#jan hammer group

[scary-pixie]

Tagged by @thewebspinner!

do this picrew and share the last song you listened to <3

Sitting with the neighbor's cat since the app didn't have a hamster, but in real life he's a TUXEDO guy!

Tagging @prometheus-ghost @fadingdreamerdream @shyloudpanda @draganwhorror @depressedcorvid

[jt1674]

[coloursteelsexappeal]

Jan Hammer Group - Don't You Know (1977)

[maquina-semiotica]

Jan Hammer Group, "Don't You Know" #NowPlaying

[longliverockback]

Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group Live 2024 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab ——————————————————————— Tracks: 1. Freeway Jam 2. Earth (Still our Only Home) 3. She’s a Woman 4. Full Moon Boogie 5. Darkness • Earth in Search of the Sun 6. Scatterbrain 7. Blue Wind ———————————————————————

Jeff Beck

Jan Hammer

Steve Kindler 

Fernando Saunders

Tony Smith

* Long Live Rock Archive

[rodpower78]

Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group, 1976. Center: Tony Smith, Jan Hammer, Fernando Saunder

[rastronomicals]

4:00 PM EDT July 11, 2024:

Jeff Beck - "Darkness/Earth In Search Of A Son" From the album With the Jan Hammer Group Live (March 1977)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under: Little Fish in Big Ponds, etc.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

The coalition-building started a dozen years ago: conservationists, ranchers and outdoor recreationists, from hunters and snowmobilers to bikers and hikers. They all had different preferences for public lands in Colorado, but they thought they could work together to preserve more of it from extraction.

If they could hammer out a plan, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet told them, he’d introduce it as a bill. In September, he and Colorado’s other U.S. senator, John Hickenlooper, did just that. 

The Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Act, or GORP is one of the biggest public lands bills to come out of the state in over a decade. As the name hints, outdoor recreation is at the core of the ambitious protections the legislation proposes, a sign of how supporters think adventure sports could be key to winning votes for new public land protections in a “drill, baby, drill” environment. 

If the bill comes up for a vote after Jan. 20, it would need buy-in from a Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald Trump. But people across the political spectrum hunt, fish, hike, bike and camp.

“In Colorado, outdoor recreation is a core part of our culture and critical for local economies,” Bennet said in an email. “The broad support from public lands user groups—including from summer and winter motorized recreation, conservation, mountain bikers, whitewater recreation, ranchers, water users, rock climbers, and hunters and anglers—underscores that importance.”

The GORP Act is aimed at conservation and management practices in over 730,000 acres of public lands in and around Gunnison County, which is south of Aspen. The bill would protect huge parcels of Colorado’s high country from mining and drilling while preserving access for all existing recreation, like boating, mountain biking and off-roading. It would preserve land for planned future trails. 

Community support, including from outdoor lovers, convinced the Biden administration in April to remove more than 220,000 acres in Colorado’s Thompson Divide—near the land the GORP Act would protect—from areas permitted for new mining, mineral and geothermal leases. Two other public-lands bills proposed by Bennet in recent years, the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Act and legislation to establish the Dolores River National Conservation Area, grew out of similar coalitions. 

[mariacallous]

“We’re giving away pure gold,” Yuri Kostenko declared in 1994, “and getting back ore.”

In the years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the West was cobbling together the scaffolding for a new global security architecture. And Kostenko, then a Ukrainian legislator, was one of the negotiators trying to figure out how to trade the “gold” of nuclear weapons and strategic bombers for long-term security.

Kostenko proposed “security guarantees,” signed by the United Kingdom and the United States, which would commit Ukraine’s allies to the country’s defense.

But Kostenko was eventually removed from the negotiating team. His successors received no guarantees in the final deal, dubbed the Budapest Memorandum—only vague “assurances.” It was on that deal that Europe’s promises of protection to Ukraine were built. And it is that system that “has burst like a soap bubble,” as Kostenko wrote last year.

Today, talk of security guarantees is back in vogue. U.S. President Donald Trump promised to resolve the conflict “on day one” of his term. (The promise was subsequently revised down to the first “100 days” of the administration, which began on Jan. 20.)

Ukraine’s Western allies are already tripping over themselves to promise protection for Kyiv against further Russian aggression. And just like three decades ago, they are playing fast and loose with what’s on offer.

Ukrainians are as skeptical today as Kostenko was in 1994.

There are two types of security guarantees that NATO countries could offer Ukraine in the context of a peace deal with Russia, one senior Western official told Foreign Policy while speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The first kind would see NATO members committing to sending substantial economic and military aid to Kyiv for years after a cease-fire deal. Eventually, under this guarantee, Ukraine might be allowed to join the trans-Atlantic alliance.

The second type of guarantee would extend NATO’s Article 5 protections over Ukraine immediately, effectively extending the West’s nuclear umbrella over the country and committing the rest of Europe, the United States, and Canada to defending Ukraine. This would deter Russia from invading, these nations hope, but it would also commit NATO to the conflict with Moscow if it did.

The second option, the official agreed, was unlikely to be endorsed by either NATO or Russia. The first, they accepted, was basically just an extension of the status quo.

This is the problem that has faced Kyiv for more than a decade: Real security guarantees are difficult, while meaningless promises are easy.

When Russia and Ukraine first met at the negotiating table in 2014, after Russian special forces crossed the border to aid separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, it was France, Germany, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that promised to help keep the peace. A cease-fire deal, the first Minsk Agreement, committed the OSCE to monitoring violations of the truce. The agreement defined, however, little in the way of consequences for breaking the deal.

Unsurprisingly, the agreement was thoroughly ignored by the separatist groups, as the OSCE bemoaned often, and the Minsk II agreements in February 2015 did not fare much better.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, elected on a platform of bringing peace to Ukraine, met with his Russian counterpart in 2019, he opened their meeting with a quote from Leo Tolstoy: “The path on paper looked so smooth, we all forgot about the pitfalls.”

Those meetings didn’t even produce a path on paper. Both sides wouldn’t properly negotiate again until the days and weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. These negotiations occurred first in Belarus and then in Turkey.

Even as Russian troops advanced on, and then retreated from, Kyiv, negotiators were meeting to hammer out a peace treaty. The two sides, surprisingly, came close to agreement on many fronts.

The talks produced the so-called Istanbul Communiqué, draft copies of which were obtained by the New York Times. The deal, drafted from February to April 2022 and not published until 2024, envisioned an unaligned Ukraine—forbidden from joining NATO, free of foreign military bases, and with a considerably reduced military.

In exchange, other powers were to provide security guarantees for Ukraine, committing themselves to act should Ukraine face reinvasion from Russia. Both sides agreed that this list of possible guarantors should include Great Britain, China, the United States, France, and Russia itself—the draft obtained by the Times indicates that Moscow also wanted Belarus added to this list, while Kyiv wanted Turkey.

But the negotiations never produced a deal. The war raged on. And as the conflict crawls toward its third year, many armchair generals have returned to those early negotiations as evidence that a deal was possible—but spurned by Ukraine and its allies.

In recent months, writers in left-leaning publications have claimed that “global powers are actively dashing the chances of a diplomatic resolution to Russia’s war” and that this draft treaty was never signed because “the West isn’t ready for the war to end.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov himself claimed in December 2024, in a chummy interview with American broadcaster Tucker Carlson, that the Istanbul Communiqué was “rejected by Boris Johnson,” who was the U.K. prime minister at the time.

Sergey Radchenko is tired of these arguments.

Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs earlier this year that investigated “the talks that could have ended the war in Ukraine.”

“The main problem,” Radchenko told Foreign Policy, “is that people read the title and then do not try and understand what the article is about.”

First off, he said, the British prime minister did not scuttle the deal.

“This never happened,” Radchenko said. Nor, though both sides seemed to be negotiating in good faith, was it true that “peace was anywhere around the corner,” he continued.

One of the biggest problems came from Washington, not Moscow. In exchange for Ukraine’s neutrality and its commitment to never join NATO, Kyiv expected firm commitments from the West to rush to its defense, should Russia reconstitute its forces and invade once more.

“This was not raised previously with the Americans,” Radchenko said. “When the Ukrainians raised this, the Americans said: ‘Wait, that’s not in our interest.’”

It’s also not clear just how serious Russian President Vladimir Putin was about the talks. Under the framework being negotiated in Istanbul, the guarantors would only come to Kyiv’s defense in the event of an attack “on the basis of a decision agreed upon by all guarantor states.” In other words, Russia would have a veto over any decision pertaining to the collective defense of Ukraine.

Despite these issues, negotiations continued, even after evidence of war crimes and atrocities believed to be committed by Russia emerged from Bucha and elsewhere—evidence that was met with disinformation from Moscow.

“We believe that this is genocide. We believe that they must all be punished,” Zelensky told reporters in early April. “But we have to find opportunities to meet.”

By May, though, the peace talks had basically fallen apart. Russia, which had poured enormous human and economic capital into the war, would effectively increase its demands by asserting control over all of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts—which include huge swaths of territory that Russia did not manage to capture. Negotiations between both parties continued, but they turned mostly to the issue of prisoner swaps.

As the war raged on, Zelensky increasingly dismissed the idea that Putin would ever accept reasonable terms—even the ones that Moscow’s negotiators had proposed in the spring of 2022.

Radchenko pointed out that the skepticism is warranted.

“It goes into this question of what Putin wants,” he said. Is it merely control of Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region? Is it Ukraine’s nonaligned status? Rights for Russophones in Ukraine? Control over the government in Kyiv?

“It’s not always that we don’t know,” Radchenko said. “I think Putin himself does not know the answer to this. He’s playing it by ear.”

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg is likely to be tasked with laying the foundation for a peace deal in Ukraine.

As a co-chair of the pro-Trump Center for American Security within the America First Policy Institute, Kellogg has already laid out his vision for what a deal could look like.

In his proposal, published in April last year, Kellogg suggested that the United States should orchestrate an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine while continuing to arm Ukraine “to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again.” As talks continue, the retired lieutenant general imagines, NATO would close the door to Ukraine’s membership “in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees.”

But nowhere does Kellogg explain what, exactly, those security guarantees would look like.

Other NATO countries have started using similar language. Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign minister, insisted onstage at the Halifax International Security Forum in November that NATO’s core focus should be on preventing Russia from merely using a cease-fire to reconstitute its military power. She held up a series of bilateral security agreements, inked between Ukraine and its allies, as being an effective deterrent so that, in her words, “Putin cannot just leave, rearm, and reinvade.”

But when pressed by moderator Garry Kasparov to explain how these bilateral agreements would differ from the empty promises of the Budapest Memorandum, the Canadian minister insisted that Ukraine would “eventually” be a member of NATO and that in the interim, “it’s military aid, it’s financial aid.”

Finland’s foreign minister has echoed that sentiment, telling Reuters this month that NATO membership could come “further down the line and hopefully not in [the] too-distant future.”

Tobias Lindner, the German minister of state—responsible for trans-Atlantic relations—told Foreign Policy in a roundtable with journalists at the Halifax Forum that “there are various ideas for security guarantees—one of them is NATO membership. But it’s not the only one.”

But, he added, “what I know is that Ukraine will not accept something like Minsk III or Budapest 3.0.”

These promises did little to impress Hanna Hopko, a former Ukrainian legislator who sat next to Joly at the event.

“It’s great to have security agreements,” Hopko said, “those agreements mean this—” she held up a sheet of paper, as if to say: This paper can’t stop an invasion. “We do remember the Budapest Memorandum. Even if you have all the Ramstein Coalition security partners [sign] paper security agreements, it will never be security guarantees.”

As Radchenko points out, fudging the language—using the word “guarantee” when they really mean to invoke this nebulous concept of “assurance”—is disingenuous for Western leaders. “A general commitment to provide some military support for Ukraine, looking into the future—it’s certainly not comparable to anything solid, like Article 5.”

This all brings Ukraine back to square one. Any peace deal is almost certain to forbid Ukraine’s ascension to NATO for the indefinite future. And Trump has already closed the door to U.S. support for Ukraine’s ascension to NATO—saying that he could “understand” Russia’s concerns about the prospect.

Moscow, meanwhile, continues to insist that it wants to use a peace deal to seize more Ukrainian territory—land it currently holds, land that was recaptured by Ukraine, and land it has never held. Lavrov went even further in an interview given shortly before the new year, rejecting nearly every part of Kellogg’s peace plan.

It’s not clear whether the Trump administration has prepared itself for this intractable situation.

“I have two concerns,” Radchenko said. “I don’t think that the Trump administration has understood what the Russians are likely to demand and what their endgame is, and secondly I don’t think they have the strategic patience, necessarily.”

Foreign Policy also asked Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, who attended a bipartisan congressional delegation that attended the Halifax Security Forum in November, about a possible deal and about these security guarantees.

“Guess who broke [Budapest]?” Rounds answered. “It wasn’t one of the allies that we have. It was Russia, and very specifically Mr. Putin. That tells you the reasons why we are very suspect of any offers of a security agreements by Mr. Putin at this time.”

The congressional delegation in Halifax insisted that U.S. support for Ukraine, particularly in the Senate, remained steadfast.

On Wednesday, Trump posted a message to Truth Social proclaiming “I’m not looking to hurt Russia,” but insisting that “if we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”

Russian exports to the United States, thanks to sanctions imposed by the Biden administration, have fallen by more than 90 percent since the war began.

In December, Foreign Policy reached Kostenko by phone in his home in Kyiv.

“Ukraine has to be a member of NATO’s collective system of defense,” Kostenko said.

Kostenko’s line then crackled and dropped as he sat in the darkness of his home in Kyiv—a consequence of Russia’s relentless bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

The same issues that the former politician faced when he tried to secure these security guarantees in 1994 are still hanging over Ukraine today, he said. Back then, the risks were hypothetical. Today, they are very real.

The main difference, Kostenko said, is that the West has woken up to Russia’s taste for imperialism. When it negotiated with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Kostenko said, “the Western world hoped that Russia would move to democracy and would be integrated into different structures—including NATO. And now? Everything has changed.”

[coffee-n-bagels-comic-universe]

Neutralised Bios: Bram (1994)

One of Three Grave-Diggers Abraham Machado

A grave-digger and a musician Abraham Machado.

"Morning, Mona, sorry I'm late, Cal… car troubles"

Name

Full Legal Name: Abraham Salvador Varela Machado

First Name: Abraham

Meaning: This name may be viewed either as meaning 'Father of many' in Hebrew or else as a contraction of 'Abram' meaning 'High father' and 'Hamon' meaning 'Many, Multitude'.

Pronunciation: a-bra-AM / AY-bra-ham

Origin: English, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish, Biblical, Biblical Latin

Middle Name: Salvador

Meaning: Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan form of the Late Latin name 'Salvator', which meant 'Saviour', referring to Jesus.

Pronunciation: sal-ba-DOOR

Origin: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan

Surname(s): Varela, Machado

Meaning(s): Varela: Derived from Spanish 'Vara' 'Stick'. Machado: Derived from Spanish and Portuguese 'Machado' 'Hatchet', both from Latin 'Marculus' 'Little hammer'.

Pronunciation(s): ba-REH-la. ma-CHA-dho

Origin(s): Spanish. Portuguese, Spanish

Titles: Mr, Señor

Goes By: Abe, Bram

Characteristics

Age: 30

Gender: Male. He/Him Pronouns

Race: Human

Nationality: American Citizen. Born in America

Ethnicity: Hispanic (Sephardic Jewish)

Birth Date: 12th May 1964

Sexuality: Straight

Religion: Jewish

Native Language: Spanish

Known Languages: Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, (Some) Latin

Relationship Status: Single

Astrological Sign: Taurus

Played By: Alfred Molina

Appearance

Height: 6'3 / 190 cm

Eye Colour: Brown

Hair Colour: Black

Hair Dye: None

Body Hair: Hairy

Facial Hair: Varies between a Clean Shave and a Full Beard

Tattoos: (As of Jan 1994) 1 (Has 'Vivimos, Amamos, Morimos' [We live, we love, we die] tattooed under his left armpit, next to his heart)

Piercings: None

Scars: None

Health and Fitness

Allergies: None

Alcoholic, Smoker, Drug User: Social Drinker, Occasional Smoker

Illnesses/Disorders: None Diagnosed

Medications: None

Any Specific Diet: None

Relationships

Affiliated Groups: Mortimer & Co. Mortuary Services (Employee)

Friends: Cal, Mona, Meg

Significant Other: None

Parents: Rabbi Abiram Machado (63, Father), Haydée Machado (61, Mother, Née Varela)

Parents-In-Law: None

Siblings: Humberto Varela Machado (25, Brother), Aurora Varela Machado (20, Sister)

Siblings-In-Law: None

Nieces & Nephews: None

Children: None

Extras

Level of Education: G.E.D

Occupation: Grave-Digger

Employer: Mortimer & Co. Mortuary Services

Biography: Bram learnt from a young age that being a hardworking man would take him far in the world. He met and befriended a young Mona during his time vacationing in Eloia, Illinois for Hanukkah when he was 19. He moved to Chicago at 21 (after getting his G.E.D) and started working at the facility soon after. Assigned by Mr Mortimer to be a gravedigger after failing his physical fitness test to become a security guard. He soon became close with Cal, a fellow grave-digger and introduced him to Mona upon her joining the staff. Bram's harboured a crush on Mona ever since, even though he would never let her know as he's too busy acting tough.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dave Whamond :: @DaveWhamond

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 28, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 29, 2024

Today—last night U.S. time—three military personnel were killed and 34 more wounded in a drone attack on the living quarters at a U.S. base in Jordan, near the Iraq-Syria border. U.S. troops are stationed there to enable them to cross into Syria to help fight the Islamic State. There have been almost-daily drone and missile strikes on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since the October 7 attack on Israel by Iran-backed Hamas. The U.S. has blamed Iran-backed militant groups for the attack, and while no one has officially claimed responsibility yet, three officials from such groups have said an Iran-backed militia in Iraq is responsible. 

President Joe Biden today called the act “despicable and wholly unjust,” and he praised the servicemembers, who he said “embodied the very best of our nation: Unwavering in their bravery. Unflinching in their duty. Unbending in their commitment to our country—risking their own safety for the safety of their fellow Americans, and our allies and partners with whom we stand in the fight against terrorism.”

“And have no doubt,” he said, “we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner [of] our choosing.”

Republican war hawks have called for retaliation that includes “striking directly against Iranian targets and its leadership,” as Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, or by “Target[ing] Tehran,” as Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said. Republicans are blaming Biden for failing to “isolate the regime in [Iran], defeat Hamas, & support our strategic partners,” as Representative Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) wrote on X, formerly Twitter, today. 

But there is, of course, a larger story here. The Biden administration has been very clear both about the right of nations to retaliate for attacks and about its determination to stop the war between Hamas and Israel from spreading. 

Iran would like that war to spread. It is eager to stop the normalization of relations between Arab states and Israel, and is backing Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon—all nonstate militias—to try to stop that normalization.  

They are trying to stop what Patrick Kingsley and Edward Wong outlined in the New York Times yesterday: a new deal in the Middle East that would end the war between Hamas and Israel and establish a Palestinian state. The constant round of phone calls and visits of Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken with at least ten different countries is designed to hammer out deals on a number of fronts. 

The first is for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, which would require the exchange of more than 100 Israeli hostages taken on October 7 for thousands of Palestinians held by the Israelis. The second is for a new, nonpartisan Palestinian Authority to take control of Gaza and the West Bank. The third is for international recognition of a Palestinian state, which would be eased by Saudi Arabia’s recognition of Israel. If that recognition occurs, Arab states have pledged significant funds to rebuild Gaza. 

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has rejected this proposal, but his popularity is so low people are talking openly about who can replace him. Hamas and Iran also reject this proposal, which promises to isolate Iran and the militias from stable states in the Middle East.   

Behind this story is an even larger geopolitical story involving Iran’s ally Russia. As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg retorted when Senator Wicker called on Biden to respond to the attack that killed three Americans “swiftly and decisively for the whole world to see”: “Wasn’t funding Ukraine and Israel the first, critical step in deterring Iran? We are in this place now due to the Russian fifth columnists in the Republican Party including Trump who slavishly do Putin’s bidding.”  

Rosenberg was referring to the fact that Iran is allied with Russia, and Russia is desperate to stop the United States from supporting Ukraine. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, apparently thought his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine would establish control of the eastern parts of that country in a matter of days. Instead, the invasion has turned into an expensive and destabilizing two-year war that has badly weakened Russia and that threatens to stretch on.

In the United States, today marks the 100th day that extremist Republicans have refused to provide supplemental funding for Ukraine or Israel arguing that funding to protect the U.S. border must be addressed first. On October 20, 2023, as David Frum pointed out today, Biden asked Congress for “$106 billion to aid Ukraine and Israel against attack by Russia, Iran, and their proxies.” That funding has bipartisan support, but “[f]or 100 days, House Republicans have said NO,” Frum said. “Today, Iranian proxies have killed Americans.”

Republicans’ insistence that they want border funding has proved to be a lie, as Democratic and Republican senators have hammered out a strong agreement that extremist Republicans now reject. Former president Trump has made it clear he wants to run on the idea that the border is overwhelmed, so has demanded his supporters prevent any solution. Today, on the Fox News Channel, when asked why Republicans should let Biden “take a victory lap” with a border deal, Senator James Lankford (R-OK), who has been part of the border deal negotiation team, responded with some heat: 

“Republicans four months ago would not give funding for Ukraine, for Israel, and for our southern border because we demanded changes in policy. So we actually locked arms together and said we’re not going to give you money for this, we want a change in law. And now it’s interesting, a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end they’re like, ‘Oh, just kidding, I actually don’t want a change in law because [it’s] a presidential election year.’ We all have an oath to the Constitution, and we have a commitment to say we’re going to do whatever we can to be able to secure the border."

MAGA Republicans in charge of the Oklahoma Republican Party showed where Trump Republicans stand when they voted on Saturday to “strongly condemn” Lankford for “playing fast and loose with Democrats on our border policy.” They said “that until Senator Lankford ceases from these actions the Oklahoma Republican Party will cease all support for him.” 

In The Atlantic, Frum noted that “vital aid to Israel and Ukraine must be delayed and put in further doubt because of a rejected president’s spite and his party’s calculation of electoral advantage. The true outcome of the fiasco in Congress will be the collapse of U.S. credibility all over the world. American allies will seek protection from more trustworthy partners, and America itself will be isolated and weakened.”

Rosenberg wrote: “If you are unhappy with Iran today, first thing you should do is come out for funding Ukraine fully. Nothing will embolden Iran more than a Russian victory in Europe.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[vinyl-connection]

TIMELESS

Cascading keyboard notes and flurries of guitar; soon they are dancing through a frenetic dialogue as dextrous as it is energising. Welcome to “Lungs”, the unexpectedly manic opening to Timeless, the entrancing 1975 album by John Abercrombie. “Lungs” was composed by the keyboard player Jan Hammer, he of Mahavishnu Orchestra fame. In group leader Abercrombie, Hammer found a six-string foil fully…

[cursedcomics]

Dream Job writing the Legion of Super Heroes pt. 10

Legion fans are also quite progressive with their support of the LGBTQ+ community.  The Legion also has quite a number of fans from the community who would like to see more characters that reflect their diversity and are not written as troublesome or consistently difficult.

I don’t want this book to drown in romance. I want the legion kicking Super Villain butt, but the expectations of fandom is that there will be romances.

No one wants the book to be strictly a gay romance novel with Eternals movie-style panicked rants followed by in your face gay kisses to make a point, but Legion fans aren’t put off by a non-straight relationship having a serene, well laid out romantic moment, whether it is a kiss, hand holding, or just a heart warming glance between two people.

I have no interest in showing scenes where two characters bicker so someone can say “look at them bicker --- they must be a couple!”  I would much rather show them in the background holding hands and get on with the superhero drama.

This will sound a little harsh but “There is a place and a time for a gay kiss”. Just like there is a place and time for a straight kiss.  I used to read Clairmont’s x-men where random guy kissed random girl all the time and wonder “Are the X-,men swingers?”

A tender moment between anyone should be in the flow of the story. You have to find that balance. 

I have no problem finding the right balance.

A recent US survey found that 7% of the US identified as LGBTQ+. While that seems low, lets go with that.  If the Legion had 50 members at least 3-4 of them would identify as such.  

So Lightning Lass, Shrinking Violet, Kinetix, and Chemical King.  

Done, right?

Just joking.

I think 5-7 would be better for storytelling purposes and would allow greater ability to please our fanbase and show a diversity of characters.

I am also personally a believer in a spectrum.  I think there are a lot of people who may have gay tendencies, but see themselves as straight. So another few characters who could be in that group and a few others people might assume are ---but aren’t ( --- Lyle?). 

And then you have Jan --- a spiritual kid who (to my take) falls in love with a person’s soul. Gay? Straight?  It matter to you, not him. 

So you may have gay characters who never get together.  You could have a LGBTQ+ member with a member who would not seem or identify as gay.

I think for most Legionnaires, participating in an LGBTQ+ relationship would be a jarring departure from their historic behavioral patterns.  Brainy? Jo? Brin? Imra? Drake? absolutely not.... But not for all of them.

I think having that potential helps for storytelling drama.

I think in writing a book about teenage heroes there should be a healthy dose of relationships blossoming and wilting.  I hope to include some of the vigor of “Young Heroes in Love” in this Legion. (Shameless plug, that comic was awesome doing its own thing.)

I do want to be clear though --- there are no sacred cows and I won’t bow to groups “claiming” characters. I have to write what makes sense when I am writing.

Male gay Legion fans like to claim Jan as with his pink costume it seemed he was created as a subtle tip of the hat to gay readers.  But...the legion changed writers a lot and he wasn’t written that way.  He lived a very content straight lifestyle for years until it was retconned in a (mostly) well written way into a relationship with a transwoman and then finally awkwardly hammered into a gay relationship.  

To me, as a fan that just reads heroism, that says Jan is deeply admirable because he loves the soul of a person, not their physical form.  Just something else to love about his unique brand of heroism. With all the horrible diseases we contract late in life, we should all hope to have that kind of lover in life. 

To other Legion fans it might read like Jan was always straight until he was radically retconned to be gay or that he was gay and then radically retconned to be straight before being restored to his rightful state.

The thing is both reads are equally valid and modifying him to be exclusively one way or another changes the character -- which I am absolutely loathed to do.

The whole point of this is to retain the characters you love.

I want him to be him and the story to take him in the way he is meant to go in this timeline.

I know there is a feeling that Ayla (Lightning Lass/Light Lass) and Shrinking Violet should be together.  I am not going to guarantee that either.

In the original timeline, Ayla had a rocky but long relationship with Timberwolf who didn’t quit the Legion in support of Ayla when she had what might be described as an emotional meltdown.  Vi had a long relationships with Duplicate Boy and then weirdly was abandoned by him when she was kidnapped turning her into ...kind of a wildly angry person.

Their relationship happened because VI basically swore off men after Duplicate Boy’s betrayal and convinced Ayla who seemed on the fence that they were better off together. She gave her a hard sell and Ayla eventually came around.

 And they WERE better together.

But...

There is zero comic support to the idea they started off KNOWING they were gay. Plus is this really the relationship we should have as the featured gay relationship in the Legion?  Two women who tried hard with men and were betrayed by them?  Can’t two women just know themselves and fall in love without it being somehow proof that men suck? I know a lot of lesbians and most of them do not have stereotypical chips on their shoulders like this Levitz era duo.

Vi and Ayla seem more like they fell in love with each other first, had horrific moments, and then PAINFULLY discovered they could be a happy lesbian couple.

The new timeline has to roll out in a quick manner. 

Compressing the timeline in this project gives an opportunity to eliminate the “everyone has to pair up in heterosexual couples” inclination in Legion history.  I am happy to remove that from continuity for time purposes, but really neither character starts out comfortable in their own shoes as lesbians. 

And there is a wild card in Kinetix.  To me, she does seem very comfortably lesbian. That will have her driving the ship.  So the chips will fall where they may.

And there will be other characters inside and outside the Legion that will play a role in these relationship dynamics.

It probably won’t be what you expect (or maybe it will), but I think you’ll be happy with the results. It won’t be a gay romance novel, but it won’t be 3 panels in code every 4 months either. 

[avengersrewatch]

E14: Masters of Evil

This is the first time our Avengers get to fight a group of supervillains (well, besides "The Breakout").

The Masters of Evil have been recruiting in the last several episodes. I am not that familiar with this group in the comics, but to my knowledge, Baron Zemo is usually the one associated with the group. Here he has Enchantress, Skurge, Abomination, Crimson Dynamo and Wonder Man (Wonder Man is a hero!)

Wasp catches Whirlwind again. He had the audacity to show up "where [she] shops." Janet is often involved in fashion. I like that she thinks supervillains should pay attention to what labels she has been wearing.

But it's not Whirlwind; it's Enchantress and this is the beginning of the the Masters of Evil's plot... to attack Wasp while she is by herself, shopping. That's cold, guys. She's the littlest and the only woman. Plus she's busy. She tries to fight them all, because Jan is hardcover, but Zemo shoots her in the back. THE BACK! Like a coward. These guys really are evil!

At the Wakandan Embassy, Clint complains about how the Avengers are "a disaster." T'Challa's just chillin', muddling some herbs, while Clint rants. Clint slams Tony, Hank, Jan, Hulk and Thor for various reasons. T'Challa points out he didn't include Captain America (he kindly doesn't also say, "and me, I rock.")

We get to see T'Challa pull a prank on Clint. I'm sad now that we won't really see T'Challa interact with the other Avengers more. (He did remember Clint's name in Endgame, so that's something.) But here he tells Clint he just ate poison. For the lulz.

That's what he gets for shitting on T'Challa's teammates, man! Also, I think it shows that T'Challa likes Clint, weirdly? Because he smiles. And T'Challa rarely smiles. He's very stately. This is Wakandan male bonding, I guess.

Crimson Dynamo attacks Tony (who doesn't have his suit on).

Abomination and Enchantress send Hulk through a portal to the Frost Giant world (too lazy to look up spelling).

Wonder Man and Skurge knock out Captain America and use his ID card to call the other Avengers.

Thor is on a date with Jane. She looks so small next to him. It's adorable. So he is also rudely interrupted.

All of them show up to take on Thor. Which is smart. Clint's criticism for Thor was that he's "crazy" but he's not. He's just from a different place. Anyway, they get him too.

But T'Challa and Clint aren't stupid enough to walk into the Mansion without doing recon. Clint wants to go in hot, but T'Challa thinks innocent lives would be put in danger, and that they have to handle it, subtle-like.

I like how we get to see Avengers who aren't normally teamed up, like Clint and T'Challa, work together. They are both stealthy (Clint is a spy). So this is fun they can have together! Like how Hulk and Thor both enjoy punching things, sometimes each other.

Cap asks Zemo why he's doing this. The war was like 70 years ago, shouldn't he be over it by now? Zemo is not over it. His therapist must be terrible.

The rest of the episode is T'Challa and Clint being trickster bros and roasting the Masters of Evil. Zemo is worried about Ant-Man but he doesn't know there are two more Avengers, get with the times, Zemo!

T'Challa is proud to be an Avenger. Clint wants to do quips.

And they are both pleased with themselves because they get caught but they wanted to get caught because they also brought Ant-Man and Hank is there with a machine that makes Wonder Man go poof!

It's a slug fest after that. Somehow Thor brings Hulk back from the Frost Giants. I guess he can summon the Bifrost? But it looks like a regular portal. Anyone want to explain if Thor's hammer can do this?

This is our main team for season one. There are some more added in Season 2 and guest stars (next episode even), but this is the core group. So this is fun because it's (finally!) the first time we see all Avengers Assembled.

The Masters of Evil give up kind of quickly, and that makes it less fun of an episode than it could be. But it's only because they are going to be back towards the end of the season. So this is a prelude more than anything, especially to Clint's quips.

It is also our first glimpse at EMHU Loki! Though they don't say it's Loki. Enchantress talks to someone who is apparently behind the Masters of Evil.

... and, duh, it's Loki, guys. In his classic costume which is great and makes me think of Richard E. Grant.

Rating: Recommend

[maquina-semiotica]

Jan Hammer Group, "Don't You Know"