#muse — balkan edwards

[notelasts]

west side story muse headcanons

families

riff’s real name is rolf wilhelm lautmann. he never uses it. the only ones who know it are riff and his parents. he’s the only child of helene and wilhelm lautmann. helene had a difficult time during her pregnancy and giving birth to him nearly killed her. both helene and wilhelm hate riff for nearly killing his mother. wilhelm is physically and emotionally abusive. riff has scars on his torso and waist from his father’s belt, but his most noticeable scar is the one just under his left eye. he broke a vase when he was eight and wilhelm hit him hard enough that he fell into the broken vase. his parents refused to take him to the hospital, so riff was forced to take care of the wound himself. neither helene nor wilhelm are faithful to each other, but neither of them have ever brought anyone home. helene is drunk or high more often than she’s sober, and she constantly berates riff for being a disappointment. wilhelm also tends to be drunk more often than he’s sober.

balkan’s real name is bernard gordon edwards. he is the third and youngest child in the edwards family. his parents, james thomas edwards i and genevieve evelyn edwards (née peterson), are incredibly rich. his siblings, francesca jacqueline edwards and james thomas edwards ii, both loathe him simply because their parents do. balkan wasn’t a planned child, nor was he really wanted. james and genevieve only wanted two children, but balkan was born two years after james and four years after francesca. he met tony and riff when he was fifteen, but he never hung out with them very much until his parents kicked him out. they didn’t want any of their children associating with ruffians and hooligans, and since they’d never wanted balkan in the first place, it was an easy decision to make. balkan was kicked out on his seventeenth birthday and he’s been running with the jets ever since.

tony’s real name is anton wyzek, but everybody just calls him tony. he is elzbieta wyzek’s only child. she got pregnant out of wedlock at eighteen years old and her parents disowned her. tony’s father, casimir bachurski, left her when she got disowned. she never mentions him and she probably never will. tony loves his mother immensely and he refuses to hear a bad word against her. elzbieta works three jobs to keep her and tony (and later, riff) fed and clothed and in a house. she is incredibly proud of her son and tony is equally proud of her, although sometimes he wishes she’d like his friends more. when he goes to jail, he writes to his mother every day. he never receives a response. he’s told that she passed away a month after his arrest. the months after tony returns home are tough, but he keeps his head down and takes the job that valentina offers him.

the jets

the jets were formed when tony and riff were fourteen. it was tony’s idea and riff went along with it because he always went along with tony’s ideas. and it wasn’t a bad idea, either. the gang was small at first, but it eventually grew to include fifteen boys (and eventually, their girlfriends) that would defend each other until their dying breath. the jets’ territory is the docks and the surrounding area that tony and riff fight on during cool. when tony goes to jail, riff steps up as leader. he appoints ice and action as his second and third. there aren’t a lot of rules in the jets, but the biggest two are no hurting women and no hurting children. it doesn’t matter who they are, if one of the jets hurts a girl or a kid, they’re in trouble.

miscellaneous

riff ran away when he was twelve. he was planning to go to the train station to get away from new york, but he had to hide from the police. he hid in the dumpster outside the apartment building the wyzek’s lived in, and tony found him when he took the trash out. when tony asked riff what his name was, he misheard “rolf lautmann” as “riff lorton.” riff didn’t bother correcting him, and he’s been riff lorton ever since.

riff’s favorite brand of cigarettes are whichever’s the cheapest. tony likes camels and balkan likes chesterfield. riff doesn’t smoke too much because the smell reminds him of his parents, but he’s trying to get over that.

riff has three tattoos. one is the word “happy” on his left shoulder that he got because tony dared him to get a tattoo when they were sixteen. the second is the silhouette of a plane on his right shoulder (all the jets have this tattoo somewhere on their upper body. tony’s is on his left shoulder and balkan’s is on his right forearm) and the third is a bouquet of hydrangeas and roses that he got for graziella. he wanted to get it colored in, but it was too expensive.

riff’s bracelet was a sixteenth birthday gift from tony’s mother. he hasn’t taken it off since he got it.

in his modern verse, tony grows up to be a doctor.

riff doesn’t like thunderstorms.

riff can speak german fluently. his parents would only speak german around the house and he learned english from tony and his mother. he knows some conversational polish, but he doesn’t know enough to consider himself fluent in it. he doesn’t speak german much (he hates the language and his heritage) but he still knows how to speak it, much to his dismay.

riff doesn’t like the smell of spray paint.

riff stopped going to school when he was fourteen. mrs wyzek kept trying to make him go, but he kept skipping, so she gave up. he didn’t like school very much, because he couldn’t sit still enough for the teachers and he doesn’t like being told what to do by people that aren’t his friends.

riff’s parents would often demand that he do things (take out the trash, clean his room, etc) immediately, and riff never would, so he’d get punished for it. it was a vicious cycle and riff absolutely hates getting told what to do because of it.

riff, balkan and tony all get fidgety when they’re nervous. riff plays with his bracelet, balkan flips his coin around and tony paces. riff will also fidget with his fingers.

riff didn’t trust elzbieta for years after he moved in with her and tony. she was too nice and he was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. he didn’t understand why she didn’t get mad at him for refusing to take the trash out or clean his room or wash the dishes. he also didn’t understand why she never hit him when he did something wrong. (he knows that hitting kids is wrong, but it had been his normal for so long that he just assumed every parent did it.)

consent is a huge thing for riff, not just with sex related things. he absolutely hates being forced to do things. he needs to have the choice to say no to whatever is happening to him or is being presented to him, and if he doesn’t, he gets angry.

when riff gets angry, he makes himself as big as he can and he gets very loud. it’s what his dad used to do to him, and if riff got scared by it, that means other people will get scared by it. sometimes he’ll shut down if he’s really, incredibly angry. he’ll go quiet and just sort of stare vacantly at the person he’s talking to. tony and balkan tend to get quiet when they get angry.

riff doesn’t like anything that reminds him of his parents. if he gets called rolf, he will freeze up. he doesn’t like the smell of cigarettes or beer (but he’s working on that) and he cannot stand the smell of marijuana. he also doesn’t like sudden movements or sudden loud noises. he’s working on getting used to them, but he will probably flinch if there’s a loud noise or if someone moves too quickly around him. if someone that he doesn’t know goes to touch him, he moves away. he doesn’t like being touched by strangers unless he’s the one doing the touching, because then he can control the interaction.

riff’s cocky jet leader persona is a front that he constructed over the years of him meeting tony and forming the jets. he perfected it when tony went to jail and he always has it up. he doesn’t trust himself to take it down, and it’s less easy to get hurt if no one can get to the real him.

riff doesn’t like seeing blood on his clothes. he’s fine if it’s other people’s blood, but he doesn’t like seeing his own blood on his clothes. if he can wash whatever got blood on it, he will, but otherwise he’s going to throw it away.

when tony gets arrested, riff stops going by mrs wyzek’s place. he stopped living there at fourteen, but he still came by for dinner and to see her. he blames himself for her death. she’d passed in her sleep, but he still thinks if he would’ve been there, he could’ve done something.

riff has lived on the streets for four years (fourteen - eighteen) by the time the events of west side story happen. he sleeps on benches or in alleys. sometimes he’ll crash at valentina’s or mrs wyzek’s, but that’s rare.

riff absolutely hates getting charity from people. his definition of charity is loose, but it boils down to money, food, and a place to sleep. sometimes it also extends to clothes, but he’s very very picky about accepting what he deems to be charity from people. he doesn’t want them pitying him, so most of the time he doesn’t take whatever is they’re offering and he insists he’s fine.

before he went to jail, tony would get loud when he got angry, but after he got out, he went quiet. he doesn’t want to lose control of his temper ever again, and he’s working on making sure he doesn’t and that he knows what to do if or when he does.

balkan is an avid reader and will constantly steal magazines and newspapers from valentina’s store to keep up with the latest news and trends. he’s probably the only jet that actually cares what’s going on in the newspapers and on the news.

[topmixtrends]

IN THE SUMMER of 1989, 45-year-old Bruce Kuipers bought a 95-acre deer-hunting camp just north of Muskegon on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan. The recently divorced father of three young men — 25, 20, and 18 years of age at the time of the acquisition — Bruce was best known to his family for his love of hunting, his perennial philandering, and his stubborn adherence to doing things his way. For his sons, this paternal inflexibility had long since manifested itself in Bruce’s dogged adherence to at least the stated tenets (if not the practices) of the Christian Reformed Church, and a particular — one might even say a compulsive — approach to hunting and fishing. As kids, the Kuipers boys were encouraged more than shown how to catch trout and kill deer. Their successes brought out their father’s unbridled pride and enthusiasm; their failures earned his scorn and ridicule.

Bruce’s compulsivity and intransigence were on full display during his first year of his ownership of the deer camp. He insisted that the cabin curtains be kept drawn at all times, lest a human silhouette spook a stray deer months ahead of hunting season. The sons were forbidden from lighting cigarettes outside, or letting their dogs loose on the land. Any and all ecological aspects of the property were also deemed untouchable, even though alterations to the land — particularly its sandy soil composition — were the best bet for enhancing the local deer population.

Perhaps not surprisingly with such strictures in place, the author, Dean, his middle brother, Brett, and their youngest brother, Joe, spent little time at their father’s deer camp. But over the course of the next 20-odd years, the Kuiperses’ acreage became a site where familial relationships were recast. Haunted by depressive and suicidal episodes as a young man, Joe found solace hunting and fishing with his father; Brett would end up getting a master’s in woodland management, which enabled him to re-envision the possibilities of the family’s land holdings, even as Bruce remained — for some time — resistant to his proposed innovations. Dean, meanwhile, worked as a journalist based first in New York and subsequently in Los Angeles, often penning stories about environmental activists and movements, but increasingly finding himself back in Michigan, at the deer camp where his brothers, wife, and — eventually — their children also found themselves drawn.

As the Kuiperses’ family history unfolds, a reader is reminded a little of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, with the ecological sensibility of Edward Abbey hovering in the background. Initially, men in this family are most at ease sitting silently in deer blinds. As their time together increases, though, the brothers begin to learn, with some good-natured laughter, how little they actually know one another. At one point, Dean observes retrospectively that he and his brothers were in suspended animation, waiting throughout much of their adult lives for their father to grow up so they could follow suit: “[W]e were like him. We were all living some version of the childish adult and were as lost as he was. We needed to see him mature so we knew the way.”

As affecting as the Kuipers family evolution is, what makes The Deer Camp so memorable and engrossing is the wider environmental frame by which the author asks us to think about relationships. What brings the Kuiperses together, quite literally, is the acreage they return to year after year — through which they engage with one another and the ground. In a revelatory, understated way, The Deer Camp thinks through environmental subjects like restorative farming and ecopsychology in order to reassess how people interact both with others and themselves.

Early on in The Deer Camp, when Dean is in the midst of cleaning out his childhood closet, he comes upon a quote from the ecologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson that he had kept taped to his dorm room in college:

You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system of Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated into the larger system of your thought and experience.

Bruce, Dean, Brett, and Joe all face, at different points in time, mental disquiet and anguish, as does the boys’ mother on the heels of her abrupt divorce from Bruce. And these bouts isolate each of these family members, drawing them into enclosed spaces where they become lethargic and passive.

Another book that lurks within The Deer Camp is Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, through which Dean reads the effects of his father’s land purchase on the Kuipers family. Leopold, one of the founding figures in the field of wild game management, tells the story of his own family’s efforts at restoring decayed cornfields on their property. As Dean recounts Leopold’s story, “The more the place responded to their restoration work, the more they all loved it. It wasn’t an economic transaction; it was a love relationship. It was relatedness. The love they felt for each other came partly from the land.”

As Brett becomes more knowledgeable about land management, he and Bruce clash over the Kuiperses’ deer camp. Brett believes the sandy soil can be rectified with ample fertilizer and lime, and that the towering Scots pines on the property need to be replaced with aspens (it turns out aspen trees provide the ideal habitat for white-tailed deer). Bruce remains convinced that the soil on their property is simply bad, that razing the pines will leave the land barren, and that overfertilization will only further burn out the sand. Half-measures fail, but when Brett’s plan is adopted in full, when Bruce steps back and cedes control over the deer camp, the results are staggering:

One- to two-foot-tall sapling trees stood thick like a field of grass, thousands and thousands of them, glowing incandescent green and yellow-white and magenta where they jutted up through the bracken fern and knapweed and foxtail. The new trees were backlit by the last of the spring sun and caught midleap as they busted out of the sandy earth. The dinner-plate-sized stumps were barely discernible, turned gray and brown by winter, buried under the flags of new saplings. Just about every inch of orange, pine-needled sand displayed new trees.

For those of us old enough to remember the 1970s, it was not unusual back then for ecologists to sound a little like mystics. The subsequent balkanization of conversations about the health of the planet have largely left behind the richness of this past discourse. Instead, we are more inclined to hear “scientists” face off, helplessly, against “deniers” of global warming.

The Deer Camp harkens to an era in which science and spiritualism were viewed as symbiotically connected. Late in the book, Dean dips back into A Sand County Almanac when he reminds us of Leopold’s musings about geese:

[S]omehow, geese returning to Wisconsin from the subtropics predict with great accuracy when the ice is off the ponds back home. They don’t return on the same day each year, but only when they are certain of the ice-out and their own safety from winter-sharpened fangs. These geese are too exhausted from the journey to turn around and go back south again if they’re wrong. “His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges,” Leopold wrote.

Without being too heavy-handed, Dean braids his belief in landscape with his reflections on the winding, bumpy path his own family took toward growing closer. His book is a scientifically and personally grounded treatise that asks us to take the notion of an “ecological unconscious” seriously. The Deer Camp is a captivating exploration of what one can learn from the natural world, and our dependence on this knowledge for our own well-being.

¤

Douglas Trevor is the author most recently of the short story collection The Book of Wonders (SixOneSeven Books). He is a professor of creative writing and English literature at the University of Michigan.

The post A Family Habitat: On “The Deer Camp” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2K05SrL

[victormendesbcu-blog]

Global Discourse

According to the UN, as of June 2018 there were 68.5m people living as refugees. They had been forcibly displaced from their homes, forced to flee due to conflict and persecution. 

Daniel Etter is a pulitzer prize-winning photographer, feature writer and film maker. His photography has appeared in the New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Stern, Spiegel and in publications of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch among many others. Since 2012 he has reported extensively on migration and refugee issues along Europe’s external borders and conflict zones across the Middle East. 

For his photography he was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize, the John Faber Award of the Overseas Press Club of America and received a third place at the World Press Photo and a Honorable Mention at Pictures of The Year International. His photo from the Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul was chosen as one of the best photos of 2013 by TIME Magazine and The New York Times.

Yannis Behrakis is a greek photojournalist and a senior editor with Reuteurs. His first foreign assignment was in Libya on January 1989 and since then he documented a variety of events including the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the changes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon the first and second Gulf wars in Iraq the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia the civil war in Ukraine the Nato bombing of ISIS in Kobane, Syria the Greek financial crisis and the refugee crisis in 2015 He has also covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years, earthquakes in Kashmir, Turkey, Greece and Iran and major news events around the world. He’s won a Pulitzer prize and been Guardian’s photographer of the year in 2015. 

We are living in an increasingly, complex, culturally hybrid, and diasporic world where people have spread or been dispersed from their homeland. This increased diaspora has led to some responses to this diversity, some who have encountered a lot of discussion.

In March of 2017 Nike announced a sports hijab which legitimised the hijab across very different narratives. Some arguments were that Nike was capitalising on an oppressive symbol and discrimination against women, some people believed the traditional dress and role of muslim women was irreconcilable with the modern arena of sport, but it was also encountered with a lot of positive feedback. 

In 2015 Apple introduce emoji skin-tones. A lot of people saw this as a response to one of our many everyday diversity problems after a lot of complaining about a lack of black and brown representation. In 2016 Andrew McGill studied the use of emojis on twitter and found out the lightest skin tone was used the least even though white twitter users outnumber black users four to one. Using white skin emojis felt uncomfortably close to displaying white pride and white users preferred to use the yellow option as a way to opt out the choice. Where emojis were supposed to be something fun, a caricature, they became racialised in a way people had to confront their racial identity when they were using it. And even with the five shade spectrum there are eye shapes and hair types and nose proportions that are not captured. The emojis are simply overlaid with a darker shade and not exactly meant to represent other races. 

Many people feel the effect of racism every day. According to The Independent, religious hate crimes rose 23% in the year following the Brexit vote. Worryingly, the Brexit and Trump votes seem to have encouraged attitudes that did seem socially unacceptable to return to the mainstream. 

Institutional racism is a type of racism which is embedded within political or social institutions. Some examples of institutional or structured racism are how black hair/afros/braids are seen as unprofessional or how more typical black names get blacklisted in the hiring process. 

An example of institutional racism was the Grenfell Tower Fire where there had been previous problems with the building and it was considered unsafe, but because the majority of the residents were lower class people of colour these were not taken into consideration leading to the tragedy. 

White privilege is the term for an institutional advantage or set of benefits granted to those who are white. White people might sometimes not realise or be aware but they benefit from white privilege where the world favours light skin and European features. 

Intersectionality is a term coined by American professor Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. It considers the way in which class, race, sexual orientation and gender are interwoven and affect one another. For example the experience of a white woman will never be the same as the experiences of a black woman who has to face misogyny and racism. It never operates in isolation, racism intersects with class, nationality, gender and other tools of domination used to categorise people.

Britains racism stems from colonialism. Colonialism is the practice of taking control of another country (one outside its borders) by turning it into a colony. It is usually a more powerful and wealthy country taking control of a less powerful region. The aim of colonisation is usually the development and/or the economic exploitation of that country. 

Cultural Appropriation is the assimilation or claiming of an aspect of a minority culture by members of a more dominant culture. An example of cultural appropriation is white people wearing a native American war bonnet as a costume, or white people wearing cornrows and braids. According to critics of the practice, cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism: cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context—sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of members of the originating culture.

The exotic other

The exotic other is something written about by Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism in which he refers to the way in which the west views the east in a patronising and exotic way, however this is an idea which can be applied in other contexts too. This also can refer to the over-sexualisation of black women. In 1970, People magazine interviewed Jean Paul Goude where he exposed a dark obsession with black women in his work. He was quoted stating that, from a very young age, he was captivated by ethnic minorities - black girls and stated he had “jungle fever”. Goude capitalised on his sexualisation of black women, or his “jungle fever” in the form of a highly controversial 1982 book of the same name. It also contains a piece with his then-girlfriend and muse, Grace Jones. One photograph portrayed her oiled and naked, in a cage, with a lump of raw meat and a sign reading “Do Not Feed the Animal”, another shower her again oiled and naked, and holding a safari whip around her neck with primitive tribal face pain and a third again oiled and naked, fighter her way out of a chocolate wrapper bearing her name. 

Sarah Baartman was the most well known of at least two South African khoikhoi women who, due to their large buttocks, were paraded around as freak show attractions in the 19th century Europe in London and Paris. Today she is seen by many as the epitome of colonial exploitation and racism, of the ridicule and commodification of black people.