#scotchy's spells

[theguardianace]

most important question on the whole list tbh:

🍪 If you were a cookie, what kind would you be?

OATMEAL SCOTCHIE IDK HOW TO SPELL IT ITSBLIKE OATMEAL RAISIN BUT WITH BUTTERSCOTCH CHIPS

[saltyscotchy-blog]

Self Care Prayer & Spell Ritual

UNDER THE READ MORE IS a long ass spell I wrote as an act of self care! Feel free to adapt it to your own pantheon or possibilities because it may be that you don’t have all the resources I used for this spell!

In this spell, I called upon Freya and Skadhi because of the connection I carry with them. Again, you can switch these parts to adjust the spell to a deity of your choice (or you can work without a deity and just skip right to the actual self care spell I wrote and add on a whole load of intent!)

Need:

moonwater

crystals: carnelian (joy, confidence, courage)               lapis lazuli (self awareness, balance)               rose quartz (love)               moonstone (tenderness, support)               amazonite (trust)               blue lage agate (honesty, patience)               other crystals that invoke positive/lovely feelings.

Runes: dagaz (hope)             mannaz (support)             ehwaz (trust, faith, companionship)             berkanan (growth)             eihwaz (strength, stability)             wunjo (joy, ecstasy)             ansuz (prosperity, vitality)

Tarot cards; chariot (control, willpower, determination)                     strength (strength, courage, patience)                     death (endings - beginnings, change)                     temperance (balance, moderation)                     stars (hope, moderation)                     sun (fun, positivity, vitality)                     nine of cups (comfort, happiness, satisfaction)                     king of cups (emotional balance and control)                     other cards that invoke positive/lovely feelings.

Candles: pink (love, nurturing, caring)                blue (trust, calm, serenity, safety)                orange (joy, friendship, family)

An offering for your deity/deities.

Optional: incense, flowers, things/pictures/decorations that make you happy.

Preparations:

Cleanse the crystals in the moonwater. Keep some moonwater in a cup. Set out the incense, flowers and/or other decorations that you associate with your personal wellbeing and positive feelings.

The spell:

Cleanse your tarot deck and set it out. Enter a moment of silence and greet your deity. Light the candles and call upon them.

Freya, protector of families and children, mother of mothers. I call upon thee. May you be with me in this moment and may you lend me your love and guidance into better times. Skadhi, goddess of frost and winter, cold lady who brings warmth into my heart. I call upon thee. May you be with me in this moment and may you lend me your strength and wisdom into stability.

Leave out the crystals on your altar. Cleanse the runes by sparking some moonwater over them and leave them out on your altar. Hold your hands out over the crystals and the runes, and speak the words:

Beloved Freya, magnificent Skadhi. May you find and accept  these symbols and gifts, and may you bless them with your wisdom and love. Hail to you, almightly goddesses!

Set out the offering to your deity and take the cup of moonwater, speaking the following words:

May we drink tonight, for prosperity and strength. I raise this glass to you, Freya, for may you bless me with your love. I raise this glass to you, Skadhi, for may you bless me with your strength. Hail to you, almighty goddesses!

Enter a moment of silence. Let it last for about 15 heartbeats. Turn to your tarot deck and hold out your hands over the deck. Speak the following words to call upon your deck:

I call upon the earth Far plains and lofty mountains For power and strength to my spell

I call upon the waters Wide lakes and ever moving streams For power and strength to my spell

I call upon the sky The four winds of earth And the far reaches, infinite space For power and strength to my spell

I call upon the fires That burn in the heart of the earth At one with energies of life itself For power and strength to my spell

Pause for the length of five heartbeats, then pick up your tarot deck and search out the cards you need for the spell, saying these words:

Reaching far into the archaic past I draw forth these symbols To shape the spell I cast Here will be woven chance, fortune and fate That my deepest wish may be swiftly attained

Now turn to the spell. Hold the chosen cards in both hands and lay them out on your altar as you speak the following words:

I reach out with the power of my heart And the power of my mind I call those with kindred spirits Hearts and minds that care and cherish and love And may they answer me

May they bless me with peace May they bless me with balance May they bless me with joy May they bless me with hope

Grant me happiness and trust and faith Grant me growth and strength and vitality Control, courage and patience may come Comfort and optimism may come

May negativity end And positivity begin Blessed be the kindred spirits Who guide me onto the righteous path

Hold your hands out over the cards to charge them with the power that you visualize being drawn from your body as you say these words:

Into these cards I direct great powers Powers drawn from within me And powers called from those kindred spirits Which are at work around me

Wide ruling powers Mark well what I have done here And work to make it manifest

I call upon the beings of nature Of plains and mountains, of oceans and lakes Of deserts and forests, and distant tundra Of the heart of the planet itself

Wide ruling powers Mark well what I have done here And work to make it manifest

I place my petition before you Earth, giver of all life May you lend me strength and power To this, my spell So shall it be!

Remain before your card arrangement and your altar for a period of at least 25 heartbeats and keep your hands over the cards, runes and crystals. Visualize the subject of your spell as completed.

Put out your candles and render a salute before departing.

(TN: words used to call upon and charge the tarot cards are inspired by information found on llewellyn.com, the self care spell itself is written entirely by myself)

[chiseler]

HAUNCH, PAUNCH, AND JOWL

You probably can't call screenwriter Samuel Ornitz one of the stars of the Hollywood Ten. His name doesn't resonate like, say, fellow blacklisters Dalton Trumbo's or Ring Lardner Jr.'s do. Most of his films are now forgotten. Before he went to Hollywood, though, he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel that's still read for its marvelous details on the lives of Lower East Side Jews at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ornitz was born there to Polish immigrants in 1890. His family wasn't poor, like so many others in the neighborhood. His father ran a successful dry goods business. Ornitz's older brothers went to work for their dad, but Samuel rebelled and went into social activism. As a young man he worked for the Prison Association and spent much time in the notorious Tombs. He later worked for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as assistant superintendent.

Meanwhile he was writing. His first novel Haunch, Paunch and Jowl was published in 1923 as "an anonymous autobiography." Meyer Hirsch, the narrator, is a Lower East Side Jew who claws his way to wealth and power by any means necessary. Early chapters are rich with details of growing up on the streets at the end of the 1800s; the second half of the book is a pretty hard look at the corruption and graft that riddled city politics in the early twentieth century.

The story starts when Meyer is nine and jockeying for status among the other Jewish boys in the Ludlow Street Gang. They do a lot of fighting with a rival Jewish gang, the Essex Street Guerrillas. Both sides team up to fight the Irish kids, using fists, sticks, brickbats and stones. They disrupt local business, breaking shop windows and overturning sidewalk stalls, but the cops don't get involved -- it's just Sheenies versus Micks. The Jewish boys' nickname for a cop is Shammos, Yiddish for a synagogue caretaker. By the 1920s Shamus, as it was usually spelled, would be familiar slang for a cop or private detective, found everywhere in noir literature and films -- Bogart's Philip Marlowe refers to himself as a shamus a few times in The Big Sleep. It's not clear whether that derived from Shammos or from the Irish name Seamus, given that so many New York cops and detectives were Irish. Probably it was a confluence of the two.

As they get a little older the boys prowl the Bowery, which Ornitz describes as a "succession of saloons, bedhouses, two-cent coffee places, second-hand clothing stores, oyster stands, rescue missions, and second-hand shoe cellars... Underfoot it is slippery with chew-tobacco juice. Everybody is busy spitting. The old-timers, the right-at-home bums sun themselves in the doorways of lodging houses and at the corners. Panhandlers look for live ones. Fake cripples and blind men, offering pencils or shoe laces, whine for pennies. One drunk mutters, another speechifies, one sings or curses, and another lies prone in everybody's way and nobody pays him the least notice. Sailors, stevedores, oilers, stokers, firemen, hobos and street walkers crowd the sidewalks. Country boys, threadbare and hungry-eyed, fortune seekers stranded in the big city, and tired-looking, jobless men from everywhere, wander in this land of the down and out... Here is the city's back-wash of sewerage..."

Like Irving Berlin, another Jewish kid on the Lower East Side at the same time, Meyer and his teenage pals earn small change busking and serving as singing waiters in the concert saloons that infested the Bowery and Chinatown. Ornitz's kids work in one joint where the young Berlin actually sang: Scotchy Lavelle's saloon and dance hall at 14 Doyers Street. Lavelle was a famous hoodlum who had run with Patsy Conroy's gang of waterfront thieves in the 1860s and 1870s. Ornitz changes Scotchy's name to Frenchie, but otherwise gives us a documentary look inside the joint. A piano player -- Piano O'Brien in the novel -- accompanied the waiters on the keys as they belted out ballads, romantic tearjerkers currently popular on the street, and ragtime tunes. Ornitz writes:

'The art of a singing waiter is in a class by itself. It consists of carrying a song over a multitude of busy doings, remarks, orders, servings, making change and cleaning tables, all done during the song. Occasionally you interrupt the song to sing out the order, and then you must immediately take up the last word and note where you left off... During the heartrending moments of the piece you may have to make change for a two-dollar bill and reckon up the amount due, put down the change, receive your tip, move to the next table, mop its surface dry, remove empty glasses on a tray, call at the little door for your ordered drinks, pass out the right brass tags for the checker, show people to the tables, smile to known frequenters, laugh at a friendly gibe and stoop to pick up a coin thrown as a compliment to your vocal efforts."

Bowery and Chinatown dives drew an extraordinarily wide range of customers and looky-lous, from bums to toffs; even European royalty included a descent to the area on their New York itineraries. Ornitz:

"The East Side and West Side, uptown and downtown, drift in, singly, and in merry batches... curious lads, feeling adventurously grown up... young men with cigarettes dangling from their lips, careless-mannered, desperately affecting the nonchalance of rakes... little cliques of married men, thrillingly frisky and wicked with the matrimonial yoke cast off for a night... old men seeking youth at the fountain of folly... clean-faced college boys furiously living 'the life' ... swaggering gunmen, guerrillas and gangsters who five the place a tone... chummy groups of sailor boys and marines after a long practice cruise with faces as free and fresh as the open sea, consciously on a hell-raising shore leave... race track hangers-on and touts and jockeys in loud-patterned clothes... pimps aflash with jewelry and nobby clothes... puffed up one-horse politicians... cheap gamblers, loaded dice and cold deck artists...sneak thieves, hold-up and second-story men... husky yeggs... roving panhandlers... steerers to gambling and bawdy houses... flitting, temperamental fairies, the queer effeminate men... slumming parties, distinguished by their full dress... a world of men."

Then there were the prostitutes who "wind in and out of the table spaces like a garland of strangely strung and varied flowers... rumpled and faded, soiled and drooping with rough handling."

While some of Meyer's pals graduate to burglary and "the dreaded House of Refuge on Randall's Island," the first juvenile reformatory in the country when it opened in the 1820s, he goes to City College, the immigrants' school, "the rusty old chapel on Twenty-Third Street; vine-covered, with an air of scholarly detachment; of cloister quiet and dignity." He becomes what he calls a "Professional Jew," a lawyer and Tammany fixer, wooing the Jews away from the Socialists, organizing the pushcart men, working crooked deals in the courts and with the union bosses, sinking farther and farther into graft and greed, and growing fatter and fatter on the proceeds. Meyer sees himself as representative of his generation of ambitious young men:

"It did not take them long to see that the straight and narrow path was long and tortuous and ended in a blind alley... Politics stank of corruption and chicanery. Big business set even a worse example. Daily the people were treated to scandal after scandal in commerce, industry and government... The order of the day was -- PLAY THE GAME AS YOU SEE IT PLAYED... It was a sordid generation, a generation creeping out of the mud into the murk... It was the time and process of finding ourselves, a sort of evolutionary process that began as a creeping thing in the scum... I had taken root in the morass; I didn't dare try transplantation."

In time Meyer becomes a Superior Court judge and lives uptown on Riverside Drive, which he calls Allrightniks Row. Allrightniks is his term for Jews who'd made it, "who came in as impoverished immigrants" and "were made dizzy and giddy by sudden riches."

In 1929 Ornitz joined the droves of New York writers who headed out to Hollywood. After sound was added to commercial films in the late 1920s, the studios developed a ravenous hunger for people who could write to the new medium. The Coen Brothers' Barton Fink is a cartoon of the Ornitz generation of New York Jewish writers who went out to Tinseltown with their lefty ideals and social-realist scripts in their suitcases. Ornitz seems never to have fully committed himself to the studios, and never made it big there. He worked on a lot of B pictures. Even when it was a B for RKO or Republic, he tried to work a message in. His first movie, The Case of Lena Smith -- he wrote the story but not the screenplay -- reflected the injustices Ornitz had seen at the Tombs. Josef von Sternberg directed. Hell's Highway is about the mistreatment of a prison chain gang. In The Hit Parade, an ex-convict who jumped bail (Frances Langford) tries to hide her past when she makes it as a singer. Ornitz collaborated on some scripts with Nathanael West, and was one of the small army of writers who contributed to the 1934 adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel about race relations, Imitation of Life.

In maybe his oddest Hollywood assignment, Ornitz and another New York transplant, Budd Schulberg (best known for On the Waterfront), wrote a 1938 Paramount adaptation of Little Orphan Annie. What we know now as a sickly-sweet musical was in the 1930s an extremely controversial comic strip. Cartoonist Harold Gray was a staunch Republican who hated FDR and built a lot of anti-union and anti-New Deal messages into his strip, outraging liberals. The New Republic denounced the strip in 1935 as "fascism in the funnies." Predictably, Ornitz and Schulberg turned Gray's politics upside-down in a version that was more class struggle than comic strip.

In 1933 Ornitz and two other future blacklisters, Lester Cole (nee Cohn, another son of Jewish Polish immigrants, who grew up in the Bronx and elsewhere) and John Howard Lawson (nee Levy, from a wealthy family in Yonkers), helped found the Screen Writers Guild. The three of them were among Hollywood's most outspoken members of or fellow travelers with the Communist Party in the 1930s. Lawson headed the party's Hollywood branch and would later be accused of leaning heavily on other screenwriters to pack as many lefty ideals into their movies as they could get away with.

In the Red Scare that swept up Hollywood after World War Two, they, along with Trumbo, Lardner and five others, refused to testify before HUAC. One of them, director Edward Dmytryk, later caved and named names, including Lawson's. They came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. They were all found guilty of contempt of Congress and drew prison terms of up to a year. Unlike Trumbo (Spartacus), Lawson (Cry, the Beloved Country) and Cole (Born Free), Ornitz never wrote a screenplay after that. He did write another novel about Jews in America, Bride of the Sabbath, and died in L.A. in 1957.

by John Strausbaugh