#like the TWO earliest surviving operas being about them?

[monotonous-minutia]

I spent like a week working on this like it was some kind of school project.

anyway here's a thing I made.

[ofoceansandtombsanew]

one step closer

cw. f!reader (no pronouns or specified anatomy), pre-canon, pre-relationship, childhood friends, slightly(?) obsessive behaviors, slight angst

pairing. tartaglia x reader

synopsis. your mothers always swore one of their children would marry one day, making them both officially sisters. but for now, they'll take ajax escorting you from mondstadt to sumeru to pursue your education

notes. a christmas present for my good buddy @hash-slinging-slasher-trash. an unexpected comradery was built up between us both this year, so let's have fun in the new year! they recently got into genshin this year and, unsurprisingly, they've been bagged by mr. 11th fatui harbinger himself hehehe

"You didn't have to come all the way here for this."

"And break my promise to my beloved aunt? Perish the thought!" Ajax gasps aghast, clutching his invisible pearls. "Besides, why would I miss a road trip with my future wife? The two of us. Alone." Playful blue eyes glance your way accompanied by an equally playful smile. You give him a pointed look and Ajax raises a hand defensively. The red insignia pinned to his shirt glints in the sunlight at the movement. "I kid, I kid. Just a joke. We can save that stuff later."

"Or never," you reply without missing a beat.

"I draw the line at waiting until after our wedding night."

"You're incorrigible," you groan.

Ajax can only laugh, eyes closed and grin wide. When he's like this, he's like the Ajax you remember from when you were children. The boy who unabashedly declared he'd marry you in one of your earliest memories. Your mothers were only too happy to indulge him, long since having their own jokes about how one day their children would marry and make them officially sisters.

That had been how many years ago now?

Too long ago to recall. You simply know it had been the first time Ajax's family had come to visit your own in Mondstadt. It became a yearly tradition from before either of you were born for your families to visit one another.

According to your mothers, they became friends your mother's first trip to Snezhnaya. You'd been raised on a healthy diet of your mother's travels, your mother telling them to you much like they were old folktales. She told you about the various shades of the thunder sakura of Inazuma. How she spelunked in Natlan with a few friends you can't remember the name of. Even regaled you with dramatic stories of Fontaine's Opera Epiclese where she witnessed trial and opera alike and what she swears was a love story bubbling under the surface between the Hydro Archon and her Iudex.

All of those stories paled in comparison to her most harrowing tale of surviving a month long blizzard that ended with less importantly, your father, and more importantly, your mother's now lifelong friend.

That was all took for their future families to be intertwined and for Ajax to be a present as constant in your as the bards of your homeland.

A summer in Mondstadt here, a winter in Snezhnaya there.

A Ludi Harpastum there, a Krsnik Noc here.

You distinctly remember Kaeya's first Windblume Festival after the Ragnvindr's took him in. He was more quiet and would cling to the figures he found most familiar, you included. Ajax hated it. Unfortunately his complaints and intense nature only led to your coddling Kaeya more, scolding the ginger for being insensitive. Presently, Kaeya and Ajax's relationship has improved little.

Ajax has been there for many a life event.

Now here Ajax is, your official escort on the first day of your own journey. It was the only way your mother would relax about your finally leaving the nest. You find it absurd your mother could travel the whole of Teyvat with nothing but a knapsack slung over her shoulders and a pack of cigarettes but Celestia forbid you decide to do the same. It isn't even exactly the same!

At Ajax's insistence, your things were already waiting for you in Sumeru. "My men can take it ahead," he boasted proudly, reminding you of his recent promotion. "It's no problem at all, honest. Save your money!" Your protests were promptly ignored, your mother more than happy to save on the mora she would have had to spend mailing it otherwise.

"Ajax, I'm serious," you remind him for the millionth time as the Dawn Winery slowly but surely grows more and more distant. Even with Diluc and Kaeya's strained relationship, they both insisted on having a celebratory breakfast before early in the morning before you left for Liyue. You wanted your quest to be on foot as much as possible before boarding a boat that would take you from Liyue Harbor to Port Ormos. "I don't want you guys in uniform when you move my things in. I don't want to be known as the Fatui girl at the dorms."

"Relax, relax," his words due to little to soothe you. "Seriously," his tone shifts from impish to straight-laced. "I know better than anyone how the Fatui is viewed abroad. I know you worked hard to get into the Akademiya, so I don't want to ruin that for you."

You hold each other's gaze for a moment longer before you sigh in relief. "Thank you." Another beat passes before you say it again, "seriously, thank you. You didn't have to take time off to come all the way to Mondstadt. And it means a lot to Mom too. You being here helped her calm down a lot."

His lips relax into a smile that's small, "of course I'd be here for something like this. It's a big deal! You've wanted to go to the Akademiya since we were kids. Is Erna going to be there or is she still in Fontaine researching water vein flowers or whatever?"

You nod excitedly, "yeah, she said she wants to show me around when I get there. She's gonna meet us at Port Ormos." Another piece of the puzzle in helping your mother acclimate to your studying in another country. "She's only staying for the week though."

Erna, a cousin of yours had gotten in years ago leaving little Springvale behind to see the world beyond the wind-caressed hills you grew up. Busy as she'd become after getting into the Amurta Darshan, when she was able to come home it was her turn to tell you stories about a world you couldn't imagine for yourself.

The fanciful cafes with their majestic fountains, the smell of spices of a place called Treasures street. It's hard to believe you'll finally be seeing it for yourself after so long.

"Think she'll be happy to see me?" Ajax asks suddenly, observing you carefully as you

Your cheeks hurt as your smile becomes something forced. "Well," begin.

Ajax barks out a laugh immediately, "you don't have to lie, I know she's not happy I'm in the Fatui." He sighs as the last of his laughter leaves him, nonchalant and unsurprised. You wonder, not for the first time, what would be enough to make Ajax the young man shocked or hurt. Considering how you heard his enlisting in the Fatui at the young age of 14 had gone, you doubt anyone's reaction to his being an agent can get under his skin. "Not that Auntie is thrilled either. I suppose these are the struggles of those in the pursuit of strength."

You refrain from affirming his suspicions. Your mother isn't thrilled but she refrained from expressing the opinion knowing she had little to stand on when her former husband had been a Fatui agent once upon a time. "If that boy's own father couldn't keep him from enlisting, I doubt anything I say will make him change his mind." The next time you saw your old friend after his enlisting, he surprised you for a visit when work led him to the land of freedom.

For the second time in the past ten minutes, your eyes look at his the red insignia pinned on his shirt. He's a lieutenant now.

He's moved up the ranks faster than you can blink. It's expected, you believe, with how many of his letters recounting his many assignments and achievements he'd sent.

"Staring at your beloved so shamelessly?" Cheeks warm, you push him aside. The movement does little to make him budge and he laughs when you try again. "Sorry, snookums, that's not going to work on me anymore. Don't let my acknowledgment stop you. Stare away! I'm pretty popular, y'know. Someone'll steal me off the market if you're not careful! We should have the wedding the moment we get to Sumeru! Why wait actually, we should turn back now and head to the Church!"

Your eyes roll into the depths of the Abyss, "we're not going back to the City for a wedding. We're not even dating."

"Yet."

"And I wasn't staring at you," you ignore his jest. "I was just looking at your badge. You have a new one every time I see you." A new insignia with a new scar or two or dozen to match. He has a story for each one, remembering every occasion he's earned a battle scar with crystal clear memory.

You remember how he's the same boy whose father would take the both of you ice fishing, telling you stories of heroes. Stories of his own adventures before he settled down to have a family. You never had the patience for fishing but you loved that man's tales.

The hobby has lost its magic since your friend became a soldier for the Cryo Archon. Ice fishing is simply another form in which he trains, reflecting on battles past as he endures the bitter cold. Now there are no more stories.

Ajax gestures at your the chain around your neck where your Anemo vision hangs with pride. "It's a badge of honor, much like the one you have yourself."

It's not quite the same, you want to say. "We're already almost to Liyue," you announce instead, pointing at the small bridge in the distance. "It's hard to believe it's always been so close to the Winery." You remember how it was a test of courage when you were younger. Diluc leading the charge, he dared the rest of you to see who could walk the furthest into Liyue. He'd always been the winner, you, Jean, Kaeya and Barbara unable to match Diluc's bravery.

He's a far cry from the rambunctious troublemaker he used to be.

"One step closer," Ajax notes warmly, accepting your change in topics with ease. "There's a tea shop at the Stone Gate you'll like called Pop's Teas. We should sit there a while, you can see the whole of the Dihua Marsh and the inn we'll be staying at."

That brings a genuine smile to your face, "I look forward to seeing it."

A thinly veiled comfort of silence falls over you both grass and gravel crunch underfoot. Your hands swing between you both and from the corner of your eye, you see blue peering at you. The back of your hand burns and you ignore the feeling swiftly.

It's Ajax, simply Ajax.

Soon enough after you arrive in Sumeru, you'd be going your separate paths again. You studying the stars, him on whatever harrowing assignment he is given. A far, far cry from the children you once were.

"They're going to make me a Harbinger."

The silence shatters much like ice and you blink, blood suddenly as cold as the waters of your friend's home country. "What?"

He says it as casually as one addressing the state of the weather. You halt your steps right at the edge of the bridge that connects the land between Mondstadt and Liyue, staring at Ajax's back. "This isn't ambition talking either," he halts, chuckling as he turns to face you. "It's official. Once I go back to the motherland, there'll be a ceremony and everything. You're the first I've told."

"A Harbinger," you repeat incredulously. "A Harbinger?"

The young man nods, "the youngest in the history of the Fatui." It's said with subdued pride, only a dash of satisfaction. "Of course, this was all part of the plan to conquering this world so it's not that big a deal. I'm just one step closer."

You open your mouth only to close and open it again. Your hands clasp together, fingers fidgeting as you search for the correct words to say. Congratulations? Wow, you really will be wearing another badge the next time I see you. You're really moving up the ranks!

"Not happy for me," it isn't a question as Ajax observes your furrowed brows and hunched shoulders. You lower your head, finding a nearby cryo slime bouncing on the water's edge grounding. "It's alright, you don't have to be. It doesn't change anything between us."

"When is it going to be enough, Ajax?" Your question is quiet. "What happened to you?"

'Ajax went missing for three days this month. He had the entire household in a tizzy, that boy of mine!'

You remember receiving that letter after you recently turned 15 from Ajax's mother.

Ajax has wrote you religiously since he could hold a pen. That was the one month he didn't.

The letters that followed have never quite been the same. He's never been quite the same. His eyes are duller than you remember. His lust for adventure had turned bloodthirsty.

How could someone change so much in three days?

"This has always been me," Ajax tells you without much else of a reaction. "You know me, I've always wanted to go on an adventure."

"An adventure, yes, but never this," you shoot back, fervently. Back then, Ajax happily brandished a wooden sword and would declare he'd be the world's greatest adventurer. He'd join the Adventurer's Guild and make a name for himself, fight a dragon and give you all the mora he gained. "I just," you pinch your sinuses.

The only sounds between you are ones from nature.

The croak of a frog, the gushing of a waterfall.

Ajax breaks the silence, head on as he always has been. "We're still friends, aren't we?"

You look up at the man, looking at you with eyes a mixture of familiar and unknown. You used to be able to read them as easily as breathing. Sometimes you feel as if you still can. That he's still your Ajax, face round with innocence and wonder. Now he is as mysterious as the heavens themselves.

Still you release a breath and nod, "of course we are. You're still Ajax."

A smile spreads across his face again and he looks familiar again. "Yeah," with that sorted holds his hand out for you much like a knight. He always said he'd be yours, you recall as you accept his offer like you're children again. "I'm still me."

[tontonico]

The Meaning of Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey’s memoir opens with the great line: “I refuse to acknowledge time, famously so.” As if to establish the rules of the book, then add, with a toss of hair, but you knew that.

Most readers of The Meaning of Mariah Carey, which the record-smashing songstress wrote with Michaela Angela Davis, probably already did know that (and are happy to stick to Mariah’s anti-schedule), but there’s plenty in the 337-page volume that will surprise even the most devoted Lambs. Most surprising of all, though, is perhaps how elusive the chanteuse remains even when she makes herself so vulnerable.

She may not keep time, but it’s well known that Carey can keep rhythm, and that’s a more accurate measure of how she tells the story of her life. While the memoir’s four acts are chronological, the short chapters within them aren’t necessarily, and her storytelling is most effective in these distinct, vivid anecdotes rather than thoroughly contextualized narrative. Isn’t that the way we remember things, anyway?

The book’s first and best section, “Wayward Child,” relies the most on these well-chosen vignettes, each as piercing and specific as a song, altogether giving an impressionistic rendering of her fraught childhood. (She punctuates her memories, too, with her lyrics that were inspired by them, and the Audible version of the book, read by Carey, contains musical interludes.) The daughter of a Black father and Irish mother, Carey grew up with a brother and sister who were older and darker (in their energies even more than their complexions, she observes) than her, in a home — actually many homes, adding to the instability — where she never knew safety. The earliest childhood memory she shares is of cops breaking up a brutal fight between her father and brother when she was 3 years old; among the last is Mariah’s 20-year-old sister allegedly trying to pimp her out at age 12.

Her childhood is filled with danger, trauma, violence, fear — and music. A mostly informal education from her opera-singer mother and her friends comes so organically to the life of a little girl who had so little else, it reads like destiny that she and music found each other amid such turmoil. And it’s what takes her, of course, to the next phase in her life, in a sharp switch from want to abundance, neglect to suffocating control.

Carey’s account of her marriage to Tommy Mottola — who, for example, once screamed at a dinner party that Thanksgiving was canceled because Carey had expressed admiration for an artist in whom Mottola was uninterested — and their life in the mansion she called “Sing Sing” is harrowing. Mercifully, it overlaps with her emergence as an artist, and her writing about her life in music, while less shocking than many of the personal details, offers great insight and behind-the-scenes tidbits as well as displaying her sincere devotion to the art form (and to her fans, whom she shouts out repeatedly).

Carey’s voice is as distinctive to read as it is to hear: She addresses her reader as “dahling” or “baby” here and there, and her constant, flexible use of the word “festive” reveals it to be a deeply held personal ideal rather than just a vaguely pleasant adjective. Even in describing her lowest lows (and there are some bad ones), the writing is never austere; like her narrative structure, Carey’s prose has rhythm and high drama, savoring moments and details with melismatic indulgence.

The singer explains elements of her larger-than-life image — including some of her famous “diva” behaviors — by explicitly linking them to pain; for one, she often has photo shoots with voluminously blowing hair because she so desperately longed for the flowing waves she saw in shampoo commercials as a child, while her own textured tresses were constantly tangled, forsaken by the adults around her who didn’t know how to care for it.

That untamed hair is emblematic not only of the extreme neglect of her childhood, but the racial otherness that she has felt throughout her life — and that she expresses in some of the memoir’s most perceptive, affecting passages. As a child, her awareness of racism develops in cruel waves (there are three different, and differently devastating, stories of people she knows finding out her father is Black); as an adult, she has constantly had to assert her own racial identity in an industry (and with a first husband) that tried to erase her Blackness. She reacts to the word “urban” every time she brings it up.

The last three decades become somewhat muddled in the telling as her career becomes richer and her adult life more complicated, making it harder to prioritize — not to mention that, once she’s famous, there are publicly known pieces to correct or gaps to fill in. She can’t disregard time in these later sections, where everything needs more context, and The Meaning loses some clarity for it. (In an error that speaks to this confusion, one paragraph appears twice, 40 pages apart; it somehow feels appropriate, however, that the passage is a reflection upon the delayed triumph of Glitter.)

So, too, does it become more conspicuous when she leaves things out, like the bipolar diagnosis she revealed two years ago (“because I don’t feel like there’s a mental-illness discussion to be had,” she told Vulture last month). She is also better at starting stories than finishing them (a habit one could attribute to her being an Aries, which she mentions repeatedly). This applies to the memoir as a whole but was most disappointing in the case of her romance with Derek Jeter, the beginning of which makes for some of the book’s dreamiest, most hopeful moments.

It’s hard to begrudge her these omissions, though, when she’s recalled such great suffering and even greater survival. She’s already explained how pieces of her persona are armor, and in which moments she forged them; let her keep some stories. They belong to her.

In an early anecdote, the police are called to little Mariah’s home after a violent scene. “One of the cops, looking down at me but speaking to another cop beside him, said, ‘If this kid makes it, it’ll be a miracle,’” Carey recalls. “And that night, I became less of a kid and more of a miracle.” By the end of the compelling if imperfect Meaning of Mariah Carey, you believe it. She’s a miracle, a memoirist, a singer, a songwriter — the girl’s got range. Famously so. 

[militant-holy-knight]

In light of President Obama’s recent remarks comparing the brutality of the Islamic State to the Crusades, it might be time to take a fresh look at those events. Were they really the one-sided Dark Ages barbarism we have been taught? Were they an early manifestation of Western imperialism and global conquest?

In his landmark book, “God’s Battalions” (HarperOne 2009), Baylor University social sciences professor Rodney Stark suggests otherwise. It is a well-researched chronicle, including 639 footnotes and a bibliography of about 300 other works, yet reads like an adventure story full of military strategy and political intrigue.

What Prompted the Crusades

He begins in the final years of Mohammed and describes how a newly united Arab people swept through (Zoroastrian) Persia and the (Orthodox Christian) Byzantine-  controlled areas of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa. (Byzantine refers to the Greek-speaking eastern remainder of the Roman Empire.) Eventually Arabs took over control of the Mediterranean islands, most of Spain, and the southern part of Italy, and even reached as far as 150 miles outside of Paris before being turned back by the Franks, or early French.

The Muslims were brutal in their conquered territories. They gave pagans a choice of converting to Islam or being killed or enslaved. Jews and Christians (other People of the Book) were usually but not always treated somewhat better, and allowed to retain their beliefs but under conditions of Sharia subjugation. But the Muslim-held territories were not monolithic. Stark writes:

‘Perhaps the single most remarkable feature of the Islamic territories was the almost ceaseless internal conflict; the intricate plots, assassinations, and betrayals form a lethal soap opera. North Africa was frequently torn by rebellions and intra-Islamic wars and conquests. Spain was a patchwork of constantly feuding Muslim regimes that often allied themselves with Christians against one another.’

Not surprisingly, there was intense Christian resistance and determination to take back lost territories. Especially effective were the Normans and the Franks in Spain and Italy.

The Golden Middle Ages Belonged to Europeans

Western scholars have often characterized this clash of cultures as an Islamic Golden Age versus a European Dark Age, but Stark demolishes this as a myth. He says the best of the Islamic culture was appropriated from the people Muslims conquered—the Greeks, Jews, Persians, Hindus, and even from heretical Christian sects such as the Copts and Nestorians. He quotes E.D. Hunt as writing, “the earliest scientific book in the language of Islam [was a] treatise on medicine by a Syrian Christian priest in Alexandria translated into Arabic by a Persian Jewish physician.” Stark writes that Muslim naval fleets were built by Egyptian shipwrights, manned by Christian crews, and often captained by Italians.  When Baghdad was built, the caliph “entrusted the design of the city to a Zoroastrian and a Jew.” Even the “Arabic” numbering system was Hindu in origin.

And, while it is true that the Arabs embraced the writings of Plato and Aristotle, Stark comments,

‘However, rather than treat these works as attempts by Greek scholars to answer various questions, Muslin intellectuals quickly read them in the same way they read the Qur’an – as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction…. Attitudes such as these prevented Islam from taking up where the Greeks had left off in their pursuit of knowledge.’

Meanwhile, back in Europe was an explosion of technology that made ordinary people far richer than any people had ever been. It began with the development of collars and harnesses that allowed horses to pull plows and wagons rather than oxen, doubling the speed at which people could till fields. Plows were improved, iron horseshoes invented, wagons given brakes and swivel axels, and larger draft horses were bred. All this along with the new idea of crop rotation led to a massive improvement in agricultural productivity that in turn led to a much healthier, larger, and stronger population.

Technology was also improving warfare with the invention of the crossbow and chain mail. Crossbows were far more accurate and deadly than conventional archery, and could be fired with very little training. Chain mail was almost impervious to the kind of arrows in use throughout the world. Mounted knights were fitted with high-back saddles and stirrups that enabled them to use more force in charging an opponent, and much larger horses were bred as chargers, giving the knights a height advantage over enemies. Better military tactics made European armies much more lethal. Stark writes:

It is axiomatic in military science that cavalry cannot succeed against well-armed and well-disciplined infantry formations unless they greatly outnumber them…. When determined infantry hold their ranks, standing shoulder to shoulder to present a wall of shields from which they project a thicket of long spears butted in the ground, cavalry charges are easily turned away; the horses often rear out of control and refuse to meet the spears.

In contrast, Muslim warriors were almost exclusively light cavalry, riding faster but lighter horses bareback with little armor, few shields, and using swords and axes. Their biggest advantage was their use of camels, which made them much more mobile than foot soldiers and gave them the ability to swoop in and out of the desert areas to attack poorly defended cities.

Muslims Slaughter, Rape, and Pillage

These differences provided Crusader armies with huge advantages, but what would prompt hundreds of thousand Europeans to leave their homes and travel 2,500 miles to engage an enemy is a desert kingdom—especially after the Muslim conquest of Europe had been turned back?

In 638 Jerusalem surrendered to Muslim invaders, and mass murders of Christian pilgrims and monks became commonplace.

There had been long-festering concern about the fate of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. After his conversion to Christianity in the early 300s, the Roman Emperor Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of what was believed to be Jesus’ tomb, and other churches in Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. These sites prompted a growing number of European pilgrims to visit the Holy Land, including Saint Jerome, who lived in Bethlehem for the last 32 years of his life as he translated the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. By the late fifth century, Stark reports, more than 300 hostels and monasteries offered lodging to pilgrims in Jerusalem alone.

But in 638 Jerusalem surrendered to Muslim invaders, and mass murders of Christian pilgrims and monks became commonplace. Stark includes a list of select atrocities in the eight and ninth centuries, but none worse than the some 5,000 German Christians slaughtered by Bedouin robbers in the tenth century.

Throughout this period, control of Palestine was contested by several conflicting Muslim groups. Stark writes, “In 878 a new dynasty was established in Egypt and seized control of the Holy Land from the caliph in Baghdad.” One hundred years later, Tariqu al-Hakim became the sixth caliph of Egypt and initiated an unprecedented reign of terror, not just against Christians but against his own people as well. He burned or pillaged some 30,000 churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the tomb beneath it.

Soon enough, newly converted Turkish tribes came out of the north to seize Persia and Baghdad (by 1045) and press on to Armenia, overrunning the city of Ardzen in 1048, where they murdered all the men, raped the women, and enslaved the children. Next they attacked the Egyptians, in part because the Turks were Orthodox Sunnis and the Egyptians were heretical Shiites. While the Turks did not succeed in overthrowing the Egyptians, they did conquer Palestine, entering Jerusalem in 1071. The Turks promised safety to the residents of Jerusalem if they surrendered the city, but broke this promise and slaughtered the population. They did the same in Ramla, Gaza, Tyre, and Jaffa.

Emperor Alexius Pleads for Help

Finally, they threatened Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Alexius Comnenus wrote to Pope Urban II in 1095, begging for help to turn back the Turks. This was remarkable given the intense hostility between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Perhaps the pope saw an opportunity to unite or at least reduce tensions between the two Christian churches, but he responded with a call to create an army that would go to the Middle East.

Without ongoing support from Europe, the Crusaders could not survive constant attacks from the Muslims.

I am not going to regurgitate all the battles of the Crusades themselves. It is a fascinating history well worth studying in part for its parallels and lessons for today. Let’s just say that the Crusaders were extremely effective militarily, often defeating far larger Muslim armies, despite having traveled some 2,500 miles into an alien desert climate. Their biggest enemies were disease, starvation, and political betrayal. Plus, the Crusades were expensive and home countries grew weary of paying the taxes needed to support them (sound familiar?)

The Crusaders ended up establishing their own kingdoms in the Holy Land, which lasted for about 200 years or, as Stark notes, almost as long as the United States has existed; but without ongoing support from Europe they could not survive constant attacks from the Muslims.

How the Crusades Were Different from Military Action of the Day

So, what to make of all this?

The Crusaders were unique in that they did not seek to plunder or enslave.

Actually, the Crusaders were unique in that they did not seek to plunder or enslave. They didn’t even try to forcibly convert anyone to Christianity. Their sole interest was to protect the pilgrims and Christian holy sites. They sometimes sacked cities that refused to provide food to a hungry army, but they didn’t take riches back to Europe. There were few riches to be found. Rather than exploiting indigenous resources to benefit Europe, Europe sent money and resources to the Middle East. Pilgrims were quite lucrative for host countries, just as tourism is today.

War was a nasty and brutal business at the time, and had been for all of recorded history. Cities fortified themselves as protection against invading armies. A siege of a city meant surrounding the area and cutting off supplies until the population surrendered, often by starving. In the Bible, II Kings 6:24-33 relates the story of the siege of Samaria, in which two starving women agree to kill and eat their sons.

The rule of war at the time was that, if a city surrendered, the population would be spared, but if it resisted and the invading army had to take it by force all the inhabitants would be killed or enslaved. But Stark notes that Muslim armies often violated even this rule—promising sanctuary, then slaughtering the population that surrendered. (Before we get too smug and condescending about the savagery of these ancients, let’s not forget the rocket bombing of London, the firebombing of Dresden, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a mere 70 years ago.)

Muslim armies often promised sanctuary, then slaughtered the population that surrendered.

One way in which Muslim fighters today have advanced over their forebears is that during the Crusades they did not adopt new tactics to counter the technological advantage of the Europeans. They never used crossbows or shielded infantry, even after several hundred years of fighting. Today, Muslim warriors quickly evolve to make the most of Western technology, although they still never seem to develop anything of their own.

An Enduring Clash Between Inquiry and Submission

One final thought on this. As Stark indicates above, there is in too many Muslim countries a sense of obedience that precludes robust debate or new ideas, let alone technological innovation. In his classic, “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman quotes Osama bin Laden as saying,

‘It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had been part of our (Islamic) world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Andalusia. Spain is an infidel country, but its economy is stronger that our economy because the ruler there is accountable. In our countries, there is no accountability or punishment, but there is only obedience to the rulers and prayers of long life for them. (pp. 400-401)’

Friedman confirms that this is based on a 2002 report, the first Arab Human Development Report. This report, written by Arabs, found that Spain had a larger gross domestic product than all 22 Arab states combined!

I think Stark is closer to the mark than bin Laden. The problem is a cultural way of thinking that starts with the Qur’an and the Prophet and emphasizes unquestioning obedience. The very name of the religion, Islam, means “submission.” The thinking of bin Laden that emphasizes punishing poor rulers is a complete misunderstanding how progress is made. European cultures place a high value on questioning everything, even the divinity of Jesus Christ. Certainly there have been exceptions to this, but in the sweep of history it is an unmistakable trait.

So we have perhaps the starkest conflict of worldviews imaginable: on one hand, a robust and virtually unlimited spirit of inquiry, and on the other a fervent dedication to universal obedience and submission. How this plays out is the story of our times.

[loopy777]

Republic city ended up being one of the blandest settlements in avatar, a town withouth a personality, and with a people withouth a culture. If you were rewriting season 1 of korra, what sort of culture would you have given its people, and what changes would you have made to make the city itself feel alive(compared to how ba sing sei, or the northern water captital very much feel like they have their own personalites).

I like what was implied by Republic City in its earliest promotional material, so I’d go with something like a mix of 1930′s Shanghai and Chicago and New York.

As opposed to the fairly clean, modern look of the thing, I’d like a wild, disorganized mix of cultures and buildings and materials in play. It shouldn’t look like a planned city; it should be something that sprang up haphazardly and only over the last decade or two has even really started to really think of itself as a unified city. Roads vary wildly in width and construction material, and aren’t laid out in a grid. A brand new skyscraper is right next to a 50-year-old graffiti-covered Water Tribe pub. The people have been there for enough generations to intermarry and forget their old cultures, but they’re also just arrived after fleeing jailtime back in the old country and need to find a job right now.

There’s also kinds of “Little” neighborhoods that not only evoke the various three nations, but individual areas within them (Little Omashu, Little Whatever That Island Where Aang Had The Dance Party, etc). There should also be a ‘downtown’ section where everybody mixes. That’s where the Probending arena should be. There should be casinos and dance clubs and underground boxing arenas and streets where kids race cars while the cops try to stop them and gilded opera houses and lots of other stuff.

See, the main thing that I think should define Republic City is that it’s the city of the world- it has a little bit of everything in it. I don’t want it to be the shining utopia that Aang and Zuko built; I want it to be the experiment that wound up mutating and growing beyond their wildest hopes and it was all they could do to keep it from collapsing in on itself. It should be More. More decadent, more corrupt, more crime-ridden, more colorful, more compassionate, more enthusiastic, more fun, more dangerous. You think you’re tough because you survived in Ba Sing Se’s lower ring? Ha! They just have poverty and dark alleyways where you’ll be robbed at knifepoint; the Dai Li keep things quiet, there. In Republic City, you could be beaten to death for walking into the wrong neighborhood and the poor people eat the candle nubs they steal from their millionaire employers. But in Republic City, you could be begging in the street one morning and an eccentric wealthy banker will buy you a house because he remembers begging when he was a kid and worked his way up so that he can help people.

LoK went with the idea that RC had lost some of its spirituality, but dropped that subplot pretty quickly, and I don’t think it’s really worth trying to recover if we get to do what we want with the city. (It’s more relevant to Book Spirit, anyway, and that really only exists because canon Republic City is boring.) Republic City should need Korra because even its elected officials can’t keep control of it, and Korra’s unexpected strength should be that she’s more than willing to jump into whatever culture or trouble is in front of her- while her challenge is that she needs to balance those instincts against her duty as the Avatar and the need to keep things from getting too out of control. In that way, the city is a mirror for her; fully pacifying it would ruin what’s great about it, but complete chaos is just going to lead to pain and suffering.

Individual adventures should focus on individual aspects of the city. The organized crime stuff should have gotten a focus, perhaps with Korra cleaning it out of the Probending industry. I like the idea of using street racing to involve Asami and give her a chance to work with Korra. Korra trying to operate in the gilded upper class of the city should have been a recurring subplot with ups and downs. The council should have been shown to be blatantly corrupt, to Tenzin and Korra’s combined frustration, and they need Chief Lin Beifong’s help to strongarm a judge into doing something about it. I also like seeing riots growing in the city over the Equalist movement, with some neighborhoods coming out to meet Equalist protesters with sticks and violence. Ooh, and maybe Korra can get caught up in union drama, with the lightningbenders wanting to unionize and the electric company hiring Fantasy-Asian-Pinkertons to rough the ‘zappers’ up!

In this way, Republic City can be a bit of a metaphor for the increasingly connected world as technology advances, and a kind of proving ground for Korra. If she can step in and help when Little South Pole and Little Caldera are having a race war, she can bring her Avatar Wisdom (TM) to diplomatic negotiations between the Water Tribes and the Fire Nation.

Obviously, though, I’m not describing something that would quietly sit in the background while Korra deals with the Equalists. Frankly, I think too much time was spent on that plot for the anti-climactic way it resolved, so the Book Air I’m envisioning is lots of little Republic City adventures, with the Equalists as a running subplot, before it explodes into citywide riots (rather than the Equalists bombing the city and a majority of the citizens howling for the genocide of the Air Nomads, yeesh) that Korra needs to bring balance to using her knowledge of the people. I don’t care about Amon’s backstory, but I care about how the Bricklayers’ Union is reacting to the Equalist movement.

Oh, and Mako and Bolin are our window into all of this. They know every single street, building, neighborhood, and major figure by heart. They’re friends with criminals and cops. They’re Probenders and bet their winnings on illegal boxing matches. Bolin has an ex-gilfriend on every block of the city. Mako has been banned from every dance hall in the city.

They’re full-blooded Republic City boys.

[fallenloverecords]

Interview:  Gentle Brontosaurus

Hi lovers! Here at Fallen Love headquarters we periodically interview people that we adore in order to shine a spotlight on our wonderful pop planet. We post all those interviews right here for your education and enjoyment.

Gentle Brontosaurus are an indiepop band from Madison, Wisconsin, USA. They are Huan-Hua Chye (ukulele & keyboard), Nick Davies (keyboard & trumpet), Cal Lamore (guitar), Paul Marcou (drums), and Anneliese Valdes (bass). Fallen Love head Harley interviewed the band through a computer. Fallen Love Records: How did Gentle Brontosaurus begin? Huan-Hua: Get ready for some band lineage in excruciating detail:

Nick and I used to be in a band called TL;DR that broke up after a couple of band members moved away, so we decided to start a new band.

We knew Paul and Jon from having played with their old band, Baristacide, and we recruited Michael to play bass for us through Craigslist.

Eventually Jon decided it was time to part ways with us and we asked Cal to play guitar. Nick and I had met Cal through a songwriting website called FAWM, February Album Writing Month.

Last year Michael moved to Milwaukee and decided to leave the band so we recruited Anneliese, whom I had met via a community ukulele club called MAUI and who had filled in on bass for us a while back for a Buffy The Vampire Slayer Musical Episode cover show we did with our friends Croaker.

And here is a curated selection of a few of our other related current or recent projects you might want to check out - we are busy individuals: Square Bombs (Paul & Jon) The Werewolverine (Anneliese) The Ferns or C. H. Lamore solo (Cal) Vowl Sounds, Red Tape Diaries (Huan-Hua) Spiral Island (Nick)

FLR: All five of you sing. Was that something planned on from the early stages or did it just discover itself? HH: We used to only have three vocalists (max one lead and one backing at any given time) but decided that seven instruments and three vocals between five people wasn't making the sound guys' lives hard enough (not to mention ours) so we added some more. It has definitely been a voyage of self-discovery. I think we'll try to streamline a bit more in the future, though, since venues almost never have enough mics. FLR: Based on your social media some people might expect you to be a comedy or novelty band. Are new listeners ever caught off-guard? Nick: Is this regarding the Facebook account where we share dinosaur memes or the Twitter account where we post things like Baha Men trivia? Early on I had our genre listed as "brony rock" on Facebook just as a joke and it’s come back up occasionally. Like the time Jimmy K, a local radio personality, had both us and The Ferns (Cal's previous band) on an episode of his show and he got his intro cards mixed up and called The Ferns "brawny rock." HH: Also we got invited to put a song on an actual brony rock compilation, which was unfortunately vetoed by other band members. Anyway I aim to keep expectations at rock bottom so that new listeners can only be pleasantly surprised when we turn out to be (hopefully) honest and charming and good. I don't usually aim for funny when I'm writing songs (although sometimes it ends up there) but I usually aim to be entertaining on social media. (I usually man the Facebook account and Nick the Twitter account). I feel it's the least I can do. FLR: Who writes the lyrics? Each song carries a real depth, like a full short story condensed into four minutes. HH: Nick and I are about 50/50 on songwriting. On the first album our old guitarist wrote one and our old bassist wrote one but I think on the new album it's more or less evenly divided between me and Nick as far as lyrics go. I think the two of us share a love for possibly ill-advised wordiness and allusions so sometimes people have been surprised to find out who wrote which songs. I wrote poetry for years before ever turning to lyrics and a few songs, like "Rabbit Test", are remnants of poems or stories or concepts I could never quite make work on the written page. N: I don't intend to give every song a narrative but in addition to FAWM in February I participate in NaNoWriMo in November. Maybe some of that bleeds over into songwriting. Storytelling does provide a way to address topics without being tied to your own perspective. I'd be kind of uncomfortable writing songs all about Nick and how Nick feels right now, especially if we might decide to have someone else in the band sing it. HH: I, on the other hand, love writing songs all about HH and how HH feels right now. Maybe this is why we have so many songs about food.

FLR: Your debut album, Names Of Things And What They Do, came out in November 2015. What was the process to get there and how has the path shifted since then? HH: That album was very DIY like our new one will be. We recorded it over a period of months in our old practice space and our old guitarist Jon mixed it. Similar approach this time around, all home recordings. It's going to be an interesting mix as some of these songs, like "Kevin Bacon", we've played for years (it almost made it onto the first album) and others, like "A Shot" or "For Emma, Forever Ago", we'd only been playing for a few weeks and had never played live before starting to record. So for those newer songs we're kind of figuring out arrangements and parts as part of the recording process. We recorded all the drums and scratch tracks live, the way we're used to playing, and are now going along and re-recording individual parts to replace the scratch versions. One of the things that's pretty interesting about our piecemeal recording process is that we often can't hear/process the cool things everyone else is doing since we are distracted at the time with our own performances. Sound balance is also difficult to get right live with five people,so there have been a lot of moments where, once you're listening to a clear recording, you go "Oh, I had no idea you had this awesome part happening here." It makes you appreciate everyone and their contributions and musicianship just that much more. FLR: Do you think dinosaurs had feathers or scales? Anneliese: Yes, and some had neither. FLR: Why hasn't Netflix rebooted popular '90s sitcom Dinosaurs yet? A: This might be a question for the Jim Henson Workshop. Fun fact: Kevin Clash, who's the voice of Elmo, was also the voice of Baby Sinclair. And Jessica Walter (of Arrested Development) was the voice of the mother. HH: I'm sure it's on the horizon since we are apparently officially in the midst of a serious worldwide franchise shortage. I will officially volunteer us to provide the soundtrack for the inevitable gritty, sexy reboot. (I mean have you seen Riverdale, the gritty, sexy Archie reboot? Anything is possible.) The theme song will be called "Nobody's Baby" and will be in the style of Julee Cruise and everyone will wear black leather jackets and white undershirts in a very sexy James Dean kind of way. Also, if you don't have a physical copy of our album, Baby Sinclair fans should check out the art on the inner sleeve. FLR: Do you ever get tired of answering dinosaur questions? Will your choice of band name haunt you for the rest of time? HH: No and no. Since we are from the Land Before Time I'm not totally sure yet what this "time" thing is but I'm sure I'll figure it out one of these days. (Sorry to the random person on Tumblr I stole that joke from.)

FLR: What's your earliest musical memory? N: The first songs I wrote were entirely MIDI, written in a sheet music editor. Sadly they were lost forever in the mp3.com buyout of 2001. I thought I had a cassette copy but I went back to my parents' house in D.C. this past summer and the cassette is gone too. After that era I started recording angsty stuff with a beat-up acoustic guitar and some ill-conceived "rapping." Unfortunately there are surviving copies of that. A: Dancing around the living room to my dad's old boogie-woogie records when I was three or four. HH: They gave us recorders in grade school because the only thing better than one five year-old playing the recorder is fifteen of them all at once so I clearly recall making some really avant-garde noise rock as part of my early musical education. Also one of our music teachers was a grad student at the UC Berkeley School of Music and wrote an opera called The Nightingale that he made us learn, like a troupe of performing opera monkeys. FLR: What song have you listened to the most this year? HH: I went to look at my Spotify stats and some of my top tracks in recent months have been: Frankie Cosmos- "Fool", Big Thief - "Masterpiece", X - "The World's A Mess, It's In My Kiss", Eux Autres - "Other Girls", and Jens Lekman - "To Know Your Mission." N: I'm also enjoying the new Jens Lekman album! Crying's Beyond The Fleeting Gales has been the album that has hardly left my car stereo this year. FLR: What's one question you've never been asked in an interview that you would love to be asked someday? HH: You are standing in front of two doors. Behind one lies immeasurable riches, behind the other lies certain death. There are two guards guarding the doors, one sworn to always lie and one sworn to always tell the truth, but you don't know which is which. What is the best song ever written, and why is it "Africa" by Toto? N: If we're ever interviewed by Nardwuar [The Human Serviette] I hope he knows that I dressed as him for Halloween once. HH: Also I think Paul and Anneliese were hoping to do a Jerry Springer-style interview someday with paternity tests and chair fights in front of a studio audience. FLR: What does 2018 look like for Gentle Brontosaurus? I know you're working on your sophomore album. N: We've started recording out at Cal's parents' barn in Cambridge, WI. You must have seen the big chart on Facebook. Once we get that released I think we're hoping to go out on tour again. Maybe reconnect with some of the folks we met on the road in 2016 or maybe play some shows around the upper midwest where we actually haven't been yet. FLR: The first album came on CD with a piece of toast. Will the new album come as a download code in a jar of jam? N: If someone bought our toast in 2015 and is still hanging onto it in 2018, I don't think jam is going to make it edible. HH: I'm not really into jam bands. Gentle Brontosaurus on Bandcamp Gentle Brontosaurus on Facebook

[autodidact-adventures]

Culinary History (Part 27): Egg-Beaters

The fact that eggs can be used as a raising agent in baking was discovered during the Renaissance.  Previously, cakes (when made at all) used ale barm or yeast for this purpose, which made them taste rather yeasty, and have a bread-like texture.

Now, cooks could produce a wide variety of sweet dishes, with air as the primary component.  Pillowy cakes with a much lighter sponge were made.  The Elizabethans had yellow and white tarts (made from beaten yolks & whites respectively), sweetened with sugar & cream. Syllabub – a dessert made with wine, cream and egg whites – was very much in fashion.

Lemon syllabub.

The banqueting course after a feast often included “a dishful of snow”. This was made by frothing up many egg whites with cream, sugar and rose-water; it was then piled on a platter.

But the new discovery was not accompanied by any technological innovation to do it.  So cooks and servants toiled away, wearing out their arms to beat the eggs for the grandees.  This was the norm, of course, for no-one cared for the comfort of servants.

Le Ménagier de Paris, an advice book from 1393, gives a pancake recipe.  These are the instructions:  Get a quart-sized copper pan, and melt a large quantity of salted butter in it.  Take eggs, some “warm white wine” (we would use milk) and “the fairest wheaten flour” and beat it all together “long enough to weary one person or two”.  When one person was worn out, the next took their place.

Eggs raise a cake because the stable protein foam holds the bubbles together as it cooks.  For this to happen, the protein molecules must partially unfold (upon contact with the air), and re-form as an air-filled lattice, or “stiff peaks” as we say.  This was very hard work back then, because they didn't have the balloon whisk that we do now.  It is possible that some households made their own versions of our whisk – an illustration in The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570) looks rather like one – but none have survived.  If they did exist, they certainly weren't common.

The usual tool for whisking eggs was a birchen rod - a bunch of stripped twigs (occasionally feathers), tied together.  The twigs were usually birch, and this twig bunch was used well into the 1800's.  The benefit was that they could flavour the cream or egg whites.  Some recipes taslk of tying the twigs together with peach branches, or strips of lemon peel.

But they were very slow.  A 1654 recipe by Joseph Cooper, “chiefe cook to the late king”, says that beating eggs for pancakes will take 30min or more.  Mary Eaton (early 1800's) advises that it will take THREE HOURS to beat the egg whites enough for a cake.

And to make matters worse, superstition said that the eggs had to be beat in the same direction the whole way through.  This superstition may have come about because it was so difficult to get the froth, and they were worried about not achieving it.  Some believed that on damp days, the egg whites would become bewitched, and not get stiff enough.

But the birchen rod was better than a lot of other tools used for beating eggs.  Some cooks used a spoon, or a broad-bladed knife – neither gave much traction.  Forks became common from the late 1600's onwards, and of course were much better.  A really gross method was to wring the egg whites repeatedly through a sponge.  And it was a pretty useless method as well.

At the end of the 1600's, the moliquet or chocolate mill arrived in Britain.  It was made of wood, and is still used in Mexico & Spain for foaming hot chocolate.  It consists of a long handle and a notched head (rather like a water mill), and is spun between the palms of the hands.  At this time, they begin to appear in the inventories of large country-house kitchens, probably to whip eggs as well as froth chocolate (which was the new fashionable drink).  Even as late as 1847, an American cookbook mentions the moliquet as an alternative to the birchen, for whipping cream.  But even the moliquet was labour-intensive and not as good as the balloon whisk.

A modern moliquet.

Sugar was a problem, too.  Most recipes with egg whites also included sugar, or rather, double-refined sugar.  It wasn't until the late 1800's that sugar began to be sold ready-ground, and customers could choose between granular, caster and icing sugar.

Sugar was sold in a lump or loaf – a cone-shaped block weighing 5-40lb (2.3-18.1kg).  It was “nipped” into small pieces with sugar nippers.  But for cooking, it had to be pounded (in the mortar) and then sieved through a series of sieves, gradually getting finer. Like the mortar and pestle, colanders & sieves have changed little over the centuries.

In 1874, the chef Jules Gouffé described what was involved in processing sugar.  This is how he made granulated sugar, which was sprinkled onto sweet pastries:

Procure three sifters or colanders, one with holes 3/8 inch in diameter, another with holes ¼ inch in diameter, a third with holes 1/8 inch, and a hair sieve.

Chop the sugar into pieces with a knife, and break up each piece with the end of a rolling pin, being careful not to grind any of the sugar to powder as this would take away the brightness of the remainder.

Then, the sugar is sifted through each sieve, ending with the hair sieve. Gouffé complains that not everyone does the full process “owing to its being rather...troublesome”, instead pounding it in a mortar without sieving it.  He regrets such laziness, saying that mortar-pounded sugar lacks the brightness of sugar sifted “the old-fashioned way”.  He is of course also regretting the decrease in kitchen staff & the lack of armies of servants who are expected to wear themselves out for the rich.

The “technological conservatism” of food-processing equipment is part of this issue.  Cookbook-writers wrote for people who didn't do the work themselves, but took credit for it.  In their eyes, there was no need for technological innovations in the kitchen, if there were servants to do it for them (or a wife in poorer households).

It was really only after the Industrial Revolution that things began to change, due to the changing labour situation, and factories that could mass-produce cheap metal objects.  The term “labour-saving” was first used in 1791, in a manufacturing context.  It was another half-century before the concept was used for the kitchen.

In the 2nd half of the 1800's, the US was suddenly flooded with various types of “labour-saving” kitchen devices, including apple-corers, cherry-pitters, coffee-mills, potato-mashers, and raisin-seeders.  Many were cheap and made of tin, and many were heavy pieces of equipment, meant to be clamped to the kitchen table (like mincing machines).  And there were so many egg-beaters.  Hundreds and hundreds of varieties of them.

From 1856-1920, 692 patents for egg-beaters were granted in the US (east coast only?)  In 1856, only one was issued; in 1857, only two; in 1858, only three.  But in 1866, 18 patents were granted.  The 1870's 1880's and 1890's were the worst for it.  Designs included jar-shakers, tin-shakers, ratchets, and the Archimedes – a sort of up-and-down mixer, based on the Archimedes screw used in shipbuilding.

An Archimedes egg-beater.

Late 1800′s egg-beaters.

Most were no good at all.  Wooden handles fell off, and tin handles stained your hands black.  Some were made of “whirligigs” inside a tin cylinder, which was great until you had to wash them, and they were too big to whip small quantities.

The Williams' Egg Beater, patented on May 31st, 1870, was one of the first egg-beaters to make it past the novelty stage.  It was known as the Dover, and it set the basic form of the cheapest hand-operated egg-beaters, using two whisks instead of one.  The earliest Dover egg-beaters consisted of two bulbous beaters, and a rotary wheel to turn them.  The inventor was Turner Williams (Providence, Rhode Island), and he said that the advantage of his invention was the “very peculiar shearing action” which resulted from two wheels revolving in opposite directions, in the same space and at the same time.  This was the first egg-beater to have that happening.

1870 Dover egg-beater.

The Dover was an immediate success.  “Dover” became the generic term in America for an egg-beater.  A 1891 advertisement says to look for “DOVER” on the handle, because “NONE OTHERS ARE GENUINE”. The 1883 book Practical Housekeeping informs the reader that the Dover is “the best in the market”.

Marion Harland, a cookery writer whose real name was Mary Virginia Terhune, also praised the Dover.  In 1875, she wrote that “egg whipping ceased to be a bugbear to me” the day she bought one, and that she wouldn't sell it for $100.  A portable egg-beater cost about 10-25c at that time.

Light, portable, rapid, easy and comparatively noiseless, my pet implement works like a benevolent brownie.  With it I turn out a meringue in five minutes without staying my song or talk.

Harland was born in 1830, in rural Virginia, one of nine children.  Her mother did little cooking: the task was left to “black mammies”. Harland was more active in the kitchen, and she believed it was her calling to master the role of “homemaker”.  After she married, she decided to teach herself and her cook, to increase their skills in the kitchen.  In 1873, she published the results in Common Sense in the Household. It sold 100,000 copies.

In the book, Harland assumes that her readers will have a cook, but one who will need a lot of guidance.  At this point, middle-class American women usually only had one cook, so they also worked in the kitchen.  Harland writes about her servant Katey in a very patronizing way.

The egg-beater boom coincided with a period in American cuisine when desserts at respectable tables were very much aerated.  Apple snow, orange snow and lemon snow each required four egg whites, whipped to a “standing froth”.  The Orleans cake needed 6 eggs beaten light, and the yolks strained; the Mont Blanc cake needed 6 very stiff egg whites.

Charlottes, creams, muffins, syllabubs, trifles, waffles, whipped frostings, and of course meringues – all these needed highly-aerated eggs (the yolks were beaten to a cream, and the whites to a fluff).  They were important to a housewife's reputation, and even though her cook did most of the work, Harland took credit.  She criticizes her friend for not having been “alert” that her cook wasn't beating her eggs properly, with “half a dozen strokes of the wooden spoon”.

So the new egg-beaters were welcomed by middle-class housewives, who wanted to get more air into their eggs, and more work out of their servants.  And to those who didn't have servants, they could feel that they weren't really doing much work, even when they were.  A Holt-Lyon egg-beater (similar to the Dover one) in 1901 was advertised with the claim that its unique “flared dashes” could “instantly tear the eggs into the minutest particles”; it could beat “eggs lighter and stiffer than the best hand whips in one-fourth the time.”

But the new egg-beaters weren't very labour-saving at all, really.  The Dover egg-beater (and others like it) needs both hands to use, so you can't hold the mixing bowl.  The paddles sometimes jam in one place as they rotate, or rotate too fast.  They often slip around in the bowl and spatter mess everywhere.  The Dover promoters claimed that it could beat 2 egg whites in 10sec, but this is nonsense – it would take minutes, not seconds.

Many people invented egg-beaters that (supposedly) fixed these problems, but they only created new ones.  Some inserted the paddles into an attached jar/bowl so that the bowl wouldn't slide around, but you could only use it for small quantities, and the bowl attachment was just one more thing to wash up.

Some beaters tried to fix the problem of needing two hands.  A 1902 Roberts egg-beater was a type of Archimedes whisk, and its advertisement claimed it was “A New Idea in Egg Beaters”.  It was “the only automatic beater made that works with one hand...simply press on the handle and release.”

This was a good idea, but as usual, there were other problems.  The one-handed beaters (their mechanisms including wire whirls, springs, and discs like potato-ricers) took ages to beat the eggs, and could malfunction if you tried to speed them up.

There was also a family of water-operated egg-beaters, which you hooked up to the new running water that was appearing in American homes.  A World Beater advertisement proclaimed, “Turn the Faucet and it Starts!”

Water-powered egg-beater (1924).

Despite all the effort put into creating new fancy egg-beaters, none of them were better than the French balloon whisk, which had been used since the 1700's by confectioners (only by them?)  The egg-beater boom wasn't really useful, and wasn't really about saving labour & time, just the illusion of it.  Cooks had started to rebel against tired arms, and they could feel that the manufacturers were on their side in this.  But their arms would only get a rest with the advent of the mixer and food processor.

Glass jar turbine egg-beater (1930′s.)

[nebris]

The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning

Her disclosure of classified documents in 2010 ushered in the age of leaks. Now, freed from prison, she talks about why she did it — and the isolation that followed. 

By MATTHEW SHAER JUNE 12, 2017 On a gray morning this spring, Chelsea Manning climbed into the back seat of a black S.U.V. and directed her security guard to drive her to the nearest Starbucks. A storm was settling over Manhattan, and Manning was prepared for the weather, in chunky black Doc Martens with an umbrella and a form-fitting black dress. Her legs were bare, her eyes gray blue. She wore little makeup: a spot of eyeliner, a smudge of pink lip gloss. At Starbucks, she ordered a white-chocolate mocha and retreated to a nearby stool. Manning has always been small (5 foot 4), but in her last few months at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, she jogged religiously, outside in the prison yard and around the track of the prison gym, and her body had taken on a lithe sharpness, apparent in the definition of her arms and cheekbones. She looked healthy and fit, if a little uneasy, as people who have served long spells in prison often do. She had been released only eight days earlier, after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence. Her crime, even in hindsight, was an astonishing one: handing WikiLeaks approximately 250,000 American diplomatic cables and roughly 480,000 Army reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Collectively the largest leak of classified records in American history, the disclosures cleared a path for Edward Snowden and elevated the profile of Julian Assange, then little known outside hacker circles. “Without Chelsea Manning,” P.J. Crowley, an assistant secretary of state from 2009 to 2011, told me recently, “Julian Assange is just another fringe actor who resents what he sees as American hegemonic hubris.” To an extraordinary extent, Manning’s actions, in the words of Denver Nicks, the author of a book on her case, represented the “beginning of the information age exploding upon itself”: a new era in which leaks were a weapon, data security was of paramount importance and privacy felt illusory. In January 2017, after being locked up at five different facilities, in conditions a United Nations expert called “cruel” and “inhumane,” Manning had received a surprise commutation by President Barack Obama. Four months later, she was free, trying to adjust to life in a world she helped shape. Finishing her coffee, she fished her iPhone out of her purse and asked her security guard for a lift back to the apartment where she was staying while in Manhattan. The one-bedroom was furnished sparsely, with a wide glass table and a tan couch, opposite which Manning had set up an Xbox One video-game console. The art was of the anodyne motel variety — an old-masters-esque tableau, a canvas of a zebra standing in a forest. We were many floors up, suspended in the storm clouds, and through the window, I could see the spires of the skyscrapers on the other side of the Hudson River. Manning, who is 29, tapped an unplugged microwave next to the door and asked me to place my laptop inside: The Faraday cage in the microwave would block radio waves, she explained. But the unplugged microwave was already full of devices, including two Xbox controllers. “You can put it in the kitchen microwave,” Manning said; then, intuiting the strangeness of the request, she added with a shrug, “You can’t be too careful.” She recalled that she last gave an in-person, on-the-record interview to a journalist in 2008, on the occasion of a marriage-equality march in New York. For almost a decade after that, barred by prison officials from communicating directly with the public, she remained silent as her story was told in books, an opera, an Off Broadway play and countless magazine articles, almost all of them written before Manning had come out as transgender. “It wasn’t the whole story,” she told me, “my whole story.” Absent her own voice, a pair of dueling narratives had emerged. One had Manning, in the words of President Donald Trump, as an “ungrateful traitor.” The other positioned her as transgender icon and champion of transparency — a “secular martyr,” as Chase Madar, a former attorney and the author of a book on her case, recently put it to me. But in Manning’s presence, both narratives feel like impossible simplifications, not least because Manning herself is clearly still grappling with the meaning of what she did seven years ago. When I asked her to draw lessons from her journey, she grew uneasy. “I don’t have. ... ” she started. “Like, I’ve been so busy trying to survive for the past seven years that I haven’t focused on that at all.” But surely, I pressed, she must have some sense of the impact she had on the world. “From my perspective,” she responded, “the world’s shaped me more than anything else. It’s a feedback loop.” As far back as Chelsea Manning can remember, to her earliest days in Crescent, on the far edge of the Oklahoma City metro area, she suffered from a feeling of intense dislocation, something constant and psychic that she struggled to define to herself, much less to her older sister, Casey, or her parents, Brian and Susan. During one of our interviews, I mentioned that I heard a clinical psychologist compare gender dysphoria to a “giant, cosmic toothache.” Manning flushed. That was it exactly, she agreed: “Morning, evening, breakfast, lunch, dinner, wherever you are. It’s everywhere you go.” At the age of 5, Manning recalled, she approached her father, an I.T. manager for Hertz, and confessed that she wanted to be a girl, “to do girl things.” Brian responded with a lengthy and awkward speech on the essential differences in “plumbing.” But Manning told me, “I didn’t understand how that had anything to do with what you wore or how you behaved.” Soon she was sneaking into her sister’s bedroom and donning Casey’s acid-washed jeans and denim jackets. Seated at the mirror, she would apply lipstick and blush, frantically scrubbing off the makeup at the slightest stirring from downstairs. When she was still in elementary school, she came out as gay to a straight male friend. The friend was understanding; the other kids at school, less so. Manning tried, unsuccessfully, to retract her confession, but the teasing continued. “I would come home crying some days, and if my dad was there, he’d say: ‘Just quit crying and man up. Like, go back there and punch that kid in the face,’ ” she said. It was the late 1990s, when the trans movement was very much on the fringes of American society. “The closest I came to knowing anything was from the portrayal of drag-queen-style cross-dressing on sensational TV shows” like Jerry Springer’s, Manning told me. She spent more time inside, on the computers that her father was always bringing home, playing video games and dabbling in basic code. Her parents had issues of their own. When Manning was about 12, Susan swallowed an entire bottle of Valium. Casey called 911, only to be told that the nearest ambulance was a half-hour away. Casey loaded her mother into the car; Brian, who Manning says was too drunk to drive, sat shotgun, leaving a terrified Chelsea in the back to make sure her mother kept breathing. She told me the incident was formational. “I grew up very quickly after that,” she said. (Brian could not be reached for comment.) In Susan’s native Wales, where Manning moved with her in 2001 after her parents split, Chelsea says she took over full control of the household, paying bills and handling much of the shopping. There was freedom there, too: She could buy her own makeup at the convenience store, wear it for a few hours in public and jam it into a waste bin on her way home. She passed many evenings on her computer, in L.G.B.T. chat rooms. Her worldview shifted. While in Crescent, Manning had imbibed her father’s conservative politics — “I questioned nothing,” she told me. But at Tasker Milward, a school in the town of Haverfordwest, she studied the civil rights movement, the Red Scare, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In a term paper for a history class, she expressed skepticism about the rationale for the American invasion of Iraq. When Manning returned to the United States in 2005 to live with Brian and his new wife in Oklahoma City, she was a changed person, if not a wholly transformed one: She wore eyeliner and grew out her hair and dyed it black. “I thought, Maybe I want to just eradicate this gender thing and be gender neutral, like androgynous,” she told me. She found a job at an internet start-up and, through a matchmaking site, met her first boyfriend, who lived 70 miles away in the town of Duncan. But her stepmother, Manning said, forbade her from setting foot in the kitchen: “She felt that I was unclean.” Manning confided to no one what she was increasingly coming to understand: that she wasn’t gay, wasn’t a cross-dresser. She was a woman. In the summer of 2006, she and her boyfriend parted ways, and she lit out from Oklahoma for good, all her belongings piled high in the cab of her red Nissan pickup truck. A spell of itinerancy followed — out to Tulsa, Okla., to work at a pizza parlor; up to Chicago to work at Guitar Center; east to the suburbs of Washington to live with her aunt, with whom she enjoyed a connection she never shared with her parents. She did four sessions with a psychologist, but got no closer to unburdening herself than she had with friends or family members. “I was scared,” Manning said. “I didn’t know that life could be better.” Brian Manning had often fondly recounted for Chelsea his days in the military: It had given him structure and grounding, he said. Manning hadn’t been ready to listen then. Now she was. Enlisting might be the thing to “man her up,” to rid her of the ache. Besides, while her ideas about American foreign policy had become more nuanced, she still considered herself a patriot — in the Army, she could use her analytical skills to help her country. “I remember sitting in the summer of 2007 and just every single day turning on the TV” and seeing the news from Iraq, she told me. “The surge, the surge, the surge. Terrorist attacks. Insurgents. ... I just felt like maybe I could make a difference.” That fall, Manning reported for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks; within a few days, she had suffered injuries to her arm. “The drill sergeants were acting like I was malingering or something,” she said. “But I was like: ‘No, I’m not trying to get out of anything. I just really can’t feel my right hand.’ ” A soldier who spent time with Manning in Missouri later recalled for The Guardian that Manning was routinely called a “faggot.” “The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone. And he tried. He really did,” the soldier said. The Army, in need of more bodies to fight the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, allowed Manning another shot at boot camp. In 2008, she graduated to intelligence school at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which to her felt like a kind of community college. There, she was trained to sort what the military terms “SigActs,” or significant actions — the written reports, photos and videos of the confrontations, explosions and firefights that form the mosaic of modern war. Manning told me she fit in well with the intelligence types at Fort Huachuca, who shared her intrinsic geekiness. “There were more like-minded people there,” she said, adding, “It wasn’t ‘Rah, rah, you need to do this.’ They encouraged us to speak up. They encouraged us to have opinions, to make our own decisions.” At her first official duty station, Fort Drum in upstate New York, Manning was charged in part with helping to build a digital tool that would automatically track and sort SigActs from Afghanistan, where Manning’s unit initially expected to be deployed. For hours a day, she watched spectral night-vision video and read reports from distant battlefields. Already, she was being exposed to the bloodshed that would serve as inspiration for her leaks. But she was handling the material at a spatial and emotional reserve: She remained, she told me, “eager” to get to the front lines. “I was hungry.” Through a gay dating site, she met a bookish Brandeis student named Tyler Watkins. She started driving to visit Watkins in the Boston area, where she became a regular at Pika, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-op, and visited Boston University’s Builds, a hub of the local hacking community. At the Pika gatherings, she found friends that approached coding the same way she did: as outlet, pastime and calling. She often stayed up late into the night talking. Yan Zhu, then an undergraduate student at M.I.T., remembers Manning as “obviously intelligent,” if “nervous.” It was clear to Zhu that Manning was “haunted by something.” But she never had a chance to find out what: That fall, Manning’s unit was deployed to Iraq. In October 2009, Manning hopped a Black Hawk from Baghdad to Forward Operating Base Hammer, 30 miles east of the city. In the cabin, strapped into the chopper’s jump seats, she began putting names to places that had long been digital abstractions. “I had seen imagery for nine or 10 months prior,” Manning recalled, “I knew the landscape so well from the air that I recognized these neighborhoods, and it woke me up to see people walking around and to see people driving and to see the buildings and the trees below.” Ringed by desert, the low-slung buildings of F.O.B. Hammer baked in the summer and coursed with mud in the fall. Every night, Manning rose from her bunk at 9 p.m., dressed in standard-issue visual camouflage and grabbed her rifle. After quickly eating dinner for breakfast, she walked to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, to report for duty. Manning’s SCIF was a glorified “plywood box” with lousy airflow, situated on a basketball court. She sat at the free-throw line, in a reclining office chair, where she spent her overnight shift facing three laptop computers. Manning’s isolation took on a new form: Hidden away in the darkened SCIF, she would work for eight hours at a stretch, sifting through reports filed securely by American troops in the field, making sense of the raw data for senior-level intelligence officers. She remained sealed off from actual conflict, though she could hear the shudder of car bombs and sometimes ran into soldiers, dazed and dusty, on their way back from a firefight. At that early juncture, Manning told me, she was too busy to give much thought to the larger import of what she was seeing. “Doing my job, you couldn’t even really read all the files,” she said. “You have to skim, get a sense of what’s relevant and what’s not.” Still, to an extraordinary extent, she had a more comprehensive view of America’s role in Iraq than the infantry in the field did — often, literally, a sky-level view — and as October ground into November, she found herself increasingly dismayed by a lack of public awareness about what seemed to be a futile, ceaselessly bloody war. “At a certain point,” she told me, “I stopped seeing records and started seeing people”: bloody American soldiers, bullet-ridden Iraqi civilians. On rare reprieves from the SCIF, Manning accompanied senior officers to meetings with the Iraqi military and the Iraqi federal police, sit-downs that further entrenched her disillusionment. “There would be these tea sessions, where you’ve got the Iraqi federal police in their blue uniforms, you’ve got Iraqi Army in, like, the old chocolate-chip camouflage and the Americans in our smeared green digital camouflage,” Manning said — everyone speaking in different languages, frequently at cross-purposes. “I’d come in thinking things would be black and white. They weren’t.” Manning told me she heard the name WikiLeaks for the first time in 2008, at a computer security training course at Fort Huachuca. By the end of 2009, she had started logging on to internet relay chat conversations devoted to the site. (I.R.C., a semisecure protocol, was then the preferred method of communication for hackers.) Initially, she was an observer: She was intrigued by the work that Julian Assange and his team were doing, if not quite ready to endorse their argument for total transparency. She told me that she believed then, and believes now, that “there are plenty of things that should be kept secret.” “Let’s protect sensitive sources. Let’s protect troop movements. Let’s protect nuclear information. Let’s not hide missteps. Let’s not hide misguided policies. Let’s not hide history. Let’s not hide who we are and what we are doing.” She was edging closer to acting but said nothing about the I.R.C. channel to her friends at F.O.B. Hammer, nor about her own personal tumult. She was now fighting to keep what amounted to two life-altering secrets. She couldn’t discuss her identity openly: The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was still in effect, and it would be years before transgender people were allowed to openly enlist. “I binge watched TV shows on the internet,” she said. “I was smoking heavily. I was drinking an enormous amount of caffeine. I was going to the dining facility and eating as much as I could. Just any little tiny escape or way to feel like I’m not there anymore.” Her boyfriend was little help: Manning could feel him slipping away. “I was in denial about it, but I had a sense ... that I was being forgotten,” she told me. Manning had a two-week leave coming up. She planned to spend time in Boston, trying to patch things up with Watkins, and in the suburbs of Washington with her aunt. She dreamed about using the occasion to come out to her family and friends as trans. “I kept having this moment in my head,” she told me, “where I just yell it at the top of my lungs.” But she knew, in her heart, that she’d never be able to go through with it. Before leaving F.O.B. Hammer, Manning downloaded, from the government’s Combined Information Data Network Exchange, almost every SigActs report from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and burned a compressed version of the data onto CD-RW discs, one of which was labeled “Lady Gaga.” She did it in full view of her fellow soldiers. But what she did next violated the most important precepts she was taught at Fort Huachuca, along with the Oath of Enlistment she swore in 2007: She uploaded the contents of the discs onto the personal laptop she planned to take home to the United States. She had not decided what she would do with the data. Days later, Manning put on a blond wig and ran in a low crouch from the side door of her aunt’s house, out of view of the neighbors, and drove to the train station. She wore a dark coat and, under it, business-casual woman’s wear she bought at a local department store; she claimed it was for her friend who needed it for a job interview. In Washington, she went to a Starbucks, ate lunch at a busy restaurant and wandered through the aisles of a bookstore; later, she climbed back on the Metro and rode it aimlessly around. She took great pleasure in being seen as she knew she was and comfort in how easily she passed — rarely did anyone give her a second glance. “Before I deployed, I didn’t have the guts,” Manning, who was then privately referring to herself as Brianna, told me. But her time in Iraq was changing her. “Being exposed to so much death on a daily basis makes you grapple with your own mortality,” she went on. She no longer wanted to hide. The expedition was the high point of a disappointing two-week leave. The Army had bumped up her departure from F.O.B. Hammer, and her family hadn’t had time to readjust their schedules: Manning’s aunt was on a trip abroad, and her sister had just had her first child — it would be tricky to carve out time for Chelsea. Manning took a train up to see Watkins at his home in Waltham, in Massachusetts, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t really want her there, so she cut her stay short by three days. At that point, it would have been possible for Manning to return to Iraq with the files unshared — her actions had been illegal, if reversible. But Manning told me that being in the United States had prompted an epiphany. At home, she says, she realized how invisible the wars had become to most civilians, whose awareness of Iraq extended as far as the occasional newspaper article or chyron on cable news. “There were two worlds,” she said. “The world in America, and the world I was seeing [in Iraq],” She went on, “I wanted people to see what I was seeing.” A blizzard hit Washington. Manning’s aunt still wasn’t back from vacation. Alone, Manning transferred parts of the files to a small memory card and prepared an anonymous text file she wanted to accompany the information. “This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare,” she wrote. “Have a good day.” Manning told me her decision to provide the information to WikiLeaks was a practical one: She originally planned to deliver the data to The New York Times or The Washington Post, and for the last week of her leave, she dodged from public phone to public phone, calling the main office lines for both papers, leaving a message for the public editor at The Times and engaging in a frustrating conversation with a Post writer, who said she would have to know more about the files before her editor would sign off on an article. A hastily arranged meeting with Politico, where she hoped to introduce herself to the site’s security bloggers, was scrapped because of bad weather. “I wanted to try to establish a contact in a way that it couldn’t be traced to me,” Manning told me. But she was running out of time. She describes a clearheaded sense of purpose coming over her: “I needed to do something,” she told me. “And I didn’t want anything to stop that.” On Feb. 3, 2010, Manning signed onto her laptop and, using a secure file-transfer protocol, sent the files to WikiLeaks. Back at F.O.B. Hammer, time sped up; everything seemed to be happening at once. Manning had been away two full weeks, and there was a lot to catch up on — “I had to triple my work,” Manning told me. There had been no sign that WikiLeaks received her files, nor any indication that the Army knew anything was amiss. She remembers being in a perpetual state of heightened anxiety. She slept less, smoked more. In mid-February, on break from the SCIF, she noticed an interesting thread on the WikiLeaks I.R.C. channel, where participants were discussing the financial crisis in Iceland — a collapse that Manning, reading through the library of secure diplomatic cables available to her as an analyst, concluded was roiling onward because of the inaction of the United States and what she described as diplomatic bullying by the Netherlands and Britain. “From my perspective, it appeared that we were not getting involved due to the lack of long-term geopolitical benefit to do so,” she would later testify. Following the same steps as before, she leaked several diplomatic cables pertaining to the Iceland crisis to WikiLeaks; this time, within hours, WikiLeaks published the documents. Manning was thrilled: If the cables had reached WikiLeaks, the much larger leak of SigActs had almost certainly made it, too. Around this time, Manning had several I.R.C. conversations with a person whom Manning identified in her online address book as “Nathaniel Frank,” after the author of the book “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America.” Frank was almost certainly Assange, although Manning declined to discuss the matter with me — the bulk of the chats are classified and could be used in future legal actions against Assange. Manning followed the transmissions of the SigActs and the Iceland cables with a leak that was harder to ignore. Published by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” the three-year-old video, captured by a camera mounted on an American helicopter, showed two gunships approaching a group of men in an area where there had been reports of small-arms fire. The helicopter crew repeatedly requests permission to engage — “Let us shoot!” a voice is heard saying — before receiving it and opening fire. In total, at least a dozen people were killed in the 2007 strike, including several civilians and two staff members of the Reuters news agency. Manning says she knew that Reuters, under the Freedom of Information Act, had asked the United States government for a copy of the video but never received it. This was symptomatic, she said, of the worst impulses of a government obsessed with blanket classification. “It makes sense to keep some information secret for a few days, maybe a few years,” she told me. “The problem is, more and more, everything is secret by default.” In long chat threads, Manning’s relationship with Nathaniel Frank deepened. She warmed to the role of truth-teller, handing over a small library of Detainee Assessment Briefs, or D.A.B.s, from the American holding facility at Guantánamo Bay. “Living such an opaque life, has forced me never to take transparency, openness and honesty for granted,” she wrote the former hacker Adrian Lamo, whom Manning had reached out to as a confessor and who was, unknown to Manning, already working with government investigators. Privately, however, she was coming apart. Army investigators looking into her case would later detail several episodes of what they termed “bizarre behavior,” including blank stares and an incident in which Manning was found on the floor of a supply room, having carved the words “I WANT” into a nearby chair. She recalled that the unit, as a whole, was “on edge,” breaking out into verbal arguments and brawls. Their deployment was coming to an end, “and that’s when people start getting sick of each other and the personal animosity breaks out.” In April, Manning emailed an Army superior a photo of her as Brianna that she took in Washington while on leave. “Now I knew who I was,” Manning told me. “But the people I’m around the most didn’t.” She titled the email “My Problem.” The issue of her gender identity was “not going away,” she wrote. “Now, the consequences of it are dire.” (Manning said her captain confirmed receipt of the email but “swept it under the rug.”) Manning told me that she had resolved, in May, to go public with her role as whistle-blower, even as she was wrestling with how to express her gender identity. She was never able to settle on an approach. At the end of May, she was summoned to a conference room, where two agents from the Army Criminal Investigation Division were waiting. Manning was terrified, but she tried not to show it: “I was focused inward at that time: who I am, what my values are,” she recalled. She retreated “inside [her] head.” Days later, she was shackled, flown to Camp Arfijan in Kuwait and locked in a large steel cage. Kneeling down, she read the engraved words on the bars: Made in Fort Wayne. Seven years later, it remains difficult to overstate the impact of the Afghan and Iraq war logs, or the later publication of the diplomatic cables. “The material touched on virtually every relationship the United States had around the world,” Crowley, the former State Department official, says of the cables. Repercussions came swiftly: Carlos Pascual, the United States ambassador to Mexico, resigned over cables in which he cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Mexican war on drugs, a revelation that poisoned Pascual’s relationship with the Mexican president. Ambassador Gene Cretz was recalled from Libya after his cables detailed the peculiar workings of the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, including a squad of female Ukrainian bodyguards. The release of cables regarding the Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali are often credited with helping to inspire the uprising in that country. The Afghan and Iraq documents brought home, in exactly the way that Manning had hoped, the messiness of the two conflicts. “These war logs,” The Guardian wrote in an introduction that the release of the material from Afghanistan revealed a war in stark contrast with the “tidied up and sanitized ‘public’ war, as glimpsed through official communiqués as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting.” American officials, caught off guard by the leaks, were furious. Elizabeth Dibble, a State Department official, later testified that the release of the cables prompted “horror and disbelief that our diplomatic communications had been released and were available on public websites for the world to see.” The issue of whether American interests had been adversely affected by the release of the cables remains a charged one. In the full text of the Afghan war logs that appeared on the WikiLeaks site, Julian Assange made only partial redactions, leaving intact the names of some of the Afghans who had collaborated with coalition forces. (He showed what CNN later described as a “much heavier hand in redacting” names from the Iraq war logs.) In 2010, Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, said that “we know for a fact that people will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed.” Subsequent reviews by The Associated Press and McClatchy found this risk to be “overstated,” and at Manning’s sentencing, government witnesses testified that no American deaths could be attributed to the leaks. Still, Crowley said, a lack of evidence of fatalities was not the same thing as a lack of damage: “She burned a number of intelligence sources,” he said. “She placed Afghans in danger who were telling us what the Taliban was doing in their villages.” In her cage in Kuwait, Manning registered none of the fallout. “I was completely isolated,” she said. At a certain point, she concluded, “I’ve been forgotten about, and I’ve just disappeared.” She figured that Lamo had turned her in, but she wasn’t sure if word of her involvement in the leaks had been made public. It was the start of the hot season in Kuwait, and dust swirled in from outside, lodging in her teeth. Her only human contact was with the guards who brought her meals. “I had told the detention center when I got there that I was trans,” Manning told me. “ ‘I’m a woman,’ I said matter-of-factly. They laughed.” In utter isolation, Manning found herself consumed with rage and sadness. Officials observed what Manning’s attorney called an episode of “yelling uncontrollably, screaming, shaking, babbling, banging your head against your cell and mumbling.” Manning told me: “I was afraid I was going to be in that little cell or something like that little cell for the rest of my life. And that bad things were going to happen to me.” After a week, she fashioned a noose from bedclothes and made what she told me was a “halfhearted attempt” at suicide. “I kind of knew it wasn’t going to work.” It got the staff’s attention, and according to a medical evaluation later obtained by Manning’s legal team, a military doctor would diagnose anxiety, depression and “probable gender identity disorder.” She was given an antidepressant, which made her nose bleed and caused serious nausea. She couldn’t eat. Her skin eventually turned sallow. In late July, four days after the Afghan logs appeared in The Guardian and other papers, Manning was shackled and loaded onto a chartered military flight. She said that previously, guards had told her she would be “whisked away to a Navy cruiser” for months; now her escorts said she was going to Guantánamo. Halfway through the flight, the story changed a final time: She was going to the brig at the Marine base at Quantico, in Virginia. It was there, on arrival, that she learned the world knew who she was. “So you’re Manning!” a heavyset Marine said with unnerving enthusiasm. Manning was all over Fox News, he added. In transferring Manning to Quantico, the government said it was providing Manning with facilities better suited to her fractured mental state. But a 2011 military investigation, undertaken in part as a response to Manning’s treatment, would reveal the opposite: At Quantico, Manning spent 23 hours a day in a 6-by-8-foot cell, for nearly nine months, much of it on Prevention of Injury, or P.O.I., status, in conditions that a United Nations special rapporteur later said could qualify as torture. While on P.O.I. watch, Manning wore what’s known as a “suicide smock,” a white nylon garment that is all but impossible to twist or rip into a noose. She had no pillow, no sheets. She was required to give regular verbal confirmation during the day that she was O.K. (After the investigation, the military ordered that Quantico’s whole pretrial confinement area be shut down.) When I asked Manning this spring to describe those conditions, she answered in the present tense. “Emotions can be more intense,” she said. “There isn’t any release for them. A mean comment by a guard” — commonly a gibe about her gender — “can set you off. Completely off. I know I have stood in a cell at times, locked down with nowhere to go, pacing with anger and frustration. It just stews inside of you, and you’re helpless,” she went on. “I just start yelling, at no one in particular, or singing at the top of my lungs.” But Manning could occasionally receive outside visitors, and her aunt came to the brig. “Even though it was behind a Plexiglas window and we couldn’t talk without recording equipment around,” Manning told me, “it was one of the most powerful meetings I’d ever had.” They whispered to each other. “We love you,” her aunt told her. “We miss you.” They made plans to hire an independent attorney, eventually selecting David Coombs, a forceful lawyer in his early 40s who had served more than a decade in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Word of Manning’s treatment in Kuwait and Quantico had begun to filter out, reaching legal eminences like Laurence Tribe and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who signed an open letter criticizing what they described as “conditions that are illegal and immoral.” In the spring of 2011, the government transferred Manning again, this time to the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth. In Kansas, she was released into general population; it was, Manning recalled, “an utter shock to the system, because I had been in shackles everywhere I went or in a small room or a cage.” At the facility, inmates weren’t required to work, so she spent her time in the library, helping Coombs and his assistants prepare her case. She faced a staggering number of violations, 22 in all, from circumventing security mechanisms to aiding the enemy, an offense that carried with it the possibility of life in prison. For two months that spring, with Manning moved to a civilian prison outside Fort Meade, in Maryland, Coombs sparred with government lawyers, highlighting what he termed the general “lawlessness” of Manning’s unit and the poor security protocols in place in her SCIF. He eventually argued that Manning’s gender dysphoria — and the inability of the Army to provide treatment — might have affected Manning’s mental capacity and judgment. A few days later, the judge found Manning guilty on all but two counts. Manning was spared a conviction for aiding the enemy and avoided a life sentence. Manning told me that she was relieved, and not only for the obvious reasons: She worried that an aiding-the-enemy charge would set a frightening precedent for the prosecution of whistle-blowers. “I still worry about how that charge can be misused,” Manning said. She herself had resolved not to make her own gender identity public during the court-martial, worried that it would complicate an already unwieldy trial. But listening to the testimony of Lauren McNamara, a transgender friend who testified at the sentencing hearing, she found she had reached a breaking point. “I was tired of pretending,” she told me. She wrote a statement identifying herself as Chelsea, a name she used as a child for her handle on the Sims video game. On Aug. 22, David Coombs appeared on NBC’s “Today” show. The co-host Savannah Guthrie read from the statement: “As I transition into the next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am female.” Manning didn’t see the segment or the reaction to it. She was on a plane, on her way to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. The U.S.D.B. lies at the far northern end of Fort Leavenworth, not far from the headquarters of the 40th Military Police Internment and Resettlement Battalion. The maximum-security complex, with its 515 beds, is reserved for the military prisoners serving the longest sentences, housing offenders like Robert Bales, the Army staff sergeant convicted in 2013 of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians. For almost the entirety of her time there, Manning lived on the second floor. Her cell was narrow and small; there was a cot, a toilet, a mirror and a sink. The one window faced north, affording her a view of the surrounding landscape. In the vacuum of prison, the weather became theater: The snow that piled up against the cyclone fencing. The forked lightning that spidered the sky, sending deer and rabbits skittering for cover. At Manning’s court-martial, Coombs had introduced as evidence the photo his client emailed to a superior in 2010. The image was later distributed to the news media, and by the fall of 2013, it had appeared alongside hundreds of articles on Manning’s transition. To Manning, the idea that it should come to define her was painful. “It was just so far from her experience at Leavenworth,” Evan Greer, a trans activist and friend, told me. “And I think some people saw that image, that luscious wig, and figured she was given that kind of freedom behind bars.” In reality, every aspect of Manning’s appearance was being governed by Army rules, from her briefs to her hair, which she was required to wear, per Section 670-1 of Army regulations, in a “neat and conservative style.” Manning was in a position that can be difficult for non-trans people to understand: She had come out as female but was still being addressed and treated as if she were male — often pointedly, by the Leavenworth staff. Vincent Ward, one of Manning’s attorneys, recalls observing the way the prison guards treated his client. Ward, a former military lawyer, said he knew “who these people were. I knew the personality types. From the minute that you walked in, you could sense the bullying, the smirks, the comments.” It is a kind of isolation that can induce drastic action: Clinical psychologists who work with trans prisoners have documented high levels of suicide and depression in inmates not given appropriate medical treatment. In worst-case scenarios, prisoners have tried to alter their own genitalia by hand. To friends and the members of her legal team, Manning spoke regularly, and with despair, of feeling “poisoned” by the testosterone in her body and of a ghostlike invisibility: If people couldn’t see her as she actually was, what use was living? On entering the U.S.D.B. in 2013, Manning requested access to the regimen of estrogen and anti-androgen drugs prescribed to people undergoing a male-to-female transition. She was refused: The Army did not yet sanction hormone therapy for soldiers, let alone for prisoners. Manning’s treatment would be limited to antidepressants and counseling sessions with a psychotherapist. “Permitting Mr. Manning to live as female, much less begin to feminize his body, will create operational challenges as the inmate population respond to these changes,” prison administrators wrote in an internal memo later obtained by the A.C.L.U. The prison was unbending in its stance for nearly a year. Meanwhile, one of Manning’s lawyers — Chase Strangio, who himself is trans — grew increasingly worried that his client might try to hurt herself again; eventually, he filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense. The suit cited a clinical evaluation from the psychologist Randi Ettner and said Manning was “experiencing significant distress and is at high risk for serious medical consequences, including self-castration and suicide.” In the summer of 2014, the Army agreed to send women’s underwear to Manning’s cell — a first for any branch of the military. (A civilian judge in Leavenworth County had granted Manning’s request to change the name on her birth certificate to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.) Hormone therapy followed in early 2015, with the drugs distributed in pill form from a medical dispensary near the cafeteria. To Manning, the early stages of hormone therapy were deeply fulfilling: her skin softened, her body hair thinned. But with the welcome physical changes came unnerving intellectual ones. “I’d built all these defenses and walls around my emotions over the years, since being a teenager,” Manning told me. “When my testosterone levels plummeted, I suddenly became more vulnerable emotionally. I could no longer just hide my emotions: I had to deal with them, usually right there and then.” And the emotions often came faster than Manning could process: “Good ones, like confidence, and a sense of connection with my friends, mixed in with a lot of bad ones, like doubt, loneliness, uncertainty and loss.” For support, Manning spoke regularly to others in the trans community: Strangio and Annie Danger, a trans artist and activist. Danger listened as Manning experimented with her voice, “putting it in different pitches in an effort to find out what felt right,” Danger told me. “I tried to talk her through that searching process, that evolutionary process, which can be so important. You’re literally finding your voice.” At the U.S.D.B., Manning’s days took on a mundane, lulling rhythm. Most mornings, she woke up at 4:30 a.m. and, shrugging off the green sheets, dressed in the light of the bare bulb that hung above her bed: the white sports bra; the oversize prison uniform that hung, scarecrow-like, off her thin frame; the Army-issue boots. “O.K.,” she would say, examining herself in the mirror. “You can do this.” After a quick breakfast in the cafeteria, it was down to the prison wood shop, where she and a crew of inmates built, from scratch, the furniture sold at the base commissary. On the invitation of another prisoner, she joined a weekly Dungeons & Dragons game, playing as Esvele Dundragon, a female noble. Manning told me that even as she transitioned, she never felt physically threatened by the other prisoners, as she did the staff. “Of all the people in my entire experience” in government custody, she said, the ones “who have been consistently good to me were the other inmates — like, I’m not saying they were excited or happy or approved of me or anything.” Manning says she counted a handful of inmates among her close friends, among them Clint Lorance, an Army platoon leader convicted of second-degree murder for ordering his men to open fire on three unarmed Afghan civilians. “Remember that all these folks were active military before they were incarcerated,” David Hammond, a lawyer assigned to Manning by the Army’s Defense Appellate Division, said in describing the dynamic to me. “The discipline carries over.” In April 2014, the Army denied Manning’s clemency application, choosing to uphold, in full, her 35-year sentence. There remained the distant possibility of a presidential pardon or commutation, but Manning had no reason to expect one: The White House had condemned the leaks, as had the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. The best option, Manning knew, lay in the formal appeal. But Manning’s fight with the prison authorities was grinding into its third year, and she was tired. Her hair was still being cut to male standards. The guards were relentless. “If you were trying to get them to be more gender neutral, they would make a point of being very gender specific,” Mannings said. And a request for gender reassignment surgery had been met with silence. (According to Manning’s lawyers, the Army approved the surgery last September, but set no timeline for its completion.) The U.S.D.B., in her mind, was “creating, often deliberately and knowingly, situations that cause high levels of stress on any given number of people. This breaks people down. Good people break down.” In July 2016, one of Manning’s closest friends at the U.S.D.B., Anthony Raby, was seated at a bench in the embroidery shop, sewing name tapes for Army recruits, when a fellow prisoner dropped a note onto his table. “It’s from your girlfriend,” the man said. Raby didn’t have to ask who the man was referring to. A former Army specialist serving three decades for the rape of a young child, Raby had first met Manning in 2013, shortly after her arrival at the U.S.D.B. It was his first encounter with a transgender person; he recalls thinking Manning resembled a “sad, strange little man.” In a letter from the U.S.D.B., Raby wrote: “The idea that someone could believe they were a gender other than what they were born was akin to believing a chicken was a hat. I just didn’t understand. However, as a Christian, I fully believe in showing everyone love and compassion, so we talked.” Raby admired Manning’s intelligence, her wit, her unapologetic weirdness. “I’m all right with the weird,” Raby wrote. Manning visited his cell frequently to talk or vent or cry — taking care not to stay too long and violate the prison policy of one person to a unit. Raby, more than anyone else at the U.S.D.B., seemed to understand the toll that incarceration was taking on Manning. “Prison isn’t the best place for anyone who actually has actual emotions besides hate, anger, bitterness, apathy or indifference,” he wrote. Now his worst fears were confirmed. Unfolding the note, which was folded and sealed shut with spare adhesive from a stamp book, Raby read the header: “Chelsea E. Manning, re: My Final Letter.” He scanned the first page. Manning wrote that she would kill herself after the base’s Fourth of July fireworks display came to a close. The fireworks had ended at 10 p.m. It was already 12:25 a.m. Raby notified a guard in the embroidery shop and handed over Manning’s letter. “About 1 a.m., I heard an announcement over the guard’s radio about an alert in Manning’s housing unit,” Raby told me. “I was pacing like a madman, sure they had not gotten to her in time.” Not wanting to aggravate the staff, Raby struggled to keep his composure. Around 3:30 a.m., he was approached by an Army investigator: Manning was alive. Officials have declined to provide details about the incident, and Manning told me she only remembers waking up in an ambulance. But people with knowledge of the situation said Manning tried to hang herself and was recovered by guards, breathing but unresponsive. Manning told me that in the days leading up to the suicide attempt, she felt unusually low and alone. She had been determined to push through to the end of the long weekend, when her psychologist would be back on base. “I didn’t make it,” she said. In early September, she embarked on a hunger strike to protest what she called the “constant and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials.” She ended the hunger strike when the prison vowed to provide her with gender-reassignment surgery, an unprecedented accommodation. By the end of September, Manning was sentenced to an additional two weeks in solitary, with one week suspended. Her crime was conduct that threatens the orderly running of the barracks — her suicide attempt. If prison, as Manning has said, made her feel like a ghost — alive in her supporters’ thoughts but unable to be with them physically — then her time in solitary was akin to erasure. Isolation “changes you; it makes you angry,” she said. “You start to forget about the world outside — it’s not relevant or relatable anymore. The darkest part of solitary confinement is that you start to forget about cars, and jobs, and families, and weather, and politicians, and all the things that make up a society.” Manning again tried to kill herself, but a guard spotted her before she lost consciousness. A week later, she was returned to general population. She was beside herself with anger and fear. She was also, she told me, most likely suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — from Iraq, from Quantico. It was during her second stretch in solitary that Manning experienced an episode that the Army has no record of, and that, on the heels of the suicide attempts, seems to be indicative of severe mental anguish. In a legal brief, Manning details a vivid kind of fever dream that she still puzzles over — hearing “several reports of suppressed or silenced shots from a pistol” and listening as a group of strangers described their plans to remove her from the U.S.D.B. She refused to leave her cell, she says, and the next morning, the staff carried on as if nothing had happened. To Manning’s attorneys, it was obvious that their client was running out of time. “Chelsea needs help, and she’s not getting it,” Strangio told me this winter. He viewed a commutation application, filed in November, as Manning’s best hope. In the petition, Manning’s lawyers appended a letter from Manning. “I am not Bradley Manning,” she wrote. “I really never was. I am Chelsea Manning, a proud woman who is transgender and who, through this application, is respectfully requesting a first chance at life.” On the afternoon of Jan. 17, Manning was in the prison workshop, covered head to toe in wood shavings. She remembers looking up to see a team of security personnel enter the room. “I’m like, Oh, God, I’m in a lot of trouble,” Manning told me. “I don’t even know what the hell I’ve done now.”’ The prison’s head of security told her to come with them. “Am I coming back?” she asked. No, she was told. She grabbed her belongings and followed the guards to the Special Housing Unit. Assuming she was going back to solitary, she started to take the shoelaces out of her boots. The lead officer shook his head: She was headed for Protective Custody. In the common area, a television was playing CNN. She saw the banner on the screen: Manning’s sentence commuted, it read. Manning told me she went numb. She never let herself think about a commutation, lest she be thrown back into a deeper darkness. “It was so hard for me to process and deal with it,” Manning recalled. Obama later addressed the decision with an implicit rebuke to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. “Let’s be clear: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence, so the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished, I don’t think would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served,” he said. Four months later, on the morning of May 17, Manning was marched out the front door of the U.S.D.B. and loaded into a Ford Explorer. The driver steered the S.U.V. up a short slope and onto the curved road that winds south, past the gates of the overgrown U.S.D.B. cemetery, where 14 executed German prisoners of war were buried in 1945. A constellation of brick buildings appeared in the distance. Close to 1 a.m., the Explorer drew to a halt in a parking lot, where Strangio and Hollander were waiting. Manning was so eager to hug the two attorneys that she clocked Strangio in the face with her elbow. The week I spent with Manning in New York felt like a moment of suspended animation: the days between all the chaos of her life before and whatever was going to come next. In her final months at the U.S.D.B., Manning put together 300 pages of memoir, and she’s acquired an agent to shop the draft around. This fall, she will appear in a documentary called “XY Chelsea,” produced by Laura Poitras. Her attorneys, meanwhile, continue to work on her appeal. Even if she is exonerated, it is hard to know how comfortable her life will be in the years to come, given that some of the nation will never likely reconcile itself to what she did. But she is determined not to dwell on her reputation, and for that week in Manhattan, she seemed happy being free. We trudged, unnoticed, through busy city streets, ordered chicken nuggets at McDonald’s, ate in restaurants and cafes and went to a weekend screening of “Alien: Covenant.” On the way into the theater, the man collecting the tickets asked to check Manning’s bag. I held my breath, thinking she would be recognized. But kneeling, Manning unzipped the main compartment, revealing her laptop. She was waved through: The famous whistle-blower and former military prisoner had become just another Sunday evening theatergoer. It occurred to me that if Manning sometimes seemed to have difficulty interpreting the effect her actions had on the world, it was in part a result of the extraordinary isolation she had experienced even before her arrest, in her childhood in Crescent, when she longed for a solution for her pain. Later, in solitary in Kuwait or Quantico, or in the special housing unit at the U.S.D.B., that isolation had been made physical: The “feedback loop” she had spoken of to me had been torn. Now she had the ability to live publicly and openly as she always knew she was, and she was adjusting to the idea, sinking into it as if it were a cold pond. More than once, as we walked the streets of New York, I felt I was in the presence of someone coming fully alive for the very first time. Manning told me she understood that her identity and the actions that led to her arrest have long been tangled up in the public imagination, sometimes in uncomfortable ways: An appellate brief filed last year by Manning’s legal team implied that the Army’s inability to treat Manning’s gender dysphoria was a contributing factor in the leaks. Manning didn’t want to discuss “hypotheticals,” what would have happened if circumstances were different, but she was adamant on one thing: “What I can tell you,” she said, “is that my values would have been the same. The things I care about would have been the same.” One morning, at the end of an interview, Manning handed me a white envelope. Inside was a note from a 14-year-old trans boy. “I just wanted to say that I’m glad you’re gonna be free in a few months,” the boy had scrawled in pen, “and that I’m proud of you (is that weird thing to say?). You’re an inspiration.” Manning placed the note back in the envelope. If she was being honest, she said, she never particularly wanted to be a role model. I asked if Manning’s life would have been different if she’d had such a person. She stared down at her hands. “I don’t know how,” she said finally, “but it would have been better.” A couple of days later, we spent an hour sitting on a park bench. The skies were bruised, but the air was warm and fragrant. A flock of pigeons nearby. Manning cooed at them. She told me that at Leavenworth, not long before she learned of her commutation, a robin had alighted at her window, a small messenger from the world outside. Hadn’t it been a sign? She had taken it as one. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/magazine/the-long-lonely-road-of-chelsea-manning.html?emc=edit_ta_20170612&nl=top-stories&nlid=47522647&ref=cta&_r=0

[gigsoupmusic]

Exclusive interview with Rome based artist Dolche

Christine Herin, known professionally as Dolche, is an Italian-French singer, songwriter, composer and record producer already boasts a 20-year music career, more than 500 concerts in Europe with and key collaborations with Grammy Award winning professionals. She was born in Valle d'Aosta, a French-speaking autonomous region in the north of Italy. The first single off her forthcoming album Exotic Diorama (out Oct 2020 ) is the cinematic Roma - available now, and which has a very DIY inspired lockdown concept for its video. We had a chat with the artist herself to find out more about her life, creativity in lockdown conditions and the ideas behind her forthcoming album... How did you become a musician? Who or what inspired you? I began to sing when I was around 3 or 4 years old. My dad used to bring me to the small church of my 40-inhabitant village and he tells me I harmonized the hymns sung by the choir. Since my earliest memory music has always been there even if in my family and village nobody knew anything about music. My mother still asks me when I will find a real job! I am completely self-taught. I remember the day I found out that the public library in the city had vinyl. I was 12 and went there every day I could to listen to these amazing sounds that I never heard before. I was listening to Aretha Franklin’s records. I also had a great love for classical music…Bach, Puccini, the opera. I probably got so stubborn and sacrificed so much to be a musician (I can’t even remember how many side jobs I did) because it was the only way to do it. It was like survival for me. Music was in me and I had to do it to be myself. What do you enjoy most about being a musician? What do you hate most?’ I enjoy the live performance, the stage. Most people are afraid before concerts. I never have been. It’s the most natural thing for me. Sharing the emotions with the public, throwing myself in the instruments and in the performance. I just can’t get enough. I don’t hate anything about music. I hate that most things I am required to do today as a musician have nothing to do with writing or playing music. If you could change anything about the music industry, what would it be? No hesitation on that: I would give women an equal space. The music industry is still so anachronistically a man’s world. If you were on a desert island and could only take one album with you to listen to, what album would you choose? What a disaster, just one?! Ok it would be “Greatest Hits” of 1981 by Queen. I would already have all the sound of nature to listen to and I would definitely need some music to get the energy to face the tough wild life and to feel the power of pure art. Tell us about the new single ‘Roma’ and the video that goes with it. Ah, that is a story! Because I had to figure out a way to make a professional video from home in complete isolation. Out of curiosity, before everyone begun to do it, I was spying the unique, amazing show that the city of Rome – ‘Roma’- had to offer in these sad lockdown days. There is a website where you can connect to all the main webcams in town and watch a show that nobody has ever seen before. The city, my city, bare, silent, empty, beautiful and melancholic with its fountains pouring water and the sun changing the shades on the statues. I wanted everybody to be able to take a look into this secret jewel box. I purchased all the videos of one entire day, the day when our Prime Minister declared complete lockdown also for factories. And I used the time-lapse images to show the magnificence of the sun and clouds and water moving in an otherwise still postcard. I wanted to put my body into this narration and I covered myself with a bed sheet miming the pose of La Pietà, by Michelangelo Buonarroti. I moved all the furniture to get a white empty wall, embraced my guitar and projected the images upon me while singing. There are of course a lot of technical issues that I solved but that’s my geek side and I will not bore you with that! This was the perfect way to present to my fans my love song for Roma, a city that welcomed me ten years ago and gave me a home, a wife and a dog. I will be forever thankful to this ‘old lady’. https://youtu.be/kHe7hqRhGFc How has Covid-19 affected your music/ musical plans for this year? As all my fellow musicians we have all been hit hard by this epidemic, both in personal life and in our jobs. I planned the release of my album for 2020. And this included touring in Italy and in the USA and, hopefully, in some other countries where my music is very much loved (Turkey, Brazil, Mexico). Plus, I usually spend part of the year in New York City to write music and film music videos. All this is gone for the moment. I will soon be on Patreon with live online concerts and more. Musicians are too often afraid and ashamed to say that we do it because we love it but we need money to keep doing it. And concerts, together with merch sales, are the only income source if you are a small/medium size independent artist. People are unaware that we get absolutely zero from all the platforms they pay to listen to music. I hope this will be an occasion to let people learn more about this and support their favourite artists trough different circuits to help them keep making the music they love. Can you tell us anything about the follow up single to Roma? I can tell you that it is a completely different song and mood. It will be a song, in English this time, with a super well-produced video that we shot in New York City last November with very exciting special effects! I am very proud of it especially because of the message of the song. But I don’t want to spoil it for you! Your forthcoming album will be called ‘Exotic Diorama’ and will be released in October this year – can you give us an idea what inspired the songs on it? My wife Chiara found the name for the album and I think it perfectly expresses its deepest nature. The first time that I was in New York was with her and she brought me to the Natural History Museum, near Central Park. Quite a show. I stayed still for a time that I cannot measure in front of the dioramas of many wild habitats. A sad yet mesmerizing spectacle. An entire world in a few squared metres enclosed by glass but still so alive that I could imagine sounds and movements. Exotic Diorama is like a key hole through which you can spy an entire universe. Mine. My music is inspired by dreams and food and sounds of nature and smells. For this reason, it is varied and nearly unclassifiable. No kidding. We face a great problem each time we need to select a music category when we release a single! Each song is unique and has a different style from the others. But all together they make sense. Like an impressionist painting that you can only understand if you look to its entirety. Lastly, the word exotic fit my nature: in my home village, in my same family they look at me as if they saw a hummingbird flying in the Alps! If you had to describe the album in a few lines – what would you say? I will do it in three words. A big trip! You have fans all over the world – how do they differ? Oh, they couldn't be more heterogenous! I have this lovely and fun old guy from Punjabi all dressed in red and orange sending me pics of his hens and a young 16 year old lesbian girl from Turkey who tells me how much she feels alone and finds comfort in my music and in the fact that I am openly Lesbian. I have a lot of amazing people from South America fighting for the amazons and for the rights of our environment and a Brazilian woman who always plays my songs and sends me video might it be in the backyard during her kid's birthday party or driving to work. One thing though they all have in common. A profound respect for human rights and human freedom. Have you had a chance to meet any fans on tour (prior to lockdown)? Yes, I met some of them after my New York gigs and they joined my team for dinner right after. It was a blast! Do you have a message for your fans - old and new? Be nice. Be open. And have a Dolche day! What are your personal hopes and wishes for the rest of the year and beyond? Well, I am pregnant. After many tries Chiara and I finally made the right one just the day before lockdown was declared...perfect timing, ah! I am not kidding. I am always working and traveling and touring and rehearsing and this forced pause in the first three months (ending in two weeks) has been the only way I could stay still in one place. So, my hope is an easy one: That this kid will get into a world made better by all the hard times that we are going through. And that my wife lets me buy one more guitar! Read the full article

[topworldhistory]

Around the globe, the serpent carries potent symbolism.

Ever since Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, snakes in Christian tradition have been associated with lies, evil and temptation. But in other cultures, as far-flung as ancient Greece and Egypt and indigenous North America, snakes symbolize fertility, rebirth, renewal and even immortality. The ouroboros, the ancient symbol of eternity that was famously depicted on King Tut’s tomb in the 14th century B.C., is a serpent devouring its own tail.

From the Aztec god of wind, rain and creation to the semi-divine human-snake creatures that guarded the Buddha, here are nine snakes or serpents that have emerged, through history or myth, to play important roles in the cultures they represent.

Snake in the Garden of Eden

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

A man. A woman. A snake. And a fateful apple. In the Old Testament Book of Genesis, a serpent memorably appears in the Garden of Eden, the earthly paradise God created for the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. The cunning snake convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the “tree of knowledge,” telling her that “when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When God learned of Adam and Eve’s transgression, he banished both of them from Eden and cursed the snake for its role, saying “You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.” Debate has long raged over whether the serpent in Genesis was a literal reptile, an allegory for sexual desire or temptation or even Satan himself.

Snakes that St. Patrick drove out of Ireland

St. Patrick depicted with a snake under his foot.

Irish culture is brimming with myths and legends, perhaps none so prevalent as that of St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, banishing every last snake from the Emerald Isle. As the story goes, St. Patrick, a fifth-century Christian missionary, was fasting for 40 days atop a hill when he was attacked by snakes. He waved his staff, driving all Ireland’s snakes into the sea. Though Ireland—like New Zealand, Hawaii, Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica—is in fact devoid of snakes, that has less to do with St. Patrick than with the fact that since the post-glacial age it’s been surrounded by water, and before that its climate was too cold for any snakes to survive. The story makes more sense as an allegory: Snakes were a symbol of paganism, and Patrick was given credit for driving the pagans out and bringing Christianity to the Emerald Isle.

READ MORE: Who Was St. Patrick?

Jormungand, the Viking sea serpent

Thor battling the Midgard Serpent.

In Norse mythology, few stories are as dramatic as that of Jormungand, the powerful sea serpent. Jormungand, one of three children of the shape-shifting god Loki and the giantess Angrboda, was thrown into the sea by Odin, father of the powerful thunder god Thor. The serpent grew until his body encircled all of Midgard (or Earth), and he was able to grasp his own tail in his mouth. At the start of Ragnarok, the final battle that would end in the earth’s destruction, Jormungand left the sea and rolled across the land wreaking havoc. In their climactic confrontation, Thor slew the serpent with his mighty hammer, Mjolnir, but only made it nine paces before falling dead himself, poisoned by the serpent’s deadly venom.

Leviathan from the Book of Job

Behemoth and Leviathan, by William Blake.

There’s debate over whether the passages in Job about Leviathan and another giant Biblical creature, Behemoth, describe mythological beasts—or actual animals that existed at the time but later may have gone extinct. It’s been suggested that Behemoth could have been a hippopotamus, an elephant or even a dinosaur, while Leviathan may have been an ancient species of crocodile. Either way, the Book of Job employed both Leviathan and Behemoth to demonstrate to Job God’s power of creation, and the futility of questioning Him. Later, the word “leviathan” would be applied more generally to mean a giant whale (most memorably the great white whale in Moby Dick) or other massive sea creature.

Medusa and the Gorgons

The Head of Medusa, painted by Peter Paul Rubens.

In Greek mythology, the Gorgons were snake-women whose gazes would turn people to stone; they had serpents for hair, long claws, sharp teeth and scales covering their bodies. According to some myths, Medusa, the most famous of the Gorgons, was originally a beautiful woman. Her tryst with the god Poseidon in one of Athena’s temples infuriated the virgin goddess, who turned Medusa into a Gorgon as punishment. Athena later helped the hero Perseus slay Medusa, giving him a shiny bronze shield that he used to watch the Gorgon’s reflection rather than looking directly at her. After cutting off Medusa’s fearsome head (from which her two children with Poseidon, Chrysaor and Pegasus, emerged) Perseus mounted it on his shield, and used it to paralyze his enemies in battle.

Quetzalcoatl

A detailed view of Aztec art depicting the god Tez-Calipoca and Quetzalcoatl (right) devouring a human being.

Among the most prominent deities in Mesoamerican cultures, Quetzalcoatl, or “Feathered Serpent,” was a mix of bird and rattlesnake (coatl is the Nahuatl word for serpent). The Aztec god of wind and rain, as well as learning, agriculture and science, Quetzalcoatl was said to have played a key role in the world’s creation. In one version of the creation story, he and another god, Tezcatlipoca, transformed themselves into snakes and ripped a giant sea monster named Cipactli in half; one part of her became the earth, the other the sky. Though the earliest depictions of Quetzalcoatl show him clearly as a snake with a plume of feathers, later cultures represented him in human form.

Naga

The Chariot Hall or Royal Funerary Chariot Hall at the Wat Xieng Thong in the UNESCO world heritage town of Luang Prabang in Central Laos contains King Sisavang Vong's gilded, carved wooden funeral carriage, decorated with large Naga snakes at the front. 

In the eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, a mythological semi-divine race known as the naga (Sanskrit for “serpent”) took half-human, half-cobra form—although they could shift shapes to fully take on one or the other. The Hindhu god Brahma was said to have banished the naga to their underground kingdom when they became too populous on Earth. In Buddhism, naga were often depicted as protectors of Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha, and the dharma (Buddhist teachings), but they were also seen as powerful, and potentially dangerous when angered. Of the many naga mentioned in the Buddhist scriptures, one particularly famous one was Mucalinda, a naga king who spread his great cobra hood to shelter the Buddha from a storm that arrived while the prophet was deep in meditation.

Hopi Snake Dance

Men handling poisonous rattlesnakes, one even holding a snake between his teeth, for the snake dance of the Native American Hopi tribe.

For thousands of years, members of the Hopi Native American tribe of northern Arizona have performed the ritual known as the Snake Dance. During the multi-day ritual, which is aimed at encouraging rainfall and fertility for the land, male dancers from the Snake Clan put live snakes—ranging from small garter snakes to rattlesnakes—in their mouths and around their necks. The snakes are painstakingly gathered and washed before the ceremony, which also involves members of the Antelope Clan. Though outsiders (notably Theodore Roosevelt) have been able to witness some aspects of the Snake Dance, much of the lengthy ceremony takes place in underground chambers called kivas, allowing its most sacred aspects to remain mysterious.

The Legend of the White Snake

An actress plays the role of the White Snake in Baisha Zhuan (The Legend of White Snake) in a Chinese opera, 2000.

This ancient Chinese myth tells the story of a powerful female white snake demon who lives underwater but takes human form as Madame White, or Bai Suzhen. After Bai falls in love with and marries a mortal man, Xu Xian, a Buddhist monk, Fahai, reveals her true identity to her husband. Fahai later kidnaps Xu, and traps Bai under his lakeside pagoda—but not before she gives birth to her son with Xu, who will eventually free his mother. There are various versions of the Legend of the White Snake, which has evolved over the centuries from a horror story, in which Fahai heroically battles the evil snake demon, to a romance, focusing on the thwarted but genuine love between Xu and Bai.

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/328XE7u February 19, 2020 at 05:29AM

[jamesdazell]

Tragedy as the Joyful Art; or, The Ironic Art of Tragedy

I took this photograph in April of last year. This is the first permanent theatre ever built in the world, where some of my favourite plays were performed for the very first time. The original site where all the formality of what we know as theatre had its origins. It was also a civic art, created simultaneously with democracy, where public speaking and talking about their lives was so important. And the most important site during the festival of Dionysia. I went to Athens to read the plays sitting in the theatre seats that someone sat in watching these very plays 2,500 years ago.I think Greek tragedy is the greatest artform and the greatest approach to art there ever was. I’ve been studying and writing about it for ten years. Meeting with scholars and practitioners of theatre. Learning from so many books, talks, and documentaries. And testing out my understanding in writing my own work across stage, books, and poetry. As well as hiring art spaces out to staging some of my own performances.This is an artform that demonstrates the power of art. It’s an artform of immense passion for life, and demands its artist a great capacity for comprehending reality with all its good and bad qualities. Tragedy was no art of optimism, nor was it mere melodrama, and certainly it wasn’t grave liturgical passion plays. Tragedy is more than a genre, it's a world view. And so its technique has to be in-keeping with that world view.Over the centuries we have corroded the original meaning of tragedy. We associate tragedy with death, but not a single tragic hero dies in any of Aeschylus' best plays. And, with the exception of Ajax’s suicide, not one tragic figure dies on stage. There was no pleasure taken from death in this theatre. Its about a dilemma of existence. Its an art that's been misunderstood and has been misunderstood since Aristotle. Aristotle thought the objective was to arouse pity and fear, and produce a cathartic effect from being overwhelmed by them. This is a complete misunderstanding, of both its effect and how the work would arrive on the page at all.It’s evident that original subject matter wasn’t of much importance, since all the tragedians wrote plays on the same subject and characters. What the theatre-maker did with it was what was of importance; what they invested into it; what the play was doing not what it was about. And given these plays were written in the context of a festival competition, it would be befitting that they should write on the same subject, so that their works could go head to head, as competition was everything to the Ancient Greeks. “potter strives against potter, craftsman strives against craftsman, singer strives against singer” writes Hesiod in the Works and Days. “Strife is justice” writes Heraclitus.But even the Greeks lost their way. Euripides turned tragedy into mere melodrama, Aristotle misunderstood it and ruined an understanding for centuries. The Romans didn’t know how to handle it correctly. When the Christians revived theatre as instruction of the Bible to the illiterate they turned tragedy into its present meaning. Even Nietzsche blundered aspects of it with his loony Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy. Shakespeare borrowed from conventions unGreek, such as the Christian medieval passion plays of Christ’s crucifixion which featured enduring suffering and death on stage. Roman tragedies of Seneca that were pathos of suffering and revenge. And the comedies of antiquity which he borrowed their oscillation between protagonist and antagonist. Even the idea of the fall of heights comes from a medieval concept of the wheel of fortune. And if you combine these with Aristotle’s misinterpretations and Euripides’ melodrama, given his work survives more than any other tragedian, then our general understanding is naturally inaccurate. All in all, we’re just missing the point, and our understanding doesn’t do justice or describe any of the examples of what is going on in any of the earliest extant works of tragedy by Aeschylus, whom even in his own time was considered the greatest of the three surviving tragedians. The comic playwright Aristophanes, just after the death of Euripides, wrote a play called The Frogs wherein the patron god of theatre, Dionysus, goes to the underworld to bring back one of the three playwrights because tragedy has fallen to a terrible standard since they’ve died. Sophocles umpires whilst Aeschylus and Euripides have a kind of literary criticism competition, lampooning each others works, and in the end Aeschylus wins.When we think of this art being created, the rules for this aren't coming from literary criticism. So the rules for these works were born from their culture. Real Tragedy rose and fell in its richest form, much like what happens with our popular culture. It doesn’t seem to have been based around hard and fast rules, as with Japanese Noh Drama that keeps to its tradition. These were not professional playwrights. Theatre had only just been invented merely decades earlier (albeit in the previous century). But it had reached a refined and sophisticated brilliance, much like cinema in the sixties and seventies had done merely decades from the birth of cinema. For the same reason that we have culture of the eighties, nineties, twenty-tens, etc, the meaning of art changes. This is little or nothing to do with progress, politics, or technology, except as being part and parcel of that same consequence. As the prevailing condition of human character changes, the disposition to the world by the artist changes, both artists and in audience. The change in tragedy came with Socrates. With Socrates came rationalism, and with rationalism came optimism, and with optimism came cheerfulness, with cheerfulness comes attitudes to life of consolation, with consolation comes defensive doctrine of morality. It was this new scientific attitude that took hold of Athenian culture that was the prime symptom of the demise of real Greek tragedy. An attitude that stands in opposition to the embryonic pregnancy of how tragedy can be conceived. Not only Socratic influence in the case of Euripides’ work, but this was the age of Plato, which it is agreed upon, is a philosophy that is wholly proto-Christian, and significant to the development of Christianity by Neo-Plantonist Jews who studied his works in the Library of Alexandria. This is not all too dissimilar from the Puritanical, rationalistic and scientific age of Enlightenment that followed the period of Shakespearean tragedy.The art of tragedy differs also from our very familiarity with the presentation of theatre itself. Not only was this not a naturalistic theatre, but more stylised than even the mannerisms of opera, more in fact like the movements of a puppet theatre, the dancing of African and Indian dances, and the music of medieval secular music and our popular music, to the degree that our Modern theatre cannot be used as a frame of reference at all. If an ancient Athenian were to sit in our theatres of tragedy they would either be wholly confused or roll about laughing. It’s important to remember that Ancient Greece was a culture that looked East, and were influenced by world views and religions of the East. How sterile and cold a Modern Western European culture feels when held next to Ancient Greece, with its almost colourfully Brahmic culture. Two-thousand years of Christian Europe has lead to a lot of misunderstandings.Pageant wagons depicting scenes from the Bible were the first cinema or TV screens. They would roll through the town like a float parade representing the whole universe of the Bible. They were literally a window to the world, which incorporated all the people of the world and beyond it, whilst the audience watched, removed from its settings.This was not what tragedy was doing. Tragedy was a superimposed performance into a very real world, which didn’t have a metaphysical beyond. Olympus and the Underworld are in this one and the same world. The performances themselves were of, not Athens, but of real cities. Their plays consisted of characters absent, conjured by theatre, but the rest of the world consisted of those in the audience watching and this very same real world. The characters were not rolled out, being born from trying to re-present the world realistically, but born from a realm of poetry, with only three characters on stage at one time. The necessity of characters merely to move plot forward by bringing in new information, not because that’s how the world looks. It’s believed the first tragedies would have been only one actor and a chorus of fifty singers. Although limited, this must have a powerful kind of poetry-performance-art-music-dance-drama. The speech is stylised and poetic. compared to our modern theatre, since we see the stage as a re-presentation of a window to the world, writers naturally concluded why don’t people in the play talk like they do outside our windows, and ordinary realistic speech was pushed onto the stage. But again, we’re just missing the point. This was not a projected window to the universe, nor was it to be held up like a mirror to ordinary life. This was a drama of poetry-music performance art. The poet was by nature also a musician in these dramas, and in the case of Choral poetry, which was so integral to tragedy, a poet-musician-dancer. But the Greeks were not pessimistic. The Greeks didn’t underestimate the power of poetry and music. The tragic heroes were not poets but they were endowed with poetic abilities. The model for a poet was Orpheus who could transform the world around him with song and music, could make birds sing, and fish leap out of water. Just as the poet suffered in life they were also considered to posses divine abilities by the effect of poetry on others, and subsequently were mythologised. This was not a re-presentation of the world. This was an art. The very drama of tragedy is born from the intoxicating rapture of music and poetry, not only in to a vision of scenes, but the drama and all it contains that unfolds. The choral separations between “acts” are to reenergise the drama with its original intoxication for the drama to then spring from. The drama springs from the music, the character embodied by the poetry. Breaking up apart from out civilised cultural self into our primal nature and rebuilding into a character who cab stand in a world of such a reality, in a cycle of creative destruction. Think of that two minutes as Friends begins followed by the theme song, narrating the themes of the show, and then the acting resumes. It’s not all together different from what happens there. A pop rock quiet verse, loud chorus, quiet verse, loud chorus. Or the use of the music of Morricone in Leone's movies, in a Tarantino or Scorsese picture. The moments of talk by a singer between songs. All this is closer to tragedy than opera which literally dramatises action, feeling, words into the music itself. Opera, which is truthfully merely poetry as music, and considered a high art because it was associated with high society, the vogue of intellectual rationalism, and church music - in short, all things which modernity considered to be of refined and sophisticated high class. Modernity is Socratic art par excellence.To understand an art you have to understand the condition of its pregnancy not by its affected reception. You have to view it in embryo and look for under what conditions this would be conceived. If you study it as an afterword there are all sorts of interpretations possible. But if you study it in conception then every interpretation must end with the work. Not how do we analyse the written text as an afterword, but how you go from a blank page to this written text. We need to analyse it as the author not the audience. It's not enough to analyse effects because often the process of creation is inverse to the desired effect they produce. You can have a innumerable interpretations as an audience, but whatever interpretations you have here, all end with this. And if you apply those rules to a blank page you should end with the work too. Until I can fake a Greek play, I haven’t understood it.Challenges are what make us grow, are what make us demonstrate our outstanding qualities, and create goals which give our lives meaning. How do you give life meaning when it's full of horrible things that are hard to comprehend? It's normal that we prefer to want to live in a world of a limited amount of perception about the nature of ourselves and the world we live in. Or live optimistically and pretend that negative consequences are not likely to happen, that in the end everything works out. We prefer, not to live in a world of those difficult realities, but a world that consoles us for those things. And we put blinkers on and black-out just enough of reality so we can enjoy living in it. That can't happen in tragedy. It demands you to take in all the difficult things to comprehend about the world as a reality of lifeIn a similar way to how a pop or rock singer will sing a lyric contrary to its written expression, joyfully singing a sad lyric. And how an actor playing a villain doesn’t play the role as the audience feels about the character, but how the character feels about themselves, so to play the role convincingly they have to play the bad guy as a good guy. Tragedy is an art of irony. And irony is the essence of all great art. It sets up its pessimism and overcomes it with art. Pain shuts down language. It is such an intransitive experience that it is near impossible to express in language. Pain is the flip-side to imagination, and as such then is pain overcome by pure creative force. Pessimism is overcome by the creative act of poetry, that has a diction too strong to succumb to the very subject of their expression, overcome by their musicality and metaphorical beauty. What was pain is overcome by the power of art. Art, which stands beyond the reach of intransitive pain and suffering. And yet has by the very nature of art sprung from them, affirmed that very aspect of life which contains pain and suffering. Pessimism in the audience is overcome by the experience of the plays, of beautiful lyrical speech, the ecstasy music and dancing, performing to a collected public audience not in the dark but in the midday spring sun when everything was undergoing regeneration, in the context of a festival of wine and sex, devoted to the god Dionysus who embodied ecstasy and liberation from gloomy cares and worry. By allowing an audience to revel and feel exhilaration in a scenario of this scope of reality and spectrum of being a human being. When pain and suffering is universalised in to a collective experience being human, and again overcome by a collective experience of art. Similar to a crowd listening to an anthemic rock song all singing at the same time, liberated and reunited with that primal human being that lurks behind the overbearing cultural citizen who exists in daily civilization.Unnaturalness is the essence of archaic art because it shows the defiance of art in the face of aspects of life that would ordinarily make us gloomy. Tragedy was life affirming because it did not turn away from life. Some of the most similar examples of its technique are not from the renaissance, neo-classicalism, the opera, the Romans, but from the twentieth century. This was the pop culture of the American 1990s. This whole approach of popular culture from the 60s to the 90s. This was the art of Spain in the early twentieth century. This was some of the work of Italy and Japan. The rock music of England. The atmosphere of the Olympics, the superbowl, Glastonbury festival. Although tragedy and comedy were not mixed genres, there was no differentiation between high and popular art in Ancient Greece. Tragedy contained the popular arts we're familiar with today, and all the wisdom of Aristophanes' comedy was punctuated with fart jokes. Greek tragedy is high art popular culture.All great periods of art were during undesirable political times. The antagonism is a positive one. It shows the defiance in the power of art over aspects of life that make us gloomy. The whole objective was that pain and suffering, where a stimulant for overcoming, and therefore affirmed into the whole theatre of life, the whole horror of existence was overcome by art. This was an exhilarating joyful art. It was life affirming because it did not turn away from life. Not to use art to talk about the terribleness of the world but to use it as weights that test our strength for loving life even in that reality of the world. Like a weight lifter's strong arm that needs heavier things to test their strength. The Greeks used art to lift the heaviness of life. This was done in competition. This was the stage where the Greeks competed to demonstrate who loves life the most. That’s what I feel art is, the myth over the reality, an illusion we place over the world in order to love it more.

[disndatradio]

Danny Elfman Talks The Nightmare Before Christmas, Released 25 Years Ago Today

It’s late Wednesday evening in London and Danny Elfman is admittedly jet-lagged. “We’re right in the middle of scoring Dumbo,” says the iconic composer of the upcoming live-action adaptation of the classic story starring Danny DeVito and directed by his frequent collaborator Tim Burton. “All I can say right now about it is that the elephant is pretty goddamn cute,” laughs Elfman. “I never know, ever what (my films) are going to be, so what I do is the best I can.”

It’s that attitude that has guided Elfman in his career as one of today’s most well-known composers, working on a litany of iconic projects, from the instantly recognizable themes for shows such as The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives to scores for smashes ranging from Men In Black to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, Fifty Shades Of Grey, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and countless more.

Watch Trent Reznor, Danny Elfman, & Hans Zimmer discuss their work.

However, it’s Elfman’s creative partnership with Burton on the majority of the director’s filmography that has defined his career, starting with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in 1985 and stretching through Batman, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, Corpse Bride, and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. “What made us get along for decades, I couldn’t answer,” muses Elfman of Burton. “He’s a weird guy but he doesn’t seem weird next to me. Tim and I grew up in similar ways, which probably had something to do with it. We were both ‘monster kids,’ an odd subculture of children of the ’60s who grew up on these great low-budget horror films. When I first met him, his idol was Vincent Price and mine was Peter Lorre.”

Throughout their vast and uniquely strange partnership, one film stands among them as one whose fandom has taken on a life of its own. Twenty-five years ago today, their stop-motion animated The Nightmare Before Christmas hit theaters and helped define a new era of “monster kids,” serving as a respite to the saccharine animated children’s films of the time. A twisted musical tale focused on kidnapping Santa Claus that combined elements of the whimsical nature of Christmas and the dark fun of Halloween and whose lead character was a skeleton (aptly dubbed Jack Skellington), the film quickly turned into a labor of love for the duo. “I remember Tim sent me an outline, but then I didn’t hear anything about it for a while,” says Elfman of his earliest memories of the process. “Finally we got together and he said he needed to start doing something, but there was no script and neither of us knew how to start a musical.”

Burton had a vivid vision for the film but was simultaneously working on Batman Returns, the highly anticipated sequel to his hit 1989 film, and relegated Nightmare directing duties to Henry Selick. “I remember Henry was in Oakland ready to start shooting, but all we had was an outline for the story,” says Elfman. “So we just started working on the songs (as a starting point). It turned out to be the simplest writing I’d ever done.”

Burton would visit Elfman and explain the story of the movie, chapter by chapter. “He had all of these great pictures and drawings, as well as lines and poems; fragments of stuff. I remember a number of times I pushed him out the door because I started hearing the songs in my head. I’d start right on that, and three days later I’d have a demo which I’d come back and play for him. Then we’d start the next part of the story.”

Elfman’s goal was to achieve a musical timelessness and called on a bevy of inspirations when penning songs ranging from the anthemic “This Is Halloween” to the mischievous “Kidnap The Sandy Claws.” “I wanted it to sound like it was written 50 or 100 years ago, so I turned my own influences for that stuff. Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which was a major thing in my life, was a source, as well musicals from Cole Porter and Gershwin, and to a certain extent, Rodgers and Hammerstein.” For “What’s This?,” during which Skellington discovers the vibrant Christmas Town, Elfman turned his attention to the Victorian era. “The lyrics are very fast and constant, like some of my favorite Gilbert and Sullivan songs.”

Once a full script was concocted by Elfman’s then-girlfriend Caroline Thompson (the three previously collaborated on Beetlejuice), the movie went into production. The outcome seemed promising, until an ominous preview screening. “I remember a producer saying afterwards, ‘Well, kids hate it.’ Then I did a junket, and every person would ask me, ‘So if this isn’t for kids, who is this for?’ I’d say, ‘If your kids aren’t afraid of Halloween, they won’t be afraid of Nightmare.’”

Despite being the first animated movie nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and the film nabbing a Golden Globe nod for Best Score, Elfman remembers an underwhelming reception. “It came and went pretty quickly and didn’t do very well. Nobody understood what it was or how to market it. I put so much into this project, including so much of my own personality, that it really hurt. At the time I was really depressed after it came out. I put so much into it and it was gone.”

Perhaps appropriate to the movie’s theme, Nightmare was brought back from the proverbial dead as time went on. After becoming a hit on VHS, the movie began generating a cult fanbase in the ensuing years, something Disney was quick to seize on. “A lot of studios would ignore their (back catalog), but Disney to their credit understood what it was and started getting behind it again,” says Elfman, whose idea of its fandom was crystallized just over a decade after its release. “I remember being with Tim in Tokyo, and we were seeing Nightmare merchandise all over. There was even a club in Tokyo dedicated to Nightmare. We thought it was amazing and it was a good sense of this thing still surviving.”

In recent years Rotten Tomatoes named it one of the best Christmas movies of all time, with Disney re-releasing it multiple times, including making it the first stop motion animated film converted into 3D. In addition, an album of covers were released in both 2006 and 2008 with Fall Out Boy taking the reigns of “What’s This?” and two versions of opening track “This Is Halloween” courtesy Marilyn Manson and Panic! At the Disco. Meanwhile, on both Spotify and Apple Music, the vast majority of Elfman’s top-streaming tracks are from Nightmare.

As a result of the interest, Elfman has brought the movie’s music to life with a concert experience of the film, complete with a live orchestra and Elfman performing the character of Jack Skellington in a successful run that stretched into three shows this year at Los Angeles’ famed Hollywood Bowl. This year’s trio of concerts, which went down last weekend, also featured cast members Catherine O’Hara (Sally) and Ken Page (Oogie Boogie). “When we first talked about it, I thought it was insane,” says Elfman of the live shows. “I thought I’d be singing to empty seats. I could have never imagined that that this year we’ll be doing our sixth, seventh and eighth shows at the Hollywood Bowl, all of which bring out kids, teenagers, and both younger and older people.”

Elfman calls the concerts, and the movie’s lasting impact in general, a dream (or perhaps more appropriately, a nightmare) come true. “Of all the things I’ve worked on that I would have wished to find a second life, and I’ve worked on a million movies that died early deaths, it would have been Nightmare. I got that wish and that’s why I’m doing these shows. And the fact that kids come see it is the ultimate revenge. It just makes me say, ‘You were wrong… Kids like it!’”

This article was originally published at Billboard.

Source link

source https://disndatradio.com/danny-elfman-talks-the-nightmare-before-christmas-released-25-years-ago-today/

[neverwasmag]

Star Wars is the quintessential space opera with fans around the world. Rather than write the nth article about what makes Star Wars such a phenomenon, I am going to talk about how the movies have had an impact on mostly dieselpunk.

Stick around til the end, because your intrepid reporter managed to ask Anthony Daniels, the actor who has portrayed C3P0 since the beginning of the franchise forty years ago, some questions while he was a guest at Comic Con Brussels.

‘Punk influences

These are by no means dieselpunk films, with the exception of the two Ewok movies from the 1980s, which are ultralight family-friendly movies in the style of Mad Max and The Blood of Heroes. Pretty much the same kind of setting, none of the gore or brutality and a prime example of post-apocalyptic dystopian dieselpunk (probably why they’re not mentioned anymore now, they have a hard time fitting into the rest of the universe).

And yet, with only two dieselpunk movies in a very long list, Star Wars has had a surprisingly big impact on dieselpunk.

Although, considering all the dieselpunk elements there are in the movies, including the cartoons, it is perhaps not that surprising that ‘punks are drawn to the franchise like moths to a flame.

Tatooine in Star Wars (1977)

Star Wars concept art of Coruscant (Erik Tiemens)

From the steampunk-looking, half-built C-3PO in The Phantom Menace to the post-apocalyptic feel of Tatooine and Jakku to the atomicpunk look of the planet-wide city Coruscant.

SS soldiers rally in Nuremberg, Germany in the late 1930s

First Order stormtroopers in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

From the militaristic Empire and First Order, whose uniforms and hierarchy are strongly reminiscent of Nazi Germany, to the dieselpunky underdogs of the Rebellion.

It’s the characters, the droids, the speeders, the dirt and grit and the story which inspire fans of the ‘punk genres and draw them in.

Examples of steam- and dieselpunk-inspired fan art abound, including the work of Björn Hurri, Jesse Toves, “Cylonka” and “Rodolforever“.

Art by Björn Hurri

Art by Björn Hurri

Art by Jesse Toves

Art by Rodolforever

Art by Cylonka

The Star Wars galaxy, while far, far away from our own, is populated by our own visions of the future, including those from the past.

Star Wars timeline

Star Wars theatrical release poster

In chronological order, not in order of release:

Episode I: The Phantom Menance (1999)

Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

Clone Wars (animated series, 2003-04)

Clone Wars (GCI animated series, 2008-14)

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Rebels (CGI animated series, 2014-18)

Droids: The Adventures of R2D2 and C3P0 (animated series, 1985-86)

Rogue One (2016)

Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)

Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Ewoks (animated series, 1985-86)

Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984)

Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985)

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)

Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)

Seeing Solo hasn’t been released yet, I haven’t added it to the list, as I am unsure where exactly it fits. I’m guessing around the same time as Rebels, but at this point it’s guesswork.

Q&A with Anthony Daniels

Anthony Daniels is interviewed, March 31, 2011 (Major Nelson)

And now, as promised, quick questions with Anthony Daniels, who has been portraying C-3P0 since the beginning.

R2D2 is quite infamous for getting Treepio in all sorts of trouble. But what has been the nicest thing he’s ever done for C-3P0?

Absolutely. The nicest thing is that he has been Treepio’s friend for many, many years. And like all friends, they tease each other. They have moments where they don’t get on. But then they get on even better the next time.

C-3P0 is an iconic part of not just the Star Wars universe, but sci-fi and robotics full stop. What makes you most proud of him being such a phenomenon?

Because one of the earliest examples of human cyborg interaction. And he has survived so much that he must have been made very well made from the beginning. He has become a little more quirky since the beginning. Like an old automobile he gets idiosyncrasies that you get used to. But he particularly likes the fact that humans relate to him, even though they don’t always listen to what he says.

Exhibition in Brussels

Star Wars Identities

If all of this isn’t enough for you, currently Star Wars Identities is at its very last European stop in Brussels, Belgium until September 2.

The exhibition not only shows you a wide array of movie props, concept art and costumes, but also immerses the visitor into the Star Wars universe via unique RFDI-powered bracelets allowing you to create your own Star Wars character.

Well worth the visit to see these items in real life. They’ve done a marvelous job both presenting all the items and integrating the interactive technology in one fluent and comprehensive expo.

Make sure to also pick up the exhibition guide, because it’s a beautiful book that would not look amiss on the shelf of anyone into the franchise.

C-3PO costume at the Star Wars Identities exhibition in Brussels, Belgium, April 2, 2018 (Hilde Heyvaert)

Boba Fett costume at the Star Wars Identities exhibition in Brussels, Belgium, April 2, 2018 (Hilde Heyvaert)

More info here.

The #steampunk and #dieselpunk in Star Wars Star Wars is the quintessential space opera with fans around the world. Rather than write the nth article about what makes…

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include behind-the-scenes on Hidden Folks, an interview about the Coin-Operated Americans book, interviews from E3, and much more.

Well, am back from Los Angeles, attending E3, which was - well - not that different that anyone might expect. Lots of hype and excitement for large AAA games, most of which do have guns all over them (looking forward to more Tim Rogers dispatches like this from Kotaku!), a somewhat overcrowded E3 itself thanks to the consumer influx, and enough games for everyone to be excited about at least one.

For me, that Super Mario Odyssey trailer was enough for me to pre-order the game to play with my son - and finally work out how to get a Switch, which is coming in a couple of weeks. [Sidebar: it's actually a bit crazy how much Nintendo was being counted out by many - including perhaps me. Then, whomp, two games later (new Zelda, new Mario) they're the belle of the ball again.]

But that's why E3 works as high drama, soap opera, and metacommentary hub of the year for video games - we've all got a hot take, and hot takes are king. (Also why there's not a GREAT deal of E3 coverage in this week's VGDC, heh. Not that we're 'hot take allergic', but you can get that on YouTube & Twitch right now in real-time if you'd like.) Anyway, 'til next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Developer Q&A: Balancing storytelling and player choice in Prey (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra) "Talos-1 runs on eels. This large space station, setting to Arkane Studios’ recently released emergent sim Prey, deals with its residents’ effluent by sending it to large vats where it’s consumed by the things."

Nintendo of America Boss Fils-Aimé On Comebacks, the Future of the DS and Surviving the Wii U (John Davison / Simon Cox / Glixel) "It's almost exactly a year since we last spoke with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé at E3 2016. On that occasion he was standing fifteen feet above that Disney-like Nintendo E3 booth, which was dedicated solely to the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."

Why 'Super Mario Maker' Didn’t Kill the Mario Hacking Community (Jess Joho / Motherboard) "Yet, playing hyper-polished feats of design like Super Mario Maker leave some longtime fans of the franchise nostalgic for the days of janky programming, kill screens, and brutal challenge. That's why the heroes of the Super Mario World (SMW) ROM hacking community remain stubbornly alive, even long after the release of an official Nintendo Mario level creator."

Coin-Operated Boys: An Interview with Carly Kocurek (Dan Royles / Nursing Clio) "Carly Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) examines the origins of modern video game culture in the “classic” arcade era, spanning the release of Pong in 1972 and the industry’s first major collapse in 1983. She traces the formation of the “technomasculine” during that period, as the arcade became increasingly defined as the province of young men."

How we make a game called Hidden Folks (Adriaan de Jongh / Imgur) "Hey there! I'm Adriaan, one of the two developers behind Hidden Folks, a game for smartphones and computers in which you search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes by unfurling tent flaps, cutting through bushes, slamming doors, and poking crocodiles!"

Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns (Soren Johnson / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 Game Developers Conference talk, Mohawk Games' Soren Johnson dives into strategy game history to explain how he and his team developed Offworld Trading Company, a strategy game with little combat."

These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books (Sarah Laskow / Atlas Obscura) "Reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book can feel like being lost in a maze and running through twists and turns only to find dead ends, switchbacks, and disappointment. In the books—for those not familiar with them—you read until you come to a decision point, which prompts you to flip to another page, backward or forward."

A Falconer Enters the World of Video Games (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The story of how Nricco Iseppi, a master falconer, came to Riot Games has, among the company’s staff, acquired the malleability of myth. According to one scriptwriter, it began when Riot had an orange grove planted on its multimillion-dollar campus, in Los Angeles, a place already bristling with perks and mod cons."

Interview: “Rez” creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s unusual life evolves humanity (Staff / Denfaminicogamer) "One midnight, during an internal office chat at the Denfaminicogamer editorial department were the words “They’re crazy.” This was right at the end of 2016 after PS VR was released. As it were, the editorial departments odd excitement resulted in an impulsive interview about VR Contents “Rez Infinite” at the end of last year. This article is a written version of that insane seven hours interview. [SIMON'S NOTE: the translation isn't perfect, but this interview is AMAZING - you rarely see Japanese creators asked historical questions in this kind of depth.]"

The Garden Ages | Myst series (Sam Zucchi / Heterotopias) "How do the linking books in Myst read? These books are, in-universe, written out in the alphabet and language of a dead civilization. The text details the world that the writer wishes to visit: an island is described, its qualities delineated in some detail, and a linking pane appears on the first page, ready to literally transport the reader to the object described."

The RPG Scrollbars: In search of urban fantasy (Richard Cobbett / RockPaperShotgun) "There’s a real urban fantasy gap in the gaming industry, and it’s never made much sense. We see a thousand Tolkienesque fantasy games a minute (rough napkin calculation) and the future’s typically so bright, even the lens flares need shades. Yet when it comes to that line where the mundane meets the magical, mostly what we’ve had for the last few years is false hope."

E3 Was Different This Year, And It Wasn’t Just The Crowds (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "It’s the first day of E3. I’m walking the show floor—or more accurately, oozing across it, slug-like, followed by a trail of my own sweat. I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with swathes of people. Across the way, crowds of people whoop and holler, each of them hoping to win swag they can stuff in their floor-length swag bags. 15,000 new people are in attendance this year. [SIMON'S NOTE: one of the most considered of the 'what's up with E3 this year?' articles.]"

7 examples of accessibility design that developers should study (Richard Moss / Gamasutra) "Games are for everyone. And in recognizing this, ever-increasing numbers of developers are making a point to incorporate more accessibility features and options like remappable controls, configurable subtitles, resizable HUDs, and more."

The big interview: Xbox boss Phil Spencer (Wesley Yin-Poole / Eurogamer) "It was with all this in mind that I sat down with Xbox boss Phil Spencer at the Galen Center in Los Angeles to talk Xbox One X. At £449, I'm not sure who the console is for ("there is a customer out there who's looking for the premium experience"). I fear for Microsoft's first-party studio setup ("I do think we have an opportunity to get better in first-party")."

The State Of Virtual Reality (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "One could argue that the age of virtual reality kicked-off during last year's Game Developers Conference, an event that nearly coincided with the launch of two of the technology's most important head-mounted displays in recent history: the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive."

EA Boss Andrew Wilson's Vision of Gaming's Future Will Blow Your Mind (John Davison / Glixel) "The intervening years were tumultuous and challenging. Changing the company to deliver on that vision was a bumpy ride, but now 10 years later, Wilson is eager to convey what the new Electronic Arts stands for, and its vision for the future of games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Much snark online for some of the 'vision' in this interview, particularly the Emily Dickinson bit.]"

Ex-Puyo Puyo producer reveals some of the classic puzzler’s earliest prototypes (Kishi / Retronauts) "Last week, Compile founder Moo Niitani announced two previously unreleased works from the defunct developer’s glory days on MSX2 computers. Later this month, Dominon and Dominon X are both coming to Project EGG, D4 Enterprise’s prolific download service for old Japanese computer games."

Don't Change a Thing! The Challenges of Evolving Solitaire (Russell Carroll / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, MobilityWare's Russell Carroll shares the experience of updating Solitaire for a modern mobile audience, and what features they were able to update while grappling with intense resistance to any changes made to the core game.  [SIMON'S NOTE: I've known Russell - who used to run indie site GameTunnel - for a LONG time, and this talk is as much about management philosophy as it is solitaire - it's super well-considered.]"

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.) (Peter Suderman / Reason) "Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says."

7 roguelikes that every developer should study (Stefanie Fogel / Gamasutra) "With that in mind, we asked developers to name some of their favorite roguelikes - or games in other genres influenced by roguelike mechanics - and the lessons they can teach people today. And, many of these games are free and/or open source, which makes them easy to download, play, and study!"

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[andimarquette]

It would be hard for an American today to imagine what it was like to grow up in Germany after the war. Life was dominated by silence and lies about the past, the Holocaust, the fascist leanings of basically the whole generation before us. Plenty of Nazi criminals were still hidden and flourishing in the new, “clean” Germany. (Read John Le Carré’s new memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: what he noticed as a spy in Germany during the time of my youth is still shocking to me today.) Escaping from that white-washed, puritanical “fatherland” and leaving my oppressive family behind was essential for my survival as a would-be writer, for my longing for freedom and self-expression as a person, a woman.

I can only hope that the new fascist leanings of Trump-Republicans won’t come to remind me (and everyone) of that monstrous Germany of the war and post-War: women once again seen as “handmaids” and breeding machines, back to Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church), queer people getting disappeared from view, silenced, and worse. Can you imagine?

Paris was a radically different culture. The shame over the Nazi occupation and collaboration was still festering in the background, but did not eclipse this deep-rooted culture of extroverted brilliance and liberalism. Women in post-war France were encouraged to be both intellectual and sexual, an attitude that has prevailed throughout the centuries—from the women-guided Troubadours to the cultural Salon tradition and the power of highly educated courtesans. Paris was everything I needed to grow into my own mind and body. Paris was my chosen exile, an ideal exile—as the American language pioneer Gertrude Stein found out early on, when she established herself in Paris, at the turn of the 20th century: “After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.” (Paris France)

Stein, who was my earliest muse, was right. I found out that strangers in Paris were generally ignored and left to themselves, which was a considerable form of freedom. After my strict education and the tight German morality control, I relished being on my own and pursuing my passion for Paris and women without any supervision and critical interference. I had left Germany at age twenty-three, with nothing but two metal suitcases, one with clothes, the other with books and diaries. As I remember in my memoir:

Did it matter that I didn’t have a penny? I paid for my classes with jobs paid under the table. My attic rooms in different quartiers looked out over the city, up six or seven floors on narrow back stairs with automatic lights that clicked off between floors, so you had to grope along grimy walls for the next switch. There was a primitive WC at the end of a hallway, but I always had a friend or lover with a big tub in a white-tiled bathroom. A lover to squeeze through the Metro stile together on a single ticket. The vendors at my neighborhood street market let me negotiate for parched greens and bruised fruit. Making do without meat didn’t matter as long as I could hang out in cafés and write about my love affairs. I was proud of my freedom, proud even of my deprivation. Every now and then I had a feast: fatty, over-sugared sweets I loved to pine for in the window displays of mid-Eastern bakeries—thick, roasted almonds in beds of golden-green jelly squares.

Wasn’t this the life everyone wanted? The bohemian romance of unheated garrets, beautiful women, and broken hearts that turns artists into Artists?

For a Good Girl from Germany, taking up a bohemian life and breaking rules was an essential part of liberation. I had dropped out of literary studies in Hamburg and taken up ballet in Paris, gone on to underground theater, and then switched sides to write about ballet and theater as a freelance cultural correspondent for German media. I set my memoir about ten years later, when I had honed my bohemian skills and felt I had come of age, intellectually and also sexually. The book starts with my sneaking into the Paris Opera without a ticket, and being “rewarded” for this act of disobedience with sexy adventures during Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, falling in love with a mysterious stranger dressed in red, and flirting outrageously with an usherette, an ouvreuse.

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Sexual freedom and adventure have always been in the air in Paris. France had its permissive sexual culture to begin with, but the rebellion of the women’s movement in the early seventies threw over anything and everything that was still left to corset women and sexually hold them back. From the start, lesbian and bi-sexual writers, artists, and intellectuals were at the forefront of this gigantic wave. Many of them, like Monique Wittig or Hélène Cixous (and Simone de Beauvoir before them) were attractive, beautiful women, neither butch nor femme (or equally both), setting the tone and style of the movement in a romantic, erotic androgyny that was seductive and irresistible. It was irresistible how Parisian women challenged the famous “male gaze” by turning their desiring gaze on women. This was a whole new education for me in terms of becoming the subject, instead of the object, of desire. It was a time when I took up walking Paris by night dressed as a boy.

If my mother could see me now, I used to think. It was as if the city took me in and peeled my old skins away. Still, there was always another remnant of the Good Girl to be shed—an obliging smile, a readiness to turn my eyes away. Don’t look! The classical motto of so-called innocence as soon as there is anything interesting to see. Anything sexual, louche, forbidden. How is a girl supposed to take her place in the world if she isn’t allowed to see the world? I found out soon enough that a woman who can’t look also can’t desire. She can only entice in order to be desired. Women’s eyes are passive eyes; they wait for something to enter them and blow their minds.

By the end of the seventies, the time of my memoir, women were in fashion: every Parisian woman, gay or straight, fell in love with women as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  This collective erotic “folie” felt like a revolution that would change the world forever. (The French word folie is a perfect term for it, meaning folly, caprice, inspiration, madness.) Recalling this inspired moment in time, when every empowerment for women seemed in reach, brought back the dream that we will turn the clock against today’s backlash; that women will go free and be in fashion, again.

Renate Stendhal is the award-winning author of the photo biography Gertrude Stein: In Word and Pictures. After growing up in Berlin and Hamburg, she lived in Paris for almost two decades, pursuing ballet and underground theater, translating American women authors and writing cultural reviews for the German radio and press. Stendhal has published several books in Germany and in the United States, three of them co-authored with her life companion Kim Chernin. Her articles and essays have appeared internationally. She has a passion for country living with Kim, two dogs, and a small orchard, and she still loves to opine about opera and ballet, reviewing culture for diverse magazines. Visit her website at http://www.renatestendhal.com.

    Good Girl Gone Free in Paris by Renate Stendhal

It would be hard for an American today to imagine what it was like to grow up in Germany after the war.

Good Girl Gone Free in Paris by Renate Stendhal It would be hard for an American today to imagine what it was like to grow up in Germany after the war.

[autodidact-adventures]

Ballet History (Part 14): The Paris Opera

The Paris Opera was founded in 1669, although it wouldn't be called that until later on.

In 1655, the poet Pierre Perrin began writing about the possibility of French opera.  Unlike most people at the time, he didn't believe that the French language was inherently unmusical.  And he was worried that France would be “vanquished” in opera by foreigners. He suggested to the king that a new academy of poets & musicians should be established to prevent this, imagining a French national art that would be better than Italian opera, and distinct from it.

The king agreed, but didn't fund the venture – the Académie d'Opéra had to survive on box office funds.  The Bouteille tennis court was converted into the opera house, with a capability to seat 1,200 audience members.  The first opera was Pomone, composed by Robert Cambert.  Its opening night was March 3rd, 1671, and it ran for 146 performances.

However, Perrin ended up in debtor's prison, due to being swindled by Cambert himself and two other men.  Lully seized the chance, and in 1672, he managed to get control of the Academie.  It was renamed the Académie Royale de Musique.

In 1673, Lully got the king to agree to an important concession – no other theatre in Paris would be allowed to mount productions on the same grand scale as the Académie, and the number of musicians & dancers they could employ would be limited.  Molière died during this year, while performing Le Malade imaginaire.  Beauchamps would be appointed principal ballet master in 1680.

Lully’s takeover was the beginning of a new “artistic dynamism”, not centred at court (as it usually was), but in the professional world.  At first, the Académie seemed intended to be a “court away from court”, where royal spectacles and ballets would be performed. In its patent letters, the king wrote that any noblemen who performed on its stage would not lose their noble status, as they would if they performed on any other stage.  Many of the Académie’s early productions were ones that had already been performed for Louis at Versailles.

But it was not to be so.  Noblemen danced with professionals in the earliest productions, including Les Fêtes de l'Amour.  But soon their participation became the exception, not the norm.

Another difference was that women performed as well.  Le Triomphe de l'Amour had first been staged at court, in 1681.  When the Académie performed it the same year, the female roles (which had been originally danced by royal ladies and the dauphine) weren’t taken by men en travesti, as would be usual.  Instead, they were performed by the first professional female dancers.

One of these women was Mademoiselle de La Fontaine, who danced the principal role.  She was also known to choreograph her own steps.  Not much is known about her: she also occasionally performed in court ballets; she danced in at last 18 other Académie productions; and she was known as the “queen of the dance”.  After dancing at the Académie for a decade, she settled in two different convents without taking vows.  She died in 1738.

Mademoiselle de La Fontaine as Demeter (Ceres).

However, this change didn’t cause much surprise.  The Mercure galante commented that it was “a singular novelty” but not much attention was given to it.  Perhaps it was because this just confirmed what people already knew – social and professional dancing were going their separate ways, and this was just a part of it.

We mustn’t think that the acceptance of professional women dancers was because of a deliberate move towards equality, though.  Real nobles weren’t dancing on the Académie stage, and their places were taken by skilled, but socially inferior, professionals.  Thus women could also dance, because the status standard had been lowered.

Overall, the Académie was surpassing the court in terms of ballets. From the 1680’s onwards, ballets were still performed at court, but not as often, and with more restraint than previously. When Louis’ grand château at Versailles was completed in the early 1680’s, it didn’t even have a theatre.  And life at Versailles was dimming as Louis’ military losses increased, and as he came under the influence of Madame de Maintenon, who was pious and didn’t think much of the arts.  She was the one who demanded the expulsion of the commedia dell'arte players in 1697.

During these years, the tension between the court and Paris (which Louis would always associate with the humiliation and chaos of the Fronde) increased.  While the Académie was a sort of bridge between them, it was very much a Parisian institution, not a court one, both in its audience and its growing sense of independence.

Opera, as an Italian art form, followed closely the rhythms & cadences of the Italian language.  Lully and his contemporaries were well-versed in the French classical tradition (developed by Corneille & Jean Racine), and also in tragedy. Lully worked especially closely with Quinault, turning away from the ballet de cour and comédie-ballet, to create a new French operatic art form. The genre they created was the tragédie en musique.

Lully wanted to mold French opera around the French language, not the Italian language.  He was fascinated by theatrical declamation, and he studied the teachings of Marie Champmeslé, a legendary tragic actress (and also Racine’s mistress).  When composing, he followed the libretto (words), memorizing them and declaiming the verses, and then shaping his music around the poetic meter, both melodically and rhythmically.  Unlike Italian opera, the music he composed for serious roles was often in recitative, and he tried to keep his compositional style simple, as close as possible to speech.  He told off singers who ornamented his music.

Marie Champmeslé.

He didn’t neglect dance, even though his focus was on the music. Ballets and divertissements were interspersed into his operas – unlike the Jesuit productions.  Ballet seemed to be losing its gravitas, its serious & noble attitude.  A more brilliant, ornamented style was emerging, with quick footwork and more focus on jumps.

And not just on the professional stage.  Louis XIV’s favourite dance had always been the entrée grave (the courante) but Lully preferred the minuet, a sprightly dance in triple meter, “always gay and quick”.  He used it often in his operas.  Some years later, according to the Marquis de Sourches, Louis asked his ballet-masters to stage an entrée grave – but nobody could remember how.  He had to settle for a minuet instead.

Opera and ballet, though performed together, were different in attitude.  Opera strived to be serious, and ballet did not.  Like the ballet de cour, French opera was still an umbrella form, and it wasn’t certain which direction it should go in.  Many loosely-related genres were tried out over the years, which mixed opera and ballet in varying amounts.  The two forms were the subject of great debate.

The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is usually thought of as a literary affair, but it spilled over into opera and ballet.  At its core, the ballet & opera debate was about Louis XIV's reign, and the 1600's in general.

The Ancients believed that Louis' reign was the flowering of a great tradition that stretched back to Classical times.  The Moderns, on the other hand, claimed that Louis' reign was the beginning of a glorious new era, one that had never been equalled before.  Art and history improved through time, they said – Lully's music and French opera was better than any music that had come before.  They didn't want to work within some old tradition – they wanted to move forwards, with progress and innovation.

The Ancients included Racine and Nicolas Boileau.  They disparaged the Moderns as biased courtiers, whose “flowery writing and facile rhetoric” could “never capture the gravitas of Louis' France”. These beliefs echoed those of the Jansenists (a branch of Catholicism) which Racine in particular was closely aligned with. The Jansenists believed in purity and restraint, in art as well as theology.

So the Ancients preferred a “clear and unadorned style sharpened with irony and wit”, not the ornate, elaborate, baroque style of the Jesuits, who were their political archrivals.  And they particularly disliked opera, which was very much baroque, claiming it was nothing more than a “superficial form of flattery” which would never rival tragedy or satire.

Quinault often changed ancient texts to fit in with contemporary taste & fashions, and the Ancients hated that.  Boileau was once requested by the king to write an opera, and he found the work so “miserable” that it filled him with “disgust”.

Many of the Moderns were courtiers.  Quinault & Lully moved in Louis’ inner circle, and the king signed their marriage certificates.  Quinalt was well-known for his too-clever rhymes and elaborate verse.  Jean Desmaret, another Modern, was a writer & dramatist who worked with Louis XII, Cardinal Richelieu, and Louis XIV on court spectacles.

Charles Perrault was an author who owed much of his success to Jean-Baptiste Colbert (an influential minister), and he was an important member of the Académie Française, which was aligned with the Moderns.  Perrault became an outspeaken leader for the Moderns, and others echoed his beliefs – for example, Michel de Pure (author of a ballet treatise and a devoted courtier), and Claude-François Ménestrier (a Jesuit father who wrote about spectacles).

The Moderns agreed that ballet in particular wasn't as serious as tragedy, or even comedy.  It couldn’t be as well-structured around time, place and action; it couldn’t represent grand emotions or heroic roles; it couldn’t instruct or shape men’s morals.  But this didn’t mean it was worthless.

In 1668, de Pure stated that ballet was a new theatrical genre, and that its worth lay in its difference to tragedy.  In 1712, Antoine-Louis Le Brun (poet & librettist) said that opera should be thought of as an “irregular tragedy…an newly-invented spectacle with its own laws and beauty.”

Ballet also had to contend with its low social status.  Even though it was important at court, it was never ranked among the highly-regarded liberal arts (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, logic, music and rhetoric).  At most, it was a branch of music or rhetoric, and not believed to be worth studying for free men.  Nor was it as high as poetry, which the Ancients loved.

It was considered a more artisanal art – after all, it was a form of physical labour.  However, the issue was confused because of ballet's ties to high society.

Painting had the same problem, as painters worked with their hands. But during the Renaissance, and into the 1500's & 1600's, artists and writers worked to raise painting to the level of a liberal art (or fine art, as it was increasingly called).  They did this by comparing it to poetry.  Ut pictura poesis means “as is poetry, so is painting.”

Claude-François Ménestrier (1631-1705) and other ballet-masters adapted this argument for their use.  Ballets were like paintings, they claimed, but better, because they were animated.  They also portrayed heroic & exemplary deeds, and imitated life more closely because they moved.  So ballet's status should also be raised.

But despite their arguments, ballet would never be a part of the “rigorous and rational world” of classical theatre, and would always remain on the edges of the liberal & fine arts.  It was part of the world of le merveilleux.

Le merveilleux was the magical, supernatural, fantasy world, with fantastic effects and logic-defying miracles – long-associated with court spectacle.  And for many people of that era, le merveilleux was not simply confined to the opera stage – belief in enchantment, in fairies, ghosts, devils, witches and black magic was common, even among the educated.

For the theatre, le merveilleux meant ballets and machines.  Deus ex machina now refers to a poorly-written literary trope, but for the Paris Opera, it referred to spectacular theatrical effects – men and gods transformed and seemed to fly up into the clouds; or they disappeared suddenly through trapdoors; scenery revolved and transported the audience to another land.

Charles Perrault explained that while these stage effects, and fantastical creatures, were looked down upon in tragedy & comedy, but perfect for opera, which was different.  La Bruyère said that opera could “hold the mind, the eyes and the ears under the same spell.”

In 1697, Perrault published The Sleeping Beauty, a fairy tale to amuse his children, full of the ideas and attitudes of the Moderns.  It was a deliberately French tale, not based on mythology or Christianity, and it was full of le merveilleux.  In Perrault's story, a prince and princess vanquish evil fairies, ogres, and a 100-year-old night.  At the end, the prince (who is now a king) saves his queen and children from a terrible death, and restores order to the realm.

Perrault wrote in simple, clear French.  Christian morality was not absent – the childish innocence of the baby princess (like the baby Jesus) showed her pure faith.

The Ancients did not approve of le merveilleux. Jean de La Fontaine made fun of the cumbersome machines, complaining that mechanical failures were common, leaving gods dangling helplessly from ropes, and sometimes even plunging the heavens at an angle into hell!  Even when they worked, the stage effects were ridiculous deceptions on an audience that knew they were not real.

Charles de Saint-Évremond (exiled in England) complained about the “potpourri” nature of ballet and opera, writing, “In effect, we cover the earth with Divinities and let them dance...We exaggerate with an assemblage of gods, shepherds, heroes, magicians, ghosts, furies and demons.” But he was forced to admit that Lully and Quinault were doing amazing things with this art form.

As ballet and opera emerged from the ballet de cour, it was the Moderns who presided over it.  Lully died in 1687, and Beauchamps had been replaced by Pécour.  By now, ballet and opera had solidly established themselves, ballet even more so than opera. During the 1690's, the number of ballets in tragédies en musique more than doubled. Pécour worked with the composer André Campra to create L'Europe Galante (1697), stringing together a series of dance numbers loosely based on the theme of Europe, and dropping the tragedy part altogether.

This became the norm with Les festes vénitiennes (1710), and ballet would dominate opera for decades.  In 1713, the Paris Opera employed 24 dancers; in 1778, they employed 90.  The ratio of tragic operas to lighter, more dance-oriented productions was about 1:3.

But this was not a new golden age.  The period of balletic innovation was coming to an end.  Ballet was becoming more light-hearted, less serious; it was losing the spontaneity & grandeur or earlier performances, and the satire of the comédie-ballet was disappearing.  Ballet was growing in popularity, but losing its substance.

This was partially because it was cut off from its source (the court).  By the early 1700's, Louis' court was beginning to fade.  In 1700, the Duchesse d'Orléans complained that she'd seen courtiers at court being seated with no regard to rank.  In 1705, she wrote that the rules of etiquette were so lax that “one doesn't have any idea who one is...I cannot get used to this confusion...this no longer resembles a court.”

Louis hadn't lost his grip on court ritual – in the final years of his reign, the ceremonial requirements at Versailles grew even more elaborate.  But this represented a weakening, too, an urgent attempt to keep things as they were.  Courtiers may have sensed that the “forms were growing brittle”.

In the years before & after Louis' death (1715), the Opéra took its distance from the court, Paris regained its lustre; and the commedia dell'arte players returned.  The serious tastes & formality of the late 1600's had changed, and people now preferred the lighter, often erotic, divertissements and episodic forms.  The people of high society staged intimate fêtes galantes in their private country retreats, and clothing became looser and less ornate (for a short period of time).

Social dancer were becoming simpler; professional dances were becoming more technically complex.  In 1713, a school was established at the Opera to train dancers, and still does so today.