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bansheeoftheforest · 3 years

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A Moment Of Glory

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Chapter 7; Parva Sub Ingenti

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Chapter 8 babyyyyyyyyyyy! Oh man, the next chapters to come are not going to be fun for Henry. I also had to rewrite this chapter like... Halfway through finishing the third-to-last chapter bc I realized that this route would be better to go with <3

Also, note, in case I did not make it clear in the actual chapter: it’s a week’s timeskip between this chapter and last chapter!

Also also! Since I have written all chapters now, I would not mind to update more frequently if that would be desired! Either I can hold onto the schedule I have rn (twice a week - Wednesday and Saturday) or I can change it so I update three times a week, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday? I would very much like some opinions on how often to update!

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Wordcount: 4300

Chapter summary: Brokenshire and the Scotland Yard come to a disappointing discovery, but waste no time in following a new lead.

CW [for this chapter]: Mentions of blood, mentions of murder.

[Ao3]

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Chapters:

[Prologue] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [Epilogue]

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Sergeant Enoch Brokenshire, a man who so often took pride in the loyalty and hard work he put into his position in the Scotland Yard, did not like his night duty.

He sat by his lone desk, elbows placed upon the only empty space on his messy workspace that was not already occupied by paperwork. The only source of light that found itself in the dark office was a flickering flame from a tiny, half-melted candle that was placed next to him, so bravely and so obediently bringing light to the documents that had caught his sole attention. For once, it was completely quiet. Not even the normal noises from the world going on and on outside could be heard tonight; no drunkards laughing their way home from the pubs, no footsteps from late-night wanderers exploring the streets, not even the sound of other officers standing guard outside seemed to find its way into the office. Had Brokenshire not long since gotten accustomed to the eerie silence that so specifically seemed to haunt him tonight, he might have found the loneliness and the quietness a bit depressing, a bit bleak. Perhaps it was merely because he had one of the most boring, yet most important jobs tonight. Perhaps it was merely because he was waiting. Perhaps it was merely because he was alone.

Of every late-night duty he could have gotten, Brokenshire got the unfortunate luck of being stuck in his office for the evening. He could have been out wandering the corridors of this very station, maybe checking on one of the few currently held in the cells in the basements, or maybe he could have been patrolling the streets with Wipple and Jenkins like he normally did. Maybe he could have been breaking up gang fights, catching thieves, or inspecting the new shipments and arrivals by the docks and train stations in search of stolen goods, but no, he was stuck waiting for his two colleagues. A soft sigh of boredom escaped his lips, and yet he decided to occupy his time by gazing over the many documents laid upon his so often neat desk, the shiny wooden surface now hidden under dozens of chaotically sprawled papers. His eyes traveled, and yet it did not take long until his gaze was caught by a single photograph that displayed none other than Dr. Henry Jekyll, stapled to a short investigative essay about the doctor’s career in London, written and documented in hopes of getting a bit of insight about the whole case. Through the two weeks that had recently passed since his estimated disappearance, it felt like they hadn’t managed to get a single step closer to figuring out what had happened to him, who did it and where he was currently located. They could find no possible motives; after all, Dr. Jekyll was a beloved man. No one seemed to have any ideas of someone who had actively disliked him, rather than his work and connection to yet-so-stigmatized science, yet they were stuck on the single ‘suspect’ they had gotten from finding branded trinkets on the crime scene. They had interrogated practically every single person that had lived on the streets by the Society, and yet there hadn’t been a single witness, not a single trail to follow-- not even the blood that had so horrifyingly splattered upon almost every surface in the entire study had been found anywhere outside of the room, not in the corridors outside nor by the broken window. It seemed like the doctor had just disappeared in thin air, once he was, assumingly, dragged out of that window. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense at all and yet this wasn’t even one of the most gruesome or violent cases the Sergeant had gotten his hands on, no, but it was still so very unnerving, maybe because of the specific circumstances, maybe because it was specifically Dr. Jekyll everything was about. No matter, it was unnerving regardless and Brokenshire was going to stand by that fact, and yet he couldn’t help but let out another sigh. Another sigh among the thousands he had made just this night. Another sigh among the thousands to come.

He felt how his eyes began to roam once more, and yet they did not wander for long before they were caught by a second photograph; this one displayed the second subject of the mess of his desk, one Mr. Richard Crawford. Having found his name-engraved jewelry on the crime scene, the opposition, aggression, and hatred that Crawford harbored for the Society for Arcane Sciences had only seemed to confirm their suspicion of him as a suspect, and since there were no more suspects at all, he was currently their main lead as well, yet Brokenshire doubted that Crawford had a vendetta against Dr. Jekyll himself, rather than their two opposing beliefs and opinions. There had been a lot of theories for why Crawford would have wanted Jekyll out of the way, some including the simple fact that Jekyll was probably the only other man in all of London as popular and influential as him, some including their clashing opinions in important political and scientific questions, and yet, through their feud, it had seemed like their rivalry had been quite one-sided. Brokenshire and his team had spent the last two weeks researching both men and their rivalry and at this point, the Sergeant was quite sure that he could give a ten-page essay for each topic respectively. Crawford was about a decade older than Jekyll and had therefore been in the public eye much longer. He was a working aristocrat and a businessman, having funded many of London’s most successful businesses, spanning from medical supply companies to breweries to real estate, and it seemed like he had seen the rise of Dr. Jekyll’s career as a threat to his own. It was not a secret that most of London and the people of power in the city were-- or had been-- against science, so while Crawford had been on top of the food chain for years, the establishment and success of the Society seemed to have struck a nerve of some sort, especially so once Crawford’s allies began to support it. It seemed like Crawford had seen that as a type of betrayal, and had come to the “clever” solution of trying to shut the operation down immediately, and yet he had never managed. It seemed like no matter what Crawford threw at Jekyll, the doctor would catch it with a smile on his face, light it on fire and toss it in the trash. No matter what the aristocrat did, Brokenshire couldn’t find a single instance of Dr. Jekyll doing anything to actively harm Crawford, his image, or his businesses, despite everything the latter did to him.

He guessed it was just another instance of what a goodhearted man that Jekyll was, of course. Ask anyone on the street and they would all tell you what a great man the doctor was, and it always seemed like every single person in London had a story about how the scientist had personally helped them, their family, or their friends. The only ones that Brokenshire and his team had heart talking badly about him had, of course, been the few people still against the Society, and yet it had never really been about his character rather than the entire idea of the Society. Everyone knew the doctor was a kind, helpful man who just wished everyone well. Men of his stock were, sadly, few and far in between, and it saddened the Sergeant to know that people were willing to hurt such a good man like that. He could not figure out why someone would do such a thing-- sure, Jekyll had made mistakes, but who hadn’t? He doubted that the doctor could have done anything to anger someone to the point of them thinking the only logical solution was to hurt him, abduct him, murder him. Sure, there were probably people mad at Hyde who decided to take it out on Jekyll, but that made no sense at all. After all, Jekyll had been just as much of a victim of the fire and Hyde’s scheme as everyone else had been. Going after Hyde’s ex-employer after leading the Scotland Yard to the Blackfog Bazaar was absolutely absurd, yet a type of revenge that Brokenshire would not put past the many criminals that lurked in the London Underground.

Really, the reason why the offenders could have done it was completely unimportant. What was important was the fact that Dr. Henry Jekyll was gone, and they had to find both him and his kidnappers as soon as possible. Hell, Jekyll could be dying or very badly injured at this very moment! Who knew what kind of torture, what kind of sadistic treatment he was suffering through? Who knew if he was even alive still? Who knew if he even was in London at all? Who knew what kind of man he would be if he was found? For every day that passed, the probability that he would be found and found alive plummeted heavily, the odds and statistics were against them. They had to be quick, so very quick, and yet...

Brokenshire’s hands found the edge of his desk as he pushed his chair away quite abruptly, grunting as he got on his legs and turned his head away from all these godforsaken documents, feeling the clinically white paper blinding him in the dim light. He made a beeline towards one of the few windows in his office, quietly running a hand through his ginger locks as he peaked between the blinds, observing, watching, praying that his goddamn colleagues would come back soon. It was dark, yet it was brighter out there than it was in his office, giving him just enough light to be able to decipher anything going on outside. The streets were empty, the night was quiet... Goddamnit, where were they?

He sighed and shook his head, mostly to try to get rid of the slight paranoia and weariness that began to grip him. He moved away from the window, feeling how all the energy in his legs only got worse and worse for every second, and he almost could not stop himself as he began to pace around the office, trying to pass time and trying to distract himself as it only seemed like all his energy got worse and worse and worse for every second that passed. Jenkins and Wipple should have been here a long time ago. What could possibly have taken them so long? They didn’t have all night!

Brokenshire was an impatient man as it was, he knew that. He seldom had the patience to wait for something unimportant and he had particularly no patience for things that were important. The fact that Wipple and Jenkins had been sent out to collect documents, proof of possible evidence of Crawford’s involvement in Jekyll’s kidnapping that could either incriminate him or prove him innocent of the whole ordeal... Sure, they had his jewelry, but that was certainly not enough proof to arrest him just yet. They needed more... More proof of Crawford’s suspicious behavior, proof that he was not above kidnapping, proof that he was not a man to be trusted. Two weeks of research, two weeks of potentially wasted and precious time amounted to this. Two weeks of quietly investigating Crawford, sinking so much time and so many resources in a potential dead-end... They were hoping to find the evidence they needed to arrest Crawford, after all, they hoped that he was the criminal in all of this, the orchestrator to the entire kidnapping and especially since they had no other leads, but for that, they needed definite proof, proof that Jenkins and Wipple had been in charge of, and if they never showed up...

The Sergeant rubbed his sore eyes, regretfully feeling how the late-night weariness slowly began to get to him, slowly washing over his body like algae clinging to every surface, only seeming to become worse and worse and more and more in quantity the longer you didn’t pay attention. He had been working on this case non-stop for the last two weeks, having barely gotten any rest at all during that time, and yet it was much less because he couldn’t pawn the case off to someone else while he took his normal days off and got the rest he so desperately needed, it was much less the work piling up and being forced upon him because there was no one else to take the case, no, it was mostly the fact that he wanted to get to the bottom of this as fast as possible, and he wanted to be the one in charge of such an important case. He trusted his colleagues with his life and yet he only trusted himself with the Henry Jekyll case, even if he wasn’t fully sure why. Everyone was worried, of course, so he had no doubt that the other officers would be just as precise and active with the case as he currently was, but... Yeah. Jekyll was a beloved man, a man who was friends with practically everyone-- the commissioner specifically, but Brokenshire could not deny that he had taken a liking to that man, as much as he regretted admitting it. He knew the cautionary tale of scientists who went mad with hubris, narcissism, and... Well, madness all too well. He knew the tale of the bright young men and women who wanted to test the limits of every aspect of the world they lived in, who wanted to understand how things worked and wanted to manipulate it into their own liking, who only got hungry for more and more until they went insane and could find themselves in the Asylums all of them seemed to fear so, or until they found themselves exiled and on the run from the law. After all, Brokenshire had known Moreau once upon an eternity ago; he had been just as respectable of a gentleman as Jekyll was, then Moreau had shown his true colors, got exiled, and now he spent the last of his days stuck in a padded cell under solitary confinement and burnt to a crisp in Bethlam Royal Asylum. He knew that there seldom were scientists who did not go mad in their own way-- everyone knew the story of Frankenstein, even if she did seem... Relatively sane now, she had still caused catastrophic damage to the people around her, innocent people specifically, and Moreau was already mentioned... The odds that Jekyll and his Society, too, were just as mad as the rest of the scientists that had made and snuck their way into the history books were far too high. Respectable facades and silver-tongued speech were all they needed to trick practically everyone, both of which Henry Jekyll undoubtedly had. Impulsive, uncontrollable, testing the limits of reality while claiming that it was for the betterment of society, humanity as a whole. It was a tale Brokenshire knew all too well and yet Jekyll had done a good job of pushing himself away from any and all possibilities that he was like those scientists. They were rogue scientists, he would say, not mad scientists.

Oh, it was a speech that the sergeant had heard a handful of times already, yet it was almost endearing, and quite charming after a while. He guessed that was just the effect the doctor had on the people around him. He was a charming man and no one could deny that. He had all of London wrapped around his pinkie, spun and held together with the silken thread he had woven with his silver-tongue, and that had been quite obvious, and it still was. After all, people had been outraged over his disappearance, and they could still hear the people of London making a ruckus and demanding that they find the doctor they all loved so much. Many of Jekyll’s friends had offered to put up rewards for whoever could come forward with any possible statements or for whoever could find the doctor, and with many, he meant many; Dr. Robert Lanyon, Sr. Lanyon, Sir. Danvers Carew, the commissioner himself, and of course the entire Society, and that was only to name a few, so there was quite a large sum of money at play now. So much money was at stake and yet they still had heard nothing related to the Henry Jekyll case. No one had seen suspicious activity, no one had any clue what possibly could have caused it... You might as well have thought he disappeared in thin air just because someone wished him gone, for no reason whatsoever. You might as well have thought the doctor never existed.

The only real ‘evidence’ and the only real statements they had about the case came from their investigation of Crawford. They had dipped their noses in practically every part of Crawford’s life, investigating and interrogating every servant, worker, acquaintance, business partner, and rival with a connection to the man in question, their statements now placed upon the sergeant’s desk, neatly waiting for when they would be of use. All they needed was Jenkins and Wipple with the rest of the accounts and statements, and hopefully they would bring the long-awaited truth. They all had theories, of course, both personal and more... Hmm, official ones, so to speak, all of which suggested that the kidnapping of Henry Jekyll was not the only crime that Crawford may be involved in, many of which seemed to be about tax evasion, blackmail... The classic stuff that men of his stock often dipped into sooner or later. Now, if Jenkins and Wipple could just come back...

Knockknockknock--

Speaking of the devil, Brokenshire couldn’t help but let out a relieved breath he hadn’t known he had been holding as he finally stopped his pace. His attention immediately shifted towards his door, and it only took a moment before he saw the door handle moving, and then through the darkness, Brokenshire finally-- finally!-- saw his dear colleagues entering, the expected documents in hand.

“Oi, sergeant, why are you cooping up in the darkness?”

As Jenkins moved forward with the documents, Wipple stayed behind to close the door behind them, taking the opportunity to also turn on the light, which, in its turn, successfully blinded the poor sergeant whose eyes had gotten so accustomed to the soft, simple light from the candle on his desk. He did not get a lot of time to adjust to it, however, as Jenkins soon placed the new documents down on the little empty space on the sergeant’s desk that had not been occupied with paperwork and, instead, occupied it with more documents. Brokenshire watched the papers, then his gaze turned to Jenkins, who looked less than proud of the work they presented. His thin lips and mustache curled into a frown, the disappointment in his sigh seemed to echo through the room.

“You are not going to believe this, sir.”

“Well, what is it? Did you find anything?”

“Well... You are not going to like it.”

The three of them surrounded the desk, waddling together so everyone could have a good view of the newly added documents. Brokenshire eyed it up and down with great interest, if not suspicion and caution, yet he was quick to look back up at Jenkins, quietly gesturing for him to continue to explain.

“Crawford has been actively against the Society, as we knew, but his way of sabotaging, as we theorized, is nowhere near illegal.” Jenkins filtered through the documents until he got a specific page, tapping it with his finger against the headlines, and them moving the tip of his finger down to the summary, “According to his bank statements, the only money that has been taken out and put into anything remotely against science as been into perfectly legal campaigns, some of just so happens to affect the Society, would the things they push for actually go through. Other than that... The only proof we have is the jewelry found on the scene. Sure, yeah, it’s clear proof but it’s nothing we can arrest or accuse him with. It’s practically impossible for the jewelry to have found its way into the office...”

Brokenshire might as well have thought he got a door slammed into his face.

Their main suspect turned out to be a dead end. All the work, all the time, and all the funds they had put into investigating Crawford turned into a dead-end, and now they came up empty-handed without a new suspect.

But... That didn’t explain why his jewelry was in Jekyll’s workspace.

“Well... Do either of you have any idea why the ring and necklace were in the office otherwise?”

Wipple and Jenkins stayed silent, glancing at each other for a short second, yet they quickly looked back at Brokenshire and seemed to struggle to come up with a logical answer to such a question. So many things could have made the jewelry appear where they did, yet none of them actually seemed as logical as... Well, the theory that Crawford paid some thugs to get Dr. Jekyll out of the game, although having paid them with jewelry-- specifically name engraved jewelry-- was certainly not the most logical option, either. The thought that Dr. Jekyll might have stolen the trinkets didn’t even cross their minds, the thought that Dr. Jekyll might have planted them there seemed too absurd for any of them to even consider it, the thought of Dr. Jekyll having faked the entire thing would probably be the dumbest thing either of them would have thought in years. Dr. Jekyll was gone, he was kidnapped, there had been blood everywhere in the office and the blood might have dried into the wood at this point. Red crimson that coagulated and stained into the mahogany wood was a reminder of what Jekyll, in this very moment, might be suffering through, a reminder that if they weren’t quick, Jekyll’s blood might not have only stained his office.

But... Hold on...

“What if it wasn’t Crawford who planted them there?” Jenkins suddenly spoke up, you could practically see the lightbulb shining over his head as the idea struck him. Both Wipple and Brokenshire furrowed their eyebrows, looking at their colleague.

“Well... Obviously. It isn’t like someone-- if Crawford did hire criminals, would have put them there intentionally. Crawford would clearly not have done the dirty work himself.” Brokenshire pressed.

“No, no-- What if someone tried to frame him?” Jenkins continued, “Think about it-- Crawford is a high standing man, he has a lot of enemies, someone might have stolen the jewelry and planted it on the scene when they kidnapped Jekyll, to throw us off of their tracks?”

The officers all went silent for a moment, as Jenkin’s words and his theory began to sink in. It only took a moment, and then Wipple gasped, almost with excitement. He grabbed Jenkins’ arm and stared at him in awe, before immediately giving him a quick pat on the back.

“Jenkins! You might actually be onto something!”

Jenkins grinned proudly, preening under the praises before the two constables turned towards the sergeant for his input. Brokenshire continued to stare down at the documents, eyebrows knitted into a deep, deep frown upon his forehead. Jenkins’ and Wipple’s excited grins slowly washed away as they watched their friend, a bit confused, a bit worried, as the sergeant reached up a hand to scratch his beard in thought.

“That... Complicates things.”

Brokenshire straightened himself, placing his arms behind his back as his frown only seemed to deepen by the second, yet his eyes did not leave the documents. If someone had kidnapped Jekyll and tried to frame Crawford for it... This might be a much more complicated situation than they had anticipated. This must be a gang activity, or someone who was very dumb for using two pieces of jewelry and nothing more. He could not deny that the idea seemed plausible-- it actually sounded quite reasonable and logical, But how did the criminals get their hands on the trinkets? Could the Scotland Yard afford to finally go and confront Crawford about it, if he knew that his things had recently gotten stolen?

Well... It wasn’t like they had anything to go on, otherwise.

“Gentlemen... I think it’s time that we go to the source, eh?”

“Source?”

“We have to interrogate Crawford. Perhaps he can point us to the reason for why his stuff was in Jekyll’s office.”

Wipple and Jenkins looked at each other, and yet they both immediately turned back to the sergeant.

“Well... What are we waiting for, then?”

The three of them looked at each other for a short moment, only allowing a second of hesitation before all three of them practically sprinted to the door, tearing it open and practically running down the corridors, immediately jumping into the police carriage that was stationed outside and then they were off, galloping through the city streets, off to an unsuspecting Richard Crawford. They had no time to waste, perhaps that’s why they all decided that they had to rush, perhaps that’s why they decided to be quick, or maybe it was the excitement of finally having another lead-- another lead that actually made sense and could be true. In just a few hours they might have their truth. In just a few hours they might find the culprits. In just a few hours, they could all just hope that they would find out what happened to the beloved Dr. Henry Jekyll.

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This chapter was originally going to be Thomas going home from the... Ahem, “hook up” with Robert and meeting Emma Carew and flirting a bit with her, but that plan was only in the drafts and I never wrote it so it’s not what I originally had planned and mentioned in the notes above, but I’m weak for Emma and also Emma X Henry so I hope I will be able to write something for them when this fic is over <3

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Taglist: @artzycreature @jekkiefan

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#tgs #the glass scientists #tgs fanfic #tgs fanfiction #the glass scientists fanfic #the glass scientists fanfiction #banshees fanfic #banshees writing #tgs brokenshire #tgs sergeant brokenshire #tgs sergeant enoch brokenshire #the glass scientists brokenshire #the glass scientists sergeant brokenshire #the glass scientists sergeant enoch brokenshire

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star-anise · 6 years

Note

do you have any sources on the claims you made? im always willing to change my stance if you have legitimate backing for it haha

So first, I’m sorry for blowing up at you the way that I did. I’m not proud that I reacted in such a kneejerk, aggressive fashion. Thank you for being open to hearing what I have to say. I’m sorry for mistaking you for a TERF, and I’m sorry my response has caused other people to direct their own hostility towards you.

So, here’s the thing. “You can’t call bi women femmes” is pretty intrinsically a radfem thing to say, and I am deeply opposed to letting radfems tell me what to do. I’m trying to write this during a weekend packed with childcare and work. I’ll try to hit all the high notes.

The one thing I am having trouble finding is the longass post I talked about in my reply, that was a history of butch/femme relationships in lesbian bars, which had frequent biphobic asides and talked about “the lesbophobic myth of the bi-rejecting lesbian”; the friend who reblogged it without reading it thoroughly has deleted it, and I can’t find it on any of the tags she remembers looking at around that time. If anyone can find it, I’ll put up a link.

As far as possible, I’m linking to really widely accessible sources, because you shouldn’t intrinsically trust a random post on Tumblr as secret privileged knowledge. People have talked about this at length in reputable publications that your local library either has, or can get through interlibrary loan; you can look up any of the people here, read their work, and decide for yourself. This is a narrative of perspectives, and while I obviously have a perspective, many people disagree with me. At the end of the day, the only reason I need for calling bi women femmes is that You Are Not The Boss Of Me. There is no centralized authority on LGBT+ word usage, nor do I think there should be. Hopefully this post will give you a better sense of what the arguments are, and how to evaluate peoples’ claims in the future.

I looked up “butch” and “femme” with my library’s subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary because that’s where you find the most evidence of etymology and early use, and found:

“Femme” is the French word for “woman”. It’s been a loanword in English for about 200 years, and in the late 19th century in America it was just a slangy word for “women”, as in, “There were lots of femmes there for the boys to dance with”

“Butch” has been used in American English to mean a tough, masculine man since the late 19th century; in the 1930s and 1940s it came to apply to a short masculine haircut, and shortly thereafter, a woman who wore such a haircut. It’s still used as a nickname for masculine cis guys–my godfather’s name is Martin, but his family calls him Butch. By the 1960s in Britain, “butch” was slang for the penetrating partner of a pair of gay men.

Butch/femme as a dichotomy for women arose specifically in the American lesbian bar scene around, enh, about the 1940s, to enh, about the 1960s. Closet-keys has a pretty extensive butch/femme history reader. This scene was predominantly working-class women, and many spaces in it were predominantly for women of colour. This was a time when “lesbian” literally meant anyone who identified as a woman, and who was sexually or romantically interested in other women. A lot of the women in these spaces were closeted in the rest of their lives, and outside of their safe spaces, they had to dress normatively, were financially dependent on husbands, etc. Both modern lesbians, and modern bisexual women, can see themselves represented in this historical period.

These spaces cross-pollinated heavily with ball culture and drag culture, and were largely about working-class POC creating spaces where they could explore different gender expressions, gender as a construct and a performance, and engage in a variety of relationships. Butch/femme was a binary, but it worked as well as most binaries to do with sex and gender do, which is to say, it broke down a lot, despite the best efforts of people to enforce it. It became used by people of many different genders and orientations whose common denominator was the need for safety and discretion. “Butch” and “femme” were words with meanings, not owners.

Lesbianism as distinct from bisexuality comes from the second wave of feminism, which began in, enh, the 1960s, until about, enh, maybe the 1980s, maybe never by the way Tumblr is going. “Radical” feminism means not just that this is a new and more exciting form of feminism compared to the early 20th century suffrage movement; as one self-identified radfem professor of mine liked to tell us every single lecture, it shares an etymology with the word “root”, meaning that sex discrimination is at the root of all oppression.

Radical feminism blossomed among college-educated women, which also meant, predominantly white, middle- or upper-class women whose first sexual encounters with women happened at elite all-girls schools or universities. Most of these women broke open the field of “women’s studies” and the leading lights of radical feminism often achieved careers as prominent scholars and tenured professors.

Radical feminism established itself as counter to “The Patriarchy”, and one of the things many early radfems believed was, all men were the enemy. All men perpetuated patriarchy and were damaging to women. So the logical decision was for women to withdraw from men in all manner and circumstances–financially, legally, politically, socially, and sexually. “Political lesbianism” wasn’t united by its sexual desire for women; many of its members were asexual, or heterosexual women who decided to live celibate lives. This was because associating with men in any form was essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.

Look, I’ll just literally quote Wikipedia quoting an influential early lesbian separatist/radical feminist commune: “The Furies recommended that Lesbian Separatists relate “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege” and suggest that “as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will at some point have to betray their sisters, especially Lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits”“

This cross-pollinated with the average experience of WLW undergraduates, who were attending school at a time when women weren’t expected to have academic careers; college for women was primarily seen as a place to meet eligible men to eventually marry. So there were definitely women who had relationships with other women, but then, partly due to the pressure of economic reality and heteronormativity, married men. This led to the phrase LUG, or “lesbian until graduation”, which is the kind of thing that still got flung at me in the 00s as an openly bisexual undergrad. Calling someone a LUG was basically an invitation to fight.

The assumption was that women who marry men when they’re 22, or women who don’t stay in the feminist academic sphere, end up betraying their ideals and failing to have solidarity with their sisters. Which seriously erases the many contributions of bi, het, and ace women to feminism and queer liberation. For one, I want to point to Brenda Howard, the bisexual woman who worked to turn Pride from the spontaneous riots in 1969 to the nationwide organized protests and parades that began in 1970 and continue to this day. She spent the majority of her life to a male partner, but that didn’t diminish her contribution to the LGBT+ community.

Lesbian separatists, and radical feminists, hated Butch/Femme terminology. They felt it was a replication of unnecessarily heteronormative ideals. Butch/femme existed in an LGBT+ context, where gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people understood themselves to have more in common with each other than with, say, cis feminists who just hated men more than they loved women.

The other main stream of feminist thought at the time was Liberal Feminism, which was like, “What if we can change society without totally rejecting men?” and had prominent figures like Gloria Steinem, who ran Ms magazine. Even today, you’ll hear radfems railing against “libfems” and I’m like, my good women, liberal feminism got replaced thirty years ago. Please update your internal schema of “the enemy”

Lesbian separatism was… plagued by infighting. To maintain a “woman-only” space, they had to kick out trans women (thus, TERFs), women who slept with men (thus, biphobia), women who enjoyed kinky sex or pornography or engaged in sex work (thus, SWERFS) and they really struggled to raise their male children in a way that was… um… anti-oppressive. (I’m biased; I know people who were raised in lesbian separatist communes and did not have great childhoods.) At the same time, they had other members they very much wanted to keep, even though their behaviour deviated from the expected program, so you ended up with spectacles like Andrea Dworkin self-identifying as a lesbian despite being deeply in love with and married to a self-identified gay man for twenty years, despite beng famous for the theory that no woman could ever have consensual sex with a man, because all she could ever do was acquiesce to her own rape.

There’s a reason radical feminism stopped being a major part of the public discourse, and also a reason why it survives today: While its proponents became increasingly obsolete, they were respected scholars and tenured university professors. This meant people like Camille Paglia and Mary Daly, despite their transphobia and racism, were considered important people to read and guaranteed jobs educating young people who had probably just moved into a space where they could meet other LGBT people for the very first time. So a lot of modern LGBT people (including me) were educated by radical feminist professors or assigned radical feminist books to read in class.

The person I want to point to as a great exemplar is Alison Bechdel, a white woman who discovered she was a lesbian in college, was educated in the second-wave feminist tradition, but also identified as a butch and made art about the butch/femme dichotomy’s persistence and fluidity. You can see part of that tension in her comic; she knows the official lesbian establishment frowns on butch/femme divisions, but it’s relevant to her lived experience.

What actually replaced radical feminism was not liberal feminism, but intersectional feminism and the “Third Wave”. Black radical feminists, like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, pointed out that many white radical feminists were ignoring race as a possible cause of oppression, and failing to notice how their experiences differed from Black womens’. Which led to a proliferation of feminists talking about other oppressions they faced: Disabled feminists, Latina feminists, queer feminists, working-class feminists. It became clear that even if you eliminated the gender binary from society, there was still a lot of bad shit that you had to unlearn–and also, a lot of oppression that still happened in lesbian separatist spaces.

I’ve talked before about how working in women-only second-wave spaces really destroyed my faith in them and reinforced my belief in intersectional feminism

Meanwhile, back in the broader queer community, “queer” stuck as a label because how people identified was really fluid. Part of it is that you learn by experience, and sometimes the only way to know if something works for you is to try it out, and part of it is that, as society changed, a lot more people became able to take on new identities without as much fear. So for example, you have people like Pat Califia, who identified as a lesbian in the 70s and 80s, found far more in common with gay leather daddies than sex-negative lesbians, and these days identifies as a bisexual trans man.

Another reason radical feminists hate the word “queer”, by the way, is queer theory, which wants to go beyond the concept of men oppressing women, or straights oppressing gays, but to question this entire system we’ve built, of sex, and gender, and orientation. It talks about “queering” things to mean “to deviate from heteronormativity” more than “to be homosexual”. A man who is married to a woman, who stays at home and raises their children while she works, is viewed as “queer” inasmuch as he deviates from heteronormativity, and is discriminated against for it.

So, I love queer theory, but I will agree that it can be infuriating to hear somebody say that as a single (cis het) man he is “queer” in the same way being a trans lesbian of colour is “queer”, and get very upset and precious about being told they’re not actually the same thing. I think that actually, “queer as a slur” originated as the kind of thing you want to scream when listening to too much academic bloviating, like, “This is a slur! Don’t reclaim it if it didn’t originally apply to you! It’s like poor white people trying to call themselves the n-word!” so you should make sure you are speaking about a group actually discriminated against before calling them “queer”. On the other hand, queer theory is where the theory of “toxic masculinity” came from and we realized that we don’t have to eliminate all men from the universe to reduce gender violence; if we actually pay attention to the pressures that make men so shitty, we can reduce or reverse-engineer them and encourage them to be better, less sexist, men.

But since radfems and queer theorists are basically mortal enemies in academia, radical feminists quite welcomed the “queer as a slur” phenomenon as a way to silence and exclude people they wanted silenced and excluded, because frankly until that came along they’ve been losing the culture wars.

This is kind of bad news for lesbians who just want to float off to a happy land of only loving women and not getting sexually harrassed by men. As it turns out, you can’t just turn on your lesbianism and opt out of living in society. Society will follow you wherever you go. If you want to end men saying gross things to lesbians, you can’t just defend lesbianism as meaning “don’t hit on me”; you have to end men saying gross things to all women, including bi and other queer women. And if you do want a lesbian-only space, you either have to accept that you will have to exclude and discriminate against some people, including members of your community whose identities or partners change in the future, or accept that the cost of not being a TERF and a biphobe is putting up with people in your space whose desires don’t always resemble yours.

Good god, this got extensive and I’ve been writing for two hours.

So here’s the other thing.

My girlfriend is a femme bi woman. She’s married to a man.

She’s also married to two women.

And dating a man.

And dating me (a woman).

When you throw monogamy out the window, it becomes EVEN MORE obvious that “being married to a man” does not exclude a woman from participation in the queer community as a queer woman, a woman whose presentation is relevant in WLW contexts. Like, this woman is in more relationships with women at the moment than some lesbians on this site have been in for their entire lives.

You can start out with really clear-cut ideas about “THIS is what my life is gonna be like” but then your best friend’s sexual orientation changes, or your lover starts to transition, and things in real life are so much messier than they look when you’re planning your future. It’s easy to be cruel, exclusionary, or dismissive to people you don’t know; it’s a lot harder when it’s people you have real relationships with.

And my married-to-a-man girlfriend? Uses “butch” and “femme” for reasons very relevant to her queerness and often fairly unique to femme bi women, like, “I was out with my husband and looking pretty femme, so I guess they didn’t clock me as a queer” or “I was the least butch person there, so they didn’t expect me to be the only one who uses power tools.” Being a femme bi woman is a lot about invisibility, which is worth talking about as a queer experience instead of being assumed to exclude us from the queer community.

#cherryhearrts #staranise original #answered asks #ranting in bisexual #lgbt discourse #terf shit #exclusionist shit #radfem shit #apologies to my girlfriend for not including carole queen in this post #she just didn't fit baby

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cryptonewseye · 3 years

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#Bitcoin News #Crypto

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peakwealth · 3 years

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The PLUCC Factor

Observable fact. (Azulejo, Museu Berardo, Estremoz, Portugal 2020)

I had barely finished my rant about the corruption of the news and the underlying issue of reality-fatigue when I came across a similar analysis but in a different context.

The forces behind the coronavirus disinformation are complex, perhaps more so than those that triggered the great eruptions of populist discontent in recent years, Brexit and Trumpism. They are intertwined, cross traditional political divides and bring together activists from opposing corners of society. Some wave crucifixes, some are white supremacists, some are environmentalists, while others are antivaxxers, anarchists or climate-change deniers. A common denominator can be hard to figure out. Apart from the so-called 'negative solidarity', it seems to thrive on alienation and disenchantment, or simply on vengeful resentment directed at the elites.

This particular analysis goes some way to untangle the web of deceit that surrounds the coronavirus pandemic and the efforts to bring it under control. It is an attempt to reverse-engineer, as it were, the why and the how of the science-denial, the disinformation and intellectual dishonesty that have distorted the public COVID debate.

References to the original (in German) are at the bottom of this post. *

Although far from complete, it provides a useful set of analytical factors, grouped under the acronym PLUCC. (**)

PLUCC stands for - P pseudo-experts - L logic failure - U unrealistic expectations - C cherry picking - C conspiracy thinking

P s e u d o - e x p e r t s. Faced with complicated scientific matters, beginning with epidemiology and statistics, the media call on experts, doctors and professors to explain things as they see fit. There is a lot of name dropping. The professors are often 'affiliated' with prestigious institutions and big-name teaching hospitals. Harvard here, Stanford there. But that does not mean they are ipso facto qualified to hold forth on the specifics of the pandemic. The credibility game can be opaque and partisan. The fact is that some experts lack the actual knowledge or the right credentials. Except that the viewers and readers cannot be expected to know this. To put it differently, television talk shows, split-screen discussions on youTube or elsewhere are not the best place to shape public policy or to further the understanding of the pandemic.

Some concepts have found their way into received coronavirus knowledge (the ‘hair salon’ variety) without medical logic to support them. This includes false analogies, such as comparing COVID to influenza, or the idea that we "will just have to learn to live with the virus". Oversimplification is common, like sealing off retirement homes, advocated early on to allow the rest of society to get on with life.

Another instance of L o g i c F a i l u r e showed up in the USA as a spurious consensus idea that may have seemed plausible but made little sense. The 'Great Barrington Declaration' (***) got a lot of uninformed (and ultimately deceptive) media play when it was released with academic fanfare last October. It opposed lockdowns and proposed instead that "Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal." What this actually suggested was deliberate manipulation for political purposes.

Time and again, wave after epidemic wave, we have seen that there are no quick fixes. Yet the search for easy solutions and bite-sized explanations is part of a pattern of U n r e a l i s t i c e x p e c t a t i o n s.

Some news media insist on (or are tricked into) presenting 'both sides of the coin', i.e. they will cover both the scientific and the unscientific perspective of, say, vaccination. It is a ploy well known from the evolution vs. creationism debate, or from climate change denial. It suggests that factual and counterfactual information both deserve a fair hearing, or that both might be valid and legitimate. It opens the door wide to quacks and to 'alternative' or selective explanations that are not rooted in reality. This can take the form of C h e r r y p i c k i n g of data or findings taken out of context (read: misleading news headlines) or from 'pre-published' studies (not peer reviewed) driven by poltical agendas or personal ambitions.

Beyond that lies the deep end of the public debate, far removed from scientific fact. C o n s p i r a c y t h i n k i n g about the epidemic is fed by paranoia, religious faith, wanton rejection of reason and a belief that everything is rigged by the establishment, Bill Gates or other incarnations of evil. Little distinction is then made between science and Big Pharma and their corrupt underlings in government.

That disinformation and suspicion on this scale should have become so widespread raises questions that go beyond the pandemic, questions about education and disenchantment or about the pushback against authority and against the complexity of evidence-based knowledge.

____________________________________________________________ * NDR Info. Das Coronavirus Update, episode # 82 with professor Christian Drosten, head of virology at the Charité hospital, Berlin. (German public radio podcast.) Drosten has been influential in formulating German COVID policy.

** PLURV in the original German version.

https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/82-Coronavirus-Update-Die-Lage-ist-ernst,podcastcoronavirus300.html#Argument

*** https://gbdeclaration.org/

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years

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PART TWO: Glitching the Collective Mind (Dan Power)

Figure 3.1

“Living in a globalized, economically destitute society has turned us into neurotic Internet-dwellers with our nerves relentlessly racked by political failures and a media industry that runs on the fumes of our panic and anxiety. We do everything we can, from colorfully invoking a better world on Instagram to adopting the fashion trends of a vague past era, to distract us from the existential reality that under late capitalism we are miserable.” - Grafton Tanner (2015)

In the last instalment of this series, we saw how the surplus of online content makes constructing a coherent conception of the world through the internet an impossibility. We’ve seen that this content is produced by and for an increasingly large mass of people. Being active internet users, all of these people must be experiencing information saturation, and producing content which responds to, or at least participates in, this saturation.

> We also saw that the internet is a hyper-object and therefore nonlocal. However, we understand it using a range of spatial terms; we visit different web ‘sites’, using search bars to ‘navigate’ between them. We saw that the internet is a database and so atemporal, and yet we refer the constantly-growing feeds of information on social media sites like Twitter as “timelines”, as if the data isn’t all existing online simultaneously, uploaded then frozen in time. Perhaps as a way to make this info-saturated hyper-object seem less ineffable, a language of repurposed non-digital terms has emerged. This betrays an ontological disparagement felt by internet users who simultaneously are inhabiting real and virtual space. Considered alongside the omnipresence of code/space, which causes the digital world to leak into the physical, this reality-masking language becomes increasingly problematic.

> The surreal short film icced (2017), which we examined briefly before, is a depiction of how non-spatial and atemporal virtual worlds might be understood in physical and temporal terms. Characters in conversation appear in the same frame, as if they’re physically located within the same space, and yet they can float away or dematerialise at will. At one point they appear to be in a convenience store, but later an exterior depiction of the building reveals the store not to be on a street, but floating in an indeterminate part of outer space. The store is a recognisable location, and yet we are given no information which can locate it in any specific place. It is both ubiquitous and anonymous. It is, to use a term from the influential anthropologist Marc Augé, a non-place.

> Augé (2008) writes that “if a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity will be a non-place”. While modernity brought with it the establishment of cities and so created a sense of being in a place, supermodernity produces non-places, areas within places which bear no qualities that identify them as being anywhere specific. The “essential quality” of supermodernity, Augé states, is “excess”, and excess creates the need for anonymous public spaces to be mass-produced. Mass-production creates clones, replicas of an original place rather than places which are new and have their own distinct identity. An example Augé provides is “the big supermarket”, a symbol of excess consumerism which was made necessary by people’s desires to purchase a wide range of goods with minimal effort. Aside from superficial branding, the experience of being inside a supermarket is the same regardless of where in the world it is found. Each supermarket is defined not in relation to the area it exists in, but to existing ideas of what a supermarket is. If a supermarket in one country is interchangeable with a supermarket in another, then the experience of entering a supermarket is the experience of exiting a place and entering a non-place.

> Place is important because it provides something around which the occupants can build a sense of identity. When the features which distinguish one place from another are removed, stable sense of belonging and understanding are removed with them. The non-place “creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude” – its lack of identity strips visitors of their own identity, forces them to become anonymous.

Virtual space, being non-local and homogenized in structure, is a non-place also. In order to understand the problems post-internet surrealists are confronting we must update our conceptualization of the internet. Not only is it one single work with innumerable contributors, but it’s a work which the creators and observers can inhabit and interact with. The virtual plaza can be entered from any internet-connected place or non-place on the planet. As such it is not just an artwork which changes our understanding of the world, but by belonging in a place in inextricable from a person’s sense of self, it’s an artwork which makes us redefine our conceptions of identity.

> The ‘virtual plaza’ is a phrase borrowed from the author and experimental musician Grafton Tanner (2015), who uses it to conceptualise the interactions of internet users between content and each other. He describes the plaza as a non-place through which “we drift and consume, lulled by the saccharine tones of muzak”. The lulled drifting through this nondescript plaza evokes the same melancholy as Augé when he says that “The [supermarket] customer wanders round in silence, reads labels, weighs fruits and vegetables on a machine…”. In digital non-space the supermarket becomes a hyper-market, and the alienating dislocation this inflicts on its visitors takes place on a global scale.

> Bridle (2018) writes that the “ubiquity” of smartphone computers make “the entire world” a code/space, and by extension this standardises “culture itself”. Writing on memes and online culture, Shifman (2013) notes that “contemporary participatory culture” consists largely of “user‐driven imitation and remix”, with internet users continually adapting and readapting existing ideas to create new ones. Nothing new is created, and nothing old has immutable associations. Because this has taken place in the virtual plaza for years, the reference points for things which are being remixed are often themselves remixes of other things. The lamb sauce memes we encountered in the last chapter function as in-jokes, with only those who have seen the original lamb sauce clip, the remix, or variants of it being in on the joke. This meme can only be understood in relation to other memes. In the corners of the internet where this meme is popular it has constructed its own virtual space of signification which does not rely upon anything in the real world.

> Bruenig observes that in surreal internet comedy “loops of self-referential quips warp and distort with each iteration… until nothing coherent is left” (2017), but perhaps a more accurate assessment would be that nothing appears to be coherent from an outside perspective. There is an internal logic to each meme which is created and sustained by the internet users who deploy the content or frames in consistent ways. Internet culture, if such a broad concept can be meaningfully invoked, has reached a point where its reference points are also part of internet culture. As such this culture is self-sustaining, and evolves in an entirely separate way to cultures offline.

The virtual plaza is inherently anachronistic, with the oldest posts and websites being as instantly accessible as the most recent. Online, the past and present co-exist without contradiction. The past, like the present, is made of data. This makes subcultures within the internet unique, since they have developed without a stable sense of history. Augé notes that the mass-production of homogenised place leads to places being built which bear no signifiers of temporality. Non-places appear one day and immediately function as if they have existed for years, so that a supermarket built today might be interchangeable with a supermarket built in the previous millennium. This not only dulls the influence of history over the feel of a place, but replaces individual understandings of local history with a standardised, globally “collective history”, the “reference points” of which are indeterminate and so “unstable”. Online this instability is further amplified, as Bridle observes when he says that, online, “history is networked and atemporal”. The internet’s database structure takes the identity-stripping atemporality and a-spatiality of non-place to its logical conclusion: by finally creating a place without a physical location, and where cultural artefacts are interpretable only in relation to other data objects, the internet deletes the cultural identity of all those who move through it, and requires them to construct a facsimile of themselves before they can manifest within the virtual plaza.

> We all enter the virtual plaza in a state of anonymity, and in order to lose this a new identity must be constructed. If every individual online is doing this, and if enough people’s constructions resemble each other, then the idea of a distinct and significant post-internet cultural identity becomes a tangible possibility.

One subculture which was born online is the vaporwave community, built around the musical genre and aesthetic of the same name. Vaporwave artists take mass-produced commercial muzak and distort it until it feels haunted and unnerving. Vaporwave identifies itself as “a descendant of punk”, and both genres share an output of lo-fi content with anti-establishment sentiment. Like punk, the aesthetic of vaporwave “has been associated with the Situationist détournement, where mainstream culture is edited to convey alternative and oftentimes subversive messages” (Jimison, 2015). In this case, the mainstream culture being edited is the heartless muzak which saturates non-places. As opposed to music, muzak is designed to not make an impact on the listener: it’s background noise, designed to keep you stimulated but pacified as you move through the plaza, or cheery and more willing to spend when passing through a big supermarket. Music is made for listeners to enjoy, muzak to manipulate them into acting in a certain way. By putting this background content at the foreground of their own work, vaporwave artists intend to “wake us up to the corporatist society in which we are trapped”, replacing the “mask” of consumerist art with the “dead stare of unfettered capitalism”.

> All vaporwave art, being a product of the virtual plaza, is a form of remix. What separates this content from the rest is the creators’ uniformity of intent and the execution of ideas. Not only are they manipulating commercial music to reveal its omnipresence within the virtual plaza, but they distort it so that anything which might once have been comforting becomes sinister and dark. Floral Shoppe, released by electronic musician Vektroid under the alias MACINTOSH PLUS (2011 - see figure 3.1 above), is one of vaporwave’s seminal albums, and the track ‘リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー"’ (or ‘Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing’) is almost synonymous with the genre. Throughout this album pre-existing songs are slowed so that the melodies become drowsy, the vocals deeper, and with massively increased reverb they become slurred and ghost-like. Looped melodies are overlaid slightly asynchronously, so the songs feel perpetually on the verge of collapse.

> Vaporwave is a movement bent on alienation. Every aspect of Floral Shoppe– from the convoluted and untranslated titles to the space- and temporality-busting combination of historical artefact and virtual space on its cover (figure 3.1) – exists to serve the deconstruction of artificial reality. Tanner notes how “electronic media’s propensity to glitch and malfunction” can put users into a “sudden state of disarray”, and this same effect is achieved in vaporwave’s clunky deconstruction of highly-polished commercial music. This disarray constitutes a kind of “horror”, a sudden collapse of what we perceive to be real.

> Stephen Curtis (2019) suggests that the glitch is a kind of existential awakening, the systems operating below the surface of the plaza revealing themselves, and vaporwave artists have certainly tapped into this mode of thinking. Their artefacts exist within the non-physical plaza, where sounds and images are the building blocks of a virtual reality. When these malfunction and glitch it appears, from the perspective of an immersed internet user, as if reality itself is breaking. Through its disruptions of the digital diegesis, vaporwave abruptly disengages its listeners from the virtual space, and so frees them of its dread-inducing effects.

Escaping the virtual plaza in this way can be blissful, as seen in Lucien Hughes’ S-U-N-D-A-Y S-C-H-O-O-L(2017). This video remixes clips from The Simpsons (1989-) into a music video for the vaporwave song ‘Teen Pregnancy’ (Blank Banshee, 2012). It depicts Bart Simpson listening to the track and dissociating from reality. The diegesis we perceive is governed by Bart’s internal mood, and only begins to change when he presses play on his cassette player. As he dances through the streets of Springfield the space deconstructs – the sky becomes vectored, the colours saturated and hyper-real. Objects slide over each other unnaturally, as if fighting for space, and the world goes through phases of appearing blurry and distorted. Bart has flashbacks to his early childhood and the space deconstructs further; past and present locations are spliced together, the overlaid glitch effects become more intrusive, and clips unexpectedly skip or repeat.

> The manipulation of diegetic reality through the glitch, manifested as an apparent error in the hardware sustaining the digital object’s existence, allows the filmmaker to alter the film on a fundamental level. As with vaporwave music, the glitch here breaks apart digital reality, and when deployed as an aesthetic tool, reconstructs a reality from the diegetic rubble.

> In a state of dissociative bliss, Bart barely reacts to the environment changing around him. As we drift between day and night, location and year, he continues to smile vacantly and dance away. His new world is infused with signifiers of the virtual plaza: a Windows 95 logo flickers across the sky, the pink grid sky and a cartoon stone bust evoke the cover of Floral Shoppe, and we even an earlier clip of the video loading on a computer screen.

> There is a temporal displacement not only within the video’s narrative but in its composition: the saturated colours and flickering lines across the image give the impression of an old camcorder, while the background shown above is fractured in the style of a digital glitch. The video reflects the atemporal environment in which it exists. The use of a classic Simpsons episode, fixation on Bart’s cassette player, and sampling the iconic riff from Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ (1982) all invoke nostalgia, while simultaneously the glitching images make the video’s post-internet status apparent. This is a depiction of the past distorted by technologies of the present. The past is only accessible to us through documents and artefacts, and online these become artefacts become files. In the case of S-U-N-D-A-Y S-C-H-O-O-L, these files have been corrupted.

The spilling of the past into the present, and the temporal and ontological disarrays which result, are hallmarks of a hauntological work. Tanner invokes Derrida’s concept of hauntology in regard to vaporwave, which exposes “the haunting of present culture by the past” by generating works which eschew temporality. Importantly, this haunted restructuring of muzak forms part of the genre’s social critique. Tanner explains that “hauntology posits that the past notions of the future have in some way failed”. The emergence of fully networked information through the internet brought with it the promise of digital global enlightenment, but this future hasn’t arrived. As Bridle said in the first chapter of this series, “that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it”.

> Derrida (2006) describes the haunting of late capitalism as being conducted by “neither soul nor body, but both one and the other”. Hauntology is conceptual, but still provokes a tangible hauntedness. Something “crucial” to the haunted nature of consumer culture, Mark Fisher (2006) explains, is the “temporal disjuncture” from which the hauntological feeling arises. Since atemporality is intrinsic to a database structure, and the internet is one giant database of databases, there is a haunted quality inherent in all internet media. Digital space is saturated with ghosts of the past, and the continuous mixing and remixing on which internet culture is built stirs these ghosts into the liquid concrete of the future’s building blocks.

> Tanner observes that “vaporwave is the music of “non-times” and “non-places” because it is sceptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space”, and this certainly appears to be true. The identity-stripping alienation of non-place is evoked through the layered pseudonyms of artists such as Ramona Xavier (Vektroid / MACINTOSH PLUS), and the temporal instability of networked culture is foregrounded in the movement’s continual remixing and recontextualisation of disparate cultural artefacts. Rather than surrender to the existential crises posed by the haunted virtual plaza, or obscuring them with pacifying commercial entertainment, vaporwave artists confront them directly in an attempt to reconcile atemporality and alienation with sincere artistic practice.

> Jimison writes that, as with "the historical avant-garde, Vaporwave appears to want no part in the institutions of entertainment and art, but to produce a radical space of their own, on their own terms”. Digital networks have made cultural progression in reality increasingly difficult. By operating within the network to start a culture from scratch these artists are forging their own reality, a reality of which atemporality and aspatiality are a part, and in which hauntings are not a horror but part of the enjoyment.

Tanner argues that “producers making simple, radical vaporwave dissolve the notion of progress both in its creation and in the feelings it invokes in us”. If progress entails the dilution of feeling in increasingly commercialized music, and the dilution of meaning which results from too much information, then vaporwave is wilfully regressive. Importantly, if the future we’re hurtling towards is dizzying and overwhelming, then regression can be its own form of liberation.

> Bridle expresses a similar sentiment when he writes that “we have much to learn about unknowing”. His point might not be that ignorance is bliss, but that unlearning obsolete modes of communication and cultural proliferation are a necessary first step towards progression in a highly-networked world. He describes ‘the network’ as “us and our machines and the things we think and discover together”, meaning that humanity is an active part of the network, implying that cooperation between humans and machines is necessary in order for the network to advance society. The virtual plaza is essential to the running of millions of people’s daily lives, but since it dissolves our fixed conceptualisations of history and identity we must adapt to fit in. This requires casting doubt over some things we believe to be fundamentally true – that history is linear, that identity is individual – but this shouldn’t be alarming. As Bridle muses, “uncertainty can be productive, even sublime”.

In the final installment of this series, we will see how post-internet surreal filmmakers are responding to the same concerns of meaninglessness in a networked and atemporal world, and do so in a similar manner to the vaporwave artists before them. They have much to teach us about unknowing. In abstracting the minutiae of daily life almost beyond the point of recognition, and so challenging our most basic concepts of how objects move through space or how a sentence is constructed, they manage to find comedy, insight, and create a powerful dissonance which often borders on feeling sublime.

Full list of works cited plus bonus discography are available here.

This is part two of a three part series. Part one is available here and part three available here.

Text: Dan Power

Published 8/10/19

#essays #SPAM essay #glitch #virtual plaza #Dan Power #virtual sublime #Grafton Tanner #vaporwave #Simpsonswave #post-internet #post-internet theory #post-internet aesthetics #essay

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/travel/art-review-at-frieze-new-york-islands-of-daring/

Art Review: At Frieze New York, Islands of Daring

Getting into this year’s Frieze Art Fair on Randalls Island will cost you $57, plus the round trip on the ferry. But that’s nothing compared to what it cost nearly 200 galleries to exhibit there. And so dealers have made the reasonable decision to bring a little of everything that sells — which may account for the conservative vibe. That said, there are many islands of daring, including special sections focused on solo presentations, small galleries, the influential gallery JAM and virtual reality. We sampled them all — along with the mainland fairs that are part of Frieze Week. Our art critics Martha Schwendener and Will Heinrich pick a handful of the best booths under Frieze New York’s big tent.

Booth C2

Bridget Donahue and LC Queisser

One of the strongest single-artist booths is a joint presentation by Bridget Donahue Gallery and LC Queisser, who represent the artist Lisa Alvarado in New York and the Republic of Georgia, respectively. Ms. Alvarado made her acrylic-on-canvas pieces, each painted with a thrilling zigzag pattern, as backdrops for performances by the Natural Information Society, in which she plays the harmonium. If the fair’s not too loud, you’ll be able to hear the band’s hypnotic music, too. WILL HEINRICH

Two exceptional but very different displays are on view in the fair’s midsection. At Casey Kaplan gallery, Matthew Ronay’s carved wooden sculptures, pieced together into abstract, evocative organic configurations in various coral hues, are placed on plinths and feel like an oasis amid the fair’s chaos. (Mr. Ronay also has an exhibition on view at Kaplan’s Chelsea location.) Martine Gutierrez continues her rampage as the Indigenous Woman, a transgender alternative-fashionista at Ryan Lee. In photographs and faux-fashion spreads, Ms. Gutierrez combines traditional Mayan and Guatemalan garments and fabrics with fantastic and futuristic accessories and makeup to conjure new, fluid forms of being. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Booths F6, F12 and F14

Company, Bank and Very Small Fires

The Frame section of Frieze, devoted to galleries 10 years or younger, is particularly good this year. Befitting the ethos of the emerging artists they represent, the booths are platforms for performance or installations, with linoleum or AstroTurf covering the floors. The New York gallery Company is hung with paintings by Jonathan Lyndon Chase that feature roughly drawn figures or graffiti, as well as crude sculptures of a toilet seat or a dollar sign. Yanyan Huang treats the booth at Bank, a Shanghai gallery, as an “immersive portal” (according to a handout) in which traditional ink drawings merge with digital applications. Nearby, Diedrick Brackens’s colorful tapestries at the Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires join traditional materials with references to figures like African-American cowboys. SCHWENDENER

The Tehran gallery Dastan (appearing here as Dastan’s Basement) has hung more than 50 portraits by the artist and architect Bijan Saffari. A member of the royal family who left Iran for Paris after his country’s 1979 revolution, Mr. Saffari was also gay, which made his position doubly precarious. The portraits are rather simple and conservative, drawn in graphite and colored pencil. And yet they are sensitive and closely observed, and they gain by their group presentation, appearing like a narrative of his circle of friends in the ’70s and ’80s. There is an elegiac tone to these drawings; the artist died days before the current edition of Frieze opened. SCHWENDENER

Booths B36 and F9

David Lewis and Antoine Ertaskiran

In a fair dominated by painting, David Lewis of the Lower East Side and Montreal’s Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, making its Frieze debut, stand out with presentations that could pass for gallery shows. Four cool acrylics by New York painter Charles Mayton, at Lewis, feature schematic eyes and hands in jazzy mash-ups of shelves, bars and circles. Jane Corrigan’s large wet-on-wet paintings of women on the go, at Ertaskiran, are exquisite brown and yellow collisions of impatience and poise. HEINRICH

Booths A11, B32, C7 and D1

Foxy Production, Simone Subal, Rachel Uffner and Galerie Lelong

Several New York galleries have mounted outstanding painting displays in which artists bend the medium in a variety of ways. At Foxy Production, Srijon Chowdhury, Gina Beavers and Sascha Braunig offer reinventions of Gothic romanticism, surrealism, Op or Pop Art. Simone Subal is showing the work of Emily Mae Smith, whose paintings are slick and whip-smart updates and appropriations of posters from the ’70s and ’80s. Maryam Hoseini works both on and off the wall at Rachel Uffner, but combines abstracted Persian imagery or techniques with contemporary painting. Sarah Cain’s take on painting at Galerie Lelong offers candy colors, cutouts and a floor flooded and stained with pigment. They remind you of paintings’ origins — in childhood — and suggest a kind of joyful, delirious regression. SCHWENDENER

Booths S4, S10 and S11

Galerist, Galeri Nev and Pi Artworks

The fair’s outstanding Spotlight section, curated by Laura Hoptman of the Drawing Center, is dedicated to “significant work by overlooked figures.” They include Yüksel Arslan, a Turkish painter born in 1933 who moved to Paris at the invitation of André Breton and died in 2017. His “Arture 439, Sans Titre, l’Homme,” from 1992, in a joint presentation by Turkish galleries Galerist and Galeri Nev, is a gloriously strange gallimaufry of interspecies sex acts and quotations from the artist’s scientific reading, drawn with homemade colors. Susan Hefuna makes ink drawings inspired by the intricate wooden screens of her Cairo childhood. The examples presented by Pi Artworks of London and Istanbul are done on overlapping sheets of tracing paper fastened with rice glue. The multitude of tones and textures create a fascinating tension between clarity and ambiguity — the drawings are like letters of a foreign language glimpsed in a dream. HEINRICH

The Diálogos section of Frieze includes solo presentations of Latin American art, organized by Patrick Charpenel and Susanna V. Temkin of New York’s El Museo del Barrio. I was particularly taken with Mariela Scafati’s hybrids of paintings and sculpture at the Buenos Aires gallery Isla Flotante. Ms. Scafati takes wooden bars where canvas is stretched and treats them like bones, joining the parts together in puppetlike configurations, sometimes bound or “wearing” a jacket or a pair of pants. SCHWENDENER

Booths B9, B10 and B20

lokal_30, Koenig & Clinton and Kate Werble

A vibrant knot of color and form awaits you at the intersection of New York’s Koenig & Clinton and Kate Werble galleries and Warsaw’s lokal_30. From Poland come three painters exemplifying postwar and contemporary Surrealism, among them the young Ewa Juszkiewicz, who repaints classic portraits of women, but hides their faces with cloth, ears of corn or a backward French braid. They evoke feminism, dream logic and implicit violence. Tony Marsh’s over-the-top ceramic vessels, encrusted in what look like shards of glaze, meet the eye-bending optical paintings of Anoka Faruqee & David Driscoll at Koenig & Clinton. Marilyn Lerner makes delicately complicated oil-on-wood abstractions at Kate Werble; don’t miss the unlabeled low tables by Christopher Chiappa, also in Werble’s booth. HEINRICH

There’s something magical about William T. Williams’s early 1970s “Diamond in a Box” paintings, hard-edged geometric patterns in blazing colors. The subtle misdirection of those patterns, and the complicated rhythm of the colors, mean you could look at them forever. Michael Rosenfeld presents a dozen never-before-shown acrylic-on-paper works from the same period. In these, a wiggly meander snakes in and out of concentric circles filled with vibrant brush strokes — they’re like Bauhaus takes on the Aztec calendar. HEINRICH

Booth F18

PM8

Spanish gallery PM8 presents 80 black-and-white photographs by the Lithuanian photographer Gintautas Trimakas, shot in the mid-90s and hung in three long rows. The piece shows 80 women with their heads and legs cropped out. Though the backgrounds range from white to nearly black, and the clothing and body types are all over the map, the typological presentation wears away these differences and leaves the figures all looking more or less interchangeable. It’s a deeply cynical take on both the consumerist Western freedoms available to Lithuanians after their 1990 independence and on the fate of all human bodies — the women aren’t so much living people as corpses in waiting. HEINRICH

V.I.P.s have access to the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at Frieze New York. But nearly everyone can benefit from PPOW’s display of paintings by Steve Keene, which are on sale for $15 to $50. Mr. Keene was heavily influenced by indie rock bands in the early 1990s — his friends in Pavement, Silver Jews and the Dave Matthews Band — and the idea of selling quick, sketchily rendered paintings like cassette tapes. Using a stage in PPOW’s booth as a pop-up studio, he will produce hundreds of paintings on thin plywood panels — they are part endurance performance, part public art stunt. The vibe feels like one in a record store during an album release party. SCHWENDENER

Frieze New York

Through May 5 at Randalls Island Park; frieze.com. Tickets are limited and only available online.

#n i travel news #travel news a47 #travel news leicester #travel news london #travel news m55 #travel news uae

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johnchiarello · 4 years

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Anselm- Aquinas

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[TODAY’S POST BEGINS HERE]

[1462] ANSELM- Over the next few months I will do some brief overviews on important historical figures from church history. They will be under a separate section after the same name. Anselm was born in Italy in the year 1033, he eventually became a very influential church teacher and is famous for a few things; he came up with an argument for the existence of God called ‘the Ontological argument’ ontology is a word that means the nature of being. His idea went like this ‘Because there is no other greater conceivable being than God, that means God must exist’ in so many words he said because humans have this conscious belief in God as the greatest being, that therefore he must be that being. I’ll admit when I first read this argument I had some difficulties with it, I think you can find problems with it. But he nevertheless introduced it and it has become one of the classical apologetic arguments for God’s existence. The second major teaching that Anselm gave us was the teaching on the Atonement; Anselm taught that Jesus died to ransom man back to God, the penalty of death was a penalty paid to God. You say ‘what’s so new about that’? Many other church teachers taught that Jesus died to pay a ransom to the devil, that at the fall of man satan gained dominion over man and that Jesus death purchased us back from satan. Though there is some truth to man being under the dominion of satan after the fall, yet Anselm was ‘more right’ in the way he approached it. As a matter of fact His teaching eventually became the norm for the church. Anselm introduced Reason into the argument for the existence of God. Many teachers used scripture and appealed to the church fathers to prove the reality of God, Anselm was one of the first to lean heavily on logic when arguing for Gods existence. He is considered one of the greats of church history and we still benefit from the influence of Anselm to this day.

[1469] AQUINAS, THOMAS- Thomas is considered to be one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time. Born in Naples around 1225, he studied in Cologne under the Dominican order. During Thomas lifetime there was a rediscovery of the ancient writings of the philosopher Aristotle. Thomas would write commentaries on the philosophy of Aristotle and he would attempt to introduce reason into the arguments to prove the existence of God. He was a follower of that form of Christian teaching called ‘scholasticism’ this method used reason and logical debate to arrive at truth. Other scholars would reject this method [Bonaventure] they felt that using these rationale methods was a contradiction to faith. Thomas would become famous for his ‘five ways’ also referred to as Natural Theology. Thomas taught that there were 5 basic ways man could examine the natural created order and come to a rational belief in the existence of God; Thomas taught that the first cause of all things had to be God, you logically needed a first ‘causer’ to start the ball rolling [prime mover]. John Duns Scotus was a contemporary of Aquinas and he disagreed with the scholastic method. Scotus would become famous among the Franciscans; Aquinas would be famous among the Dominicans. Today many Catholic scholars pride themselves in being ‘Thomistic’ in their thought. Thomas also spoke much about ‘just war’ theory, originally introduced by Augustine. He taught that the means of war had to be just in order for the war itself to be ‘justified’; in today’s wars [Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan] I believe the use of unmanned drone attacks that kill civilians can be considered an unjust method. Thomas’ great works are Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae, Thomas is called the ‘angelic doctor’ of the Catholic faith.

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These are some of the first posts ever made, I hope to share some of them over time in between my regular studies. Of course they are ‘dated’- and it would be too difficult to edit each post. Some have old news comments in them, but if I also taught on the posts, I’ll post them ‘as is’. Hopefully they will be a benefit in some way- John.

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biofunmy · 5 years

Text

At Frieze New York, Islands of Daring

Booth C2

Bridget Donahue and LC Queisser

Booths F6, F12 and F14

Company, Bank and Very Small Fires

Booths B36 and F9

David Lewis and Antoine Ertaskiran

Booths A11, B32, C7 and D1

Foxy Production, Simone Subal, Rachel Uffner and Galerie Lelong

Booths S4, S10 and S11

Galerist, Galeri Nev and Pi Artworks

Booths B9, B10 and B20

lokal_30, Koenig & Clinton and Kate Werble

Booth F18

PM8

Frieze New York

Through May 5 at Randalls Island Park; frieze.com. Tickets are limited and only available online.

Sahred From Source link Travel

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allwicca · 7 years

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The most influential witch in history

There aren’t many words as loaded as ‘witch’ in the English language. Centuries of mythology, persecution, and perhaps the greatest patriarchal massacre of women, elderly people, and disabled people (and generally speaking, anyone who dared question or contradict holy logic) have resulted in a cultural trope that is far too often seen in contemporary imagery. Doreen Valiente (née Edith Dominy) changed all that, sparking the conversation about the Pagan traditions of witchcraft at a time when it had only just been made legal in 1951.

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente (4 January 1922–1 September 1999) remains, simply, the most influential woman in the world of modern Witchcraft. Her fame and achievements are only surpassed by her popularity and respect among the world’s Pagan community.

Doreen Edith Dominy was born in Mitcham, South London on January 4th, 1922 to parents Harry and Edith.

Harry was a draughtsman described by Doreen in later life as a “failed architect” the family moved to the South of England somewhat during her childhood living at various times in Surrey, Exeter, and Southampton which is how she was to acquire her characteristic soft west country accent. She had her first magical experiences at the age of 7 and she recalls playing at riding a broomstick up and down the street, behavior that led to her parents fears that she would be attracted to the occult in later life, how little they could have known.

On a balmy summer evening in the 1920s, she crept into her south London garden at twilight and was consumed by the feeling that her surroundings were fabricated to hide something else: something “very potent.”

Valiente began practicing magic as a teenager, walking out of her local convent school at the age of 15. Her passions remained unwavering through WWII, during which she worked as a translator at Bletchley Park, up until she was initiated into a coven during the summer solstice.

When she was thirty, Doreen was introduced to Gerald Gardner. By this time, she had been married twice – her first husband died at sea, her second was Casimiro Valiente – and in 1953, she was initiated into the New Forest coven of witches. Over the next several years, Doreen worked with Gardner in expanding and developing his Book of Shadows, which he claimed was based on ancient documents passed down through the ages. Unfortunately, much of what Gardner had at the time was fragmented and disorganized.

With a gift for poetry and an indomitable objectivity and research-led mind, Valiente quickly rose to become High Priestess of the coven and rewrote much of Gardner’s seminal Book of Shadows and Charge of the Goddess, two texts that continue to act as the lynchpins of Wiccan practice due to her resilience.

Although Valiente’s career may seem strange to our modern condition of cynicism and Google-powered rationality, it’s important to consider the context in which she emerged. Besides the broomsticks and cauldrons, she advocated the protection of nature and animals, as well as the advancement of women’s rights, long before such movements had truly gotten off the ground. As Ralph Harvey, a Wiccan High Priest, remarked in her eulogy, “Wiccans were the original green party.”

Rarely seen without her hypnotic spectacles and dramatic necklaces, Valiente was not one to be missed. Her collection of folk and Wicca paraphernalia, from broomsticks to five-point stars, as well as cauldrons and capes and candles, has come to inform the imagery surrounding witchcraft across various cultural outlets. Considering that in the 1950s, Wicca was an underground cult which subsequently became the world’s fastest growing religion in a matter of decades, Valiente is one of the 20th century’s most significant figures of influence. She lent a traditional folkloric, Pagan aesthetic to her movement and embraced it during her Wiccan festivals and rituals. In her last address to over a thousand people at the National Conference of the Pagan Federation in 1997, Valiente noted: “We have literally spread worldwide. We are a creative and fertile movement. We have inspired art, literature, television, music and historical research. We have lived down the calumny and abuse. We have survived treachery. So it seems to me that the ‘Powers That Be’ must have a purpose for us in the Aquarian Age that is coming into being.”

As a self-proclaimed witch, she naturally found herself being attacked from two sides: by Christians who believed that witchcraft was Devil worship, and by rationalists who refused to acknowledge it. Her answer to them was that the theology of witchcraft was purely Pagan and therefore refused to acknowledge the Devil, a Christian invention and that the Wiccan rituals undoubtedly released a power from within.

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Near the end of her life, Doreen was concerned about the many misconceptions about modern witchcraft, as well as the wide distortions of original teachings. She became a patron of the Centre for Pagan Studies, described as “offering a facility for learned research and a noncommercial environment.” She passed away in 1999.

Much of Valiente’s work is still in print and can be found both new and in used versions. Many of these titles have been updated since their original publication, and even after Valiente’s death, but are still worth seeking out.

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