#john moses browning you did it once again

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Ithaca model 37 ?

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[taleoftalespod]

Tale of Tales | episode: 1.07 “Risen (Part 1)”

Once there was a god who rose from the dead…

In this (year late) episode of Tale of Tales, we'll explore the complexities of imperialism, the joys (and sorrows) of sex, and why you literally cannot win once you've gotten yourself mixed up in goddesses' interpersonal disputes.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/800948/8267888-1-07-risen-part-1.mp3?blob_id=37471845&download=true

Tale on this episode:

Publius Ovidius Naso, “Venus and Adonis”, The Metamorphoses, ed. Charles Martin (0:18:47-0:43:58)

“Inanna and Dumuzid”, reconstructed from various hymns collected by Samuel Noah Kramer and Diane Wolkstein in Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns From Sumer (0:51:22-1:29:54)

All Music Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Track Listing:

“Afterlife” by Alexander Nakarada (0:00:12-0:03:09)

“Tranquil Fields - Eastern” by Alexander Nakarada (0:03:10-0:04:33; 0:54:22-0:56:26; 0:58:13-1:00:40)

“Wanderer” by Alexander Nakarada (0:18:47-0:20:25)

“Stay the Course” by Kevin MacLeod (0:24:32-0:31:17; 1:02:33-1:04:40)

“Ancient Rite” by Kevin MacLeod (0:31:17-0:36:28; 0:51:22-0:54:22)

“Tranquil Fields - Peaceful” by Alexander Nakarada (0:37:55-0:41:55; 1:33:32-1:34:36)

“Send For the Horses” by Kevin MacLeod (0:41:55-0:43:58)

“The Enemy” by Alexander Nakarada (1:04:38-1:07:28)

“Oppressive Gloom” by Kevin MacLeod (1:08:39-1:14:19)

“Reign Supreme” by Kevin MacLeod (1:14:50-1:15:53)

“Expeditionary” by Kevin MacLeod (1:15:51-1:18:57)

“Gathering Darkness” by Kevin MacLeod (1:20:29-1:25:06)

“Burnt Spirit” by Kevin MacLeod (1:24:55-1:26:45)

“Tempting Secrets” by Kevin MacLeod (1:26:24-1:29:54)

Episode Extra: The Afterlife of Mary Magdalene

There is another woman, closer to home for Christianity, who has been known for the love she had for a dead man. Though the number of women at the empty tomb varies depending on the gospel being read, the Christian Church has traditionally recognized the round number of the Three Marys: Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Salome, and Mary Magdalene, also known as the Myrrh Bearers since they brought precious ointments with them to embalm Jesus’ body. Mary was a popular name at the time — in Hebrew, it’s Miriam, the name of the prophetess who helped Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt during the Exodus. In a time of political dissatisfaction and nostalgia for an imagined past of religious and national freedom, many Jewish parents of the first century named their children with the expectation of an imminent reversal of fortunes. 

Mary Magdalene is an enigmatic figure from her very first appearance in text: her title “Magdalene” doesn’t translate very well into anything. The most common scholarly reconstruction is that it means she was from Magdala, a large fishing village in the Galilee, but even that isn’t very certain. Mark and Matthew only refer to her by name, without any other description beyond her attachment to Jesus’ following. Luke informs us that she had been rid of seven demons by Jesus, but also that (somewhat more importantly) she and a couple other women were his patrons — they funded his work. In spite of her mysterious past as a demoniac, then, her role in Jesus’ ministry reflected not simply womanly servitude but the power and prestige of a typical rich Roman woman helping pay a client’s bills — a position common enough in early Christianity to afford women quite a lot of say in the Church in the first few centuries CE.

Naturally, there was some tension about these powerful roles, and the second and third centuries saw increased squeamishness from Christian men about women’s outspokenness, and for one reason or another Mary Magdalene became, for both misogynist and proto-feminist sides of the debate, the prototypical woman disciple. The second century Gospel of Thomas ends with a scene in which Peter, prototypical of male discipleship, asks Jesus to tell Mary Magdalene to go away since “women don’t deserve to live”, but Jesus reassures him that she can stay because his guidance will make her (at least spiritually) male — a pro-Mary Magdalene take in which women are allowed to be prominent in the Church but must act like men to do so. Another somewhat-easier-to-digest text, named the Gospel of Mary by scholars, describes a discussion between the disciples after Jesus has gone back to heaven — Mary Magdalene tries you reassure the male disciples that Jesus promised her he’d be with them forever, and Peter responds that Jesus would never have spoken alone to a woman, inciting a furious argument between all the disciples about Mary’s place. Later legends told how Mary Magdalene sailed to Rome after Jesus’ resurrection and tried to convert Emperor Tiberius, bringing a white chicken egg as a humble gift; when Tiberius claimed a man could no more rise from the dead that her egg could change color, the egg in her hand turned blood red — a potential source for the modern Easter egg tradition.

Misogynistic arguments found support in Mary’s sordid demonic past and her subservience to Jesus and relative silence in the New Testament gospels themselves. The medieval pope Gregory XIV did the Magdalene a further disservice by proclaiming (with no evidence) that she was the same woman as the “woman of ill repute” in Luke 9 who cried on Jesus’ feet, instigating a number of inventive portrayals of Mary Magdalene as the terrible scandalous harlot whom Jesus converted  into a repentant, quiet saint. A sorry, penitent Mary Magdalene, usually tantalizingly undressed but still covered by her long hair, sometimes contemplating her own mortality via a skull in one hand, became a favorite subject of Christian artists, giving the Church a whore to complement Mother Mary.

The past century has seen attempts to revitalize and reclaim the image of the Magdalene. Some attempts have been less progressive than others — such as the rumor that, rather than a sex worker (gross), Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife (good), an allegation that inspired The Last Temptation of Christ and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. More recently, Pope Francis in 2012 declared Mary Magdalene “apostle to the apostles”, based on the fact that in the Gospel of John she is not only the only woman at the empty tomb, but also the first person to see Jesus alive again, and the one whom he himself entrusts with the news of his resurrection, essentially making her not only the very first apostle, but also the very first Christian. In her book The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, feminist theologian Jane Schaberg notes, “Mary Magdalene is the madwoman in Christianity’s attic... hidden there because of an open and not fully appreciated secret, and its implications, at Christianity’s core: that the male disciples fled and the women did not.”

[justjessame]

Takes One To Know One Chapter 1

Could a person die of boredom? Was it possible? I was pondering this worrisome conundrum, during a very worrisome time indeed, when I was told by one of the men I kept close by for security that we’d had a breach. FINALLY, I thought, something to end the monotony AND put a pin in my fear that I’d end up a fucking mindless insatiable corpse from the WORST end possible.

“Really?” My eyebrow arched in hope laced incredulity. After all, one reason for the boredom was the fact that my security was just that fucking amazing. “Someone managed to actually BREACH our boundaries?” I contemplated the very idea and where the possible breach happened, where our defenses could be weak.

John, tall, broad shouldered and smouldering John, nodded while looking like he’d love to be squirming under my scrutiny. I didn’t drop my focus, enjoying his discomfort, knowing that it bothered him that someone my size and gender could make him feel so inadequate and also knowing that he would just as easily have me pinned against the wall behind me if I asked him to. “We have him in the cafeteria,” the main area, big enough to keep secure and maintain control while allowing our group to watch the fun.

I’d lucked out when I took over the community college, fences and buildings were in good repair, a little tweaking here and there and we had a perfect place to ride out the ‘end of days’ as our resident doomsdayers kept muttering about. “He wouldn’t stop talking, so Max used some duct tape.” I grinned, Max was nothing if not resourceful.

I got up from the comfortable desk chair that I’d been seated in, the president’s office was mine, it seemed fitting given my role in our group. John stepped back and my smile held as his head dropped slightly in a natural sign of reverence. When he handed me my crowbar, the gauze and fabric taped grip toward me, I took it as gracefully as if he’d handed me an umbrella.

“Thank you, John.” I moved through the open doorway. “Maybe you and I can have a little time alone, later.” I bit my lip when I heard a small moan come from the large man following me, I wondered what Max would want for his ingenuity for use of duct tape in a time of need? Well, John first, then I’d think up something memorable for Max after I had a look see what my pets drug in.

The cafeteria was crowded. The tables pushed aside, since it was that awkward time between meals and the workday was nowhere near finished, but it wasn’t everyday that we had a breach. The crowd parted like the sea had for Moses when my boots met the tiles, knees hit the floor just as fast as I walked past, but my eyes were on Max and Greg, and the lean stranger they held between them.

His eyes were locked on me as I approached, and my smile grew as his dimples peeked at me from the duct tape that Max had been frugal with in keeping him quiet. He wasn’t struggling, in fact, if I didn’t know better I’d say he was exactly where he wanted to be. “Why, Max, it looks like you got me a present,” I stared up at the lanky stranger who stared right back without blinking. “Did you at least ask for a name before you pressed his mute button?” I was holding my weapon of choice loosely, swinging it gently by my hip, an idle gesture, still somewhat bored. His laugh lines were deepening around his eyes, amusement while surrounded wasn’t a normal response in these less than normal times so I was a touch intrigued.

“Megan?” Max and Greg shared a look and both shrugged. “It sounded like Megan or Regan.” I kept them around for usefulness and attractiveness, not necessarily for the depth of their intelligence or memory.

I snorted. “His name is either Megan, like a five year old girl, or Regan, a dead president?” He was shaking his head and rolling his eyes in commiseration with my feeling the need for better minions. I stepped closer and raised my free hand to an edge of the duct tape. “I apologize in advance, but-” with one rip I had the tape off and he didn’t make a sound for a moment, impressing me.

“SHIT!” Or, I thought, I gave credit too soon. “Fuckity fuck fuck.” He pulled an arm free from Max and rubbed his hand across his mouth. “Christ, are my fucking lips still fucking-” I waited for him to get himself under control. Clearly the pain had made him stupid. “Negan.” He bit the word out and I was still staring at him. “My name? You asked, they fucked it up, it’s Negan.”

“I guess that’s better than Megan, and definitely an improvement on Regan.” I nodded to Max and he pulled out the roll of tape. Negan’s eyes widened.

“Wait a minute,” he held the hand he’d pulled free up. “Why don’t we discuss-”

“You’re right, Negan.” He looked pleased and smug. “We should discuss how you breached our perimeter.” John brought me a chair and I sat, laying my clean and nicely balanced crowbar across my lap, my chair was close enough so I could look up at Negan. “Where did you come in?”

While I waited for him to choose what he was planning on telling me, I took in the man before me. Pants, worn but serviceable. Layered shirts, leather jacket, bloodstains, all fairly normal given the current climate. Short hair that was longer on top, scruffy face, also fairly common. Boots, also worn but in good shape given that they had to be several years old. Shrewd eyes, and I had bets on just how silver his tongue could be.

“You have a spot, behind the ag building, near the east edge of the grain garden,” I glanced at Greg and he nodded that he was making a note of it. “If your guards ran on a more regulated schedule, I had them pegged at fifteen minute rotations,” my lip querked. I wasn’t planning on helping him out with a corrected time table. “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Fuck there found me and here we are.”

I smiled even as John and Max stiffened at their new monikers. “You told me where you came in, but not how you knew our layout.” His expression changed only subtly. “Who sent you?”

“No one sent me,” his head tilted to match mine, and he smiled back. “I just saw your setup here and couldn’t help but want to join.”

“Leave us,” I didn’t raise my voice, I didn’t have to. John told the crowd to get back to work, Max and Greg directed traffic and I kept my eyes on our uninvited guest. Soon it was just me, him, and my three current closest ‘advisors’. “Greg,” smaller than Max or John, was also the stronger of the three. “I think you have a weak spot to look into.” A curt nod and he was on his way. Max moved to stand closer to Negan but I stopped him with a look. “You and John should have a conversation with our current guards, see if anyone’s,” my eyes were still on Negan and he looked far too unconcerned for me to feel serene. “See who’s newest to the list. When they were added, where they came from.” Nothing, not even a twitch. “See if anyone on the guard list has a new friend, same questions.” They left and then it was two.

“You seem pretty confident that you’re safe alone with me,” he was still standing and I was still comfortably seated. “That either means that you are the ULTIMATE badass,” he wasn’t pacing, no, he’d found a place to lean and he looked as at ease as I was. “OR you’re the supreme head of EVERY goddamn thing here.”

“Maybe I’m both,” I crossed my ankles and waited to see what he planned on offering me. Every person who came in wanted to barter. Be it I’ll be this, if you grant me that or back my people in this, and we’ll happily hand you this much of our take in supplies. This world was nothing if not negotiable. “What are you?”

He snorted and stared down at me with something that smacked vaguely of condescension, which I truly hoped he wasn’t stupid enough to employ. “Me?” He bit his lip and his eyes roamed over my small form sitting in the chair that John had brought for me. “I’m YOU.”

I laughed, thinking that he must have gone completely insane during the time since the first corpse rose and started eating people. “You’re me?” I blinked at him, wondering if perhaps he was right and I was overly confident at being alone with him. If he was batshit crazy, even a crowbar to the head might not fucking work. “I think we’re a little too different for that to be plausible.”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Not literally.” Well that was a relief, he wasn’t completely insane. “I WAS you. I had ALL this. Different time, different place. Different genitals.” I snorted. “Different weapon.” His eyes fell to my lap and my hand curled around the fabric and tape bound handle, tensing slightly. “It’s temporary, all of it, I fell, so will you.”

“That sounds like a threat.” I smiled up at him, thinking if nothing else he was amusing. “Are you thinking that you want another go at leader of a pack, Negan?” He shook his head, but his lips weren’t cooperating, the smirk was lurking, even as he fought it. “You can taste it, can’t you? The power. Having them kneel.” I could see it, he really had had it once, a tiny pinch in his eyes told me more than all the words that his mouth could ever spill. “How long were you the king of your mountain?”

“Fleetingly,” his voice had lost the strength he’d led with, and I went back to carefully studying him. “It wasn’t- Nothing is permanent. Not anymore.”

I wondered what broke him, because something clearly had, even if he still had bursts of something. Something almost magnetic. “And you want to join us?” The disbelief was palpable. “Why?”

His eyes, never far from meeting my own, laser focused on mine and he stopped fighting his lips urge to curl into a smile. “I’m a joiner, and this?” He threw his arms wide and gestured around us. “This is just too good to NOT want to join.”

I snorted again, feeling slightly as if I were turning into a pig. Squinting I leaned forward to stare up into his eyes. He stared back. “How is it your eyes aren’t dark brown?” He raised an eyebrow and I went on. “Since you are clearly so full of fucking shit that it has to be up to your fucking forehead.”

His grin grew, if possible and I was reminded of the Joker from Batman. “Why are you so cynical? I told you, I WAS you, I’m a font of fucking knowledge-” he stopped studying me as he seemed to be puzzling out something. “What the fuck is your name?”

I bit my lip and fought the laugh threatening to bubble out of me. Before I could answer, John was back. “Megan?” I turned to see what he needed and I heard our new recruit give a snort of his own.

“Like a five year old girl, wasn’t it?” I rolled my eyes as John came closer, but my hand twitched on my trusty crowbar when he added, “guess it makes sense since you LOOK like a fucking-”

“I’d be VERY fucking careful with how you finish that sentence, Negan.” I didn’t turn to look at him, I was still waiting for John to tell me whatever he needed to. My tone was clear, watch it, and I wasn’t surprised that he listened. “What is it, John?”

John updated me on the trio’s progress. The breach point was easily found and mended. They were ‘interviewing’ our current group of guards. Since I made it a point to rotate duties, not only guards, but throughout our community this wouldn’t take long, but if I wasn’t satisfied that Negan had just stumbled onto us by some fucking wild coincidence then we might have to widen our net. I listened and considered the next steps I wanted to take, while tossing the interloper into one of our ‘holding areas’ sounded fucking wonderful so I could take a nice relaxing pounding with John, or Max, or Greg, I knew that I’d have to deal with the stress of the mess first.

“Finish the interviews,” I advised, studying the wall across from me as I made up my mind. “Focus on the lonelier females, the ones that seem needier than most. And any of the men who like to play follower more than leader.” John was nodding when I finally looked back at him again. “If no one seems to know who Negan is, then go back to the last rotation. And then another rotation.” Another nod and I sighed. “I guess we won’t get our playtime for awhile, John.” I gave myself a moment to pout and heard a snicker come from the general direction of my newest thorn in my ass. “Back to work.”

“Do you want me to-” John gestured toward Negan’s relaxed and leaning form and I shook my head. “Megan, I can-”

“John, you can do a vast quantity of magical and horrible things, but ONLY if I give the say so.” He flinched at the reminder of our roles in this world. “Now, you have a job, so-” he nodded with a slightly bowed head and I fought a grin at the knowledge that he didn’t want to show any weakness to this new entity. I watched him as he left, wondering how many waves Negan would cause from his very existence.

“Wow,” I turned to see the new bane of my being studying me with the same interest I’d watched John. I waited as his laugh lines and dimples made his charm grow. “You really ARE me.”

“What?” Maybe I should call for John to come back and secure the man, if he kept insisting that we were so damn alike. “Now how are we twinsies?”

“Got yourself a trio of hubbies?” I stared at him in shock, marriage? In this fucking world? “OK, maybe not husbands, but you’re definitely letting them dip their pricks in the company pool.”

I laughed at that. He wasn’t wrong, but damn that euphemism was fucking hilarious and old fashioned. “How old are you, grandpa?” He glared at me. “Pricks and company pool?” I shook my head. “Currently Greg, Max, and John and my ‘advisors’ and they have the added perk of satisfying my EVERY need. So yeah, we fuck. It isn’t poetic, we aren’t married, and I sure as fuck don’t think of them like husbands.”

“What would you do if they decided to dip their dicks in one of those needier than normal females?” He looked so damn smug as though he just KNEW what my answer would be that I nearly tossed something at his head, something heavy and metal based.

“Nothing.” He raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “IF one of the CURRENT three saw someone they wanted to DIP into more than me, then they can do so, and leave their position as advisor behind.” His smile grew like he was proven correct. “What?”

“I’m sure that that ‘advisor’ position comes with more perks than your ear and your-” his eyes roamed my seated body and I nearly felt the fucking heat from it. “Other assets.”

I sat back again, studying him. “Negan, just how do you think things are run around here?”

[blogger360ncislarules]

For the first and last time simultaneously, The 100 actually gave its main characters a (sort of) happy ending.

By the end of the series finale, "The Last War," Clarke (Eliza Taylor), Raven (Lindsey Morgan), Murphy (Richard Harmon), and the rest of the (few) remaining juvenile delinquents who were sent down to Earth in the very first episode finally found themselves together, alive, and with no more wars to fight. As the music swelled in the background, everyone hugged and smiled. But since this is The 100, that "happy ending" also included the rest of the human race basically ceasing to exist. This show still has to stay on brand!

So how did we get here? Clarke killed Cadogan (John Pyper-Ferguson) while he was taking the "test" to see if the human race was ready for transcendence (aka the next step of evolution/joining a higher state of consciousness), and the test couldn't be stopped once it started. So the judge of the test, who was in the form of Cadogan's daughter Callie (Iola Evans, reprising her role from the prequel episode), changed into the person Clarke loved the most: Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey). Clarke was then forced to finish the test on behalf of the human race to save them from extinction, but since she murdered someone during the test, the Lexa avatar told her that she failed.

With the human race on the verge of being wiped out as a result, Raven stepped in to appeal the decision as the judge changed into who she loved the most: Abby (Paige Turco). And with Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos) giving an inspirational speech to the warring Grounders and Disciples, stopping the battle before it ended in massive losses, the judge decided the human race was ready, and reversed its decision and all humans transcended, meaning everyone became golden beams of light and found peace. Only the living could transcend, and so that meant even Madi (Lola Flannery) could get her happy ending despite what Cadogan did to her in the previous episode. In a cruel twist of fate, it also meant that Bellamy (Bob Morley), the only member of the 100 who actually believed in transcendence and who died at Clarke's hands just a few episodes ago, did not get to transcend.

The other person who couldn't transcend? Clarke. Because she had failed the test, and to show that her actions have consequences, she was left behind on an abandoned planet. All alone, facing the rest of her life without any other human beings to keep her company, she used the stones to travel back to Earth to make a new, lonely life for herself. But the Lexa avatar returned to explain that people have the choice of whether or not they transcend, and all her friends chose to stay behind on Earth with her so she wouldn't be alone. It meant they wouldn't be able to have any kids (because they're the last of the human race) and they would only have each other for the rest of their lives and they couldn't transcend after they die, but they were alive, together, and finally able to live in peace. They all decided that exchange was worth it for Clarke.

So before trading the last "may we meet again" now that the show is over, let The 100 creator Jason Rothenberg (who made his directorial debut with the series finale) breaks down what that ending means, why he wanted to end the show that way, all those shocking character returns, and more below.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What were you trying to say with that ending, as all our favorite characters choose to stay on Earth with Clarke instead of transcending?

JASON ROTHENBERG: We wanted the moral of the story to be, simply stated, "Until we stop fighting, we're doomed." Until we stop killing each other in the name of country or tribe or even family, we're doomed to keep repeating that cycle of violence. And once we do and we link arms and we realize we're all in this together, then we can get to whatever comes next. In this case, it's transcendence. That was the moral of the story. Clarke doesn't get the gift of transcendence because of her actions; her actions have a cost, as the Lexa avatar said to her on the beach. Like Moses not getting to go into the promised land, she's going to be alone – until she sees her friends. We thought that it was the most beautiful way to say found family is important. They know that Clarke sacrificed so much for them, gave up so much of herself for them, that they were not going to let her be by herself. They are foregoing whatever transcendence is, they're giving that up to be together. As dark as the show has been at times, I feel like the ending – and I always say I was not trying to make people feel good most of the time and the show is not a show that was supposed to bring you joy, it's supposed to move you and make you feel sad or angry even – but here we were definitely aiming for people walking away feeling uplifted.

Why have all the main characters make that choice except for Clarke's daughter Madi?

Lexa on the beach, she says that Madi knew that Clarke would not want her to come back and be the only child. They're not going to have children, this is the last generation, they can't have offspring. And so, as a mother, Clarke would have obviously preferred for her daughter to transcend and go to whatever the next journey/adventure/whatever it is, it's obviously something special and unique and beautiful, as opposed to staying on the ground with her. That choice was made easier for Madi by the fact that Clarke wasn't going to be alone.

Was this always your original idea for how to end the show?

I can't really remember that we ever had the details of an ending. I always wanted to have it have the moral of the story be told, which is what I just told you. So however that was going to manifest, that was going to be the takeaway. And of course, as the world expanded and we went to another planet and we met other characters and we started exploring the universe via the interstellar subway system of the stones, the details of how we got there obviously changed. But the point was always going to be that.

Now let’s talk about some of the returning faces we saw in the finale – Lexa, Abby, and Callie. Did you always know you were going to have them come back for cameos?

It happened organically, for sure. Once we settled on what the rules of the test were, the idea that the judge takes the form of a person's greatest love, greatest teacher, or greatest enemy, then it became clear that it was going to be Callie for Cadogan, Lexa was my first choice for Clarke, and fortunately, Alycia agreed to come back and do it, and Abby obviously would've been for Clarke as well if Alycia hadn't agreed to come back. But it also made perfect sense that when we knew Raven was going to be the one to come in and appeal the verdict once Clarke failed, that relationship was so important to Raven that there was a beauty to that being her person too. The decisions were dictated by who was going to face the judges and what the rules of the test are.

Were there any other characters you wanted back for the finale as well but it didn’t work out because of scheduling or other issues?

When we landed on what the rules were, it was about who those special people would be. We'd already played Dad [Chris Browning], we already had Monty [Christopher Larkin] come back in a really special way, we'd already played a few of those cards in a previous season. So no, there was never anybody that we wanted to come back and didn't come back.

What about Bellamy? After his shocking death a few episodes back, did you ever consider having him back in the finale as well?

For me, it was Lexa all the way. When that idea came up in the room, it was one of those moments where, it doesn't happen very often, there was unanimity of excitement. Then it was about getting her to agree to come back. And we couldn't have Bellamy return in the end, because the rules of transcendence were only the living shall transcend. And so, unfortunately, he died short of that finish line, so he couldn't be there in the end, which is another tragic realization for Octavia certainly in the finale.

So why did you want to kill Bellamy in the way that you did when the show was so close to giving all the characters some kind of a happy ending?

Bellamy's storyline changed hugely this season as a result of needing to give Bob time at the beginning of the season. Everything kind of downhill was affected by that, including the ending. You want the decisions to always be driven creatively, and certainly when it comes to character deaths. Sometimes unfortunately though we have to react to situations outside of the writing, outside of the creative. That's not necessarily the case for him, but definitely, over the course of seven years, lots of characters died, and sometimes it was out of our control and we made the best of it.

Now that The 100 is over, do you have any updates on the potential prequel series?

All I can really say about the prequel is that conversations are ongoing. I'm hoping to be able to continue this universe because I feel like it's so rich and there is so much story to tell. But the discussions are far, far above my pay grade at the moment. The same day you find out is when I’ll find out.

Where do you see Clarke and co. going in the future now that they’ve all reunited on Earth and are starting a new life for themselves?

We're leaving them together, making that choice to stay together and live out their days peacefully. There's no one left to fight with. Jokingly, I suppose I could see like 70-year-old Murphy and 70-year-old Clarke are in like a blood feud and everybody else is lined up one one side or the other, except they're too old to really do any damage to each other. [Laughs] But truthfully the ending is supposed to imply that it's not happily ever after, but it's certainly peacefully ever after.

What are you most proud of, looking back on the entire series?

The legacy of the show, that we were bold, we pulled no punches, we told big stories, we had kickass female characters, and one of the most diverse casts on television. I'm proud that the show will exist and that people can discover it now in streaming. Hopefully, when it's consumed in a binge all at once, some of the things that perhaps didn't work for people will work better for the audience as they're coming to it consuming the entire series in two weeks rather than over seven years. It's bittersweet to come to the ending of something that has occupied such a huge part of my life for as long as the show has. It's been a long ride, we rode it to the end, and that's great but it's sad at the same time.

[sandeepmaheshwaritips-blog]

Best Motivational Quotes to Overcome Anxiety and Depression

Moving statements and motivational quotes to overcome anxiety and depression have a stunning capacity to change the manner in which we feel about existence. This is the reason I find them so intriguing and significant on our ways to progress.

So what's their mystery?

The manner in which you contemplate yourself, including your convictions and assumptions regarding what is workable for you, decides everything that transpires.

To be successful, you have to use each day as an opportunity to grow, to find purpose in life, to be better, to get a little bit closer to your goals. It might sound like an impossible thing or a lot of work—and with a busy schedule, next to impractical. But the best part is, the more you get the results, the more you’ll want to work hard, the higher you’ll want to reach. So as long as you have the hunger for success, you will always have the power within you to achieve it.

You have full oversight over just a single thing known to mankind — your reasoning – and that is the place inspirational statements come in!

Everybody needs a little motivation now and again.

Regardless of whether you're experiencing a separation, you've recently lost your employment, or you just woke up feeling a little shaky toward the beginning of today—we've all had nowadays.

I've assembled a rundown of probably the best-overcome anxiety and depression quotes so you can begin the year by assuming responsibility for your considerations, thinking emphatically and defining new objectives.

Dont Forget to read the best Dalai Lama Quotes and Sayings to bring a positive change in your life.

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” – Dr. Suess

Motivational and Inspirational Quotes

“I think being in love with life is a key to eternal youth.” —Doug Hutchison

"I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.” – Abraham Lincoln

“The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” — Dalai Lama

“Feelings don’t try to kill you, even the painful ones. Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You’re responsible for its consequences, you’re responsible for treating it. But…you’re not responsible for causing it. You’re not morally at fault for it. No more than you would be for a tumor.”  ― Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” — John Lennon

“Get busy living or get busy dying.” — Stephen King

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” — Mae West

“Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.” — Seneca

“If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

“How can a person deal with anxiety? You might try what one fellow did. He worried so much that he decided to hire someone to do his worrying for him. He found a man who agreed to be his hired worrier for a salary of $200,000 per year. After the man accepted the job, his first question to his boss was, “Where are you going to get $200,000 per year?” To which the man responded, “That’s your worry.”  ― Max Lucado

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” —Dolly Parton

“Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as you can.” — Hillary Clinton

“Don’t settle for what life gives you; make life better and build something.” — Ashton Kutcher

“Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it’ll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.” — Kevin Hart

“Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.” — Kobe Bryant

“I like criticism. It makes you strong.” — LeBron James

“You never really learn much from hearing yourself speak.” ― George Clooney

“Life imposes things on you that you can’t control, but you still have the choice of how you’re going to live through this.” — Celine Dion

“Life is never easy. There is work to be done and obligations to be met – obligations to truth, to justice, and to liberty.” — John F. Kennedy

“Live for each second without hesitation.” — Elton John

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein

“Life is really simple, but men insist on making it complicated.” — Confucius

“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” — Helen Keller

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” — Steve Jobs

“My mama always said, life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” — Forrest Gump

“Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”— Lao-Tze

“When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life or the life of another.” — Helen Keller

“The healthiest response to life is joy.” — Deepak Chopra

“Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.” — Lillian Dickson

“The best portion of a good man’s life is his little nameless, unencumbered acts of kindness and of love.” — Wordsworth

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” ― Robert Frost

“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.” — Charles Swindoll

“Keep calm and carry on.” — Winston Churchill

“Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.” — Jack Kerouac

“Life is a flower of which love is the honey.” — Victor Hugo

“Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.” — Marilyn Monroe

“Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.” — Buddha

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” — Dr. Seuss

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” — Mark Twain

“Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.” — Stephen Hawking

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The greatest pleasure of life is love.” — Euripides

“Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.” — Grandma Moses

“Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.” — Benjamin Franklin

“Life is about making an impact, not making an income.” — Kevin Kruse

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” – Babe Ruth

“I’ve spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won’t leave, and fearing that it’s a matter of time before they figure me out and go.”  ― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” – Mark Twain

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” – John Lennon

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” – Les Brown

“The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.”– Henry Ford

“In order to write about life first you must live it.”– Ernest Hemingway

“The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything.”– Frank Sinatra

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”– Thomas A. Edison

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”– Albert Einstein

“Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.”– Babe Ruth

“Money and success don’t change people; they merely amplify what is already there.” — Will Smith

“Sing like no one’s listening, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching, and live like it’s heaven on earth.” – (Attributed to various sources)

“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” – Leo Burnett

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”– Soren Kierkegaard

“To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self…. And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one’s self.”   ― Søren Kierkegaard

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates

“Turn your wounds into wisdom.” — Oprah Winfrey

“The more you pray, the less you’ll panic. The more you worship, the less you worry. You’ll feel more patient and less pressured.”   ― Rick Warren, The Purpose of Christmas

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” – Steve Jobs

Thank you for giving your time to read these beautiful inspirational and motivational quotes about anxiety and depression. Stay connected for more.

Source: Best Motivational Quotes to Overcome Anxiety and Depression

[fandom-fluff-writer]

Ben Armstrong

Way Down in Egypt Land

“Give me twenty,” Ewell said as the carriage shook rapidly over dead trees and rocks. “Twenty niggers is all I need.”

Houston shook his head and said the same thing he had been saying the past thirty minutes. “I can’t, Federal troops are moving through this here forest, too close for comfort,” he sighed. “I already lost half of my slaves in this damned woods, I can’t lose more. So I’m moving them all to my main plantation south from here. It’s safer there.”

“Please Houston, I don’t have enough niggers to help move all of my belongings and my famly,” Ewell begged one last time, “I can’t just stay here after what just happened to Atlanta. Do it for a friend, please.”

“I just can’t,” Houston said with a sorrowful frown. “I’m sorry Ewell. I have a horse, Bessie, for you to ride back, she’s a fast bugger. Send my regards to Shawna for me.”

“Abraham!” Houston shouted. “Go saddle up Bessie for Mr. Conwell.”

“Y’a sir,” Abeham shouted back, soon arriving with a muscular black mare.

“Be safe,” Houston said as Ewell mounted the horse. “The Feds are less than three miles away. Best of luck Ewell, again I’m sorry.”

Ewell did his best to smile, nod, then trot his horse away.

He had been going no more than a mile when he heard something running. It can’t be more than a fox, he told himself. But there were six, six continuous footsteps crashing the ground beneath them crushing already broken twigs. Ewell’s eyes shot to the sound as three panting and sweating men in blue appeared before him. Ewell’s rapidly beating heart leaped to his throat.

“Ello’ boys,” Ewell said as beads of sweat raced down his wide forehead. “I aint armed, and I don’t fight with the Confederate, I’m just a…”

Before Ewell could finish his sentence a shot rang out as one of the three soldiers pointed his rifle and fired. Ewell’s mare screamed and kicked as it began to choke on its fresh blood. In an entanglement of horse and man Ewell fell to the ground.

Before Ewlell could spit the dirt from his mouth the three men were on him. The first threw a punch to Ewell’s face, the second began to loot the dying horse. The third one though was odd, he hit Ewell in the side of his gut, the most painful punch Ewell had ever felt. It wasn't a punch though, Ewell’s eyes widened as the man pulled the dripping red dagger from Ewell’s stomach. He tried to scream but no word left his trembling mouth as he fell to the dirt.

“Come on Sam,” the man with the knife shouted to the one searching the dead horse. “Help me get coins from this man. Quickly, after this we’ll be home in no more than a month.”

“They will brand us though,” the first man said as the third dropped the knife and began to search Ewell’s pockets. “I saw them once. George was his name remember him? Put a big old D on his head, like he was a cow.”

“Now that was for running in the heat of battle,” the man coming back from the horse said. “They would most likely kill us.”

“Either way we can’t go back now,” the third one said as he found Ewell’s golden pocket watch. “Now here's a pretty thing.”

All the while Ewell laid on the ground trying to breath. He was going to throw a punch but decided not to. IfI do, they'll find out I’m alive and kill me, he thought.

“Why’d you do that, Jess?” The third one said checking the time on his new watch. “Kill the horse and all? We could have used it.”

“He would have rode off with it,” Jess said.

“That's why you shoot him, you bloody retared,” the man who must have been Sam said, giving Jess a light slap to the back of the head.

“Oh, I never thought of that,” Jess said staring at the dead mare. “I’m sorry Lance.”

Lance put the pocket watch in his pocket and grabbed a few coins out of Ewell’s other pocket, “Enough bickering,” he said in a stern voice. “It’s getting dark and they will be on our asses in no time.” Lance took the three rings off Ewell’s fingers as Sam took Ewell’s shoes and jacket from him. When all three of them left, Ewell let out a long and painful groan.

As he tried to stand he fell back to the ground, new dirt sneaking its way into his wound. Ewell looked at his leg which was all twisted,”O lord!” he cried, it must have broken when his horse fell. More groans left his body as he laid there, groan after groan till he finally fell asleep.

Ewell did not know if he was asleep for minutes or days, all the same when he woke, it was to the sound of hoofbeats. When his eyes opened he saw four men in blue on horseback.

“Help me!” Ewell’s voice cracked as he screamed. They began to ride towards him.

“Look at that John,” one pointed faced man said, looking down on Ewell through eyes of pity. “He’s hurt.”

“Poor lad, there's nothing we can do for him,” a man with a fine-trimend beard said in a deep voice. “He is a dead man now, not a thing we can do.” Ewell tried to croak words but none left his quivering lips.

“He’s probably a plantation owner anyways, the ones with all them poor slaves,” another man said with a squeaky young tone. “I bet he’s killed countless negros. I say this is a lesson for him.”

“We can’t just leave him here to die,” the pointed faced man said. “Besides, that would make us as bad as him.”

“This is war Jim,” the deep voice man said slowly lifting his gaze from Ewell to the pointed face man. “There are many casualties we all must live with.”

“I have myself a cousin down south,” the fourth man finally spoke up. “And I’d hate to see him like this. All gutted and bloodied up.”

“Then lets just put the bastard out of his misery,” the young one said drawing his lever action rifle.

“We aren't going to kill civilians,” the deep voiced one said. “Leave him here he probably wouldn't make it back with us in time anyways. We gotta get going; those cowards can’t be far gone by now.” They all began to turn their horses and leave.

“We can’t just let him die, John,” the pointed faced man turned to look upon ewell once more.

“The hell we can’t,” the deep voice man shouted over hoof beats. “If you're so worried just give him your damn canteen or something.”

The pointed faced man looked on Ewell with more eyes of pity, tossed Ewell the container, then left. Ewell wept.

He was half done with the water and cradling it like a child's stuffed toy when he heard the gun moving towards him. Ewell rolled to his left side and saw a large artillery piece moving down the wood pulled by two large horses. There were five soldiers moving along with the gun while three other soldiers carried rifles. They did not notice Ewell nor did they speak to one another. Ewell tried to speak but couldn't. The silence was broken when when there was a crash of the cart

“God damn it,” a man shouted.

“Hush up Ed,” another man said. “They’ll hear us.”

“Well it won’t bloody matter if we're stuck here all damn day,” Ed shot back. Ewell looked at the cart and saw that one wheel was stuck in a small ditch.

“Don’t cuss in front of the horses Ed,” another man pleaded. “They don’t like it.”

“Cuss in front of the horses?” Ed cried in a shrill voice. “This is why we're losing this war, cause of flapdoodle shats of your sort. And don’t complain about my cussing.”

Ewell heard a crash of a whip on skin and cries from man and horse.

“Don’t whip ‘em you imbecile,” Ed explained. “They'll tear the cart in half.”

“Well they need to go faster to get out of the ditch,” a man said.

“No, no, no,” Ed replied. “We need to get out and lift the wheel up ourselves.

They all got out from the front of the cart and began to lift the wheel. Ed sent one of the men with a rifle to guard their rear. As the man unknowingly walked towards the dying body, Ewell noticed that this was not a Union soldier at all, this man was Confederate. They have to help me, Ewell thought. The man paused a few yards away from Ewell and his face turned to horror as he saw the body, then he quickly looked back into the distance as if he saw nothing. As he stood over Ewell he began to visually cough into a green stained handkerchief. Ewell tried to cry out but all that came from him was not words nor a sob, more shrill ache from his lunges. The man jumped at that perhaps thinking that Ewell had been dead. The man looked upon Ewell with his pitiful brown eyes.

“I...” Ewell forced out. “Robbed.”

He didn't finish his sentence for it felt like ten daggers piercing him every word he spoke. Ewell didn't speak nor did the man who just stood there, his eyes fixed to Ewell. No more than a minute passed when they heard the shout of Ed.

“Jay,” he shouted as if there wasn't a Union regiment a heartbeat away from them. “Let's get a move on. We have to get this gun up there before dark.”

The man gave Ewell one last sad glance with a frown then laid a Confederate five dollar bill on Ewell’s bloodied chest then walked off. While Ewell’s blood, dried fresh blood and tears appeared painting the bill’s state capitol red.

I will surely die, Ewell thought. He had to have run out of all his blood by now. It was silent out, only birds chirping to one another in their own beautiful language while Ewell laid here to rot. The silence was broken by a voice, a deep voice. Too deep in tone to be a white man Ewell noticed. This was a Negro. As the man got closer Ewell could make out the words, the man was singing a hymn, a song Ewell had heard his slaves sing from time to time.

“So Moses went to Egypt land

Let my people go

He made old Pharaoh understand

Let my people go…” The man sang on in a smooth deep rhythm. When Ewell could make out the singer he could see a tall Negro man that looked as if he were in his forties with no hair on his head but a few patches on his large chin. He was pulling a wagon behind him loaded with some sort of supplies and sheets. The man looked startled when he came upon Ewell.

“What do we have here?” The man said in a deep voice breaking from the song. The man squatted down to get a closer look; he could hear Ewell’s soft breaths. “Well I’ll be damned,” the man bellowed. “You're still alive. Let me help you up, I don't presume you can walk .” He hefted Ewell up and lightly laid him in the cart.

“That's a nasty cut you got there,” the man said as he grabbed an unopened bottle from the cart. “Now this will sting but it’ll help with the infection.” The man poured the clear liquid from the bottle onto Ewell's injury. Ewell began to pound his fist on the wooden cart from the pain.

The man pulled out a large handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to Ewell, “I want you to hold that tight to your wound,” the man chuckled. “Don’t worry I ain’t used it since it’s been washed. Do you need some water?” Ewell rapidly nodded his head yes, he had long finished the water the Union man had given him. The Negro man held the back of Ewells head up and began to slowly tip the canteen up, cool refreshing water began to fill Ewell’s parched mouth. The man lifted the wagon up by a handle and was off again as Ewell laid in the back of it sipping water and soaking up blood with the handkerchief.

“Why did you do that?” Ewell asked the man when he finally got the strength to speak. “ Help me and all, you're a slave right?”

“Yes sir,” the man said, not looking back at his passenger.

“I own slaves just east from here,” Ewell admitted.

“I assumed that,” the man replied. “You looked mighty fine other than all the blood and all.”

“Then why’d you do it?” Ewell asked again. “You're a slave and I own slaves, black men as yourself.”

“Well here's the difference from what you're saying right now,” the man stopped the cart. “When I saw you I didn't see no white man nor black man, I saw a dying man. And it was the Lord's will for me to help you. I don’t care if you were a Mexicain or an Indian, once we make it to Heaven there are no blacks or white we are all spirits, we are all humans. So when I saw you sir all I saw as a human in need of my help, so I helped you.” The cart began to move again.

“Oh,” was Ewell’s only reply.

Through the silence of the crushing branches and dead leaves Ewell heard the man hum, he hummed the familiar tune of Go Down Moses. When Ewell finally drifted asleep he dreamt of Egypt and a man named Moses.

When he finally woke up Ewell was in a warm bed with fresh sheets and pillows. As he tried to get up he could feel a stinging pain in his side. When he looked at it he saw fresh white bandages on this old wound. A white man walked into the room, “Ah, you're awake,” the man exclaimed. “Martin picked you up along the way here.”

Ewell noticed the man, he had met him once or twice before. He sold and cut lumber in the northern parts of the woods. The man gave Ewell some crutches. Ewell thanked the man and asked him where he could find the slave who had saved him. The man led Ewell to the slave who was just about to leave again with the cart.

“You're all better,” the man said gleefully to Ewell. “I better be off, I have to get more supplies.” The man smiled and began to walk away.

“One more thing,” Ewell called out, the man stopped and looked back. “Thank you.”

The man smiled and tipped his hat, “Sure thing,” then he was off and broke into another song.

“Go down, Moses,” he sang, “way down in Egypt…”

[therandombanjo]

Songs From 2019 (one per artist)

Another mixed bag of stuff i either enjoyed a lot, thought was excellent or interesting (regardless of taste… sort of), emerging artists to maybe look out for, and generally music that for whatever reason connected with me in some way, including the odd earworm i just couldn’t shake. Some artists are left off just to vary a little more from some other popular lists. Hope you enjoy some of this too and find something new to be taken by. Please do buy their music if you can and hopefully from a local independent record store if possible to support their work. There’s a spotify playlist (below) for easier listening but I’ve also posted a few links to extra things on some of them if you want to check them out.  Spotify:

(As ever…. as i don’t tumblr or blog or anything (besides this list), this won’t be seen by many (if any?) people so if you like it or think it’s of any worth in any way, please do share this along)

In Alphabetical order:

A.A. Bondy - Killers 3 Abdallah Oumbadougou - Thingalene Alasdair Roberts - Common Clay Alex Rex - Latest Regret Andy Shauf - Try Again Angel Bat Dawid - We Are Starzz Angel Olsen - All Mirrors        bonus. her collab with Mark Ronson “True Blue” Anne Müller - Solo? Repeat! Antoinette Konan - Kokoloko Tani Arthur Russell - Words Of Love Asmâa Hamzaoui and Bnat Timbouktou - Sandia Baby Rose - All To Myself BCI - Grateful Bedouine - When You’re Gone Benny The Butcher - Crowns For Kings      ft. Black Thought Ben Walker - Afon Better Oblivion Community Center - Chesapeake Beverly Glenn-Copeland - A Little Talk     (from a reissue of her 2004 record Primal Prayer) Bibio - Curls The Big Moon - It’s Easy Then Big Thief - a. Not    b. Cattails    (from 2 excellent albums released in the same year: “U.F.O.F” and “Two Hands”) Bill Callahan - a. What Comes After Certainty    b. The Ballad Of The Hulk Bill Fay - Filled With Wonder Once Again Bill Orcutt - Odds Against Tomorrow billy woods - a. Spongebob w/ Kenny Segal     b. Western Education Is Forbidden    ft. Fielded        (From 2 excellent records this year: “Hiding Places” with Kenny Segal, and “Terror Management”) Black Country, New Road - Sunglasses Blu & Oh No - The Lost Angels Anthem    ft. Kezia Bon Iver - Hey, Ma Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Beast For Thee Bonny Light Horseman - Bonny Light Horseman      (”supergroup” of the great Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D Johnson & Josh Kaufman) Brent Cobb & Jade Bird - Feet Off The Ground Brighde Chaimbeul -  O Chiadain an Lo Brigyn - Oer Brittany Howard - Stay High    (the video for this, with Terry Crews, is a delight) Bruce Hornsby - Voyager One    ft. yMusic Burd Ellen - Sweet Lemany Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Thomas Bartlett - Kestrel Caribou - You and I Caroline Polachek - Door Cate Le Bon - Daylight Matters Caterina Barbieri - Arrows Of Time Clairo - Bags Cochemea - Mitote comfort - Not Passing The Cool Greenhouse - Cardboard Man    (a pretty hilarious song about David Cameron) CRAC - You Can’t Turn Your Back On Me    (Unreleased old track from ‘76) Cross Record - PYSOL My Castle CZ Wang and Neo Image - Just Off Wave Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble - a. Rebuild a Nation   b. Power Daniel Norgren - The Flow Danny Brown - Dirty Laundry Daphni - Sizzling    ft. Paradise Daughter Of Swords - Fellows      (Mountain Man member Alexandra Sauser-Monnig’s 1st solo record) Dave - Psycho David Kilgour - Smoke You Right Out Of Here David Thomas Broughton - Ambiguity     (from the 15th anniversary reissue of his remarkable debut album, The Complete Guide To Insufficiency) Denzel Curry - RICKY Destroyer - Crimson Tide Dry Cleaning - Dog Proposal Dubi Dolczek - Do The Gloop Durand Jones & The Indications - Long Way Home Ela Orleans - The Season      (From 2012 but on a career retrospective, Movies For Ears, put out this year) Elkhorn - Song Of The Son Emile Mosseri - a. The Last Black Man In San Francisco b. San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)    ft. Mike Marshall         (both from the wonderful score for the wonderful film The Last Black Man In San Francisco, the latter a cover of an old song sung here by the guy who sang “I Got 5 On It”!!) Erland Cooper - Haar Ernest Hood - Saturday Morning Doze        (from a re-issue of his “self-released proto-ambient masterpiece” in ‘75) Fat White Family - Feet Faye Webster - Room Temperature Fennesz - In My Room Fernando Falcão -  As 7 Filhas Da Rainha Sumaia     (reissue from ‘87) FKA twigs - cellophane Florist - Shadow Bloom Flowdan - Welcome To London Fontaines D.C. - Roy’s Tune Four Tet / KH - Only Human French Vanilla - All The Time Gang Starr - Family and Loyalty   ft. J. Cole Georgia - About Work The Dancefloor Girl Band - Shoulderblades The Good Ones - Will You Be My Protector?   (of Rwanda) Grand Veymont - Les Rapides Bleus       (of France) Gyedu-Blay Ambolley - Sunkwa     (of Ghana) Hailaker - Not Much HAIM - Summer GIrl Hana Vu - Actress Hand Habits - placeholder Hannah Cohen - Get In Line The Harlem Gospel Travellers - If You Can’t Make It Through A Storm Hayden Thorpe - Diviner     (Former Wild Beasts frontman’s debut solo record) Helado Negro - Running The Highwomen - Redesigning Women Hiss Golden Messenger - I Need A Teacher Holly Herndon - Frontier Homeboy Sandman - Far Out Hoops - They Say Hotel Neon & Blurstem - Language Of Loss House and Land - Rainbow ‘Mid Life’s Willows Ibibio Sound Machine - Wanna Come Down IDER - Saddest Generation The Innocence Mission - On Your Side International Teachers Of Pop - I Stole Yer Plimsoles    ft. Jason Williamson (of Sleaford Mods) Jacken Elswyth - The Banks Of Green Williow Jaimie Branch - nuevo roquero estéreo Jake Xerxes Fussell - The River St. Johns Jamila Woods - ZORA Jayda G - Leave Room 2 Breathe Jenny Hval - Ashes To Ashes       Jenny Lewis - Red Bull and Hennessy Jesca Hoop - Outside of Eden     ft. Kate Stables (of This Is The Kit) and Jesca’s 12 year-old nephew Justis. This live performance is so sweet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUPmE_hU7Ss Jessica Pratt - As The World Turns Joanna Sternberg - This Is Not Who I Want To Be Joan Shelley - Cycle John Blek - North Star Lady Jordan Rakei - Say Something        bonus. under his DJ pseudonym: Dan Kye - Focus Jo Schornikow - Incomplete Joseph Shabason - West of Heaven Julianna Barwick - evening Junius Paul - Baker’s Dozen Kali Malone - Spectacle Of Ritual Kate Teague - Sweetheart Kate Tempest - a. Firesmoke    b. People’s Faces Kelly Moran - Halogen (Una Corda)       (from a record full of all the bare piano parts she played for her prior record before all the editing and processing) Kim Gordon - Air BnB Kindness - Hard To Believe     ft. Jazmine Sullivan KOKOKO! - Buka Dansa     (Congolese collective upcycling discarded materials to make their instruments) Konradsen - Baby Hallelujah     (of Norway) Lambchop - Everything For You Laura Cannell - a. Sing As The Crow Flies     b. Flaxen Fields Laura Stevenson - Lay Back, Arms Out Le Groupe Obscur -  Planète Ténèbres Leonard Cohen - Happens To The Heart Leo Svirsky - River Without Banks Little Simz - 101 FM Lizzo - Tempo   ft. Missy Elliot Loren Conors & Daniel Carter - Departing Lou Roy - Bite Low Chord - Walkk Lower Dens - Galapagos Mahalia - What You Did    ft. Ella Mai Majja - Black James Dean Maria Somerville - This Way Maria Usbeck - Amor Anciano Mary Halvorson & John Dieterich - Vega’s Array      (Mary the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant this year, because she is) Mary Lattimore & Mac McCaughan - IV Matana Roberts - As Far As The Eye Can See Meitei - Ike Melanie Charles - Trill Suite, No. 1 (Daydreaming/Skylark) The Menzingers - Anna Messiahs Of Glory - No Other Love      (from a collection of rare black gospel from the Midwest between ‘65-’78 put out on Tompkins Square) Mica Levi - a. Hosting     b. Lobo y Lady (from the excellent Colombian film Monos) Michael Abels - a. I Got 5 On It (Tethered Mix)    b. Pas De Deux (both from the terrific score to the excellent Jordan Peele film, Us) Michael Kiwanuka - Living In Denial Michael Nau - Poor Condition Mike Adams At His Honest Weight - Wonderful To Love Minor Pieces - Rothko      (duo of Ian William Craig & newcomer Missy Donaldson) Modern Nature - Footsteps Molly Sarlé - Twisted      (Mountain Man member’s 1st solo record) Moodymann - I’ll Provide Moon Duo - Stars Are The Light Moor Mother - After Images Moses Boyd - Stranger Than Fiction Moses Sumney - Polly Mount Eerie & Julie Doiron - Love Without Possession MSYLMA - Inqirad (Rihab-U Dhakir)     (Saudi Arabia) The Murder Capital - Don’t Cling To Life Nardeydey - Freefalling The National - Rylan   ft. Kate Stables (of This Is The Kit) The New Pornographers - Falling Down The Stairs Of Your Smile Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - a. Waiting For You   b. Bright Horses   c. Night Raid Nivhek - After Its Own Death: Side A    (Liz Harris of Grouper) Noname - Song 32 Octo Octa - Move Your Body ODD OKODDO - Auma      (Kenyan/German duo) Øyvind Torvund - Starry Night      (Norwegian composer) Pet Shop Boys - Burning The Heather Petter Eldh - Fanfarum for Komarum II Porridge Radio - Give/Take PREGOBLIN - Combustion Purple Mountains - a. Snow Is Falling In Manhattan    b. All My Happiness Is Gone   c. That’s Just The Way That I Feel Quelle Chris - Obamacare Quinie - Whas At The Windy Rapsody - Ibtihaj   ft. D’Angelo & GZA Reb Fountain - Faster Rian Treanor - ATAXIA_A1 Richard Dawson - Two Halves Robert Stillman - All Are Welcome Róisín Murphy - Incapable Rosalía - Milionària Rosenau & Sanborn - Saturday Rozi Plain - Symmetrical Ruth Garbus - Strash Sam Lee - The Moon Shines Bright   ft. Elizabeth Fraser (of Cocteau Twins) Sam Wilkes - Run Sandro Perri - Soft Landing SAULT - Smile and Go Seabuckthorn - To Which The Rest Were Dreamt serpentwithfeet - Receipts    ft. Ty Dolla $ign Sessa - Flor do Real         (of Brazil) Sheer Mag - Hardly To Blame Shit and Shine - No No No No Sinead O Brien - A Thing You Call Joy Siobhan Wilson - Plastic Grave Six Organs Of Admittance - Two Forms Moving Sleaford Mods - Kebab Spider Slow Meadow - Artificial Algorithm Snowy - EFFED    ft. Jason Williamson (of Sleaford Mods) SOAK - Knock Me Off My Feet Solange - Binz Sophie Crawford - A Miner’s Life Squid - Houseplants         bonus. Their cover of Robert Wyatt’s  “PIgs..... In There at End of the Road Festival) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DktZtQbo-YU Stella Donnelly - Old Man SUSS - Ursa Major Swamp Dogg - Sleeping Without You Is A Dragg   ft. Justin Vernon & Jenny Lewis Tami T - Birthday  Tenesha The Wordsmith - Why White Folks Can’t Call Me Nigga Theon Cross - Activate     ft. Moses Boyd & Nubya Garcia Thom Yorke - Dawn Chorus Tierra Whack - Wasteland Tim Hecker - That World Tiny Leaves - Respair Toya Delazy - Funani         (of South Africa) Twain - Death (Or S.F.?) Twin Peaks - Dance Through It Tyler Childers - All Your’n Vagabon - Water Me Down Vampire Weekend - This Life Vanishing Twin - Magicians Success Velvet Negroni - Confetti Vendredi Sur Mer - Chewing-Gum      (of France) Victoria Monét - Ass Like That Vieo Abiungo - Cobble Together Visible Cloaks - Stratum      ft. Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano Warmduscher - Midnight Dipper Weyes Blood - Andromeda Wilco - Love Is Everywhere (Beware) William Tyler - Our Lady Of The Desert Willie Scott & The Birmingham Spirituals - Keep Your Faith To The Sky     (from a collection of obscure 70′s era gospel on Luaka Bop, “The Time For Peace Is Now - Gospel Music About Us”) Xylouris White - Tree Song Ye Vagabonds - The Foggy Dew Zsela - Noise

[citizenscreen]

Out of the blue I watched a new-to-me movie the other day about a retired Army Colonel who takes on corrupt politicians in his hometown in Georgia. The movie’s title is Colonel Effingham’s Raid, a 1946 comedy directed by Irving Pichel starring Charles Coburn as the title character. Colonel Effingham’s Raid has a lot going for it with charm high on its list of attributes thanks in large part to Coburn, the Georgia native with a talent for comedy and an English accent. It was then that I decided to dedicate an entry to him because I enjoy him so…and…lo and behold, this week would have been his birthday.

Charles Coburn (June 19, 1877 – August 30, 1961)

We have an embarrassment of riches in the character actor department of classic films. There are numerous memorable actors who deserve praise for bettering films simply by their appearance no matter how small a role. One of those is Charles Coburn who enjoyed a popularity many of the other character players did not. Indeed, thanks to Coburn’s 3-decades-long screen career during which he appeared in nearly 100 movies and television shows, his name recognition rivaled that of the stars whose names appeared above the title. Coburn was also highly regarded critically receiving three Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor, taking home Oscar once for his delightful portrayal of Benjamin Dingle in George Stevens‘ wartime comedy, The More the Merrier (1943). More important than awards, however, was Charles Coburn’s undeniable ability to delight greatly with his talent.

Charles Douville Coburn was born in Macon, Georgia on June 19, 1877 and grew up in beautiful Savannah. He was the son of Scotch-Irish Americans Emma Louise Sprigman and Moses Douville Coburn who were not entertainers, but that didn’t stop young Charles from taking odd jobs at the local Savannah Theater starting at the age of 14. He was bitten by the entertainment industry bug early and did everything from handing out programs to being the doorman to theater manager by the age of 18. Failing to make his mark in Georgia, Charles left for New York at age 19. Although Mr. Coburn didn’t hit the big time immediately, his Broadway debut in 1901 was an inevitability as was his forming The Coburn Shakespearean Players in 1905. His partner in that endeavor was another actor, Ivah Wills, who became Mrs. Coburn in 1906. The two had six children together.

In addition to managing the Coburn Players, Charles and Ivah starred in and produced many plays throughout the decades during which the troupe traveled to college campuses across the country and appeared on Broadway. The couple met when he was playing Orlando to her Rosalind in As You Like It. They continued to work together until her death in 1937 performing Shakespeare and French and Greek dramas and comedies. In her book, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theater …, Karelisa Hartigan mentions how the Coburn Players would give over 100 performances every summer mostly outdoors. The popularity of their performances created an interest in outdoor theaters with other companies following their lead. Charles Coburn played most of the male leading parts with Ivah, billed as Mrs. Coburn, playing the female leads. The productions were often called “amateurish” by critics, but the performances were always praised. These scholarly productions likely led to Charles’ English accent despite being a Southern gentleman.

I’d be remiss not to mention that although few know her name, Ivah Wills had a long list of credits in her own right both as an actor and producer in a career that spanned 35 years. Ivah garnered positive reviews along with her husband and both were highly regarded members of the acting community. To put it in perspective, consider that George M. Cohan was among the honorary pallbearers at Ivah’s funeral.

Cobrun and Wills in The Taming of the Shrew

Ivah and Charles

After Ivah Wills’ death, Charles Coburn moved to Hollywood to start a movie career. He’d already appeared in a 1933 short film and in The People’s Enemy, a crime drama directed by Crane Wilbur. However, the roles that would cement his legacy as a screen star began in earnest in 1938 with comedic performances far removed from his classical training, but roles in which he excelled. Coburn’s best movie roles are the ones where he perfectly balances the high-brow snootiness with a touch of bumbling fool. Roger Ebert described him as a toned down Charles Laughton and that’s exactly right. Coburn paved the road to stardom at the age of 61 and became a steadfast presence that could be counted on for his comedic timing as charming old men with affected manner and accent – always with a monocle, which he removed only to eat, and sometimes chomping on a cigar. One cannot help but smile when he appears on screen.

Clarence Brown‘s Of Human Hearts (1938) offered Coburn his first substantial role alongside a first-rate cast led by Walter Huston, James Stewart and another terrific character actor, Beulah Bondi. Although that film is a Western, Coburn played a doctor, the type of professional role along with several judges, business men, a couple of “sirs,” and rich guys that he enjoyably brought to the screen throughout his career.

Charles Coburn’s memorable big screen credits are too numerous to list, but he made important contributions to such enduring classics as John Cromwell‘s Made for Each Other (1939) and Garson Kanin‘s Bachelor Mother (1939). A personal favorite of mine, Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941) wherein Coburn plays “Colonel” Harrington, father to Barbara Stanwyck’s Jean Harrington, a duo of card sharps adept at swindling the rich, would not be the same without him. The actor followed that Sturges gem with his first Oscar-nominated performance as an irascible tycoon who goes undercover as a shoe clerk at a department store to try to uncover agitators trying to form a union in Sam Wood’s The Devil and Miss Jones (1941). Starring Jean Arthur, Robert Cummings and a slew of fantastic character actors like Spring Byington, Edmund Gwenn, S. Z. Sakall, and William Demarest, you must make time to watch The Devil and Miss Jones if you’ve not seen it. It is bewitching fun.

Coburn and Jean Arthur in THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES

The 1940s served several standouts for Charles Coburn who appeared in 4 to 5 pictures a year in the early part of the decade. Of course, his Oscar-winning performance in Stevens’ World War II comedy The More the Merrier stands tall above the heap. Opposite Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea, Coburn is wonderful as the retired millionaire who finagles his way into a room during the wartime housing shortage. Coburn’s blustering but endearing manner in this film typifies the greatest gift he brought to the movies, by my estimation, and it is hard to resist. Variety agreed with me as of this movie they wrote, “A sparkling and effervescing piece of entertainment, The More the Merrier, is one of the most spontaneous farce-comedies of the wartime era. Although Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea carry the romantic interest, Charles Coburn walks off with the honors.”

Another worthy 1940s turn for Coburn was Ernst Lubitsch‘s Heaven Can Wait in 1943. Here he plays another grandfather and another millionaire with usual memorable flare alongside a stupendous cast led by Gene Tierney and Don Ameche. Once again I must mention Pichel’s Colonel Effingham’s Raid in which Coburn co-starred with Joan Bennett and William Eythe and several other veteran character actors like Donald Meek and Cora Witherspoon. This was a fun discovery.

Charles Coburn received his third Academy Award nomination for what TCM’s Robert Osborne described as a “rip-roaring performance” as a gruff but loving grandfather in the coming-of-age tale told in Victor Saville‘s The Green Years (1946). Following that performance, Coburn’s big screen appearances slowed down significantly. He had signed a contract with Columbia Pictures in 1945, which required only four films in two years. This meant that the actor had more time to return to the stage and to dedicate time to television work, which he did with gusto starting in 1950 as a premiere guest on many anthology series. Still, Coburn made a few notable pictures in the 1950s delighting audiences with a comedic millionaire performance as Sir Francis “Piggy” Beekman in Howard Hawks‘ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), a role that could have easily been creepy portrayed by anyone else. He also played against type in John Guillermin‘s murder mystery, Town on Trial (1957), which I must get my hands on.

Coburn with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe in a publicity shot for GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

Coburn’s final screen appearance was in The Best of the Post, an anthology series adapted from stories published in the Saturday Evening Post magazine. The March 1960 episode is titled “Six Months More to Live.” That seems a somber ending to a stellar career, but one to be proud of for many reasons not the least of which is that Coburn appeared in five Oscar Best Picture nominees: Kings Row (1942), The More the Merrier (1943), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Wilson (1944) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Only the last of these won, but they were all improved by the Coburn brand.

At the time of his death Charles Coburn was married to Winifred Natzka who was forty-one years his junior. The two were married in 1959 and had a daughter together. The actor’s final acting role was fittingly on stage in a production of You Can’t Take It With You in Indianapolis, Indiana a week before his death at the age of eighty-four. The previous year he had been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 6268 Hollywood Boulevard. If you ever pass that address be sure to look downward at his star – it was well earned.

A Tribute to Charles Coburn Out of the blue I watched a new-to-me movie the other day about a retired Army Colonel who takes on corrupt politicians in his hometown in Georgia.

[protectblackchildren]

OVERLOOKED

These remarkable black men and women never received obituaries in The New York Times — until now. We’re adding their stories to our project about prominent people whose deaths were not reported by the newspaper.

Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries, capturing the lives and legacies of people who have influenced the world in which we live.

But many important figures were left out.

Overlooked reveals the stories of some of those remarkable people.

We started the series last year by focusing on women like Sylvia Plath, the postwar poet; Emma Gatewood, the hiking grandmother who captivated a nation; and Ana Mendieta, the Cuban artist whose work was bold, raw and sometimes violent. We added to that collection each week.

Now, this special edition of Overlooked highlights a prominent group of black men and women whose lives we did not examine at the time of their deaths.

Many of them were a generation removed from slavery. They often attempted to break the same barriers again and again. Sometimes they made myth out of a painful history, misrepresenting their past to gain a better footing in their future. Some managed to achieve success in their lifetimes, only to die penniless, buried in unmarked graves. But all were pioneers, shaping our world and making paths for future generations.

We hope you’ll spread the word about Overlooked — and tell us who else we missed.

Read about the project’s first year, and use this form to nominate a candidate for future Overlooked obits.

1907-1960

Gladys Bentley

A gender-bending blues performer who became 1920s Harlem royalty.

BY GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

When it comes to loosening social mores, progress that isn’t made in private has often taken place onstage.

That was certainly the case at the Clam House, a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Harlem, where Gladys Bentley, one of the boldest performers of her era, held court.

READ MORE

1867-1917

Scott Joplin

A pianist and ragtime master who wrote “The Entertainer” and the groundbreaking opera “Treemonisha.”

BY WIL HAYGOOD

When Scott Joplin’s father left the North Carolina plantation where he had been born a slave, there was one thing he wanted to hold on to: the echoes of the Negro spirituals he had heard in the fields. In those songs he found a sense of uplift, hope and possibility.

In the post-Civil War era, the cruel breath of slavery and the aborted plan of Reconstruction still hung over the American South. But in the Joplin home, banjo and fiddle music filled the family’s evenings, giving the children — Scott in particular — a sense of music’s power to move.

READ MORE

1834-1858

Margaret Garner

In one soul-chilling moment, she killed her own daughter rather than return her to the horrors of slavery.

BY REBECCA CARROLL

Margaret garner, who was born as an enslaved girl, almost certainly did not plan to kill her child when she grew up and became an enslaved mother.

But she also couldn’t yet know that the physical, emotional and psychological violence of slavery, relentless and horrific, would one day conspire to force her maternal judgment in a moment already fraught with grave imperative.

READ MORE

1878-1932

Major Taylor

A world champion bicycle racer whose fame was undermined by prejudice.

BY RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

More than 100 years ago, one of the most popular spectator sports in the world was bicycle racing, and one of the most popular racers was a squat, strapping man with bulging thighs named Major Taylor.

He set records in his teens and was a world champion at 20. He traveled the globe, racing as far away as Australia, and amassed wealth among the greatest of any athlete of his time. Thousands of people flocked to see him; newspapers fawned over him.

READ MORE

1905-2001

Zelda Wynn Valdes

A fashion designer who outfitted the glittery stars of screen and stage.

BY TANISHA C. FORD

More than a half century before a “curvy” model made the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and before hashtags like #allbodiesaregoodbodies, there was a designer who knew that it was the job of clothes to fit the woman, not vice versa.

Zelda Wynn Valdes was a designer to the stars who could fit a dress to a body of any size — even if she had to do so just by looking at the client. “I only fit her once in 12 years,” Valdes told The New York Times in 1994 of her long-time client Ella Fitzgerald, “I had to do everything by imagination for her.” Valdes would simply look at Fitzgerald in the latest paper, noting any changes in her full-figured body, and would design the elaborate gowns — with beads and appliques — that she knew Fitzgerald loved.

READ MORE

1941-1970

Alfred Hair

A charismatic businessman who created a movement for Florida’s black artists.

BY GORDON K. HURD

“Well-Known Artist Alfred Hair Slain,” read the headline in The Fort Pierce News Tribune newspaper in Florida.

But before he was killed in a barroom brawl on Aug. 9, 1970, at just 29, Hair had become more than just an artist. With his drive, charisma and business acumen, he helped start a collective of Floridian artists, all African-American, who painted vibrant landscapes of their home state. They would later come to be known as The Florida Highwaymen, or more simply The Highwaymen.

READ MORE

1912-1967

Nina Mae McKinney

An actress who defied the barrier of race to find stardom in Europe.

BY ANITA GATES

About 20 minutes into “Hallelujah,” Hollywood’s first all-sound feature with an all-black cast, Nina Mae McKinney appeared on screen as Chick, a singer and dancer, in a sexy flapper dress.

She had flashing eyes, an armful of jangly bracelets, and no qualms about cheating a handsome young cotton farmer out of the money he had just gotten for his family’s crop.

READ MORE

1856-1910

Granville T. Woods

An inventor known as the ‘Black Edison.’ He found that recognition came at a hefty price.

BY AMISHA PADNANI

He carefully sealed the drawings in a mailing tube and quietly placed them out of sight from his business partner, then went to a meeting.

But when he returned, Granville T. Woods found that his drawings — a design for a novel invention that held the potential to revolutionize transportation around the world — were gone.

READ MORE

1884-1951

Oscar Micheaux

A pioneering filmmaker prefiguring independent directors like Spike Lee and Tyler Perry.

BY MONICA DRAKE

Almost as soon as you settle in to watch the 1939 melodrama “Lying Lips,” you can figure out who is the victim, who is the villain and who is the hero. And even if you know how it all will end, you want to watch anyway.

That was the beauty of the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. He made you want to soak up the exuberance he clearly felt in delivering a whole new way of telling stories.

READ MORE

1814-1907

Mary Ellen Pleasant

Born into slavery, she became a Gold Rush-era millionaire and a powerful abolitionist.

BY VERONICA CHAMBERS

When the abolitionist John Brown was hanged on Dec. 2, 1859, for murder and treason, a note found in his pocket read, “The ax is laid at the foot of the tree. When the first blow is struck, there will be more money to help.” Officials most likely believed it was written by a wealthy Northerner who had helped fund Brown’s attempt to incite, and arm, an enormous slave uprising by taking over an arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. No one suspected that the note was written by a black woman named Mary Ellen Pleasant.

In 1901, an elderly Pleasant dictated her autobiography to the journalist Sam Davis. As Lynn Hudson writes in the book “The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco,” Pleasant told Davis, “Before I pass away, I wish to clear the identity of the party who furnished John Brown with most of his money to start the fight at Harpers Ferry and who signed the letter found on him when he was arrested.” The sum she donated was $30,000 — almost $900,000 in today’s dollars.

READ MORE

1827-1901

Elizabeth Jennings

Life experiences primed her to fight for racial equality. Her moment came on a streetcar ride to church.

BY SAM ROBERTS

Because she was running behind one Sunday morning, Elizabeth Jennings turned out to be a century ahead of her time.

She was a teacher in her 20s, on her way to the First Colored American Congregational Church in Lower Manhattan, where she was the regular organist, when a conductor ordered her off a horse-drawn Third Avenue trolley and told her to wait for a car reserved for black passengers.

READ MORE

1876-1917

Philip A. Payton Jr.

A real estate magnate who turned Harlem into a black mecca.

BY ADEEL HASSAN

“Human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings,” is how a white journalist and co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., Mary White Ovington, described the filthy tenements that black New Yorkers were relegated to at the turn of the 20th century.

As more rural Southerners arrived in the city, the teeming Manhattan slums in which African-Americans were living had become the most densely populated streets in the city, nearly 5,000 people per block, according to one count, as landlords rented almost exclusively to white tenants.

READ MORE

1857-1924

Moses Fleetwood Walker

The first black baseball player in the big leagues, even before Jackie Robinson.

BY RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

When Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, becoming the first African-American player in modern major league baseball, he was not only a trailblazer in the sports world, but an inspiring figure in the modern civil rights movement.

But Robinson was not the first ballplayer in the long history of big league baseball known to be an African-American. That distinction belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker.

READ MORE

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/obituaries/black-history-month-overlooked.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

[huahsu]

YEAR OF THE GHOST DOG

[TL;DR version for the New Yorker -- I loved many great short songs and became obsessed with (1) a very old, much longer one (2) and YouTube comments this year.]  [links to previous year’s lists at the bottom]

A while back, I found myself in an extended funk. The reasons are uninteresting and honestly a bit dumb, a mix of everyday bummers and more existential stuff, all of which manifested in a kind of 360º sluggishness. I couldn’t really figure my way out of it but I believed that I would eventually stop feeling this way.

One night, I saw that someone online was selling a copy of the Emulations “These Are the Things,” a magnificent soul ballad 7″ out of Oakland. I wasn’t exactly homesick for the Bay Area, but something about the song’s roots, as well as its overwhelming feeling of optimistic yearning, resonated with (through?) me. There’s a moment when the singer’s falsetto peaks, and the piano starts cascading, and things feel like they’re going to work out after all. The copy for sale wasn’t in great shape, and it cost $100, an extravagant amount of money to spend on a piece of music. But I convinced myself that I’d feel better at some point, weeks, months, or years later, and I’d listen to my Emulations single, and recall that weird summer/fall.

As often happened with independently produced records of the sixties and seventies, “These Are the Things” was pressed on styrene, rather than vinyl. Styrene is a kind of plastic that’s lighter, cheaper and much more fragile than vinyl, and you can tell the difference by a kind of hollow plink when you put it on a turntable. Styrene also means that it has a limited life, and that each time the needle drags across its grooves, the record degrades a little bit. Over time, styrene records that get played a lot no longer sound as crisp or clear (or so it seems). I listened to it once it arrived, feeling a bit of regret at this wild expenditure, but also imagining my future self’s gratitude. I imagined entering into communion with everyone who had played this copy before me. I decided to only listen to the song once a year, if that--after all, each time I listened to the record, the song was changing, slightly.

A few months later, I felt normal (whatever that means) again, and the record became a marker of...I’m not sure what--maybe a kind of blind, stubborn optimism. Someone years later uploaded the song onto YouTube, which means I can listen to it whenever I want. This fall, I was trying and failing to spend less time on the Internet. But I decided that, instead of going on Twitter and Facebook, I would just read comments fans left on YouTube. I became obsessed with reading all the intimate histories people shared with one another--the chance encounters, the teenage dates and breakups, the seventies shop owners who recalled the days when stocking the right hit single could cover an entire month’s rent. I was listening to the Emulations when I noticed this comment, from Deric Jackson, who was apparently one of the group’s members: “I sung this song when I was 19yrs old. It was a pleasure to record and send this messageout into the airways. I have been with the women that God had given me to marry when I was 22yrs old. I did not understand at that time I was singing about my own life and the women who I had not met, but how wonderful it is to be with my wife fo 35yrs and life is still a breath of fresh air and wonderful. I would like to say to all real men love your wife, never worship her only one to worship is God alone.“ I’m pretty agnostic about most things relating to providence. But I felt as though I had been living in these words: “I did not understand at that time...” Jackson’s song was a prophecy, maybe even a conjuring, of his own path, and I wonder what he hears when he listens to it now. Sometimes you don’t know what’s coming next. But there’s always another song, and it doesn’t always sound the same as the last time.

(LATE 2017 BUT I REALLY DOUBT ANYONE NOTICED AKA THE FRENCH “MO BAMBA”) Junior Bvndo, “T’as ça #3 (Kylian Mbappe)”

I WILL LISTEN TO ANYTHING THAT USES DISTORTION Sheck Wes, “Wanted” OR OLD SCHOOL STABS Santi feat. Shane Eagle and Amaarae, “Rapid Fire” EVEN MORE THAN THAT, I LIKE THINGS THAT SOUND MESSY AND SLOPPY BUT ARE ACTUALLY PERFECT Caleb Giles featuring Cleo Reed, “Name” WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN AS GOOD AS IF IT HAD BEEN PERFECT, THE WARPED AND SMUDGED BEAUTY IS WHAT MAKES IT BEAUTIFUL Tirzah, Devotion Niagara, Apologia SAME, BUT SLIGHTLY OFF-STEP Blood Orange, “Charcoal Baby” THE BEST GENRE OF MUSIC REMAINS “SADE” Sade, “Flower of the Universe” and “The Big Unknown” Amber Mark, “Love is Stronger Than Pride” Bon Iver and Moses Sumney, “By Your Side” Kelela, “Like a Tattoo” 808s AND HEARTBREAK AND NEAR-OCTOGENERIANS Swamp Dogg, “She’s All Mind All Mind” I WASN’T AS ENAMORED WITH A LOT OF “NEW JAZZ” BUT DID LIKE Sam Wilkes, Wilkes Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes, Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar …WHICH REMINDED ME A BIT OF THIS FACEMELTING REISSUE (RIYL: ALICE COLTRANE, DON CHERRY, ETC ETC) John Tchicai, With Strings SPEAKING OF TERRIFIC JAZZ-ADJACENT STUFF Dos Santos, “Manos Anjenas” THE ORIGINAL “BIG MOOD” Okonkolo, Cantos THE YEAR I REALLY REKINDLED MY LOVE OF THE CELLO Clarice Jensen, For This From That Will Be Filled Oliver Coates, “A Church” …WHICH I DEFINITELY PREFER TO VIOLIN--ESP PIZZICATO--THOUGH THIS WAS QUITE GOOD Sudan Archives, “Nont for Sale” HARPS ALWAYS SOUND GOOD Leya, The Fool Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore, Ghost Forests ALWAYS HAVE TIME FOR WOODBLOCKS AND VIBES Kate NV, для FOR AS WELL AS MIAMI BASS SIGNIFIERS (KICKSTARTER FOR CITY GIRLS TO RAP OVER DJ BATTLECAT IN 2019) City Girls, “Act Up” AND BANJO DRONE...WHY NOT Nathan Bowles, Plainly Mistaken ALBUMS THAT I LIKED IN 2018, AND THAT I SENSE I WILL LIKE EVEN MORE BY THIS TIME NEXT YEAR Ben LaMarr Gay, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun Neneh Cherry, Broken Politics AN ALBUM THAT I WISH WAS TEN ALBUMS Tierra Whack, Whack World AN ALBUM I WISH WAS JUST A LITTLE BIT LONGER Pusha-T, Daytona OF THE MANY REASONS I MOURN THE DEATH OF “THE ALBUM,” ONE IS THAT I ALWAYS LIKE TO HEAR WHAT PEOPLE DO WITH THAT LAST SONG YG, “Bomptown Finest” OR HOW ALBUMS, FULL OF SIGNS, ANGLES, FLEETING MOMENTS, CIRCULATE AND RE-CIRCULATE Angelique Kidjo, Remain in Light AND HOW THEY ARE LIKE WHAT NOVELS REPRESENTED IN THE AGE OF POETRY—OPPORTUNITIES TO LIVE INSIDE COMPLEXITY, SPACE, A DEMOS U.S. Girls, In a Poem Unlimited ONE OF THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR WAS A SOUNDTRACK... Kendrick Lamar et al, Black Panther AND TEASER FOR  Jay Rock, Redemption AND ANOTHER WAS JUST SOME RAP SONGS Earl Sweatshirt, Some Rap Songs WHICH ISN’T TO SAY ARTISTS DON’T STILL VALUE AND HAVE FUN WITH THE FORMAT Vince Staples, FM A TWENTY-FIVE TRACK ADVENTURE INTO VIBES Pink Siifu, ensley AND SOMETIMES TWENTY MINUTES OR SO IS ENOUGH boygenius, boygenius ONE MORE ALBUM THING – FIRST SONGS HAVE ALWAYS FELT LIKE THESIS STATEMENTS, AND STREAMING HAS ONLY APPLIED MORE PRESSURE TO THE SOOTHING, BEWITCHING, PERFECT WELCOME Mac Miller, “Come Back to Earth” MAC MILLER AND THUNDERCAT LOOK SO HAPPY HERE whole thing, but esp six minutes in, and even more so about nine minutes in THE BEST VIBES Show Dem Camp feat. Boj and Ajebutter 22, “Damiloun” Koffee, “Toast” HAPPY-GO-LUCKY B/W DEVIL-MAY-CARE Shoreline Mafia, “Nun Major” I LIKE NEF AND EPs PERFECTLY SUIT HIM Nef the Pharaoh and 03 Greedo, Porter 2 Grape 

RAPPING AS FAST AS YOU CAN OVER FREESTYLE/HI-NRG WILL NEVER SOUND BAD TO ME… SOB X RBE, “Paid in Full” SOB X RBE, “Carpoolin’” …ALTHOUGH THEY ALSO SOUND SICK OVER FAKE GHOST DOG BEATS, TOO, THIS WAS ONE OF MY SONGS OF THE YEAR SOB X RBE, “Paramedic!” SAME WITH MEDHANE Medhane, “The Garden” TRIPPIE REDD PUTS OUT A LOT OF MUSIC FILLED WITH TRANSCENDENT MOMENTS, BUT RARELY MAKES TRANSCENDENT SONGS, AND IT PAINS ME A BIT THAT MY FAVORITE SONG OF HIS THIS YEAR WAS Diplo featuring Trippie Redd, “Wish” TRIPPY-ASS DOO-WOP Cuco, “Sunnyside” A STRONG HARMONY IS A VISION OF WHAT LIFE COULD BE Ben Pirani, “How Do I Talk to My Brother?” WHERE WERE U IN 94 Young Echo, Young Echo SWEAR I'VE NEVER HEARD MUSIC THIS “GREY” ManOnMars, ManOnMars IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE A FAKE D’ANGELO SONG, IT SHOULD BE THIS GOOD Patrick Paige III, “Voodoo” LIKED THIS, BUT IT’S ALSO POSSIBLE TO BE A BIT TOO FAITHFUL TO THE PAST Teyana Taylor, “Hold On” NOT QUITE FAYE WONG DOING THE CRANBERRIES (RIP DOLORES O’RIORDAN) BUT STILL MEMORABLE Katherine Ho, “Yellow” LIKE THE BEST PARTS OF FEELS-ERA ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, BUT TAIWANESE Prairie WWWW

NEVER THOUGHT TO VISIT THE LOUVRE UNTIL The Carters, “Apeshit” video BROWN EXCELLENCE Humeysha, Departures "BROWN BEATS” FOREVER RIP Cameron Paul

MY FAVORITE DISCOVERY OF THE YEAR Pharoah Sanders playing “Kazuko” in a tunnel near the Marin Headlands LIKE NONE OF ITS INFLUENCES (FOOTWORK, AMBIENT), LIKE NOTHING ELSE OUT THERE, REALLY Foodman, Aru Otoko No Densetsu DARESAY SKI MASK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN BOOED OUT OF THE CIPHER Ski Mask the Slump God, Beware the Book of Eli THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON I’VE SEEN ON THE BIG SCREEN AT THE PAST THREE YEARS’ NETS GAMES IS Young M.A., “PettyWap” DEMOS FROM A GROUP I HAVE ALWAYS ADORED, BEFORE THEY FOUND THE SOUND THAT I ADORE The Nonce, 1990 EXTREMELY GOOD AND LARGELY OVERLOOKED REISSUE Suzanne Menzel, Goodbyes and Beginnings FOUR TET IS GOING THROUGH HIS LIVE ARCHIVES, AND IT’S A TREAT TO STUDY HIS ARC/EVOLUTION  Live at Hultsfred Festival, 18th June 2004 Live at LPR New York, 17th February 2010 Live in Tokyo, 1st December 2013 Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 STRANGE TO LIVE IN A MOMENT WHERE BEING WEIRD SEEMS A BIT DERIVATIVE. STILL, THIS IS BLISSFUL SahBabii, “Anime World” HAPPY FACE Smino, “Klink” SAD FACE Drake, “In My Feelings” (especially this version) “JIM FROM THE OFFICE” FACE Pusha-T, “The Story of Adidon” STOLE YOUR FACE Sophie, “Faceshopping” FACE/OFF YG and Mozzy, “Too Brazy” Sammy Bananas feat Antony and Cleopatra, “Slow Down” Kode 9 and Burial, Fabriclive 100 GASSED FACE E-40 and B-Legit, “Whooped" ABSOLUTELY FACEMELTING Todd Barton and Ursula K. Le Guin, Music and Poetry of the Kesh VACATION AWAY MESSAGE SiR, “D’Evils” Bad Bunny x PJ Sin Suela x Nejo, “Cual Es Tu Plan” BEST OPENING DISCLAIMER TO A VIDEO 808INK, “Come Down” “TAGS: LATIN CHORAL CUMBIA GOTH LOS ANGELES” San Cha, “Cosmic Ways”

BEST USE OF “OOCHIE WALLY,” STILL ONE OF MY FAVORITE BEATS EVER Stefflon Don, “Oochie Wally freestyle” BEST USE OF “SUPERTHUG” Rico Nasty, “Countin’ Up” EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS--THE HEADBANG MINIMALISM, THE LAS VEGAS WALGREENS--BUT ESPECIALLY THE LINE ABOUT WELLS FARGO Rico Nasty, “Trust Issues” “ORGASM ADDICT” (RIP PETE SHELLEY) Victor Oladipo, “One Day” “I JUST TOOK A FLIGHT TO FRANCE TO COP CARDIGANS” Black Thought and Styles P, “Making a Murderer” “AT THE EMIRATES I MILLY ROCK” Manzo and Malachi Amour, “Lingard” DOPE TUNE, AND UNEXPECTED KELLYANNE CONWAY REFERENCE JPEGMAFIA, “1539 N. Calvert” YEAH YEAH YEAH (RIP MARK E SMITH) Travis Scott and Drake, “Sicko Mode” R-E-S-P-E-C-T (RIP ARETHA FRANKLIN) Rosalia, El Mal Querer REEL DEAL, “DRIPPIN’ DOPE (SAXAPELLA)” (1989) Gunna, “Top Off” WAMP WAMP (WHAT IT DO) B/W WAIT (THE WHISPER SONG) Vallee feat. Jeremih, “Womp Womp” SAD REGGAETON IS NOT BAD Bad Bunny, “Solo De Mi” SOUNDS GOOD TO ME, 2002-PRESENT Temani, “Power” Westerman, “Confirmation” REAL LIES, POET LAUREATS OF “YOUNG PEOPLE THINKING ABOUT BEING OLD” Tom Demac and Real Lies, “White Flowers” A SONG DESIGNED TO SOUND LIKE IT CAME OUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, WHICH ALSO FEELS LIKE IT CAME OUT A MILLION YEARS AGO (IT WAS JUST JANUARY) Bruno Mars feat. Cardi B, “Finesse (remix)” TAY-K WAS JUST A YEAR AGO Comethazine, “Highriser” FAVORITE 2 BRIDGES MUSIC ARTS “MIGHT AS WELL” RANDOM PURCHASE OF THE YEAR  Kizaki Ondo Preservation Society and Clark Naito, 木崎音頭 Kizaki Ondo FEELS LIKE IT CAME OUT TEN YEARS AGO (IT WAS JUST JAN/FEB) BUT I NEVER GREW TIRED OF IT Rich the Kid, “Plug Walk” ODDLY REASSURING THAT PEOPLE STILL JANGLE Massage, “Oh Boy” Earth Dad, “Walter” ...AND DISCOVER WORLDS FROM WITHIN THEIR BEDROOMS Soccer Mommy, Clean ...AND EXPLORE THE CONTOURS OF GROWLING AND NAGGING Sada Baby and Drego, “Bloxk Party” ...AND CAN USE THE PAST TO MAKE SOMETHING SO VISIONARY AND FORWARD-THINKING Virginia Wing, Ecstatic Arrow Mitski, Be A Cowboy ...AND LOOKING FOR FOURTH WORLDS Arp, Zebra ...AND MAKE IMPOSSIBLE RHYTHMS Heavee, WFM ...AND THAT ARTISTS I HAD NEVER HEARD OF, WORKING IN IDIOMS I HAD NEVER HEARD OF, MIGHT STILL BLOW MY MIND Odunsi (the Engine), rare. JUNGLE LIVES X-Altera, “Blowing Up the Workshop” mix TOP THREE TIMES I SAW STANDING ON THE CORNER THIS YEAR 3 - The Merciful Allah Black Hole Theatre 2 - The Time it All Ended with Fireworks on Grand St. 1 - An Empty Storefront During a Blizzard

{HONORABLE MENTIONS -The Time They Brought a Monolith -THEME DE YE-YO [Respect to the Gods]} SONG OF THE SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER, YEAR,  STILL UNDEFEATED ### A CHURCH AND JOHN LENNON’S “IMAGINE” :: 2017 SIKH DEVOTIONAL MUSIC :: 2016 SPOOKY BLACK :: 2015

[whateverjeanne]

OK.

Performance Studies. This whole thing is called, "a personal prehistory of pre-performance studies." Performance Studies. What's amazing is not its appearance but what took it so long to appear, given "all the world's a stage," the "theatrum mundi," and the maya-lila concept. This is not an occasion for a disquisition or even a modestly scholarly lecture about performance studies. Tonight, for me especially, is personal. And from that perspective, I want to ask, and partly answer, the question: How did performance studies start, not institutionally, but in me from way back? Not exactly my childhood, though that would be relevant, stories for another occasion, but from my undergraduate years at Cornell, 1952 to ’56, through to my time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, my two years in the army, my time in New Orleans from 1958 [should be 1960] to ’67, my first years at NYU, 1967 to ’70. And then my journey, my first journey outside of the Euro-American sphere, to India and many other places in Asia, but India especially.

In New Delhi, shortly after arriving, this is in October 1971—my first steps outside the Euro-American ken, Ramdev, a waiter in the Ashoka hotel, told me, quote: "One is born just to die—so one should not think of danger" unquote. "One is born just to die—so one should not think of danger." This is not just physical danger, this is spiritual danger, emotional danger, intellectual danger. Danger is all around us—and it can be very productive. [laughter and affirmations]

What was "performance" to me before PS had its name?

In 1953, while working on the Cornell Daily Sun, I decided to write several in-depth articles on the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court challenging the segregation doctrine of "separate but equal." To understand the case, I wrote to the lead lawyer for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall. He responded that if I wanted to learn about it, I should visit him in his Harlem law office. Which I did. Marshall, a big man, easy in his mind and body, threw his legs up on the desk, the pullout shelf of his desk, and explained the Brown case to me. A drama, a performance before the Court, something theatrical that would change American history—and my life.

Flash forward three years later to September 1957. I was on my way to Little Rock Arkansas bearing a letter from Thurgood Marshall to Daisy May Bates, head of the local NAACP chapter. Thanks to that letter, I was the only white in the basement across the street from Central High School. I watched as the Little Rock Nine, protected by troops of the 101st Airborne Division, crossed that street, mounted the stairs, and entered high school. I knew— even if I couldn't articulate—that something momentous and theatrical was happening. I knew that the word "demonstration," which we called these things, meant to show something. I didn't, I hadn't read Brecht, but there was street theatre, there was all of that presenting itself to me.

I was accepted then into Paul Engle's Iowa Writers Workshop and there I wrote a play for my master’s degree. I was also part of the regular English Department too, and I taught freshmen, quote, "communication skills." [laughter] Mutual bullshitting. [louder laughter]

There was plenty of experimental theatre too. During the summer of 1958 and again 1960 [should be 1961] (before and after the army which I will talk about in a bit) I created and led the East End Players of Provincetown. There I experimented with what would become environmental theatre. I did Sophocles's “Philoctetes” on the North Truro beach with Odysseus and Neoptolemus arriving by boat as Philoctetes, his wounded leg wrapped in fish blood soaked rags, fought off fierce flies. I did Ibsen's “Master Builder” in the Provincetown Town Hall with Solness's crowning structure rising to the beams of the Hall's steeple. I also experienced Provincetown as a place performing itself in one way in the summer, another in the winter. In 1958, I stayed till November, then joined the army. I lived on Commercial Street in a room rented to me by Mary Heaton Vorse, on whose wharf the first Provincetown Players presented their productions. She knew them all; she was a member of them. I savored Mary's clam chowder as I soaked up her tales of the Players and Provincetown.

Then, I did something surprising, I volunteered for the draft in 1958. Volunteering for the draft is a little different than being drafted. What happens, if you are drafted, your number comes up and you're drafted. Volunteering—the draft boards had to deliver a certain number of recruits—you go to your draft board and say, "Make me number 1." Which means they've satisfied some of their requirement. In exchange for that, you got a few privileges of, you know, maybe what you would like to specialize in. Of course it was lies. [laughter] But I volunteered for the draft and that day that I volunteered, I left. I served until August 1960.

Why sign up though? I turned down an offer of an officer's commission in order to be with people as unlike me as I could possibly imagine. People not of my class, background, race, religion, or education. I really wanted to experience the world as I could not experience it voluntarily—except by volunteering for the draft. I said I wouldn't be an officer. Because if I had just went on with my life, I would hang out, you know, mainly with people like you, and, uh, which is fine [laughter], you're my milieu, but there's a lot out there that's not my milieu and how could I learn about that first hand? Forced to, as it were. So, uh. At first, I was assigned to Fort Polk in Leesville, Louisiana. Don't go there. [laughter] And then Fort Hood, Texas. Probably don't go there either. [laughter] From Fort Polk, I made my first trip to New Orleans -- more on the Crescent City later. But it was through the army that I went to New Orleans and immediately fell in love with it—because there's nothing as different from an army barracks, than, you know, the French Quarter.

The army was uniforms, drills, inspections, and full-scale war games. And my ploys to subvert and avoid these. Performative dodges for sure, though I didn't have that word— "performative"—yet. My main job in the army was to write the weekly lessons on world events that later would be taught to all the troops stationed in the continental United States. I had to follow the army's guidelines. Given this, once in a lecture to the instructors I was instructing, I had a large map projected showing Western Europe ending at the Iron Curtain, and then a vast white space, and then the island of Taiwan. [laughter] "Gentlemen, gentlemen"—because they were all men—"Gentlemen," I said, pointing to the map, "We all know that China is a small island lying directly off the coast of...West Germany." [laughter] Only a few of them laughed. [laughter] Most took that message forward. [laughter] That was one of the reasons why later on I was investigated by the army. Because each week I inserted something a little bit subversive but within the boundaries of what they were asking for.

During the quote "Big Thrust" quote war game whose newspaper I was editing, “The Big Thrust Bugle,” [laughter]. It wasn't phallic, I don't know what's the interest in that. I went to Austin for two days, reporting in this newspaper—and Carol can attest to this, she's seen the newspaper itself, it's in my files at Princeton—quote "Big Thrust Bugle Editor Vanishes" unquote. [laughter] In other words, like many before me, I saw the military not only as something grim and death-dealing, but as absurd. Another performative.

In the army, I also had plenty of time to read. I read the whole Greek tragic canon (in the Grene and Lattimore edition) and fell in love with Euripides's “The Bacchae.” While in the army, I wrote my first published scholarly essay—about “The Bacchae”—published in the Tulane Drama Review. [laughter] Ten years later, with The Performance Group, I devised Dionysus in 69. [applause] Bill Finley also thanks you. Bill Finley was often Dionysus.

I don't remember precisely when I read Erving Goffman's “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”—while in the army or shortly thereafter. Goffman's ideas perfectly fit the crazy onstage/ offstage life of the army. His theory also helped explain my experience in Little Rock. But he did not elaborate his theory to include popular entertainments, play, games, and ceremonial ritual, of the large scale—because he was dealing with everyday life.

My army stationing in Louisiana brought me to New Orleans, which I immediately loved for its variegated people, street life, music, and food. So after discharge, I decided to get my PhD at Tulane, and I did it rather rapidly, less than two years, from entry to having a degree. I wasn't interested in remaining a student for long and I recommend that you tell your students the quicker that they finish the happier they will be. [laughter and scattered applause] Tulane hired me to replace Robert W. Corrigan, as you heard, TDR's founding editor, and Corrigan went to Carnegie Mellon and then on to NYU. And shortly thereafter, Corrigan became the first Dean of the Arts of what is now our school, the Tisch School, and he brought me to NYU.

He also brought Monroe Lippman, who was the chair of the department at Tulane, to chair—because Corrigan asked me to be chair, which I wouldn't. And shortly thereafter, Brooks McNamara, who was one of my first students. When I was a young PhD, he and I were about the same age, but I had the degree and he didn't yet. And Brook's specialty, as some of you know, is popular entertainments, the Shubert Archives, a whole vast range of performance stuff prior to performance studies that was performance studies.

Also while at Tulane, I was one of three producing directors of The Free Southern Theater, founded at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, in 1963. The other producing directors were John O’Neal and Gilbert Moses. In 1964, Freedom Summer, as it was called, we toured with—and get this repertory—Martin Duberman's “In White America,” Samuel Beckett's “Waiting for Godot,” and Ossie Davis's “Purlie Victorious.” Now which one of those did I direct? [silence] Give it a chance, which one? [various responses, not clear, then someone shouts Godot] I directed “Purlie Victorious”—the only black play [in the FST repertory that summer]—authored by Ossie Davis, an African American.

The FST was a completely different kind of theatre, for me and for many people. We performed more often in churches and farmyards than in regular theatres. In fact, I don't remember every performing in a regular theatre. The spectators often interacted with us, with the performers, as they would in church—they would shout back, they would ask questions. And yet, they really got it, they got the idea of waiting, they got the parody of course of “Purlie Victorious,” and “In White America” is a documentary about, basically, black experience in white

America. The FST's model, motto, was quote "a theatre for those who have no theatre." But they had a theatre, I realized, permeating rural Mississippi and Louisiana; it was a particular theatre rooted in black culture, vibrantly participatory, performative. And I began to sense this. Now remember this is the pre-history, so I didn't have full theory for it. But I knew that something was going on beyond what was on the stage, etc.

Also, while in New Orleans, I participated in both the civil rights movement and the anti- Vietnam War movement. I was one of the first two whites arrested for sitting in at the Maison Blanche department store soda fountain. What a name, "Maison Blanche," and again it was a time when we really—it was a demonstration—we were not there to get, you know, a black-and-white soda which is what we were ordering, of course. But we were there because they would either serve us, and would make the point of integrating it, or arrest us. I do remember a little anecdote. On the way, the other person, the other white person, was Cynthia Adams, the wife of a painter, Franklin Adams. On the way, we're in the paddy wagon, she leans over to me, she was true-and-true from New Orleans, [in New Orleans accent] "Richid, I'm sorry but, and I just remembered, in my purse I have a tiny little bit of weed." [laughter] I said, "Cynthia, if they find that on you, you're up to Angola [Louisiana maximum security penitentiary], and me too, for a long time. How can you do that?" "I jist forgot. What should I do?" I said, "Well you're a good Southern white girl, play it to the hilt. Say that you didn't know what you were getting into. That you didn't want to have anything to do with these radicals, these commies, ah, you know, these N people -- just play it to the hilt so that they would accept you as one of them and just let you go. Without ever searching you." Which she did. So that was very lucky. [laughter] But it was also a performance, you see. First, her demonstration and then of course her performing what she appeared to be, but which she was not.

[At Tulane] I was also part of the first teach-in against the Vietnam War ever taught in the south. Also I found real use for my Army training because I would go to the ROTC training ground and when their instructors would say, "To the left, harch!!" I would say even louder, "To the right, harch!!!" [laughter and applause] and I would totally disrupt the ROTC. For this, the campus police guy, Colonel Scruton, [loud laughter] and you can imagine what we could do with that, came to tell me, "Why were you, you're a professor, what're you doin'?" I'd say, "Well Colonel Scrutum, Scrotum, I mean ..." etc. and so forth. All these experiences... "To the right, harch" was an early form of guerilla theatre, of course.

All these experiences—I could elaborate on them greatly—demonstrated how orthodox "theatre" was very limited in relation to the much broader category of "performance." I also saw how human performances were of a piece with animal performances; that ritual and play were the opposite sides of the same coin. I theorized this synthesis—which I later dubbed the "broad spectrum approach"—in two essays, "Approaches to Theory/Criticism," which was in TDR in 1966 and "Actuals," which was published in a festschrift to Francis Fergusson in 1970.

Ok.

And then came India. In October 1971. India deeply put me to the test, even as I was introduced to the broadest possible range of performances, from the streets of Calcutta to Ramlila. My first days in India were not pleasant, they were transformative. Take this excerpt from my notebook 42 [really notebook 41]. I have been keeping notebooks since the mid-1950s so by 1972 [actually 1971] I had 42 [should be 41] 500-page notebooks filled. Sooner or later those notebooks will go to my archive at Princeton—they're interesting reading, some of it, and there's a lot of it. So here's from notebook, October 1971, quote:

“In the streets every kind of living and dying is going on. There are the beggars. But more pathetic by far are those who sleep in a daze, barely living, wrapped in heat, rags, hunger, and disease. One Indian hostess confessed that it does not take long to shut these people out. [...] Thus one goes down the street not seeing—stepping over the dying in fact as one does in consciousness: assigning these people to empty spaces where they perish in the void. If there is a solution to this problem—and Imust use "if"—then it is in total revolution. And whether it is possible to support such a revolution and also satisfy basic human needs for expression, I do not know.”

Unquote. I need to stop here. I still believe in total revolution, even as I fear it. Thank you. [applause and cheers]

-Richard Schechner

[auburnfamilynews]

Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

This dynasty is far from dead

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be taking a quick look at every Auburn opponent on the 2020 schedule.

2019 Record: 11-2

2020 Signing Class: 2nd (2nd SEC)

Head Coach: Nick Saban (14th Season)

Key Departures:

QB Tua Tagovailoa - 180/252 (71.4%) 2,840 yds 33 TD 3 INT 2 rushing TD

WR Jerry Jeudy - 77 rec 1,163 yds 15.1 avg 10 TD

WR Henry Ruggs III - 40 rec 746 yds 18.7 avg 7 TD

RT Jedrick Wills - 1st Round Draft Pick

DT Raekwon Davis - 47 tackles 3.0 TFL 0.5 sacks

OLB Anfernee Jennings - 83 tackles 12.5 TFL 8.0 sacks IN 5 PBU FF

OLB Terrell Lewis - 31 tackles 11.5 TFL 6.0 sacks 2 PBU FR

CB Trevon Diggs - 37 tackles 0.5 TFL 3 INT 8 PBU TD 2 FR TD

S Xavier McKinney - 95 tackles 5.5 TFL 3.0 sacks 3 INT 5 PBU TD FR 4 FF

Key Returners:

QB Mac Jones (RJr) - 97/141 (68.8%) 1,503 yds 14 TD 3 INT rushing TD

RB Najee Harris (Sr) - 209 carries 1,224 yds 5.9 avg 13 TD 27 rec 304 yds 11.3 avg 7 TD

WR Devonta Smith (Sr) - 68 rec 1,256 yds 18.5 avg 14 TD

WR Jaylen Waddle (Jr) - 33 rec 560 yds 17.0 avg 6 TD

LT Alex Leatherwood (Sr)

LB Dylan Moses (Sr) - 86 tackles 10.0 TFL 3.5 sacks PBU FF

CB Patrick Surtain Jr (Jr) - 42 tackles TFL 2 INT 8 PBU FR 3 FF

Preview

2019 was the first time the Alabama Crimson Tide were not in the College Football Playoffs. It was the first 2 loss regular season since 2010. An eight game win streak over LSU was snapped and the Tide lost their 2nd Iron Bowl in three years. Dynasty dead right?

Uh.... Probably not...

While it’s been a whopping TWO years since Nick Saban has caressed that national championship trophy in his less than average sized arms, Alabama is still one of the top contenders heading into the 2020 campaign. The Tide, per usual, lost a slew of talented players to the NFL but more returned than expected. Granted, it wasn’t like a domino type of return but enough to easily slide Alabama into the #1 or #2 spot on your preseason rankings list.

Two time Iron Bowl loser and “generational” quarterback Tua Tagovailoa is now a Miami Dolphin but touchdown maker Mac Jones returns. The junior QB performed admirably in Tua’s stead including tossing six touchdowns in the Iron Bowl. Granted, two were to the Tigers but that’s still some big time production returning.

@ZAKOBYMCCLAIN picks it off and GOES THE DISTANCE! pic.twitter.com/HrfPIoqnMz

— Auburn Football (@AuburnFootball) April 7, 2020

But his spot is far from secure. Once again, Alabama has stolen away a “generational” 5-star QB from the USC Trojans. Bryce Young finished ranked #2 overall by 247 Composite and looks poised to compete for the starting role. The lack of spring ball makes it unlikely he will be the day 1 starter but Nick Saban has shown in the past he’s not afraid to make a change if he feels one is necessary. Just ask Kirby Smart. I still think Jones ends up being the starter for the whole season but it’s a nice problem to have in Tuscaloosa.

Whomever is quarterback will be surrounded by weapons. Jerry Jeudy and Henry Ruggs are gone but Devonta Smith, Najee Harris and Jaylen Waddle all return. Getting both Smith and Harris back might have been the best recruiting job Saban’s staff did this offseason. The duo combined to score 34 touchdowns last fall. Auburn fans are also well aware of Waddle’s talent. Who emerges behind this trio will be interesting to see. John Metchie is a name to watch at wideout while former 5-star running back Trey Sanders is healthy and looks poised to be the Tide’s #2 back.

Weapons are great but even better for Alabama’s new starting QB is that four members of last year’s outstanding offensive line return. Jedrick Wills departed to the NFL but Alex Leatherwood, Evan Neal, Landon Dickerson and Deonte Brown all return. There’s a good chance Neal slides out to right tackle opening the door for Emil Ekiyor at left guard. Right guard Deonte Brown might be the best interior OL in college football this fall. He’s the only man I saw win more than he lost against Derrick Brown in 2019.

The Tide’s offense was elite again in 2019 but that was not the case on defense. Auburn’s rushing attack was unable to average 3 yard a carry against Minnesota but shredded this Bama front 7 for over 5 yards a pop and 2 scores. A big reason for those struggles were the amount of injuries to that group. Alabama was forced to start three true freshman in the Iron Bowl and it showed. But now that group has some legit experience and a number of those talented defenders return in 2020. Alabama’s defense should take a major step forward this fall.

There are plenty of studs on this Alabama defensive line but the name to watch is Christian Barmore. In only a limited number of snaps he finished 5th on the team in tackles for loss. Phidarian Mathis, LaBryan Ray, DJ Dale and host of other formerly highly ranked prospects are all back as well. I expect the Tide’s front to be much sturdier in 2020.

The biggest area of improvement though will likely be at linebacker. As true freshman, Christian Harris and Shane Lee took their lumps while also flashing big time potential. Now Dylan Moses and Josh McMillon are both back giving the Tide one of the deeper LB units in the country. On the edge, keep an eye on Louisiana native Christopher Allen. There’s excitement about his potential. Plus the Tide signed a loaded 2020 EDGE class that includes five stars Will Anderson and Drew Sanders.

On the backend, Xavier McKinney, Jared Mayden and Trevon Diggs are all gone. McKinney lead the Tide in tackles last season while also intercepting 3 passes and forcing 4 more fumbles. But none of you care about that. JUST SHOW US THE HIGHLIGHT NERD.

would NOT be denied en route to the end zone. pic.twitter.com/9GVDQkCtz0

— Auburn Football (@AuburnFootball) May 4, 2020

Shaun Shivers now possesses his soul.

Patrick Surtain is back and a number of talented athletes are joining him in the 3rd level of Bama’s defense. Josh Jobe is likely to take over the corner spot opposite of Surtain. But the man to watch back here is Jordan Battle. Alabama pumps out elite NFL safeties and he looks like the next man up.

This is an Alabama team that will be very hungry this fall. There was a feeling of disrespect when the Playoff Committee dropped them to #13 following their Iron Bowl defeat. With so much returning production back on both sides of the ball, Nick Saban’s dynasty looks far from dead. Granted, counting and kicking still jump out as major weaknesses for this squad but if they can clear those two hurtles they have a shot at winning their 575th national title.

War Eagle!

from College and Magnolia - All Posts https://www.collegeandmagnolia.com/2020/7/10/21320012/sneak-peek-the-alabama-crimson-tide-nick-saban-mac-jones-najee-harris-dylan-moses-jordan-battle

[the-master-cylinder]

SUMMARY A nuclear war breaks out in 1986, expending the world’s entire nuclear arsenal, except for one missile. Two children, Philip Chandler (John Stockwell) and Marlowe Hammer (Michael Dudikoff), are abandoned by their fathers in a fallout shelter cut into the side of a wooded mountain. The pair grow up in the shelter, with 1950s detective fiction and swing music as the guiding force in their learning. Fifteen years later Marlowe succeeds in digging out the cave entrance. The pair give each other haircuts, dress in suits, and go to rejoin the world.

Philip narrates their adventure on their first day out:

My name’s Philip, and this is going to be a yarn about me and my pal, Marlowe. About the day we got out of this shelter and went off into the post-nuclear world. Now, as excited as we were about leaving the shelter, it was still a joint that held fond memories. I mean, it was the only world we’d ever known. Where I practiced my magic, Marlowe, his dancing; where we both dreamed of becoming private eyes, just like the ones we’d read about.

Marlowe hopes to find their fathers, but Philip is disgruntled that they never returned, and presumes that they are dead. The mountain is now devoid of trees. The first people they find are a trio of radiation burned “mutants” chasing a beautiful woman, Miles Archer (Lisa Blount). They rescue Miles, who kisses Marlowe as a distraction and steals his gun. This backfires, as she drops the activation keys to the last nuclear missile. Miles leaves, and the pair are immediately attacked by a biker gang of bald women in red wigs. Afterwards the boys discover the activation keys, which bears their fathers’ names. This excites Marlowe, but disturbs Philip.

They rescue another young woman, Rusty Mars (Michele Little), from a group of armed children Philip nicknames “disco mutants”. She takes a liking to Philip, and leads the two of them to Edge City which is plagued by gang warfare. Rusty takes them to a dance club, where they are captured by cannibals. They want the nuclear keys, and to eat the young men, a rarity of uncontaminated meat. Although Rusty helps them escape and apologises, Philip doesn’t trust her. Just after they part ways the pair meets up with a friend of Miles’ who also wants the keys. After he is dispatched Miles shows up and takes them to her hideout. There she tells them about the purpose of the keys. Miles then threatens to kill them, but they escape.

Rusty has followed them to the hideout, but is attacked by the child gangsters. The pair chase them away, but Philip still doesn’t trust her. He wants to shoot her, but is out of bullets. After Rusty apologises again for lying to him and originally handing him over to the cannibals he says, “That was a million years ago, and I got a short memory. In fact, I don’t even remember who you are”.

The pair resolves to rid the city of the gangs and keep the keys. They go to an abandoned warehouse, using themselves as bait, in the hopes that the gangs will kill each other before killing them. For the most part, the plan works. However, the bosses of the child-gangsters are in fact Philip and Marlowe’s fathers. Before he dies, Philip’s father tells him that the past does not matter. In the end, the only gangster left standing is Miles, who has the keys. She shoots at them, and misses, but startles Marlowe into shooting and killing her.

The film ends with Philip letting go of the angst which he had nursed for 15 years. He adopts Marlowe’s “silver-lining look on life”. The two demonstrate Marlowe’s tap-inspired “post-nuke shuffle” to the crowds of the city. In the closing narration, Philip explains that they plan to set up shop as detectives, but that first he will find Rusty and see if he can repair his relationship with her. Of the keys, he says that he and Marlowe hid them in a secret location, because “you never know, in a tight jam a nuclear missile just might come in handy”.

PRODUCTION Albert Pyun’s first film, THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, made box office waves and instantly established him as a hot property in Hollywood. If you haven’t heard much about the young director in the past two years, it’s because Pyun has been busy working on his next feature, a post-nuclear fantasy-adventure tale entitled RADIOACTIVE DREAMS. The film is scheduled for release later this year, though a distribution deal has not yet been finalized.

The long pre-production period was, in part, due to the challenge of acquiring financing (after THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, Pyun had several offers, but wanted to work independently from the studio system and a six month talent search for the roles of Phillip and Marlowe. Pyun estimates that he saw over 600 young actors, striving to find two who weren’t too modern-looking, and could believably carry a 40’s attitude as part of their characters. During this time, Pyun and Karnowski wrote some 50 drafts of the script, began scouting locations, and dove head-long into the other crucial pre-production elements.

A visit to the production office at Laird International Studios reflects just how much work had already been done on the project which, in Pyun’s words, has a budget only “slightly larger than the $3.5 million spent to film THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, the walls are covered with color storyboards by in-house illustrator Shawn Joyce (who will be preparing all the film’s matte paintings), character sketches, blueprints of sets, and even tabletop poster board miniatures of the hippie city square (modeled after San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district), and the bombshelter (which comes complete with a two-car garage). Mark Moses, a winner of several CLIO awards, serves as the film’s visual consultant, with Chester Kaczenski handling art direction.

Principal photography, by German cinematographer Thomas Mauck, who shot many of Werner Herzog’s films, began in March in Pyun’s native Hawaii, on the island of Hawaii. The remote locations-in the mountains and on the site of the Mauna Loa volcano, where an unexpected eruption occurred on the first day of shooting-generated some visually sensational dallies, according to publicist Scott Fields.

Interview with Albert Pyun

How did you come about writing Radioactive Dreams? Albert Pyun: I wanted to do something after “The Sword and the Sorcerer” that was distinctive and not like anything else. I think I felt that if I only got to make 2 movies in my life, the second had to be as imaginative as I could create. So that was the start of it and I had a lot of meetings with studios and what they liked about my first film was how it was imaginative, so I went that direction.

Did the 1980’s missile crisis have anything to do with what inspired you? Albert Pyun: Well, no, but growing up in the Col War years certainly did. I always was a fan  of Dr. Strangelove and i think that and “O Lucky Man” got me going on the idea of the last nuke left.

How long did it take for the guys to get the “Post Nuke Shuffle” down? Albert Pyun: Did they ever?? To be fair, we had to shoot it really fast as the sun was coming up and we were losing extras. So we had to shoot it fast and that was unfair to John and Michael because they did work hard on that dance. We shot most of the big music scenes and extras scenes in one night so that really made it a very rushed shoot night. I don’t know if John was as comfortable with the dance as Michael. I think it went against this sort of “cool” vibe John had. He was very dedicated to what we were doing but some of it i could tell unsettled him.

The dance looked pretty amazing. I’m surprised it isn’t a staple to dance to at weddings and birthdays. Any memories of when you filmed the big final scene? Albert Pyun: Just how fast we had to do it. I was disappointed we could do it with more takes and shots. It was pretty basic and FAST. And they had a costume change in the middle of it. I had actually shot several book end scenes which were set 40 years later and had a young mutant reporter interviewing Rusty about Philip and Marlowe. It talked about what eventually happened to them and how Marlowe was murdered by a gang trying to get the launch keys and how Phillip left rusty to destroy the keys once and for all but never returned. I think there was a small shot at the end showing Philip and Rusty’s son and a quick peek of Philip watching from afar to keep them safe.

The soundtrack to this film still remains very popular. Did you personalty pick any of the artist that made it into the movie? Albert Pyun: Yeah, I selected the songs used. My friend and co-producer John Stuckmeyer was into that LA music scene and got a lot of bands to submit cassette tapes of demos. He weeded out the most appropriate ones and he and I selected the final choices to be used. I think we had a couple written for the movie specifically when we couldn’t find exactly what we wanted.

How did you end up meeting John Stockwell and Michael Dudikoff? Albert Pyun: They came in  during the casting process. We saw a lot of great actors of that time, Judge Reinhold, Clancy Brown, Tim Van Patten, Harry Anderson, many really good actors. We even had a breakfast meeting with Tom Hanks, a tape submission from Ellen DeGeneres. All were young and at the start of their careers as was I.

As a special effects makeup artist, I found the mutants completely terrifying! Any memories of the makeup process on the actors? Albert Pyun: That was by Greg Cannom who would go on to win oscars for Dracula and more. He figured out the design and look. I was disappointed that I had to lose the surfing sequence in the film. We wanted to dye the ocean flourescent orange and have surfing mutants surf and rot I think but the Coastal Commission said no.

Do you think a film like that could be made today? Albert Pyun: No, Radioactive Dreams wouldn’t get made today. It’s way too eccentric and weird. Even in 1984 it was tough to get made. I raised the budget myself from a single investor. He was a real estate developer in San Bernadino California. I think he did it because he finally gave in to my dogged persistence for over a year. He said “no” many times, but I kept hearing “yes”. I’m an optimist I guess. I believed in the film and knew it would be a unique picture to follow up The Sword and the Sorcerer. Anyway halfway through production the funding disappeared.

A couple of Edge City’s best and brightest with costume designer Joseph Porro

SPECIAL EFFECTS Special prosthetic make-ups were created by Greg Cannom. His bizarre designs range from the mysterious repulse men to a wrinkled surf bunny (a girl whose excessive bathing in the post nuclear sun has given her the appearance of a 90 year-old woman) and his favorite, the mutant surfers: those who refused to give up their treasured pastime, even though the ocean has become radioactive.

The surfers’ skin, hanging loosely from their bones, is riddled with chemotherapy patches and permanently-affixed barnacles. their long. scorched, platinum blonde hair is missing entire sections. Josephine Turner, who did the intricate hair ventilating for THE HOWLING and THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN, will create the wigs. Straight and extra make-ups will be provided by Ve Neil and Rick Schwartı.

Mutant Surfer

Special fire and mechanical effects will be handled by Joe Lombardi’s Special Effects Unlimited. The film’s extensive stunt work, under the direction of Alan Gibbs offers several cliff-hanging sequences: a chase on winding mountain roads involving female bikers, a high-speed helicopter pursuit, various gun battles and a warehouse explosion. Additionally, there will be a surfing sequence in a ‘radioactive’ ocean-a portion of the real ocean near the shoreline will be chemically dyed expressly for filming.

Cast and crew spent most of their final week of production in Los Angeles, working with a 14-foot high mechanical rat created by Charles and Steven Chiodo, with 22 separate functions and 12 operators-giving it head, arm, and body movement capabilities-said to be the most advanced pneumatically controlled robot ever constructed for a motion picture. Star Lisa Blount does a scene while standing in the rat’s mouth. Her stunt double Andre Gibbs, wife of the film’s stunt coordinator Alan Gibbs, takes over for Blount’s death scene in which she is eaten alive by the rat.

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Radioactive Dreams (1985) Soundtrack Most of the songs featured in the film are pop rock in the new wave vein. The exceptions are Zim Bim Zowie, a swing number, and also a tune in the American Songbook style, Daddy’s Gonna Boogie Tonight, played on a phonograph during the scene when Philip and Marlowe prepare to leave the fallout shelter. The latter and another track called All Talk were left out of the Australian and German soundtrack releases.[7]

Nightmare – Jill Jaxx – 5:10 Radioactive Dreams – Sue Saad – 5:18 She’ll Burn You – Maureen Steele – 4:13 Young Thing – Cherri Delight – 4:09 Tickin’ Of The Clock – The Monte Carlos – 2:07 Psychedelic Man – Shari Saba – 2:41 Eat You Alive – Lisa Lee – 2:40 Guilty Pleasures – Sue Saad – 3:44 (Performed by Saad on-screen) Turn Away – Mary Ellen Quinn – 2:13 She’s A Fire – Sue Saad – 2:07 When Lightning Strikes – Sue Saad – 6:51 Zim Bim Zowie – Darryl Phinessee – 2:20 Daddy’s Gonna Boogie Tonight B.J. Ward All Talk Lynn Carey

CAST/CREW Directed Albert Pyun Produced Moctesuma Esparza Written Albert Pyun

John Stockwell – Phillip Chandler Michael Dudikoff – Marlowe Hammer Michele Little – Rusty Mars Lisa Blount – Miles Archer Don Murray – Dash Hammer George Kennedy – Spade Chandler Norbert Weisser – Sternwood Christian Andrews – Brick Bardo Paul Keller Galan – Chester (as P.K. Galán) Demian Slade – Harold Hilary Shepard – Biker Leader (as Hilary Shapiro) Sue Saad – Punk District Singer Kimberly McKillip – Sadie – Hippie Chick Gulcin Gilbert – Greaser Chick (as Gulshin Gilbert) Mark Brown – Greaser Russell Price – Greaser

Makeup Department Greg Cannom    …  special makeup Ve Neill  …  makeup designer Brian Wade     …  additional makeup effects designer / additional makeup effects supervisor / special makeup effects artist Kevin Yagher   …  prosthetic makeup assistant

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Cinefantastique v15n01 La Cosa Cine Fantastico Issue #113, July, 2005 staystillreviews

Radioactive Dreams (1985) Retrospective SUMMARY A nuclear war breaks out in 1986, expending the world's entire nuclear arsenal, except for one missile.

[iquotation]

Top 100 Inspirational Quotes

Inspirational quotes and motivational quotes have the power to get us through a bad week, and can even give us the courage to pursue our life’s dreams. Here are 100 inspirational quotes: 1. Life isn’t about getting and having, it’s about giving and being. –Kevin Kruse 2. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. –Napoleon Hill 3. Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. –Albert Einstein 4. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. –Robert Frost 5. I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. –Florence Nightingale 6. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. –Wayne Gretzky 7. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. –Michael Jordan 8. The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. –Amelia Earhart 9. Every strike brings me closer to the next home run. –Babe Ruth 10. Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. –W. Clement Stone 11. We must balance conspicuous consumption with conscious capitalism. –Kevin Kruse 12. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. –John Lennon 13. We become what we think about. –Earl Nightingale 14.Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover. –Mark Twain 15.Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. –Charles Swindoll 16. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. –Alice Walker 17. The mind is everything. What you think you become. –Buddha 18. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. –Chinese Proverb 19. An unexamined life is not worth living. –Socrates 20. Eighty percent of success is showing up. –Woody Allen 21. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. –Steve Jobs 22. Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. –Vince Lombardi 23. I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. –Stephen Covey 24. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. –Pablo Picasso 25. You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. –Christopher Columbus 26. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. –Maya Angelou 27. Either you run the day, or the day runs you. –Jim Rohn 28. Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. –Henry Ford 29. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. –Mark Twain 30. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 31. The best revenge is massive success. –Frank Sinatra 32. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. –Zig Ziglar 33. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. –Anais Nin 34. If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. –Vincent Van Gogh 35. There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. –Aristotle 36. Ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. –Jesus 37. The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. –Ralph Waldo Emerson 38. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. –Henry David Thoreau 39. When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me. –Erma Bombeck 40. Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him. –Booker T. Washington 41. Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart. – Ancient Indian Proverb 42. Believe you can and you’re halfway there. –Theodore Roosevelt 43. Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. –George Addair 44. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato 45. Teach thy tongue to say, “I do not know,” and thous shalt progress. –Maimonides 46. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. –Arthur Ashe 47. When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. –John Lennon 48. Fall seven times and stand up eight. –Japanese Proverb 49. When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. –Helen Keller 50. Everything has beauty, but not everyone can see. –Confucius 51. How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank 52. When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. –Lao Tzu 53. Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. –Maya Angelou 54. Happiness is not something readymade. It comes from your own actions. –Dalai Lama 55. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on. –Sheryl Sandberg 56. First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end. –Aristotle 57. If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. –Latin Proverb 58. You can’t fall if you don’t climb. But there’s no joy in living your whole life on the ground. –Unknown 59. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. –Marie Curie 60. Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown 61. Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. –Joshua J. Marine 62. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. –Booker T. Washington 63. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. –Leonardo da Vinci 64. Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless. –Jamie Paolinetti 65. You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing, no one to blame. –Erica Jong 66. What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. –Bob Dylan 67. I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong. –Benjamin Franklin 68. In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. –Bill Cosby 69. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein 70. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb 71. There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. –Roger Staubach 72. It is never too late to be what you might have been. –George Eliot 73. You become what you believe. –Oprah Winfrey 74. I would rather die of passion than of boredom. –Vincent van Gogh 75. A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. –Unknown 76. It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. –Ann Landers 77. If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money. –Abigail Van Buren 78. Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs. –Farrah Gray 79. The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself–the invisible battles inside all of us–that’s where it’s at. –Jesse Owens 80. Education costs money. But then so does ignorance. –Sir Claus Moser 81. I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear. –Rosa Parks 82. It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. –Confucius 83. If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough. –Oprah Winfrey 84. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. –Dalai Lama 85. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. –Maya Angelou 86. Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan 87. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. –Martin Luther King Jr. 88. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. –Teddy Roosevelt 89. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. –Tony Robbins 90. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. –Gloria Steinem 91. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison 92. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try. –Beverly Sills 93. Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. –Eleanor Roosevelt 94. Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. –Grandma Moses 95. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. –Ayn Rand 96. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. –Henry Ford 97. It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. –Abraham Lincoln 98. Change your thoughts and you change your world. –Norman Vincent Peale 99. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. –Benjamin Franklin 100. Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” –Audrey Hepburn 101. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. –Steve Jobs 102. If you can dream it, you can achieve it. –Zig Ziglar

[godssea7-blog]

What God commanded to remember, rebellious men will resort to every argument of human reason to justify forgetting! Consequently, many have used the argument, without any scriptural authority of course, that the Ten Commandments were abolished at the cross. Of course they never stop to realize that, if there is no law, there is no transgression—as Paul plainly states in Romans 4:15—and no one has sinned since the cross—and therefore we should not need a Savior!

Yet, even if this perverted and deceptive argument were true—if God had abolished all 10 of His commandments at the cross, and then brought back nine of them in the New Testament, in order to get rid of the Sabbath—as many do teach—still they are without excuse!

For God made of the Sabbath a special and separate covenant, binding forever!

Covenant Complete

You will remember that to the Ten Commandment law, God added no more (Deuteronomy 5:22). Any other law, or covenant, coming later, is no part of it, but a separate law or covenant. Paul makes this plain: “Though it be but a man’s covenant, yet if it be confirmed, no man disannulleth, or addeth thereto” (Galatians 3:15).

The Ten Commandment law is complete—God added no more. Also, the Old Covenant was confirmed, as described in Exodus 24:4-8. It cannot be added to.

Later, after both the Ten Commandments and the Old Covenant had been made complete,ratified, put in force and effect, God made another totally separate and eternally binding covenant with His people.

WHY the Sabbath?

God never does anything in vain—that is, to no good and useful purpose. When God does anything, or makes anything, there is a reason—an important purpose.

God created man and put him here on Earth. But mankind has lost knowledge of His purpose. God had an important reason. You were put here for a very important purpose.

God, through “the Word” (John 1:1-3) who became Jesus Christ, made the Sabbath. He made it for man.

But why?

What purpose does it serve? Mankind has lost knowledge of that important purpose, too! Jesus Christ (Mark 2:27-28) said it was made for man, rather than man for the Sabbath. But at that time He merely told for whom He had made it—not why—not for what purpose,except to serve and benefit man.

That is why this special, separate Sabbath covenant is important. For it reveals the reason—the basic purpose. Therefore it becomes important to study it carefully.

It is found in Exodus 31:12-17:

The Special Sabbath COVENANT

“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, Verily my sabbaths ye shall keep ….” Notice, once again, which day is “the Lord’s day.” The Eternal calls the Sabbaths “my sabbaths.” The Sabbaths are His—they do not belong to us—they are not our days, but the Lord’s. They are not “the Jewish Sabbaths” or “the Gentile Sabbaths.” The Sabbath is a space of time. That time, whenever it arrives, is not ours, but God’s. If we appropriate it for ourselves—for our own use, whether work, pleasure, or what, we are stealing that time from God!

Notice again! He said: “[M]y sabbaths ye shall keep.” In Exodus 20:8 we saw that He commanded to “keep it holy”—God made it holy time, and commanded us to keep it holy—not to profane what is holy to God.

Now study this special covenant a little further: “… for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you” (Exodus 31:13).

What tremendous meaning is packed in that portion of this sentence! Yet most people read right past it, failing to get the vital truth it contains!

Notice! Here is the purpose of the Sabbath. “… for it is a sign ….” What is a sign?

You walk down a main street in the business section of a city. Everywhere you see signsidentifying stores, offices, factories. If you want to know what a sign is, just turn to the word in the “yellow pages”—the classified business listings of your telephone directory. You will find such names as “Jones Neon Sign Company,” or “Smith Brothers Signs.” If you call one of them on the telephone and ask, “What do you make, or sell?” he will tell you that they make signs for business firms, institutions, or professional individuals to hang out in front of their place of business. The sign identifies whose establishment, institution or office is inside.

A sign is a badge, symbol, or token of identity. You see the sign, “A.B. Brown, Furniture and Furnishings.” The sign identifies the owner. It tells you what kind of business he owns.

Webster’s dictionary defines a sign thus: “A publicly displayed notice on a building, office, etc., to advertise the business there transacted, or the name of the person or firm conducting it. Something indicating the existence of a thing; a token.” And, of course, there are the special technical meanings in mathematics, medicine, astronomy.

The word which Moses wrote, in the Hebrew language, which is translated “sign” is ‘owth,and the Hebrew-English dictionary defines it as “a signal, as a flag, beacon, monument, evidence, etc.—mark, miracle, sign, token.” A flag identifies a nation. A beacon is a signal to announce the existence of something warned about. A token is a visible sign; something that serves as an identifying signal to make something known, as a white flag is a token of surrender.

God commanded His people to keep His Sabbath as a sign. It is a sign between God’s people and God—“… a sign between me and you,” the commandment says. It is a badge or token of identity. It advertises, or announces, or proclaims certain identifying knowledge. But what knowledge? God answers: “… that ye may KNOW that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you.“

WHO Is God?

Note those words carefully!! It is the sign that identifies to them who is their God! It is the sign by which we may KNOW that He is the Lord!! It identifies God!

But doesn’t everybody know who God is?

Absolutely NO! This whole world is deceived—so says your Bible (Revelation 12:9).

This world has a god—a false god—Satan the devil! He pretends to be “an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). He has his religious organizations. Not all are Buddhists, Shintoists, Taoists, Confucianists.

Many have appropriated the very name “Christian,” whose ministers, says your Bible, actually are Satan’s ministers: “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness …” (2 Corinthians 11:14-15).

But do they actually call themselves the ministers of Christ? Read the verse just before the two just quoted—verse 13: “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.” Yes, Satan is the great counterfeiter.

He palms himself off as God. He is called, in your Bible, the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). He palms off his ministers as the ministers of Christ—accusing the true ministers of Christ of being “false apostles” to divert suspicion from themselves!

Does this world’s “Christianity” really know the true God? It is deceived into believing it does, and a deceived world may be sincere in that false belief.

But the true God is the one whom we obey.

This world is not taught to obey God! Its false “Christianity” teaches that God’s law is “done away.” It actually puts human conscience, actuated by Satan’s false teaching, in place of God’s law! It does not teach, as did Christ, that we must actually live by every word of God—of the Bible!

It obeys Satan by sinning!

The PURPOSE of the Sabbath

God gave man His Sabbath, for the purpose of keeping mankind in the true knowledge and true worship of the true God.

But how does the Sabbath identify God—how does it point to the true God, rather than the false? Does not Sunday do just as well?

Positively no!!

Notice verse 17 of this special Sabbath covenant: “It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17).

It was on the seventh day of that creation week that He rested from the work of creation. Not Sunday, the first day of the week. Only the seventh day of the week points back to creation.

How does that identify who God is?

If you believe anyone else or anything else is God, I will prove that my God is the true God, because whatever else you may think is God was made or created by the true God. He who created and made everything else is greater than whatever He made—superior to anything else that could be called God.

Creation is the PROOF of God—of His existence. It—the act of creating—identifies Him!

So God took the most enduring, lasting imperishable thing man can know—a recurring space of time—the only day that is a memorial of the act of creating. He took the only day which points, constantly, every seventh day of the week, to the existence of the almighty, all-powerful, all-ruling God—the Creator!

And God set that particular day apart from others as His day—God made that particular day sacred and holy to Him—designating it as the very day on which He commands His people to assemble for worship—the day man is commanded to rest from his own work and physical pleasure—and to be refreshed by assembling with other obedient worshippers in spiritual fellowship!

No other day is a memorial and reminder of creation. True, Satan has deceived a deluded world into supposing Christ’s resurrection occurred on Sunday morning at sunrise—the very time which has always been the time of pagan sun-worship. But this is not true! It is a shocking eye-opener—and it is the truth you can verify and prove at your public library.

The resurrection of Christ actually occurred on the Sabbath, not on Sunday! And, further, nowhere in the Bible does God tell us to celebrate the day of Christ’s resurrection! That is a pagan custom of men, on apostate man’s authority alone—contrary to the commands of God!

So here we find a great purpose in the Sabbath. It identifies God! The very day which Godset aside for assembly and worship points as a memorial to whom we are to worship—the Creator-Ruler of all that is!

But that is not all!

The Sabbath also was given as a sign which identifies who are the people of God and who are not!

Notice! Not only does this special covenant say, “… that ye may know that I am the Lord …” but read the remainder of that sentence: “… that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you” (Exodus 31:13).

Notice the tremendous meaning of that!

What does the word sanctify mean? It means “to set apart for holy use or purpose.” On the seventh day of the very creation week, the Eternal sanctified—that is, He set apart for holy use—the Sabbath day. But now we see that God says it is a sign that He, the Eternal, also sanctifies—sets apart from other people as HIS, for His holy purpose—those who are His people.

In Old Testament times His people were the people of the congregation of Israel. In New Testament times, His people are those of God’s own Church—the truly converted, Spirit-begotten Christians!

But how does the Sabbath set them apart—separate them—from those who are not God’s own true people? Well, if you have begun to keep God’s Sabbath holy, as He commands, you have found the answer already, by actual experience. If you haven’t, just start keeping God’s Sabbath holy as He commands you—and you’ll soon learn that you are automatically set apart from all other people! Yes, sir!

The Sabbath is God’s sign, which identifies not only God as Creator-Ruler but it also identifies those who are truly His.

But how?

Definition of God

Let me give you still another definition of God. Although the only wise and true God is the great Creator-Ruler of the universe, there are many false, or counterfeit, gods. Satan palms himself off to the deceived as God—and indeed the Bible plainly calls him the god of this world. Idols were worshipped as gods—and still are, today, even in so-called “Christian” churches. Whoever, or whatever, you serve and obey is your god!

The very word Lord means ruler, master, boss—the one you obey! Jesus exclaimed: “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46). If they did not obey Him, then He was not their Lord! So why did they call Him Lord, when He was nottheir Lord?

Then again, Jesus said: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). Only they who obey God can be His children, and enter His Kingdom! God is the one you obey!

Notice again: “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey …?” (Romans 6:16).

Regarding idols as false and counterfeit gods, the Second Commandment says: “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them”—that is, obey them—“for I the Eternal thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity [disobedience] of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:5-6).

How significant! The Sabbath command is the only one of the 10 which is a signidentifying who are the real and true Christians today! It is the real TEST command! The people of the world are willing to acknowledge the other nine commandments—but the Sabbath command is the one they positively rebel against! It is the one that is the crucial test of obedience!

It identifies those who have surrendered their wills to God—who obey God, regardless of persecution or cost!

Oh, it sets you apart, all right!

What a sign! It identifies the true God on the very day He set apart for assembly and worship. It identifies the real people of God!

God’s sign is one you accept voluntarily—of your own volition, or not at all. But the “beast” (symbol of the coming resurrected, so-called “Holy” Roman Empire in Europe) has a mark, which is soon going to be branded on, by physical force! And it has something to do with buying or selling—trading—business—earning a living—having a job! (Revelation 13:16-17). Yes, this is the test command—the one on which your very salvation and eternity depends!

But Is It a COVENANT?

I have said that God made the Sabbath a separate, eternal and perpetual COVENANT,entirely separate and apart from what we term “the Old Covenant” made at Mt. Sinai.

How, then, is it a covenant?

Let’s define the word covenant. Webster defines a covenant as: “An agreement between persons or parties. A solemn compact.” A covenant is a contract, or agreement, by which one party promises certain rewards or payments, in return for certain stipulated performance by the other party.

The Old Covenant between God and the children of Israel made at Mt. Sinai imposed upon the people certain terms and conditions to be performed: the obedience to the Ten Commandments. It promised the reward of making Israel a nation “above all people.” The promises were purely national, and material, for this world. The New Covenant is founded on better promises (Hebrews 8:6), which consist of “eternal inheritance” (Hebrews 9:15).

Once a covenant is signed, sealed, or ratified—confirmed—it cannot be added to(Galatians 3:15). Anything appearing beneath the signature is not legally any part of the covenant. You read of the actual making of the Old Covenant, and sealing it with blood, in Exodus 24:6-8. And notice (verse 8), it concludes with the words, “the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you ….” It was then already made—completed.

We do not come to the making of this special eternal Sabbath covenant until seven chapters later. It is, therefore, no part of the Old Covenant!

But, again, is it a covenant?

The wording in your Bible says it is! Notice Exodus 31:16: “Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the sabbath, to observe the sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual COVENANT.”

Perpetual means continuous, and unbroken. But was it to last forever? Read the following verse: “It is a sign between me and the children of Israel FOR EVER ….”

Now what is the condition to be performed? The keeping holy of the Sabbath! “[I]t is holyunto you,” says God (verse 14). And what is the reward promised upon performance of the condition? It is not only a sign, but also a compact, or covenant, “between me and you,” says God, “that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you.”

There it is! God promises to sanctify them—He will set them apart as holy—as Hisholy people! Can you ask for a bigger promise?

Yes, it is a covenant! It is a separate, totally different covenant. Even if one tries to argue that the Old Covenant is “abolished” and that therefore the Ten Commandments are abolished, he cannot argue that this covenant was to last only until the cross. This covenant is binding “throughout your generations” (verse 13); “a perpetual covenant” (verse 16), and “for ever” (verse 17).

Sign for Israel ONLY?

“Yes,” says the rebellious one, who would argue his way out of obedience, “but it is between God and the children of Israel. It is throughout Israel’s generations; it is between God and the Israelites forever.”

Oh—then you admit it is binding forever on Israelites—and throughout theirgenerations? There are two answers to that argument that will condemn you, if you so argue, into the lake of fire!

1) No one can deny that this absolutely binds the people of Israel to keep the Sabbath forever, and throughout their generations perpetually. Their generations are still going on. Therefore it is binding on them today.

Also, you have to admit that salvation and Christianity are open to Jews and allIsraelites. The gospel is the power of God “unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

So, then, the Jew can be a converted Christian! Indeed, the Church at the beginning was nearly altogether Jewish! So the Jew, even though a Christian, in God’s Church, is boundto keep God’s Sabbath as a perpetual covenant, throughout his generations, forever!

Now, does God have two kinds of Christians? Is it sin for a Jewish Christian to break the Sabbath, and sin for all others to keep it? Must Jewish Christians assemble on the Sabbath, and those of other nationalities on Sunday? Didn’t Jesus say a house divided would fall?

Are there two kinds of Christians? Read Galatians 3:28‑29: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one inChrist Jesus. And if ye [ye Gentiles] be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

So, since the Sabbath is binding today on the Jewish part of God’s Church, and there is no difference—we are all one in Christ—it is also binding on Gentiles!

We Are Israel

2) But there is another answer to this argument: The peoples of the United States, the British Commonwealth nations, and the nations of Northwestern Europe are, in fact, the peoples of the ten tribes of the house of Israel. The Jewish people are the house of Judah.

Now, in the light of this Sabbath truth, more than ever, it is important that you read, study, and check the proof of this identity in our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy. It is a staggering revelation! And it is true! Yes, the Sabbath is binding on us today!

But if the Sabbath is God’s sign to identify His people Israel, then WHY don’t our nations keep it today?

The answer to that question is the answer to another: WHY are the 10 tribes of the house ofIsrael called “the lost ten tribes”? And why do our nations think they are Gentiles? WHY don’t they know their true identity?

Ah, NOW we have a staggering, startling, surprising truth to reveal!

WHY Ten Tribes Became LOST!

Here’s a dumbfounding truth, far stranger than fiction!

Here are facts, hidden for centuries, more intriguing than a mystery novel! WHY is the Sabbath called, disrespectfully, sneeringly, “the Jewish Sabbath”? Why does the world think all Israelites are Jews, and that the Jews are all of the Israelites?

Here’s an astonishing surprise to those who have believed that! The Jewish people are only a small minority of the Israelites, believe it or not! The very first place in all the Bible where you’ll find the name “Jew” or “Jews” is in 2 Kings 16:5-6—and believe it or not, there you’ll find the kingdom of Israel, allied with Syria, in a war against the Jews.

Yes, there it is! Israel at war against the Jews!

Strange as it may seem, the children of Israel had become divided. They had become two different nations! One was the kingdom of Israel. Its capital was not Jerusalem, but Samaria. The other was the kingdom of Judah. Judah’s capital was at Jerusalem. Now hear the strange story!

After the death of King Solomon, the people of the nation Israel rebelled against the high tax rate. The wise old Solomon lived in a state of luxury and splendor perhaps never equaled before or since. To pay for his great enterprises he simply kept raising the taxes.

The people demanded tax reform of King Rehoboam, son of Solomon. But he was young. He had young ideas. He surrounded himself with a “brain trust,” or “whiz-kids.” They, too, had young ideas. They counseled, “Tell the people you’ll show them who’s their master—tax them even higher than your father did.” Rehoboam scorned the counsel of older, wiser heads. To him they were the reactionaries of his day.

The people staged a gigantic mass rebellion. They rejected Rehoboam, and set up Jeroboam, who had been promoted to high position by King Solomon, as their king.

But the tribe of Judah dissented. Rehoboam was of their tribe, and they wanted to keep him as their king. So the tribe of Judah seceded from the nation Israel. They formed a separate kingdom, called the kingdom of Judah. The tribe of Benjamin went with them. They became known as the Jews—nickname for Judah.

Israel Lost Sign

Nowhere in all the Bible are any of the 10-tribed nation Israel called Jews. That name applies only to the kingdom of Judah. Jews are Israelites, truly—but only part of the Israelites are Jews!

Almost immediately on being made a king, Jeroboam became afraid that, when his people journeyed to Jerusalem to attend the annual festivals, they would see and desire Rehoboam again for their king. He took swift action to protect his own position.

The tribe of Levi composed the priesthood. They were the leaders—the best-educated. The Levites had enjoyed incomes two or three times larger than the other tribes—living off the tithes. With one swift stroke, Jeroboam demoted the Levites, set the lowest and most ignorant of the people to be the priests. He could control them! Thus he would control the religion, as Gentile kings had always done. Thereupon many, if not most, of the Levites went back into the kingdom of Judah—became known as Jews.

So immediately Jeroboam set up two great idols for his people to worship. He ordered the fall festivals (including the annual sabbaths) to be observed in the eighth month, at a place in the north of his choosing—instead of in the seventh month, and at Jerusalem as Godordered (1 Kings 12:28-32). Through the rule of 19 kings and nine successive dynasties, the 10-tribed house of Israel continued in the basic twin sins of Jeroboam—idolatry and Sabbath-breaking. Several of the kings added other evil and sinful practices.

Israel Made Slaves

But in 721-718 b.c., God caused the house of Israel to be invaded and conquered by the kingdom of Assyria. These Israelites were removed from their farms and their cities, and taken to Assyria on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea as slaves. But the house of Judah—the Jews—a separate and different nation, was not invaded until 604 b.c.

Two or three generations after the captivity of Israel, however, the Chaldeans rose to world power, forming the first world-ruling empire. Under Nebuchadnezzar the Chaldeans (Babylon) invaded Judah (604-585 b.c.).

The Assyrians later left their land, north of Babylon, and migrated northwest—through the lands that are now Georgia, the Ukraine, Poland, and into the land that is called Germanytoday. Today the descendants of those Assyrians are known to us as the German people.

The people of 10-tribed Israel also migrated northwest. Though the Assyrians had taken Israel into captivity, the Israelites did not remain as slaves of the Assyrians in Europe. They continued on a little further—into Western Europe, the Scandinavian peninsula, and the British Isles!

Now why did they come to be known as the “lost 10 tribes”?

They had lost their national identifying SIGN!

All of Israel’s kings followed the practice of Sabbath-breaking, as well as idolatry! As long as they remained in the land of Israel, and called themselves “the kingdom of Israel,” their identity was known. But in Assyria they were no longer a nation with their own government and their own king. They were mere slaves. They took up with the language of the Assyrians as succeeding generations grew up. They lost the Hebrew language. They lost all national identity.

After several generations, the tribe of Joseph divided into the two tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh which today are the British and American people.

The tribe of Reuben settled in the country that is France today. They had lost their national identity. But the French have the very characteristics of their ancestor Reuben.

The ten tribes, known as the house of Israel, lost their identifying tag—God’s Sabbath. That is why they lost their national identity!

WHY Jewish People Are Recognized

But Judah kept the Sabbath! They did not continue long to keep it holy, or to keep it God’s way—but they did maintain it, to this day, as the day of rest they acknowledge and observe.

Result? All the world looks on them as the chosen people of God! The world thinks they are Israel—not merely Judah!

The identity of the Jewish people has NOT been lost! And, since their identity as racial descendants from ancient Israel is known—and that of the far more numerous “lost 10 tribes” is not known—the world supposes that the Jews are Israel, instead of Judah.

And so, here again, the whole world is deceived, even as to the true identity of who the chosen birthright people of God really are!

The reader, if he has not already carefully read it, should write immediately for our free booklet, The United States and Britain in Prophecy. It explains the dumbfounding, astonishing truth that the people of the United States, the British, the peoples of Northwestern Europe, are, in actual fact, those very “lost” 10 tribes of the nation Israel—and not by birth Gentiles at all!

Yes, the Sabbath, God’s day—the true Lord’s day—is, after all, the day for our peopledoubly—first, because it is for all people of God, even Gentile-born people who are now Christ’s; secondly, because racially, even by flesh birth, it is God’s daywhich He gave our own forefathers, and commanded to keep holy forever!

[thisdaynews]

‘He’s Like, Okay, Well, Screw It’

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/hes-like-okay-well-screw-it/

‘He’s Like, Okay, Well, Screw It’

BOSTON—Beto O’Rourke last week stopped here for beers. He wasn’t hunting big-dollar donors or votes in a state with a meaningful primary. He instead wanted to stand on a box in the middle of a pub and just let it rip. So that’s what he did. The crowd was young, diverse and notably not reaching to write checks, but they were plenty ready to hear his profane riff on his proposed gun buybacks. He downed a Ricochet IPA while answering their questions and then took his place in the picture line and ordered another. Two women joined him in raising their pints. “Salud,” he said.

For a one-time Democratic darling who hasn’t sniffed double digits in the polls for months, this brewery called Backlash didn’t seem like a materially strategic, smart spot to be in the run-up to a debate night that might for him be do-or-die. But O’Rourke’s clearly not doing the obvious anymore.

Story Continued Below

In the wake of August 3, when a bigot with an AK-47 murdered 22 people in a Walmart in O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso, the former congressman has changed the way he’s waging his presidential campaign. He’s running with arguably reckless abandon, breaking norms to try to rekindle some lost spark. Beyond his much-discussed uptick in swearing, he has traveled to places that make limited political sense, taken a provocative proposal on assault-style rifles that could permanently jeopardize his electoral viability in his native state, and trashed President Trump with increasingly explicit rhetoric. What’s interesting about O’Rourke at this moment is not just that he’s sayingfucka whole bunch—he’salwaysdropped curse words on the stump—but that he’s entered more broadly a new phase of his 2020 bid, which supporters find inspiring and critics consider desperate to the point of pathetic. Up close, though, it feels actually pretty compelling.

Let’s go ahead and call it Beto’s “fuck-it phase.”

“That’s where I think he’s at now,” Moses Mercado, a Democratic lobbyist from Texas, told me. “He’s like, okay, well,screw it.”

“Eff it,” Austin-based Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser said.

“He has no fucks to give,” added Jay Surdukowski, an attorney and activist who is one of O’Rourke’s most devoted backers in New Hampshire.

“This feels right to me,” O’Rourke said when I asked him about how he’s currently campaigning when he met with reporters by the stainless-steel beer tanks at Backlash. He said this was “the way politics should be.”

The question lurking behind this caution-free style is whether O’Rourke is doing this because he cares less about his stagnant candidacy or because he in fact cares so much more.

Six months ago, O’Rourke was drawn into this race, it seemed, because of some combination of a sense of entitlement (“… born to be in it …”) along with an irresistible inertia (he did, after all, bring in a record-breaking $80 million in his bid to unseat the unlovable Ted Cruz). After the lengthy will-he-or-won’t-he, the middle-of-America meandering and his overwrought postings on Medium, his entrance prompted a frenzy of live-coverage attention on cable news. Reality bit, alas, and right out of the gate was as good as it got. His fundraising dipped precipitously in the wake of his considerable initial intake. The mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana swiped his new-guy, next-gen fizz. He turned in oddly leaden showings in the first couple debates and languished in a polling position unbudgingly far behind the clear top three and trailing even out-of-nowhere entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

Then, though, came the shooting.

O’Rourke hurried home. He stayed in El Paso for almost two weeks. He listened and gave hugs and attended vigils and silently marched. He called Trump a white supremacist. He called him “the greatest threat to this country.” He couldn’t fathom, he would say, leaving to go to the comparative inconsequence of the “corn dogs and Ferris wheels” of the Iowa State Fair. Anxious, angry and rattled, he was asked by a reporter if there was anything Trump could do to “make this any better.” He answered with a kind of righteous despair that sounded new. But it boiled down to this: “What the fuck?”

By the time he was ready to return to the trail, he did so by saying he could “see more clearly,” and that there was “a way to do this better,” and that one of those ways was to not simply retrace well-trodden, politically prudent early-state paths.

He went to Mississippi to try to shine a spotlight on the recent ICE raids. He went to a gun show in Arkansas. He went to Oklahoma to go to the 1995 bombing memorial and the site of a 1921 race riot and talked about “white nationalism” and “domestic terrorism.” Even at pitstops in more expected locales, O’Rourke acted in ways that were suddenly, strikingly, even dangerously un-standard. At historically black Benedict College in South Carolina, for instance, his campaign booted a reporter from conservative Breitbart News.

It was on the whole in some ways reminiscent of his run against Cruz, in which he hit every one of the 254 counties in Texas, even the reddest of the red, all part of an effort that was not just DIY but (to a fatal fault, some said) DITWHW (do it the way he wanted). And in a rural, Trump-loving portion of Virginia, after yet another mass shooting in west Texas, he said it was “fucked up,” and said it again live on CNN, and made his stance on these kinds of guns even more blunt.

How, he was asked by a reporter, would he reassure owners of assault rifles that the government wasn’t coming to take their guns?

“I want to be really clear,” O’Rourke answered. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Just in case that wasn’t enough, his campaign manager added in a tweet, “GET EVERY ONE OF THOSE GODDAMN GUNS OFF OUR STREETS.” Shortly thereafter, the campaign leaned in harder, hawking shirts that said, “THIS IS F*CKED UP,” not once, not twice, but six times stacked.

With this, O’Rourke “broke some glass,” as BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith wrote in his newsletter. In the minds, though, of some Texas political strategists, Republicans and Democrats alike, he did more than that. He might have killed his career, they told me.

“Those words will come back to destroy him should he run for statewide office again,” said longtime Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who’s worked on campaigns all over the country.

“To say, ‘We will take away your guns,’ you know, in this state, in this culture, that’s a no-no,” Steinhauser said.

“His presidential bid,” said Matt Mackowiak, another GOP strategist in Austin, “has been very bad for his future in politics in Texas.”

Last week, though, he was in New York, for CNN’s climate change town hall, and from there he took the budget Bolt Bus to Boston. In the raw aftermath of the shooting in El Paso, the “performance, the ritual … all the editing that goes into speaking when you’re running for office,” he said during the drive, “just really evaporated, or didn’t seem important, or I didn’t even really know that I cared at that point.” He described the question that elicited his most memorable response “the stupidest fucking question I’ve ever been asked.” He described himself as “pissed at the world.”

O’Rourke’s long been a slinger of four-letter salt when making his political pitch. But this new level has been hard to the point of impossible to ignore. And now at Backlash, which endeavors to “brew in defiance,” he harangued Trump and “the crazy shit he says.” He decried the suggestion that four black and brown women who are members of Congress should “go back” to anywhere that isn’t the United States of America. “Tell me what the fuck that means!” he said. And he lamented the prevalence of weapons that were built for war and meant “to shred your insides to shit.”

“This is fucked up!” called out Chris Wright, 39, a square-jawed, flat-topped food distributor from nearby Scituate wearing a blue “Beto Por Texas” T-shirt.

O’Rourke heard him and looked at him. “Thisisfucked up,” he confirmed.

Some see this as “glorified performance art,” “a caricature of authenticity,” but it’s working for Wright. “Beto’s not afraid to say things,” he said. “He’s not afraid to say it like it is. For those people that say, ‘Oh, Trump says it like it is,’ well, guess what, let’s go head to head.”

Will it work for not only Wright but many more persuadable voters? The swearing? The going anywhere and everywhere? The talk of making people give up their prized but deadly guns? That, of course, is TBD. No sign so far in the polls. Politicos from both parties are not optimistic.

“He’s seeking ways to bring the fire back,” Sheinkopf said. “Too late.”

“He’s almost become a target for mockery,” Steinhauser added. “I don’t know what he does after this. I don’t think he’s going to run for Congress again. I think if he were to run for Senate”—the editorial board of theHouston Chroniclerecently pleaded for him to drop out of the presidential race and come home and challenge John Cornyn—“I don’t think he would just walk into the Democratic nomination. I think he’s been that damaged.”

After his stop in Massachusetts, he continued on up to New Hampshire, where he rejoined the rest of the still massive field of 2020 Dems and did a town hall in Keene. He took off his shoes to go into a mosque to tell the people gathered that Trump is “the most dangerous president the United States has ever had.” He ate and complimented vendors on their Indonesian rice pudding at a festival in Somersworth. And at the state party convention at the downtown arena in Manchester, wearing a white shirt with no tie and a navy suit with no belt, he delivered a speech in which he said Trump had “no honor, no morals and no ethics.” Talking to reporters in a cramped, stuffy room off the floor, he discussed climate change more. “If we can’t make progress on climate change,” he said, “then people are going to give up on their government. They’re going to say, ‘You know what? This shit does not work.’” He was asked on his way out if he was going to swear Thursday night on the debate stage in Houston.

He responded with a verbal shrug of the shoulders.

“Maybe.”

“Lot of talk of late of your use of the wordfuck,” I said to O’Rourke a few hours hence when I caught up to him in the early evening at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, where he spoke to perhaps a hundred students. “I’m not interested so much in that, but I am interested in the idea that you’ve sort of entered this, like, ‘fuck it phase’ of your campaign.” I wondered if that was an accurate read.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I am trying my best to be as honest and direct as possible, and when asked a question, or thinking through a given issue, to make sure that it is as candid a response as I can possibly produce, in part because I think I realize that our rhetoric, our politics, the scripts we as politicians, the talking points we as politicians, have been using have been completely insufficient to the challenges that we face,” he explained. “The demands that we have in this country, I think, necessitate, you know, a different kind of politics, and a much more honest, transparent way of discussing these issues.”

He exited through a side door. He needed to get some rest. He was slated the following morning to make another unusual campaign stop—a trip with commercial fishermen that took him to Maine.

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