Sol along a similar route). But also, she says, to bring a canister of mugs from the infamous Hutton Orbital space station into the void and leave them there. Just because.

— Elite Dangerous pilots are scrambling to rescue an explorer stranded in the void between galaxies

[Eminem says] that he's not making his music for other artists who aren't fans to begin with.

— Eminem Responds to Vince Staples’ Criticism of Him

Reports so far claim the spec will offer support for low, mid, and high-band spectrum from below 1 GHz (like 600 and 700 MHz) all the way up to around 50 GHz while including the 3.5 GHz band. It’s been said that the first 5G networks for consumers will begin rolling out in 2019 and this will continue throughout 2020.

— First 5G Specification has been Declared Complete by the 3GPP

As Brian and his wife wandered off toward the No. 2 train afterward, it crossed my mind that he was the kind of guy who might have ended up a groomsman at my wedding if we had met in college. That was four years ago. We’ve seen each other four times since. We are “friends,” but not quite friends. We keep trying to get over the hump, but life gets in the way.

— Friends of a Certain Age

Comment section: Blaming Amazon for this is wrong. The people make a choice to work for them. This is an indictment on our society that forces these people to have to work. Amazon isn’t a charity that should have to take care of people. But it’s all of us who are to blame.

— A Glimpse Inside CamperForce, Amazon's Disposable Retiree Laborers

Effective filmmakers, no matter their genre or taste, put their fingers in the air, feel for a current, and then make art that either complements or pushes against it. They distill the world they live in, which is why there’s no such thing as an apolitical film.

— How Big Screen Sci-Fi and Horror Captured 2016’s Political Paranoia

The Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts California will eventually make more than $1 billion annually from taxing recreational marijuana.

— HOW RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA IN CALIFORNIA LEFT CHEMISTS IN THE DARK

What makes for an effective office environment? Random encounters with your coworkers. And food. Lots and lots of food.

— How to Build a Collaborative Office Space Like Pixar and Google

Fidelity suggests having your yearly income saved at 30, three times your income at 40, seven times your income at 55, and 10 times your income at 67.

— How Much Should You Have Saved at Every Age?

HCI (human-computer interaction) is the study of how people interact with computers and to what extent computers are or are not developed for successful interaction with human beings.

— Human-computer interaction, from University of Birmingham

The company says it is now focused on “on developing and investing in globally scalable blockchain technology solutions,” but, as reported by Bloomberg, it has exactly zero partnerships in the works with crypto firms

— Iced Tea Maker's Stock Price Triples After Adding 'Blockchain' to Name”

9 “Should you invite someone who assaulted you to your wedding.” No.

— It Came From The Search Terms: “I Can See The Sun In Late December”

The best way to cook a steak is medium rare. Plenty of people will disagree with this statement, for different reasons.

— Medium Rare: The Best Way to Cook a Steak

It sounds like it was made by an algorithm. It checks off so many boxes it could land in anyone’s “Because you watched” recommendations.

— Netflix’s first big movie “Bright” feels like a blockbuster built by an algorithm

State law that is rarely invoked requires tied elections to be settled by “lot.”

— Oyster shucking? A duel? No, Virginia will pull a name from a film canister to settle tied election

— Parents give teacher wine with son's face on label

— Reggie Watts: Fuck Shit Stack

— Reggie Watts: Humor in music

Self-efficacy is defined as a personal judgement of "how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations".

— Self-efficacy (Wikipedia)

The problem Haven aims to address is known as an “evil maid” attack. Basically, many of the precautions you might take to protect your cybersecurity can go out the window if someone gains physical access to your device.

— Snowden's New App Turns Your Spare Android Phone into a Pocket-Sized Security System

After doing a lot of online research and making a terrible mess, I thought I could make a tutorial for humble people like me. If I can do it, you can do it too.

— The Ultimate Guide to DIY Screw Post Book Binding

The robot obediently appeared in the distance, floating next to Miller. Miller then walked into the same space as the robot and promptly disappeared. Well, mostly disappeared, I could still see his legs jutting out from the bottom of the robot. My first reaction was, “Of course that’s what happens.” But then I realized I was seeing a fictional thing created by Magic Leap technology completely obscure a real-world human being. My eyes were seeing two things existing in the same place and had decided that the creation, not the engineer, was the real thing and simply ignored Miller, at least that’s how Abovitz later explained it to me.

— We Need to Talk About Magic Leap's Freaking Goggles

What’s this mistake so many make? It’s using your current job title as your headline.

— What Your LinkedIn Headline Reveals About Your Self-Confidence At Work

With the Dec. 14 repeal, Comcast and others will be able to charge content companies exorbitant fees without, technically, blocking. This fundamentally changes how the internet works, argues Ryan Singel, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

— What will happen now that net neutrality is gone? We asked the experts

The story [Cat Person] stuck with me because I, too, have felt like the story’s main character, Margot. I have belittled myself to make a man in a vulnerable situation feel more comfortable. I have allowed myself to spend time with boys who I did not like that much but who I felt I owed my time to because they really liked me. And I have also taken part in the practice of ghosting- ignoring somebody who is texting me, instead of outright rejecting them. With time, I have gotten much better at being straightforward when someone is interested in me and the feeling is not reciprocated, but I still do the dance many women do: We exert energy into finding the most polite, passive way to get ourselves out of uncomfortable situations with men.

— Why Women Are Ghosting You

#weekly digest

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jimrmoore · 6 years ago

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Sensory Deprivation Tank

Excerpt from SOLITUDE FOR EVERYONE by Baron Otto von Tu

One of the most rewarding experiences I have had in my reclusive life is putting myself in a ‘float tank’. Developed by medical practitioner and neuropsychiatrist John C. Lily in 1954. After 10 years of experimenting with sensory deprivation he went on to make it a public tool for people to use. In the early 1980’s the ‘float tank’ business was quite successful. I have my own installed in my penthouse and use it every day.

The 18” inch deep tank that will accommodate your full body lying down and stretched out contains water and 2000 pounds of epson salt makes for a wonderful muscle relaxation experience. The sensory overload that we experience on a daily basis (provided you partake in the cultures constant media bombardment) is remedied by this tranquil environment. No sound - No sight - Water is body temperature so you lose track of your physical body while floating. Once you enter the tank you have control of when the lights go out. I have worked out many plans and ideas and problems by thinking them out while floating. No distractions or physical disturbances for the time you are in the tank. I usually float for at least 2 hours and sometimes 3 hours.

The design of these tanks are basically 2 types. The pod and the closet type.

By the early 1970s, Lilly had perfected the flotation tank in much the design used today.

In 1982, International REST Investigators Society (IRIS) was founded in order to give the increased number of REST researchers a platform to share their research findings. For several years float tanks were solely used by researchers in university laboratories or by private individuals. In 1983 floating increased in popularity as more became known about it's effects.

Some people insist floating has helped them meditate.

Carl Lewis used in-tank visualization techniques to prepare himself for his gold medal long jump at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Two-time NBA MVP, Stephen Curry reportedly uses a sensory-deprivation tank every 2 weeks. For further information read the comprehensive book about floating, ‘The Book of Floating’ by Michael Hutchison listed in the bibliography.

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raiseveganus · 6 years ago

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Interview With World Boxing Champion, Vegan Athlete Unsal Arik

The World Boxing Champion, Turkish boxer, vegan athlete Unsal Arik is also an animal rights activist and he is promoting veganism in every possible way. This iron-fisted man had success at every turn, but he also has infinite compassion in his heart and one day, it was no coincidence that he was recognized by the entire world. The vegan boxer and World Champion Unsal Arik has sincerely answered all the questions I asked him.

You might also like:

The Bravado of Not Being Manly Enough While Vegan

NFL Players Going Vegan To Boost Performance

Could Cory Booker be the First Vegan President?

5 Mind-Blowing Vegan Documentaries You Should Watch Right Now

Check Out This Vegan Celebrities List and What Urged them towards Veganism

An Interview With Vegan Athlete UFC Fighter Abel Trujillo

The post Interview With World Boxing Champion, Vegan Athlete Unsal Arik appeared first on Raise Vegan.

source https://raisevegan.com/interview-with-world-boxing-champion-vegan-athlete-unsal-arik/

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lorcleis · 8 years ago

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tag meme: what i’m writing

List all the things you’re currently working on in as much or little detail as you’d like, then tag some friends to see what they’re working on. This can be writing, art, vids, gifsets, whatever.

Tagged by: the trash monarch @sagemb

Okay so like Amy I am working on ten million things at once so I’m just going to list them in the order that they’ll probably end up done.

numero uno: corinthians, corinthians: sinking, and all corinthians-related projects

I love this fucking series with all of my heart but I’ll probably end up finishing it by the time Dwayne The Rock Johnson becomes president. Here’s an excerpt from chapter 11 of Corinthians:

“You watch your language, Valentina,” Josiah said. His voice had an underlying growl to it that betrayed a hot temper. “You raise your voice to me again and I will double your punishment. You will be shoveling waste until the cows come home.”

“That analogy doesn’t make any sense!” She shouted. Her hair flew everywhere. “We don’t even have cows!”

An excerpt from Corinthians: Sinking:

They tell the new guy about the regular, but he still fumbles through his first interaction with him, all thumbs at the cash register and stutters when he speaks.

“Lilies, right?” Jack asks. He fidgets with the ends of his apron.

“Lilies.” Dimitri nods and glances at something on his phone. He couldn’t pay less attention to Jack if he tried.

The metal tip of Jack’s prosthetic leg taps against the tile of the florist shop as he reaches into the back for the ever-present bundle of lilies reserved for their ever-present Sunday customer.

Dimitri glances down at Jack’s leg, but knows better than to ask about someone else’s war wounds. Jack notices his glance and bites his lip.

“Strigoi attack,” Jack says. He places the lilies on the counter gingerly. “They like whole limbs now, I guess.”

Dimitri grunts and Jack is suddenly away of how imposing his frame is in the tiny store. He hands Jack a set of bills and takes the lilies, leaving without another word.

An excerpt from Monarchists:

“You? You’re in class with them?” Sasha pointed towards the trio, who had moved on from braiding Norah’s hair to reading a book Loren had brought with studious sincerity.

“Astounding, I know,” Kailani said dryly. “But they can’t go it on their own. They might make up water, fire, and air, but they still need earth. Rumor has it, they’re searching for a spirit user as well, but none have turned up in this generation yet.”

As Sasha watched them from afar, Norah lifted her head from the book and made eye contact with him. She had an unscrupulous glance, but her face was so mesmerizingly beautiful it was like staring at the sun. Norah smiled, slow and cat-like. Sasha blinked, looking away in embarrassment.

“Don’t get too attached,” Kailani said, looking at Sasha’s expression. “The last one in their little group died in the spring semester. Brigitte was a bitch, but she didn’t deserve to be pulled apart by Strigoi like a rack of baby-back ribs.”

“And you?” Sasha asked.

“What about me?” Kailani answered.

“Do you think you’ll go the same way?” Sasha turned away from Norah’s group sitting on the grass, but could still feel her gaze on him.

“I like to think that I’ll go out in a more spectacular fashion. Maybe sparklers will be involved.” There was a twinkle in Kailani’s eye.

numero dos: paradise

This is half a short film and half a podcast. I have 10 million ideas running around in my head for Paradise and originally wanted to make it a mockumentary short film, but I think I can do it as a podcast as a proof of concept thing, then make that into a short film when I have the resources.

The town of Paradise is shaken by the murder of the town sweetheart, Kitty Westerfield. When an opportunistic journalism student catches wind of the conspiracies surrounding her death, she begins an investigation that might reveal more than she bargained for.

The Paradise cheer squad set up a memorial for her by her locker. It's decorated with pictures from her Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Her favorite flower is a light pink rose and Laura has made sure her locker is full of them. It smells up the entire hallway; people can barely stand it. It's as if Kitty Westerfield is haunting everyone from beyond the grave.

numero tres: wardlaw gardens

This has been in my back pocket for years and years. I sort of want to start shooting scenes from it, but I’m afraid it will fall flat, you know? My original concept was a four-book series, but I’m thinking it might better suit a TV show.

It was the quiet moments right after midnight when he could finally breathe. Bruise preferred a solitary life, which was something most people never understood. So he came here, to the roof. To the only place where he could think.

He narrowed his eyes as the light flickered again, this time in another window. Someone at Wardlaw was a restless as he was.

The world held its breath.

Bruise stood, shaking the darkness of the night off of him. His cigarette was gone and Monet had disappeared, taking the lighter with him. He made a note to buy another pack from the corner store when they were let off for weekends.

“Goodnight,” Bruise said, half to the world around him and half to the light in the distance, ever-flickering.

He began walking back towards the edge of the fire escape, but turned around to take one last look at the distant outline of Wardlaw Gardens.

The manor home was stately and vast, only the main house visible from the roof of Dumfries’s east wing. All lights were off save for one on the top floor at the far end. The curtains shifted to reveal a figure that Bruise could barely make out through the darkness. He could have sworn she put a finger over her lips.

Quiet.

The bell tower in the village chimed lightly, echoing across the surrounding mountainside and breaking Bruise out of his reverie. He descended the fire escape and entered the east wing of Dumfries through a crack in the back door. It was one o’clock in the morning.

Some call the hour after midnight the witching hour.

numero quatro: stygian

Uh, I just really love PJO/HP crossovers??

numero cinque: other shit i found in my google drive

So there was a thing called The Other Few about an aged child saviour of a fantasy realm that portalled to different places and was framed for murder:

“’Hmm?’ All you have to say to that is ‘hmm?’” Walden was becoming increasingly exasperated.

“Time moves more slowly in the Other Realm,” Isa said. “Hollis and I were taken in the late 1800s, but didn’t come back until recently.”

“No thanks to you,” Hollis said.

“Will you ever let that go?” Isa asked.

“They exiled me into the 1980s,” Hollis said. “It was awful.”

“Okay, so you’re time travelers,” Walden said.

“No,” Hollis and Isa said in unison.

“So you’re aliens,” Walden replied.

“No.”

“Alright,” Walden threw his hands into the air. “I give up.”

Isa sighed. “Hollis and I were soldiers. We were chosen when we were children by people from the Other Realm to help carry out a prophecy, but because we lived in the Other Realm so long there were… side effects.”

“Like your friend here’s translucent skin and my immortality,” Hollis said.

“You get to live forever?” Walden asked.

Hollis leveled a blank stare at him. “Yeah, it’s a hoot.”

Something called Mortuaria that only had a character list???:

NARRATOR

The one who narrates.

CECIL PAIL

A calm child of fourteen years. He is very reserved and considers his words carefully before he says them. Ebenezer’s nephew.

EBENEZER CAIRO

The eccentric owner of the funeral home in town. He may be silly at times, but his beliefs are very firm and he is often closed-minded about the most ridiculous things.

CARTER LANG

The funeral home assistant to Ebenezer. He preps all of the bodies for burial. Carter bears the burden of most of the work and does it with grace and a touch of sarcasm.

CONSTANCE BAUDELAIRE

The eldest sister in the Baudelaire coven. She has had to play mother after their father died and their mother succumbed to the darkness. She is strong-willed and always ready for an argument. Constance helps protect the reapers within the funeral home.

MAGDALENA BAUDELAIRE

The middle child of the Baudelaire coven. Maggie is the soft side to everything and a social butterfly, often complimenting Constance’s rougher side.

CARYS AND IVA BAUDELAIRE

The youngest girls in the Baudelaire coven and twins. Carys is handy with potions magic but cannot seem to perform spells on her own. Iva has a wealth of power but rejects the notion of witches.

RHYS IRONS

A well-dressed demon with a Queen’s English accent. He is often dressed in fine suits and pines after Constance.

AMARINTHE KAR

The nephilim librarian and caretaker of the Historic Lindley house. Cecil’s tutor. She’s a spitfire of a woman that gets along better with the elder residents of the town than people her own age.

ADELAIDE AND BRAM PAIL

Cecil’s parents. Seafaring treasure hunters that were lost at sea after searching for the pirate ship Perroux.

THE VERY IMPORTANT MEN

Two men that send Cecil to live with his uncle, claiming to be from the government. There is something inhuman about their very dark hair and very nice suits.

TAXI DRIVER

The man who is hired by the Very Important Men to take Cecil to Ebenezer’s house.

Hell, the precursor to Paradise and definitely a short film that will win me an Oscar:

A prom queen goes missing in the small town of Hell, prompting questions about the mysterious crack in the earth that lay just outside of the city limits.

BETTI (V.O.)

Did you ever stop to think--

UP FROM BLACK

CUT TO: MAIN ROAD

Betti is riding her bike. We see the town sign.

INTERCUT: BEHIND THE HIGH SCHOOL

Betti and Theo are sharing a joint.

BETTI (cont’d)

--that our town is pretty weird?

CUT TO: AN OPEN FIELD

Betti wakes up next to the crack. Aerial shot of the crack.

THEO

Nah. It’s the suburbs.

CUT TO: VARIOUS

Kellianne Hamilton smiles widely at a bake sale. Children play in a playground. Teenagers laugh encouragingly.

Desperate grabs inside of a coat closet. The wicked glint of blood being licked off of teeth. Someone knocks someone else out with the blunt end of a knife handle.

THEO

How bad can it be?

And an amazing script for a movie called Grace Under Pressure about a girl who was cheated on by the lead singer in the band she manages, he’s kicked out, she has to babysit her sister’s genius non-binary kid for the summer, the lead singer winds up dead, and the entire band rally’s around stealing the lead singer’s ashes and sprinkling them all over America on a road trip.

I tage: @objectiveheartmuscle @gigi256 @doubtthestarsarefire and @alyssiamking

#tag meme #my writing #mine #goddamn there's a lot in here but is discovered some fuckin GEMS in my google drive

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spicynbachili1 · 6 years ago

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Deep Analysis: Watchmen

The best/worst adaptation ever

You can’t find a more influential comic book than Watchmen.

Watchmen was a 12 issue comic book limited series released from 1986-1987 that received critical acclaim upon its release. It was the first comic book to be seen by mainstream audiences as a legitimate story which dealt with several serious topics and themes. It wasn’t just a silly picture book that you would buy for your kids at the grocery store for a quarter, this was a comic book for adults. Of course, there were other stories that came before Watchmen that also dealt with serious topics like alcoholism, drug abuse, and the clash of political ideologies, but Watchmen was the one that people outside of the comic book community took notice of. To this day, Watchmen ranks as one of Time Magazine’s 100 greatest novels ever made, standing alongside classics like A Clockwork Orange, The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, and To Kill A Mockingbird.

For the comic book community, it, alongside The Dark Knight Returns, ushered in an era of comics where characters became darker, more serious, edgier, and full of 90’s…ness. Referred to as “The Dark Age,” this time period was one of the worst periods ever for the comic book industry, culminating in Marvel’s bankruptcy, but none of that was because Watchmen was a bad story. Quite the contrary. Watchmen was so popular that people misunderstood why it was as successful as it was. Many prominent comic book creators believed Watchmen was successful because it was a dark and mature story, so they tried to emulate that style without understanding that the content of Watchmen is what made it so good, not just because it was aimed at adults. Watchmen was good because it was a good story, one that comic book creators still look to for inspiration to this day. The legacy of Watchmen is undeniable, safely secured in the pantheon of comic book greatness.

And then Zack Snyder made an adaptation of it in 2009.

Before I get into dissecting Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, I wanted to share a little behind the scenes look at what led to this post. Back at the beginning of October, Matt approached me and asked me to revive the “Deep Analysis” feature from a few years ago, saying that we were in a position where we had enough talented writers to pull off a new monthly feature. I was honored, but also a little concerned at how big of a task it was. What the hell could I talk about that would justify a Deep Analysis? What would be worthy of writing several thousand words that people will actually want to read and discuss? What would be a movie that people will be passionate about?

I was debating doing Spring Breakers, a 2013 slice of arthouse shlock that condemns the dissonance between reality and fantasy that’s generated from the media, but I’m pretty sure not many people have seen it. And the people that have seen it would say that the movie is about ASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Then I thought about doing Silent Hill so I could write about how valid a good/decent movie is when it butchers its source material, but I didn’t want to beat on the Silent Hill horse more than it has been. But then I found my answer in the comments of my NYCC article on HBO’s upcoming Watchmen series. It was relevant, people are clearly interested in Watchmen, and it would be worth discussing since I’m a pretty big fan of the movie. So let’s do it. Let’s analyze Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.

A Finely Assembled Clock

Watchmen began with the murder of a government-sanctioned vigilante named the Comedian. Murdered in his own apartment, the police are at a loss at how a man like the Comedian, real name Edward Blake, could have been thrown from his apartment window when he was built like a tank. A mentally unhinged vigilante that used to work with the Comedian, Rorschach, investigates the crime scene and believes that someone is trying to murder costumed vigilantes. He warns Nite Owl/Dan Dreiberg, his former partner, Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt, the smartest man in the world, Doctor Manhattan/Jon Osterman, the most powerful being in existence that can bend space, time, and matter to his will, and Silk Spectre/Laurie Jupiter, Manhattan’s girlfriend who is his only tether to humanity. What follows is a huge conspiracy of lies, murder, and existentialism all in a bid to save the world from nuclear Armageddon.

If you were to ask me what separated Watchmen from every other comic at the time, it would be that it relied on extensive world building and flashbacks to flesh out its cast as well as the topics that it addressed head-on. When you read Watchmen, you could just read through the story and be done with it, but that would be doing a disservice to author Alan Moore. At the end of each issue are several pages dedicated to extraneous materials that have no bearing on the rest of the story, but flesh out the world that the characters inhabit.

There are multiple excerpts from the autobiography of the original Nite Owl that detailed his life, how he became a police officer, and what made him become a costumed vigilante. Then you have articles, interviews, and other supplemental material featured at the end that only serve to enhance the world of Watchmen. Yes, it’s supposed to take place in an alternate 1980’s America, one where Richard Nixon is still in office after successfully winning the Vietnam War, but it’s still our world. But so much time and effort are placed in creating a living, breathing world where other side characters exist. Mind you, you don’t have to read these supplemental materials. You can still enjoy the story as is, but the extra material only serves to do more good than not.

Over the course of the comic, when we’re not following the vigilantes try to solve the mystery of who killed the Comedian, we’re following along with multiple different characters who are living their daily lives. They never directly intercede in the main plot with the exception of maybe one character, but they’re around to flesh out the world and ideas that Watchmen brings up. We may follow some police officers, a right-wing newspaper organization, a psychologist, a guy who sells newspapers, a cabbie and her problems with her girlfriend, or we may just read a comic book about a sailor trying to return home to his family before they’re killed by pirates. All of it serves to cement that there are living, breathing people that aren’t wrapped up in the march to doomsday.

Which brings us to the themes that are addressed in the story. I could go on for days talking about each of the story’s main ideas, like how Watchmen addresses identity, patriotism, fate, time, the validity of vigilante justice, crime, and the moral gray area of achieving world peace at the immense cost of life (Ozymandias and Thanos would get along really well). Those are all well and good, but they’re not what I think the story is really about. For me, Watchmen is a story about the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear apocalypse.

Through both the main plot and the various characters interactions, one troubling scenario remains at the forefront; the world is inching closer to nuclear war. Nite Owl dreams of the world ending in an atomic explosion, Ozymandias tries to save the world before the nukes start flying, and the people don’t worry about how Dr. Manhattan could erase reality if he wanted to. Instead, they worry about the Soviet Union. To take a step away from Watchmen for a minute, in 1986 in our world, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were trying to do whatever they could to reduce their nuclear arms, terrified that one of them would be the one to end all life on Earth.

Fears of a nuclear war were prevalent during the 80’s but the fear of the atomic bomb was around for decades. The Cuban Missile Crisis is probably the best example that comes to mind, with even people in the White House like former Secretary of State Robert McNamara saying that the only reason the Cuban Missile Crisis didn’t erupt into nuclear war was because of level heads. The Cuban Missile Crisis may have been the theoretical worst case scenario of atomic warfare, the nuclear detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the practical reality. More relevant during the creation of Watchmen was the Chernobyl meltdown, where a nuclear power plant in Russia had a catastrophic meltdown in 1986, rendering all life in the immediate area inhospitable to humans still to this day. Fears of nuclear war were legitimate, and with the two largest superpowers in the world having polarizing ideologies that frequently butted heads, you’d better believe that it was a very real possibility that World War III would erupt over the slightest dispute.

I’d argue that Watchmen could only exist in the 1980’s, right when the Cold War was still at the forefront of politics. Telling the story outside of the 1980’s is possible, but you need to heavily alter it or just ignore the Cold War connections. DC Comics is currently making a sequel to Watchmen called Doomsday Clock, which as of this writing is at issue seven of 12, but it’s not set in the world of Watchmen. It’s set in the modern DC universe, without a single mention of the Cold War. The DC prequels, Before Watchmen, knew that it wasn’t the smartest idea to directly set themselves during the Cold War and the events of the original series, so each of the various miniseries was more character focused and set during whatever time period the creators wanted to set it in. But the 2009 film version tries to tell the story of Watchmen and its Cold War fears from the perspective of 2000’s America through Zack Snyder’s vision. Unfortunately, Snyder made the same mistakes that the comic book creators of the 90’s took from Watchmen that nearly doomed the industry; he took the story at face value. He thought Watchmen’s value was in its violence and darkness.

We’re Locked In With Rorschach

Zack Snyder isn’t a bad director, but he is a director with a very particular style. All you need to do is look at a Zack Snyder movie and you’ll see for better or worse, a lot of his hallmarks. Is there a dark/muted color palette? Is there hardly any joy or positive eomtion? Is the focus more on the action than the story? Are the characters unlikable? If you’ve answered yes to all of these questions, then there’s a pretty good chance that you’re watching a Zack Snyder movie. That’s not to say that we’re watching a bad movie, but we’re definitely watching a Zack Snyder one.

At first glance, you may think that Watchmen would be a good movie for Zack Snyder to direct. He holds the original comic in reverence and slavishly tried to recreate scenes from the comics on film the same way that Dave Gibbons drew it. He used David Hayter’s (yes, that David Hayter) script, which took wholesale lines and scenes from the comics that even Alan Moore, who has historically been against any adaptation of his work ever being made, said that Hayter’s script was the closest he saw anyone ever getting to making an ideal Watchmen screenplay. So what happened? Why do some people revile it and call it a bastardization of the comic, despite the time, effort, and love that was clearly put into it?

We might as well start with Zack Snyder, since this is less Watchmen and more Zack Snyder Presents: Watchmen. His style is caked all over the movie, whether it fits or not. Snyder is what you get when you let an edgy teenager become a director. He’s going to focus on what he likes and what he thinks is cool over what other people think. You can easily see this in Batman v. Superman, where most of his time is spent dealing with the sloppy moral dilemma that Batman and Superman have to go through despite none of it making logical sense. However, when the two heroes eventually duke it out, it’s pretty damn awesome. The same can be said for Watchmen, where it seems like Snyder was interested in only two things; Rorschach and the Comedian.

Rorschach was one of the main characters of the comic, but time was evenly spent getting to know all six of our main characters. Each character had an issue dedicated to them where we learned more about them and their personalities, but everyone had an equal amount of development. In the movie, we learn all about Rorshach, but as for Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, Silk Spectre, and Nite Owl, we barely delve into their backstories besides a few throwaway lines. Of the four, Dr. Manhattan does have his backstory explained, but it feels like it was out of necessity. They offer the briefest explanation about how Jon Osterman became Dr. Manhattan, but they leave out his relationship with Janie Slater, Laurie Jupiter, and his father forcing him to become a scientist out of necessity, making what we do get feel hollow. That being said, Snyder does spend a lot of time focusing on the Comedian, which lends weight to the fact that Snyder was only interested in what he thought was cool.

The Comedian keeps all of his scenes intact, as does Rorschach. We get an extended fight scene with the Comedian that wasn’t in the comic. Rorschach’s fight scenes are all in graphic detail. The Comedian’s nihilistic dialogue and Rorschach’s grim narration haven’t changed at all. Snyder’s Watchmen is obsessed with these moments, yet the movie doesn’t realize that we’re not supposed to really root for these characters. They’re terrible people and the comic made it vastly aware at how awful both of these characters are, but they’re framed as being badass and cool. The movie cuts down on their condemnation and instead focuses on their greatest hits. Remember when Rorschach threw the vat of hot grease at a guys face? Well, here it is in live action with Rorschach screaming like a maniac about it!

Everything else is downplayed. Ozymandias’ presence in the story is mitigated to his introduction, his assassination attempt, and the ending, which does line up with the comic, but he feels like an after thought here. At least in the comic we frequently saw him talking with other characters, albeit in flashbacks, but we were still able to see him as a fleshed out character. We sort of see how Nite Owl struggles with his identity and accepting that he loves being a vigilante, but you’d have to squint to really see it. Worst of all, the extensive world building is gone. It’s understandable that there had to be some cuts made to make sure the movie didn’t run five hours and it’d be nearly impossible to recreate the pages of supplemental material well, but a lot of what made Watchmen the comic it was is gone. The issue with Dr. Malcolm Long, Rorschach’s psychiatrist, was my favorite issue in the entire series due to how it painted Rorshach as both a monster and a victim, yet showed how the good intentioned doctor could be dragged down to Rorschach’s level, unable to help him and instead adopting Rorschach’s nihilistic viewpoint on humanity. Here… it’s reduced to a quick line about how Dr. Long can’t possibly help him.

But really, the biggest problem that the film adaptation has is that Snyder turned Watchmen into just another action movie. Yes, there was action in the comic, but it was never the focus like it was here. You can’t go a few scenes without an action beat taking place. While some of them are actually really well done, like Hollis Mason fighting against a gang that breaks into his house while flashing back to his days as Nite Owl, you have way more that are just brawls for the sake of brawls. We didn’t come to see the Watchmen fight and pop bones out of arms. Zack Snyder forgot the biggest truth of them all. The original series was a mystery starring vigilantes set during the Cold War that featured action in it. He made an action movie starring 90’s heroes and Batman wannabees that has some mystery elements. All of that Cold War fear of nuclear Armageddon that the characters feel and discuss that was one of the driving themes of the comic? Rarely acknowledged.

And just to quickly bring this up, a lot of the design choices made in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen were to make the movie more similar to Christopher Nolan’s trilogy. Nite Owl was designed to be more like Batman, Ozymandias was designed to be a parody of the Schumacher movies, and you could easily swap scenes from Watchmen and The Dark Knight and be unable to tell the difference. We’ll come back to this.

Turning Oxygen To Gold

So if Watchmen completely bungles its themes, turns itself into an action movie, and focuses on the “cool” characters Rorschach and the Comedian over the rest of the main cast, you might be shocked to hear that I’d still rank Watchmen as one of my favorite movies. It’s a testament to how good the original story is that I could overlook the many, many, many, flaws of this adaptation. Yes, it is more interested in Rorschach and his crusade against evil than the other characters, but Rorschach is undeniably the best character in the movie.

In the comic, Rorschach was a man of few words and very few emotions. Most of his dialogue and choice of words was up to the reader’s discretion, when certain moments, like his climactic final scene with Dr. Manhattan, always felt a bit flat to me with how brief and matter of fact it was. I can’t imagine a voice for Rorschach except for Jackie Earle Haley’s performance. He brings a certain menace to the character that we always knew he had, but never saw. Rorschach’s most vile acts were usually done off panel, but we see that this Rorschach is much more active and unstable, which perfectly suits the character. When Rorschach isn’t a violent sociopath, there are a few scenes where we do see a warmer side to him, mostly through his friendship with Nite Owl.

While the movie does away with a lot of the world building, it did decide to expand upon the Minutemen is fantastic ways. The intro to the movie, set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is easily one of the best intros I’ve ever seen in a movie, telling a complete story solely through music and action. No dialogue needed. In fact, I’m a fan of the entire soundtrack. The music that plays during Dr. Manhattan’s backstory is simple, yet perfect for the story being told, but the true highlight comes from the licensed music featured throughout. Yes, even the “Hallelujah” sex scene has its charms (obviously NSFW), if only for how laughably over-the-top it is. It also doesn’t hurt that all of the songs used are great tunes in their own right.

But as sacrilegious as it may sound, what really seals the deal for me is the new ending. It isn’t perfect, but it really is superior to the original ending. Not just the epilogue, where Silk Spectre and Nite Owl adopt fake identities and Nite Owl grows a terrible blonde mustache, but the change for what saves the world. Minus the changes made to the characters and what got more screentime that was prevalent throughout the entire movie, the biggest change that riled up fans and critics alike was that the movie drastically altered the ending. And I like it. Fight me.

In the original series, Ozymandias’ plan for world peace was to fake an alien attack on the United States by kidnapping artists, scientists, and writers to create a fake monster with the cloned brain of a psychic that would have been teleported into New York City, let out a psionic EMP, kill millions of people and drive even more insane, and use that alien attack to force world leaders to put their differences aside to fight a non-existent alien threat. It’s goofy and introduces plenty of leaps of logic in the original series as well as introduce ideas that were never mentioned before that point. Now we have to contend with aliens and psychics in the world of Watchmen that don’t really gel with the rest of the world. I know that Dr. Manhattan exists and he’s more bizarre and outlandish than any alien or psychic could ever be, but the characters at least acknowledge that he’s an aberration. His presence is terrifying because of how unnatural he is.

In the movie, Ozymandias’ plan for world peace is a little bit different. Using his vast resources, he creates multiple fission reactors and places them in key cities across the globe. The reactors all share the same energy signature as Dr. Manhattan, so when Ozymandias forces them all to meltdown, they kill millions while emitting the energy signature of Manhattan himself. Every world government instantly turns on Manhattan, effectively ending the threat of nuclear war because now they have a common enemy; Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan agrees that this plan is for the best to ensure a lasting peace and leaves Earth for another galaxy, allowing the peace to exist.

The problem that the original ending had was that it was easy to prove that Ozymandias’ alien attack was a fake. In the first issue of Doomsday Clock, civilians are protesting against him because they discover how the alien was a model, how Ozymandias was responsible for kidnapping the artists/scientists/writers, and the peace was instantly shattered. At least in the movie, it’s much harder to prove that Ozymandias was the mastermind behind it all. Everyone knows who Dr. Manhattan is in the world of Watchmen. Everyone saw him have a mental breakdown on live TV. So when a few days later and energy that is similar to Manhattan’s energy destroys New York, Paris, Moscow and a whole host of other cities, you better believe that people are more willing to believe it. It just makes more sense to turn the world’s greatest hero into the world’s greatest villain.

Damon Lindelof: Smartest Man or Smartest Termite?

It’s ironic that when Watchmen released in 1986, it revolutionized the comics industry, but when a movie was made about it in 2009, it was met with indifference. Sure, some people loved it, but others hated it, or worse, thought nothing about it. The most revolutionary comic in existence was met with apathy when it was released to theaters. I think that Watchmen was met with lukewarm reception was because instead of it being a trailblazer like its comic counterpart, it was just following the then current trend of comic book movies.

It’s not a stretch to say that The Dark Knight is one of the best comic book movie ever made. It redefined what a comic book adaptation could be, introducing themes, ideas, and depicting violence that no mainstream audiences had ever seen before in a comic book movie. Watchmen was still in development when The Dark Knight released, but you better believe that Warner Brothers tried to force Snyder to make Watchmen as similar to Nolan’s Batman movies as possible. This is purely my own opinion here, I don’t have any hard evidence to support this claim, but it’s hard not to notice that Watchmen feels more like a Batman movie than an adaptation of Watchmen, or at the very least, a Watchman movie put through a Batman filter.

Watchmen was stuck between a rock and a hard place. You had one of the best stories ever told, but it was created from a very 2000’s mindset. Zack Snyder tried to make it his version of Watchmen, putting a focus on what he liked and ignoring what made the comic stand out. The Cold War commentary was put on the back burner to make it an action movie. Warner Bros. tried to make it aesthetically similar to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. In short, everything that made Watchmen Watchmen was removed and replaced with… well, a late 2000’s action movie. The fact that Watchmen still comes out in one piece by the end of it is a miracle to say the least, but that the movie is still visually striking, contains some truly spectacular scenes, phenomenal performances, and even finds a way to improve on the original source material is a goddamn gift from the gods.

2019 is shaping up to be a big year for the franchise. Doomsday Clock is set to conclude (hopefully) sometime in the summer and Damon Lindelof’s version of Watchmen will release as well. He’s been pretty quick to refer to Watchmen as sacred text and that he’ll keep it intact but remix it, whatever the hell that means. I’m not expecting HBO’s Watchmen to be a perfect version of the story. Nothing will compare to the original limited series. But experimenting with it isn’t a bad thing. Zack Snyder’s version was full of experimentation and while some would argue that most of it was poorly planned and ultimately failed, there are some like myself that adore it. No one is ever going to be 100% happy with any adaptation of Watchmen. Hell, you can say that about any adaptation in existence. But change is not inherently bad. Make it Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen. We’ll always have Alan Moore’s Watchmen and yes, we’ll always have Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. I just hope the new show lives up to its lofty expectations.

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