#like can you IMAGINE the modern political landscape if this was still common practice???

[ravenkings]

one of the (many) funny things about ancient rome imo is that, as an adult, you could just get yourself legally adopted by another family for whatever reason, even, as in one notable case, by someone younger than you so that you could be eligible for a specific political office

[aubenoe]

Modern!MDZS HCs

Yunmeng Jiang

The lakes are preserved and you can't use motorized boats, only traditional ones 

Absolutely amazing street food. Like > over almost any sit down

and very good sweets. Candies, cakes, fritters, sweet cakes

Canals through skyscrapers

Marine bio, zoology, engineering, botany, chemistry majors

Yoga is huge. Relaxant services/classes like massages, barre classes are v normal

The disciple bells can have small little LEDs that glow in them, can be jewel encrusted, rose gold detailing, etc

Flavored lotus seeds as a snack, chipotle, lightly salted

Their perfume is lotus obv, but you know Daisy by Marc Jacob with the flower cap? Yeah looks like that but purple/blue/white/pink lotus deal. Shimmery.

Lotus Pier has festivals at the port all the time, trade festivals, kite festivals, flower festivals

DOGS. Everyone loves them, they swim well, they're cuties. There are puppy cafes, many many good kennels, everyone volunteers at an adoption fair. 6pm after work? Its like a dog show outside when they go for a walk

Gusu Lan

Wake up. Stretch. Skincare.

Also, hair masks.

Literally only place that the university is not a party school. Like at all.

Music, philosophy, history, bio, psych, literature, art, nutrition majors. 

Good wood carvers

I imagine the food to just be plain/healthy. Not necessarily bad, just nothing special. Maybe like Mennonites.

Accepted LGBT first and forever ago bc of LWJ+WWX and others in their sect c: Believe that the love and passion between you and your special person has no bounds by gender.

Rules voted on by elders. Their’s an app that shows them + a list of whose punishment is rn and what rule they broke. Rules can change to be practical, except the wake up at 5 stuff, which will never change.

iPhones but never the brand spanking new ones. Like iPhone 6s/plus is  👌 Headphone jack, just in case. (And they still use charms!)

$$$ Headphones/earbuds. Never even seen the $15 crappy ones.

Hanfu Movement? Please, they never stopped.

CARRIES A TIDE PEN LIKE A BIBLE

There aren’t any pets in the Cloud Recesses per say, but everyone still cares for the Rabbits and the one stray cat who sleeps on the window sills 

Gusu is a designated Dark-Sky city

Lanling Jin

Nice cars and motorcycles. German-level care for them.

Also uses/makes lotsss of good skincare, has like a Myeondong shopping district for it.  

Communications, accounting, political sci, public relations, marketing, theater majors

Dental school is also popular, people have good teeth around here

Every restaurant is a five star restaurant

V15 Pro/Google Pixel 2 XL/iPhone XR 128G...Nice Big Phones.

Youtubers + Influencers

With YumengJiang on the whole dog thing and will fight you if you disrespect their Chow Chow.

They like cats too

Party school but somehow??? tied with Gusu Lan for scores

Best Interior designers

They have large, grand Koi ponds that children love to sit around and watch

Believe their partner’s zodiacs have to align

Everyone goes to the nail salon, men, women, children, animals. Good nails considered the most accessible weapon.

Qinghe Nie

WE THE NORTH! is their sports chant

Really good cold weather foods like beef stews, meat pasties

Earth sci, Kinesiology, Welding, Speech Pathology, Crimnal Justice majors

Make really nice homemade soaps

A common children’s game is to make paper mache horns and headbutt each other to see whose horn breaks first

Actually very nice Chinese Landscape paintings inside residences

Crossfit culture, tire flipping, rope workout, whole deal

Takes very good care of disabled/special needs citizens, its a flat area but if need be, lifting the wheelchair in one arm the person in the other. Free speech pathologist at all the schools. If they can’t fight, they like to still include others in whatever they play/train in.

No fast fashion here, durable, well made clothes that can be worked in 

The “Unclean Realm” is spotless. No litter absolutely anywhere. Eerie.

Also a Dark-Sky City

[aprilgrayrobin]

Judgment XX

Part 1

When I was sixteen, I came home from school one day and my mother gathered my little sister and I in the living room with an enormous sense of urgency.  Her face was full of fear and sorrow as she presented us each with a backpack, and told us that everything we would need to hopefully survive could be found inside. A change of clothes, running shoes, thermal blanket, protein bars, tablets to disinfect drinking water, basic first aid supplies, iodine tablets to prevent the body from absorbing radiation, and a bundle of cash in small bills.

She informed us that the very next day, according to the prediction of an evangelical pastor, the rapture would take place. In Christian theology, this is the second coming of Christ to Earth and the event that signals what is commonly conceptualized as “the end of the world.”  As a Christian, my mother believed that she would ascend to heaven. As “non-believers,” my sister and I would be left in the rubble… which is to say some vague, resource-scarce dystopian landscape of smoky skies and fights to the death in abandoned grocery stores aisles.

My mom was ready to go. She was ready to leave this world, and move on prematurely to the afterlife. But this was not a new thing. She had been ready, with barely one foot on the ground, for as long as I can remember.

As a young child, I recall tornado warnings that would send us running to the basement with sleeping bags, ready for the worst. The world ending wasn’t always about Christ’s return, see. More broadly, for my mom, I think it was about retreating from reality. It was any excuse to hole up and defend her nuclear family from threats semi-real to fully imagined.  She hoarded (and still, I believe, hoards) supplies as a regular practice--cleaning products, canned goods, bulk grains, batteries--and invariably most of it would expire before it was ever put to use. But it soothes her, my mother, and abates the anxieties stoked by Fox News, InfoWars and fire-and-brimstone preachers delivering end times prophecies to the day.

It is hard to share this. Despite the harm she caused me, and the fact that we do not speak, I have love for my mother. I see her paranoia and her attempts to feel safe in a world that is fundamentally not safe.  I feel sad that she can only conceptualize safety as being more prepared than her neighbors, and keeping it all to herself. I want to share this, though, because in being raised by someone perpetually readying herself for the apocalypse, I developed a readiness of my own.

I am thinking about the Dean Spade lecture on mutual aid, “Solidarity Not Charity,” that I attended this past fall. There was a moment when he was speaking about the idea of safe spaces as being not only an impossibility, but a concept that actually detracts from effective organizing. I want to quote him as saying, “If I get my safety from making you wrong, that’s authoritarian.” He described being at a meeting where people were planning for a common goal, and someone saying something hurtful and offensive. Rather than immediately kicking the person out, he said, what could come of recognizing that you had a common enemy (capitalism, the police, etc) and educating them. The “safety” that would allow him to respond to that situation in the latter way was generated by “having enough, and being held in community so that we can tolerate discomfort.” it is this definition of safety that I have been orienting towards.

Part 2

Recently someone asked me what kind of witch I am, and I told them “a political one.”  I say this because the witch hunts of early modern Europe are one of the main origin points for our current conception of what a witch is. Although the Wicca of second wave feminism claimed those executed as “witches” to be ancestors of a Pagan religious tradition, in reality many if not most of them understood themselves as Christian. According to Silvia Federici’s extensively researched thesis, the people executed as witches were killed for the threat they posed to the newly enforced order of economic and social relations— early capitalism. In medieval Europe, most people practiced some form of what we would call magic. Charms for love, money and protection were run of the mill. It was only the magic of those who existed in opposition to the patriarchal capitalist order--the unmarried, disabled, unhoused, and destitute--that was labeled diabolical. Those Christians became heretics, and heretics became witches. The practice of magic alone did not, and perhaps does not, make someone a witch.

I am a witch in part because I was baptized in the Presbyterian church. I am a witch because I am a dyke who loves God (in a polytheistic kinda way). I am a witch because I survived an upbringing that nearly killed me, and I have committed my life to fight to destroy the societal structures which give rise to the interpersonal violence that I endured. I am a witch because of the non-hierarchical way I strive to relate to life in all its forms— plant, animal, human and non-human, living and dead. I am a witch because I believe that what we can imagine, we can bring into being.

In March of 2017 I was preparing for a spring equinox ritual with a group of witches as part of a Wheel of the Year class offered by my teacher, Miel Rose. On the seasonal theme, we wanted to cast a spell for moving back into embodiment after a time of being numb... For embracing the movement of spring after the dormancy of winter.  In the week between our planning meeting and the day of our ritual, I found out the man my sister was dating, Rafael, an undocumented man from Guatemala, was detained by ICE in Pennsylvania.  I remember feeling utterly powerless to free him from the jaws of the evil machine that is our immigration system. I went into ritual thinking about our intention for greater embodiment and movement. It wasn’t complete, I realized, as a spell to support our own transformation. We needed to cast a spell for freedom of movement for all people, all beings.  And so we did.

On the bike path in Northampton, under the South Street overpass, we chalked in huge letters

A WORLD WITHOUT CAGES IS POSSIBLE.

And we chanted and hummed and visioned and sent the truth of that world we could feel in our bodies out to be picked up and passed on by others.

After ritual, I wrote these words in my journal:

"I WILL FEED MYSELF BECAUSE I LOVE THIS WORLD AND I AM OF THIS WORLD AND I DESERVE TO BE FED

Let it all come up into the (sun)light

Learning to be vulnerable, slowly Learning I won’t be punished for it Learning it’s ok to make mistakes, to be wrong, to fuck up That I can and will be held

Real change is slow and sometimes it hurts but sometimes it’s a steady drip till the water flows in full."

We were unsuccessful in our legal efforts to free Rafael from detention and prevent him from being deported. Witnessing his journey struggling against the system--attending his asylum trial inside the prison where he was being held--further radicalized me and moved me to political engagement in a new way. Fast forward a couple of years and I’ve been blessed to organize as part of the Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network to get transgender and genderqueer asylum seekers across the U.S./Mexico border, out of ICE detention, and set up with sponsors and support in western Massachusetts. This work has drawn me into a web of community I had previously only dreamed of (and cast spells for). We believe it is possible and necessary to abolish the police, abolish prisons, abolish capitalism. As a collective, we treat each other with kindness and encourage honesty in everything we do. We recognize that we need each other, and we act like it. What an immense gift to be surrounded by people who believe that a world without cages is possible, and to be fighting for it together. The more I connect and build with radical left activists, the more I realize we could have an entirely different world.

Part 3

And that is what I am sitting with in this moment. Everyone is calling it the apocalypse, and I don’t think that’s heavy handed. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein meaning ‘uncover, reveal.’ The whole world is seeing what was behind the curtain that is the mythology of capitalism.  There are extreme losses occurring in this process. Death abounds. This is heavy. And. In the shadow of death there is preciousness. On this, I think, my mother and I agree. Everything is cast in a softer light. The finiteness of life becomes more real. There is possibility for deep change, because the ultimate change looms so large. We feel the urgency of how totally unsustainable the current order of economic and social relations is. The working class is fed up, and recognizing that they have power.

I re-read the Revelation to John (aka the Book of Revelation) recently for the first time in years. I believe that the end of the world described there cannot be separated from the description of the downfall of the Roman empire. I choose to read it slant. I choose to queer it. I choose to cultivate a relationship with this apocalypse moment that centers weaving webs of care alongside on the ground organizing to bring about the downfall of our current empire. For me, it is the only way through.

[samosoapsoup]

Women designers in history

In a world that largely fails to properly recognize the millions of women who lead the way in many fields, here at Webflow, we want to do better for the design community.

Here are fifteen women who have made lasting contributions in their creative fields, whose careers and work should serve as an inspiration to everyone.

1. Paula Scher

“The goal of design is to raise the expectation of what design can be.” - Paula Scher

Paula Scher’s work unleashes the hidden potential of typography. Through positioning, scaling, and space, she takes the tame lines of letters and makes them eclectic. This imaginative rendering of typography, combined with her bold yet tasteful use of color, makes her work instantly recognizable.

Paula’s first major role was working in the music industry as a designer for CBS Records and she would later move on to Atlantic Records. During her tenure in the music business, she would create album covers for such artists as Charles Mingus, Boston, the Yardbirds, and other notable musicians.

Her experience designing album covers would inform the widely recognized work she did for New York’s Public Theater. Where theater is often associated with a stuffy seriousness, she pioneered a branding identity for them that reflected the creative spirit of their productions. The posters she produced for them buzz with the energy of rock and roll and hip-hop.

A good designer can capture — in a microcosm of space — the essence of what makes something unique. Whether it’s on the space of an album cover, a poster, or the cover of a book, Paula’s designs balance experimentation with practicality to communicate messages in a way that captivates. Paula is still a working designer — check out more of her work over at Pentagram.

2. Ray Eames

“What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts.” - Ray Eames

Ray Eames’ roots were in abstract painting, and she was an active member of the art scene in New York during the 1930s. A common criticism of abstract art is that it’s an amorphous mess, lacking any sort of cohesion. But looking at Ray’s paintings shows that, early on, she understood how shape, form, and color worked together.

Her talents in creating visual harmony would serve her well with the work she did with her husband, Charles, in creating furniture and other industrial designs. Ray was a true polymath, whose work as a designer, painter, and filmmaker all display attention to detail as well a high level of artistry.

There’s something timeless about all the work Ray was involved in. From the functional beauty of the chairs she produced to the abstract symbol patterns she crafted for textiles, even those with an untrained eye can recognize the talent behind her designs. She embraced a sense of modernism that has never gone out of style.

3. Louise Fili

One of the things Louise Fili does best is synthesize classic typography in new and unique ways. We can see traces of where she draws her inspiration, but her sense of inventiveness and imagination takes typefaces to places that are uniquely hers.

This flair for typography can be traced back to her time at Pantheon books. She was an art director there for 11 years and designed almost 2,000 book covers. That time spent on looking and arranging text gave her a chance to develop her own typographic sensibilities, as well as give her a keen eye for clean design.

Louise is still designing today. She heads her own agency in NYC and is still creating book designs that have a classic elegance and a slick sense of modernism.

4. Elizabeth Friedländer

Elizabeth Friedländer was born in Berlin, Germany in 1902. As someone of Jewish descent, hostility in Germany and the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws of 1935 forced her to flee from her home country. Though she only got to spend a short amount of her young adult life in Germany, she managed to become the first woman to create two typefaces — Elizabeth-Antigua and Elizabeth-Kursiv — for Bauer Types in 1927.

After Elizabeth left Germany, she spent much of her time as a designer in England. She worked across various mediums including book covers, packaging, prints, and typography. She had a talent for patterns and texture, which can be seen in much of her work.

From book design for Penguin to counterfeit Nazi documents and materials for the British black propaganda unit of the Political Intelligence Office — she did it all.

Elizabeth’s work is an example of how the creative spirit can shine through, even during some of the darkest days in history.

5. Zaha Hadid

Born in Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid was one of the most prominent Iraqi-British architects in history.

She studied mathematics and later went on to the Association School of Architecture in 1972. Though she was adept at the analytical skills that came from her education, she found something lacking in standard architectural illustrations. She developed an approach to loosen up these rigid lines and tapped into the expressiveness of painting to inform her work. We can see this duality — where formality meets artistry — in the curves and lines of her architectural works that can be seen worldwide.

Her professional accomplishments are many. She was the first ever woman to land the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which she received in 2004. Her buildings are undulating waves of glass and concrete, melding into the landscape, instead of the unmoving straight lines of more conventional architecture. Some of her most famous creations include the Broad Art Museum, the Guangzhou Opera House, and Galaxy SOHO.

6. Susan Kare

“Good design’s not about what medium you’re working in, it’s about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.” - Susan Kare

Susan Kare’s contributions to design shaped how we interact with computers today. Her work in creating icons for the early Macintosh brought what was once a sterile and cold piece of technology to life.

Susan put much of her time into developing her skills in the fine arts — she pursued sculpture in undergrad and in graduate school. Though her focus was in the malleable medium of clay, she learned graphic design as an intern in high school and would continue to land design gigs in her adult life. Her skills in these two different artistic pursuits — one tactile and the other visual — would be her guide in her work for Apple.

Susan created digital-based icons that reflected the real world. Macintosh’s scissor symbol was instantly recognizable as something used to cut. Instead of boring symbols, she wanted users to feel a personal connection with the machines they were interacting with.

If you’re on a Mac right now, look at the symbol on the command key. This icon was created by Susan. Derived from a Swedish symbol representing “special attraction,” any designer will see the brilliance in this small clover-shaped knot.

Susan has had a long and varied career as a designer, having also worked with Pinterest, Facebook, Intel, and IBM.

7. Bea Feitler

Bea Fetier was a Brazilian graphic designer who worked at the zenith of magazine publishing. At 25, she became an art director at Harper’s Bazaar. She held this role for 10 years, pushing its identity in a more modern direction. After her stint at Harper’s Bazaar, she was the art director at Ms. Magazine, whose feminist-empowering philosophy aligned her own beliefs.

Her work from the late 60s and early 70s captures an aura of excitement and experimentation that seized the art world. Before her death in 1982, her design skills touched Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, as well as album covers, advertisements, and posters.

Bea was one of the first women in design to give a voice to feminism through her work, showing that graphic design can be more than just an arrangement of text and visuals, but that it can help challenge societal norms and push forward change.

8. Deborah Sussman

Environmental graphic design places a focus on how people interact and process physical spaces. It relies on understanding how disciplines like graphic design, interior and exterior design, and architecture intersect to create spaces that are more than pedestrian experiences.

Deborah Sussman has had a prolific career as an environmental graphic designer for the last thirty years. She’s most famous for the work she did for the 1984 Olympics held in Los Angeles. She developed graphics and signage with a distinct visual language that helped visitors attending.

Whether you’re creating an Olympic Village or a website, both need to have a user experience that’s both engaging and easy to navigate. Looking back on her work has many valuable lessons for designers today.

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9. Cipe Pineles

Cipe Pinele brought fine art into the world of publishing. As the art director for publications such as Mademoiselle, Vogue and Glamour, she commissioned artists to create custom illustrations and other visuals, elevating these magazines from generic consumerism, into artworks of their own right. Her skills as an artist and graphic designer helped her find the appropriate artists who would give these publications a sense of distinction.

She is credited as being the first woman to land the role of art director for a major mass-market publication. Her influence can still be seen in high fashion today.

10. April Greiman

When computers became a viable way to create art and design in the early ’80s some were skeptical of this emerging technology. Others, like April Greiman, saw new dimensions in artistic creation that could be opened up, and jumped into this new medium. April was an early adopter of this brand new way to design.

As a part of the CalArts faculty and a member of the design department, which she joined in 1982, she took advantage of the technology available at the school. It allowed her to experiment with digital and video equipment. She used this technology to innovate new ways of creating designs.

This poster titled “Iris Light” was one of April’s most notable pieces. She took a 35mm photograph of a video image that was displayed on a monitor. The end result was silk-screened, bringing together both old and new technologies for something fresh and exciting.

Forward-thinking designers have a way of seeing the potential in technological advancements. April is an inspiration to any creative for embracing change to help one evolve in their work.

11. Marian Bantjes

Marian Bantjes draws from a deep pool of inspiration in creating stylized lettering, heady patterns, and rendering designs that defy conventions. She spent a decade as a typesetter in book publishing, fostering uniformity and cohesion in her work. Though there’s a strong sense of structural undertone in her designs, there’s an organic feeling and warmth to her creations.

After spending time as an agency cofounder, she now works on her own as a designer and writer. She continues to create work marked with her modern, yet hard-to-classify artistic sensibilities.

12. Margo Chase

We always love hearing stories about those whose paths took a turn or two before landing on their current career. Who would have thought that the woman responsible for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer logo earned her BA in biology?

Margo planned on becoming a veterinarian, and in an effort to boost her GPA for grad school applications, she took an illustration class. It was here that she found her calling as a creative. After graduation, she was accepted into the medical illustration program at UCSF, ultimately discovering that it wasn’t the best fit. She would then move to LA where she started her design career as a freelancer.

Outside of the work she did for Buffy, Margo has also worked with high-profile clients like Pepsi and Procter Gamble. She also worked in the music industry, creating album cover artwork for Prince, Madonna, and Selena. Her personality and flair for typography can be seen across all of her designs.

13. Debbie Millman

“Visual storytelling utilizes both language and art to pass on the essence of who we are.” - Debbie Millman

Debbie Millman isn’t only skilled as a designer. She’s also an artist, writer, and speaker. She also launched the first-ever design-focused podcast, Design Matters, in 2005.

Along with her impressive career as a designer, Debbie is also an accomplished author. She has authored six books touching on various facets branding and design. She’s also an illustrator, whose work has appeared in a variety of publications including Fast Company and The New York Times.

With an impressive skill set, Debbie is a multidisciplinary wonder woman, showing that it’s possible to be successful in a variety of creative realms.

14. Carolyn Davidson

Carolyn Davidson found her way to a career in design after taking a design course as an elective at Portland State University (PSU) in 1972. Her major was journalism, but she enjoyed the class so much that she soon switched to graphic design, earning a bachelor’s degree.

While still a student at PSU, Carolyn had a chance encounter with Nike’s co-founder, Phil Knight, who was an accounting teacher at the time. That encounter led her to a career at Nike, where she would eventually design one of the most widely recognized brand logos in history: the Nike Swoosh.

She started her career at Nike doing grunt work, churning out visual materials for meetings. She eventually moved up, creating marketing collateral, and was tasked with coming up with a logo for a new line of shoes. She came up with a couple different ideas, and the swoosh was chosen. She was paid $35.00 for her work at the time. Phil Knight later gave Carolyn more compensation in the form of Nike stock — 32,000 shares, to be exact.

The Nike swoosh is a simple symbol, but it’s effective in communicating motion — a pure display of Carolyn’s genius as a designer.

15. Muriel Cooper

“Information is only useful when it can be understood.” - Muriel Cooper

Muriel Cooper began her career as a designer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) publication office. She had a simple job, creating and printing flyers for the office. In the 40 years that followed, she continued working for MIT, where she became the first design director at MIT Press.

Similar to April Greiman, Muriel was another designer who embraced digital technology in its early stages — but she also saw the challenges that technology posed. She was brilliant at figuring out how to navigate the complicated nature of digital technology, using it effectively in her design work.

Her Bauhaus-inspired design graced many covers of books that MIT published. She also created the iconic MIT Press logo, with its minimalist row of lines reminiscent of a row of books.

Muriel is a great example of someone who stayed curious her entire career, whose expertise grew, and who stayed ahead of design trends.

Giving women the recognition they deserve

Women have existed at the top of creative fields for decades. Though much has changed in favor of design becoming a more inclusive space, there will always be room for more awareness and appreciation.

Pear Weerawong, Webflow blog https://webflow.com/blog/women-designers-history?utm_source=iterable&utm_medium=email

[fictionadventurer]

Father Brown Reread: The Flying Stars

“The most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last.

This flips the regular detective story in multiple ways. The focus is on the criminal, rather than the detective. We’re trying to find out why he repented, rather than how he got brought to justice.

In one sentence, we see Flambeau showing some shocking character development. Not only does he stop committing crimes--he becomes “highly moral.”

Once again, if we know what Flambeau was like in his old age, when are the Father Brown stories supposed to take place? Given that Chesterton later mentions some “old Victorian chandeliers”, and that he often discusses “modern” political and philosophical fads, I think he’s engaging in a bit of literary time travel, where the stories take place in the “present day” but give us glimpses of the characters’ futures. (Sayers sometimes does something similar in the Peter Wimsey stories).

This is a strong contender for my favorite Father Brown story. I’ve read it at least six times. (It’s been a Boxing Day tradition for a few years. I’m listening to Christmas music right now to get me in the spirit.) As such, I may have a lot to say. I’ll try to restrain myself.

It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group.

Flambeau, here’s a hint: most criminals don’t care about the aesthetics of their crimes. You’re not a thief. You’re an artist. Your trouble is that you create your works of art using other people and their possessions.

Did Flambeau ever really need the money? Or was he just carried away by the romantic idea of being a trickster and creating those types of tales in real life? Brown’s speech at the end suggests he used the latter to justify the former. (“I’m not a criminal. I’m an artist.”)

I really think my imitation of Dickens’ style was dextrous and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening.

So Old Flambeau has repented of his crimes in a moral sense, but he still appreciates them on artistic terms. He’s reformed, but he hasn’t lost that flair for the overdramatic, or that arrogant self-confidence.

I’m suddenly struck by the desire to see Flambeau meet Lord Peter Wimsey. They’d be two obnoxiously self-confident artistic snobs who’d end up getting drunk on the good wine and doing ridiculous acrobatics to break into someone’s house.

Flambeau would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and even from the inside it was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must study it.

Why does the stranger have to study it from the outside? We heard the first part of the story from Flambeau. I want the rest of Flambeau’s version!

Not that I dislike this version, of course. It’s too much fun to wish for any change, and we do need to keep some aspect of the mystery intact.

Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure. “Oh, don’t jump, Mr. Crook,” she called out in some alarm; “it’s much too high.”

I believe my first suspicion was that this person was Flambeau--he would do just that sort of acrobatic nonsense. The suspicion’s quickly squashed, but it’s a nice little misdirect.

It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that Chesterton was trying to mislead us by naming one of the suspects “Crook”.

This is also a parallel to Father Brown’s conversation with Flambeau at the end of the story.

“I think I was meant to be a burglar,” he said placidly, “and I have no doubt I should have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice house next door. I can’t see any harm in it, anyhow.”

Even if Mr. Crook’s not literally Flambeau, he’s certainly a symbolic parallel. This is the sort of philosophy that Flambeau uses to justify his crimes. Perhaps Flambeau was a bit like this before he became a thief--which makes it more meaningful that he reforms at the end of this story.

With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel’s late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to such family gatherings.

I can only imagine Flambeau’s dismay at discovering this priest showing up yet again. (I doubt that he knew about this family habit beforehand). After making such elaborate preparations for the heist, he couldn’t just abandon it on the fear that Brown would recognize him.

Did this make it more fun--a chance to finally pull one over on the priest? Or did it make it more awkward--the guy did convince him to repent last time, after all.

“I’ll put ‘em back now, my dear,” said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. “I had to be careful of ‘em coming down. They’re the three great African diamonds called ‘The Flying Stars,’ because they’ve been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them.

What made you think these would be a good present for your goddaughter? Just what every girl wants--three diamonds that’ll draw every big-name criminal to her house.

Also, why put them back in the tailcoat? I imagine the house has a safe, if he thought they could keep the present. Unless they plan to put them in a bank later?

... What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?” “A saint,” said Father Brown. “I think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a Socialist.”[...] “A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.” “But who won’t allow you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot.”

I’ve always loved this bit. Father Brown shows that religion doesn’t necessarily line up with any political fashions.

The major philosophical tension in this story is the question of property--who has it, who deserves or doesn’t deserve it, how we should distribute it. Crook supports redistributing property and attacking policemen in theoretical terms. Flambeau takes the initiative to do so in practical terms.

"Why couldn’t we have a proper old English pantomime--clown, columbine, and so on.

As in “The Blue Cross”, Flambeau’s artistry is his downfall. He could have stolen the jewels by sleight-of-hand at any moment and been gone long before the policeman arrived. Instead, he decides that a much better plan is to throw together a pantomime.

But no matter how insane the plan is, I have to respect how well he pulls it off. He gets the whole household in on the plan in a matter of minutes, and no one thinks to question him about this “actor friend”. 

I adore this whole section. The wild energy of their slap-dash little play is infectious, and very Christmassy.

The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In fact he would have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds.

I know Flambeau would have adored smashing that chandelier (and I love the image of him trying to do it) but he really lucked out that Ruby had some paste jewels. If he’d smashed those chandeliers, I doubt her father would have been in a mood to let the pantomime go on.

He was supposed to be the clown, but he was really almost everything else, the author (so far as there was an author), the prompter, the scene-painter, and, above all, the orchestra. At abrupt intervals in the outrageous performance he would hurl himself in full costume at the piano and bang out some popular music equally absurd and appropriate.

I’m surprised at how much Crook gets into this. He’s almost as enthusiastic as “Blount” is.

The fantastic @isfjmel-phleg has located recordings or sheet music of all the songs mentioned in this story. Definitely a post worth checking out.

The climax of this, as of all else, was the moment when the two front doors at the back of the scene flew open, showing the lovely moonlit garden, but showing more prominently the famous professional guest; the great Florian, dressed up as a policeman.

How did Flambeau explain the lack of policeman during the rehearsal? Everyone was okay with the explanation of “He’ll show up in the middle of the show”? For that matter, how did they open the doors just when he showed up? There’s no mention of him knocking.

“Wife!” replied the staring soldier, “she died this year two months. Her brother James arrived just a week too late to see her.”

Flambeau knew that Fischer had the diamonds two months in advance? And ingratiated himself to the family that long ago? Talk about elaborate planning. Was there really no other moment he could he could have retrieved the diamonds? I suppose the day of gift-giving would be when they were most vulnerable.

“Chloroform,” he said as he rose; “I only guessed it just now.”

Apparently Flambeau carries chloroform on him at all times. Nothing like being prepared, I suppose.

Father Brown’s detective style is the opposite of Sherlock Holmes’. It’s truly deductive reasoning--starting with the “big picture” and finding details to support it. So far, we haven’t really seen Father Brown collect clues. He’s just living life, quietly observing, until he gets a sudden flash of inspiration. Only then can he pick out the little details to support his theory and show how the crime was done.

There were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden, in which the laurels and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire sky and silver moon, even in that midwinter, warm colours as of the south. The green gaiety of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of the garden trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic as impossible.

Here Chesterton shifts from past tense to present tense for a page. There’s no explanation. Sayers does these kinds of shifts sometimes, too. Were writing rules different back then, or is this a failure of editing?

The present tense does give it a bit of a “stage show” feel, paralleling the dramatics of a moment before.

“Well, Flambeau,” says the voice, “you really look like a Flying Star; but that always means a Falling Star at last.”

Does Father Brown practice these one-liners?

Flambeau’s disguise must have been pretty good if Father Brown didn’t recognize him until now. But once Brown understood the crime, it must have been easy to figure out the criminal’s identity. Who else would do something so overelaborately artistic?

You were going to steal the jewels quietly [...] You already had the clever notion of hiding the jewels in a blaze of false stage jewellry. Now you saw that if the dress were a harlequin’s the appearance of a policeman would be quite in keeping.

The stage jewellry can’t already have been a part of Flambeau’s plan, not if he planned to steal them quietly.

However, just before he got his letter, he was ready to applaud Ruby’s idea of a little show. Perhaps Brown meant that this gave him the idea to use a Christmas show to hide the jewels, and he got the idea for a pantomime a moment later when he heard about the policeman?

“I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade.”

Father Brown already got Flambeau to repent and return his stolen goods once before. This time he has to be more specific. It’s not good enough to just give back the goods. He has to give up this life entirely.

Flambeau may be the criminal, but there’s an innocence about him. Father Brown, for all his cloistered lifestyle, has a much grittier and more realistic view of the world. Yet another example of how these stories invert the typical detective story tropes.

“...I know the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey. But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops will be very bare.” [...] “Your downward steps have begun. You used to boast of doing nothing mean, but you are doing something mean tonight. You are leaving suspicion on an honest boy with a good deal against him already; you are separating him from the woman he loves and who loves him. But you will do meaner things than that before you die.”

This page is one of the best monologues in fiction. This entire speech gives me chills, but the ending is especially powerful.

The restoration of the gems (accidentally picked up by Father Brown, of all people) ended the evening in uproarious triumph; and Sir Leopold, in his height of good humor, even told the priest that though he himself had broader views, he could respect those whose creed required them to be cloistered and ignorant of the world.

Chesterton loves highlighting this bit of irony. It’s also a nice bookend to “The Blue Cross” where this irony was the turning-point of the whole story.

After the chilling dramatics of the garden, it’s nice to end on this lively, cheery, Christmassy atmosphere.

I wonder how Flambeau first got back in touch with Father Brown. The next time we see him, he and Brown are already good friends. It must have been an awkward, dramatic, and epic moment when a fully repentant Flambeau reapproaches the man who convinced him to reform.

[xgenesisrei]

Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?

It was in 1983 that I heard the distinguished Greek Orthodox historian Aristeides Papadakis casually remark in a lecture at the University of Maryland that the earliest Christians were “communists.” In those days, the Cold War was still casting its great glacial shadow across the cultural landscape, and so enough of a murmur of consternation rippled through the room that Professor Papadakis — who always spoke with severe precision — felt obliged to explain that he meant this in the barest technical sense: They lived a common life and voluntarily enjoyed a community of possessions. The murmur subsided, though not necessarily the disquiet.

Not that anyone should have been surprised. If the communism of the apostolic church is a secret, it is a startlingly open one. Vaguer terms like “communalist” or “communitarian” might make the facts sound more palatable but cannot change them. The New Testament’s Book of Acts tells us that in Jerusalem the first converts to the proclamation of the risen Christ affirmed their new faith by living in a single dwelling, selling their fixed holdings, redistributing their wealth “as each needed” and owning all possessions communally. This was, after all, a pattern Jesus himself had established: “Each of you who does not give up all he possesses is incapable of being my disciple” (Luke 14:33).

This was always something of a scandal for the Christians of later ages, at least those who bothered to notice it. And today in America, with its bizarre piety of free enterprise and private wealth, it is almost unimaginable that anyone would adopt so seditious an attitude. Down the centuries, Christian culture has largely ignored the more provocative features of the early church or siphoned off their lingering residues in small special communities (such as monasteries and convents). Even when those features have been acknowledged, they have typically been treated as somehow incidental to the Gospel’s message — a prudent marshaling of resources against a hostile world for a brief season, but nothing essential to the faith, and certainly nothing amounting to a political philosophy.

It’s true, of course, that the early church was not a political movement in the modern sense. The very idea would have been meaningless. There were no political ideologies in the ancient world, no abstract programs for the reconstitution of society. But if not a political movement, the church was a kind of polity, and the form of life it assumed was not merely a practical strategy for survival, but rather the embodiment of its highest spiritual ideals. Its “communism” was hardly incidental to the faith.

The early church’s radicalism, if that is the right word, was impressed upon me repeatedly over the past few years, as I worked on my own translation of the New Testament for Yale University Press. When my longtime editor initially proposed the project, I foolishly imagined it would be an easy task: not because the text is a simple one, but because I had often “corrected” what I considered inadequate renderings of many of its passages, either for students or for myself. I assumed that long familiarity had prepared me to turn the Greek into English almost effortlessly.

Soon, though, I realized that while I may have known many things about the text, I had not always grasped them properly. I knew that much of the conventional language of scriptural translation has the effect of reducing complex and difficult words and concepts to vacuously simple or deceptively anachronistic terms (“eternal,” “hell,” “justification,” to give a few examples). But I had not appreciated how violently those conventions impoverish the text or obscure crucial dimensions of its conceptual world. The books of the New Testament, I came to see, constitute a historical conundrum — not because they come from the remote world of late antiquity, but rather because they often appear to make no sense even in the context of antiquity.

I found myself constantly in doubt, in particular, regarding various constructions concerning words dealing with that which is “koinon,” or “common,” and most especially the texts’ distinctive emphasis on “koinonia.” This is a word usually rendered blandly as “fellowship” or “sharing” or (slightly better) “communion.” But is that all it implies?

After all, the New Testament’s condemnations of personal wealth are fairly unremitting and remarkably stark: Matthew 6:19-20, for instance (“Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth”), or Luke 6:24-25 (“But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort”) or James 5:1-6 (“Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling out at the miseries that are coming for you”). While there are always clergy members and theologians swift to assure us that the New Testament condemns not wealth but its abuse, not a single verse (unless subjected to absurdly forced readings) confirms the claim.

I came to the conclusion that koinonia often refers to a precise set of practices within the early Christian communities, a special social arrangement — the very one described in Acts — that was integral to the new life in Christ. When, for instance, the Letter to the Hebrews instructs believers not to neglect koinonia, or the First Letter to Timothy exhorts them to become koinonikoi, this is no mere recommendation of personal generosity, but an invocation of a very specific form of communal life.

As best we can tell, local churches in the Roman world of the apostolic age were essentially small communes, self-sustaining but also able to share resources with one another when need dictated. This delicate web of communes constituted a kind of counter-empire within the empire, one founded upon charity rather than force — or, better, a kingdom not of this world but present within the world nonetheless, encompassing a radically different understanding of society and property.

It was all much easier, no doubt — this nonchalance toward private possessions — for those first generations of Christians. They tended to see themselves as transient tenants of a rapidly vanishing world, refugees passing lightly through a history not their own. But as the initial elation and expectations of the Gospel faded and the settled habits of life in this depressingly durable world emerged anew, the distinctive practices of the earliest Christians gave way to the common practices of the established order.

Even then, however, the transition was not quite as abrupt as one might imagine. Well into the second century, the pagan satirist Lucian of Samosata reported that Christians viewed possessions with contempt and owned all property communally. And the Christian writers of Lucian’s day largely confirm that picture: Justin Martyr, Tertullian and the anonymous treatise known as the Didache all claim that Christians must own everything in common, renounce private property and give their wealth to the poor. Even Clement of Alexandria, the first significant theologian to argue that the wealthy could be saved if they cultivated “spiritual poverty,” still insisted that ideally all goods should be held in common.

As late as the fourth and fifth centuries, bishops and theologians as eminent as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria felt free to denounce private wealth as a form of theft and stored riches as plunder seized from the poor. The great John Chrysostom frequently issued pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin sound like timid conservatives. According to him, there is but one human estate, belonging to all, and those who keep any more of it for themselves than barest necessity dictates are brigands and apostates from the true Christian enterprise of charity. And he said much of this while installed as Archbishop of Constantinople.

That such language could still be heard at the heart of imperial Christendom, however, suggests that it had by then lost much of its force. It could be tolerated to a degree, but only as a bracing hyperbole, appropriate to an accepted religious grammar — an idiom, that is, rather than an imperative. Christianity was ceasing to be the apocalyptic annunciation of something unprecedented and becoming just the established devotional system of its culture, offering all the consolations and reassurances that one demands of religious institutions. As time went on, the original provocation of the early church would occasionally erupt in ephemeral “purist” movements — Spiritual Franciscans, Russian non-possessors, Catholic Worker houses — but in general, Christian adherence had become chiefly just a religion, a support for life in this world rather than a radically different model of how to live.

That was unavoidable. No society as a whole will ever found itself upon the rejection of society’s chief mechanism: property. And all great religions achieve historical success by gradually moderating their most extreme demands. So it is not possible to extract a simple moral from the early church’s radicalism.

But for those of us for whom the New Testament is not merely a record of the past but a challenge to the present, it is occasionally worth asking ourselves whether the distance separating the Christianity of the apostolic age from the far more comfortable Christianities of later centuries — and especially those of the developed world today — is more than one merely of time and circumstance.

-David Bentley Hart, fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and the author of “The New Testament: A Translation.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/opinion/sunday/christianity-communism.html?referer=http%253A%252F%252Fm.facebook.com%252F&fbclid=IwAR1KlXrvqEjfVsfLOKaOkeSBnRvs3RbrGFYmpearekEqRdNfkYJLIY_Sow4

[lucyt0601]

Research Paper Draft #1

Katie Paterson and the Concept of Memory 

The purpose of my research is to study the work and practice of the artist Katie Paterson and to see how her work relates to the concept of memory- how she replicated her memories into her art works and takes what is inside of her to create her visible mediums, which include texts, monographs, videos, sculptures, images, numbers, etc. She used light and dark colors together and separately, how she employed simplicity and a clean style. According to Ollivier Dyens in his article The Sadness of the Machine, “Memories of pleasure, pain, sadness and joy, are the common thread that unites all human beings. Memories are our existence, and art is their system of replication” (Dyens 2001, 77).

Basic biographical information/identity as an artist and a person:  

Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1981, one of the leading artists in her generation. Received her BA from Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, United Kingdom in 2004 and her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, United Kingdom in 2007. She has since been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions, recipient of the John Florent Stone Fellowship at Edinburgh College of Art, and was the Leverhulme Artist in Residence in the Astrophysics Group at the University College London in 2010-2011. In collaboration with scientists and researchers from around the world, her projects consider the place of humans on planet Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her words utilize advanced technologies and expertise to display the engagements between people and the natural environment. Approach is Romantic and research-based, rigorous conceptualism and minimalist, shortens the distance between the viewer and the edges of time and the cosmos. She has broadcast the sounds of a melting glacier live, mapped dead stars, compiled a slide archive of darkness from the depths of the Universe, created a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, and sent a recast meteorite back into space. “Eliciting feelings of humility, wonder and melancholy akin to the experience of the Romantic sublime, Paterson's work is at once understated in gesture and yet monumental in scope.” Paterson has exhibited internationally, from London to New York, Berlin to Seoul, and her works have been included in major exhibitions including Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain, Kunsthalle Wien, MCA Sydney, Guggenheim Museum, New York, and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. She was the winner of the Visual Arts category of the 2014 South Bank Awards, and is an Honorary Fellow of Edinburgh University. Her poetic installations have been the result of intensive research and collaboration with specialists as diverse as astronomers, geneticists, nanotechnologists, jewelers and firework manufacturers. As Erica Burton, curator at Modern Art Oxford, wrote at a solo exhibition in 2008, “Katie Paterson’s work engages with the landscape, as a physical entity and as an idea. Drawing on our experience of the natural world, she creates an expanded sense of reality beyond the purely visible.”

Her artistic creations:

Among recent works are: Totality (2016), a mirrorball reflecting every solar eclipse seen from earth; Hollow (2016), a commission for University of Bristol, made in collaboration with architects Zeller & Moye, permanently installed in the historic Royal Fort Gardens: a miniature forest of all the world’s forests, including over 10,000 unique tree species spanning millions of years telling the history of the planet through the immensity of tree specimens in microcosm; Fossil Necklace (2013), a necklace comprised of 170 carved, rounded fossils, spanning geological time; Second Moon (2013), a work that tracks the cyclical journey of a fragment of the moon as it circles the Earth, via airfreight courier, on a man-made year-long commercial orbit; All the Dead Stars (2009), a large map documenting the locations of 27,000 dead stars known to humanity; Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight (2009), an incandescent bulb designed to transmit wavelength properties identical to those of moonlight; and History of Darkness (ongoing), a slide archive of darkness captured at different times and places throughout the universe and spanning billions of years.

“Paterson created Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) (2007). With the assistance of radio operators Peter Blair in Southampton, England, and Peter Sundberg in Lulea, Sweden, Paterson bounced Morse code Signals of the score of the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata off the moon and then transcribed the echoed information back into notation, which was then played back in exhibition on a player piano” (204). 

“Paterson employs a novel subtractive sonification based on ever-present loss. Regular radar scans of the surface would employ much higher power and include repetitions to override error producing a refined data set that a conventional sonification strategy would then transform into music or another art of sound. Paterson’s approach is different. Just as one hears the Pacific Ocean leak into the off-timings of Nam June Paik’s version of Bach, in Earth-Moon-Earth you hear the moon in what Beethoven does not sound like” (208). 

Musicalization of dead silences- Sound recordings of three Icelandic glaciers on records made of frozen meltwater from these glaciers are played until the records melt, mimicking the loss and silencing of their source.

History of Darkness, 2010: “...essays a cosmically laconic take on astro physical discovery of the protocols of its recording. For the Dying Star Letters, Paterson is sent an email each time scientists note a star has been expired; she then writes a letter of condolence” (31). 

Paterson praises the book,“Stone Mattress,” by Margaret Atwood, our first author for “Future Library.” (Paterson herself says) I love her work because she can speak through generations and time. I’m also reading “Invisible Cities,” by Italo Calvino, which is a collection of texts that imagines cities of all varieties made of bizarre materials. And “The Blue Fox,” by the Icelandic author Sjon. You follow a blue fox through a hunted journey. It’s like a fairy tale. All three books travel through time and space. And they all have very poetic language as well.

Paterson addresses her political standpoint by saying, “I was following the Scottish referendum on BBC Scotland, Yes Scotland and the Wee Blue Book Mobile Edition. I submitted my vote: Yes for an independent Scotland. I think we will see positive results from the referendum, even though the result is not what I had hoped for.” 

Inspirations/influences:

Her experience living in Iceland felt like living on another planet- traveling to drastically different places feels like going to different planets, which is what sparked her fascination with outer space and the cosmos. 

Reputation as an artist:  

She is fascinated by science and is known for her multidisciplinary and conceptually-driven work with an emphasis on nature, ecology, geology and cosmology. Her conceptual art finds everyday analogies for profound cosmological themes, is consistent in exploring scientific themes through contemporary art: her works have ranged from sending a "second moon" around the earth by courier service, to playing a record at the speed of the earth's rotation. Institutions approve of  her art because it fits some deep need they have for art that is conceptual and intellectual. That combination allows museums and respectable prize givers to feel they are “down with the kids,” while also furthering their liberal mission to educate the public.“The Works of Katie Paterson go sailing off the scale of civilization. Using technologies normally applied to the speed and scope of human experience, the Scottish artist zooms out or tunnels in to other, more alien dimensions, reframing natural and cosmic phenomena… anthropocentric worldviews are dissipated in favor of a different kind of consciousness, one keyed to evolutionary systems and rooted in contact with igneous chaos.”

Working and collaborating with others:

"You, at least, believe that the human race will still be around in a hundred years!" enthused the acclaimed writer and environmental activist Margaret Atwood when she was asked to be the first contributor to Paterson's centennial project, Future Library, 2014-2114, a work of art that is essentially a form of time travel.” 

Focusing on a single work and how it ties to our FSEM/memory: 

Fossil Necklace, a giant circular string displaying the development of life on Earth. It is made of 170 carved fossil beads representing the Earth’s memory of a major occurrence in evolution through geological time. According to Paterson, “Fossil hunting is a new hobby of mine. It happened because I made a necklace of 170 beads carved from fossils and it charts all of geological time on Earth. The first bead is 3 1/2 billion years old and contains the first cellular life on earth and it goes on from there. I had no experience in paleontology and it took ages to work out what I was looking for. Scotland has got an amazing coast where you can find fossils just on the beach. I didn’t know this at all. I also got fossils from fairs, eBay and auctions.” 

Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky, 2012- may work with memory concept better (see video on James Cohan site). 

Suggestions from the writing fellow: I met with Emma Consoli this past Sunday and 5pm. I had a positive experience in the CTL with her because she liked the way I outlined my first draft, but she did tell me to cut down on the raw quotations and use more of my own voice. She had me change my wording of phrases here and there and pointed out some grammatical errors from when I first typed out the draft. 

Bibliography 

Murphy, Kate. "Katie Paterson." The New York Times Sunday Review. Last modified September 20, 2014. Accessed October 20, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/ 09/21/opinion/sunday/katie-paterson.html?searchResultPosition=1. 

Larsen, Lars Bang. 2014. 1000 WORDS: Katie paterson and margaret atwood. Artforum International. 11, https://ezproxy.hws.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1625101398?accountid=27680 (accessed October 16, 2019).

McKinnon, Dugal. "Dead Silence: Ecological Silencing and Environmentally Engaged Sound Art." Leonardo Music Journal 23 (2013): 71-74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43832509.

Dillon, Brian. "Attention! Photography and Sidelong Discovery." In Aperture, No.

     211, Curiosity (Summer 2013), pp. 25-31. Published in JSTOR.

     Accessed October 29, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24473799. 

Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal : Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Accessed October 29, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central.

[archiveofprolbems]

Island Mentality by Alice Bucknell

This report about Ed Fornieles’ recent workshop  What Will It Be Like When We Buy An Island (on the blockchain)? is published in partnership with DAOWO, a series that brings together artists, musicians, technologists, engineers, and theorists to consider how blockchains might be used to enable a critical, sustainable and empowered culture. The series is organized by Ruth Catlow and Ben Vickers in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut London and the State Machines programme. Its title is inspired by a paper by artist, hacker and writer Rob Myers called DAOWO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation With Others.

Imagine an island not far off the coast of French Polynesia, floating quietly while it absorbs hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in crypto capital. Idyllic animatronic palms made of stainless steel manufactured in Germany and coated in organic coconut husk waft gently in the breeze, while an underwater generator noiselessly converts salt water to a drinkable resource. A backdrop of impossibly green hills glimmer with solar panels coated in a thin layer of hyper-absorbent algae, courtesy of a Swedish start-up whose CEO lives in a villa nestled into the landscape. Welcome to the future of Seasteading.

A few years ago, when British artist Ed Fornieles began researching the social dynamics of the blockchain and cryptocurrency, this sort of scene was an ecstatic fantasy conjured up by what’s generally perceived as the delirious imagination of the rich and bored; of opportunistic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and a pack of wily investors on the hunt for the next lucrative buzz.  “Now it’s become our present reality, and it’s not so funny,” says Fornieles of the burgeoning crypto society. We’re gathered in the Goethe-Institut London on a drizzling afternoon in March, and Fornieles, embodying the role of a digital coach and dramaturge, is introducing the concept of live action role play, LARPing for short, to a motley group of around two dozen participants including students, artists, techies, architects, and–unbeknownst to all–IRL Seasteaders in disguise.

Convened in collaboration with Ruth Catlow, co-founder of online research platform and gallery Furtherfield and Ben Vickers, CTO of the Serpentine Galleries, the workshop, titled What Will It Be Like When We Buy An Island (on the blockchain)?, is the fifth installment of DAOWO(Decentralized Autonomous Organization With Others): a series bringing together artists, writers, curators, technologists, and engineers to investigate the production of new blockchain technologies and their socio-political implications. It’s also an effort “explore the hazards of formalizing the idea of ‘doing good on the blockchain’,” according to Fornieles.

Participants are sorted into four groups, or islands, adopting the personas of crypto-millionaires and billionaires in order to configure a speculative society upon the Seasteading frontier. The LARP is organized into four sessions, including a period of self-actualization, where the committee members of each island settle upon an operating structure for their crypto-community; a four-year throwback, where the group reflects upon the success of their fledgling island’s socio-political structure and makes any necessary adjustments, and finally a fifty-year “truth and reconciliation” process followed immediately by a super convention, where each island proudly presents its success story – or laments its struggles – to the broader international Seasteading community.

In order to introduce different practical challenges and ethical quandaries, Fornieles throws two Seasteading communities on artificial islands and two pre-existent (and potentially already inhabited) islands into the mix. While Seasteading technically excludes such “organic” islands, the idea of “mining cryptocurrency in paradise” has mutated into colonizing real communities ravaged by natural disaster, as many critics including Naomi Klein and Nellie Bowles of the New York Times have noted about Puerto Rico. He’s also established a dozen roles for participants to assign themselves: from Ministers of Religion and Education, to Island Architect, Mayor, and Chief Technology Officers, in order to jump-start the camaraderie (or anarchy). “For first time role players, there’s a tendency to be the sociopath you always wanted to be,” cautions Vickers in the warm-up introduction. “Please try to suppress this desire.” Otherwise, it’s game on, and immediately after we separate into groups, all kinds of strategic and ideological questions emerge: Do we want a central government, or is it best to leave politics to algorithms? Should we convene a Church of Something, or are we all too woke for religion? Do we need a justice system, a formal corrective center, or a Sims-like human rating system to self-regulate behaviour? Maybe we can just vote people on and off the island?

I’m relieved to be sorted into an artificial island established by Paypal founder Peter Thiel, therefore bypassing what plenty of cultural theorists, including Klein,1 have pointed out as the immediate and unmistakable stench of neocolonialism. We’re given a name, “The Pilgrims,” and a socio-political disposition: as “Modern Libertarians,” we’re supposed to be a “free-thinking community that believes the only way to create an honest, new, distinct way of living is to set sail and create a new network.” Filled with neoliberal buzzwords like innovation, entrepreneurialism, and disruption, Pilgrim Island is the paragon of Seasteading ideology. Oh, and we’re really into wearing all-black hi-tech athleisure. Seriously–it’s the stuff of neoliberal dreams.

But without a pre-existing ethical quandary to mediate, the need to immediately establish an ideological commons stays airborne. The island’s socio-political landscape ricochets between one participant’s idealized utopia and another. Still, whether by defaulting to their actual areas of expertise or diving head-first into a full-fledged crytpo-billionaire alter persona (I suspect the former), the founding committee of my island quickly jumps on their self-assigned roles. I note with interest as the player to my right, a small, sassy woman sporting a bowler hat, a markedly “business casual” blazer, and big, blinged-out hoop earrings, promptly elects herself mayor without much resistance from the rest of the group. Almost as if by reflex, she launches into a compelling speech that touts the glory of the hands-off and unregulated economy of Seasteading; the imminent intellectual and financial capital to be gleaned from the “limitless potential of high-tech islands based on real life values.”

Things quickly slip off the deep end. Less than twenty minutes in, the island’s architect has gone on a minimalist-inspired rampage, apparently inspired by a very jovial spiritual pilgrimage with his “good friend” Elon Musk to Vegas. Conjuring a Panopticon2-like self-corrective facility-cum-worship center in the middle of the island known as the PayPal Meditation Center, the architect introduces an elaborate system of self-enacted punishment for residents involving a penny-by-penny payment for one’s sins fulfilled by the obsolete performance of extracting Real Money from an ATM (the horror!). Meanwhile, the Minister of Religion is busy ordaining a Thiel-inspired sect that ties spirituality to physical health, brandishing a harsh, zero-tolerance approach to dissenters.

She colludes with the Minister of Agriculture to debut an all-seeing pineapple that simultaneously provides sustenance to Pilgrim Island’s speculative inhabitants while also monitoring their spiritual commitment. The Minister of Education crafts a secret p2p anarchist boot camp on the Northwestern coast of the island, for the self-conscious younger generation eager to find deeper meaning in this brave new digital world. For a reason that still escapes me, Peter Thiel is then involved in a tragic water-taxi accident that ends in the ultimate demise of he and his partner. A referendum is held for a new leader amidst the for-profit utopian soul-searching…

As for myself? In order to preserve proper journalistic objectivity (obviously), I’ve self-identified as a ghost (more specifically, the ghost of reason). This works great at first, but when we hit the four-year benchmark, I learn the Minister of Religion has been voted off the island, a movement initiated by the Energy Manager and Local Representative. As the spiritual attachment, I also get the boot; we’re shipped off to a neighbouring island called Blue Frontiers that’s likewise self-fabricated, and also exhibits the same weakness of a spiritual void. With an algorithmic overlord, the (not-so) speculative island is situated after the unfortunate ravaging of French Polynesia by an unavoidable natural disaster: A narrative that oddly parallels that of Puerto Rico. Fast forward 50 years into the future, I am welcomed to join them in a painful process of reflection.

We quickly learn that an existential ennui due to lack of faith and purpose amongst the island’s population has led to a mass suicide. “There have been lots of residents killing themselves, but our technology is so good, can it really be that bad?” asks the island’s hands-off Mayor, who apparently doesn’t believe in building. Having fired the Architect early on (“We’ve all enjoyed the beach, why pollute it with architecture?”), whose algorithmic approval rating sits at a measly 32%, the Mayor proceeds to gloat over his 90% approval rating, while the Chief Technology Officer also curiously boasts a sky-high rating of 96%. Suddenly, Pioneer Island’s schizophrenic governance starts to look pretty good.

Minutes later I find myself at the mid-century International Seasteading Convention, where I am exposed to the triumphs and tribulations of our near-present Seasteading future. Alt-right acceleration gives way to a hyper-libertarian group named Sol declaring allegiance to a new religion steered by Crypto-Christ that touts a new hedonistic world order, completed by furnishing its children with sex robots.  An Anarcho-communist community has catapulted its Mayor and Minister of Education to a new planet, and tout the great success of introducing an emotional currency to the island’s residents while skirting around the issue of a veganism-inspired massacre. “We’re leaving a very beautiful piece of archaeology for other nations to learn from,” the Mayor proudly asserts from her new life across the galaxy.

An animatronic tear rolls down my cheek as I hear the recent struggles of Pioneer Island. With their reputation system based on the blockchain overloaded by a sea of new residents, their dwindling natural resources (“We have plenty of crypto, but no food or water”) leads to an appeal from the rest of the bitcoin billionaires to lend a helping digital hand. Still, the Mayor remains unshaken, once again delivering a solid speech that praises the blockchain mantra of “pioneering small, self-organized projects that lead to independence,”; of “never aiming for total cohesion and never following democracy,” but instead “generating local, self-sufficient systems” in order to achieve success.

Curiosity takes over, and I approach the brilliant spokeswoman after the workshop winds up in order to uncover her background. Turns out she’s none other than Nathalie Mezza-Garcia, the self-termed “Seavangelesse” and research strong-arm of Blue Frontiers. Currently pursuing a PhD that investigates the politics and sociology of Seasteading at the University of Warwick, Mezza-Garcia was recruited by the Blue Frontiers team in 2017. Now, with the company just months from unveiling to the public its island off the coast of French Polynesia [after this report was filed, the island nation pulled out of the deal –Ed.], she’s keen to spread the message amongst the masses and change some minds. Naturally, we go for a drink.

“If someone like me who basically lives and breathes Seasteading 24/7 can get so much wrong, it’s no wonder the general conception of Seasteading is so far from the truth,” says Mezza-Garcia. “The biggest mistake people make is laminating the ‘evil billionaire’ narrative onto the whole enterprise.” Still in the midst of her research, Mezza-Garcia has nothing but admiration for the wealthy patrons of Seasteading. Rather than using the enterprise merely as a tool to acquire more capital, Seasteading companies like Blue Frontiers are more interested in the limitless social, political, and ideological benefits awaiting this post-human frontier, she argues. “It’s a step into a world where we all have more decisions.”

As for the regular members of society who can’t afford their own slice of animatronic paradise on the enlightened blockchain, hotel accommodation will soon be available on Blue Frontiers’ islands. For now, role-playing is a valuable exercise for warming up a heterogeneous batch of the general public to the idea, so they can form their own opinions. For Mezza-Garcia, What Will It Be Like When We Buy An Island (on the blockchain)? is the first time she’s seen artists – “instead of libertarians or blockchain people” – engage with the principle ideas of Seasteading in a direct, open, and low-stakes way; many attendants of the workshop voiced a similar sentiment (but thought another round or two of role-playing would help them with the trickier bits–like avoiding vegan anarchy, or summoning a Bitcoin Jesus).

As the once-distant dream of Seasteading is eclipsed by its imminent reality, the potential of role playing as an educational strategy emerges on both ends of the chain – but the takeaway is by no means consistent. Eager to make the operations of Blue Frontiers accessible to a broader audience, Mezza-Garcia celebrates activities like this as a potential source of new recruits. She even intends integrate LARPing into Blue Frontiers board meetings to encourage a top-down empathy with non-billionaires of the blockchain. Yet the results of the workshop–in which speculative future Seasteading communities are ravaged by a despairing lack of faith, suicides, and massacres–paints an entirely different story: One that becomes increasingly problematic when one considers the flawless criminal, mental, and physical health records Blue Frontiers’ selection process requires, alongside the obvious economic factors.

For a community keen to “enrich the poor, cure the sick, and liberate humanity,” according to Blue Frontiers’ co-founder Joe Quirk, their operating logic seems to reinforce many of the social stigmas and power structures already responsible for much of the suffering and inequality within contemporary society. Rather than offering any single narrative or conclusion, LARPing underscores these divergent visions of Seasteading’s (failed) utopia just before the ship sets sail.

All illustrations by Maz Hemming.

[1] In a piece published on The Intercept on March 20, Klein blasted Bitcoin as “the most wasteful possible use of energy”, characterizing leading cryptocurrency figures as opportunistic “Puertotopians” keen to capitalize on the hurricane-ravaged island of Puerto Rico. Klein also equates the “wealthy libertarian manifesto” of Seasteading to the colonizing powers of the new world that seized once-free nations and converted their indigenous inhabitants into slaves.

[2]  Though conceived by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, the idea of the panopticon was popularized by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish. Says Foucault of the Panopticon’s unlucky captive: “He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.” Remote island or bustling city center, the Panopticon’s relevance has resurfaced in the realm of the digital; see Thomas McMullan’s 2016 piece in The Guardian about the relevance of Panopticonism amid the cross-fire of data capture and digital surveillance.

Source: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jun/14/island-mentality/

[caveartfair]

Iceland’s Population Is Staggeringly Creative. Why?

Still from "Wanderlust" directed by Encyclopedia Pictura, 2008. Björk "Björk" at Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015)

It’s not gone unnoticed that some of the most innovative contemporary artists working today hail from Iceland. Björk, Ragnar Kjartansson, Katrín Sigurdardóttir, and Olafur Eliasson (who, to be fair, is half Danish) are all known for taking unique, interdisciplinary approaches to their art. The country, with a scant population of around 330,000, is also host to a thriving microcosm of designers, writers, and musicians.

Iceland has consistently ranked among the most innovative countries in the world. Indeed, one in four people there work in creative careers; a whopping one in 10 have published a book. The small nation boasts some 7,000 creative companies, and a growing number of creative jobs, despite the impact of 2008’s massive economic crisis.

While outsiders have long suspected that the island nation’s isolation and striking natural environment are key drivers of this creative boom, a new research study, published in the Gifted and Talented International journal, has found that various other significant factors can more directly account for why Icelandic people are so creative and innovative.

The Study

Olafur Eliasson, Harpa. Photo by mariejirousek, via Flickr.

In 2011, University of Kansas professor and psychologist Barbara A. Kerr and her daughter, an art student, had a weekend stopover in Reykjavik on their way to a vacation in Prague. Charmed by the city’s creative community, Kerr’s daughter moved there after finishing school two years later, and found a supportive circle of creative peers that far surpassed what she’d found at an American university. Keen to understand what’s driving Iceland’s creative community, Kerr developed a university seminar for her doctoral and masters students, and took her team to Iceland.

Driven by the question “Why is Iceland so creative?” Kerr and eight students sought to examine “the people, places, processes, and products that may contribute to driving Icelandic innovation,” with a special focus on fine art and music. They collected data to address multiple variables, looking for distinctive elements in various areas: the abilities and personalities of individuals living in Iceland; the natural and built environment; social, familial, educational, and cultural dynamics; and government and economic policies.

They conducted a comprehensive literature review (CLR), which involved over 1,000 hours of analyzing existing scholarship, literature, and popular media, but also conducting new, on-the-ground research interviews in Reykjavik.

“It certainly takes us right out of the ivory tower,” Kerr said of the method. “We got in there to see to what degree our own observations support what the literature has to say, and it allowed the Icelanders themselves to comment upon the research.”

Working with their existing networks and new local contacts, like the editor of the popular newspaper the Reykjavik Grapevine, Kerr and her team chose to interview 15 individuals whom they believed were representative of artists, musicians, and writers working in Iceland. These subjects were complemented by more focused, off-the-cuff conversations throughout Reykjavik and elsewhere in the country, at local events, bookstores, museums, or other venues. In some cases these were quite informal; Kerr gives the example of a researcher having a 5-to-10-minute conversation with an Icelandic man at a club to discuss nightlife or relationships.

What They Found

Photo by Jonatan Pie.

Despite the fact that Icelanders largely refuted the idea that they were any more creative than people of other nations, Kerr and her team’s CLR supported the theory that creativity among Icelanders was a result of their individual, social, educational, and cultural attributes.

While Icelanders did not possess remarkably distinct personalities or abilities, they were found to commonly display “attitudes of independence and tolerance” which, Kerr wrote, “supports openness to experience, the personality attribute that is most strongly correlated with creativity.”

In terms of the environment, Icelanders rejected the idea that the vast beauty of the landscape was a font of creative inspiration. Kerr said that interviewees were overwhelmingly skeptical of this, often saying one of two things: “The inspiration comes from community and culture, and not from the environment,” or “That’s just the national advertising, policy makers came up with that idea, just trying to attract tourists.” Researchers found that urban and social contexts were more important to creativity.

“At one point, we came to the conclusion that Icelanders are like fish in water—they live in an inspiring environment, but they’re used to it,” Kerr quipped. Research found that unsurprisingly, non-natives were more likely to be inspired by the natural landscape.

Kerr noted that one of the most important differences between Icelanders and people from the United States and European countries is “extreme differences in family life.” They found that relationships between couples are remarkably egalitarian, and women’s creative output is well-supported. And while the institution of marriage is not a priority (only 30 percent of Icelandic people are married), family life and caring for children are central to adulthood.

Both in schools and at home, it’s common practice to give children the space for play and exploration, which “encouraged both imagination and the creative process,” the study found. In schools, which are free and public, testing is de-emphasized, and students engage in hands-on learning and free-play. Over the past two decades, the dominant curriculum has been innovation education (IE), which originated in Iceland in 1991, and is also used in other parts of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. Students are given opportunities to apply creativity to everyday life, and teachers act as “facilitators rather than lecturers,” the researchers wrote, serving to support students in generating high-quality, novel ideas through their work.

Kerr also pointed to an emphasis on craft and making things by hand. “Every Icelandic male knows how to knit, every female knows how to use tools,” she said. “It seems important to the development of creativity to simply know how to use tools for making and learning at home and school.”

The government can also be credited for fostering creativity, researchers found, as “policies in Iceland encourage the development of creative products,” like public art commissions for street artists. Interviewees noted, however, that the government’s support might be “impeding more radical expressions of creativity,” given their political motives.

The less hierarchical society also enables greater creativity, Kerr’s team found. For one, an online phone book enables creatives to reach out to peers or leading artists, as well as local officials and business professionals, to discuss projects and collaborations. “I think that’s especially important to artists—not only can they get in touch with each other but opinion-makers and promoters,” Kerr said. “If you have a rock band, you can get bookings, you can get reviewers to come and watch you, it’s not that hard to reach out.”

What It Means

“World Light – The Life and Death of an Artist”, 2015. Ragnar Kjartansson "Ragnar Kjartansson" at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC

The greatest learnings from the study, researchers recognized, are in terms of educational opportunities for fostering creativity among children and young adults. Schools in Iceland are particularly key to the creative community, not only in providing children with designated space for creativity, but also in implementing the promising approach of the IE curriculum.

Research concluded, though, that a great deal of emphasis should be placed on the generous, social safety net that Icelanders enjoy. They summed this up with a quote from an Icelandic immigrant who collaborated on the study: “Never underestimate what knowing you will always have food, shelter, childcare, and education will do for your creativity.”

from Artsy News

[missboomissquick]

One of the film critics that I find most useful is, of all people, Leonard Maltin, the bespectacled, avuncular cinema scribe who has made a mint with his ubiquitous Movie Guide. This shallow, moralistic “critic” can always be relied upon to give many of my favorite movies a “BOMB” rating, or better yet, one-and-a-half stars out of four, the former at least raising his outrage to a certain dramatic pitch, the latter being merely dismissive and condescending. While he has given such arguable masterpieces as Salo, Querelle, The Driver’s Seat and Mandingo the BOMB, he reserves his one-and-a-half star designation for films such as Caligula, Star 80, Cruising, That Cold Day in the Park, von Trier’s The Idiots, Scorsese’s New York, New York, The Brown Bunny, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession. What most of these films have in common is what Maltin would describe as a “sordid” or “demeaning” representation of sexuality or, more accurately, investigations into morally ambiguous territory within the realms of fetish, sexual obsession and transgression. If Maltin gives it *½, you know it has to be good, or at least pretty damned interesting.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), one of Maltin’s 1.5 star specials, has to be one of the most audacious and fascinating movies of the seventies. Despite (or, more to the point, because of) its Restricted rating, as a teenager I snuck into the movie theater to watch it multiple times, and it rocked my world. It was the first movie poster I put on my bedroom wall (much to my parents’ consternation), spurring my sexual imagination, my budding homosexuality, and my identification with complex, unapologetically sexual female characters in a profound and lasting way. The film has a murky and somewhat mysterious reputation, praised at the time of its release for Diane Keaton’s fearless performance, and doing good box office, but dismissed in some circles (like Maltin’s) as tawdry and exploitative. I eagerly bought it when it was released on VHS, but astonishingly it has never been officially released on DVD or Blu-ray. Some sources attribute this to music rights (the soundtrack is stellar, including classic songs by Donna Summer, Marlene Shaw, Thelma Houston, and many more); others say that Tom Berenger has tried to keep it under wraps (a shame if true, as it’s one of his best performances). Whatever the reason, it’s almost fitting that such a complex and transgressive film has been suppressed.

What strikes me first about rewatching Goodbar (now available on YouTube!) is how practically experimental it is in form and narrative style, especially in comparison to contemporary Hollywood’s slavish capitulation to conventional narrative form and formulaic content. The opening montage of color street shots, including flash-forwards of Keaton in her milieu of porn theaters and seedy bars, is immediately followed by a black-and-white still montage (photos by Kathy Fields, daughter of the film’s producer, Freddie Fields) set to an overture of the soundtrack music, for the opening credit sequence. (Both Goodbar and Cruising, a kind of gay counterpart to Goodbar that came out two years later, had trailers composed of black-and-white still photo montages, something that would be unheard of today.) The director of the film, Richard Brooks, who also adapted the screenplay from Judith Rossner’s pulp novel of the same name, came out of the tradition of classic Hollywood (he directed such seminal films as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry and In Cold Blood), but here he was clearly influenced by the deconstructive and fractured narrative and formal techniques of seventies Hollywood, which was influenced itself by underground and experimental cinema, B-movie chic, and even pornography, a genre that, after the sexual revolution, had a certain forbidden cachet. Goodbar veers between classic technique (rear-screen projection, artificial street sets and lighting – Manhattan as depicted in Goodbar at times almost looks like Kubrick’s studio recreation of it in Eyes Wide Shut) and more modern formal flourishes – location shots, jarring montage, fragmented images, achronological editing, etc. (Brooks’ excessive and highly symbolic use of mirrors in the movie almost gives Altman a run for his money.) The old and new schools of Hollywood clash in Goodbar, with spectacular and disturbing results.

What better actor, then, than Diane Keaton to portray Goodbar‘s main character, Theresa Dunn? (The novel and film are based on the true-life story of Roseann Quinn, a first-grade teacher of deaf children who cruised Manhattan’s dive bars seeking anonymous sexual partners and recreational drugs until she was brutally stabbed to death in her bed in 1973.) Straddling old-school Hollywood glamour as Woody Allen’s main muse and playing Al Pacino’s love interest Kay in The Godfather films (in Goodbar, Theresa reads The Godfather in one of the bars she frequents), Keaton also signified a new kind of female star, independent, liberated, and sexually assertive, wearing men’s clothes and putting her career first in Annie Hall, for example, released the same year as Goodbar. (In several scenes, like the one in which she accidentally drops the phone receiver into the toilet, Keaton actually becomes Annie Hall.) The film is told completely from Theresa’s point of view, showing us her fantasies and desires with dogged subjectivity (Keaton is virtually in every scene in the movie, save for several in which her murderer is introduced).

To say that Goodbar is an obsessive and symbolically overdetermined film would be an understatement: the film compulsively reiterates themes, visual motifs and parallel narratives, a relentless and repetitive reiteration of ideas that lends that film the aspect of a Freudian dream landscape, a baroque, Boschian sequence of fantasies, projections and illusions. (Fantasy sequences often start out as “false narratives,” initially perceived as a progression of the actual narrative, only to be revealed ultimately as merely morbid or sexually transgressive daydreams.) The first third of the film, before Theresa hits the bars in earnest, is slightly more conventional, but still plays with subjective and objective reality. The fractured fantasy motif is introduced when she throws herself in front of a car driven by the self-absorbed college professor who just jilted her (“I can’t stand the company of a woman right after I’ve fucked her,” he says, one of many memorable lines in the film), and then has her breast kissed by the emergency doctor (Brian Dennehy!) who tries to seduce her on the way to the operating table. Theresa gets sexually aroused when she visits her sex-kitten sister, Catherine (a deliciously self-referential Tuesday Weld, garnering her one and only Oscar nomination here) and finds her watching 16mm porn films as part of a swinging foursome. (“You like home movies? Let’s watch the kiddies play,” says Weld’s female companion.) Theresa smokes grass and marvels at the pornographic glass mobile hanging in her sister’s pad. (It later becomes the major symbol of her own pornographic imagination.) She moves into the dingy basement apartment below her sister, and begins practicing sign language in the bathroom mirror, then masturbating with a pillow. Her life begins its ceaseless tide between day and night, light and dark, respectability and licentiousness, morality and immorality: first-grade teacher for the deaf by day, with her hair pulled back and wearing glasses; unbridled, hedonistic adventuress by night, letting her hair down, sans glasses. As her future lover and cokehead gigolo, Tony (Richard Gere), will succinctly put it, “Teacher of little kids cruising crummy bars. Jesus Christ, no wonder this country’s all screwed up!”

But the film is not judgmental of Theresa’s sexual voraciousness and pursuit of altered states or reality. Quite the contrary, it celebrates her libidinous drive and portrays her as happy and content with her life, except on the occasions when it starts to interfere with her day job. This has a lot to do with Keaton’s startling, orgasmic performance. For the only actor who refused to disrobe in the original Broadway production of Hair, Keaton certainly rises to the occasion here. Showing her breasts unselfconsciously, lifting up her skirt to expose her ass after she straddles her professor lover, she gives a performance of rare sexual frankness and sensuality. When the film really kicks in, following Theresa to a variety of smoky, crowded bars, scoring coke and dancing with the multicultural clientele, you get a genuine sense of the character’s carnal exuberance and exhilaration. (Novelist Rossner was reputedly not happy with this sanguine representation of Theresa’s sexual liberation.) All this is set in counterpoint to her strict Irish Catholic family life, with her father (Richard Kiley) constantly judging and berating her, the only part of the movie that tends to fall into cliché. (Her lower back scar from a congenital disease becomes the main symbol of her family’s dysfunction.) The scene in which she is confronted with an imposing nun in the subway sums it up neatly, although it’s not at all clear whether it’s intended as reality or a fantasy projection of her guilt.

In terms of reflecting the era and all of its sociological and cultural underpinnings, Goodbar is a unique document of the post-sixties sexual revolution, reconfigured as a neo-noir. Theresa Dunn, and Keaton’s interpretation of her, is undeniably feminist – living happily on her own, eschewing marriage, monogamy and reproduction (in one scene she tells a doctor to fix it permanently so she will never have kids). But the film also gently lampoons feminism, as per the scene in which Theresa does isometric exercises to increase her bust size (a trend of the era) while watching Women’s Lib protest footage on TV. Theresa’s idea of feminism is much more daring and politically incorrect than the traditional Second Wave: she fantasizes about being a hooker turning tricks on the street early on in the film, and later she is amused when she starts to inadvertently get paid by one-night-stands who mistake her for a prostitute. She makes no judgment when Catherine tells her she’s found a good “safecracker” (abortionist), and she takes full control of her own reproductive destiny to the point of rejecting it altogether. Quinn, the real-life Theresa, was murdered less than 10 years after IUDs and oral contraceptives became popular, which changed the course of female sexuality forever. New York City was also a completely different animal in the seventies, with an estimated 40,000 prostitutes working, three times as many murders as today, and a very high incidence of crack and heroin use. (Quinn’s apartment was only a couple of blocks from the infamous Needle Park, a shooting locale for junkies immortalized in Jerry Schatzberg’s 1972 The Panic in Needle Park, starring Al Pacino.) The scenes in which Theresa smokes grass and snorts cocaine are shot in a hazy, romantic style, capturing the sensuousness and pleasurableness of the drugs that makes them so popular in the first place. In one extraordinary scene, when Theresa is about to try cocaine for the first time, she asks Tony the Gigolo what it does to you. “It makes America beautiful,” he replies.

Although the film is undoubtedly weighed more toward a celebration of female sexuality and hedonism, inevitably Theresa’s pursuit of pure pleasure catches up to her, as it must in all Hollywood movies. However, the film doesn’t particularly moralize about her lifestyle, but rather presents an explanation for the forces that ultimately destroy her: the impotence, sexual repression, and, more to the point, homosexual repression of her male lovers. The film presents three main male figures in Theresa’s life: James (the great William Atherton), the good Catholic boy and welfare worker favored by her father who helps her get a hearing aid for a poor black deaf girl in her class; Tony (early vintage Richard Gere), the coke-fueled American gigolo with a mother complex; and Gary (a very sexualized Tom Berenger), the repressed homosexual hustler who ultimately murders her. Each one is presented as her potential killer, their psychoses developed in parallel narrative threads.

James, acting as a surrogate for her father, represents the ideals of family and normalcy, and yet he is also portrayed as having, like her father, a violent temper (in one scene he tears down her pornographic glass mobile in a rage): an impotent, sexually repressed monster of sorts. In order to get her into bed, he tells her a made-up story about how as a child he witnessed his mother humiliating his father for not being able to get it up, and him beating her for it, which is followed by the extraordinary scene in which Theresa, when she discovers he’s wearing a condom, laughs hysterically and blows it up like a balloon, asking, “Is this supposed to protect you or me?” She humiliates and rejects him for his conventional sexuality, resulting in him becoming her stalker. He finally confronts her with the traditional, moral point of view: “What’s here when you come home? Anything that means anything to you? Family, a dog, a cat? Friends? Do you have one woman friend you can talk to? Last election did you even fucking vote?” James’ reinforcement of the status quo and his likeness to her father repulses her. You can easily imagine that he could kill her for it, especially when she suggests that perhaps he isn’t even really into women sexually at all.

Richard Gere, as the hustler Vietnam war vet Tony, gives one of the most electric performances of the seventies, in the role that probably made him a star. Theresa meets Tony when she witnesses him trying to steal money from a purse on the bar (later Theresa herself starts to shoplift as part of her own rebellion), and subsequently takes him home for a one-nighter. In the scene that blew my mind when I saw the film as a teenager, Gere, wearing nothing but an open blue shirt and white jock strap, chugs from a bottle of champagne and does pushups, his muscular ass clearly visible. Then, clad only in the jock, he does a frenetic dance in the dark with a green fluorescent switchblade, which ends with him mock-stabbing Theresa, one of many foreshadowings in the film of her grisly demise. Later in the film, after Theresa rejects him, he simulates a premature ejaculation with a bottle of beer, symbolizing his sexual shortcomings. “You and my mother: the two biggest cunts in the world,” he tells her, his mother complex also suggesting sexual impotence. In another mind-blowing scene, Catherine rushes into Theresa’s apartment on New Year’s Eve with a masked companion who stabs her with a fake knife. “Your thing is limp,” says her sister, to which the man replies, “Story of my life.” Theresa also accuses another random trick of being queer after he takes her to a gay bar. “Me, queer?” he says. “Jesus, I’m a married man. I have two kids and a very expensive mistress!” All the men in Goodbar are putting up a front of being a prime specimen of heterosexual normalcy, a façade that Theresa sees through like a seer. (In Greek mythology, Theresa is the blind seer who warns Narcissus of his ultimate demise.)

As in the real-life story, Theresa is ultimately murdered by a gay male who is wracked with guilt and in denial about his homosexuality. Whether consciously or not, Tom Berenger plays the sexy murderer as a cross between Rocky in the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Helmut Berger in The Damned. In the scene in which he is bashed by a group of homophobes (that hop out of a hearse!) on New Year’s Eve, he violently careens around in a jock strap, blond wig and feather boa, blaming his sugar daddy for turning him into a faggot. When Theresa picks him up at a bar (she intends him to be her last trick, giving up her wicked ways as a New Year’s resolution), she doesn’t realize that he’s an ex-con with a violent temper, and a self-loathing homosexual. (“In my neighborhood,” he tells her, “if you didn’t fight, you were a fruit. In prison, if you didn’t fight, you spread ass!”) Like Narcissus, Theresa has finally found her Nemesis. (The film is full of double imagery, from the Dorian Grey drawing of herself that appears on her wall, to the constant mirror imagery, to the various dopplegangers that faux-stab her throughout the movie.) This time, when her love object can’t get it up and starts to masturbate furiously, she tells him he doesn’t have to prove anything. The consequences are fatal. “Prove? Prove what? I don’t got to prove nothing to you. You think I’m a flaming faggot!” What follows is one of the most harrowing, dark and disturbing rape/murder scenes ever to appear in a mainstream movie. In his rage, Gary inadvertently knocks over the strobe light that James had given her as a birthday present, turning the horrible act into a lurid, cinematic spectacle. (The symbolism couldn’t be thicker: earlier James had told Theresa he bought her the strobe because it reminded him of her: light and dark, on and off, now I see you, now I don’t.) In a gruesome display of the return of the repressed, he violently rapes her while plunging the phallic knife repeatedly into her chest. No matter how many times I watch the film, this visceral scene moves me to tears. Theresa, who has been portrayed as the strong, intelligent, liberated woman, has her light brutally extinguished by the forces of sexual repression that mangle and destroy the male egos of her lovers. It’s not so much a cautionary tale against female promiscuity and hedonism, but rather one against those who deny their own desires and project their rage and frustration onto the Other.

via Talkhouse //