#i always thought it was a term that only described new yorkers but apparently not

[15fishes]

*new england is basically a group of states in the northeast of the u.s, new york is not considered part of new england along with other states people may lump in with the general northeastern u.s (depending on where they live) so in some cases its important to distinguish between just vaugly the northeast/‘north’ and the actual region of new england

edit: PLZ TELL ME WHAT IT IS IF U SAID OTHER

[bleachbleachbleach]

HELLO.

I just wanted to say that I love, love, love your tags on that character/tool post a lot! Some of my favorite shows/books involve characters that can't keep it together and just barely make it to the end of the story or make it there in an "inconvenient way" and tbh I find that usually the narratives that follow these characters don't really work away from them either--the narrative is just usually more questioning instead of fully formed.

Like, 'what if/how would', y'know? There's less of a clear meaning and more just 'what if they hadn't done that. what if they had done that. what if all that meant nothing. what if that struggle was all there was'.

But oh boy, when they DO work away from the narrative. *chefs kiss*

I mean, most of my favorite Bleach characters are narrative nightmares who either hinder or cut off lines of theme in the story entirely. And, in general, I think there are A LOT of characters in shonen--a genre known for very long narratives that can't possibly complete every thought but also can't just abandon all those characters introduced ESPECIALLY the fan favorites or personal favorites--work in the way you described.

Tbh i think your tags really highlight why so many ppl get drawn to these characters/why they're so fun to play with in fanfiction.

If you have more to add or more thoughts about this you want to lay down I am here, eagerly awaiting and ready to pick them up.

Also, who do you think in Bleach is the most fun characters who sort of drop kicked the story, in your opinion? Who's the one you like the most? And who's the one you dislike the most?

[For posterity the referenced post is this one.]

Aww, thank you! That’s really lovely to hear. I was anxious about even putting it in tags because I don’t think I presently have the capacity to explain it well—and even if I did might still sound bananas to many. Or at least the bit about negotiating with characters and how *they* feel about being subjects in stories. Because as much as that really is my practice saying it out loud takes me back to like… FFN in 2003 where every store was prefaced by extensive chat-form back-and-forths between the fic author and their character "musies" and that is not something I think fandom would benefit from bringing back in force, hahaha. But anyway.

Here’s the part where I disappoint because I don’t think I actually know Bleach well enough to speak to it in this context. WHICH SOUNDS DUMB EVEN AS I TYPE IT BECAUSE LOL WTF IS THE NAME OF THIS BLOG WE ARE CHARLATANS AND POSERS FOR CLAIMING AS OUR NAMESAKE NOT ONE BLEACH BUT THREE BLEACHES but truly, my experience of Bleach has a shallow depth of field. I feel like I have weirdly intimate knowledge of some severe rabbit holes but a non-existent to uneasy sense of the gestalt.

Like idek man, in my "slow re-read where I am actually paying attention" Ichigo hasn’t even met Byakuya and Renji yet. ToT

I'm gonna put this behind a cut because it spidered all over the place, but in summary:

characters and their capacity to produce narrative failure

the charm of longform serialized series and their invitations to imagine stuff

me attempting to talk about Hitsugaya and feeling a fool, as usual

I guess in general terms, I’m really interested in characters and their capacity to produce narrative failure. Not failure as in 'bad' but failure as in things that break form or are circuitous or are actively detrimental to a narrative arc. All my strongest examples of what I’m thinking of are from a different fandom and therefore not relevant to this blog, alas. By comparison I think anyone in Bleach can keep it together better than the characters that are immediately coming to mind, lol. But I think this idea dovetails often with trauma narratives, or depression narratives, because these things are often… non-narrative? Like, there’s no fourth or fifth for minor fall or major lift. Sometimes it’s the same thing over and over again, or maybe nothing. Maybe it’s the exact same self-sabotage narrative dictates could have been avoided. Maybe it’s some act that emanates forth but cannot be explained because it cannot be explained and will never be explained. That’s a version of what I’m talking about, in any case, though not the only version.

Your note about longform shounen definitely resonates with me, too. In my mind I don’t like long things and I prefer series that are more self-contained but whenever I have ever landed in a long-term fandom, with a piece of media I felt obliged to carve out chunks of my life for, and to interact with at that level of creative fannishness, it’s always been something stupid long and serialized by the seat of its pants. I know plot holes or dropped threads bother a lot of people (makes total sense, don’t get me wrong) but I find these things incredibly attractive. I see them as invitations to join in the fun. Especially when it’s so much a part of the form and genre to have this, as you said, lack of real expectation that every thread will be followed to its conclusion (or that it would be worthwhile to do so) and every thought completed.

There’s this piece by David Grann that was published in The New Yorker in 2004 that I really love that speaks to part of this idea, albeit in terms of fictional universes versus fictional characters. But Grann is talking about Sherlock Holmes (Doyle original) and the ways that Sherlockians would like, approach apparent lapses in narrative and then solve them according to the established rules of the universe. I just love that. There’s also the line, "Never had so much been written by so many for so few," which LOL if that ain’t fandom I don’t know what is!!

I feel like I’m actually talking about three distinct but related facets of these thoughts in this post, except all at once and without clear transition, uhhhhh.

Gah, I am broken and now can ONLY think of examples from my not-Bleach fandom, but to try a different tack and add yet another facet to this already funhouse-mirror post, my various attempts to write Hitsugaya often feel like they come up against a version of this. I think Hitsugaya has aggressive side character energy, and I find it difficult to make him the center of a story and have it feel right to me. He feels different to me than writing other minor characters, where they can be the center of their own stories even if their story is not the main story. Like, two of my fave characters in my other fandom have literally like… three lines in 350+ episodes and it feels easier to imagine THEM at the center of their story and I think what it comes down to is that Hitsugaya probably prefers what he not be written. And when he does become more narrative I think he’d prefer that none of it was happening in the fist place. But at the same time he always seems to be…around??? whether there is really a good reason for him to be present or not. XD So while, say, he and Bartleby "would prefer not to" (because THAT'S what this post needs, a Melville reference), Bartleby actually opts out and Hitsugaya out here volunteering.

He also often feels non-narrative to me because he feels very declarative, if that makes sense? Like, the coming-to-decisions or coming-to-realizations parts of existence happen pretty quick, or are approached perfunctorily. I feel like I find narrative in the "coming" part of that equation and instead Hitsugaya will be like, well, I’ve already done that part without you, and/or plan to do that part in the future and it will still be without you, the audience. Anyway, here’s the determination I’ve made, here’s what I’m going to do, and here begins the long and probably tedious process of my doing that thing (off 2 go train in a cave for a bit). I don’t think he actually believes the world is that simple, Tab A into Slot B, but I do think he’s already made that assessment and can see coming to terms with that as a horizon, if that makes sense. So even if he doesn’t know the answer to something, or is completely at a loss of what to do (what to say to Hinamori? how to productively address the number Aizen’s done on him) there’s still not necessarily a story there. Maybe the answer is you grind, and it is repetitive and boring. Maybe you just hold things. There’s not even the act of learning how to hold things, necessarily, just the practice of doing so.

Wow, that probably doesn’t sound good! I feel like I need to suffix this with the assurance that Hitsugaya is my absolute runaway character in the whole series and this was true 15 years ago and it is still true now (truer, even) and everything I just said are reasons why I love him.

[bobasheebaby]

200 Brooklyn 99 Prompts

Rosa

1 “Talk to him, that's what friends do.” “Nope. I'm gonna wait 'til I'm on my deathbed, get in the last word and then die immediately.” “That's your plan for dealing with this?” “That's my plan for dealing with everything. I have seventy-seven arguments I'm going to win that way.”

2 “I'm already seeing somebody, NAME.” “Oh, and just like that, things got interesting.” “And just like that, I left.”

3 “NAME is even wearing his/her formal leather jacket.” “It's the one without any blood on it.”

4 “Right, that's the guy/girl you said the lame stuff about. Like he’s/she's a good listener.” “Sorry, what do you look for in a guy/girl?” “Real stuff, like the shape of his/her ass.”

5 “Sorry I'm late. I had to go back to the deli and return my Everything Bagel. In what world does everything not include beef jerky?” “All of them.”

6 “He/She also likes to look up recipes online and go, "Who's got the time?"

7 “Thank you, NAME. Your entire life is garbage.”

8 “NAME , tell us about your family.” “I have one.”

9 “Anyone over the age of six celebrating a birthday should go to hell.”

10 “I am dating his/her nephew/niece. Now we are hanging out on weekends. What is next? Oh! Small talk.”

11 “Wait, is that a smile I see?” “Possibly. My immune system is too weak to fight off my smile muscles.”

12 “Whoa, what happened? You know what, forget it. I'll just read NAME’s notes.”

13 “NAME? Are you stuck in there?” “No, I'm in here by choice.” “Oh, 'cause I hear some banging noises as if someone was struggling to open the door.” “No. That was the pipes.” “Or, is it the sound of you learning how to ask for help? You know, you can't spell ‘independent’ without ‘dependent.’” “And you can't spell ‘Go [bleep] yourself’ without ‘[bleep] you.’”

14 “I've said "excuse me" more times this morning than I have in my entire life. Twice!”

15 “Oh, nothing better after a long shift than coming to BAR NAME. It's like Cheers, where everybody knows your name.” “A place where everybody knows your name is hell. You're describing hell.”

16 “So, what is this? Casual, serious? I need to know how to make fun of you.”

17 “NAME and I broke up. He/She ate soup too much.” “What, like every day?” “It happened twice.”

18 “So, what are you drinking?” “I'll have a margarita. But, like, a skinny margarita. So, like, tequila, lime, and a tiny splash of agave.” “Mm. I refuse to order that.”

19 “What are you looking all wistful about?” “Just thinking, about relationships and love, and how I'm way better at them than I thought I'd be. Should I do a TED Talk on it?” “Doesn't seem any dumber than all the other TED Talks.”

20 “Why didn't you tell me? I had no idea things were getting that serious.” “Yeah, it's very embarrassing having feelings.”

21 “So are you bringing someone to the wedding?” “No, I'm taking a break from dating for a while.” “What?” “I'm sick of asking people how many siblings they have. Oh, is it somewhere between zero and two? How fascinating.”

22 “I grew a goatee and it looks amazing, and I know you can see it.” “Of course we can see it, NAME. It's horrible.”

23 “It feels like you're being a little harsh.” “Thanks, good note. I was going for extremely harsh. I'll turn it up.”

24 “Are your senses heightened?” “I think I might be pregnant, not bitten by a radioactive spider.”

25 “You're what sneezes are!”

26 “Seriously, you guys should stand up once in a while. You know, for your hearts.”

27 “NAME, this is dumb. I'm just gonna go.” “No, no, no. You promised me more time. I still have seven minutes.” “I really don't want to miss my flight, and I cannot physically stand the way that room smells anymore.” “Just breathe through your mouth.”

28 “You know, some people say, ‘Mo money, mo problems,’ but those people are idiots. Money's amazing.”

29 “Dude, just admit you ruined everything and turned our lives into a living hell. No biggie.”

30 “We don't want anyone getting alcohol poisoning, so if you throw up, you're disqualified.” “I never throw up. I just tell my stomach to deal with it. My body is terrified of me.”

Jake

31 “I also have a hairline fracture in my thumb. Mankind's least important finger, am I right?”

32 “I wasn't hurt that badly. The doctor said all my bleeding was internal. That's where the blood's supposed to be.”

33 “How much could I possibly owe you? Fifty, sixty bucks?” “Two thousand, four hundred and thirty seven dollars.” “Dollars?! Wait, of course dollars. Why was that the part I was surprised by?”

34 “So, I'm going to grab a healthy breakfast.” “Are those gummy bears wrapped in a fruit roll-up?” “Breakfast burrito, but yeah.” “I pity your dentist.” “Joke's on you. I don't have a dentist.”

35 “I'm talking to my credit card company. I tried to get an online subscription to the New Yorker and they declined me. Apparently, based on my previous purchases, they assumed it was fraud. That's crazy. I'm fancy. One time I had coffee-flavored ice cream.”

36 “Rules are made to be broken.” “They were made to be followed. Nothing is made to be broken.” “Uh, piñatas.” “Glow sticks.” “Karate boards.” “Spaghetti when you have a small pot.” “Rules.”

37 “Hey, can I ask you something?” “Mm-hmm.” “If the toilets drain into the ocean, does that mean a tiny shark could swim up and bite me in the butt?” “No, not at all.” “Psh, lame.”

38 “NAME, super important question. Which one of these shirts should I wear to dinner with your dad/mom tonight?” “Those are exactly the same.” “I have a signature look, NAME.”

39 “Hello, good sir, I'd like your finest bottle of wine, please.” “That will be $1,600.” “Great, I'd like your $8-est bottle of wine, please.”

40 “I am straight-up depressed. NAME’s been doing her best to cheer me up. He/She gave me this sticker this morning just for waking up.” “Ew, it's like you're dating your teacher.” “I know, it's so hot.”

41 “Wait. Before you say anything, I want to guess what happened based on your face. Someone died. No! You won a prize. I'm not getting better at this.”

42 “What is the bandwidth on the wifi here? We have much content to stream.”

43 “Oh, you sweaty, chair-spinning morons. You're gonna get us out of here.”

44 “Sir, I think I speak for all of us when —“ “He/She doesn't.” “He/She doesn't.”

45 “So, your brother/sister's a bit of a nightmare.” “I wouldn't say that. I mean, at most, he’s/she's a daymare.” “Those are so much scarier.” “Yeah.”

46 “Look, NAME, I burnt two hundred calories.” “That's your heart rate.” “Yeah, that checks out.”

47 “I don't slump, people. I opposite of slump. I pmuls. That's slump backwards and it's what I do. I pmuls all over this bitch.”

48 “Excuse me. We were just looking for a place to —“ “Boink.” “Yes, boink. That's my preferred term for it, too.”

49 “Thank you for doing this. I love you.” “Noice. Smort. I love you too.”

50 “Adult parties? I believe they're called orgies.”

51 “I have a sexy voice!

Champagne.

Mountain range.

Hugs.”

52 “Has anyone ever told you you look just like a statue?” “Yes.”

53 “NAME, you're smiling. It's very weird. Like seeing a turtle out of its shell.”

54 “You look happy. Let me guess. Your egg sandwich fell on the floor, and they gave it to you for free.” “No. Can you do that? Why doesn't everyone just drop their sandwiches on the floor?” “I was trying to insult you.” “And instead you gave me an amazing life hack!”

55 “So, we gonna talk about what happened back there? I haven't seen someone cry that much since NAME heard they were remaking ‘First Wives Club.’”

56 “Hey, there, NAME. Everything okay?” “No, I'm having a meltdown.” “Props. That was amazing.” “Thanks. It was a lot of work.”

57 “Almost makes me wanna take things seriously all the time. But then I'm like ‘boobs, farts, boobs, whatever’.”

58 “Ahh, babe, this is so nice. There are hot stones on our butts for no reason.” “Not on mine. My butt stones keep falling off, because I'm so tense about NAME being here and ruining everything.”

59 “Okay, don't shoot! That's how people get shot.”

60 “Rule number 3: Let's not have sex right away.” “Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool. No doubt, no doubt, no doubt. Good rule. No sex. Good rule.”

Charles

61 “Okay, but I thought since you were in charge, maybe I could be your right hand man? Your Tinker Bell?” “Tinker Bell?” “Let me tell you something about Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell is a loyal lieutenant and a real thorn in the side of Captain Hook.”

62 “NAME, why don't you show Danger what a fax machine is.” “Okay. Imagine a letter had unprotected sex with a phone.”

63 “Hey, NAME, are you ready to go streaking?” “What?” “That's what my dad/mom and I called getting blonde streaks in your hair. We used to do it to our ponytails on road trips. You just take a little lemon up top, and let the sun do the rest. We called it giving each other road head.” “You just said you called it going streaking.” “It had a couple names.”

64 “So we have good news, and we have bad news.” “My Nana always said, ‘Bad news first because the good news is probably a lie.’ Fun fact: she made me cry a lot.”

65 “What about me? What if something happens to NAME, and he never gets to meet my baby? I don't want to hang out with some stupid baby who's never met NAME.”

66 “Oh, you're right. I'm gonna tell him/her. It might not be today. It might not be tomorrow. It definitely won't be later than tomorrow. So pretty much today or tomorrow then.”

67 “No! I was eavesdropping. I'm always eavesdropping.” “I don't like it.” “Look, I didn't spend the last seven years watching your love ripen, only to have it sullied by a city hall wedding. You're getting married right here, right now.”

68 “I know you think my judgement's clouded because I like him/her a little bit.” “You doodled your wedding invitation.” “No, that's our joint tombstone.” “My mistake.”

69 “How many times have I smacked you in your face?” “Lost count.” “And you still have no fear of me.” “I'm trying to read your womb vibe.” “Exactly. Knock it off.”

70 “Okay, first of all, NAME, you look amazing. Secondly, I made an appointment at the salon with Nikki, for you, under the name Gabriella Fuentes de San Miguel Estrada. I had fun with the name.” “Clearly.”

71 “He’s/She's got a type, which is really any one but you.” “Yeah, that was my ex-husband/ex-wife's type, too.”

72 “Sexy train is leaving the station. Check out this caboose. Later, sluts.”

73 “I can't wait to see you, my luscious little breakfast quiche. I just want to draw you a bubble bath and spoon-feed you caviar. I think we should open up a joint checking account. I love you. [pause] What am I doing?” “It's okay. I hung up right after ‘Chucklebunny’.” “Help me. I've gone Full NAME.”

74 “Do you desire a crispen potato?” “Oh, don't mind if I do-ble. Wait a minute. Crispen potato. Why are you fancy talking.” “How dare you, sir/madam. I speak the common tongue.” “There it is again. You only do that when you're lying or hiding something.” “Hiding? Ha. Pish-posh.”

75 “Hey, donut holes. Don't mind if I do. Eurgh! Fish? Fish donuts, NAME? What is wrong with you?” “It's takoyaki. I'm drowning my sorrows in octopus balls.”

76 “Put on a T-shirt for all I care. It doesn't matter what you wear.” “Of course it matters. He has to wear the smaller checks. Big checks wash him out. Where are you, NAME?”

77 “Ooh, if they have your phone, we can track where they're going. I have ‘Find My Phone’ set up to track you. What? I do that for all my friends, not just you.” “Show me.” “There's no time!”

78 “You okay?” “Yeah, no burns. The doctor said I was lucky my body was so damp.”

79 “You guys have been down here for two hours. What, did you have sex forty times?”

80 “What? You don't need closet space. You have, like, one outfit.”

81 “You just graduated pie school, bitches. [pause] Sorry I said bitches, I'm just really worked up.”

82 “So, I know you're NAME’s best friend, and —“ “Did he/she say that? Did you get that on tape?” “No.” “No, he/she didn't say that or no, you didn't get it on tape? Doesn't matter. Either way, you screwed up big time.”

83 “What you did is the culinary equivalent of unprotected sex.”

84 “That's right. Boom. Just kicked Santa in the testicles.”

85 “No, there's no one in my life. [wink] Sort of a sad thing to wink about, I realize now.”

86 “NAME! Were you dreaming about NAME again?” “Why did you wake me up?! I told you never to wake me up!”

87 “You used all the touching time, NAME. I get 100% of the goodbye touching time. 100%.”

88 “Do you wanna know why he/she went out with him/her and not you?” “Yeah.” “Because he/she actually asked him/her out.”

89 “NAME, will you taste this batter?” “Mm-hmm. Hmm. I think it's a little off.” “You know what's off? Your mouth! Why NAME lets your stupid tongue anywhere near him/her I'll never know. Nope, I forgot the sugar. That's on me.”

90 “There's no need for NAME to see me unleash the beast.”

Captain Holt

91 “Look at you. Always working. What happened to my fun big/little brother/sister?” “Fun? I was never fun. You take that back.”

92 “It's the most fun day of the year. Something you wouldn't understand because you're not programmed to feel joy.” “Yes, but my software is due for an exuberance upgrade.”

93 “Sticks and stones, NAME.” “Describing your breakfast?”

94 “NAME, how are you feeling?” “Better today. I even managed to eat some plain toast this morning.” “Smart. Something bland.” “That's my favorite breakfast.”

95 “Joining us for lunch, Sir?” “Oh, no, I've already consumed the required calories for this day period.” “Yummy.”

96 “You all right, NAME? Tough weekend?” “I went to Barbados with my husband/wife. We wove hats out of palm fronds and swam with the stingrays. I've never been happier.”

97 “Maybe I should wing it. Love, it sustains you. It's like oatmeal.” “Okay. Okay. Not bad for winging it.” “I lied. Took me two hours to write that.”

98 “I do not have a problem. If I want to play Kwazy Cupcakes, I will play Kwazy Cupcakes. Kwazy is a difficult word to say in anger, but I think I've made my feelings clear.”

99 “This place is so romantic.” “Yeah, and so intimate.” “Don't worry. I'm not listening to you. I'm just thinking about how this sea bass is cold but not as cold and cruel as the hands of fate that have thrust my entire life into darkness.” “Ah, damn it. I just ordered the sea bass.”

100 “Yeah, and your new shirt is very aggressive and confusing. Is the pineapple the slut, or is it calling someone else a slut?” “Clearly the pineapple is the slut.” “Huh.”

101 “Oh, I've caused a problem. I think I am getting a text message. Bloop. Ah, there it is.”

102 “So nice of you to greet us, NAME. I thought surely you'd still be crushed under that house in Munchkinland.”

103 “So, do you NAME --“ “Yes.” “And do you --“ “Yes. Yes. We do. We're married.”

104 “I mean, don't people call you NAME?” “How dare you.”

105 “So you lied to me? Out of pity. You pity me.” “I wouldn't put it that way.” “I would. I am offended. I am angry. I am very tired. So I'm gonna take a nap, but when I wake up, oh, you are in for it.”

106 “Look at that. You've helped me find my smile.”

107 “Huh. Meat from the street. Sounds like a fun treat. Hah. I'm a poet and ... I didn't even know I was rhyming those words. But it happened anyway.”

108 “Oh, look at that. An alert. I'm probably trending already. What? My account has been deactivated?” “Twitter thinks you're a bot.” “Why? I am a human. I am a human male/female.”

109 “Care to sit? I'm sure you'd like to take some weight off your cloven hooves.” “Call me the devil, NAME? How original.” “Actually, I was calling you a goat. You goat.”

110 “NAME! I'm coming with you.” “Thank you, NAME.” “I'm also coming.” “Not necessary.”

111 “Spot checks are done. Needless to say I'm thoroughly underwhelmed.” “Huh. From your expression, I would have guessed constipated. Or chilly.”

112 “NAME, you have a pretty low bar for what you consider drama. Once, I used an exclamation point in a email. You called me Diana Ross.” “I assure you, in this case, I do not exaggerate.”

113 “I know they say it's not good to have a TV in the bedroom. Which is why I don't.”

114 “NAME, did you just laugh?” “Uproariously.”

115 “You know when you play along with the robot jokes, it kinda ruins my enjoyment of them?” “Yes, I know.”

116 “And what do you hope to get out of this, NAME? Let me guess revenge on Dorothy for killing your sister?”

117 “It was a good game though for a dumbass.” Okay, you're kinda overusing that one. Maybe switch it up a little bit.” “Oh, good note. You dick.” “That landed good.”

118 “Dancing over. Situation defused.” “No!”

119 “All right, NAME, I'm sick of you wasting time. So, yes, I spilled some minestrone on my pants and I'm sitting in my underwear. Happy?”

120 “You found me. Drinking seltzer in the shadows.”

Gina

121 “It's a sloppy Jessica. Mac n cheese, chili, pizza on a bun. Its everything I've wanted to eat for the last 48 hours.” “What happened? I thought you were gonna 'last forever bitches.'” “Turns out I gave up easy. You hear that bitches? I gave up so easy.”

122 “If NAME had a twin, he/she would have eaten him/her in the womb.”

123 “Wait a minute, I think I just figured something out. I got to go.” “Aren't you forgetting something?” [person a gives Person b a kiss on the forehead] “Uh no, pay your bill! Damn, who raised you?”

124 “The English language can not fully capture the depth and complexity of my thoughts. So I'm incorporating Emoji into my speech to better express myself. Winky face.”

125 “All right, gang. Diet day 4. How's everyone holding up?” “Honestly, I'm going to last forever. You hear that bitches? I'm gonna last forever.”

126 “If I die, turn my tweets into a book!”

127 “The only reason I didn't tell you is I don't value you as people, so why be honest?”

128 “Breakups are a cartoony thumbs down. They make people feel face-with-Xs-for-the-eyes.”

129 “I'm sorry. I just don't think this is something you're good at.” “What? The only thing I'm not good at is modesty, because I'm great at it.”

130 “Click. I just captured the exact moment you realized you had failed. I guess we all got something out of this.”

131 “It's so addictive, right? I play so much that when I close my eyes at night, I just see cupcakes instead of my normal dizzying array of flashing lights.”

132 “Forget your ex with meaningless sex. It rhymes because it's true.”

133 “NAME. NAME. NAME, I screwed up, big time.” “NAME, given your daily life experiences, you're gonna have to be more specific.”

134 “So, talk to me, goose. How are we looking?” “Sexy, but not like we're trying too hard. Like, sure, we're trying, but it's almost effortless.”

135 “Give me the ring.” “You sound like Gollum.” “That means nothing to me. I don't see those movies, I'm too pretty.”

136 “Oh no, six drink NAME isn't fun. He’s/She's just sad. Damn it!”

137 “I never have second thoughts. That's the luxury of having great first thoughts.”

138 “Ugh, constantly getting NAME’s approval is the worst.” “Yes. I can only imagine.”

139 “You think you can just bully people, but you can't. It's not okay. I'm the bully around here. Ask anyone.”

140 “This just might work out after all.” “You're damn right it will, 'cause we're a ragtag, scrappity, fart-dumb, moron parade, smart-ass team!”

141 “Okay, NAME, stop freaking out. I have the day off. I can step in and help.” “Yeah, me too. I'm not off, but I come and go as I please. It's part of my charm. I'm like an outdoor cat.”

142 “Gina, please keep an eye on NAME today. He's/She’s gonna say something to the wrong person and get himself/herself punched.” “Sure, I'd love to see NAME get punched.” “Try again.” “I will stop NAME from getting punched.” “Correct.”

143 “Oh, I want him/her out. But I'm too scared to tell him/her. “ “All right, listen. I know that your spirit animal is a caterpillar that's been stepped on —“ “Mm-hmm.”

144 “What are you creeps doing? You made me look away from my phone. You better pray I didn't miss a text.” “In the two seconds you looked away?” “Seventeen texts. All of them important.”

145 “What is my favorite soup?” “Chicken noodle.” “Potato leek.” “Corn frickin' noodle. I mean, chowder, damn it.” “You're all wrong. I've never had soup.” “Don't bother. They all suck.”

146 “Okay, so that plumber was useless. But we are two smart and capable people who can definitely figure out how to fix a toilet.” “Of course we can. The internet will tell us what to do. She always does.”

147 “It's crazy how much he/she flirts with me.”

148 “Good morning.” “For whom?” “For you-m.”

149 “So he/she didn't say what happened, which can only mean one thing.” “He's/She’s in a fight club.”

150 “What's up? How can I help?” “Well, when I was a kid, I invented a magnetic flashlight clip so I could read under the covers. This clip and I went all around the world together the Shire, Sweet Valley High, Terabithia.” “But never to a friend's house, huh?” “Uncalled for.”

Amy

151 “That stuff with us is in the past. We talked about that.” “I know, but that was before you saw me in this dope ass tux. I mean you must be freaking out.” “Oh, I really am. I'm really into rented clothes. I love how many butts have been in them.”

152 “You know, we're birds of a feather, you and I.” “I hate cliches.” “Cliches are the worst.”

153 “And now I don't know what to do.” “I think you do know what to do.” “Thanks, NAME.” [leaves the room] “I have no idea what he’s/she's gonna do but that's the safest way to give NAME advice.” “Yep.”

154 “Insult me all you want, for I have only this to say —“ “Victory shall be mine!” “I heard you practicing in the shower. You can't surprise me. Letting me into your life was the worst mistake you ever made.” “Cool, fun take on our relationship.”

155 “NAME, where you at?” “Four drinks.” “What's four-drink NAME again?” “Why don't you come over here and find out?” “Right, Horny NAME”

156 “I'm sorry. We only excluded you because you're kind of an over-texter.” “Over-texter? That's not even a thing.” “Oh really? So you don't remember the time you sent 97 unanswered texts in a five-minute span?” “My phone vibrated itself off the desk. I think it was committing suicide.”

157 “What the hell? I used NAME's exact recipe. I know I'm not a great cook, but I love following instructions.”

158 “What's going on? Is this a dream? No, I'm not holding a label maker.”

159 “My power went out last night and my alarm didn't go off.” “Your alarm is power dependent? You brought this on yourself, son.”

160 “I'd also like to apologize for my friend. His /Her parents didn't give him/her enough attention.”

161 “I'm in! A bet which improves someone's manners? Double score.”

162 “He’s/She's scared.” “He’s/She's not scared. With all due respect, NAME, NAME has no feelings.”

163 “I'm so cold even my fiery dance moves aren't keeping me warm.”

164 “I'm sorry. I tried to be myself and they hated it.”

165 “All right, someone's gotta go out there and kill that feathery bastard. NAME, you're always looking for an excuse to behead something.”

Sergeant Jeffords

166 “It was like taking candy from a baby.” “Why are you giving candy to a baby in the first place? Don't give candy to a baby! They can't brush their teeth!”

167 “I was raised on disco. Little NAME loved to hustle.”

168 “Or is your favorite artist really Taylor Swift?” [Scoffs] “No.” “Lie.” “All right, fine, she is. She makes me feel things.” “She makes all of us feel things!”

169 “Urgh, what's in these?” “Potatoes, butter, a little milk. Oh, and I ran out of salt, so I used baking soda.” “Why wouldn't you? They're both white powders. Of course they're interchangeable.” “Yeah.”

170 “I warned you against using donuts. They're my trigger food.”

171 “Hey, NAME, you know how you're really good at doodling?” “I know you think you're complimenting me, but calling them doodles is an insult. You a big fan of Picasso's doodles?”

172 “Your tone's braggy but your words are real sad.”

173 “See, NAME? Tough love works.” “Damn it! NAME proved the wrong point.”

174 “Now, be respectful and grieve your asses off.” “I don't know why this is happening.” “NAME, I love it. Everyone follow his/her lead!”

175 “Everything's spoiled. My lunch is ruined. My chicken, my potatoes, pasta, my meatballs, ham, my yogurt.” “Wow, that's a lot of yogurt.” “I love yogurt.”

176 “Kind of seemed like you were gonna get up and leave after saying all that.” “I was, but I think I hear NAME.”

177 “You better look cute in this picture, or no one's gonna want you. Do something with your damn paws!”

178 “My tolerance has really changed since I had kids!”

179 “I'm hungry!” “Oh, you're in luck; the fanny pack is filled with granola.” “Mmm! Loose granola.” “I don't want fanny granola! I want steaks and whiskey!”

180 “You probably can't tell, but I'm flexing my brain like crazy right now.”

181 “What's that smell? That's lavender. NAME loves lavender.”

182 “Okay. Excuse me. Can we please eat? My body is starting to digest itself. NAME needs nutrients!”

183 “Don't look at me. NAME wastes all that time building muscles, make him do it.” “Oh, come on, you all know these are just for show.”

184 “Sorry? You bumbling son of a bitch. You just ruined my life. I hope you get hit by a truck and a dog takes a dump on your face.” “Nothing to see here. Just a little hypoglycaemic rage. Move along.”

185 “I feel like a proud mama hen whose baby chicks have learned to fly!”

Hitchcock

186 “NAME, why do you have your shirt off?” “Can't spill food on your shirt if you're not wearing one.”

187 “What bet? What are you guys talking about?” “Seriously? The bet? They've been keeping score all year. It comes up all the time. What are you doing all day?!” “Nothing. Why, you want to hang out?”

188 “So you just want us to lie on the ground and do nothing like a bunch of losers?” “Yes, precisely.” “No!” “Jackpot!”

189 “I don't like it. Something stinks.” “Well, I'm sorry, but I refuse to mask my natural musk with a bunch of chemicals.”

190 “My God. NAME, are you the only person still making sense?” “Yeah. It's bad.”

191 “All right, food is ready, decorations are set, guests should start arriving any moment, and the chairs are still perfection.” “He/She said they're perfection. I'm so proud of you, buddy.” “It was you. You made this happen.”

192 “Who do you think it's gonna be?” “I've no idea.” “I bet it's me. I just hope I'm ready.”

193 “Okay, look, this was maybe a weird way to start the night, but the good news is, we can still make our dinner reservation and no one got hurt.” “Actually, I cut myself real bad.” “Of course you did.”

Scully

194 “Oh, so your plan is to not take this seriously at all?” “Oh, I am as serious as a heart attack. No offense, NAME.” “Nah. Mine are never that serious. I call 'em ‘oopsies’.”

195 “I miss my home chair.” “You miss a chair?”

196 “Are those thumbtacks? What the hell, NAME?” “I thought they'd make good confetti.” “Why?”

197 “All right, anyone else have questions? NAME, NAME, you've been weirdly silent.” “We didn't want to say anything that would get us uninvited.”

198 “Okay, first of all, I want to say that this was one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make. There is so much talent in this room.” “Just tell us, bitch. Act as if you already have the role.”

199 “I'll be back. Don't move.” “Not a problem. I hate moving.”

200 “Where should we begin? Do you have any experience with puzzles?” “Yes. I've never solved one.”

[musicmixtapes]

October 10, 2018 Mix

Welcome to this week's installation of music! I loved finding tracks that blended well in terms of sound and meaning, as well as playing around with the pace of the pieces so not to cause monotony inside the eardrums. Enjoy and any suggestions/opinions, send my way

Spotify Playlist (Listen in order!) 1. Walls by The Lumineers - First off, can I just say how excited I am to see new music from a group who never seems to disappoint both my ears and my heart. While listening for the first time I thought, "Wow what a great song, but this sounds kind of familiar" so when I showed it to my mom she said "Of course it sounds familiar, it's a cover of one of Tom Petty's songs" and then it made my heart that much fuller knowing that. Petty is known to have the American writing way of describing through metaphor exactly how love and relationships feel at a moment suspended in time. Using that craftsmanship and words that cut to the bone, The Lumineers created a cover that is so folky and vulnerable sounding, I am sure that Petty would not be disappointed in it. 2.  I've Just Seen A Face by The Beatles - Continuing with classics that we may find hidden in corners of our mind, that pop out into existence from time to time, is this wonderful treasure from the Help! album, a beloved album to me and most of the world, I'm sure. I specifically chose this track because the title definitely created a supernatural element in my mind that translated to the feeling that love often gives, which is that it transcends regular human volition. It causes this reaction that cannot be expressed through regular conversation and absolutely needed to be sung about, which to me, is fantastic. Also, the really fast and frantic pace of the song adds to the urgency of the message of seeing someone in passing and instantly feeling a surge of love and the need to be with them at the moment. Falling in love is sometimes done in a slow motion type fall, but in this instance, it seems more immediate. 3. Moon Barks At The Dog by Saintseneca - The lyrical value that this song has is endless, and quite honestly, I could spend a long time doing an in depth analysis of this piece line by line, but for now I won't. The main thing I wanted to go in depth with a little bit is this image of the moon barking at the dog, which is just such a strange and abstract concept to grasp. Of course, the typical thing that someone would refer to is the dog barking at the moon, which is apparently a reference to the famous statement (I had no idea this existed): "It is common for the dog to bark at the moon, but if the moon barks back, the dog becomes famous." As a person who loves strange expressions, this has quickly become one of my favorites. There is also an entire verse that nods to Bruce Springsteen and his music not being the singer's cup of tea, which I disagree, but appreciate the reference anyway. 4. Los Ageless (cover) by The Wombats - I would say I'm sorry about including another version of the same song within two months, but I am not sorry at all because it is my firm belief that different versions of the same song can change it entirely and bring fresh perspective and possibly a new interpretation of meaning. Originally a St. Vincent song from her amazing album Masseducation, it was a more techno rock sound for sure, but this alternative group brought it down with a more acoustic sound fleshed out through it. I don't think the sound was altered so much that it changed the composition entirely, but the male voice for sure gave it a perspective which I was not expecting. To have a male singer express the notion "How could anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds too?" makes me feel a glimmer of hope to diminish toxic masculinity. 5. More Than Romantic Love by St. Lenox - I don't know exactly what to classify this as and to be fair, I'm not sure that putting this artist in a box would be serving him justice in any way. I felt that I was having a conversation with a fellow new yorker while really really cool, eclectic music was playing in the background. And I loved it. Just all of the references to living in a place in time where you are losing someone because you cannot accept the fact that they only want a platonic love, not romantic. This goes deeper though, and examines how to deal with someone who is going through personal struggle and how to reach them emotionally while being sensitive to their needs. St. Lenox has such a soulful conversational tone that speaks freely about mental health, breakup and the nervousness of the city, also shout out to Washington Square. He's an artist on the rise for sure. 6. This Is The Day by The The - This is a classic example of a song with an upbeat, generally happy sounding tune that literally step by step tells about the woes that a person with depression has to go through. It actually really reminded me of a Smiths song, where the mood totally does not match the words, and this is a trope I absolutely love to see in older music. The image of eyes being red and burning when seeing daylight is so profound because insomnia is one of the main traits of depression, so this feeling of always feeling tired in the daytime is so relatable to hear about in song, which I never have before. The synthesized sound and the acordion that are strung throughout the song really emphasize the dichotomy of the sound and feeling, which also add the layer of how you look on the outside doesn't always match how you are on the inside. 7. Greyhound by Calpurnia - Have you ever made future plans with someone you are in a relationship with, thinking that basically you'll be with them forever, and then suddenly, the time for that plan comes around, except you're not together anymore? Yeah? Me too, and apparently the writer of this song was in this exact position because that's essentially what it's about to put it in base question format. But what really satisfied me concerning this song was not the super relatable storyline aspect, but the sarcastic way of telling something pretty sad, which seemed like an epic breakup and heart break. The whole "hats of to you, for you to go" is so sassy and like a middle finger in the center of a song about still having feelings for an ex-love, which was so fun to see. I hope the subject of this song listened to this song. 8. 15 Minutes by The Strokes - Whenever asked my top favorite bands, they are always at the top of the list. I don't know exactly what resonates with me, but I have been trying to pin point the moodiness and exacerbated feelings for awhile that me and this band seems to always share. I think it's the way that Casablancas always mutters some really sad yet humorous things while hard core guitar comes in and really great drum beats and a bass line are right in line with it. This song is no exception because it totally defies the meaning of telling someone how you feel and being comfortable with oneself about it; if I may be so bold, I think it generally classifies how one with lots of anxiety would go about telling feelings from a real perspective, rather insecurely and with the approach of joking about emotions in a very honest way. 9. Think I'm Still In Love With You by Joyce Manor - A new album by an awesome punk, angsty, emo rock band, news I will never be upset to hear about. Specifically, this artist has so many different qualities going past the initial relatable angst you feel when listening to the many, many, many songs they have about not being able to get over something or feeling like a burden in someone else's life constantly. This song has a clear shift in feeling though because the uncertainty is definitely present in terms of wanting to still be in love with someone because of a past emotion, but now things seem a bit hazier and they aren't so sure if the feelings are still quite there. This song comes about midway through the album, a really great placement on their part because it signifies perhaps a shift in weather during a one sided relationship and perhaps things will change thereafter. 10. So Tied Up by Cold War Kids and Bishop Briggs - Oftentimes I speculate from an outsider's look at a song, and piece together the meaning in relation to both the music and my own life. In this instance, I didn't really have to do so because the artist actually shared exactly what his intentions were with the meaning behind this song. He said, "With every new relationship, you either talk about previous relationship stuff (warts and all), or you just pretend like they never existed. Both are kinda terrible. When you go the full disclosure route it’s probably sincere, maybe you’re even praised for your vulnerability. However, you know it’s probably gonna be used against you later, in a fight, in the worst way." So that's that, and in terms of the gospel vibes I received from this alt rock song, I am very happy and get really pumped walking down the street to it. 11. Days On A Wire by Case - This instantly gives me the image of watching a movie scene where one person is lovingly thinking about another and kind of like sitting on a train looking out the window and considering their feelings, all wrapped up in desire. So now that I have shared my mental scene, let me explain that the really awesome acoustic with horns sounds that are produced in this piece add to the love song vibes that is perceived while listening. Also, the singer's voice is super dreamy and light, at some points seeming like barely more than a whisper of phrases, adding to the whimsical elements involved in the song. Actually, the horns in this song kind of act as a guitar usually would in terms of a melodic riff that occurs between verses and choruses, and I love this difference of instruments, a unique sound. 12. In The Morning I'll Be Better by Tennis - Taking some else's pain away is the hardest thing to do, especially when it's something not curable by care and devotion on it's own, but that's precisely what the artist is intending to say in this piece, which is tragically beautiful. So originally, I perceived this to be about someone's mental anguish and a relationship of sorts attempting to remedy this suffering by acceptance and love. In fact, this is not what the artist meant, but it's still a cool interpretation if I do say so myself. It was revealed that the writer's friend was deemed terminally ill and this was their way of processing the emotions that go into realizing that someone is most likely not going to get better. It is a love song that goes beyond love, but more about the wanting to take someone's pain and endure it so they don't have to. 13. Clueless by The Marías - Yes, yes, yes. My exact thoughts when seeing that this group came out with new music, when listening to the first few bars of the song, and then again when hearing the song two full times through (once for sound and another for words and meaning). The palpable tension heard in the song is so real for so many people when having an argument and to match the tension is the dialoguing throughout that basically says they can't handle the ups and downs going through the relationship anymore. I read that this was inspired by a spat between the vocalist and her significant other, drummer-producer Josh Conway. This revelation was incredible because imagine being in a band and a relationship with someone and having to create music while a major fight is going on. Me neither. 14. Running by Nicotine's Famous Honey - If I could title this anything other than what it is, I would title it "The Art of Just Barely Getting By In Our Fucked Up World" but that would not be as aesthetic as this aptly titled name. In the past, I have publicly argued against certain styles of music, simply because I knew less about music and didn't listen to enough genres on a regular basis. I am still trying to broaden my horizons, especially in terms of R&B and the Hip Hop genre in general, but this under emphasized artist is such a beautiful example of taking one genre that is criticized for being cliched and overdone and taking it to a whole different level. I love this combination of dream-pop, low-fi indie and hip hop and R&B all in one piece, and if you haven't looked into them, definitely check out some of their other music, it is so enticing. 15. Weird Honey by Elvis Depressedly - I'm taking the meaning of this song entirely from the artist because I think it can be interpreted a hundred different ways, depending on who you are thinking about while listening to it and what kind of mental state you are in too. Also we love to see an iconic guitar riff thrown in sporadically to a pretty sad low fi rock song, so that's a pretty cool spot in hell. The meaning though: "I lied before. It’s just an homage to Jesus and Mary Chain, and has no direct meaning. This is a love song so it could be seen as a pet name, or even a symbol of a love that is strange and new but full of sweetness. I find it incredibly strange that so many people have interpreted this song to be so negative, or even a break up song, when it’s the opposite. It’s a song about new love." There you have it. 16. Wings In All Black by Gregory Alan Isakov - If you are looking for an acoustic folk artist who puts emphasis on literally every single word and note of a song, look no further, he is right here, and also in my soul forever. Hailing from his brand new album, is this gem which sinks your heart to your stomach almost immediately upon listening. I believe this to be about having to rise up out of a really dark time in your life, despite not wanting to, the fact that instead of feeding the beast of loss, you have to grow wings of your own and fight against the demons you are experiencing. The image of having "wings in black" is a nod to the struggle between staying down in a bad place and having to come out of it no matter how impossible it seems at the time. I am now noticing a lot of these songs have to do with dealing with loss and mental health day by day, which is very important. 17. Should I by Arum Rae - I have to give entire props and credits for this song to my wonderful mother, who is always good for sending me songs to listen to on a weekly basis. Particularly, I first heard this song on my ferry ride home to New Jersey for the first time since leaving for college this year, so it has earned a really special place in my heart for the year. The piano is so present in this song, which as I have mentioned in previous posts, you don't get to see a lot in newer slow songs, which have become taken over by guitar a lot of the times. Also, Rae's voice questioning her every move and overthinking all her choices for the future is so heart felt and honest that you can't help but empathize with these feelings. The message of the song is maybe taking things one step at a time is the healthiest thing you can do when things get overwhelming in life. Yes. 18. How by Daughter - Ok, so finding out that most of the songs I have chosen for this week's mix surround the topics of loss and grieving past versions of self has become super illuminating in terms of my own maturation process. Staying topic though, this group always sheds light on the painful emotions rather than the pleasurable ones, which sometimes creates a dreary mood, but I like to view it as not being afraid to voice some negativity in order to clear it out of one's mind, which many people are apprehensive to do. This song describes pain as being in slow motion and I can't explain why that is true, but it is. The lines "hold me back, hold me back" in reference to wanting to go get someone that they have lost is so crucial to the theme of the song which is moving on from something while still having regrets in regards to the situation, feeling cheated or let down by someone. 19. Killer by Phoebe Bridgers - This playlist began with this song all by it's lonesome, but all along I knew that the rest of the pieces would be built around this, so I guess this has to be the reason why all the songs are so deeply related with one another. You may be thinking, wow I can't believe this song is about one's own death, this is really morose and ominous. Yes, I totally agree and think that it's really sad and death related, but knowing that it goes deeper than that is really vital to appreciating it's beauty. This is about a relationship being buried away and while doing so, dredging up all the past memories of loving a person. There is no remedy for knowing that two people are too much for one another, but this soulful lament is definitely a start. Also, Bridgers has noted that this song is in reference to Ryan Adams, famed songwriter who had a short fling with her when she was pretty young. 20. WALLS by Kings Of Leon - I did this on purpose, I made the first and last song both titled "walls" for a particular reason. I think they both serve very different purposes and perspectives to the metaphorical walls that are being broken down and simultaneously built up within a relationship. In the covered song that the Lumineers did, we see a shift to a more positive message of hearts having walls and climbing them is a struggle, but that it is worth it for the love we get to experience on the other side of it. In contrast, this very low tempo song (especially for Kings of Leon) is about kind of the exact opposite. This is about a man's ego being utterly shattered, exemplifying walls being torn down, in order to love a woman who just took his heart with her when she left. I don't think it's all sad though; I think this experience of walls coming down around someone to experience true loss of a person is so important for personal growth and strength. Thanks for listening and reading into things really deeply with me, catch you next week! Love & Listening,

Julia 

[koreaunderground]

(2013/08/20) Groklaw - Forced Exposure ~pj

[groklaw.net][1]

  [1]: <http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175>

# Groklaw - Forced Exposure ~pj

Tuesday, August 20 2013 @ 02:40 AM EDT

14-17 minutes

* * *

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.

There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.

What to do?

What to do? I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it's good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don't know how to do Groklaw like this.

Years ago, when I was first on my own, I arrived in New York City, and being naive about the ways of evil doers in big cities, I rented a cheap apartment on the top floor of a six-floor walkup, in the back of the building. That of course, as all seasoned New Yorkers could have told me, meant that a burglar could climb the fire escape or get to the roof by going to the top floor via the stairs inside and then through the door to the roof and climb down to the open window of my apartment.

That is exactly what happened. I wasn't there when it happened, so I wasn't hurt in any way physically. And I didn't then own much of any worth, so only a few things were taken. But everything had been pawed through and thrown about. I can't tell how deeply disturbing it is to know that someone, some stranger, has gone through and touched all your underwear, looked at all your photographs of your family, and taken some small piece of jewelry that's been in your family for generations.

If it's ever happened to you, you know I couldn't live there any more, not one night more. It turned out, by the way, according to my neighbors, that it was almost certainly the janitor's son, which stunned me at the time but didn't seem to surprise any of my more-seasoned neighbors. The police just told me not to expect to get anything back. I felt assaulted. The underwear was perfectly normal underwear. Nothing kinky or shameful, but it was the idea of them being touched by someone I didn't know or want touching them. I threw them away, unused ever again.

I feel like that now, knowing that persons I don't know can paw through all my thoughts and hopes and plans in my emails with you.

They tell us that if you send or receive an email from outside the US, it will be read. If it's encrypted, they keep it for five years, presumably in the hopes of tech advancing to be able to decrypt it against your will and without your knowledge. Groklaw has readers all over the world.

I'm not a political person, by choice, and I must say, researching the latest developments convinced me of one thing -- I am right to avoid it. There is a scripture that says, It doesn't belong to man even to direct his step. And it's true. I see now clearly that it's true. Humans are just human, and we don't know what to do in our own lives half the time, let alone how to govern other humans successfully. And it shows. What form of government hasn't been tried? None of them satisfy everyone. So I think we did that experiment. I don't expect great improvement.

I remember 9/11 vividly. I had a family member who was supposed to be in the World Trade Center that morning, and when I watched on live television the buildings go down with living beings inside, I didn't know that she had been late that day and so was safe. Does it matter, though, if you knew anyone specifically, as we watched fellow human beings hold hands and jump out of windows of skyscrapers to a certain death below or watched the buildings crumble into dust, knowing there were so many people just like us being turned into dust as well?

I cried for weeks, in a way I've never cried before, or since, and I'll go to my grave remembering it and feeling it. And part of my anguish was that there were people in the world willing to do that to other people, fellow human beings, people they didn't even know, civilians uninvolved in any war.

I sound quaint, I suppose. But I always tell you the truth, and that is what I was feeling. So imagine how I feel now, imagining as I must what kind of world we are living in if the governments of the world think total surveillance is an appropriate thing?

I know. It may not even be about that. But what if it is? Do we even know? I don't know. What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7.

Harvard's Berkman Center had an online [class][2] on cybersecurity and internet privacy some years ago, and the resources of the class are still [online][3]. It was about how to enhance privacy in an online world, speaking of quaint, with titles of articles like, "Is Big Brother Listening?"

  [2]: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/privacy/index.html>   [3]: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/privacy/module4.html>

And how.

You'll find all the laws in the US related to privacy and surveillance there. Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That's not the rule of law as I understood the term.

Anyway, one resource was excerpts from [a book][4] by Janna Malamud Smith,"Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life", and I encourage you to read it. I encourage the President and the NSA to read it too. I know. They aren't listening to me. Not that way, anyhow. But it's important, because the point of the book is that privacy is vital to being human, which is why one of the worst punishments there is is total surveillance:

  [4]: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/privacy99/lesson1/malamud/mal_index.html>

> One way of beginning to understand privacy is by looking at what happens to people in extreme situations where it is absent. Recalling his time in Auschwitz, Primo Levi observed that "solitude in a Camp is more precious and rare than bread." Solitude is one state of privacy, and even amidst the overwhelming death, starvation, and horror of the camps, Levi knew he missed it.... Levi spent much of his life finding words for his camp experience. How, he wonders aloud in _Survival in Auschwitz_ , do you describe "the demolition of a man," an offense for which "our language lacks words."... > > One function of privacy is to provide a safe space away from terror or other assaultive experiences. When you remove a person's ability to sequester herself, or intimate information about herself, you make her extremely vulnerable.... > > The totalitarian state watches everyone, but keeps its own plans secret. Privacy is seen as dangerous because it enhances resistance. Constantly spying and then confronting people with what are often petty transgressions is a way of maintaining social control and unnerving and disempowering opposition.... > > And even when one shakes real pursuers, it is often hard to rid oneself of the feeling of being watched -- which is why surveillance is an extremely powerful way to control people. The mind's tendency to still feel observed when alone... can be inhibiting. ... Feeling watched, but not knowing for sure, nor knowing if, when, or how the hostile surveyor may strike, people often become fearful, constricted, and distracted.

I've [quoted][5] from that book before, back when the CNET reporters' emails were read by HP. We thought that was awful. And it was. HP ended up giving them money to try to make it up to them. Little did we know.

  [5]: <http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070507094824404>

Ms. Smith continues:

> Safe privacy is an important component of autonomy, freedom, and thus psychological well-being, in any society that values individuals. ... Summed up briefly, a statement of "how not to dehumanize people" might read: Don't terrorize or humiliate. Don't starve, freeze, exhaust. Don't demean or impose degrading submission. Don't force separation from loved ones. Don't make demands in an incomprehensible language. Don't refuse to listen closely. Don't destroy privacy. Terrorists of all sorts destroy privacy both by corrupting it into secrecy and by using hostile surveillance to undo its useful sanctuary. > > But if we describe a standard for treating people humanely, why does stripping privacy violate it? And what is privacy? In his landmark book, _Privacy and Freedom_ , Alan Westin names four states of privacy: solitude, anonymity, reserve, and intimacy. The reasons for valuing privacy become more apparent as we explore these states.... > > The essence of solitude, and all privacy, is a sense of choice and control. You control who watches or learns about you. You choose to leave and return. ... > > Intimacy is a private state because in it people relax their public front either physically or emotionally or, occasionally, both. They tell personal stories, exchange looks, or touch privately. They may ignore each other without offending. They may have sex. They may speak frankly using words they would not use in front of others, expressing ideas and feelings -- positive or negative -- that are unacceptable in public. (I don't think I ever got over his death. She seems unable to stop lying to her mother. He looks flabby in those running shorts. I feel horny. In spite of everything, I still long to see them. I am so angry at you I could scream. That joke is disgusting, but it's really funny.) Shielded from forced exposure, a person often feels more able to expose himself.

I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the US out or to the US in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend. And once you know they can, what is there to say? Constricted and distracted. That's it exactly. That's how I feel.

So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.

I'm really sorry that it's so. I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint.

If you have to stay on the Internet, my research indicates that the short term safety from surveillance, to the degree that is even possible, is to use a service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is under different laws than the US, laws which attempt to afford more privacy to citizens. I have now gotten for myself an email there, p.jones at mykolab.com in case anyone wishes to contact me over something really important and feels squeamish about writing to an email address on a server in the US. But both emails still work. It's your choice.

My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible. I'm just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write. I've always been a private person. That's why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours.

Oddly, if everyone did that, leap off the Internet, the world's economy would collapse, I suppose. I can't really hope for that. But for me, the Internet is over.

So this is the last Groklaw article. I won't turn on comments. Thank you for all you've done. I will never forget you and our work together. I hope you'll remember me too. I'm sorry I can't overcome these feelings, but I yam what I yam, and I tried, but I can't.

**Update:** Bruce Scheier has some [advice][6] for those who do wish to remain on the Internet:

  [6]: <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance>

> With all this in mind, I have five pieces of advice: > >> 1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it's work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are. >> >> 2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it's true that the NSA [targets][7] encrypted connections – and it may have explicit exploits against these protocols – you're much better protected than if you communicate in the clear. >> >>    [7]: <http://www.informationweek.com/security/government/want-nsa-attention-use-encrypted-communi/240157089>

3) Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA – so it probably isn't. If you have something really important, use an air gap. Since I started working with the Snowden documents, I bought a new computer that has never been connected to the internet. If I want to transfer a file, I encrypt the file on the secure computer and walk it over to my internet computer, using a USB stick. To decrypt something, I reverse the process. This might not be bulletproof, but it's pretty good. >> >> 4) Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. It's prudent to assume that foreign products also have foreign-installed backdoors. Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software. Systems relying on master secrets are vulnerable to the NSA, through either legal or more clandestine means. >> >> 5) Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. For example, it's harder for the NSA to backdoor TLS than BitLocker, because any vendor's TLS has to be compatible with every other vendor's TLS, while BitLocker only has to be compatible with itself, giving the NSA a lot more freedom to make changes. And because BitLocker is proprietary, it's far less likely those changes will be discovered. Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography. Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.

See also Dan Geer's talk, [Cybersecurity as Realpolitik][8]:

  [8]: <http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt>

> Those of us who are backing out our remaining dependencies on digital goods and services are being entirely rational... > > ... I will busy myself with reducing my dependence on, and thus my risk exposure to, the digital world even though that will be mistaken for curmudgeonly nostalgia.

[pinelife3]

Getting Short Stories

I read the short story “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” by Haruki Marukami last weekend. I really enjoyed it - until it finished. Because then it was obvious the story wasn’t going to give me any more help to understand it. Of course, I thought about if after I finished it, still trying to get whatever Murakami was on about. And I’m still thinking about it now. I don’t get it.

(Disclaimer: I cannot give you a clear definition of what it means to get it. It’s the same as when a poem works. It’s something clicking into place. Something you couldn’t learn on Wikipedia. Sweeping clear new pathways in how you think about something. I’d argue that you can get something from a piece of media without explicitly getting the media itself (for example, I love “Burnt Norton” but it is pretty inscrutable to me). Equally, you can get something without really caring about it (see: the more recent seasons of Black Mirror) - but that’s not all that interesting to talk about.)

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders is an example of a short story I like and get: the character’s actions and motivations are sometimes surprising but still make sense, the world is vivid and interesting, the writing is highlightable, and I think I understand what Saunders is trying to say. Or - if I’ve misunderstood what he’s saying, I’ve been able to wring something satisfying out of it on my own. It means something to me, and I feel moved by the story and its ideas in some inarticulable way. I think I read it in a food court.

“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” was published in The New Yorker in 1990 and then made its way into Murakami’s 1993 book of short stories The Elephant Vanishes (published in English in ‘93 - it wasn’t published in Japanese until 2005). Probably like many people who have bought the book in the past year, I was inspired to read it after seeing the Korean film Burning (which is based on a story in the collection called “Barn Burning”). Also, I haven’t read any Murakami (that’s a lie: I tried to read Norwegian Wood when I was 21 but didn’t have much patience for it and gave up after ~100 pages) and thought this might be a low-effort way of remedying that.

In terms of the action of the story, The New Yorker summarises it well: 

The narrator, a resident of Tokyo, has quit his job in a law office, and is living as a house husband. One Tuesday morning he receives a phone call from an unknown woman, who says she will help him "come to an understanding," if he'll give her ten minutes. Busy cooking spaghetti for brunch, he hangs up. Later, his wife calls to tell him of a job prospect, as poet and poetry editor of a magazine for young girls. She also asks him to look for their missing cat; it's named Noboru Watanabe, after the wife's brother. She thinks it's in the yard of an abandoned house on their street. In his own yard, the narrator hears a bird screeching; he doesn't know what species of bird it is, but he and his wife think of it as the windup bird: it's there each morning, as if to wind up their world. That afternoon the mysterious woman calls back, and tries to have an erotic dialogue with the narrator. After he hangs up, the phone rings again; he doesn't answer. At the abandoned house, a young girl coaxes him to sunbathe with her. She tells him a fantasy about ripping up a corpse to get at "the lump of death itself." That night, his wife angrily accuses him of killing the cat. He writes a poem: Noboru Watanabe Where have you gone? Did the windup bird Stop winding your spring? The telephone begins ringing once again, but neither the narrator nor his wife will answer it.

This is basically the extent of the story but there are some weird details that add flavour. For example, the protagonist seems to have an auditory fixation. A lot of the story is about him listening to female voices (side note: Murakami is known for having a thing for ears - or formerly having a thing for ears). When a woman calls him on the phone, he makes much of his ability to place voices but has difficulty placing hers. Eventually, their conversation devolves into what is essentially phone sex. He hangs up and avoids answering the phone for the rest of the day, although it keeps ringing. The narrator describes a secret garden path/passage with no entrance or exit. It runs behind all of the houses in his block, so when he walks down it, he has a view into everyone’s backyards: he can see their washing, smell their cooking, etc. He is surprised and suspicious that his wife is familiar with this corridor. (If this were high school English I would be hammering home that the blocked in tunnel is a metaphor for the protagonist’s directionless existence, etc.) The ‘young girl’/teenager mentioned in the summary above, is described as crippled/limping and she mentions that she’s taking the year off school while her leg heals after a bike accident. He falls asleep in a deckchair in her garden while she talks to him. When he wakes up she’s gone. This never goes anywhere. The phone sex never goes anywhere. The corridor never goes anywhere. 

The passages about the wind-up bird are brief and seem trivial while you’re reading them: just lazy, dreamy thoughts from our unemployed protagonist as he drifts off to sleep on a warm Tuesday afternoon:

A regular wind-up toy this world is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grown old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

Okay... sure. Clearly, the bird has some significance, but the protagonist spends an equal amount of time thinking about spaghetti. What I also find difficult is that people’s emotions, reactions and motivations in the story don’t make sense. When his wife yells at him at the end of the story, accusing him of killing their cat, I wondered if maybe she was trying to pick a fight, if she’s sick of the marriage and wants out. I also thought she might be more distressed because the cat is named after her brother - how do you tell your brother that the cat you named after him is lost, probably dead. What would that symbolise? Still, to me she seems like an unreasonable person because the way her emotions escalate (apparently without any real trigger) is seriously out of step with normal human behaviour:

I emerge from an after-dinner bath to find my wife sitting all alone the darkened living room. I throw on a gray shirt and fumble through the dark to reach where she’s been dumped like a piece of luggage. She looks so utterly forsaken. If only they’d left her in another spot, she might have seemed happier.

...I take a seat on the sofa opposite her. “What’s the matter?” I ask. “The cat’s dead, I just know it,” my wife says. “Oh c’mon,” I protest. “He’s just off exploring. Soon enough he’ll get hungry and head on back. The same thing happened once before, remember? That time when we were still living in Koenji -” “This time it’s different. I can feel it. The cat’s dead and rotting away in the weeds. Did you search the grass in the vacant house?” “Hey no, stop it. It may be a vacant house, but it’s somebody’s house. I’m not about to go trespassing.” “You killed it!” my wife accuses.

I heave a sigh and give my head another once-over with the towel.

“You killed it with that look of yours!” she repeats from the darkness. “How does that follow?” I say. “The cat disappeared of its own doing. It’s not my fault. That much you’ve got to see.” “You! You never liked that cat, anyway!” “Okay, maybe so,” I admit. “At least I wasn’t as crazy about the cat as you were. Still, I never mistreated it. I fed it every day. Just because I wasn’t enthralled with the little bugger doesn’t mean I killed it. Start saying things like that and I end up having killed half the people on earth.” “Well, that’s you all over,” my wife delivers her verdict. “That’s just so you. Always, always that way. You kill everything without ever playing a hand.”

I am about to counter when she bursts into tears. I can the speech and toss the towel in the bathroom basket, go to the kitchen, take a beer out of the refrigerator, and chug. What an impossible day it’s been!

Am I dumb? Do I not understand adult relationships? Because this seems like a very weird exchange to me. Does the way he reacts to her accusations, with exasperation rather than anger or surprise, suggest that he’s seen her behave like this before? A pop culture analogue: remember the video of Solange beating up Jay-Z in an elevator after the 2014 Met Gala?

Jay-Z is in the white suit. Solange is the one hitting him. There’s a bodyguard trying to keep them apart. And Beyoncé is standing there calmly - not getting involved, just trying to protect her outfit. Here they are directly after the incident.

What a fucking pro. Thousand yard smile. 

At the time, speculation was rife about what Jay-Z did to trigger such a beating (in italics because it’s still surprising that everyone was so okay with the domestic violence). What really thrilled people was the crack in the facade of perfection. A glimpse into their lives that hadn’t been perfectly curated, something we were never meant to see. The common read was that Jay-Z must have done something because otherwise Beyoncé would have stepped in to protect him. The consensus now is that Solange had found out that he’d cheated on her sister. Maybe even that he’d done something at the Gala. This is all now part of the Carter canon because they’ve referenced it in their music to great commercial and critical success.

Another interesting interpretation was that perhaps Beyoncé had seen Solange raging and uncontrollable many times before and knew how to weather the storm. Maybe Solange has a temper when she drinks? Maybe she’ll have an outburst, and all you can do is stay out of the way and ignore it until the mood passes and she sobers up. Perhaps her family is used to this behaviour. There’s no point engaging or trying to reason with her, you just have to let her get it out and then smile for the press at the elevator doors. 

As with Beyoncé, maybe our protagonist is accustomed to bad behaviour: recriminations, tears, tantrums. You kill everything. Most people would want to dig in if their partner said something like that. But perhaps it doesn’t trigger such a strong reaction in him anymore. Another odd behavioural detail, perhaps again showing the protagonist’s muted response to the world, is that he is pretty indifferent to the mysterious phone call. He resolves not to answer the phone, but is otherwise not at all curious about who’s calling him. If I received a call like that from a shadowy stranger, I would sacrifice a great deal to find out who was behind it. I know I’m not alone here - because, as every scammer knows, the most efficient way to get someone to open an email which it is in their best interest to not open (full of malware, spyware, etc.), is to include a declaration of love or romantic interest in the subject line.

Searching for some connection between the events of the story, I wondered if maybe the wife hired the woman on the phone to seduce her husband so that she’d have a concrete reason to divorce him. But this doesn’t really track because just earlier in the day she was encouraging him to stay a house husband - why would she do that if she wanted to leave him? 

There are lots of weird details in the story, none of which signify much to me. Our protagonist is unemployed, he doesn’t have much to do and isn’t looking for much to do, his voice as narrator is anxious, circular, repetitive. The key themes seem to be curiosity, restlessness, loneliness, directionlessness, nessness, etc. But unless the point is that everything that happened in the story was pointless, and that’s supposed to echo the protagonist’s torpor, I don’t get it. Basically every major plot element is still a question mark - are we supposed to dismiss those as magical realism or wishful thinking on the part of the protagonist and move on with our lives, never being curious about who the lady on the telephone is, or why the girl has a messed up leg and won’t go to school? I can’t do it. I want to know! I want to get it.   

Fortunately for us, Murakami wrote a novel called The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which spins off the short story into the first chapter of the novel and runs from there. Do you think it answers any of my questions above?

Remember the cat named after the wife’s brother? In the novel, the brother is an incestuous rapist. Maybe that is why the narrator doesn’t care for the cat much. Maybe that’s why the wife is accusing her husband of killing it? Some kind of wishful thinking? Still, we don’t get any background on the relationship with her brother until The Wind-up Bird Chronicle so you’re kind of grasping at air in the short story. 

In a chapter of the novel apparently not published in English versions (according to Wikipedia, Vintage, the English publisher, was concerned the book was too long so they had the translator cut about 61 pages from the original 1,379 pages), it is revealed that the phone sex lady was actually his wife. Twist! In the short story he said of the woman’s voice:

I have absolutely no recollection of ever heading this woman’s voice before. And I pride myself on a near-perfect ear for voices, so I’m sure there’s no mistake. This is the voice of a woman I don’t know. A soft, low nondescript voice.

I presume his skill for placing voices isn’t in the novel. Because that seems like a pretty lame trick to pull on your reader. It’s one thing to have an unreliable narrator. But an incompetent, overconfident one is just setting you up for a shitty experience. That’s a book I don’t want to read. I also don’t want to read it because it’s 1,318 pages, so that’s that.

Perhaps it’s wrong to judge Murakami based on one short story. But he put this one at the start of the book! And actually (even though I’ve read hardly any of his stuff) I would argue this story is probably representative of his work. Check out this Murakami bingo card:

Appearing in “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”:

Mysterious woman

Ear fetish? Perhaps not - but, like I said, an auditory fixation for sure

Unexpected phone call

Cats

Urban ennui

Secret passageway

Precocious teenager

Cooking

Vanishing cats

This story is in his usual stylistic neighborhood. He’s got to be comfy here. 

What do people like about Murakami? Does his writing make me feel like the universe is singing a song? Certainly, this story has stuck with me. By which I mean, it plagues my every waking thought. It torments me. It twists my toes backwards, blocks the drain of my shower with hair, corrupts my Excel files. It is a blight I shall bear for the rest of my life: who was on the phone? Not only do I not get Murakami, but I don’t get what others might like about him. Like I said at the top, I did enjoy reading this story because there were tantalising threads. I could tolerate the dull inner monologue about the narrator’s erstwhile legal career and how he felt as he drifted off for an afternoon nap if there were a resolution to at least one of the story’s mysteries. But this story does not pay off. Not even a little bit. The idea that you need to read 1,300 more pages for a resolution is frustrating. In 2014, The Guardian covered an event where Murakami spoke about The Wind-up Bird Chronicle:

The author of 13 novels and many short stories admitted to having completely forgotten what he has written – or indeed why – when asked about specific plot points, without seeming bothered at all. “Really?” and “I don’t remember that” were two of his most frequent answers, and he had the audience laughing at his frankness every time. “It was published 20 years ago and I haven’t read it since then!” he said of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, around which the event centred...

“I don’t have any idea at all, when I start writing, of what is to come. For instance, for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the first thing I had was the call of the bird, because I heard a bird in my back yard (it was the first time I heard that kind of sound and I never have since then. I felt like it was predicting something. So I wanted to write about it). The next thing was cooking spaghetti – these are things that happen to me! I was cooking spaghetti, and somebody call. So I had just these two things at the start. Two years I kept on writing. It’s fun! I don’t know what’s going to happen next, every day. I get up, go to the desk, switch on the computer, etc. and say to myself: “so what’s going to happen today?” It’s fun!” 

Fun for you, maybe.

I don’t think a feature of good fiction is wacky shit inexplicably occurring with no explanation or follow up - otherwise, it’s not a narrative.

I don’t need every plot line neatly resolved, and I don’t need to be told explicitly what everything means (I’m happy to do some legwork on my own) but none of the plot points are resolved at all in "The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”. In fiction, as in life, I want things to be connected, to have a cause and effect relationship. I want things to make sense: to have a trigger, make an impact, be remembered. Even if the trigger is hidden, I want people to react to the things happening around them in a plausible way. Ideally, I want to think the things in the story mattered. 

“Up in Michigan” by Hemingway is a short story I like. It’s an interesting depiction of sexual politics, innocent female affection, etc. As I’ve gotten older, the reasons I like it have changed. When I read it when I was 20, I felt some kind of feminine kinship across time with the protagonist because she falls for the wrong guy, and her romanticism is crushed by the weight of the drunk guy she likes falling asleep on her after some bad sex, and she loses a little bit of herself that night - yes, her virginity but also some trust and whatever. And now I find it kind of amusing because you know Hemingway killed with the ladies and probably played the heart breaker (or the drunk dude falling asleep on some poor girl) a hundred times over so it’s funny to imagine Hemingway in his early 20s, having just got done stomping some girl’s romantic aspirations, then sitting down to write this story, all soulful and sensitive, as if he gave a fuck about girls crying over boys who will never like them. Still, Hemingway’s short stories fucking kill. Killing fuck. They’re good. In “Up in Michingan” as in many of Hemingway’s stories, things are implied rather than uttered (as per the law in Hemingwayland), so sometimes you don’t know the background to a conversation and have to deduce what two characters are talking about, but the dynamic between them is revealed through dialog and their actions. You may not understand why something happened, and often there’s no narrator to help you out, but you infer how people feel about it and what it means to them. Not everything needs to happen for a reason: sometimes babies are born with cancer, sometimes the guy you like doesn’t like you back, sometimes guys get into fights outside bars, sometimes you meet a weird teenager in a secret garden path. But the things that happen should matter to you, to your reader, and to your protagonist, at least a little bit. Otherwise what’s the point?

[apexart-journal]

Stephanie Lawal, Day #20

Today I went to Open Café in St. Leonards.  St. Leonards is the westernmost part of Hastings along the sea (I did not travel inland in Hastings).  I should add that Hastings had been described to me as a kind of edgier version of Brighton.  I could understand this description in the community vibe I felt here.  The Open Cafe is a kind of refuge space for immigrants and asylum seekers.  Maybe that is not quite the right way to term it, as it is not at all a residence.  It is a literal café in a minor sense, in that coffee and tea are served there (also the best baklava ever - I promise.), but this is only for a donation, which I can’t imagine generates much revenue.  Rather, the space itself is used for all kinds of community events and exhibitions.  There is even a hair dresser located on the premises.  I believe that the night before there was a film showing of Knock Down the House - the U.S. documentary following four female political candidate campaigns.  The space is volunteer run, and the person I spoke to was sitting in for the regular manager.  It was a very quiet morning, and I didn’t feel like asking a bunch of nosy questions.  However, this person did inquire about my being there.  She was friendly, and looking to give me some info about the place.  I don’t think I digested many specifics as I felt a bit uncomfortable not speaking to the people who seemed to be the immigrants for whom the space was to benefit.  I had just barely nodded and thanked the woman behind the counter who served me, and again to Abdul, who I was introduced to later as being the person who made the baklava.  I praised him but refused another piece, as at that point in my trip I was feeling very conscious about all the things I was consuming that I shouldn’t have been.  I then perused the hanging exhibit.  This featured portraits and statements from young adults in Afghanistan, about the political process and needing to be able to contribute in a process that corruptly excludes them - especially, but not solely the women. 

From there I walked back eastward to the Hastings Herring Festival.  While fish is really not my thing, I am a sucker for festival, especially niche things as such.  This part of Hastings (Old Town) clearly takes great pride in its fishing heritage, and there were several food vendors and a music tent.  Once I decided to partake, I chewed on an antihistamine and found something that I could enjoy - a Colombian recipe chowder with local herring, cod, and mussels in a coconut milk base.  I also got a mulled wine ( Did I mention that it was cold and spitting...again?) and I went to the tent to listen to Carol Prior (I think that was her name) sing.  At first I wasn’t sure what to think of the performance.  It seemed a bit rough.  Her songs felt like storytelling to music - kind of just singing aloud her thoughts on the topics.  She grew on me though.  This was storytelling as it should be.  She sang songs about women.  First acapella and then she pulled out her guitar.  I actually wish that I could remember some of the lyrics now.  She sang about Virginia Woolf and how we all women should get rid of the stones in our pockets.  She sang about a woman buried in Brighton, whose gravestone inspired Carol to do some research.  She sang about Molly Malone - presumably a composite of women from that time and place (late 19th century, English seafront), and though I didn’t have a clue as to what a cockle or a whelk was, I sang along with everyone else.  Then she sang the theme song to a show called Gentleman Jack.  I haven’t seen the show, but apparently Jack was a dyke in a time and place where that was (more so) frowned upon.  Lastly, she sang about Harriet Tubman.  This surprised me, but was nice to hear in this audience, though she seemed to speak about the Underground Railroad as having actual trains.  I was tempted to talk with her about this after the performance, but I just let it go.  I left the festival and hopped on a cliffside “elevator” trolley car, up to what I believe was national parkland.  The views were ridiculous.  Again, I was so impressed at the expanse of green, far beyond my sight and the sight of the ocean - all just literal steps (200+ without the elevator) from town.  I am in absolute awe of this landscape.

From there, even though I wanted to relax at the hotel and possibly take a bath, AND I had absolutely no intention of shopping... I stopped in a shop with what turns out to be clothing from Thailand.  Somehow I would up in an hours long? conversation with Lisa, who (of course) was on my wavelength about all things political and humane.  What a lovely (though somewhat depressing - just because of the way of the world these days) conversation and connection.  I am just so thrilled when that happens.  The night continued to be a treat with a “new moon sister soul circle.”  I am pretty sure that I’ve added to the title of this event, but I think it all applies.  This was the second very purposefully women oriented group participation gathering I had taken part in on this trip.  In each, our discussions were quite personal and our interactions healing.  It brought to mind the question of whether or not men ever do this kind of healing work with each other.  I personally can’t imagine this scene, but I would welcome it.  In any case, in this session the intent was to be conscious of our own life cycle’s alignment with that of the moon.  With the upcoming new moon, the idea was to set intentions for the next couple of weeks.  The first activity though was one that incorporated touch.  We were partnered and applied to shiatsu techniques to each other - one that involved support and holding of sorts, and another where we applied comforting pressure.  Each of these actions was held for 5 minutes in silence.  Again,  I thought about the power of touch and the willingness or unwillingness of men to be affectionate towards each other, but also all our willingness or unwillingness to touch each other, let alone strangers.  This exercise brought back parts of the conversation I had had with Lisa earlier in the day about all the people who are solitary (we were speaking specifically of older people who live alone and don’t or are unable to leave their houses often), and how often they interact with another human being.  I also wonder this about homeless people often.  I try not to treat anyone as invisible, but sometimes as I am going about my daily life, it is really hard to take that time to acknowledge everyone who might need acknowledgement.  Also, it’s just not my everyday personality.  All the exercises we did were moving and felt relevant.  One other that I think most people would find hard was to listen to our partners speak for five minutes without interjection.  It was hard even to begin speaking in that moment, but I think powerful to be listened to uninterrupted.  I know that this is a skill I need to practice more on.  An aside to this was that the person who spoke to me described a kind of racial dysmorphia.  I think that is the correct term.  She has always felt that she was/should be black, and had always pictured herself having biracial children.  I really did not know what to do with this information, and was glad that I did not have to respond.  That is such a strange desire? for me.  It does make me think about how I feel about transgenderism and the like.  In what ways can we feel that we are in the wrong selves, and how far can we/should we go to repair this?

As another aside - just on observations of Brightoners - they have a slightly closer personal space distance than New Yorkers.  It is not at all uncomfortable, but noticeable.

[hviral]

New Mexicans Saw Young Girls With Epstein as He Shopped for His ‘Baby Ranch’

R. Kelly arrived under escort of U.S. Marshals on Friday at the same small New Jersey airport where Jeffrey Epstein was arrested last month.

The singer and the money manager are charged in separate cases with having sex with multiple minors. Both have long been seen in the company of underage girls. And both cases raise the question of why so many people said nothing over the years.

Saying something when you see something—the post-9/11 adage about terrorism—should also apply to the sexual abuse of underage girls.

Of course, not everybody could be expected to have understood the significance of what they were seeing before Epstein’s proclivities became widely known. That included realtor Pat French of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Back in September of 1992, French was on the way to take her tween-turning-teen daughter and a friend to see the first woman to lead the Cherokee tribe, when she stopped at a luxury hotel to drop off some papers to a mega-rich New Yorker who was shopping for a ranch.

When she rang the doorbell to the suite at the Rancho Encantado that September day in 1992, Jeffrey Epstein was not who answered.

“There were all these girls,” French told The Daily Beast this week. “A little bit older than my daughter. Not much.”

French made what seemed at the time to be a completely reasonable assumption.

“I thought, ‘Oh, these must be his daughters and friends he took along on the trip,’” French recalled.

She did not know at the time that Epstein had no children.

The girls took the papers, which described properties that French thought might interest Epstein. He had told her he was seeking isolation.

“He wanted really far away from people,” French recalled.

French proceeded on with her daughter and friends to see Cherokee Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller receive an an award from the International Women’s Forum. Mankiller—now deceased, from cancer in 2010—was a leading champion of women’s rights as well as Native American rights and human rights in general. Mankiller was taking particular steps to combat the sexual abuse of children in her tribe. French never imagined that the girls she saw back at the plush Rancho Encantado were victims of evil such as Mankiller battled.

“I had no idea about this man,” French later told The Daily Beast.

French had no further dealings with Epstein. He chose to buy a ranch through another realtor, Rhonda King, who was also then a representative to the New Mexico state legislature. The purchase of the 10,000-acre Zorro Ranch came with an additional, instant political connection, as Epstein bought it from the realtor’s uncle, former Gov. Bruce King.

Epstein proceeded to build a 26,700 square foot hacienda-style hilltop mansion, the largest private home in Santa Fe County, perhaps the state. The former governor’s brother, New Mexico State treasurer David King, was quoted saying of Epstein, “He’s building what you want as a heavenly ranch.”

Epstein was reported to have bought $600 bedsheets. He was said to have his bread flown in from New York.

“They do have money,” a local builder remarked.

But money was still money for Epstein. He sued Santa Fe County in 2000, alleging that he was being overcharged on property taxes because the ranch was worth only $30 million, not the $33 million it had been officially appraised. He demanded a refund of $20,000 he had already paid. The suit was settled for an undisclosed amount.

Visitors to the mansion included the leading candidate for governor in 2002, Bill Richardson, who was later quick to say that he was accompanied by his wife. Epstein contributed $50,000 to Richardson’s campaign. Epstein kicked in another $50,000 towards Richardson’s successful run for reelection in 2006.

Gary King, the former governor’s son, was running for state attorney general that year and Epstein donated $15,000 to his primary campaign. Epstein also donated $10,000 toward Jim Bacca’s campaign to become head of the land commission and $2,000 toward Santa Fe County Sheriff Jim Solano’s bid for reelection.

In the meantime, Epstein was apparently flying in underage girls as well as fresh bread, usually through Santa Fe when he was using his Gulfstream, or the larger Albuquerque airport when using his Boeing 727. One of his accusers would say that she was raped at the ranch when she was 15.

No doubt people at the airports and ranch workers and folks in town saw the girls. But nobody seems to have contacted the authorities even after the news broke in July 2006 that Epstein was being charged in Florida with having sex with underage girls.

The following year, Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to just one count of engaging a minor in prostitution. This unconscionable deal allowed him to serve just 13 months of nights and weekends in a private section of the Palm Beach County Jail. A resident of Santa Fe recalled to The Daily Beast that when she went into a local newsstand, the proprietor remarked, “Oh, he always used to come into town with all these girls.”

Upon his release in 2009, Epstein was required by the plea deal to to register as a sex offender. Federal law required him also to register in any other jurisdiction where he maintained a residence, including what his lawyers termed his “vacation home” outside Santa Fe.

On July 23, 2010, Epstein received a notice from the New Mexico Department of Public Safety (NMDPS) stating it had been notified by its Florida counterpart that Epstein was a registered sex offender.

“A convicted sex offender who resides in New Mexico shall register with the county sheriff no later than ten (10) days after establishing residence in this state,” the notice said.

On August 17, Epstein registered in person with Detective Deborah Anaya at the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office. Anaya afterwards paid a standard visit to the offender’s home. What wasn’t standard were the offender’s conveyances, which she listed as two private jets and two helicopters, along with a fleet of land vehicles.

Two days later, on August 19, Epstein received a second notice from NMDPS, which said, “You are not required to register with the state of New Mexico.” A NMDPS spokesman later told The Daily Beast, “While in New Mexico we expressly disapprove of such conduct as specific to this case, the determination made when someone must register in New Mexico is a fact-based inquiry. The state conducted a ‘translation’ on August 11, 2010, regarding Mr. Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution in the state of Florida, i.e., a comparison of the out-of-state elements of the Florida conviction were compared against New Mexico law. It was determined at that time that because the victim was not under the age of 16, Mr. Epstein does not have a registration requirement in New Mexico.”

The spokesman did not respond to a query as to how this squared with federal law, which would seem to say that the conviction in Florida required him to register in New Mexico even if the victim was not under 16. The Florida definition of a minor was the operative one in whatever state when it came to registering.

The standard letterhead in both NMDPS notices was identical, but in retrospect the words “Bill Richardson, Governor” seem to jump out a little more in the second one.

Richardson—a former Energy Secretary in the Clinton administration—was in the final months of his second and final term as New Mexico’s governor, but Gary King remained the state attorney general until 2015. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2014 and may have imagined nobody would be any the wiser when he accepted $35,000 donated by five shell companies that Epstein had established.

The companies—three of which were apparently named after streets in the gated Brooklyn enclave where Epstein was raised—are based in the Virgin Islands. That is where Epstein has two private islands and where numerous people also saw him in the company of apparently underage girls and where he also made numerous political contributions, and even hired a former governor’s wife as his office manager.

Epstein almost certainly would still be flying girls to New Mexico and the Virgin Islands, along with his residences in Palm Beach and New York and likely Paris had he not been indicted by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office for sex trafficking. He was arrested when he stepped off his Gulfstream at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.

Epstein seems to have been abusing girls in New Mexico for at least 27 years. If he was traveling with underage girls after his widely reported conviction, no one should have imagined that he was doing so for any purpose other than should have been immediately reported to the authorities.

So many people saw something and said nothing.

Epstein apparently imagined people would keep saying nothing and he would remain at liberty. He has long leased grazing rights for 1,244 acres adjoining his Zorro Ranch and he renewed the lease in 2016 so it runs to 2021. He was reported in 2011 to have 39 Angus-cross cows and two bulls. The bulls are apparently for breeding.

Epstein seems to have been obsessed with breeding. As The New York Times reported, he talked about using his seed to impregnate a herd of women, whom he seems to have regarded as just cattle at whatever age. He was said to have suggested to scientists that the human race would be improved by having what might in ranch terms be called an Epstein-cross.

We can all hope that his line dies in prison along with him.

Until then, look for Epstein to seek to curry favor with other inmates at the Metropolitan Correctional Center by putting money in their commissary accounts the same way he used to contribute to politicians in New Mexico and the Virgin Islands.

Out in New Mexico, one of Epstein’s more remote neighbors was spared ever encountering him. But the artist Sina Brush did receive an unbidden letter from him not long after he built his mansion. He informed her that he was paying her $25,000 for her refuge of 40 years. The letter did not even ask she was interested in selling. She sent back a polite “no thank you” note despite his rudeness.

The modest parcel where Brush lives and works with an aging mare named Billie—“after the kid”—is one place that Epstein could not have bought with all his money. There, Brush enjoys a realm whose magical light and timeless peace have inspired many other artists, including not only Georgia O’Keeffe, but also Gerald Cassidy, Forrest Moses, Woody Gwyn and Fritz Scholde. Here is isolation that can also lead to what is the very best in us.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she told The Daily Beast. “I need this kind of tranquility and beauty.”

The post New Mexicans Saw Young Girls With Epstein as He Shopped for His ‘Baby Ranch’ appeared first on HviRAL.

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[jessicakehoe]

How Do We Feel About Aziz Ansari’s Return to Netflix?

The ranks here at FASHION are not filled with men. Shocking, right? But there are one or two (there are actually, literally, two). Naturally, when a question about male/female dynamics arises it’s only fair that one of them stand in for the members of his gender and provide some insight. Our last topic of conversation was about Bohemian Rhapsody’s controversial director Bryan Singer, and today we’re talking about the fact that Aziz Ansari is returning to Netflix with his first post-#MeToo comedy special. Two of our staffers—from the men’s corner, Greg Hudson, and from the women’s, Pahull Bains—talk it out.

Pahull Bains: It’s a familiar tale: men screw up, disappear for a while, and return stronger and more powerful than ever. Some men, like Trump, don’t even have to do the disappearing bit. They just get stronger and stronger right in front of our eyes. It’s like watching Mark Ruffalo transform into the Hulk, only with less grunting (and a lot less saving-the-world).

Anyway, the latest disgraced man to return is Aziz Ansari. Next week, he’s back on Netflix with a new comedy special, directed by Spike Jonze (is it just me or is that a weird choice?). Aziz Ansari: Right Now was filmed during the Brooklyn stops of his ‘Road to Nowhere’ tour, which has taken him everywhere from Mumbai to Sydney to London to Austin over the past several months. Now, we know comebacks are inevitable. But because we’re either eternal optimists or just absolute idiots, we seem to hold out hope that these disgraced men will return as chastened, repentant, more respectful versions of their earlier selves. Louis CK has already proved us wrong. So what can we expect of Aziz?

Judging by the reviews coming in from various international outlets as he makes his way across the globe, the comedian who built a career on being a woke ally is dancing around the elephant in the room instead of mining it for thoughtful, introspective material. Reviews have been mixed—Vulture called his New York show “sombre,” while the Guardian deemed his London set “combative”—but a word that comes up often is bitter. It shows up in a New Yorker review of his New Haven show, in a Cut report from a show in Massachusetts, and a Quartz piece from Connecticut.

So rather than grapple with the complex gender dynamics, social norms and patriarchal traditions that landed him on Babe.net’s homepage, he seems to have directed his energy towards criticizing his critics. Well not his critics necessarily but in general the “really hardcore woke people” trying to outdo each other in a “secret progressive Candy Crush” game. In short, he’s angry with people for being angry, instead of taking a beat to think about why.

I’m not quite sure what to expect of this documentary of his Brooklyn shows but considering he knew they were being taped, I’m betting he brought a fair bit of introspection and penitence into this one. Because when you’re plotting your return to the small screen for the first time after a scandal of this magnitude, you make damn sure that you look good. What do you think? Or rather, what are you expecting to see?

Greg Hudson: I’m not looking for points or anything, but when I have an internet-based written discussion with a co-worker, I like to read their thoughts before responding. I know it’s not required–after all, listening before we speak isn’t really something most men “do”– but I’m glad I did. Because this is hella interesting!

Aziz Ansari’s inclusion in the #MeToo narrative was always ambiguous: some people–and not just dudes–saw it as a sign that the movement was overreaching and overcorrecting, whereas as others saw it as an opportunity to call out and discuss the more insidious, banal side of misogyny that allows men not to think about their partner’s comfort and pleasure, so long as they don’t explicitly shout NO TOUCHING! Even those who were ready to cancel Aziz along with all the other MeToo Men would begrudgingly admit that what he did was in a different category than what Weinstein, or even Louis did. But…there was still a shadow cast over him.

What I find so interesting is that, more than a year later, Aziz Ansari is apparently still up for interpretation. (Granted, that’s true of literally everything in the world: it’s all subject to individual interpretation and meaning). Maybe we read different reviews of the same events, but I think we saw a lot of the same stuff, and yet our conclusions are not the same.

When I read about shows from his tour, sure the writer mentioned that she sensed “a bitterness emanating from the stage,” but I wonder how much that was confirmation bias. I wasn’t there, nor do I know what the writer’s beliefs were going in that she was looking to confirm. But, for me, the lines that stood out from that review were the ones that seemed to contradict the idea he was traveling down the same path as Louis. Namely: “Unlike Louis C.K., who seems to have given up on trying to win back the affections of people who wrote him off… Ansari’s set had moments of genuine contemplation.”

For me, who (full disclosure) felt that Aziz didn’t deserve to be in the #MeToo conversation at all [and we can totally re-open that discussion if you’d like!], it sounds like the theme of the show is totally appropriate. “The set revolved around the question of cultural forgiveness, and the idea that we’re all flawed people who make mistakes and that the knee-jerk ‘cancel culture’ that we all participate in only serves to exacerbate divisions.” Isn’t that an entirely appropriate angle to take? It’s not claiming innocence, nor is it raging bitterly against progressive politics. It’s pointing out a social issue that is surprisingly hard to address: people who pride themselves on doing the right thing have an almost impossible time admitting that they are actually doing harm.

And yet, more and more stories are coming out about the real world pain and disproportionate punishment that arises from cancel culture. I don’t think talking about that, especially if it’s with humour and humility (which his sets are, according to the reviews), should be seen as bitterness. Nor should we see this as an example of how naively, foolishly forgiving we are to men who screw up.

We all talked about how the danger with #MeToo was that there was neither a process in place to adjudicate complaints, or to provide a path to redemption. (Actually, even saying that sounded like a defense of bad behaviour in the moment). If we don’t allow someone like Aziz, who never denied his actions, who apologized both publicly and privately, and who clearly had made being an ally not just a talking point in his comedy, but a part of how he worked, the freedom or space to “come back,” then is the movement really about justice?

PB: I feel like his take on the current culture of “cancelling” people would be stronger if he actually acknowledged his place in it. I don’t think we can hope for any progress if we sweep things under the rug or try to address things in blanket terms rather than specific ones. I know we both agree that what’s being lost in present-day discourse is nuance, and how can you have nuance without specifics? I also find it odd for a comedian who very publicly mines the personal and private (talking about his grandmother’s Alzheimers, his immigrant experience etc) to suddenly take a giant step back from the personal at this crucial moment. As a person who’s a medium-level fan of Aziz’s (I really enjoyed Master of None but haven’t seen much else that he’s been in), I think I would admire and respect him a whole lot more if he addressed all of this straight up, if he talked about how cancel culture suddenly got real for him when the Babe piece came out, and how it made him think about wokeness being taken to an extreme. (As well as his own, former, place in our culture as a woke poster boy.) I guess what I’m saying is I’d love to hear from him why he thinks he doesn’t deserve to be cancelled, instead of just railing nebulously against the system that might be trying to do so. (And I don’t even agree that it is!)

A couple of reviews mention Aziz briefly touching upon the experience with Grace: “Ansari recalled a conversation in which a friend told him it made him rethink every date he’s been on: “If that has made not just me but other guys think about this, and just be more thoughtful and aware and willing to go that extra mile, and make sure someone else is comfortable in that moment, that���s a good thing.””

Now I’d love to hear him riffing more on that. You mentioned how Aziz had made being an ally a focal part of his work, and I’m curious: how do you see him continuing to be a feminist ally if he doesn’t publicly—through his comedy, which is the easiest way to reach millions of his male fans—address what he’s learned and how he may have changed? If all his fans take away from these comedy sets is that it’s the people who are wrong for overreacting, that’s not correcting anything at all is it? I just don’t see how he’s going to hold on to his woke badge if he refuses to engage meaningfully—head on—with this issue.

GH: Obviously, this is all hypothetical at this point, since we’re basing our opinions about a comedy special we haven’t seen on a handful of small write ups that describe snippets of new material that may or may not have survived long enough to be in the show. So, we don’t know if he digs deeper into that specific event, or his general complicity in a patriarchal society. Maybe he does and it’s masterful!

But, my question is: why is his woke card at risk? Divorced from the social context of the time, what must he address, reckon or wrestle with? To me, this a reminder of the fungibility of memory. Tests have shown (I know because I spent about ten minutes Googling it) that people will still make inferences and judgements based on misinformation, even after they’ve been told that the information they were given was inaccurate.

So, if a group of subjects were told about a house fire, and then told about how there were highly flammable paints and chemicals in the garage before the fire started, they understandably infer that those paints had a hand in the fire. Interestingly, and kind of distressingly, even after subjects were told that at the time of the fire those paints had been removed (so they definitely weren’t a catalyst), subjects still surmised that the fire was probably caused by those damn paints and things.

While Aziz’s story was unfolding, there was a general acceptance that this wasn’t as serious as all the other stories, but that acceptance started feeling as genuine as “I’m not racist, but…”. Aziz isn’t as bad as Louis, but….

And so now, that’s how we remember the story. We know he didn’t do anything super serious, but it all happened at the same time, and we remember the outrage and so…now Aziz has to be a proxy–or at least a pilot–for every other man who has been shamed.

Still, one might argue that the conversation about entitlement, consent, communication and sexual privilege needed to happen, and so any negative consequences experienced by Aziz was justified (and likely negligible). I think that’s probably true–or rather, I believe the people who take this stance. But if that’s the case, then it shouldn’t be about Aziz, and whether he’s grown now.

Stipulated that you may not be able to write in Aziz’s voice, what does him reckoning with his actions even look like? I’ve started to notice, as we talk about presidential candidates and their personal and professional histories, that when a pundit says that X will really have to reckon with Y, what they really mean is that Y should disqualify X. The idea of reckoning is so vague as to be meaningless. When we don’t have a firm definition of what “reckoning” looks like, let alone when it is done sufficiently, then the whole process becomes futile in its subjectivity.

Yes, there is the lesson men need to learn about explicit consent and communication, but more broadly, everyone can look at their willingness to pile on strangers while giving themselves a pass, and see something untenable and unjust.

PB: One major thing I think we tend to forget when we talk about how/whether public figures should atone for misdeeds/misbehaviours is the fact that they’re public figures. They don’t owe us any explanations but by this point they should be damn well used to being asked for them. (You wrote that if a friend had done the same thing, I’d assume he’d wrestled with it enough but no I certainly wouldn’t, unless he explicitly told me so.) So since we’re not all best buds with Aziz, and he’s not telling us any of this over a glass of scotch, we expect him to address it on stage. Because when you’re a public figure whose career is built on engaging candidly and irreverently with both what’s going on in the world and what’s going on in your life, it seems particularly disingenuous to just ignore a scandal that you’re at the centre of. Don’t you think by not addressing this whole thing directly, he’s basically just asking us all to pretend it didn’t happen? And the thing is, one of the reasons I want him to address it is precisely because I think he can move on from it, that it’s not disqualifying.

I feel like this is one of those instances where the actual problem isn’t as telling as your response to that problem. I, like many others, agree that this shouldn’t be conflated with the other #MeToo stories, and is emblematic of a larger, structural issue than a single man’s actions. He’s a tiny symptom of a much larger problem, and at the same time, uniquely positioned to address that problem in a way that, down the line, might even result in real change. To just ignore it seems like a huge missed opportunity.

You asked earlier at some point: “Divorced from the social context of the time, what must he address, reckon or wrestle with?” And my response is that you simply can’t divorce context from these sorts of game-changing conversations. We wouldn’t even be talking about Aziz and Grace 20 years ago — it wouldn’t have even been a story. Heck, Peter Farrelly said in a published story in the ’90s that he liked to whip his dick out at unsuspecting people and that barely registered as a blip. As our culture’s threshold for bullshit changes, so do the kinds of conversations we have, and what we accept from the men (or women) responsible for that bullshit, whether in our personal lives or public ones.

GH: I do think that the conversation that grew out of the scandal was a positive one, or at least one that was needed–more needed than I would have thought, which shows how much it was needed (Hello circular reasoning!). But if a positive thing came out of it, then why is his ‘comeback’ controversial?

PB: I don’t think it is though. I don’t think people want him to be exiled or to become a pop culture pariah. I think it’s the substance of his comeback that might be considered controversial if he just pretends the whole Babe thing never happened, or worse, says the onus is on everyone else for overreacting, not on the patriarchal culture that made it okay, for so long, to behave the way he did and not think twice about it.

GH: I think he can call out and critique cancel culture without implying that it’s society’s fault that he got in trouble. Can’t he? And based on the little snippets of his shows in some of the reviews, he’s not saying people are too sensitive. He’s saying society picks and chooses who to cancel, who to be outraged by, without consistency or accountability. And he’s saying we all do it to a certain extent. Hence the difference between people’s reaction to R. Kelly vs Michael Jackson. It’s why John Lennon, who abused women, and Led Zeppelin, Motley Crew, Guns and Roses, and hell, David Bowie who all did horrible things with and to groupies, are still beloved. It’s hypocritical. But, since we weren’t around for their misdeeds, we’re cool about overlooking them?

Normal people can make mistakes in private, they can apologize to who they offended, make restitutions as much as possible, and grow, all without people calling them out on social media. Historical people already did their misdeeds, and cultural consensus is pretty hard to change, so they often get a pass. What Aziz is saying is if we were to shine celebrity-level spotlight on any random person, we’d likely find something for which, if they were a present day celebrity, we could yell at them about. For instance: still listening to Michael Jackson. And so, if no one is perfect, it’s awfully dangerous to hold people up to a perfect standard.

I think mostly though–and this extends beyond Aziz–I don’t like the vagueness of people’s expectations. He didn’t reckon with it! But what does that mean? It’s like, people always say the most important thing in a relationship is communication. As a divorcee, I totally agree! But also, no one actually tells you, while giving you the communication advice, what that means.

PB: Yes but that’s just it. He’s not a “normal person.” He’s a public figure that “normal people” look up to and possibly even emulate. Yes, society does pick and choose who to outraged by and to what degree, but the response is still dictated by the level of the “crime” (using this term very loosely here). I think most people would agree that Aziz’s role in this whole conversation is very different from say, Weinstein or Kelly or CK. And I think that’s largely why people are hoping he addresses it; there’s not much room for defense as far as those guys go, but there is plenty of room for Aziz. I think what people are hoping for is a thoughtful take on everything that’s happened in the last year—happened to Aziz, specifically, and to our culture as a whole, as a result of that story. Like it or not, he’s at the centre of a culture-shifting conversation that’s incredibly important. It’s hard to say what him adequately “reckoning” with it would look like, but maybe we can circle back on this once we’ve actually seen the damn Netflix special?

GH: And if it isn’t good, we can just talk about John Mulaney’s specials. They are also on Netflix and not at all controversial!

The post How Do We Feel About Aziz Ansari’s Return to Netflix? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

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[bountyofbeads]

The Dangers of Trump’s Approach to Iran (He DOESN'T HAVE AN APPROACH OR A PLAN!! HE'S DANGEROUSLY SHOOTING FROM THE HIP!! REMEMBER, HE KNOWS😂🤣 MORE THAN ANYBODY. 🥵🤬🤬) #NoMoreWars #VoteBlue2020 #ANYBODYBUTTRUMP2020

By Isaac Chotiner | Published June 19, 2019 5:00 AM PM | New Yorker | Posted June 19, 2019 |

Last May, President Trump withdrew from the nuclear agreement that President Obama struck with Iran. Now, many fear that the Trump Administration may be on the verge of a military strike on the country. Tensions with Iran began escalating rapidly in April, when Trump announced that he was designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization and imposed more sanctions. Last Thursday, two tankers, one Japanese, the other Norwegian, exploded in the Gulf of Oman. The Trump Administration quickly blamed Iran for the attacks, and for attacks on four other tankers in the same area on May 12th. Then, on Monday, Iran announced that it was likely to breach the nuclear deal by keeping more uranium stockpiled than is allowed by the agreement, as the U.S. prepared to send a thousand more troops to the region.

To talk about the state of U.S.-Iranian relations, I spoke by phone with Wendy R. Sherman, the lead American negotiator on the nuclear agreement, and a former State Department ambassador. She is currently the director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of “Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power, and Persistence.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the risks of escalating tensions, why Trump has taken such distinct approaches to Iran and North Korea, and the difference between hard-liners and hard-hard-liners in both the U.S. and Iran.

Do you have a view other than agnosticism on who was behind these tanker attacks?

I have not seen the intelligence myself, so it is very hard to definitely say what occurred here. Nonetheless, the fact that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee [Adam Schiff] has publicly said that he believes the intelligence is conclusive is certainly an important data point. I think the real issue here is not only what happened but why did it happen, what will be the response to it happening, and is this part of an escalatory cycle that was begun by the Trump Administration when the President withdrew from the J.C.P.O.A. [the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the Iran deal is officially known]?

What is your sense of American policy toward Iran right now? Do you see any rhyme or reason, or anything that could even be called strategic belligerence?

I do not think there is a coherent policy or strategy regarding Iran. I think President Trump made a commitment during the campaign to withdraw from the deal. His then [team] all believed he should not. When they all departed, his new team supported his withdrawing from the deal. Within that new team, I would say we have the never-saw-a-war-he-didn’t-want-to wage national-security adviser, John Bolton. We have a chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who pretty much endorses everything the President says. We have an acting Secretary of Defense [Patrick Shanahan, who withdrew from the confirmation process on Tuesday] who clearly doesn’t have a voice in this Administration, it appears. And we have a Secretary of State [Mike Pompeo] who may think he is trying to bring nuance to this policy, but seems to be pursuing a path which, either intentionally or by accident, may take us to war.

Maybe I am picking up on something that is not there, but I thought you sort of described Pompeo as thinking of himself as a voice of moderation or compromise. Is that based on something you have heard?

I think “moderation” is too strong a word. I think Secretary Pompeo may believe that he is talking with all of the allies and partners, and trying to make sure everyone is aware of the intelligence. But there is no question that he has become what I call a hard-hard-liner, and not a hard-liner. We are all at some level hard-liners when it comes to Iran. Nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And nobody wants Iran to continue malign or nefarious behavior in the region or in the world, or human-rights abuses, or its state sponsorship of terrorism. But the hard-hard-liners are on the ascent in the Trump Administration, and hard-hard-liners are certainly on the ascent in Iran. And that has created a virtual symbiosis where the hard-hard-liners in each of these spheres have ramped up an escalatory and very dangerous cycle.

One concern among opponents of the Trump Administration was that by ramping up sanctions and being more aggressive, the United States would only embolden Iranian hard-liners. What have you seen that suggests that has already occurred?

Think of it this way: it is actually rather extraordinary that, even in the face of the Trump Administration withdrawing from the deal, and the reimposition of sanctions, and the ramping up of pressure, Iran has stayed compliant with the deal. But the Supreme Leader of Iran has always understood that for his survival, he needs to balance the forces in his country. And there are hard-line forces—I would probably call President [Hassan] Rouhani a hard-liner—and there are hard-hard-liners—the I.R.G.C. and the Quds Force. And clearly the hard-hard-liners are in the ascendancy, because they have said, “Enough already. Being part of this deal has gotten us more sanctions, more pressure. We have gotten nothing out of this. We told you all along that the deal was a bad deal.” The I.R.G.C. never wanted this deal. They owned the black market. They owned the Iranian economy. They would like to go back to those good old days. They want freedom of action in the Middle East. Apparently, they have it. On the day the Prime Minister of Japan was in Tehran, if the intelligence is accurate—and, as I said, I haven’t read it, so I don’t know—they attacked a Japanese tanker.

You are saying that even people like yourself in the Obama Administration who wanted a nuclear deal and people like Rouhani, who, in the American press, is generally called a moderate, are hard-liners. Everyone is a hard-liner. Is that accurate?

I don’t think that President Rouhani is moderate in American terms. He is a very conservative cleric. He believes in the theocracy of Iran; he is a product of it. And he is a hard-liner. People would call me a moderate in U.S. terms, because I was willing to negotiate with Iran under the direction of President Obama and Secretary [John] Kerry, but I am in my own way a hard-liner, because I believe Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. It should stop locking up Americans in Evin Prison. It should stop its state sponsorship of terrorism. And it should stop its human-rights abuses of its own people.

Right, I just meant that it’s interesting that we are at a place where there are really no doves—

I am more of a dove when it comes to finding the strategy and the tactics that can address these issues peacefully, as opposed to war. That is not to say I am a pacifist. I am not. There are times when war is the last and only result. But what we are experiencing right now is an escalatory cycle between the hard-hard-liners in each of our countries. They are spinning each other up on a path that could lead us to a war that is unnecessary, in my view, and will be horribly destructive.

What is the specific meaning to Iran keeping more of its uranium? How important a component was that of the deal?

It’s a very important component. The restrictions that were put in place include that, for fifteen years, Iran cannot enrich above 3.67 per cent, nor have a stockpile of 3.67-per-cent- enriched uranium of more than three hundred kilograms. One cannot make a nuclear bomb with those restrictions. There are restrictions that go on for twenty and twenty-five years and forever that also will make it very difficult for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. But, for those first fifteen years, those two requirements are quite profound.

So if Iran begins to enrich above 3.67 per cent, it has violated the agreement. It means that Iran, in its own way, is withdrawing from the agreement. It will then put pressure on the Europeans to both fully enforce sanctions and impose new ones. It will probably create a crisis at the U.N. Security Council. It will probably create a circumstance where the U.S. feels it needs to take additional action. And even before that, in some quarters, my understanding is that there is discussion of taking a strike in retaliation for the tankers, to act as a deterrent to insure that the Strait of Hormuz is open. I think there are many ways to deal with that, and I would hope that the Administration would be extremely careful about any military action.

What specifically have you heard about this?

I think I’d rather not say.

What did you learn about Iran’s government from the nuclear negotiations that you were surprised by, or that is helpful when thinking through this current crisis?

I’m not sure “surprised” is the right word. I probably came to understand more. Iran is a culture of resistance. They will resist coming to the negotiating table unless and until President Trump puts something on the table for them. You may recall that in the case of North Korea the President put on the table stopping exercises in South Korea. The Iranians will not capitulate in any way, shape, or form. They lived with the Iran-Iraq War, with chemical attacks on their own people. It took a long time to find a way through that.

Second, they are a country with politics. Most Americans hear “Supreme Leader” and they think he tells everyone what to do and that’s it. But that is not true. The Supreme Leader balances a number of political forces, including the hard-liners and the hard-hard-liners. And so you constantly see this back-and-forth of trying to manage the politics and the various forces in his country. Yes, he has a lot of control. Yes, people don’t get to run for President in Iran unless a slate is agreed to by the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council. But, that said, there are still politics in Iran.

And Iran is all of the things people say. I have no trust in Iran, and Iran has no trust in me. We may have gained some mutual respect and understanding through the negotiations, but there is no trust. And Iran does a lot of bad things in the world. But, for the life of me, if the current President of the United States does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, I do not understand why he withdrew from a deal that was keeping them from getting nuclear weapons.

How has Iran’s behavior in the region changed or not changed over the past year—specifically in the time since Trump announced he was pulling out of the nuclear deal?

I see them doing more, not less in the region. Sometimes that is through proxies—in Yemen, in Syria, even in Afghanistan—but Iran is very active in the region. And more so than at the time that the deal was agreed. That’s my perception certainly.

Given that we have a President who insists on doing things his own way, and that way often has to do with flattery and meeting people face-to-face, do you see any hope of high-level meetings, or something like North Korea, where some sort of negotiation can keep the lid on things after a lot of belligerence, even if we don’t see any sign of a long-term solution?

There is a possibility, but President Trump would have to put something on the table, as he did in the North Korean situation. There is a sense of no respect by the President of the United States for Iran. It is a very different situation than North Korea. I think I will not be the first person to remind you that one of the reasons that President Trump took on North Korea was that Barack Obama had not. We took it on, but not in a way that got to a solution. And he wanted to withdraw from the Iran deal because Obama had done it. I am always open to unconventional ways to negotiate, but they have to come with a strategy, a plan, a team, and a way to execute that plan, and a way to consult with others in the world to insure the durability of what you are trying to do. And I don’t see that here.

[i-am-very-very-tired]

News Rankings 9 Reasons Your Skin Is Changing Color Anna Medaris Miller • April 14, 2016, at 11:43 a.m. Stella Pavlides was admiring her new ruby ring under the black lights of a New York City bar when she noticed something else glowing: "I had white spots on my knuckles," remembers Pavlides, a 70-year-old in Clearwater, Florida, who was 22 at the time. But when she stepped outside, the spots were gone. "I didn't think much of anything," she says. Within a few years, however, the bleached-looking patches became more prominent against her Greek skin, and spread to the tops of her hands, her elbows, back, knees, armpits and genitals, and around her eyes and mouth. Dermatologists told her it was vitiligo, an autoimmune disease that causes the skin to lose the melanin that colors it – sometimes in small patches, other times across most of the body. While the condition – which affects about 1 percent of the world's population and can be more noticeable in people with darker skin – is relatively physically harmless, it can be emotionally devastating and socially isolating. Stella Pavlides founded the American Vitiligo Research Foundation because she wanted to support vitiligo research that didn’t use animals in testing. Stella Pavlides founded the American Vitiligo Research Foundation because she wanted to support vitiligo research that didn’t use animals in testing. (Courtesy of Stella Pavlides) No big deal, it's only vitiligo, it won't kill you,'" Pavlides recalls doctors telling her. But to people with the condition, it is a big deal. "I got inhibited," says Pavlides, an otherwise confident, straight-shooting native New Yorker who remembers turning down trips to the beach with her friends, wearing long sleeves that she'd pull down to cover her knuckles no matter how high the temperature and feeling degraded when people dropped – rather than placed – change in her hands. Since founding the American Vitiligo Research Foundation more than 20 years ago, she's heard from countless kids who've been bullied or beaten up due to the condition, and even from a parent whose son with vitiligo committed suicide. "It's a very, very difficult disease," says Pavlides, who runs the foundation full time. [See: 10 Lessons From Empowered Patients.] While there's no cure for vitiligo, which typically first appears between ages 10 and 30, there are treatments – ranging from makeup and steroids to light therapies and skin grafts – that can help stop the disease progression, restore color or at least mask the lack of it. "Do we have an optimal treatment? The answer is no," says Dr. Pearl Grimes, director of the Vitiligo and Pigmentation Institute of Southern California who also prescribes vitamin D and antioxidants to patients with vitiligo to support their immune function. "But there is hope." For Pavlides, who says she's "tried everything" with not enough success to make the side effects or expense of treatment worth it (insurance companies don't always cover therapies because they deem them cosmetic or experimental), she feels the best medicine is support. "Don't give up," she tells parents of kids with the condition. "Tell your kids they're beautiful. Tell them everybody's different." Still, it's important to seek care for any skin pigmentation changes, dermatologists say, since some can signal more serious problems and many influence quality of life. Here are some reasons your skin might be losing, gaining or otherwise changing color – and what to do about it: 1. You Have Vitiligo If Pavlides' symptoms sound like yours – or if you have a loss of pigmentation elsewhere, such as in the hair on your body or head or inside your mouth – find a dermatologist who specializes in treating vitiligo, Grimes suggests, since many physicians wrongly believe there are no treatments and don't understand the condition's psychological impact. Vitiligo also shouldn't be ignored, experts add, since the condition – which Michael Jackson had but treated by removing the pigment from the rest of his skin rather than trying to restore color to the vititigo patches – often coincides with other autoimmune problems like thyroid disorders and can make people's skin more vulnerable to sun damage. 2. You're Pregnant While vitiligo causes a loss of pigmentation in the skin, melasma – sometimes called "the mask of pregnancy" – seems to cause some skin cells to produce more pigment, which usually appears as brown or gray-brown patches on the face, according to the American Academy of Dermatology "It's just so prominent and concerning to people," says Dr. Bruce Robinson, a dermatologist in New York City and spokesman for the American Academy of Dermatology, noting that the vast majority (some 90 percent) of patients with the condition are women, since it seems to have a hormonal component. "Pregnancy makes it worse, birth control makes it worse and sunlight makes it worse," he says. While having the baby, stopping the birth control or protecting yourself from the sun can clear up the condition, it often recurs, experts say. "For a lot of people, it's a constant battle," says Dr. Marie Jhin, a dermatologist in San Francisco. But, with expert supervision, chemical peels, bleaching creams and laser therapies can help mask flare-ups. 3. You Mixed Limes and Sunshine When patients come to Jhin panicked about mysterious dark marks on their hands or around their mouth, she asks, "Did you just go on vacation?" If the answer is yes, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Chances are, the diagnosis is phytophotodermatitis, a skin reaction to sunlight and a chemical in limes and other citrus fruits such as lemon and oranges. While the first reaction – blisters or burning – is often dismissed as sunburn or allergies, if noticed at all, the lingering pigment changes usually fade in a few months. It's common in the spring and summer months, Robinson says, since people make mixed drinks with lime, get some juice on their skin and then go out in the sun. That's why the condition is often nicknamed "Club Med Dermatitis" and "Mexican Beer Dermatitis." 4. You Have a Form of Eczema Another condition that tends to bring patients – typically children – to dermatologists during warm-weather months is pityriasis alba, which first causes red, scaly patches before leaving lighter patches on the skin, according to the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology. "It gets moms really nervous that their kid has vitiligo," Robinson has found. But in fact, the condition seems to be a feature of eczema that's simply more apparent on tanned skin, Jhin says. Treatment is usually simple sunscreen or, if more severe, a topical steroid, she says. As Robinson puts it: "You stop the eczema and the pigmentation comes back." [See: 9 Surprising Facts About Sunscreen.] 5. It's a Remnant of Past Skin Damage The technical term is "post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation." To the layperson, it simply means darker skin in places you once had acne, allergic reactions, an injury or any other type of skin inflammation, perhaps from another condition like psoriasis. Here, too, the first-line defense is treating the underlying inflammation. 6. It's Fungus Before you say "ew," keep in mind this possibility is pretty much harmless – and sometimes not even noticeable. Tinea versicolor, a common fungal infection when the natural yeast on our skin overgrows, tends to pop up in the hot, humid summer months – or among people who've visited those climates. "Most of the time it's brown or red or white and it's … in the areas where people sweat," Jhin explains. The solution? An anti-fungal treatment. 7. You Have Addison's Disease If you thought John F. Kennedy was just a tan guy, you are mistaken: He had Addison's disease, which is actually an adrenal – not skin – problem in which the adrenal glands don't produce enough of some hormones, Jhin says. "Someone who says, 'I'm a lot darker but I didn't get any sun,'" might have the condition, Jhin says, and should visit his or her primary care doctor, who might prescribe oral medicaitons to help replace the lacking hormones. 8. You Have Acanthosis Nigricans Here's another mouthful of a name; this one describing the darkening and thickening of skin folds, such as those in your neck or under your breasts. "It could just be because you're a little overweight," Jhin says, noting, however, that it could also be a sign of diabetes. If blood and other tests come up normal, though, the common condition can be treated with creams or other products that help soften the skin, she says. 9. You Have Cancer Cancer is, of course, the worst-case scenario for oddly-colored skin. Fortunately, it's also among the rarest of pigmentation issues, Robinson says. "People with melanoma – we talk about their skin turning 'slate blue,'" he says. "That's a really bad sign" because it signals that the melanoma is cancerous and has traveled throughout the body. If you have moles that change color, size or shape, too, see a dermatologist pronto. [See: 7 Ways to Prevent Skin Cancer.] Bottom line? If you notice any changes in your skin color, see a board-certified dermatologist, who can properly diagnose and treat you. Hopefully, it was the margarita. U.S. News & World Report Rankings & Research Colleges, cars, hospitals, doctors ... more News & Opinion Latest headlines and news you can use News Education Health Money Cars Real Estate Travel Copyright 2018 © U.S. News & World Report L.P.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND CHECK

But there is another set of customs for being ingratiating in print is that most essays are written to persuade. You'll find that you can't make yourself care. Today we move around more, but great work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots: the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker, Lockheed's Skunk Works, Xerox Parc. The way Apple runs the App Store? History is full of examples of parents who thought their kids were wasting their time and who were right. The people we funded came from all over the country indeed, the way to do it on their terms. Should you do it at any age? I'm not sure what regularity is, or what advantage, if any, code that is merely readable.

The first thing to understand is that encouraging startups is a rare and valuable skill, and the handful of people who will sacrifice two hours a day commuting rather than live there. What I've just described is an acquisition by a public company. But I don't know what the ideas are hard. In some countries this is the same as asking, what can I do in the language? Better check. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves.1 VCs are like car salesmen or bureaucrats: the nature of future discoveries is hard to predict. Fortunately, I was 19 at the time thought were important, and in particular that their parents didn't think were important.2 The latter is much more expensive. Well, we humans are as conspicuously different from other animals as the anteater.3 For startups to grow. Think about what you have to get iPhones out of programmers' hands.

You're always going to have to add a spoonful of sugar to make the software run on the server.4 The trouble is, it's not saying much that America is more open to immigration than Japan. The main economic motives of startup founders seem to be freedom and security. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style.5 Though this election is usually given as an example of the power of TV, Kennedy apparently would not have won without fraud by party machines in Illinois and Texas. Now we'll show it to you and explain why people need this.6 Its more general version is our answer to the wrong question. Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I can imagine some where trying to make sales would be a good heuristic for product design, and one that it would be possible to reproduce Silicon Valley in another country. An expert pianist can play notes faster than the brain can send signals to his hand. And this skill is so hard to measure that if a government did try to hire people with it, it seems obvious.7 But only a bad VC fund would take that deal. It sounded serious and difficult.8

You also need Florence in 1450. Of course they do.9 I've read that the same is true in the military—that the swaggering recruits are no more likely to turn out to be really tough than the quiet ones. How much would that take? I admit there seem to be freedom and security.10 Its more general version is our answer to the Greeks: Don't see purpose where there isn't. That's true now, and we don't realize how lucky we are that it is. The only people dumber were retail investors.11 This seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model, like runtime typing and garbage collection.12

Notes

Google and Facebook are driven by money, and are paid a flat rate regardless of the definition of property.

I don't think these are even worth thinking about for the sledgehammer; if there is one problem where rapid prototyping doesn't work. Travel has the same town, unless you're sure your money will be just mail from people who had made Lotus into the shape of the people working for startups is a bad idea the way I know it didn't to undergraduates on the one hand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive biography, and stonewall about the smaller investments you raise money, but you should probably be multiple blacklists. But it is very visible in Silicon Valley.

The late 1960s were famous for social upheaval.

Ideas are one step upstream from economic power, in the early empire the price of an urban legend. Turn on rice cooker and forget about it. Add water as specified on rice package.

This must have faces in them, but viewed from the VCs' point of view: either an IPO, or working in middle management at a Demo Day by encouraging them to. Ironically, the switch in the press or a blog on the ability to change. Which means if the founders: agree with them in advance that you're small and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a baleful stare as they do, and b not allow them to represent anything. Com of their hands.

This is an instance of a lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally.

The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the Ming Dynasty, when they say they were getting results. This of course the source files of all.

Auto-retrieving filters will be near-spams that you never know with bottlenecks, I'm guessing the next uptick after that, because they were supposed to be located elsewhere. The Department of English Studies. It's a case of Bayes' Rule.

So whatever market you're in the comment sorting algorithm. And what people actually paid. Some of the venture business, Bob wrote, for example, probably did more drugs in his twenties than any design decision, but mediocre programmers is the most important section. In theory you could get all that value, don't make wealth a zero-sum game.

They shut down a few years. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school kids arrive at college with a clear upward trend. Which means the investment market becomes more efficient.

It did not help, the more accurate predictor of success for a monitor. Progressive tax rates were highest: 14. But that turned out the words out of fashion in 100 years, it seems a bit of an outcast, just that they're practically different papers. In high school, because she liked the outdoors?

Sheep act the way they do the same thing 2300 years later Jim Ryun ran a 3 year old, a proper open-source but seems to be a distraction.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: I confess to being troubled rather than elated by the daily rumble of idols falling to accusations of “sexual misconduct,” the morbid masscult fixation that conceals private titillation, knowing smirks, and sadistic lip-smacking behind a public mask of solemn reproof. Weinstein and Trump and Roy Moore and Bill Clinton are vile pigs and creeps, no doubt; I have always detested the smug neoliberal performance-art strut of Al Franken and the careerist-toady journalism of Glenn Thrush and Charlie Rose, the latest dominoes to tumble amid the barrage of public accusations of “inappropriate” advances or touching. But the boundary between cultural tolerance/intolerance blurs and shifts with each passing revelation, as the litany of sins, ancient or recent, cardinal or venial, snowballs into an avalanche of aggrieved, undifferentiated accusation—a stampeding herd of “Me-Tooists.” Successive waves of long-forgotten gropes and slurps now overwhelm the news channel chyrons, leaving us with the sense that no greater crime against humanity is possible than an unsolicited horndog lunge of the hand or tongue, some of them from twenty or thirty years past but divulged only in the past few weeks. Let’s be honest—these “shocking” revelations about Franken—that he tried to tongue-kiss a woman one time in a rehearsal and mock-grabbed her somnolent breasts in a silly frat-house pose or that maybe his hand strayed too far toward a woman’s derriere as he obliged her with a photo at a state fair five years ago—would have elicited nothing more than a public yawn just a few weeks or months ago in the BW (Before Weinstein) era; in fact, these two women, seemingly unperturbed enough to leave these incidents unreported for five or six years, would likely not have thought to join the solemn procession of the violated on national TV if not for the stampede effect of each successive cri de coeur. But is it an advance in collective ethical consciousness when the public reservoir of shock and indignation is so easily churned up and tapped out over erotic peccadillos? And here I must, of course, distinguish between outright rape—always a viscerally sickening crime against human dignity— or implied or explicit threats to a woman worker’s livelihood over sexual “favors” on the one hand, and on the other the impetuous volcanic eruptions of erotic passion that inevitably leave one or both partners discomfited or embarrassed or forlorn by unexpected or unwelcome overtures, tactile or verbal. As the left blogger Michael J. Smith points out, “Not all acts are equally grave—an off-color joke is not as bad as a grope, and a grope is not as bad as a rape.” Then what interest of sanity or reason is served by this reckless lumping together of flicks of the tongue and forcible rapes into the single broad-brush term “sexual misconduct,” as though there is no important difference between an oafish pat or crude remark at an office party and a gang rape? This would be like applying the term “communist” alike to advocates of single payer healthcare and campaigners for one-party centralized control of the entire economy—oh wait, we have seen precisely that: during the McCarthy era. Now then . . . is all this beginning to have a familiar ring to it? And not merely deeds but words have fallen under scrutiny: on Sunday Jeffrey Tambor joined the ranks of the accused, walking the plank by quitting his acclaimed Amazon series Transparent in the wake of two allegations of the use of “lewd” language in front of his assistant and a fellow actor. So the stain of ostracism has now spread from conduct to mere speech. Alarmingly, the Pecksniffian word lewd has enjoyed a recent rehabilitation among the corporate-media “news” networks, cogs in giant infotainment conglomerates whose cash flow depends precisely on mass dissemination of HD cinematic depictions of explicit sexual “lewdness” and violence that their news departments then deplore when evidenced in real life. “Lewd” enjoyed a boomlet during the presidential campaign when the pro-Clinton newsies and talking-head strategists were professing daily bouts of horror at the revelations of the Donald’s coarse frat-boy talk on Access Hollywood. This seems to have been the first time this word had gained any traction since seventeenth-century Salem and Victorian England. This battalion of elite lewdness police are the same Ivy League graduates who in college probably considered Henry Miller a genius, not in spite of, but because of, his portrayal of raw lust in language that makes Trump’s private palaver or Tambor’s japes seem tepid and repressed by comparison. (It’s not impossible that some of these same people consider Quentin Tarantino, cinematic maestro of the vile obscenities of language and violence, a great auteur as well.) The whole spectacle is at once comical and nauseating. And it indeed looks as though huge swaths of the world’s art and literature, from Pindar to Botticelli to Shakespeare to Joyce to Updike, will soon fall to the axe of the lewdness police. Let’s say that a college English professor, in a unit on American Transcendentalism, assigns the Whitman poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” and reads the poem aloud to his students, including the following passage: This is the female form, A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction, I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it, Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed, Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable, Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice, Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day. What if just one woman student were to wilt in distress at the sound of “quivering jelly of love” and then report the professor for imposing “lewd” and disturbing language on his students? Would he be hauled before the Ethics Committee? Stripped of tenure? Forced to resign? You find this preposterous? Then consider the following report from The Atlantic on the alarming trend of bowdlerizing the great canon of Western literature because of potentially offensive erotic content: Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. . . . A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses. . . . Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. . . . Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma. And this virus of censorious American PC puritanism has leapt across the Atlantic to inhibit even the teaching of Shakespeare—yes, Shakespeare—at British universities, as reported just last month in the The Independent: Academics have criticised “trigger warnings” after Cambridge University students were warned about “potentially distressing topics” in plays by Shakespeare. English literature undergraduates were apparently cautioned that a lecture focusing on Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors would include “discussions of sexual violence” and “sexual assault.” According to The Telegraph, the trigger warnings were posted in the English Faculty’s “Notes on Lectures” document which is circulated to students at the university. Academics have expressed concern that colleges trying to protect young adults from certain issues may render them incapable of dealing with real life when they graduate. Supporters of trigger warnings say they serve to help students who may be upset if a text reminds them of a personal traumatic experience. However, critics such as Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, say allowing students to avoid learning about traumatic episodes of history and literature is “fundamentally dishonest.” Beard said previously: “We have to encourage students to be able to face that, even when they find they’re awkward and difficult for all kinds of good reasons.” David Crilly, artistic director at The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, said: “If a student of English Literature doesn’t know that Titus Andronicus contains scenes of violence they shouldn’t be on the course.” But voices of sanity such as Beard’s and Crilly’s may be fighting a noble but lost cause against the PC cultural vigilantes, clamoring for the blood of the next prominent stumbler into errant sexual expression, in the lecture hall or office or rehearsal hall or bar. But if we may be allowed to descend from the High Courts of Sexual Inquisition to the land of the living—that is, the merely fallible, sex-tormented mortals who actually make up the human race—who hasn’t lived through anguished or comical moments, either as predator or prey or both at once, in the throes of the temporary madness of desire? And did such impulsive leaps of lust or passion strike anyone as a cause for ritual mass tongue-lashing and tongue-clucking and compulsive daily confessionals and public media crucifixions in the BW era, except perhaps among the most severe of anti-sex feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who considered every heterosexual act of intercourse to be a form of rape? Did anyone but reactionary blue-noses think about suppressing or avoiding the works of Henry Miller? Or D. H Lawrence? Or even Al Goldstein? Yet now even Shakespeare finds himself on the PC Index. Among the sexual-politics contingents of early second-wave feminists, there were, to be sure, literary eviscerations and cultural firestorms, but nothing like the current pell-mell instant media arraignment for crimes against humanity warranting public investigations, tribunals, denunciations and career death sentences. It all smacks of the hellfire zeal of a religious persecution, a jarring devolution of establishment liberals into old-fashioned American sexual head hunters and cultural bluenoses in the tradition of their forebears in Salem and the fundamentalist South. Betraying a fundamentally elitist impulse to manage and control, the PC inquisitors instinctively recoil from the unruly tempests of human sexuality—the source of desire, the primal torrent driving all passion and pleasure, the wellspring of life itself—that at times deafens and blinds and exalts all of us. With the soul of an accountant and the temperament of the professional manager, the PC inquisitors seeks to confine the Dionysian chaos of Eros within the strictures of a bureaucratic handbook of procedure and etiquette, as though a sexual impulse or encounter were a banking transaction or a court proceeding. Thus do the neoliberal elites conduct this front in their incessant war on nature, including the unruly source of nature itself: behold the dismaying spectacle of these joyless, bloodless mortals doing futile battle with the god Eros. The vigilantes cannot win this battle, of course, but they can inflict needless damage on reputations, careers, on our entire cultural heritage in enforcing their groupthink compendium of trigger warnings, speech codes, and rules of order. Something surpassingly strange is at work here—a wrong-headed authoritarian ire over the spasmodic misfires of the human comedy combined with some primal meltdown of a besieged and increasingly desperate ruling class and its longstanding winking sexual hypocrisies. It is a moral panic that is, ironically, immoral at its core: repressive and diversionary, an identity-politics orgy of misdirected moral energies that breeds a chilling conformity of word and deed and, in so doing, cripples the critical faculties and independence of spirit needed to challenge the status quo the PC monitors profess to abhor. In reality, their speech and conduct codes foster a spirit of regimentation rather than rebellion, thereby shoring up the power of the repressive elites that are leading the human race to social, economic, and ecological disaster. So this is not just a moral panic—but a bizarre inversion of values in which Bill Clinton can murder 500,000 Iraqi children, throw millions of poor women and their children off welfare, and instigate the global rule of transnational corporations with NAFTA, but he is not impeached or stigmatized for any of those atrocities but rather for a workplace blowjob; in which Hillary Clinton can lead the charge for the destruction of Libya, reducing that country to primeval rubble, and is not only not fired or ostracized but is rewarded with the Democrats’ presidential nomination and lauded by corporate feminists as a champion of “inclusiveness”; in which Barack Obama pushed fraudulent health-care reform that leaves a barbaric 27 million people with zero coverage and millions more with crippling premiums and deductibles that render their “coverage” all but unusable, thus sentencing tens of thousands of people to death every year because they cannot afford timely medical care, and dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone, and yet he is not only not reviled and abominated as a con artist but is worshipped as an icon of enlightened governance; in which the entire ruling elite and its associates in the corporate media are chronically underplaying—indeed, scarcely mentioning—the gravity of the climate change crisis, which could merely spell the end of the human species within a hundred years, yet no copycat 24/7 umbrage or five-alarm indignation on the part of anyone in those elite circles or their acolytes over this unprecedented planetary emergency. Hence the long-buried, freshly unearthed ego bruises of the privileged identity-politics crowd eclipse mass murder and ecocide on the outrage meters of this country’s opinion shapers.  The same solemn cohort—mostly white and middle-class, many of them ardent McResistance DNC partisans (or, in the case of Leean Tweeden, Franken’s tongue-kiss accuser, a movement conservative who twice voted for George W. Bush)—is so easily roused to near-apoplexy about a naughty lunge of the hand or tongue yet discreetly ignores or openly cheers on unparalleled crimes against humanity: endless debilitating wars against nameless enemies abroad, the toxic mercenary corruption and annihilation of democracy, staggering political/social inequality (the top one percent of the world’s population now owns half of the world’s wealth), and ecocide everywhere—committed and abetted with impunity by the PC brigades’ culture heroes like the Clintons and Obama and their cohorts in the media and the corporate/political elites. So yes—prosecute the rapists and pedophiles and let them suffer in jail. But you will excuse me if I stand aside from the stampede of outrage about Al Franken’s wayward tongue or even Donald Trump’s juvenile frat-house boasts while the world teeters on the brink. The scale of values of this country’s liberal elites, and the issues that fuel and exhaust their capacity for outrage, border on moral dementia. Their vaunted “values” lead us not to virtue and to spiritual renewal, but to the nauseating sanctimony of the custodians of a charnel house—to the abyss. • This article originally appeared in CounterPunch http://clubof.info/

[ztdavis]

Thoughts/Readings 2017 Week 8

My weekly overview of what I’ve been reading, thinking, doing.

Photo of the week:

Grace contemplating life while visiting Birmingham.

Tech News:

Maybe what I wanna be when I grow up?: Hiring Your First Chief AI Officer from HBR

“The term product/market fit describes ‘the moment when a startup finally finds a widespread set of customers that resonate with its product’.” 12 Things about Product-Market Fit over at a16z

Pew has a big long analysis of how algorithms have and will continue to shape our lives: Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age (reminds me of this BBC 4 documentary)

“The Bad Product Fallacy: Your personal use cases and opinion are a shitty predictor of a product’s future success.”  The Bad Product Fallacy: Don’t confuse “I don’t like it” with “That’s a bad product and it’ll fail” from Andrew Chen

We are now apparently inventing AIs to explain to us what other AIs are up to: “Meta-intelligence software that generate rationales and narratives for explaining data-driven machine decision to humans.” 4 Models for US AI to Make Decisions also from HBR, which has been a bit AI crazy of late

Misc News:

J. S. G Boggs funded most of his life by selling art -- hand drawn dollar bills: His money or his art? Obituary: J. S. G. Boggs was found dead on January 23rd from the Economist

A sobering look at how Trump is — and more importantly is not — like Hitler. I took some solace in the fact that we’re a long way away from private militias and death squads, at least: Ron Rosenbaum’s Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post” over at LARB

I sorely sorely wish I could go see this in DC, it looks amazing: Immersed in Yayoi Kusama’s Lonely Labyrinths and Infinite Worlds from Hyperallergic

Great profile of Mike Mills, the director of 20th Century Women (which is also great) “While his stance is one of self-deprecating bewilderment, he is also often genuinely bewildered” MIKE MILLS’S ANTI-HOLLYWOOD FAMILY FILMS from the New Yorker

Podcasts

Tech in Chicago interview with Nick Moran, an investor in Chicago. Interesting that he has a goal of investing 50% in Chicago but can’t find enough to invest in at the moment. What An Ideal Startup Looks Like & Deal Sourcing With A Podcast

Vox’s The Weeds has a very sobering series of interviews with Trump voters that are currently using Obamacare and hoping Trump does right by them. Weeds in the Wild: Sarah Goes to Kentucky

Fiction

I’m currently flying (as much as one can with his books) through Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge.

On Republicans:

“Back when I was getting into the business, all ‘being Republican’ meant really was a sort of principled greed. You arranged things so that you and your friends would come out nicely, you behaved professionally, above all you put in the work and took the money only after you’d earned it. Well, the party, I fear, has fallen on evil days. This generation – it’s almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them.

On poutine in Montreal:

In Montreal it’s a diagnostic for moral character – if somebody resists poutine, they resist life.

On IKEA:

An entire section of the store was dedicated to replacing wrong or missing parts and fasteners, since with IKEA this is not so exotic an issue. Inside the store proper, you walk forever from one bourgeois context, or “room of the house,” to another, along a fractal path that does its best to fill up the floor space available. Exits are clearly marked but impossible to get to. Horst is bewildered, in a potentially violent sort of way. “Look at this. A barstool, named Sven? Some old Swedish custom, the winter kicks in, weather gets harsh, after a while you find yourself relating to the furniture in ways you didn’t expect?”

Recipes

I doubt I’ll always include recipes each week, but when I try something I like I’ll be sure to link to it.

Loved this, recommend adding some carrots along with the potatoes: Roasted Chicken With Potatoes, Arugula and Garlic Yogurt from NYT

Did you know anchovies melt in butter? I’m going to be using the breadcrumbs fried in anchovy butter part of this recipe all the goddamned time: Pasta With Carmelized Cabbage, Anchovies and Bread Crumbs from NYT

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/sundance-day-8-wounds-queer-perspective-plus-throughbred-sidney-hall/

Sundance Day 8 'Wound's' queer perspective plus 'Throughbred,' 'Sidney Hall'

The 2017 Sundance Film Festival is nearly over, and as we’re basking in the glow of fresh air and theater lighting, it’s exciting knowing that some amazing treasures found here will be resonating with today’s world. Some of our favorites picks of today are John Trengrove’s fascinating The Wound which really gives an eye-opening look at a South African secretive rite of passage for boys entering into manhood.

Thoroughbred is another very interesting one that many people can relate to about two friends trying to rekindle their connection. It reminded me of when you home five years or more after high school and run into some of those same people who never left your town. You realize how much you’ve changed in that time and trying to connect again is nearly impossible, especially for those that haven’t changed at all in that same timeframe.

‘THE WOUND’ PRESENTS A QUEER PERSPECTIVE ON A SOUTH AFRICAN RITUAL OF MANHOOD

For his enthralling debut feature, South African filmmaker John Trengove lifts the veil on the secretive rite of passage from boyhood to manhood in a remote area of South Africa. The Wound follows Xolani (Nakhane Touré), a forlorn factory worker, as he travels to an obscure mountain camp where teen boys go through the traditional Xhola initiation. Xolani has been assigned to mentor a friend’s son, Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini), who notices the attraction between Xolani and another caregiver, Vija (Bongile Mantsai), who is not only secretive about his sexuality but also prone to bursts of explosive behavior.

Following the screening, Trengove, who is white and self-identifies as queer, said he made the movie because there’s a complete lack of queer imagery in the African film canon. “It came out of a sense of urgency,” he told the audience. “For myself as an outsider, it’s something I could speak about more freely than someone who is inside the culture. I’m speaking about same-sex desire. As a queer filmmaker I was able to introduce the subject into this very intricate world and practice.”

Describing the project as the result of profound collaborations, Trengove revealed that to achieve authenticity he spoke with a South African novelist who had been through the initiation himself, and the two men began to create the story together. The three principal actors in the film each in his own way made a formidable contribution to the film, not just in terms of what an actor does but in making the characters their own and contributing something quintessential and unique to their own experiences.

Trengove noted that the film’s subject matter is very controversial in South Africa, despite being the subject of various documentaries and news articles and even being mentioned by Nelson Mandela in his autobiography. “I think our film comes at a moment when there’s a growing conversation about a sensitive subject,” he stated. “The ritual has come under fire for reasons of relevance and safety. I think equally it’s still regarded as a meaningful process that boys go through that shows them their place in the world of men.”

The director praised the courage of his three lead actors for taking on the roles. “I was very fortunate to have the bravery of these three actors to collaborate on what you saw tonight,” he said. “They did it for their own very personal reasons, primarily out of a conviction that these are stories we need to begin to speak out.”

THOROUGHBRED: OLIVIA COOKE AND ANYA TAYLOR-JOY CONSPIRE TO MURDER

With his debut film, Thoroughbred, Cory Finley finessed his way through two major challenges that could confound another first-time filmmaker. The first, as he told the audience during a post-screening discussion on Thursday at the Yarrow Theatre, was a transition from theater to moviemaking. And the second was pulling off a nuanced tone that at once straddles comedy, drama, and thriller.

The film stars Sundance Film Festival veterans Olivia Cooke (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) and Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) as Amanda and Lily, two old school friends who uneasily try to rekindle some kind of connection. Though Amanda is emotionally blocked, incapable of showing or perhaps even having feelings, chilly Lily slowly reveals herself to be in greater crisis, as she bristles against a stepfather whose strictness is driving her to entertain wicked thoughts.

Finley talked about how Thoroughbred started out as a play but became a film. “When it was a play it really was a kind of philosophical, moral discussion between these two characters on one couch. It started with asking questions about myself, and attacking some of my own fears and anxieties about my own mind and moral compass, through writing,” he said. “As I started getting towards the later drafts of the play, I realized that there was something about it that was very film noir. And even though it was contained in one household, I started becoming aware of all the things I could do cinematically.”

Producer Alex Saks talked about her first conversation with Finley, after coming across what was still a play. “Within five minutes I knew that even if he didn’t know it yet, he was going to direct the movie — and that he was a filmmaker,” she said. Finley described trying to make up for his inexperience by reading books, watching movies, and visiting film sets in the months before his first shoot. “I tried to cram in as much preparation as possible so that I could communicate effectively with the whole crew,” he said. “But I was certainly learning a lot on the job.”

And as for that fine-tuned tone, Finley said it was something they consciously refined from rehearsals through the shoot and then in editing. “We talked about [the tone] as being a narrow tightrope,” he said. “I was lucky to get a couple of days of rehearsal before we started, with the two leads, and we came to a clear understanding of the tone that we were all aiming for. And then in the editing process we had another chance to really look carefully at these scenes and play very specifically with timing and pauses and different takes. There’s a fun balance to be had in trying to provoke an audience to laugh and also to be slightly afraid. The two emotions, if you can balance them, go well together.”

Though he said he still plans on producing more theater, Finley’s first foray into filmmaking has him hooked. “I’ve fallen in love with the tools to which a director has access,” he said. “So I’m definitely looking forward to playing around in this world more.”

WINNIE: A DOC ABOUT WOMEN, POLITICS, AND MISOGYNY

With WINNIE, the new documentary about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Pascale Lamche offers an illuminating portrait of the complex story of the woman, who is often cast in the shadow of legendary human rights activist Nelson Mandela, her husband of 38 years, even though she fought on the frontlines to end apartheid during the 27 years he was imprisoned.

While Winnie’s story has been capably told by other filmmakers and documentarians and through countless books and articles, Lamche manages to create a fresh, thorough, and likely definitive study by using revealing new interviews, as well as a veritable treasure trove of newly uncovered archival materials.

“I interviewed Nelson twice for previous films, and each time it was a great honor to meet him and speak to him and spend time with him, but I was always very intrigued by Winnie,” Lamche told the audience at the post-screening Q&A. The director noted that, while Winnie is mostly venerated in her home of Soweto, South Africa, Lamche learned that her subject was also widely demonized in many European capitals for her crusade against racism, and a smear campaign was launched against her. “That seemed like a space to explore,” the director offered.

Through a meeting and conversation with Mandela’s daughter Zindzi, who also speaks on camera in the doc, Lamche was eventually introduced to Winnie. She ended up interviewing her subject four times over a period of two years, including once just after the death of her former husband, when she was still dressed in her black mourning clothes.

“On each occasion, I tried to pull back another layer of the story,” Lamche shared. “Each time I met her I uncovered more in the story because I’d been digging away and making progress with the people who’d been her enemies. I never went to her with specifics and said I interviewed this guy who waged this warfare campaign against you. As our relationship progressed over time, it deepened. I hope that’s apparent in the film.” As her film skillfully explores the intersection of women, politics, and misogyny, it’s not a challenge for audiences to draw a strong parallel between Mandela’s story and the current political climate in the U.S.

PERSON TO PERSON: A SUBTLE, OPTIMISTIC COLLAGE OF EVERYDAY NEW YORKERS

“I made [this movie] with a lot of friends. And it’s about tenderness, it’s about friendship, it’s about wanting to have a friend, and what it’s like to be a friend, and what it’s like to lose a friend,” explained director Dustin Guy Defa as he introduced his latest project, Person to Person. Defa makes his return to the Festival after his 2014 short film of the same name.

The feature, shot in retro 16mm, follows various characters throughout one day in New York City, including a moody teenager putting up with her best friend’s antics, an endearingly simple man trying to buy a rare vinyl record (Bene Coopersmith, who also starred in the short film version of the story), a depressed guy attempting to reconcile with his girlfriend after hurting her, and an anxiety-ridden rookie reporter who feels completely out of place her first day on the job. But unlike other films that depict a large ensemble of characters with different story lines, this one doesn’t aim to connect them in any obvious way other than the fact that they’re in the same city.

Defa said that when he first thought of the idea for this project, “I got very excited … to make such a variety of people and to not necessarily connect them. So I got very excited [about how to] pull it off. I developed all the characters separately. … But once I started actually working on the outline and the writing, I was interconnecting it in other ways that aren’t visible. … Even though they all had such different things and different tones and things like that, I was still connecting them thematically in many ways. And so I needed the flow to really work even though all these people had such different things going on.”

When asked which characters he relates to the most, Defa revealed, “They’re all me in many ways. I’ve done stupid things in my life, I’ve treated people weirdly, and then friendship is very important to me [like it is with Bene]. And Wendy the teenager is definitely me as a teenager in many ways. … But I don’t have a favorite.”

The characters don’t necessarily go through anything captivatingly dramatic, but Defa’s purpose wasn’t to have audiences on the edge of their seats. He explained that, amid many abrasive, visceral depictions that often appear on the screen, he simply wanted to create “a nice place to go for an hour and a half” — to which the audience applauded in agreement.

  SIDNEY HALL: A PRECOCIOUS WRITING TALENT DRIFTS INTO OBSCURITY

Sidney Hall, which premiered on Wednesday night at the Eccles Theatre, spans 12 years in the life of the eponymous character, from the moment that the precocious high school kid becomes a celebrated author to his apex of fame and emotional nadir, and to his time disowning all that he’d become and drifting into obscurity. Remarkably, those 12 years mirror the 12 years it took writer-director Shawn Christensen and writer Jason Dolan to see the project to completion.

“Shawn was in a great band called stellastarr*, and when he was on tour I sent him the first couple of pages of the script, and we went from there. It was the summer of 2004,” Dolan said during the post-screening Q&A. “We wanted to tell a story about perspective — what it’s like to think about how you were at 18, 24, and 30. We chose those ages because those were the ages we were at when we were writing the script.”

The breadth of time covered presented challenges for both the crew and the performers, including Logan Lerman as Sidney and Elle Fanning as his neighbor and later wife, Melody. “The transitions between ages — sometimes we had only hours in which to do it,” Lerman recalled.

“We shot 10 days of [age] 18 first, then we shot the [age] 24 segment, and then we shot the 30, with the intention of having a weekend in between each era,” Christensen said. “But actually for Elle and for Logan I had to break the news to them that we were going to have to switch from 18 to 24 over the lunch break.”

Though it seems like such a quick shift in age would be challenging, Fanning explained, “You can’t really think about playing older or playing a certain age, because what does that really mean?” She continued, “I was more interested in where Melody was in her life.”

The script doesn’t take a straightforward chronological approach to those eras, and instead interweaves them throughout, such that it’s only at the end that you know how the characters resolved each of those dramatic moments. Dolan explained that he hoped audiences would connect to that structure because “your life is sometimes a mess in your own mind.” He said, “What we wanted was to give people a puzzle to put together, to reflect on this character and also themselves.”

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