#nobody closes down the Woolworths

[roseg96]

Nobody closes down the Woolworths!

[mogai-sunflowers]

MOGAI BHM- Day 3!

happy BHM! today i’m going to be talking about the greensboro four and how they inspired the sit in movement!

The Greensboro Four-

[Image ID: A black-and-white photo of the “Greensboro Four”- four Black male college students. From left to right, they are David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan and Joseph McNeil. Two are wearing their college gowns, the other two are wearing long white trench coats. They are walking side by side in a building. End ID.]

The “Greensboro Four”, as they have come to be called, is a group of four Black students who, at the time, attended the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, sparked one of the most well-known and effective movements of the Civil Rights Movement. Their names are Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond- four Black friends who decided to challenge the segregation laws that still subjected Black Americans to the ‘separate but equal’ fallacy in public places.

On February 1, 1960, the four men staged a sit-in at the lunch counter of the popular store Woolworth’s- which didn’t allow Black people to sit there. Although they feared for their safety, they nonetheless went to Woolworth’s and sat at the lunch counter. After being repeatedly asked to leave, they refused, placed their lunch orders, and though the police were called on them, they remained in their places until the store closed, when they left.

Soon after, they got in contact with other Black friends from their university and nearby universities and asked them to join them in future sit ins. The Greensboro Four were soon joined by a growing mass of Black students who sat with them at Woolworth’s lunch counter. At this point, they were faced with threats and harassment, but nobody was physically harmed. Thus, the sit in movement was born.

The Sit-In Movement-

[Image ID: A black-and-white photograph of four Black men sitting at the counter of a lunch place. End ID.]

For months before the first Greensboro sit-in, students across North Carolina had been secretly meeting in houses, Church basements, and YMCA chapters to do underground work- they established phone networks, studied nonviolence and nonviolent protest tactics, and connected with each other to form underground networks of student activists. This dedication paid off after the first Greenboro sit-ins.

Black students spread the word about sit ins all across the South- college towns all across the US began to see a rise in Black students, occasionally accompanied by supportive white students, staging sit ins at segregated stores and restaurants. In the time directly following the Greensboro sit-ins, many stores were opened and closed and then opened again and de-segregated. This was all aided by the student-formed organization the Student Executive Committee for Justice along with Greensboro’s NAACP chapter. By the end of the month, over 30 towns across the US had been home to sit-ins staged by students.

These sit-ins were not spur-of-the-moment. They took months of planning, and each was only acquired through the dedication and work of every single student who participated. In Charlotte, NC, 200 students occupied all the downtown lunch bars. In Rock Hill, it was 300 students. They refused to back down and 4 months later, the Charlotte students saw success with all the downtown bars being desegregated.

Not even two weeks had passed since the first Greensboro sit in when, under the guise of the Nashville Christian Leadership conference, a partner organization under the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, students formed a wildly successful organization to coordinate sit-in efforts and encourage boycotts as well as other nonviolent methods of protest to oppose segregation.

On April 19, 1961, Alexander Looby, a Black lawyer who had been providing legal support to the students who participated in sit-ins, was targeted, and his house was destroyed by a bomber. In response to this, thousands of demonstrators marched to the steps of Nashville’s City Hall, where rising student activist Diane Nash directly confronted Nashville’s mayor, Ben West, forcing him to admit that segregation is wrong and that the lunch counters should be desegregated. After this, Nashville became the first Southern city to start the process of desegregating all of its public facilities.

Despite being arrested, beaten, and threatened, the students did not quit. They were unfairly arrested, beaten, threatened with unfair jail terms and fines, and through all of it, they did not give up. Sit ins raged across the South for years to come. The Freedom Movement grew rapidly out of the Sit-In Movement, and in 1964, the sit-in movement was a major inspiration for the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which officially illegalized segregation in all public facilities.

Sources-

https://files.nc.gov/dncr-moh/The%20Greensboro%20Four.pdf

https://www.crmvet.org/info/sitins.pdf 

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/educate/lunch.html 

[shebeafancyflapjack]

“Nobody closes down the Woolworths!”

Too soon!

[fake-gamer-boy]

god yonderland is good

[ritchieblackless]

Cozy Powell's Top Ten Days

(I did my best to make it look as if it was scanned)

Cozy Powell is a busy man and we thought we'd ask him what he considered to be his best remembered days...

COLDEST-

"The very first time I ever went to Germany my van broke down and caught fire on the side of the Motorway, and the gig we were aiming for was 30 miles away. We got there eventually, but as we had intended sleeping in the van we hadn't booked a hotel and so we had to find an alternative, a railway station! It was December 1st and there was very thick snow, so it was absolutely freezing. To make matters worse it was the first time I'd ever been away from home and so I was homesick, cold, hungry and I couldn't speak a word of German, so when the police came to move us none of us could explain what we were doing there."

MOST EXPENSIVE-

"Buying my car, a Ferrari Dino, was a pretty expensive day for me. They cost six and a half thousand pounds new, but mine wasn't brand new so it cost me a little less!"

MOST FORGETFUL-

"I forgot my passport twice in the last month, which is something I never usually do. I got to London Airport and realised that I'd left it at home; home being 16 miles away, and as the plane was due to leave, even I couldn't have got back in time. Luckily, we were going to Holland and they can let you through without passport. However on the second occasion we were going to Belgium and we had to arrive at Gatwick Airport the night before as we were booked on a very early plane. I got there at midnight and discovered straight away that I'd forgotten it. So I had to drive all the way home again, about 100 miles each way. I finally arrived back at about 3.30 am. I don't remember much of the flight, as I slept the whole way there."

WETTEST-

"I was coming back from London on a motorbike, wearing just a pair of jeans, T shirt and a helmet, when suddenly a cloud burst. I was so drenched that I had to pour the water out of my boots."

HOTTEST-

"I played at the Roundhouse with Jeff Beck and we broke the house record, because apparently there were three times the number of people than there had been a few weeks before for The Rolling Stones. So there were over two thousand people and dozen of lights all around the stage. Just as I started my drum solo they turned four really big and hot lights on, aimed directly on to my back. So what with the intense heat in there already and the heat from the lights I practically passed out. I'm sure there was steam coming off my back!"

NAUGHTIEST-

"The first naughty thing that I ever did was when I was about six and I stayed away from school. I hid in the woods thinking that nobody would find me, and suddenly my next door neighbour rode past on a bike and saw me. The next thing I remember was being confronted by my headmistress!"

MOST MIRACULOUS-

"I was on the way to this interview in my Dino and I was coming round a bend at about 75 m.p.h.. but as I know this stretch of road so well it was a fairly natural thing for a racing fanatic like me to do! However, when I turned the corner the road was blocked solid with people digging it up. And about 200 yards in front of me was a big tipper lorry moving very slowly across the road. There was absolutely no sign to warn me, so I didn't have any time to slow down. There was nothing I could do but to aim for the gap behind the lorry, which I knew wouldn't be wide enough for the car. Luckily there was a bank and this gave me a bit more width. Miraculously I managed to make it through with two wheels on the road and two up the bank, and not one single scratch on the car or me."

EARLIEST MEMORY-

"I can remember being parked in a pram outside Woolworth on a rainy morning"

MOST DANGEROUS-

"I was skiing in Switzerland, and being a speed fanatic I was going too fast. Suddenly, on my right I noticed a deep ravine, so I had no choice but to veer left. I was only a learner and I was going so fast I really didn't think that I'd be able to manoeuvre myself away from the ravine but I'm still here today, so yet another miracle has occurred in my life!"

CLUMSIEST-

"I was at my uncle's house last week. He's rather wealthy and he has a fine collection of antiques. I was admiring one particular vase and I picked it up to examine it more closely. The next thing I knew it was on the floor in about ten pieces!"

[whileiamdying]

Tales of Ike and Tina Turner:

The world’s greatest heartbreaker

Tina Turner performs on stage with Ike and Tina Turner in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1971. Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferbs.

— BEN FONG-TORRES     Published  14/OCT/1971

Walk into what, from the outside, looks to be another well-paid, well-kept home in suburban Inglewood, California, and you’re hit: a huge, imperial oil painting of Ike and Tina Turner, dressed as if for a simple, private wedding, circa 1960, modest pompadour and formal mink. A thriller? The killer, honey…

Also in the foyer, under the portrait, a small white bust of John F. Kennedy. Next to him, the Bible, opened to Isaiah 42­ – A New Song to the Lord. The smell is eucalyptus leaves and wet rocks; the sound is water, bubbling in one of several fish tanks and, over in the family room, splashing, programmed, is a waterfall.

Two trim young housekeepers stir around the kitchen; dinner is cooking at 4p.m. Ike is asleep upstairs, and Tina is out with a son at football practice. But you cannot just plop down somewhere, adjust yourself, and be comfortable. Next to the waterfall there’s a red velvet sofa, designed around a coffee table in the shape of a bass guitar. Or, in the blue room, the blue couch, whose back turns into an arm that turns into a tentacle. Above that, on the ceiling, is a large mirror in the shape of a jig-saw puzzle piece, and against one wall is a Zenith color TV, encased in an imitation ivory, whale-shaped cabinet.

(Tina, later, will say: “Ike did the house. It was Ike’s idea to have the TV in the whale shape. I thought, ‘Oh wow!’ I felt it was gonna look like the typical entertainer’s house, with the stuff not looking professional. But everything turned out great. I’m very proud of it.”)

It is very personal, but there are all these mail order touches. The neo-wood vertical frame with four bubbles to hold color pictures of the Turners’ four sons. The JFK bust. On the wall, over a mantel, a large metallic Zodiac sunburst, with no clock in the middle. Also, a Zodiac ash tray atop the guitar-shaped table. (Ike showed his refurnishing job off to Bob Krasnow of Blue Thumb Records one day last year, and Krasnow remarked: “You mean you actually can spend $70,000 at Woolworth’s?”)

Atop a white upright piano complete with gooseneck mike, there’s the gold record – not “A Fool in Love,” or “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” or “I Idolize You,” but, rather, “Come Together,” the single on Liberty, their seventh or eighth label in ten years. And next to that, some trophies—a couple that the kids have earned, and a couple that Tina has earned. To the sweetest wife and mother, Tina Turnaer. Love’s Yea. Ike Turner and Your Four Sons. Another, larger one, Olympiad, with a small gold-plated angel holding a torch above her, hara-kiri:To Tina Turner. The World’s Greatest Heartbreaker 1966. Love Ike Turner.

Tina’s not back – half an hour late­ – and now I’m down to the sunlit bookshelf in the corner. A neat junior edition of encyclopedias. A couple of novels – Crichton’s Andromeda Strain; Cheever’s Bullet Park. But the main line appears to be how-to’s, from Kahlil Gibran and astrology to a series of sharkskin suit-pocket hardbounds: How to Make a Killing in Real Estate, How to Legally Avoid Paying Taxes, and How to Scheme Your Way to Fortune. Atop the pile, a one-volume senior encyclopedia: The Sex Book.

***

Someone once called Tina “The female Mick Jagger.” In fact, to be more accurate, one should call Mick “The male Tina Turner.” After all, in 1960, Ike and Tina and the first of God knows how many Ikettes began doing their revue, and, as Tina tells it, “Ike used to move on stage. He was bow-legged and bow-hipped and when he moved from side to side, he had an effect he used to do with the guitar, and I used to do that, ’cause I idolized him so. Before I fell in love with him I’d loved him. We were very close friends. I thought there was nobody like Ike, so I wanted to be like Ike. I wore tight dresses and high heels, and I still moved, and that’s where the side-step came from.”

Philip Agee, who was 17 when he first saw them in 1960 in St. Louis, became such a fan that he has put out a book on them – for a seminar course in printing at Yale. Tina Pie is a collection of the colorations of Ike and Tina’s romance and career, tawny browns and flashy reds and moanful yellows and hurtful blues. Silkscreening the act through the dark years and into the fast ones, with even remembrances from Tina’s mother, or various of Phil Agee’s friends and fellow-worshippers.

“Tina came out and up on the stage. Nobody screamed or fainted. We were just real glad to see her. She always wore sparkling dresses and very high-heeled shoes with no backs and holes in the toes. Sometimes she was pregnant, singing with her stomach stuck out, stomping her high-heeled shoes with stiff legs. They would sing special songs when you asked them. Everybody liked ‘A Fool in Love.’ ‘Staggerlee’ was my favorite. When Ike started slow, ‘When the night was clear and the moon was yellow, and the leaves came tumbling down…’ by the time ba-da, ba-da, ba-doo ended, everybody was out on the floor. During their breaks the jukebox played again. Tina disappeared and the men sat at card tables near the stage drinking with their blonde girlfriends. When the men started playing again, Tina appeared for the second show. By 11 it was over. Pat’s dad picked us up and drove me home. We went every Tuesday while they were in St. Louis. “Tina Turner’s part Cherokee and so’s my Mom, so so am I.” — Kathy Klein

By 1966, there was more practiced flash. You learn what works. The Ikettes came storming out of the wings in a train formation, in mini-skirted sequins, haughty foxes thrusting their butts at you and then waving you off with a toss of their long whippy hair. Tina came out, eyes flashing until she became a fire on the stage. And across Broadway, there’s your Motown act, the Marvellettes in their matching long evening gowns or the Tops in pink velvet, doing soul-hula, singing through choreographed smiles. Tina spitssex out to you. And Mick Jagger:

Before that breakthrough tour with the Rolling Stones in 1969, Ike and Tina had worked with them in England in 1966. “Mick was a friend of Phil Spector,” says Tina. “And the time we cut ‘River Deep Mountain High,’ Mick was around. [This is at Gold Star, Phil’s favorite studio in Los Angeles] I remembered him but I never talked to him. He’s not the type to make you feel you could just come up and talk to him. Mick, I guess, thought the record was great, and he caught our act a couple of times. Mick wasn’t dancing at the time…he always said he liked to see girls dance. So he was excited about our show, and he thought it’d be different for the people in England.

“I remember I wasn’t mingling too much – Ike and I were having problems at the time, and we stayed mad at each other – but I’d always see Mick in the wings. I thought, ‘Wow, he must really be a fan.’ I’d come out and watch him occasionally; they’d play music, and Mick’d beat the tambourine. He wasn’t dancing. And lo and behold, when he came to America, he was doing everything! So then I knew what he was doing in the wings. He learned a lot of steps and I tried to teach him like the Popcorn and other steps we were doing, but he can’t do ’em like that.He has to do it his way.”

“River Deep Mountain High.” To hear that song for the first time, in 1967, in the first year of acid-rock and Memphis soul, to hear that wall falling toward you, with Tina teasing it along, was to understand all the power of rock and roll. It had been released in England in 1966 and made Number Two. In America, nothing. “It was just like my farewell,” Phil Spector says. “I was just sayin’ goodbye, and I just wanted to go crazy for a few minutes – four minutes on wax.”

Bob Krasnow, president of Blue Thumb, knew Ike and Tina from their association with Warner Brothers’ R&B label, Loma, in 1964. He was an A&R man there. “Spector had just lost the Righteous Brothers,” he recalls, “and at the same time, Ike was unhappy,” having switched to Kent Records.

“Spector’s attorney Joey Cooper called and said Phil wanted to produce Tina—and that he was willing to pay $20,000 in front to do it! So Mike Maitland [then president at Warners] gave them their release, and they signed with Philles.

“Watching Phil work was one of my greatest experiences,” says Krasnow. It was indeed a special occasion. Only “River Deep” was cut at Gold Star; the other three Spector productions were at United. (There was only one Philles LP ever made with Ike and Tina, which was finally re-released last year by A&M.) And Ike didn’t attend.

“Dennis Hopper did the cover on that LP. He was broke on his ass in Hollywood and trying photography. He said he’d like to do the cover. He took us to this sign company, where there was this 70-foot high sign for a movie, with one of those sex stars – Boccaccio ’70 or something. And he shot them in front of that big teardrop. Then the gas company, had a big sign, and Hooper took them there and shot them in front of a big burner.”

On stage, there may be reason to compare Tina Turner to Mick Jagger; Tina, in fact, is more aggressive, more animalistic. But it is, indeed, a stage:

“I don’t sound pretty, or good. I sound, arreghh! Naggy. I can sound pretty, but nobody likes it. Like I read some article in the paper that Tina Turner had never been captured on records. She purrs like a kitten on record, but she’s wild on stage. And they don’t like a record like ‘Working Together.’ I love that record. I love that River Deep Mountain Highalbum, but nobody likes me like that. They want me sounding all raspy…I have to do what Ike says. “My whole thing,” she once said, “is the fact that I am to Ike – I’m going to use the term ‘doll’ – that you sort of mold… In other words, he put me through a lot of changes. My whole thing is Ike’s ideas. I’ll come up with a few of them, but I’m not half as creative as Ike.”

***

The world’s greatest heartbreaker drives up in her Mercedes sedan and strides in, all fresh and breezy in a red knit hot pants outfit, third button unbottoned, supple legs still very trim at age 32,charging onto 33. (“Everyone thinks I’m in my forties, but I was only around 20 when I started. Born November 26, 1939,” she says, very certain.)

Tina’s hair is in ponytails, tied in brown ribbons; she is wearing brown nail polish and red ballet-type slippers. Here in the living room, of her $100,000 house, she is trying to paint a portrait of the offstage, in-home Tina Turner. There are four bedrooms, she says, four baths, and, let’s see now…13 telephones.

Additional phone cables are employed in the closed-circuit TV system, a system like the one in Ike’s studios less than a mile away. There, Ike can sit in his office and push-button his way around the various studios, the writers’ room, the entrances, the hallways. Just recently, he was laughing about the time he punched up the camera scanning the bedroom in the private apartment he keeps there, and what did he and the people around him (Tina was at home) see but some heavy fucking going on, one of his musicians and a groupie. And everyone’s lapping it up, and finally, when the sideman is caressing one of his nightstand’s firm-nippled breasts, Ike’s bodyguard springs out of the office, and the next you see him, he is piling into the bed, over most of that same station…

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But later. Tina Turner is trying to paint a picture here. “I just got rid of the housekeeper. I get housekeepers and they sort of do just things like vacuuming and dusting, and nothing else is done—like the mirrors—and I’m a perfectionist, and that would never be. People think I’m probably one of those that lounge around, but I’m always on my knees—I do my own floors ’cause no one can please me. When I was in the eighth grade I started working for a lady in Tennessee keeping her house; she more or less taught me what I know about housework.”

Tina also tries to do most of the cooking, even if she usually does report to the studios around 4 PM to do vocals. She also likes to do gardening. “Every now and then I get out and turn the dirt…but now I’ve started writing, and Ike, every time I turn around, he says, ‘Write me this song.’ So I went out and bought some plants and when I was in the hospital I got a lot of plants that I really love, and I sort of take care of them like babies.”

“Ike is a very hard worker,” a friend is saying. “He’s such a driver. Last winter Tina was sick with bronchial pneumonia, 104 temperature, in the hospital with her body icepacked to bring the temperature down. And Ike was visiting, and he was going, ‘You get out and sing, or you get out of the house!'”

Tina doesn’t discuss such things, even if her talk is often punctuated by references to Ike as the manager, the brains, the last word; despite his back-to-the-audience stance on stage. But in Tina Pie, Phil Agee’s book, there’s a piece of conversation backstage between Tina and one of Phil’s friends: Pete: I thought maybe you wouldn’t be here tonight. Tina: No, I never miss a performance. The doctor came to the hotel today, brought a vaporizer and that helped it a lot. I haven’t coughed anything up today – so I was kind of worrying if it was okay. I always go on. Whatever’s bothering me – I don’t care how bad it is­ – I drop it when I go on stage. I hadn’t coughed up anything today. You know that kind of hypnosis – I don’t know what it’s called – where you induce yourself into a trance? (Tina’s friend): Self-hypnosis. Tina: Yeah, that’s it. I hypnotize myself, and I forget the cold and stuff.

***

“Dope?” Bob Krasnow repeats the question, only in a softer voice. “Let me close the door a minute.” (A few weeks before, I asked an ex-Ikette about Ike Turner and sex. “Sex? Oh, my god, that’s another volume,” she’d said. “I’ll have to get a cigarette on that one!”)

Krasnow: “Tina is so anti-dope I can’t tell you. She’s the greatest woman I’ve ever known, outside of my wife. She has more love inside her body than 100 chicks wrapped up together. And she’s so straight, it’s ridiculous. “As for Ike…Ike was not into dope at all until three, four years ago. One night in Vegas we were sitting around and got started talking about coke. He didn’t care about it, and I said – and Ike, you know, is like 40 or so – and I said, ‘One thing that’s great about coke is you can stay hard – you can fuck for years behind that stuff.’ That’s the first time Ike did coke.”

Krasnow can’t help but continue. “That night he made his first deal – bought $3,000 of cocaine from King Curtis, and he bought it and showed me, and I laughed and said, ‘That’s no coke; that’s fucking Drano!’ Since then, he’s learned.”

What – to lighten up on drugs?

“No – to tell what good coke is and what bad coke is.”

Krasnow worked with James Brown at King for years before he joined Warners and signed Ike and Tina to Loma. His evaluation: “Ike is 10 times a bigger character than James Brown. And they’re both fucking animals. How can I put this? Say, whatever you can do…they can do 10 times as much. And Ike – he’s always putting you to the test.

“What I like best about Ike is also what I hate: He’s always on top of you.”

“I find him one of the most fascinating people I’ve met,” says Jeff Trager, who did promotion work at Blue Thumb. “If he knows you he can be real warm, and do whatever he can for you. There’s just no limit to Ike Turner. He’d carry around $25,000 in cash in a cigar box – with a gun. He’d drive around town, man, sometimes to Watts, sometimes Laurel Canyon, in his new Rolls Royce to pick up coke. And he is real sinister-looking.”

“In Las Vegas,” says Krasnow, “I brought some friends into the dressing room, and Ike pulled out this big .45 – just putting them on. Another time he came into the front room at Blue Thumb and threw $70,000 on the floor, in cash, and dared anyone to touch it. Just to blow everybody’s mind.”

“Krasnow and Ike are both crazy,” says Trager. “Ike would storm into the office with a troop of people, six-foot chicks, a bag of cocaine. Really, really crazy. He always came in. He loved Blue Thumb, and he was always saying he’d come back. Krasnow says he couldn’t afford him now.”

Krasnow produced both their Blue Thumb albums and brought “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” to Turner.

“He hated Otis Redding,” Krasnow says. “He just didn’t think Otis had it.” The Ike and Tina version sold some half million copies. Blue Thumb was also a good showcase of Ike Turner’s fluidity as a blues guitarist, and of the flexibility of the Ike and Tina sound – from “Dust My Broom” and “I Am a Motherless Child” to the stark raving “Bold Soul Sister.”

Ike Turner, who places “River Deep” up next to “Good Vibrations” as his two favorite records, says the Spector production didn’t get airplay because the soul stations said “too pop” and the white stations said “too R&B.”

“See, what’s wrong with America,” he told Pete Senoff, “is that rather than accept something for its value…America mixes race in it. Like, you can take Tina and cut a pop record on her – like ‘River Deep, Mountain High.’ You can’t call that record R&B. But because it’s Tina… But I can play you stuff like Dinah Washington on Tina. I can play you jazz on Tina. I can play you pop on Tina. I can play you gutbucket R&B on Tina like we have on our Blue Thumb record…really blues. I can play you that stuff, then I could play you the Motown stuff.”

Ike and Tina had a showcase at Blue Thumb, but no cross-market success. “Bold Soul Sister” went to number one at KGFJ, the black station in L.A., but Jeff Trager remembers, the program director at light, white KRLA refused to play it. “No matter what. I asked him, ‘What if it went to number one?’ and he said ‘I don’t care; I’ll never play it.'” Whether too R&B or what, the program director at KFRC, the Bill Drake station in San Francisco, wouldn’t play “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” which Krasnow, its producer, called a “pop record.” KFRC had to be forced – by its sales – to put the song on the playlist.

What finally carried Ike and Tina through was the 1969 Rolling Stones tour, where the revue broke out with “Come Together,” in its own raw style, Tina snake-snapping across the stage, punching out the John Lennon lyric. Raves everywhere, and the mass magazines were stung to attention. Playboy and Look ended up using the same phrase to characterize Tina’s entrance: “like a lioness in heat.” Vogue did a photo spread. And Ike and Tina got booked into Vegas and both Fillmores. Liberty Records began talking big money, so big that even Krasnow encouraged Turner to go to them as an exclusive artist. “We didn’t have a contract, anyway,” says Krasnow. “It was just on a piecemeal basis.” That’s when Ike refurnished his $100,000 home and began building his lavish studios. Tina is sitting in the “game room” of the studios. The move to interpreting white rock and roll, she says, was quite natural. “We went to a record shop in Seattle, Washington, and someone was buying ‘Come Together,’ and I said, ‘Oh, Ike, I gotta do it on stage, I love that record.’ That’s the thing I think of – the stage – because it’s action, you know. And ‘Honky Tonk Woman,��� that’s me. And then people came to us and said, ‘You gotta record that song, it’s so great.’ And we said ‘What’s so great about it; we’re doing it just like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones,’ and they said ‘No, you have your own thing about it.’ So when we cut the album, we were lacking a few tunes, so we said ‘Well, let’s just put in a few things that we’re doing on stage. And that’s how ‘Proud Mary’ came about. I had loved it when it first came out. We auditioned a girl and she had sung ‘Proud Mary.’ This is like eight months later, and Ike said, ‘You know, I forgot all about that tune.’ And I said let’s do it, but let’s change it. So in the car Ike plays the guitar, we just sort of jam. And we just sort of broke into the black version of it. It was never planned to say, ‘Well, let’s go to the record shop, and I’d like to record this tune by Aretha Franklin’…it’s just that we get it for stage, because we give the people a little bit of us and a little bit of what they hear on the radio every day.

“My mother – her radio was usually blues, B.B. King and all. But rock and roll was more me, and when that sort of music came on, I never could sit down. I’ve always wanted to move.” Tina gave a slightly – shall we say – different account to Changes magazine: Tina: I guess ‘way before the Stones asked us to tour with them, Ike started to get into the hard rock thing, dragging me out of bed to listen to this or that, and at 4 o’clock in the morning. Ike: She didn’t like rock. Tina: Finally, he said ‘You going to have to sing it, so you may as well like it.’ So I started to listen to rock.

***

“They are really making it now,” says Krasnow. “Really. Everytime he plays a place – like last week, Carnegie Hall – it’s sold out a week before. And everybody’s raving about the show.”

But there was a time…”I got pissed at him ’cause we worked our asses off to get him on the Andy Williams Love show. We had dinner afterwards, and I said, ‘This is it! You’ve made it, man!’ He was back playing the bowling alley the next night. I kept saying, ‘Why play for $1,000 a night when you can get $20,000 now?’ I mean, he was just touring himself out.” Ike himself says, “It doesn’t matter to me; we’ve got a living to make.” Recently, he has relaxed the road pace, from six nights a week all year to two or three nights a week. Ike and Tina are now regularly on TV – on variety shows, talk shows, and specials; they were in Milos Forman’s Taking Off and Gimme Shelter, and they helped celebrate Independence Day this year in Ghana. Soul to Soul. And what is now apparent is that in Africa or in Hollywood, in bowling alleys or in the Casino Lounge of the Hotel International, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, with the Ikettes and the Kings of Rhythm (nine pieces plus Ike) is pretty much the same show: The band member doing the introductions and shameless album plugs; the Kings warming up with a couple of Motown-type power tunes, followed by the Ikettes singing “Piece of My Heart” or “Sweet Inspiration,” then Tina running on, churning through “Shake Your Tail Feather,” then saying a hearty hello and promising “soul music with the grease.”

***

Tina’s recitations and spoken paeans – and Ike’s wise-ass, not-quite-inaudible cracks, are all pre-greased…Mama don’t cook no dinner tonight, ’cause Daddy’s comin’ home with the crabs…

When Tina sings, “I been lovin’ you…too long…and I can’t stop now,” bossman Ike invariably croons, “‘Cause you ain’t ready to die…”

The Otis Redding song is the show-stopper. Back in ’67, Tina was simply breathing heavily over the instrumental passage; by ’69, she was touching the tip of the microphone with both sets of fingers oh, so gently. Now, of course, it’s a programmed gross-out, with Ike slurping and slushing and Tina rigid over the mike doing an unimpressive impression of an orgasm while Ike slams the song to a close, saying “Well, I got mine, I hope you got yours.”

In 1969 it was a solid salute to sex as a base for communication. Now, the subtleties gone, it’s just another request number to keep the crowd happy. “We cut the song,” says Tina, “and Ike kept playing the tune over and over and I had to ad lib, so I just did that – just what comes into your head. So we started doing it on stage. How could I stand on stage, I felt, and say ‘Oh baby, oh baby, uhh’—I’m just going to stand there, like an actress reading the script without any emotion? So I had to act.

“What I did on the Rolling Stones tour was only what had matured from the beginning. I don’t think it can go any further, because it’s, as they say in New York, it’s getting pornographic. I agree, because like now Ike has changed words, which makes it obvious what that meant when we first started doing it. I was thinking it meant sensually but not sexually.

Sometimes he shocks me, but I have to be cool. Sometimes I want to go, ‘Ike, please.’ I start caressing the mike and he goes, ‘Wait ’til I get you home,’ and I feel like going, ‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t say that.’ Everything else I feel like I can put up with, but not that. But like I can’t question Ike because everything that Ike has ever gotten me to do that I didn’t like, was successful.

“I think in the early Sixties it would have really been out of bounds – like, I probably would have been thrown off the stage. But today, it’s what’s happening. That’s why I can get by with it.”

***

From Tina Pie, this strange crossfire: “… It could be nice but it would probably turn out awful – especially with that dirty ol’ Ike hounding me. I sat through the first half of the second show with him and he kept telling me he want to give me a fit and just ’cause he had Tina didn’t mean he couldn’t want me, too. He’s got the greatest skin going but that’s about it. -Melinda, New York City

Melinda Who? -Ike Turner, New York City

***

Tina is giving me a tour of Ike’s new main studios – the master control room with the $90,000 board featuring the IBM mix-memorizer (a computer card gives an electronic readout on the mix at whichever point the tape is stopped), a second studio marked STUDIO A (Ike Turner’s, can you guess, is STUDIO AA), a writers’ room, business offices for his various managers and aides, a playroom furnished with a pool table, Ike’s own office, and, inevitably, Ike’s private apartment suite.

Again, it is disgusting, flowers chasing each other up the wall, a Cinerama mural of a couple in embrace next to the breakfast table and refrigerator. Again, sofas, of Ike’s own design, with hard-on arms. White early American drapings and chairs, and a draped, canopied bed so garish that Tina turns to Ike and says, “Can I tell ’em what we call this room? We call it ‘the Whorehouse.'”

There’s a double-door air closet at the entrance to Ike’s private quarters, where he spends so many nights, “because of all the work to be done.” This is the Trap. You bust into Bolic Sound, and all the doors are automatically locked, leading you down the hall, into the stairwell in front of the apartment. The only way to open the door there is by dialing a secret telephone number. And the only word that can get to you will come from above you. Ike’s got a TV camera there, too.

Ike Turner has moved around from label to label for 10 years. Ike and Tina began with “A Fool in Love,” which Ike cut with Tina when the original singer for his composition didn’t show up at a date. That record hit in 1960 and was on a midwest R&B label, Sue. It was followed by “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” but the head of Sue delayed its release so long – that he sent the master back three times, said Ike – that he split in 1964, going to Warner Bros.’ fledgling R&B label, Loma, for a pair of live LPs recorded in Ft. Worth and Dallas by “Bumps” Blackwell, now manager of Little Richard.

1963 to 1966 was a dark period for the Revue – they made what they could on the road, and they had no hit records – and Loma records were hard to find. Ike then took his act to Kent, a label he’d worked for in earlier days when he traveled the South scouting and recording, on a cheap Ampex tape recorder, bluesmen like B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf. This time around, he managed a hit for the Ikettes, “Peaches and Cream.” But, he said, “They tried to steal the Ikettes. They sneaked around and tried to buy the girls from under me.”

Then it was Spector, won over by Ike and Tina’s work as a substitute act in the rock and roll film, T’N’T Show. But after “River Deep” bombed, said Ike, “he got discouraged and went down in Mexico making movies.” Phil recommended Bob Crewe as a producer, a single didn’t hit, and they moved to an Atlantic subsidiary, Pompeii Records. “We were lost among all of Atlantic’s own R&B stuff,” Ike said, and that’s when he ran into Krasnow. With no contract ever signed with Blue Thumb, Ike actually made a deal with United Artists/Liberty in mid-1969, before the Stones tour, through their New York-based R&B label, Minit.

“Spector gave Ike an absolute guarantee of hits forever,” says Bud Dain, then general manager at Liberty. What Minit promised was a $50,000 a year guarantee “plus certain clauses – a trade ad on every release, sensitive timing of releases – but Minit was a mistake. They defaulted on the contract, and Ike was free to break the contract.” Then Ike and Tina toured with the Stones, and the next time Ike talked with Liberty, Liberty was talking about $150,000 a year guarantee, for two albums a year. Ike signed in January, 1970. “The first LP was Come Together, in May,” said Dain. “Now Ike wanted to build his own studios. The option came up again in January, 1971. The album sold well, but we couldn’t exercise the option unless he’d sold 300,000. And he only had one album out that year. But he needed $150,000, and Al Bennett [president at Liberty] believed in him. We gave him the money.”

With the second advance, Ike’s studios were well underway, and he got another hit record, the single on “Proud Mary.” “Then he came in – he needed another $150,000. He got that in June. So there’s a total of $450,000 in advances.”

And that’s why United Artists may yet be Ike and Tina’s final home. Ike Turner must produce those two albums a year, and UA has no choice but to promote its ass off.

***

Ike’s head is on one woman’s lap, his knee-socked feet on another’s. His thin frame is blanketed by a trench coat, a sleeping bridge across the sofa in the dressing room. Tina has her back to them. She’s working her hair into shape for the second show this Friday night, and Ike’s getting the only rest he’s gotten all day. And after the second show, he’ll jump off the revolving stage of the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, then back to the nearby San Francisco Airport to return to his studios to cut instrumental tracks the rest of the night and into the day, then back up to San Francisco and to the Circle Star mid-Saturday evening. In the hallway, after the second show Friday, he stops long enough to give you a solid shoulder grab – a football coach’s kind of friendly gesture – and a warm hello. He turns to the zaftig lady photographer nearby, glancing right through her tangle of cameras and giving her the onceover. He asks if maybe she wouldn’t fly down with him. “What? You got a boyfriend?”

“This is the critical point of our career; I can’t lighten up now,” he says, and is off to the airport. At 2:30 in the morning, Tina – who doesn’t return to L.A. with him – shows up at a banquet room in her hotel for a photo session. The photographer’s assistant asks, “What’s your advice for people getting into the business?”

Tina, at 3 a.m., is serious: “Have some kind of business knowledge.”

In the dressing room between shows, she had said, “I’m glad I got Ike, ’cause I would’ve quit years ago. I probably would’ve worked for promoters and not get paid. Our policy is to have our money before we go on stage. Even if it’s for the President.”

Just before the Stones tour, Ike and Tina were booked for the Ed Sullivan Show, in September, 1969. “And he got his money in front,” says Jeff Trager. Most promoters say 50 percent deposit, the rest after the show. “So Sullivan comes up to Ike before the show, and Ike hasn’t got his guitar with him, and it’s showtime. Sullivan asks where his guitar is, and Ike tells Ed he needs ‘the key to the guitar,’ the key being the money.” Sullivan paid. “You have to protect yourself,” Tina is saying to the two women on the sofa with Ike.

Road manager Rhonda Graham, a stern, curt white woman, is seated nearby, in front of a rack full of Tina’s costumes and shoes. “In the early Sixties we went through that. If you don’t know these people, some of them just take the gate and leave.”

“Three, four years ago, they were playing a club,” Trager recalls, “and Rhonda had a cigar box at the door. And one dollar would go into the box, one dollar to the club. At Basin Street West he got cash all the time.” But if you are black and in the music business, you get burned until you either quit or learn. Turner learned, through all the different labels and beginning in the late Forties.

In junior high, he says, he’d decided to devote himself to “giving people music sounds that they could really dig, and pat their feet to. I’m not a very good speaker, so I try to express myself when I play.” Turner told Pete Senoff: “I started professionally when I was 11. The first group I played with was Robert Nighthawk, then Sonny Boy Williams. This was like back in 1948-1949. I went to Memphis in about 1952. That’s where I met Junior Parker, Willy Nix, Howlin’ Wolf. I was just playing with different groups all around – playing piano. From Junior Parker, I left Memphis and went to Mississippi, where I met the people from Kent and Modern Record Company. That’s when I started scouting for talent for them. That’s when I started recording B.B. King, Roscoe Gordon, Johnny Ace, Howlin’ Wolf. We were just going through the South and giving people there $5 to $10 or a fifth of whiskey while we recorded over a piano in their living rooms.

“I wrote 32 hits for that firm, but I didn’t know what a songwriter’s royalties were. I didn’t know nothing, man. They were sending me $150 a week, which was enough to keep me very happy in Mississippi, but not enough for me to get away to find out what was really going on.”

Right after high school, Ike had formed the first Kings of Rhythm; their first job was in Lulu, Mississippi, and each King got 18 cents for the night’s work. One time, they went to Memphis and recorded “Rocket 88” at B.B. King’s label. It was a local hit. “But some dude at the record company beat me,” Ike said, “and I only got $40 for writing, producing, and recording it. And the lead singer took the band from me and went on his own.” Ike went back to Memphis, gigging around. After the record company job, he went back to his hometown, Clarksdale, reformed the Kings of Rhythm, and ended up in St. Louis. From 1954 to ’57 he played all around the city. One night, 17-year-old Annie Mae Bullock went to see Ike’s show. She had moved to St. Louis two years before to join her sister. “She’d been telling me about Ike Turner, who was like a legend in St. Louis – you know, his picture and name spread about the newspapers. I went to this club to see what it was all about. I remember Ike was on top of the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis and the band was walking, and everybody was moving. Well, I’ve always sung and one night I asked Ike if I could sing and he said okay, but he never called me.” Annie Mae went out again, another night in 1957, to the Club Manhattan. On a B.B. King tune, with Ike on organ, the drummer went to the audience and set the mike in front of her sister – “teasing, I guess. She said ‘No,’ so I grabbed the mike and started singing. Ike looked up all surprised, like, ‘Oh wow, she can really sing.'”

She became a regular, singing on weekends, until she cut “A Fool in Love” in 1960, and the demo became a hit. By that time, they’d been married – “in 1958,” says Tina, “one of those house things, little preacher things, sort of quiet, saying, ‘Okay, let’s do it.'” – and Ike changed Annie Mae’s name to Tina. “He’s always looking for something different in a name,” she said.

Bolic Sound, the name of the studios, is taken from her maiden name. Tine was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, and grew up in Knoxville. They way she stretches her limbs on stage, she looks tall, and her high cheekbones give her a proud Indian appearance. But she’s only 5’4″, and as for Indian blood: “It’s in the family, but I don’t know where or from what tribe. My grandmother really looked like an Indian, though. She was maybe one-fourth Cherokee.”

Tina never studied music. Of course, she learned some from church – in Knoxville, she went to Baptist church and sang in the choir and, in high school, she sang some opera. But mostly she remembers a baby-sitter taking her to “sanctified church, a religion, they call it holiness – it’s where they play tambourines and dance, but not just dancing – dancing like godly to the fast music, sort of like today. I remembered the excitement of the music; it inspired you to dance.”

***

“Before Ike,” says Tina, gingerly feeling hotpants, “I didn’t – I never owned a record player. I listened to songs on the radio, but I never knew the artists went out and performed. I never connected the two. It’s like you’re dumb, you don’t know how they make movies. I never knew…I just thought I’d be singing in a church the rest of my life and marry.”

The dumb kind travels the world and meets royalty. And her innate sensibility shows through. In Ghana: “I went to see where they kept the slaves before they brought them to America – and it was very interesting and touching. They kept the women on one side in a room this big [about 20 by 30 feet]. The only light was three holes at the top, and only the sea light came in. A lot of them got diseases from the dampness of the sea; it formed a sort of crust on the wall. They had to live in all that filth; there was no bathrooms, no nothing. Like just women over here and men over there – the men in a much larger room – and they’d open the door so they could ‘multiply,’ as they called it—in all that filth. It was really something to see where you came from – where it all began.

“I knew nothing about NY-kruma…is that how you say…Nkruma – none of that. I never did much reading. Everything I could have learned in America in two years, I learned in a week’s time. But I went out and toured, going like 100 miles out of the main town. I got a chance to see how the real people live. Huts, no electric lights, no windows. They lived down in the fields.

“But I never go out a lot. Never saw the Statue of Liberty, which I’d really want to – especially since I’ve seen the Eiffel Tower. But I never feel like it; you get in the habit of sleeping all day. But there isn’t a whole lot to see in America. We tore all our historical things down. Like there’s no Indians, no real Indians for you to go out and see.

“Every now and then I read. Like for instance I took time to read what I wanted to about astrology, and I took time to read up on the health food thing.”

Tina is trying to move away from meat, and her kids “are doing vitamin pills, wheat germs, and sunflower seed flour. But I like a good steak now and then…

“I read the Jacqueline Kennedy, the Ethel Kennedy book. From the very beginning I never paid any attention to the political end of America. So then when President Kennedy became president, I became interested, because for some reason I liked him. Every time they said the President’s going to speak, I watched. Something about that family – they’re real people. I don’t know what it is – lively, life-like.”

Ike and Tina played Hyannisport once – “a very small, really cute town for a married couple that’s not interested in the city life and wants to live an old-fashioned sort of clean-cut life” – and got an invitation from Ethel to visit the Kennedy estate. “You could feel there was a real family. Like my family, it’s too late now. Sure, it’s my family, and they know, but I’d like to have been able to teach them things before they reached the age of 13 where…you know how kids question things, why say it this way or…that’s what they do, automatically know that this is the right way and why, not just because I say it is…But you start from the root. Because my oldest son, he’s really prejudiced, and I don’t know why, because we’ve always mixed, being entertainers. And Greg’s got this thing, ‘Ahh, wow, mother, she’s white…’ None of the other kids are like that, but he’s really…”

***

Ike is playing his new sides in his office, and everybody’s moving, just so, head nodding, lower lip out a little, legs maybe churning a bit, and this photographer is sitting there, tapping both feet lightly on the floor, and Ike strikes an accusatory pose: “See? See? You white people – You have to move from inside! Man, white people put black people off beat clapping so long…” Which is not the way the Turners usually talk about their audiences. “Okay,” says Tina. “In the beginning we worked the chitlin’ circuit, and now we go back, and it’s really terrible. They really don’t listen now, because they feel like, ‘Well, we knew you first.’ Black people seem to be like ‘We know what Ike and Tina can do’…like at one of our gigs, a guy right down front kept passing a cigarette the whole time, anything to distract from what’s going on stage. Instead, with a white audience, they sit and listen, and you have their attention. Or they leave. But they never start walking around or start a fight.

“Like I’m not shameful of my people or anything, and I’ve had a lot of people come and say, ‘Mama, when you gonna grow out the hair?’ ‘Where’s the natural?’ I told them, ‘I’m black, you can see it.’ I don’t have to wear a big wooly head of hair. I like straight hair, I wear it, I feel myself, you don’t see me walking around trying to be white…

“Ike could do this better than myself, but have you ever noticed that when black people go to a dance, they dress the complete thing, the high-heeled shoes, the purse. But the whites, they just wear something they’ll be comfortable in. All right, so I think that the black person a lot of times doesn’t go to see what is there, he goes to be seen. And like you find in the middle of a number where you’re really trying to climax your show, someone gets up and walks straight across right in front of you – a woman most likely, or a man dressed with a hat that’s tilted and all the colors, and the flaps on his shoes, and you know, they don’t think a lot about being entertained. They want to do the entertaining.”

***

“I knew there had to be a time for us. I’d go and catch shows that people said were great that did nothing for me. And I felt our show was much better. And I knew we had to get some records out, but I didn’t feel that it was going to be the records. I felt it was going to be timing. I didn’t know that the timing would be a change in the world, but I thought it would be a certain time, like maybe the 70’s. But all of a sudden, remember when they used to call longhairs beatniks? Okay. Now they call them hippies. The hippies came and more of them came and more and more. They took over San Francisco, they took over the highways, they just took over. That was the beginning of the change.

“They changed minds; they said, ‘Well, why?’ and everybody else said, ‘Yeah, why?’ And that’s who accepted us. They felt like ‘why dress up, for the acts.’ ‘Why is it that a woman can’t wear short dresses or whatever?’ You understand what I’m saying? And here I was that they could say, ‘Here is Tina Turner, here is the Supremes. Why is it that Tina Turner isn’t as good as the Supremes? Because you’re of this – would it be – ‘culture’? No – you would say that the Supremes could play for a more sophisticated audience, but Tina Turner couldn’t. And the hippies would say ‘Why?’ So everybody got into the ‘why’ bag and I sit right down in the middle. And sayin’ that this girl and their act is just as good as these other people; it’s class. Really, they just got polished down, and for the other set of people.

“I never did like James Brown. I always did like Ray Charles. He was my only influence, because I always liked to sing more or less like men sing, and sound like they sound. Like he and Sam Cooke were my influences.” What Tina likes, and what she aims for when she choreographs the Ikettes – is action. “I let an Ikette wear an Afro once,” she says – “Esther, the little short one, because it fit her personality and she wanted to. But I’ve found that long hair adds to the action of our show. Esther was on television with a natural, and she said, ‘Why is this, I don’t look like I’m doing anything.’ The difference was the difference in the action. We went on stage once, and I wore a fur dress and the Ikettes wore leopard furry dresses – but you gotta work harder, because there’s no swing. Every time I wear a chiffon dress, everyone says ‘What’s wrong with you tonight, Tina? You weren’t moving.’ The chiffon hides the action.”

Before any given date, Tina will run the Ikettes through rehearsal, “all day and all night and they eat at the house. If I’m training a new girl, we rehearse every day from 2 to 6 for two weeks, like a constant grind, because there’s a lot for her to learn and she’s still going to forget when she gets on stage, because once the music hits you and the audience and the stage and the lights, a different thing comes over you. But now with an old set of girls, I don’t have to call a rehearsal, I’ll say in the dressing room, ‘Hey, let’s put this step in or change this routine.’ It’s a matter of like driving somewhere, someone gives you directions – you go so many blocks and turn left – that’s how I get it over to them.”

Friday night at the Circle Star, the Ikettes were by themselves, each packaged in silver micro-minis, combing out their hair and laughing insults at each other, like dormitory girls. The Kings of Rhythm were into the first of their usual two-number set, and the Ikettes, right on time, were adjusting their sequin chokers and ready to put on their medium-heels. As one, they laughed about the bad old days.

***

Various ex-Ikettes had said how difficult Ike and Tina were, how selfish they were, how stingy (one ex said Ikettes got $30 a night if they were within 50 miles of L.A.; an extra $5 outside – this in ’68 and ’69 – “and we paid our own rent; they just paid transportation”).

Another girl spoke about a fine system – $10 for a run in an Ikettes’ stockings; $25 for “laughing too loud” – even if it happened off-stage, in a hotel room. She also spoke of Ike putting down their singing and hiring local session singers for his albums. When they were called in for a session, she said, they weren’t paid – except for “Bold Soul Sister.” The Ikettes, she said, wrote the song, but didn’t get credit – “only $15 each for that session.”

And the turnover. “They give excuses like, ‘Lots of girls have to get married.’ But most of them just can’t take their baloney. Of course when you leave you have a bad attitude. I was so naïve – Ike’d holler on stage, and it was hard to concentrate on what you were doing.” But, she admitted, it was good training – not unlike boot camp. And there’ve been plenty who’ve served – including Bonnie Bramlett, in 1965 – and another soulful white singer, Kathy MacDonald. Ike found her at the Fillmore West and wanted to sign her as a solo artist, and she sang on “Come Together,” but she stayed with her job in the chorus behind Joe Cocker. “It was very common to get approached by Ike,” said one former Ikette. “He’ll just approach anything in a skirt. He’d be shrewd about it, buy you things and make you think twice about it. Tina may know all this, but she tries to act like she doesn’t. They’re not as happy as they put out front.”

***

The current Ikettes, a minute before curtain call, put on happy faces. “The last time there was a fine was almost two years ago,” says Edna, and she proceeds to knock on wood. Esther “Bills” Jones and Jean Brown Burks (“Brown is my maiden name,” she emphasizes) join her, slamming their knuckles on their vanity table in unison and laughing. “Tell the girls you talked to that things have changed,” said Esther, who’s been an Ikette for three years. Edna dropped out for a year – she had TB – and rejoined, a year ago. Jean dropped out for two years after working two years. She’s been back six months.

Driving from her house to the studios, Tina talks about interviews. Her least favorite question is about the different Ikettes. “Lord knows how many there’ve been,” she says, evading another question by adding, “They leave for one reason or another.” Bonnie Bramlett, she says, “would have lasted, but we went to the South, and we had trouble down in Louisiana, guess she looked too white. We put a scarf on her and we felt she’d pass as ‘a yellow nigger,’ but they just sort of knew, and they blocked us and everything…But whenever I run into anyone like with a good voice that could be an asset to the group – if they can dance – I hire. I don’t worry about color.

“Yeah, I work with the Ikettes on their records because a lot of times they can’t always do Ike’s ideas – control the voice and all. Sometimes we have to use other outside voices for certain sounds…”

As for Ike and Tina and whether they’re a woosome twosome – it’s difficult to tell. Ike makes himself unavailable – by his pace – and lets Tina do the talking. When they do an interview together, invariably they disagree and chide each other. Posing for a photo, Ike is asked to embrace Tina; he does, and warns: “Better catch this quick; I don’t do this often.”

In the dressing room, while Tina talked, Ike slept. In the hallway, while Ike chatted, Tina was in seclusion.

Ike Turner spends most nights in his private apartment – “the Whorehouse,” – a mile away at his new studio, Bolic Sound, but Tina says she stays there whenever she can. And yet she’s upset now because Ike was talking to the telephone man the other day about buying cable lines, so he can hook up another remote camera from his office and watch what’s going on at home.

[cultureofresistance]

February 1, 1960 Bess was working as a busboy on the day that Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond walked into the store. He says that before making their way to the counter, the young men bought some school supplies. Bess says he had seen other black people try to sit at the counter before the A&T Four, but none had attempted to stay after being asked to leave. After doing just that, the men kept calmly asking the waitresses for a cup of coffee each time one of them passed by. “I remember it was kind of a cold day,” Bess says. “I guess that’s why they wanted the coffee.” He remembers how one of them asked why he couldn’t be served if his money was just as good as anyone else’s. After being ignored by the waitresses, they stayed for about an hour until closing time. “Here’s the thing,” Bess says. “They didn’t move. Nobody could understand that. They were just teenagers. It really took the younger guys to get it to boost off because at the time, the older people were afraid to do that. The older folks were set in their own ways. These four guys, they were not hungry for just food, they were hungry for a change.” He was so surprised by their actions that he stopped working for a while and just watched the four students as they protested. “I really wanted to see what was going to happen,” Bess says. “I was looking at ’em. I didn’t say nothing to them.” And while the now-famous photograph shows Bess as reserved and a bit distant, Bess says, he was ecstatic on the inside. “I was excited about it,” Bess says. “I was really excited to see it happen. I felt like whites and blacks and any other race should be able to sit down and eat together.”

The Man Behind the Counter

In an iconic photo from 60 years ago, four young African American men sit at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and stare resolutely back at the photographer behind them. Behind the counter is a young busboy. His name was Charles Bess. Here is his story. By Sayaka Matsuoka, https://bittersoutherner.com/southern-perspective/2020/charles-bess-greensboro-woolworth-sit-ins-civil-rights?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[princessjasmineofmeowtown]

2019 was the most traumatic year of my life. I was in a major car accident where a huge truck ran up the back of my car and wrote it off, I had serious issues with work all while completing a diploma. The year was honestly awful and spending my New Year's Eve packing my valuables into my car and waiting to be evacuated really topped it all off. We went out with the bang of all bangs for worst year ever.

We left early on in the day but my dad stayed at home and didn't evacuate until the fire was really close. When he left, he says there were embers falling onto the roof of our house and fire was roaring quickly towards us as our house backs onto a creek with complete bushland on the other side. We were staying at a friend's house at the top of our suburb further away that overlooked our house and all we saw was a roar of flames go up and extreme amounts of black smoke. We could smell everything burning and we were positive we had just lost everything including my dad who had called saying he was leaving but the glow was so large, we weren't sure if he made it out. When he arrived we were so relieved but the glow of fire blew up again and we were doubly sure our house was now gone. Soon after the entire suburb was evacuated because the fire was moving so quickly, we drove about 20mins away to a Woolworths car park and sat there for about 3-4 hours accepting the fact that we didn't have a home. Our house was most likely burnt to the ground and all we could hear were idiots setting off fireworks in a total fire ban whilst over 3 million hectares of land were burning in NSW.

We found out that the fires had passed our suburb and went back to our friends house while my uncle went to check on our home. Firefighters brought him through to assess the damages and somehow they managed to save our house however my 12 year old sister's fully insulated cubby house full of about $3000 worth of Lego (every birthday and Christmas present from every family member since she was 5 years old was inside) had burned to a crisp. That also caught onto our shed which was directly next to it holding all our kayaks, snow gear, boxes of my parents childhood toys, boxes of my favourite childhood toys and boxes of my books, all our bikes, all mum's craft supplies, dad's mower and some tools. All gone. The firies had put it all out and moved along because a street further up was flaring up and manpower was limited. The shed kept minorly flaring up again from a box of my parent's plush toys so my dad and our family friend went down to our house at midnight and fought that fire on their own until it stayed out then they went back to our friends house. That was their New Year countdown.

They told us that our back window had exploded from heat combustion and the front glass panel of the house was smashed in by firefighters to ensure nobody was inside the house so all the smoke was throughout our house BUT IT WAS STILL STANDING and all our belongings inside were safe from flames, just severely smoke damaged. So we knew the main damage of what happened and decided to go back in the morning and assess it all in daylight.

Before we went back in the morning we woke up to find this image on the front link of a daily telegraph article about what they were calling the Charmhaven Fires.

The image has no photographer credit (unlike every other image in the article) and no firefighters are pictured. The photo is taken from the exact perspective of where our garden hose was layed out with the tap on. We know that the firefighters burst through the side gate directly in front of the burning shed, they busted the padlock and pushed through the gates to put it out so it can't have been taken by a firefighter before they started fighting it, the person that took this photo had to come through the other side gate that can't exactly be viewed from the street. It all just feels a bit suspicious to me especially since we contacted the newspaper and they said it wasn't one of their reporters and they can't tell us who took it. We spoke to the firefighters today and they said they did not have any media personnel as there was no time to even consider such things when homes were seconds away from being lost. So theres a mystery that may never be solved.

Today we went back again and started sweeping up glass from the combusted back door and found it had spread throughout the entire house. Insurance got someone to come in and board up the broken glass door and panels with wood so the house would be secure. However, we can't fully clean everything up until the insurance inspectors come and assess the value of the damage so the house is still unlivable and probably will be until we can get the glass properly fixed and properly get all the smoke out which possibly means new or professionally cleaned carpets and possibly new mattresses and a new couch.

I went through the ashes of the cubby house and shed to see if there was anything that could be saved from the rubble and found some pretty sad but very interesting things. Everything had just burned into a pool of childhood toys and memories and a few burnt out family collections.

Now we move on. All the horrible things that happened in 2019 and every year before that have literally burned to the ground and left us with only the most important things, a family and a roof over our heads. We, as a family, have decided that this was a sign we needed to start fresh. This year is going to be different. We've lost a lot and it's been tough but we are only coming out of this stronger. We aren't letting this break us and we have the highest hopes for 2020. This is our year.

Taylor's music will be helping us through it all every step of the way. Maybe this will be the year my mum, my sister and I finally get to meet her and say thank-you for being with us through every struggle over the past 8 years and always giving us a sense of hope and happiness.

We will sing long live to all the memories we made but move on and shake it off and get back to living our lives like everyday is the best day.

So many things have been put into perspective. Belongings can come and go but family and our memories are the most important things we will ever have. ❤️❤️❤️

[fourthingsandawizard]

Dan and Phil Rize Summary, Sept. 4/5, 2018

-Dan started the stream before Phil could fully sit down in frame, and then Dan hit the wrong button and almost ended the stream

-Phil made Dan write the notification, Dan refered to them “Dip and Pip.” Our secret code has spread to them, what have we done??

-Phil said his quiff is droopy because he just woke up. He just had his coffee before the stream, so he said we should see him wake up in about ten minutes

-Dan’s response to why they chose this time for the livestream: “Earth man. It’s crazy”

-They’re staying in a rainforest in a house surrounded by birds and nature before they leave for Asia

-Martyn told them they were renting a place if D&P wanted somewhere to relax instead of a hotel, but neglected to tell them beforehand that it was in the rainforest

-A lot of “nature” keeps coming inside the house, including a very specific mosquito that made a very specific noise, which Dan and Phil attempted to imitate to show us.

-They spent about an hour trying to find the mosquito so they could get rid of it and get some sleep last night. Phil: “I think every clap [of our hands] made it stronger.”

-Dan said they’ve made it through Australia without seeing a spider, and Phil got mad because he was going to jinx them. Dan said nature was about to burst to life because it’s almost spring, and Phil then did a rendition of Chasing Cars as “Show me your beast bursting into life” which he said was by the band “Beast Patrol”

-Dan tweeted out the Truth Bomb question about superheroes while Phil was asleep, and Phil reminded him that they already gave a question about what animal Dan looks like last week. Phil laughed while Dan hid out of frame in shame, and decided that will be the question next time

-Phil bought some “exciting” new Tim Tams that are iced coffee gelato flavor that you’re supposed to put in the fridge. Phil said it had a 0.5 out of 5 health rating. Dan: “Same.”

-They went on a tangent about Woolworths because it’s a thing in Australia. Dan discussed the “family underwear” section; Phil said there was a section called “Manchester.” They couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be because the rest of the aisle was diapers and stuff, so Phil suggested it was their “family planning” section

-Phil cried (on the inside) at Hobbiton, Dan ACTUALLY cried. Apparently you get on a bus, and then they start playing Frodo running through the Shire, and it made Dan a mess

-Phil said the best thing was the giant tree on top of Bilbo’s house, which is made out of steel, and Phil said, “It’s STEEL there!” Dan gave him a classic “this guy” look at the pun, and then the livestream broke. Dan: “I think Phil just made a pun so terrible, it crashed the app”

-After seeing their friend try to take a picture leaning out of the Hobbit-sized door that looked like they were sticking their butt out, Dan told them they looked like they were “Backin’ it up the Bilbo.” (For Bilbo? Idk, they were laughing too hard to understand). When the waitress at the pub wanted to take a group photo of them, Dan said they should all say that instead of cheese and the waitress seemed confused and horrified

-Phil told Dan to “let me talk about the glowworm thing.” Dan said he wasn’t going to stop him.

-They loved their glowworm cave tour guide’s accent because he sounded kind of like Taika Waititi’s character in Thor Ragnarok

-They bantered about the difference between stalactites and stalagmites, Dan got so annoyed with Phil that he shifted the angle of the live stream so he was the only one in frame to talk about the cave

-Dan said they shouldn’t have told them what the glowworms were before they went through, because they are basically giant maggots that hang from “spider silk” stuff coming out of them to catch bugs

-Phil said it was a beautiful experience, like looking at a galaxy, but they weren’t allowed to take pictures. It was apparently a bright, satisfying blue that he would have flown straight to if he were a fly

-The ice cream place they went to doesn’t let you see the ice cream before you ordered it, they just show you an iPad, and it comes in some weird cones that go around your face? Phil got honeycomb, Dan’s was really difficult to eat, but really good. You could also get ice cream inside a Yorkshire pudding

-Dan: “You got your toast violated by a strange person.” Phil: “I did! Someone buttered my toast for me!” They went on a tangent about how personal the “buttering” experience is, and Phil said he started thinking about how much the person must have touched the bread while doing it. He still ate it, though

-The bath in their 32nd floor hotel room had a window that showed the entire city. Dan used a bath bomb, climbed in with the window shade closed, then opened it to look, but then the window steamed up so he couldn’t see anything. Phil said he likes when windows steam up because you can draw pictures. Dan: “Someone has to clean that, Phil.”

-They saw some “urban explorers” next to their hotel who were balancing on the edge of the skyscraper across from them, and they made awkward eye contact through their hotel room window. Phil apparently peed moments before, and he thinks they probably could have seen him through the window next to the toilet

-Phil: “Swish, swish, bish, another fly in your mouth!” Dan said Phil’s song was worse than actually getting a fly in your mouth

-Phil showed off his Friends t-shirt. Dan said that Phil is a combo of Ross and Phoebe. Dan said he is mostly Chandler, but also a bit of Monica. They said Friends was highly problematic by today’s standards, but everyone should go back and watch it

-They “smashed” all of Olan Rogers’ Final Space episodes. Dan is happy that people are finally appreciating Olan’s work. Phil said it was very emotional, and Dan is excited for more

-Phil about AHS: “Sometimes they put all of their eggs in one basket, and I’m just like, ‘Guys. Don’t ruin the basket.’”

-They finished Big Little Lies, Dan’s official review: “Dank AF”

-Phil had to remind Dan about the rest of the bath story, as Dan “repressed” it. Dan apparently got in the bath, then housekeeping knocked on the door and came in to replace the towels. Dan was waiting for Phil to do “LITERALLY anything,” but Phil didn’t think about Dan being in the bath. Dan screamed “NOOOOO” to stop her from coming in, Phil said it was a haunting scream, and the lady just left.

-Phil: “I forgot. It was fine. She didn’t see you. You were showing your naked body to the whole city anyway!”

-They apologized for the Manila mix up, and said there are bound to be some hiccups on a big tour like this. (If you’re still confused, check the FAQ on the tour page!)

-Someone told them to get a cat. Phil said he’s more allergic to cats than dogs, so that wouldn’t be a good idea

-They dodged giving details about the ii movie, they still aren’t allowed to say anything. They ARE putting ii tour merch on the website on FRIDAY though

-Dan said Phil doesn’t wear his Introvert jacket enough because he wears his blue one more

-They started up Truth Bombs with “What animal does Dan look like?” to which Dan’s answer was a tired, greasy rat

-The first person’s audio came through, but not video. Dan asked if they were existing in the space between dimensions, and they said yes. They said their group chat decided Dan’s spirit animal is Big Bird from Sesame Street (because he’s big and awkward). Phil said he used to have nightmares about Big Bird being in his bedroom when he woke up

-The next person’s video worked, and they were wearing a Phil hoodie. Dan complimented their nails, which were black on one hand and colorful on the other. They had an answer for Dan and Phil, which was Timon and Pumba if their personalities were switched. Dan said it made perfect sense on “like five different levels…Freaky Friday Lion King edition, the AU that nobody asked for”

-They tried the dice option to call a random person, it didn’t work. Twice.

-The next person was the one to get Phil the Polaroid shirt. Dan said it’s covered in Sharpie now

-Their answer was that Dan is a howler monkey. Phil: “Dan HOWELL-er monkey!” Dan disapproved of the pun, but declared them the winner

-Next week’s question is “If Dan and Phil were a superhero duo, what would their powers be?” Phil said he probably shouldn’t be trusted with powers

-Before the great mosquito hunt last night, Dan went to get a drink and found a lizard. He wasn’t scared of it, he just kind of closed it up in the room to let it do its thing

-They tried the ice coffee Tim Tams, they both liked them and said they would dip them in coffee later. Phil: “Dip, dip, bish”

-They went back and forth with the chat on how to pronounce “mukbang”

-Dan hasn’t listened to Bloom yet. He was going to listen on the plane, Phil told him not to so the plane noises wouldn’t interfere. Dan agreed because he wants to take it very seriously to see how Troye has matured as an artist. Phil suggested that he “eat it with his ears.”

-There will be another “fun” DAPG video with “the thing with the thing” that is coming “soon...ish.”

-Phil tried to say he hoped we were having a nice day, and accidentally said “I hope you’re having a nice guy”

-They might do the next liveshow on a Thursday because they’ll be settling in Manila next Tuesday

[cydie]

so Aaron had a yikes expression when I told Stephen to not talk to me at pearl fishery but also

dear diary,

[[MORE]]

I got in the skyline with Aaron and Stephen, and I got a little ptsd scared when Stephen wouldn't respond to repeating the song he wanted to queue

but it finished playing as we were driving

and Aaron skipped to Young, Dumb, Broke

beat was chill vibe

I put the window up a bit, and my elbow against it

felt like what I used to feel like with the boys

and then I thought about today, and it was good

I haven't felt love or compassion from him in a while

and I can put my head on his shoulder again

without feeling the weight of anything else (February, February Aaron, Stephen insecurities, self-doubt)

I started tearing up, in the car, and I did a chin up intake of breath to compose myself

I really thought I'd lost him

but tonight at Gong Cha, he pointed at the ?two something that said best friends and he said "that's you and me, we're the best of friends, best friends"

and I pointed at the two bobas that said a bubble tea related pun spinoff of the term "best friends" and he said "that's us" and I said "ur this one cos it's the colour of mountain dew" and he said "urs is dragonfruit coloured" and I searched for a different drink that was more the bright pink coloured and I said "the strawberry one!" and he said "awwww yeah that really good strawberry one you got at Mandy's" and I said "yeah the strawberry green tea and coconut jelly"

anyway the point is that he said we were best friends and repeated it 3-4 times to emphasise/solidify/bring substance to the idea and we are finally back ( and we joked about February back in the car at the uni hospital bus stop crossing on the way to Woolworths when we were talking about what if Jodie says no and he's like "I've been through much worse" and I laughed, not thinking of anything in particular and then he went "NOT you, Azumi" and I was like "uhhhh" and he went "there was a whole language barrier there" and I was like "yeah but you didn't even ask me out you just confessed and then we both fell into a month long depression" and he laughed in agreement, we both laughed. we're at the laughable stage now.)

i really thought I'd lost him because every time I was with him, he was so distant from me

but tonight was really different, and I started tearing up, and I tried to match it , and it felt like when I cried in Mat's bed about him at Disney

when I thought he had found a girl and he wasn't going to have time for me anymore

and I've never felt that before, except in that one situation, and I felt it again tonight - the feeling of wanting to finally let go of the emotions I'd been holding onto and holding back from, and holding back from him too

if he had questioned me in the car, I couldn't say whether I would have burst into tears or not -and usually, I wouldn't be close to tears at all

I wanted to cry to him that I thought I'd lost him

and I wanted him to tell me I would never lose him

just like I did with Mat that night

so, since this feeling is Mat specific, maybe it's situation specific, and maybe Mat's level of importance to me is a category or type of person in my life for me

and if that was the case,

I thought,

Aaron could really be Mat spec

he could really end up- make it all the way up there.

he's actually sort of managed it

he's very close. I could almost put him up there

Nobody has really come close to how important Mat is to me, and this is the first time I'm seeing a potential for a spot

idk what to do with this information

so, we dropped Stephen off a little while after, and he drove me home

he said 1 thing at the lights leaving main beach "I'm so tired" or something similar

I responded with "yeah hh"

and he drove me home in silence, blasting music

I got ready to exit the car, bc i doubt he wanted to get out of the car to hug me, but he interrupted me exiting by trying to give me a fistbump, and then a hug in seats still

I left, and crossed the road to my driveway, idled a bit, but he probably wasn't watching anyway, watched him leave, and I sat down on the pavement, and I just cried

I cry silently, I guess I always have, but sometimes I cry so desperately that i do strongly shaky intakes of breath, and sometimes, when I'm SO frustrated, I cry with sound

this time, I just cried normally, but I was sitting upright, instead of lying in bed

I heard some noises down the dodgy street of someone hitting something?? so I got my keys out and packed my bag in case I needed to run

the noises subsided and a car came out

idk if that was them or if they stopped cos a car passed

I cried a second time, each cry probably about 7 or so minutes each?

I got most of my emotions out, and I started writing this post

[magziraphale]

No Surrender

I can’t do epic, but this was bugging me until I did something, so here is some Thesival finding themselves again. (@coffeesugarcream)

I. 

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim The walls of my room are closing in There's a war outside still raging You say it ain't ours anymore to win

Theseus Scamander was the kind of man they invented colour film for. The sort of man with a presence so big he would have a room’s attention just by walking into it. It was like he’d ended up in the modern world by mistake, misplaced from times past when people still believed in heroes. Percival had half joined the fucking war just to stand by his side. And it was Percival alone who watched fading grey light play across skin bathed in mud and gore and smoke, across green-grey eyes half wild with fear, who watched the man pull his own spirit back from the brink of despair by sheer force of will. And he’d known, it is you I would follow.

Age and pride and a world all but lost to a kind of grinding hopelessness had taken their toll. Had tried to grind them down like a cigarette butt under a boot heel - Percival twice as hard, given his predisposition toward melancholy - but some scars are borne of love, not cruelty, and the ones they had marked in magic and blood had yet to fade. A reminder - not today.

All those years and a fucking ocean in between, and they’d pushed on, step by step until only the brave or stupid would stand against them. 

Or the evil.

He couldn’t see the scar anymore, not when his skin was a ruin. And it shouldn’t have mattered now, after everything, when he was still alive. But his memories were like things read in a storybook a long time ago now. His mind told him the tale, but he couldn’t see.

He worked, because it was necessary. He ate, because he didn’t want to have to buy a smaller wardrobe. He slept, enough to function. They called him a hero and they called him a traitor and his expression remained the same for each one. Another war was coming, but it wasn’t his to fight. Too old. He was just laying the groundwork.

II.

I wanna sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover's bed With a wide open country in my eyes And these romantic dreams in my head

When Theseus Scamander walked into the Woolworth building it was like a force of nature. His brother had been chaos, quick and fluid and ever-shifting. Theseus was constant, rhythmic and strong, and they couldn’t look away. But he didn’t stop for them.

He strode through the door and the wards to Percival’s office as if they were not there, and slammed both in the face of those who officiously followed. The man himself sat at his desk like a shadow, but he couldn’t control the shock that spasmed over his face at the entrance of his friend brother.

“Thes-” his voice a hoarse whisper. Theseus didn’t give him space, pulled him out of his seat and into his arms. Never, not once before, had he seen Percival Graves look small.

“What the actual fuck, Percy?” Theseus gripped him by the shoulders. “Were you ever going to fucking tell me?”

Percival was crumbling, cornered, trembling, his eyes darting across Theseus’ face as if searching. Finally, he spoke, “What would I have said?”

“Anything. Anything, you complete idiot.” He moved one hand to stroke a thumb across the cheekbone of that familiar face, too obvious now in his gauntness. Dark eyelashes fluttered and one shaking hand reached for his waist, almost touched.

“Thes- I don’t- I can’t-”

“Can’t what pup?”

“It’s gone, Thes. He took- it’s all gone.” He was shaking his arm, the one once pressed to his own in blood and feverish youth. Theseus dragged him closer, bent down to press their foreheads together. He would have drowned in those eyes twenty years ago and Christ alive if he wouldn’t now.

“Percival Graves that fucker couldn’t pry me out of you with the fucking elder wand. I’m in deeper than your skin you absolute wanker.”

He pressed a kiss to his mouth like a brand, and finally, finally felt arms grip him back, strong and clutching. Percival held on, and Theseus breathed in the warmth of his skin, the smell of the pomade in his hair, the hint of coffee on his breath. He felt tears sting his eyes, knowing he was almost too late.

“I’m so fucking tired Thes,” the man in his arms groaned. Theseus nodded, squeezing slightly.

“Then let’s get you home Percy-pup.”

III.

Well now young faces grow sad and old And hearts of fire grow cold We swore blood brothers against the wind I'm ready to grow young again

Having Theseus in his house felt like some sort of dream. Once or twice he would turn round to find him taking up space in his kitchen, his living room, his bed, and wonder if it was an hallucination. He found that he wasn’t overly bothered if it was, only that it didn’t fade.

But the days went by and Theseus didn’t leave, didn’t even bring it up though he would read through Ministry files at Percival’s side, making notes and sharing thoughts as they worked by the fire in the study. He thought war was coming too, but nobody was listening much.

Getting to see the colour of his eyes again, to remember the rasping quality of his early morning grumble, to catalogue the changes in the lines on his face, was like a kind of rebirth. Like his heart had started to pump blood through his body again, his lungs take breath; no longer a shell, a machine, but a man.

“You’ve got that constipated look that says you’re thinking Percy-pup.” Smug fucker. Never change. 

“I’m surprised you recognise such a look, as underdeveloped as your own faculties are.”

“Arse,” he responded, tackling Percival to the sofa. After a few moments they settled. Percival could hear the thump of his heart as he laid on the larger man’s chest. Theseus petted his hair, humming. He always did have a thing for hair.

“What are we doing Thes?” he whispered finally.

It took Theseus a few moments to respond.

“Regrouping, I’d say.”

“And then?”

A soft chuckle. “My Percy.” There was something so painfully gentle in his voice. Percival squeezed his eyes closed. Theseus sighed.

“I’d ask you what you want but you always were a self-sacrificing bastard.” A few beats, then he spoke again. “There’s a war coming.”

“Not our war, not this time.”

“Mmm. I think you almost believe that.”

Percival sat up, looked at the man he’d called friend, brother, love. Felt something spark in his chest.

“What are you saying?”

There was that famed Scamander smile, tempered now by the lines on his face and a softness in his eyes that refused to die.

“Come with me Percival.”

“Where?”

“Wherever we need to go.” Theseus gripped his hands. “You’re dying here, growing small and old. That’s what they’ll make you. They’re doing the same to me. They’ll write us off and tell us to stay home, rest on our laurels and fade away.”

That spark in his chest was growing. He had no idea that Theseus felt anything like he did.

“So let’s find our own way Percy, let’s fight our own way, together.”

Two ageing soldiers going it alone was ridiculous. But he wasn’t afraid anymore of looking foolish. He’d given so many years to MACUSA, to the law, to what he wanted to be justice. And he’d lost himself, before this man of flesh and blood and fire had called him back.

“Neither of us really were the retiring kind,” he mused.

“Perce, if I actually thought you wanted it, I’d fucking buy you a cottage in the country with a herb garden and a kneazle, and I’d be your fucking housewife until we pop our clogs, but I really don’t think you do.”

“Mmm not now perhaps.” Percival smiled.

“No, not now.” Theseus bumped his forehead with his own. “We’ll fight, and we’ll live, and we’ll sleep together under open skies in places we’ve never been. No more hiding. You’re my very heart, Percival Graves, and I’m keeping you.”

“I love you, you know.”

Their kiss was a little bit soft and just a bit sharp.

“Good, ‘cause if we live I really do think we should get that cottage after all. I’d look fucking incredible in a housewife apron.” 

Theseus’ smile was love and mischief and Percival laughed to see him. He felt the spark in his chest flare and burn. It felt like adventure. It felt like home.

“I’m ready.”

[joandelahaye]

Hello, my Freaky Darlings! Here's a short extract from my horror novel - Fury! Something was different about him. The flirtatious glint had left his eyes and been replaced by a shifty look as he glanced down the driveway, back towards the quiet street. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “Nothing’s wrong,” he answered, turned away and walked towards the front door. “Let’s get inside.” “You don’t regret bringing me home, do you?” “No, I don’t,” he said without looking at her. His back impenetrable and his shoulders hunched. What had she done wrong? She asked herself as she stared at his back in confusion. Had she not held on tight enough while they rode? A tall black man in an expensive, tailored, suit opened the front door. It wasn’t the kind of suit you’d find at Edgars or Truworths or even Woolworths. Her confusion turned into a tight ball of fear in the pit of her stomach. There was something very wrong with the picture developing in front of her. The man in the suit greeted Andre with an air of superiority and slapped him on his back. “Good job,” the man said, staring at her. “She’ll do nicely.” His accent was English, not Downton Abbey English, but more Football hooligan English. “She’s got the whole innocent girl-next-door thing going on,” Andre said looking her up and down. “As requested.” His top lip curled up into a snarl. She turned away from them, towards the gate, and started to run. She ran for her life. “Angela,” Andre shouted. “There’s nowhere to run. The gate is locked, and the street is deserted. Nobody’s going to hear you scream and even if they did, they wouldn’t care. They would simply close their windows and pretend they didn’t hear you. You’re on your own. No one is coming to rescue you.” Download Fury from your favourite ebook store now for $2.99. https://books2read.com/u/mV7rRr #horrorauthor #horror #horrorfiction #darkandtwistedfiction #horrorcommunity #applebook #applebooks #kobo #koboreads #ibooks #googleplay #googleplaybooks #nookbooks #igreads #kindlereads #bookstagram #bookquotes #teasertuesday #GhostStories https://www.instagram.com/p/CKyguESABzz/?igshid=1kdloqwmzvmcy

[anoldfashionedlife]

COVID-19: Tuesday, April 7

In normal times when the weather turns pleasant I switch between my Prospect Park run and my Manhattan Bridge run. It’s nice outside, but also the park has been crowded lately. Today I run the Manhattan Bridge.

I listen to Matt’s new podcast. It’s good—informational yet keeping his signature “no shit there I was” style—but it brings a familiar voice to the stories I’ve been reading in the newspaper.

I leave my apartment and turn left onto Lafayette, turn right onto St. James, left onto Dekalb, right onto Clinton. I’m guided by the signals to walk and make my way towards Flushing, which will give me more-or-less a straight shot to the bridge, running along the Navy Yard

I remember the first time I’d ever been to the Navy Yard many years ago. It was always a curiosity behind a high, guarded wall, filled with mostly-empty buildings, some light industry, and miscellanea. A collective of artists had open studios that a group of friends and I went to, not because we were interested in the art but because we wanted to see the inside of the Navy Yard. We saw some bad art and then climbed several stories to the top of the building for one of Brooklyn's few remaining unobstructed views of the Manhattan skyline.

Fast-forward a few years and there’s now a distillery and a vineyard, wholesale coffee roasters and bakers, and even a client of mine is headquartered there after spending many years in Flatiron. I once arrived for a meeting and was asked to provide extra identification—and to leave early—because Hillary Clinton was speaking there later that night.

There’s a line outside Wegmans grocery store where Admirals Row once was. I turn right onto Navy, I pass the temporarily closed Kings County Distillery bar and turn left onto Sands, which turns into a bike path that leads directly to the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian access ramp.

I cross the Manhattan Bridge, running over Brooklyn Bridge Park and the East River and the FDR. The pedestrian bridge ends at Point #3 of the former Five Points neighborhood at the intersection of Bowery and Canal. Normally I’d turn around and run back home. Normally the sidewalks along Canal would be impenetrable, pedestrians would be shoulder to shoulder and there would be no space to run: tourists buying knock-off Gucci and Louis Vuitton bags; traditional Chinese medicine shops; vegetable stands; fish mongers; and if you look hard enough you can see Little Italy.

But today Manhattan looks like a ghost town. Even a satirical image of plastic-bag-as-tumbleweed fails because New York banned single-use bags five weeks ago, an eternity.

Not to belabor a point, but the near absence of human life on Canal is such an aberration that I am beside myself. Canal is the main east-west artery of Lower Manhattan, linking the Manhattan Bridge—Brooklyn to Manhattan—to the Holland Tunnel—Manhattan to New Jersey. My most recent memory of Canal is not buying soft-shelled crab or cannoli—both of which I’ve done within the last year or so—but rather sitting in traffic at 2 o’clock in the morning and it taking 30 minutes to drive from Baxter to the Manhattan Bridge onramp. A distance that today takes 20 seconds on foot.

I run down Canal and turn left onto Broadway. The streets are empty and the stores are closed, of course, but even restaurants that could technically remain takeout-only are closed because there are few residential buildings. I pass a store called Prime Essentials that sells cheap clothes. It’s closed.

There’s something eerily familiar, but it’s the familiarity of walking through the Financial District on a weekend afternoon in the middle of winter. Not a weekday afternoon on a beautiful spring day. It’s impossibly empty; you can’t not social distance. A particularly cinematic moment is when I run past a restaurant playing Standing Still by Jewel to their nonexistent al fresco diners. Remind me again how long we’ve been self-isolating? God damn you all to hell, I think to myself.

I run past the Woolworth Building and St. Paul’s Chapel. I run past the Stock Exchange and turn towards Battery Park. At the southern tip of Manhattan I pause and look towards the Statue of Liberty in the distance. A few men are fishing nearby. The stockades holding tourists bound for Liberty Island are empty. “Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be—Daniel J Boorstin.” I think to myself there must be literally thousands of quotes better than this one containing the word “freedom."

I turn back towards the Brooklyn Bridge, towards home. I run past the National September 11 Memorial. It’s empty and the trees are dead, but I remember the trees always being dead. I run past the Oculus, our $4 billion Calatrava-designed transit hub, looking like it did in architectural renderings from before it was built: clean, white, no people. The Apple Store is closed. Eataly is closed. Shake Shack is closed. Khiel’s Since 1851 is closed.

I’d planned to be in Manhattan for the evening applause for essential workers, but there isn’t anybody to applaud, so turn back towards Brooklyn. Approaching the Brooklyn Bridge I run past city hall. It’s quiet. As I leave the city I think about congestion pricing: if Manhattan had congestion pricing would the algorithm go haywire and start paying people to drive into the city?

Before home I run to Ft Greene Park. There are six-foot-wide signs in fire-engine red indicating how far to keep distant from one another.

I told my mother that I wouldn’t walk over to Brooklyn Hospital just to see what it’s like, but I do. It’s strangely quiet from the outside. I clap to nobody, but for everybody.

I run home wondering what scams Gwyneth Paltrow has cooked up at Goop.

[damndonnergirls]

10 favorite characters

Thank you @litlifelover for tagging me! I’ve made a couple of similar lists before, but you can never have enough :D Yes, I understand this defeats the purpose of having favorites

Winston Bishop, New Girl

Salim, American Gods (both the book and the TV version)

Chava, The Golem and the Jinni

Lady Pole, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Khutulun, Marco Polo

Sokanon, Frontier

Glad Promise, Spring Moon

Yousef Acar, Skam

Tamatoa, Moana

Sir Ellis of Woolworth, Yonderland (“nobody closes down the Woolworths!”)

If they haven’t done this yet, I’m tagging @madeleinehatter7 , @londonistblue, @mimingnuns, @thefrydayafternext, @ummm3ummmmm5, @speakthroughpaint, @nemesis729, @callmehux, @edenseveangel, @dyannehs, @dandelionlass and anyone else who wants to play :)

[mudstonephoto]

Girls I shot who were in Gary Winogrand works at SF MOMA - how matt sweeney and gary crossed paths doing street photos in early 80s california

Shooting on the street in Los Angeles, Hollywood, Venice, and Santa Monica in the late 70s and early 80s was what I did as a 17-20 year old with my free time. My day job was a clerk in a photostore. I had three jobs, twice I worked at Franks Highland Park Photo and once at Freestyle Photo.

I’d been super lucky to find a place to live in the Hollywood hills. It was a little shack in the back yard of a small old home up near the HollywoodLand market. A guitarist and his Anthropologist wife lived in from the a rabbit and a kid. The family of the wife had a big ribbon factory in brazil they’d owned for years. Having already done some programming at my junior high school by then, I recall discussing the jacquard looms they used.

Running away from home with no high school degree or college also meant I was fairly poor and couldn’t come close to owning a car. So I walked and rode the bus mostly. It meant easily 3-5 hours a day commuting when at Frank’s in Highland Park. Freestyle was lots closer and I could walk the whole way home if I really wanted to. Hollywood Boulevard was the main transit hub I used and I spent lots of time there.

Being a decent swimmer and having learned to body surf before I was 10, I liked to ride the bus out to the beach in Santa Monica and swim. It was a cheap thrill.  I’d shoot my way down Hollywood, hop the bus to Melrose, shoot, transfer at the May Co at Fairfax onto a bus to Santa Monica. Then shoot Santa Monica and Venice walking the bike trail. When I wanted a swim, I’d wrap my camera bag in a towel and bury it and swim.

Anyway, that was me. I knew a little of Gary Winogrand by then, but not much. I was simply trying to do any art I could. It was street photography. So when I ran into him on hollywood boulevard I was not sure it was him. It was only later that I was sure.  At the time I met him, he was just an old guy in wrinkly rumpled tan shooting with a leica.  Perhaps a tourist, but something was funny. It was the leica and the fact that i saw almost nobody else doing street photos over the years on Hollywood that drew me to him. I went across the street when I saw him at Whitley in front of Woolworths and Fredericks. I’d watched him a bit and decided I wanted a closer look. He was out of place. He looked surprised to see me, evaluated my Nikon F2/wide angle rig with a quick look, hurrumphed and walked away. Guess he didn’t want to talk shop much.

There are some videos of Gary at that time in both Venice and Hollywood on line. I have many shots taken within inches of where he is in them. It is pretty cool to look at my shots and see the EXACT same everything at the same time in his photos and in the videos. The SFMOMA a few years ago had a show of his work. While looking at his work at the MOMA I found a pic of some people that I had also shot. Not his most famous shot, but one I like pretty well.

In Venice along the bike path two girls would set up on the edge of the buzzy commercial active area. They were about the same age and I saw them there a few times in different bikinis. They were pretty obvious and right along the path. Sometimes guys would be gathered around them. I’d admired them from afar as a 19 year old hetero male might.

After a few months I came upon them alone on towels there in the later afternoon sun with good light and great color suits. I asked them to shoot them, they let me and we shot stuff with them on the front, on the back, and dressed in shorts and in bikinis. Not the typical street photography I’d do, and I kinda creepy. But wow. So cute. I had to take a shot.

Gary’s shot is of the same girls. They were hard to miss. Gary being older captured the guys hitting on them as well as the girls. Me I WAS the guy hitting on them, and just shot the girls.  I shot in color with Kodachrome and just scanned them and located the Winogrand piece.

Here’s Gary Winogrand’s shot

http://img.over-blog-kiwi.com/0/93/16/08/20141015/ob_7fb1a7_img-6727.JPG

from

http://www.actuart.org/2014/10/expo-retrospective-photographie-garry-winogrand.html

and it is also at this location

http://www.theasc.com/site/blog/johns-bailiwick/on-the-streets-garry-winogrand-at-sfmoma-part-two/

The girl in the white bikini on the right in Winogrand’s is the same girl in red i shot. It is labeled Venice Beach and from the bicycle wheel and the distance to the surf, I’d guess it is just about where I would often see them.

Anyway, that and a nickel gets you a ride on the bus as my dad used to say.

[nootnootandthesaurusscamander]

Rediscovered friendship || Closed rp with realpercivalgraves

@realpercivalgraves

War hero, auror, progidy son. He went by many names in his lifetime, most of them imposed on him by others. The only names he truly liked were those given to him by his mother, brother and friend. Theseus, or Seus, as Newt used to call him when he was too little to fully pronounce his name right. Not that he truly cared about such matters but it was always interesting to hear others’ expectations of him. And it was nice to know that some people held no expectations of him whatsoever.

Part of him was tired, washed out and all he really wanted to do was lay down in his bed and sleep for the next year. But the world needed him, the world needed Theseus Scamander. The war hero. Escpecially in the dark times ahead. So that’s what he became, he took the role upon himself with confidence, almost arrogance. Because that’s what people expected of him. That’s what people wanted him to do.

So he stared at the letter in his hand, frowning down at his new orders as he let out a sigh. The Woolworth building loomed up in front of him as he walked down the streets of Manhattan. This was it, a new chapter in his life and career as an auror. The upside to all of this was that he’d see Perry again. The director of Magical security had been a good companion during their time at the academies and they had met briefly during the war, keeping up a correspondence after that. He had wondered why those letters had stopped after awhile, although knowing what he did now he wasn’t surprised.

He was more pissed off that nobody had noticed the switch. Really, MACUSA had to be in real shambles for them not to notice a dark wizard in their mids. Quite pathetic really. Not that he’d ever admit that out loud.

Theseus entered the building and strolled in as if he’d always belonged there. Keeping his head high as he walked past several desks and ascended the stairs leading to the elevator.  The goblin manning the contraption gave him a rather weird look. But he paid it no mind. “Auror department, please.”

“Do you work he-”

He glared at the creature. “Auror department. I’m here on behalf of the ministry to see Director Graves.”

“Alright, alright.”

“Thanks.”

Theseus quickly made his way down to Perry’s office. Knocking on the door briskly before letting himself in. “Well, if it isn’t my favourite American. How are you, Perry?”