#so you couldn’t assume a historical figure would be that radical even if they had been introduced to the concept

[cats-in-the-clouds]

successfully dropped the women’s and gender history class

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hey! Feel free to ignore this long question but it was just something I was thinking about. I’m interacting with this fandom for the first time since about mid season 12-ish, I was an avowed deancas meta reader and I’m trying to catch up on some goings on. Something that’s really been bothering me since it went canon was something I was trying to figure out since I left: what happened during the carver era? Was he setting it up to be canon, because I can’t not see that when I watch s8 and 9, but post-Charlie dying it all seemed so disorganized, and bad. He set it up perfectly then lost the thread totally. Do you have any insight on what happened there? And 2, if I couldn’t stand the first half of season 12 but really liked 15x18, do you think I’d like the rest of the dabb era? How does it compare to peak carver era? Thanks for reading and no pressure! Forgot how much I love this meta stuff and now it’s all I think about again lol

Hi there! 

I think Carver era behind the scenes might end up being something we have to wait for tell-all interviews to understand... At least Dabb was there for all of it so maybe after the show is over, someone might grab him for a sit down to explain some shit and go over the old territory :P I’d guess that Carver was not committed to canon in the same way but he was open to exploring and expanding the relationships and Cas’s character just because he liked Cas and these dynamics, and definitely wasn’t adverse to at least ironically thinking of Dean n Cas in a certain way, hence the “jilted lover” thing. 

I think also there was generally less of a cohesive overall voice to the show from season 8 onwards, which is not a bad thing in that it meant we began to really see each individual writer putting their talents out there (or not-talents) but does mean the interpretation of Dean n Cas or gay subtext in general was an absolute rollercoaster, depending on who was writing, because combining looser control on the creative direction per episode along with a deeper focus on character overall... Bobo could roll right up in season 9 and immediately start serving Destiel but Dabb had been writing since season 4 and it was still season 8 where he first starts flexing any what would become shipper muscles :P 

Considering how Carver era fizzled out and Dabb took over with a stronger sense of what to DO with the dang show and what radical burn-it-all-down steps that involved to take it to a conclusion, including absolutely freewheeling the plot for a little while, throwing spaghetti at the wall and even letting Buckleming serve total curveballs and all, for the sake of really digging into character stuff instead, I do think the change is obvious again. I don’t even know if Dabb took over MEANING to make Destiel canon, but that he was absolutely of the mind that Cas was important and a TFW ending would be necessary. And then once he spent some time on that, the obvious answer that Destiel was integral hit at last through some sort of self-reflection on what the fuck they’d been writing all this time as it came to tying up loose ends. 

Honestly the writers he picked kinda do obviously compliment Destiel but maybe it was even just having so many fresh young voices at the table all at once that LATER shifted the conversation into “why the heck wouldn’t we do this?” after they settled in. 

Anyway, I’m not caught up on the current season, but I would say that Dabb era was as far as I watched, loosely written on the plot front and managing Buckleming nonsense about as deftly as a bunch of excellent writers who are trying to have a consistent vision but need to constantly work around someone lobbing bricks at the story can do. But it got better and better as it went on, because it was focussing more on the emotional stuff and the character dynamics, and taking them all seriously. Season 13 was an important shift in really taking Destiel seriously, and from the sounds of things Dabb was maybe considering Destiel by season 14 and ready to hit the ground running with 15? 

I personally think that Dabb era really started to be very very good as soon as Jack was properly introduced, especially as I spent a whole hiatus dreading him and convinced this was a terrible idea (he’s buckleming spawn, from one of their worst episodes overall behind their true classics like the racist truck) but Dabb wrote the first episode with Jack and it made him instantly endearing, and his whole story was well-handled from then on, making even some of the more garbage characters at least temporarily interesting or at least relevant or to make the scenes they were in easier to endure. 

So I’d say try again and power through until you’ve given Jack the 4 episodes at the beginning of season 13 they use to introduce and explore what he means to the show, and see how you’re feeling about those dynamics and storylines, as they really are where the show goes from then onwards. 

I also have to admit that season 9 is my favourite Carver era season, and overall I don’t like the seasons so much as loving certain episodes, and having a whole lot I don’t like in between. Dabb’s crack team of writers demonstrated what it was like to enjoy every single writer except Buckleming, and have a much more reliable run of episodes in a row consistently so if I was comparing them, especially with hindsight, Carver era is really left in the dust for me. My only regret is that Buckleming never retired early and left the show in the hands of competent adults for a full season.

To really emphasise how much I trust the writers these days, I’m pretty much assuming without watching them that the dozen episodes I haven’t watched will be good and I’ll have a great time watching them, and that Bobo’s last episode will be amazing quite apart from the bizarre mark it left on the historical record. 

[lydia-bell]

The Twelfth Time’s the Charm

Happy TBTP Holidays, @mysugarglidersrox​! I wrote you a bit of AU Stragan fluff (mostly). I hope you enjoy it!

[Edit: now with AO3 link!]

The Twelfth Time’s the Charm

Alex finally made it to the front of the line for signings. She'd let everyone else go ahead of her because she wanted to have a bit of fun without worrying that she was holding anyone else up. Handing the hardcover to the author, she said "I'm really looking forward to reading this. The chapter you read was pretty compelling."

"Thank you," he said, giving a small nod of acknowledgement. He was even prettier up close, those bright blue eyes catching and holding her attention. 

"So, to whom shall I make this out?"

"Alex Reagan." She waited to see if he would make the connection.

"Is that spelled with..." his voice trailed off. He looked up at her, his brow slightly furrowed. "Alex Reagan. Have we met?"

"No, we never did quite manage it," she replied lightly. Maybe if I'd called a twelfth time."

He actually looked abashed. It was a good look on him. "Of course. The reporter." Then his eyes narrowed a bit and he said, "I hope you aren't still trying to get me to agree to an interview."

"Nope. We wrapped on that story months ago. I just thought it would be fun."

He relaxed then and started to sign her book. "Is 'Reagan' spelled with or without an 'a'?"

"With. It used to be pronounced like the president but I guess my dad's family decided they didn't want the association. It was easier to change the pronunciation than the spelling."

He laughed, signed the book, and handed it back to her. 

"I hope you didn't take it personally when I didn't call back, Ms. Reagan. But at the time, I was very much focused on finishing this book, and in any event I'm afraid I've never enjoyed talking with the press."

"It's OK, lots of people don't."

"I presume you were able to find someone else to talk to."

"Oh, sure. Though the whole 'paranormal investigator' well ran a little dry after that. Maybe if you'd returned my calls, we could have done a whole series on it," she teased. 

"I'm sure I'm not that fascinating," he demurred.

"Oh, I don't know."

He chuckled. "You have a way with flattery, Ms. Reagan."

"Alex."

"Alex. I haven't had dinner yet. Would you be interested in joining me?"

"I think I'd like that a lot, yeah."

***

Strand—he'd said to call him Richard but she was struggling a bit to adjust—wanted some good, fresh seafood because "it's not the same in Chicago." That was fine with Alex, so they found an oyster bar a couple of blocks from the bookstore. Once they'd placed their orders, and thus run out of obvious small-talk fodder, she wasn’t sure what to say next. She was feeling oddly nervous, like this was a date with stakes instead of a spur-of-the-moment meal with a (granted, hot) former prospective interview subject.

She decided to ease into the conversation by asking about something she knew he would want to talk about.

"So, what inspired you to write your book?"

"I'm trying to do my part to encourage rational thinking in the world, against the tide of all of the forces that seem to be pushing in the opposite direction."

It was really unreasonable, Alex reflected, to be attracted to someone who talked like that all the time. But here she was. "Sure, but I meant more like, why this particular book, and why you?"

"Let's just say that I have experience with," he paused, "family members who have turned to the occult in times of crisis. It didn't provide the answers they were looking for, and it probably prevented them from doing something more useful."

"Oh. I'm sorry to hear that."

"Thank you."

They both fell quiet for a moment as the waiter brought their food. When he'd gone, Richard continued as if he'd never stopped.

"The impulse to turn to paranormal explanations is understandable in some ways. Especially for people who have suffered trauma, or who lack a proper understanding of science and statistics. Other people have a psychological need to feel that they're special, that they have secret knowledge of some hidden aspect of the world. Some people are just looking for a break from the mundane. Of course there are other outlets that for these impulses—things like conspiracy theories or radical political movements, for instance. Either way, if people aren't careful about how they get their needs met, they can become targets. They can delude themselves. I want to prevent that, as much as I can."

"Wow," Alex said. "I guess that's...I don't know, deeper than I expected it to be?" Off his raised eyebrow she added, "That may have come out wrong. I guess I just expected something more along the lines of the videos I've seen you in."

"Ah, yes. Less human nature, more ripping apart the claims of charlatans."

"Something like that, yeah."

"Well," he admitted, "there's some of that too."

Alex laughed.

"Speaking of charlatans," Richard continued, "I certainly hope you found someone to represent the rational point of view on your show."

"We couldn't really find another person with your particular profile, but we did talk to a couple of skeptics. And a woman named Arianna Asadi called me..."

Richard groaned softly.

Alex laughed. "What? She said she heard I'd been calling around to paranormal researchers, and she wanted to make sure I didn't get the wrong idea. She warned me off of them!"

Richard huffed. "Ms. Asadi is an odd case. She purports to be a serious researcher. She even offers very well-founded debunkings of the ghost hunters and so-called psychics who prey on people looking for answers and meaning. And then she publishes books about 'historical hauntings'. I believe she's actually sincere, but it's all very frustrating."

"Well, she thinks highly of you."

"And what makes you say that?"

"That she said she admires your body of work." He actually blushed a little. Alex grinned and continued. "Anyway, you're right about the debunking. She asked who I'd talked to so far, and when I told her, she immediately listed off all these tricks they do to make it seem like lights are going out on their own and things like that. It was amazing, she basically described everything that happened with Emily Dumont and the old psych hospital. I think Dumont must do the same stuff a lot."

"Oh, I assure you, she does."

"See, it could have been you, explaining all this to our listeners," she teased.

"It could. But to be honest, knowing that you'd been talking to people like Dumont and Abruzzi, I wasn't sure what kind of show you were making or whether I wanted to be part of it. And anyway, I needed to focus on my book. I'm trying to reach as wide an audience as possible."

"Well, that episode was only downloaded 100,000 times, so I can see how that might not be a big enough audience."

His eyes widened. "I apologize. To be honest, I have no idea how many people listen to shows like yours. I'm not really familiar with the podcasting medium."

"I'd noticed."

"I shouldn't have assumed."

It was fun having him a bit on on defensive, a bit flustered. "It wasn't very intellectually rigorous of you."

"It wasn't," he agreed.

"It did help that we got a big boost from the mothership—from Pacific Northwest Stories," she admitted. "But yeah, the show's doing pretty well, and we have enough sponsors these days to keep us in plane tickets and free socks, so I have no complaints. Well. I might want to do something a little more substantial at some point. But this is fun."

"So if you were to do something a little more substantial, as you say, what would it be?"

"I don't know. Maybe people who are working on climate change mitigation. Like, we still have to think about reducing emissions, but there are lots of people who've just basically decided that's not going to work or it's not going to be enough and are figuring out how they're going to live in the new climate. It's kind of depressing? But also kind of hopeful. There's a lot of people doing that work around Seattle. A lot of Indigenous people, in particular. I don't think it would be hard to at least get a mini-series out of it."

"That's a big departure from interviewing Emily Dumont."

She laughed. "It is! Don't get me wrong, I definitely think there's room for both kinds of stories in the world. All kinds of stories. But I just feel like I want to branch out a little."

"Well, I hope you get a chance to do that show sometime soon," he said. "It sounds like a subject worthy of your talents."

OK, wow. And he'd said she had a way with flattery. "Thanks. So, um. What about you, what's next for you?" she asked.

"I had to basically put the functions of the Strand Institute on hiatus while I finished the book, so I'll work on getting that running again," he said. "Also, as it happens, I'll probably be back in Seattle a few times in the next few months."

"Oh?"

"Yes, my father lived here before his death. No condolences necessary," he said, pre-empting her, "it was almost 20 years ago now. But there are still some aspects of his estate that need to be dealt with, including the sale of his house."

"Oh, well. I can show you around, if you'd like. When you come back."

"I would like that very much."

The waiter came with the check. Alex started to say something about paying her share but Richard said "Please, allow me. I did invite you to dinner, after all." She had to admit to herself, as she watched the waiter show Richard how to settle the bill on his iPad, it was something of a relief; the prices had been frankly terrifying on a journalist's salary.

As they were walking back to her parking spot, they passed a quiet-looking bar. Richard stopped in front of it.

"Would you like to get a drink?" he asked.

Yes. She took a deep breath. "It sounds nice, but, I don't think that's a good idea. I had that beer with dinner, and it was a while ago so I should be OK, but I have to drive."

"Of course." He hesitated for a moment. "Although, if you don't want to drive home...you don't have to."

"Ah." It wasn't a complete surprise, but—OK, yes, maybe she was stereotyping because of his age and his manner, but he hadn't struck her as a sex-on-the-first-date kind of guy.

She must have come across as pretty unenthusiastic, because he added, "That's not why I paid for dinner."

"I know." And she did. He wasn't really smooth enough to be a manipulator...unless, of course, he was such a good manipulator that he was only faking the bluntness and questionable social graces in order to lure her into a false sense of security.

It didn't seem likely.

Did she want to have sex with him? (Well, yeah.) Did she even like him? Everybody had said he was kind of a prick, and they weren't wrong. But he wasn't just that, either. Maybe it was his obvious passion for his work, or maybe it was just that she'd seldom known anyone quite so confidently, exasperatingly himself—even if that self might be, well, a little stuffy and self-important. He wasn't even a little bit charming but he was somehow still endearing. (He'd also been very respectful to the waitstaff, and that was always a good sign.)

She was pretty sure she liked him. He was a challenge, no doubt—but Alex was never deterred by a challenge. But she had a stupidly early morning tomorrow and also, God, she hadn't worn her pretty underwear or shaved or anything, and it was silly, yes, but she liked to make a good first impression.

And then she imagined saying that out loud and how ridiculous he would find it. "The male libido," she imagined him saying sternly, "isn't deterred by those things. Women are far more concerned about their body hair than men are."

God help her, the thought made her giggle. She suppressed it, though—it didn't seem polite to start laughing right after someone asked you to sleep with them. "I'm very, very tempted," she said. "But it's late, and I have an 8am meeting for some ungodly reason."

"I understand."

"But," she continued, poking him gently in the chest, "I'm going to hold you to that promise to look me up the next time you're in Seattle."

He smiled, probably the warmest smile she'd seen on him all night. He really was very attractive, damn it. "Good."

In a couple of minutes they were back at her car. Neither one of them seemed to be sure what to do next, so she unlocked it, but didn't make a move to get in.

"Do you want me to drive you back to your hotel?" 

"What? Oh. No, thank you. I'll be fine." He seemed very distracted all of a sudden, like he was looking past her, or just a bit over her head. She turned around, but there was nothing there. Just deep shadows.

"Everything OK?"

"Of course. I just thought I saw something." 

"OK. Well. Good night?"

"Good night." A bit hesitantly, he bent toward her.

He was so tall, she had to almost get on tiptoes to kiss him. It started out light, but they both lingered and it quickly became intense. Not sloppy, do-me-right-here-right-now intense, more like... like there was a lot of feeling under that buttoned-down exterior. They stepped further into each other's space; he was so much bigger than her that his embrace was like being wrapped up in a cloak, and it could have been intimidating but it wasn't, it was warm, it was hot. He ran one hand through her hair and gently cupped the back of her head to pull her closer. Fuck, it was good.

To hell with 8am meetings, she thought. To hell with next time. She deserved some fun.

She pulled away, not far, but far enough to look him in the eye and say, "I think...I think I'd like to take you up on your offer after all."

His hand was still in her hair. "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

They got into the car to drive back to his hotel. She fumbled her keys a bit, making them both chuckle in that high-strung way of people who know something's about to happen. As they pulled away, she noticed that Richard was looking back at that same spot.

It was weird—all she could see were shadows.

[hutchhitched]

The Vintage Joshifer Series: End of Love—Chapter 19

End of Love by hutchhitched

A kazillion years ago, I started posting this story. I never intended for it to drag on this long in between updates, but life happens and so does writer’s block. I know there’s little readership in the Joshifer fandom anymore, but I needed to finish it. If you’re still around to read it, thank you. If you want to dive in, I’d appreciate it. You definitely don’t have to be a Joshifer fan to read it since Josh and Jen’s characters are historical actors and not versions of their modern selves.

Historical events in this chapter include the following:

Richard Nixon won the presidential election of 1968. He triumphed over Vice President Humphrey and third party candidate George Wallace, who famously defended segregation at the University of Alabama earlier in the decade. Nixon won by appealing to the Silent Majority, those who believed the radicalism of the 1960s had gone too far. During his presidency he worked to build a national Republican Party after it all but disappeared during the Great Depression during the 1930s. Nixon called this the Southern Strategy (downplaying civil rights by rejecting the GOP’s original stance of the anti-slavery party in 1860, when Lincoln won the election).

After winning the election, Nixon did stop further troop deployments to Vietnam and reduced the numbers already there. Instead, he instituted a bombing campaign of the Vietnam and neighboring Laos and Cambodia. This was called Vietnamization.

 Chicago, Illinois, November 1968

 “Hutch, what’s good?”

 “Andre, my man. It’s been too long.” Josh clapped his friend on the back and welcomed him into headquarters. Volunteers buzzed around them, and Josh reminded himself that spending time with a good friend in from out of town for a day was just as important as working to support the Democratic candidate for president—even though Josh was almost positive his party was going to lose the election.

 Nothing had been the same since Bobby died. The Kennedy magic was gone. Instead of the former Attorney General being the nominee, the current VP who was tainted by LBJ’s Americanization strategy in Vietnam would likely lose to Nixon. If that happened, and it almost certainly would, he knew the positive changes in civil rights and economic equality would disappear with when the GOP took power. It was beyond comprehension, but election day loomed in two days. Two days until the world fell apart.

 “Let’s grab lunch,” Andre suggested. When Josh hesitated, he offered, “My treat.”

 Reluctantly, Josh agreed, and they headed down the street to a local diner he and his friends had frequented during the campaign season. He settled into the booth and stared across the table at his friend. It had been too long. Since that night with the two girls. Before he admitted how much he cared about Jennifer. When he hadn’t sold out.

 “Fucking Nixon,” his friend swore, and Josh grinned. Leave it to Andre to put everything in the bluntest format possible.

 “What the fuck is ‘the silent majority’ anyway?” Josh asked with a roll of his eyes. “Too fucking scared to speak up for what’s right? Racist a majority of the time?”

 Josh was sick to death of Nixon’s campaign strategy—catering to what he termed the “Silent Majority,” a group the Republican candidate insisted comprised the bulk of American society and were sick of the protests in the country. Nixon argued conservatives who were okay with the status quo were the majority in the nation and only radicals demanded change from the government in treatment of women and minorities. It wasn’t true, but a lot of people bought it. Josh just assumed that meant most people were god damned stupid.

 No matter how hard he and other activists worked to right wrongs and get real democracy to win out against conservative assholes, they were met with GOP rhetoric that villainized the very people he’d marched with, who’d sat next to him in jail, who burned their draft cards along with him in unheard protests against American presence in Vietnam.

 Of course, the New Left had grown more radical, pushed for more change and faster, dropped out, doped up, and raged against Johnson’s administration. The problem was he and the other activists had worked and fought and hoped for real change, and the administration and rest of the nation was dragging its collective feet. Josh’s question was why hadn’t more people sought to right the wrongs he and so many of this friends saw as glaring inequalities that only weakened the state of the nation rather than strengthening it. It was time. It was past time, and he was getting really antsy.

 “So, how have you been? Really?” Andre asked. “The last time I saw you, you were hightailing it out of bed with two women in New Haven and coming here to get your girl. Seems like different priorities.”

 Josh shook his head and tried to work his mind around his friend’s words. He’d been feeling unsettled for a long while, but the conflict between him and Jennifer had been growing since the protests in August and her trip to Atlantic City to cover the pageant. He’d considered leaving while she was gone, but he couldn’t quite make himself slink away like a coward. He still had work to do in Chicago, and he loved his…whatever she was to him. They’d been living together for months, but he hated labels. She hadn’t pushed, and he’d been grateful for her willingness to let it go.

 But this election would change everything. He knew it, and he also knew he was biding his time.

 “I don’t know, man. It’s such a bad scene right now. Since Bobby and King and ’Nam and everything, this country’s a bomb.”

 “But you’re a good cat, Josh. You’re making things better.”

 Josh laughed and smiled ruefully. “Am I? It seems to me I’m getting laid a lot by a doll who works for the man instead of the people.”

 “Do you love her?”

 “I…” Josh paused and swallowed hard. He did. That wasn’t in question but admitting it was another thing completely. “She’s fab. She is.”

 “But?”

 “I should be doing more,” he admitted. “I don’t know what, but I keep feeling like I should bug out and work somewhere else. Or dropout all together. Go live with the beautiful people and leave everything behind. Get high and blitzed and commune with nature.”

 Andre took a bite of his burger and shrugged. “Sounds like heaven to me, man, but I don’t think you’d be happy that way. You’re going steady, right?”

 “I’m not sure—”

 “Hutch. Man. You’ve been shacked up with her for months. You’re not sleeping with anyone else. Tune in. You’re together, and you’ve been head over heels for her since college. Wake up,” Andre said, exasperated.

 Josh sat silently for several minutes as he processed the information. No one had forced him to face what was happening until now, and he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw. Jen left him the night of his graduation. Maybe he’d never really forgiven her for that. Perhaps that’s why escaping was always in the back of his mind, to punish her for hurting him so much. Or, it was also possible that he really wasn’t comfortable in such a position. He’d always been restless, always been someone who pushed the boundaries, and falling in love with Jennifer, who came from privilege and affluence, didn’t seem like it fit. None of this was fair to her, but that didn’t change how he felt.

 “Maybe I am,” he admitted, “but I’m not sure it’s enough.”

 “Then be up front with her once you figure it out. You both deserve that.”

 “After the election,” Josh breathed. “After Tuesday.”

 “By then we’ll know if the world’s ending or not.”

 “Right on.”

 ****

 The world ended. Josh sat on the couch in Jen’s apartment as the sun set and the room darkened around him. He’d chosen to watch by himself, unsure how he’d feel when Nixon and Spiro Agnew were declared winners and all the gains over the past eight years would be overturned in a matter of time. Jen was at work, covering local reaction to the election results, and he’d intentionally not watched with his activist friends. Hippies were either remarkably anti-political or flying high, and he needed to be lucid and engaged for this.

 Election results rolled in one after another, and none of it was good for the Democrats. Texas went blue, but the West went red. Big time. George Wallace stole the South for the Dixiecrats, who couldn’t reconcile themselves to JFK or LBJ’s Democratic party of Civil Rights but weren’t on board with the GOP either. A hundred years prior, Republicans were the party of Lincoln and “freed” the slaves.

 “People are fucking stupid,” Josh spat into the emptiness. “Racist fucks. God bless Texas for sticking it out.”

 One by one the states reported, and his hope for the future of his country sunk lower with each call for Nixon. At least there was hope for a pullout in Vietnam. That was big, but would that be enough to make up for what would happen domestically? If Johnson had been able to focus on his Great Society instead of getting caught up in Southeast Asia, things could have been so different.

 “Fuck the Cold War. Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

 When Nixon got 270 votes, Josh lit up a joint and took a long, hard drag. He stared at the TV, the electoral map, the celebration in California at Nixon’s headquarters, the concession speech by Humphrey. His muscles relaxed, his mind wandered, and he turned off the part of him that cared. He started drinking next, and he was blitzed by the time Jen returned. She looked at him, her face a mask of concern mixed with a hint of fear, and he knew she dreaded what he already knew he’d have to do soon. He couldn’t stay. He just couldn’t. He already couldn’t breathe, and the election wasn’t even official yet.

 Jennifer curled up on his lap, and he let her undress him. He couldn’t move. His limbs weighed a million pounds apiece, and he couldn’t feel anything except despair. She kissed him, and he responded, but he didn’t feel anything.

 “Josh?”

 He heard his name, but she was a million miles away from him. Her voice was barely audible, and her face swam in his vision. He wanted to leave, to getaway, to run. He must have vocalized his desperation because Jen raised her hand so he could see her palm. Four sugar cubes lay there, and he breathed a prayer of thanks as he put one on his tongue.

 Josh had tripped before, but none of the other acid he’d taken had given him quite the same effect. The apartment bent and sparkled as the drug spread through his system. Jen’s eyes shone beams of sunlight, and he swore rainbows spilled out of her mouth and ears. He tried to swallow them, his mouth against hers, his fingers wrapped in liquid gold that flowed from her temples and past her shoulders. He was warm and flying and soaring above the earth, and he felt nothing except his skin against hers.

 Every nerve ending was on fire, and her fingers against his chest created bright purple sparks that exploded into golden stars. She straddled him and rocked against him, and he idly wondered why. His lap was warm and damp. His mouth swallowed the diamonds on her chest, hard and cutting against his tongue. Jen’s head fell back, and he realized the diamonds were tits. He bit down hard on her nipple, and she screamed. It sounded like a folk song, a call for peace and justice.

 She grew louder, and he sang with her. Her name fell from his lips, a litany of what was right with the world and everything that was dreadfully wrong. He needed her, and he had to escape. Tears streamed down his face and they glistened from her eyelashes. He palmed her ass and counted the contractions as she milked his cock. They were fucking, he realized. It felt like he was flying, but instead, he was shoving her onto the floor, bending her in half, and rutting against her.

 The floor underneath him shook and exploded into fiery heat. A vice gripped his cock. A melody of praise. Flashing lights. Unicorns flew by his head. His dad walked toward him, out of his wheelchair. His grandfather waved hi, even though he’d died several years ago. Josh wondered if he was going crazy, but he didn’t really care.

 Josh sat up, and Jen lay in a heap on the floor. His right hand jacked his dick mindlessly. It was wet and sticky, just like the puddle beneath his girlfriend. That’s what she was, he admitted. It was easier in his altered state, easier to accept the truth that they were together. She was radiant, skin glowing, as she watched his hand get faster and faster.

 When she spoke, it was in a foreign language. Urdu, maybe, or ancient Greek. Whatever it was made complete sense to him.

 “Jerk it, baby.”

 She reached over and took his cock from him, and he realized he was the one talking, not her.

 “I don’t know Urdu,” he slurred.

 “I do,” she said before swallowing him.

 Her cheeks hallowed out, and he fucked her mouth hard. He was crying, and she joined him as he thrust down her throat.

 “Did I hurt you?” he asked, although he was still inside her. He should have asked if he was hurting her because he hadn’t stopped. He didn’t want to stop. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to go.

 He had to. He had to. He had to. He had to.

 His body split in two. Part of him drifted up to the ceiling and danced there on happy feet. The other sank into the floor in a puddle of melted wax. Streaks of cream-colored icing decorated Jen’s face, and he leaned over to lick her cheek clean. It wasn’t sweet enough. Needed more sugar.

 They had two more cubes. One on his tongue. One on hers. They stumbled to the bedroom. He flew around the room, his wings flapping, circling and swooping and riding the currents. He landed on the bed. The lights went out. She was on top. She was on his face. He was in her mouth. Waterfalls. Waves. Giggles and jokes and mapping body parts with tongues and fingers and marking each other with bands of dried moisture.

 Hours and minutes and seconds and days and decades and centuries passed. No time passed at all, and then a curtain pulled behind his eyes, and he slept.

 ****

 The next morning dawned with a throbbing headache, aching limbs, and a broken heart. He opened his eyes, and he instantly regretted losing control so badly the night before. Their bed was destroyed. The sheets were filthy, striped with evidence of multiple orgasms. The room stunk like sex and piss. His mouth tasted as if something had died inside, and he wanted to murder someone when he saw Jen curled into herself.

 Josh hadn’t been in control of himself last night, and he was scared to death he’d hurt her. She didn’t warrant that. She deserved better than him. She should be lavished with only the best. He’d always been less than he wanted for her.

 He vowed to do better.

 ****

 On Inauguration Day, he wasn’t doing better. January 20 came and went, and Josh had spiraled into a mess. High every day, he’d fallen into a cycle of depression and spent more days on his friend’s couches than doing anything even remotely productive. He was twenty-five and hated what he’d become. He had a brief moment of clarity on New Year’s Eve when he was convinced 1969 would be a good year, but then Nixon took office.

 The new president catered to racist southerners and turned a blind eye to FBI stings targeting the Black Panthers. Riots broke out, more men came home in body bags, and women raged. Jen stayed busy at work, while he tuned out. He avoided his family and Jackson’s. He barely talked to Jen. He was a mess, and he knew it.

 A few weeks after the inauguration, Nixon announced a reduction of American troops in Vietnam, and his younger brother called him from Stanford where he was enrolled in his first year of grad school.

 “The son of a bitch did it,” his brother said when Josh answered the phone.

 Josh blinked rapidly and attempted to ground himself. He was high, as usual, and he found he needed to concentrate inordinately hard to understand what the words his brother spoke meant.

 “Did what?” he garbled and slid down the wall to sit on the kitchen floor.

 “Nixon. He’s pulling us out of ’Nam. We’re safe.”

 “Safe?” he asked. “Safe from what?”

 “What’s wrong with you, man? Are you tripping?”

 “Not today,” Josh sighed and grinned dopily at the wall. “Maybe tomorrow. Definitely was yesterday.”

 Connor grunted in frustration and snarled into the phone, “Have you been paying attention to what’s happening? We’re not going to Vietnam. No more new troops. A pullback of boots on the ground. They’re calling it Vietnamization.”

 “Yay, America…” Josh drawled and waved his finger in the air in celebration.

 “Come to Cali, man. I’ll help you get straight.”

 “Why bother?” Josh asked. “It’s all going to hell anyway.”

 “Just come,” his brother insisted. “I don’t know what’s happened to you, but you’re not the big brother I know. You wanted to save the world, not wallow.”

 “We lost. As soon as Bobby died, it was over.”

 “If you’re not here in four days, I’m coming to get you,” Connor threatened. “Mom and Dad don’t need to know about this, but I’ll tell them if I have to.”

 “Don’t tell them,” Josh entreated. “Dad can’t take the stress. I’ll be there.”

 “Four days.”

 Josh replaced the receiver and looked around the apartment. There were so many good things about his relationship with Jennifer. He’d loved her for a very long time, but he wasn’t where he needed to be—physically or mentally. He wasn’t an undergrad anymore, and he wasn’t doing anything to help the world. He was dragging her down, and the last thing he wanted to do was make life worse for her. Whether or not he liked it, Nixon was the president for the foreseeable future. Josh needed a change of scenery, and his kid brother was a genius. If anyone could help him get back on track, it was Connor.

 With a breaking heart, he entered the bedroom, grabbed a rucksack and started packing. He shoved his clothes into the bag but was careful to leave some of his things that Jen loved to wear when they were alone in their apartment. He grabbed a few books—his dog-eared copies of The Catcher in the Rye, Howl, and On the Road—and his toothbrush. He shuffled through a stack of papers and found his draft card, which he shoved in his front pocket. Once he got to Palo Alto, he and Connor could burn them together in celebration. When he had everything he needed, he grabbed a pencil and a notepad and wrote Jen a note.

 Dear Jen,

 I know you’ve been expecting this for a while, but I didn’t mean to leave while you were at work. I know I have to, though, or I won’t be able to walk away. I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you at Berkeley, but I was too stubborn and terrified to admit it. You’ve always had the same fire as me, even if it’s been directed somewhere else than mine. I’ve lost myself. I’ve got to find the spark again. You deserve that. You’ve always been better than me. You shouldn’t settle for someone broken. Right now, I am. When I’m fixed, I’ll let you know. I love you. Don’t ever doubt that. You’ve been the best part of me for a very long time. I’m so sorry.

 Always, Josh

 He was crying by the time he finished writing. He’d put this off for so long because he wasn’t strong enough to leave, but Connor’s phone call had woken something in him he hadn’t been able to find for ages. He’d call her in a few months—once he had himself together again. He wouldn’t leave her without any word, the way she had with him. He wondered for a second if he was punishing her because of what she’d done, but leaving her was much more of a penalty for him than it was for her.

 He swiped at the note he wrote her, and the tear that had fallen smeared his name. He was already fading in this place. All that was left was to walk out the door.

 Just as he turned to go, he noticed a picture of her peeking out from the corner of her desk. Her long hair was down and falling over her shoulders in blonde waves. She wore a white, high-collared lace dress that made her look like an angel. He tucked the image in his wallet and grabbed his bag before slipping through the door and locking it.

 He was to the bus station within ten minutes and halfway across the state before she found the note. He was almost to California before she stopped crying.

[androgyne-acolyte]

The Radical Queer Gospel

(My first try at a sermon, for Pride Sunday 2019. You can also listen on Soundcloud.)

Why do we need a Pride Sunday? Especially in June? [Note: our local Pride festival is held in July.]

Because there is still a great lie that queer people — LGBTQ+ people — and Christians can’t get along.

I’ve had people on the internet tell me that my decision to go into ministry as a genderqueer person is worthless, because “the belief system of some two-thousand-year-old desert tribe didn’t care about being nice to gay people”. We routinely get messages telling us our church sign is wrong.

Anyone can spout talking points about this; but wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. [cf. Matthew 11:19]

I’m going to tell you about Jesus today; how he lived, and what he taught. For me, there is something powerfully relatable about the shape of Jesus’ life; not just as a person of faith, but as a queer person. I want to talk about how Jesus’ story resembles, in many ways, nothing so much as a queer life — with all the upheaval, scandal, and confounding of expectations that implies.

I’m certainly not saying that Jesus was gay, or trans, or intersex. Queer is a more expansive term than that, and is a much more immediately transgressive term; it’s a term, quite honestly, that is still very much connected to its origins as a term of abuse. While it can refer to anyone who experiences homophobia or transphobia, it carries with it a connotation of a way of being that goes against the grain; a state of being not quite one thing and not quite another.

But, fair warning: its use is sometimes quite contentious, even discouraged, within the wider LGBTQ+ community, especially when used by people who would not consider themselves “queer”. I’m using it today, however, because I’m speaking from my own point of view.

Jesus is born as an ordinary peasant, the son of a teenage mother and a carpenter — you know the story. He lives under military occupation by the Roman Empire, which has annexed all the best land; demands punitive taxes to build palaces in fortified seaport towns; has taken over the Jerusalem Temple, hiring and firing high priests at will, and doesn’t hesitate to violently crush any sign of dissent.

But as Jesus grows up, he starts to realize that he is called to be something different, something that will disturb the very fabric of the society that he lives in. He finds community through John the Baptist, a strange, wild figure who has quite a following, mostly among the more downtrodden parts of society — and through John he gets initiated into a new kind of life, a new way of being.

Then, Jesus begins to get noticed. Imagine the young Jesus, certainly no older than I am now, speaking in the synagogues all across the countryside of Galilee. And when he gets to his hometown of Nazareth, he stands in front of all his family and friends and begins to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives … to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” … The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-21)

This reads, to me, like a coming-out narrative. Because Jesus immediately follows up this seemingly empowering message with a bunch of uncomfortable truths that they don’t want to hear — namely, by citing the story of the prophet Elijah to make the point that God works from the margins of society, and plants the seeds of prophecy and change from the bottom up. “No prophet is accepted in their own country,” declares Jesus — and the congregation who had just minutes before said “Wow! This kid is going places! Joseph, isn’t this your son?” turn around and try to run him out of town.

There is something else here that the gospels aren’t quite obvious about. Jesus is giving up his place in the family structure that bound Judean culture together; striking out on his own, all the way to the raggedy edge — to share his message of healing and justice and resilience in the face of Roman occupation with those whom his people would have considered foreigners and outcasts.

It’s almost certain that Joseph assumed that Jesus would come of age and take on his father’s trade, inheriting his tools and going to work as a day labourer in Roman construction projects. All of a sudden, that’s not going to happen — because Jesus has fallen in with a very strange crowd; he’s been influenced by these people, and has come back home full of uncanny zeal and radical ideas.

I can imagine all too well the sight of Mary grieving for the image of the son she loved, who she assumed would grow up, settle down, and have children of his own — but all of a sudden he’s someone different; someone or something that can’t quite be contained. I can imagine this all too well because my own mother, my own father, have both gone through this.

But as it turns out, Jesus had discovered — he had understood, had even begun to embody — a kind of love that had never been thought possible; a kind of love that was so radical and so powerful that a lot of folks outright rejected it. The people in power certainly weren’t into it.

This is a kind of story that should absolutely resonate with queer folks like me, because we have a very similar experience — with and through each other. The dawning realization that we are meant for a different kind of life; something which not everyone can understand, but which we suddenly realize is beautiful. That moment when you see someone else, in person or in the media, who embodies an indescribable feeling that you have kept tucked away inside of you for your entire life.

Isn’t it possible that those ordinary semi-literate fishermen, Peter and Andrew and James and John, had a similar experience — seeing something in Jesus that was so powerful, so compelling, that they couldn’t help but respond when he said “follow me”?

We queer people know a kind of love that wrenches us out of the closet and into the sunlight; a kind of love that makes us feel beautiful and strong and valued in a way that no other love has before; a love that opens our hearts to weep at the injustices done to our queer siblings, our trans siblings, our Two-Spirit siblings throughout history;

A love that can make us fearless, so that no catcalling, no misgendering, no homophobic preaching, no gay-bashing, no parental rejection can dissuade us from living out the kind of love to which we are called; the ways of being that upset cultural assumptions and power structures that most of us take as fact.

The love that took root in Jesus’ movement was one that breached walls and broke down borders; that reached across ancient religious schisms — such as the one between the Judeans and the Samaritans, who wouldn’t even speak to each other; that uplifted and empowered women; that extended all the way to the Ethiopian eunuch in the book of Acts — who would have been considered not only foreign, but ritually unacceptable as a person! — to heal and unify and plant the seeds of distributive justice through small, beautiful, subversive actions. And it didn’t stop there.

Near the end of the Gospel of Matthew, some of the Roman-backed chief priests and elders come up to Jesus and start questioning him. But he takes the wind out of their sails by telling them a parable:

“What do you think? A man had two sons [keep in mind that in a lot of Bible stories, the second son is the underdog who comes out on top]; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the [sex workers] are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” (Matthew 21:28-31)

(Look at it this way; at least no one can accuse me of not being Bible-based.)

That passage is a proverbial smoking gun; of all the sayings in the Gospels, it’s the one that is still immediately subversive to us today. But it’s true, Jesus explains, because there’s one thing that the most stigmatized, most down-and-out people in society have that the respectable folks who actually obey the traffic laws and run the Temple don’t — and that is, a thirst for hope and meaning and healing, and a reason to imagine that another world is possible.

So, I’ll say it right now: I am not going into ministry to uphold the stability of the mainline church in its current form. I am going into ministry in the hope that I can help make the church into a refuge, where everyone has the opportunity and the tools to heal and thrive and care for one another; where this transformative divine love is as present and as accessible as the air we breathe.

I believe that I am called, among other things, to be a minister to and for my queer and trans siblings, for my radical siblings; to be an instrument of disorientation and reorientation and renewal and healing for the wounds that the church at large has inflicted by confusing white heteronormative Western social conventions with the actual, radical teachings of christianity.

Because how many queer and transgender children have been turned away, just like Jesus was run out of his hometown, by parents and communities and churches who don’t understand them?

I think what Jesus says to his own people later on in the Gospel of Matthew is something he might say to my radical queer siblings, and to the church that has historically rejected them, today:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children [— your queer and trans and non-binary children —] together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate.” (Matthew 23:37-38)

Because the great tragedy here is that that vital, transcendent love should have been the church’s stock in trade all along. We, the church, have the capacity and the knowledge to reach back to our radical, counter-cultural roots and throw people a lifeline of meaning and hope and healing in a tempest-tossed world — but in the eyes of far too many, we are still at best a bastion of the status quo.

I’ve connected with some wonderful radical theological people through the internet; one particular person, by the name of Jane Nichols — a remarkable lesbian trans woman who just completed her master’s degree in theology — says it better than I ever could:

[O]ur stance towards exclusionary theology should not be ‘well, actually, if we look in the Bible, we can see that it never actually forbids being gay,’ but instead, ‘how dare [we] presume to limit God’s love? What blasphemous arrogance could have possibly led [us] to where [we ended up]? When did [we] start worshipping [our] own image in place of the Divine?’ (Jane Nichols, Tumblr post, May 2019)

Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.

Where I have found the Holy Spirit alive and well and pushing the envelope is on the margins of almost every sphere. Most immediately, I encounter it in the deep insight and vulnerability of the women clergy members in my life — and most recently, I have seen it spring to life in the passion and brilliance and vision of the lesbian and queer women clergy with whom I was privileged to commune on the sidelines of the former Maritime Conference.

By the way — Jesus’ story is hardly the only one that’s relatable to queer and trans people like us. The Bible is replete with stories of transformation, of coming into new identity and purpose, even gender-ambiguity, if you know where — and how — to look.

Yes, queer people — LGBTQ+ people — and Christians, followers of Jesus, can and should get along. Yes, queer people can be Christian, and Christians can be queer; and yes, we can and should learn from one another!

Because we have a remarkable common ground — a remarkable birthright:

We are called to go against the grain; to challenge the basic patterns in which our societies operate, and to embrace a new and powerful kind of love;

a love that reshapes the way we think about ourselves, a love that beckons us to healing and renewal, a love that calls us to take action and cry out for justice, a love that is itself a radical way of being; a love that is potentially more beautiful and more life-giving than the power structures of this world are ready to understand.

Amen.

June 2, 2019 — St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax

[clarste]

In general, there seems to be a lot of confusion over the plot of LoLK, so I figured I’d sum it up in far too much detail.

Junko is a historical/mythological figure from ancient Chinese history. Like, really ancient: ~2000-1500 BCE, making her around 4000 years old. Obviously there aren’t any good records from back then, so all we know about that era comes from stories about it written hundreds of years after-the-fact. Anyway, she’s described as a famously beautiful woman of the time whose beauty hid an evil heart because she plotted to murder her husband. Although given that her “husband” was just the guy who conquered her country, and who killed her previous husband and also her son, from a modern perspective you might see it as her being in an abusive relationship with her rapist. For the record, “Junko” is literally just the historical figure’s actual name, pronounced in Japanese. It’s not an oblique reference.

Anyway, in Touhou her murdered husband (Houyi) has been conflated with another Houyi from a different story who was married to Chang’e. The Touhou Junko therefore extended the scope of her revenge to Chang’e, who maybe we could assume was also involved in the death of her son. Or maybe not, and Junko was just mad with grief and lashing out at anyone nearby. It’s open to interpretation, but we’ll probably never know since Junko purified herself of her past, and therefore her memories. All she knows now is that she wants to kill Chang’e, and doesn’t need anything so petty as a reason to do so. As a divine spirit Junko can be assumed to have been formerly human: she was literally just an ordinary Chinese woman at first.

Chang’e is imprisoned in the Lunar Capital. The moon rabbits seem to feel a sense of loyalty to her, above any other Lunarian. She’s immortal. We really don’t know all that much about her, but it probably couldn’t hurt to think of her as Moon Kaguya. Anyway, since Chang’e is kept under guard in the Lunar Capital, Junko’s been trying to get at her for a while now. Probably centuries, at least. The Lunarians know who she is and consider her a persistent threat.

Hecatia hates Lunarians and was more or less sympathetic to Junko. There’s a bit about Apollo mentioned in her profile (Houyi is also known for shooting down a bunch of redundant suns, which Hecatia has conflated with shooting down Apollo), but that seems to be mostly an excuse. Visionary Fairies in Shrine also mentions that perhaps she only cooperated with Junko to smuggle Clownpiece into Gensokyo during the confusion. Either way, Hecatia hates Lunarians and worked with Junko to siege the Lunar Capital. It’s worth noting that unlike Junko, Hecatia is powerful enough to fight the Lunarians directly, but chooses not to for whatever reason.

The “siege” was done by purifying Hell Fairies, including Clownpiece, and letting them frolic on the moon. This created an ever growing pool of pure lifeforce (kegare) which brought both life and death to the moon, to the horror of the Lunarians. The Lunarians weren’t able to enter such a death field to fight back, and since it was slowly growing it would eventually consume the entire Lunar Capital. Note that while no Lunarians were able to fight back, it’s certainly possible they sent some moon rabbits on unsuccessful suicide missions. This is unclear.

To resolve this catastrophe, Sagume came up with a radical plan: move the Lunar Capital. Specifically, to Gensokyo. Her plan to do so was to use her power over truth and lies to create the Urban Legend phenomenon in Gensokyo, where Urban Legends would come true when the proper conditions are met. By spreading rumors of the existence of the Lunar Capital in Gensokyo, it could become real in Gensokyo (ending all life in Gensokyo as an unfortunate side effect). To this end, she spread the rumors and let Sumireko get her hands on the Lunar Capital Occult Orb. With the preparations in place, all that was left was to pull the trigger by invoking whatever conditions are associated with the rumor (this is not made clear).

Which is where the invasion comes in. They weren’t there to fight: they were just there to scout things out and possibly set-up the necessary conditions to trigger the urban legend. There’s no point in sending ground troops to the place you’re going to drop an atomic bomb, after all. It was a covert ops mission, and their vehicle (the Mars Rover looking machine) was even enchanted to be invisible to youkai. No reason to poke the hornet nest. Because it was invisible to youkai, the only person who noticed it on the mountain was Sanae.

Eirin somehow caught wind of all this and decided she’d rather Gensokyo not be replaced by the Lunar Capital. To this end, she manipulated the standard incident resolvers (plus Reisen) into going to the moon on her behalf. In order to guarantee the success of this plan, she also gave them a special elixir that would allow them to see the future and avoid their own deaths. This elixir had some awful side effects such as detaching you from the concept of life and death, and therefore lifeforce/kegare, but she figured that wasn’t her problem. Canonically the protagonists refused to drink this suspicious elixir, but went where Eirin pointed them anyway.

After beating up some moon rabbits and passing through the dream world, the protagonists end up in a deserted Lunar Capital. Sagume had evacuated everyone to the dream world, with Doremy’s cooperation. It’s important to note here that Sagume can’t tell anyone what she’s doing, because doing so would guarantee the failure of her plan (because of her power which turns the truth into a lie). So Yorihime and Toyohime and Tsukuyomi are all in the dark about exactly what’s going on here, although perhaps they know that “Sagume has a plan” or something vague like that. The dream world contains a perfect replica of the Lunar Capital, so they all think they’re still on the moon. It seems that Sagume is given a ridiculous amount of authority in this situation. Either that, or she just thinks it’s absolutely necessary and plans to get court-martialed once it’s too late to take it back. I think it’s also interesting to note that there’s not a single soul but Sagume in the Lunar Capital: even the enemies are just automated drones under her control. Just imagine her being totally alone here, defending the capital both literally and figuratively on her own, with no support.

Anyway, Sagume immediately realizes that the protagonists are a gift from Eirin and tests you. Once the battle’s over, she decides that the best course of action is to trust Eirin and reveal everything to the protagonists. That’s the only way she can convince them to go after Junko, but doing so also ensures the failure of everything she’s worked towards so far. But she thinks that’s worth it, because she didn’t really want to move the Lunar Capital to Gensokyo anwyay. As soon as she thinks there’s a chance to do it another way, she bets everything on that dark horse. But it’s still a gamble: she has no guarantee that Eirin’s plan will succeed either. This is a leap of faith for Sagume.

The protagonists go on to beat up Clownpiece and Junko. Canonically, they never get hit, since if you do so then you get a bad ending. So the canon route here is a no-miss Legacy clear. Pretty impressive. Seeing the protagonists arrive, Junko immediately surrenders, her plan having been foiled by the completely unexpected move of sending Earthlings to fight her. This wasn’t a contest of strength in the first place, it was a contest of wits, and she lost. Although she fights them anyway for pleasure.

Afterward, she and Hecatia realize that the Lunarians (including Chang’e) are hanging out in the dream world and try to attack them directly from there. The protagonists stop them. Junko becomes interested in Gensokyo, and Hecatia sends Clownpiece there because it’s a nicer plan to live than Hell. Sagume later visits Eirin in person, although we’re not privy to what they discussed. Gensokyo is still affected by the urban legend phenomenon, because Sagume either couldn’t or simply didn’t bother to undo it, but is no longer in immediate danger of the Lunarians pulling the trigger. Reimu probably throws a party?

[knightbrienne]

First of all I want to apologise for calling your father something he isn't, I'm really sorry about that. Now I live in Germany and if the same happened here as in Charlottesville, it would be iilegal. They hold Nazi swastikas, which is considered a crime here, since it falls under Volksverhetzung (= incitement of the masses/people/to hatred). That doesn't mean that Germany doesn't have free speech. I can scream from the top of my lungs that Angela Merkel is a piece of shit or I could insult 1/6

a foreign head of state using offensive language (Böhmermann-affair) and it would be fine, but if I, for example, denied the Holocaust or gave the Hitler Salute, I’d be commiting a crime. Both America and Germany have free speech but I could say stuff in America I can’t legally say here and you couldn’t say stuff here you can say in America. The whole ‘crime or free speech’ is really controversial and it differs from justice sytsem to justice system as which something is considered. Limiting 2/6

free speech in that context shouldn’t be seen as ‘limiting free speech’ but rather preventing hate to spread and therefore a repeat of history. Honestly, when I found a few years ago out that Nazi symbols and gesture are legal in America, I was shocked. Personally, I don’t get it. Why legalise something even though you know it’s wrong and lead to WW || and the killing of millions of innocent people? It doesn’t make sense to me to legalise it just to discuss how to solve it. For changing 3/6

views, there are two persons that come to my mind. One is a classmate of mine who absolutely loved Erdogan because that’s what her parents taught her. I used to have very heated discussions with her about him and I always became frustrated that she didn’t have facts to reason with. My parents are Alevi Kurds and he’s the reason why they became refugees, because they coudn’t name their true believes and nationality without getting in jail. At some point my classmate started to educate herself 4/6

some point my classmate started to educate herself. She questioned her opinions, researched, and now she hates him as much as I do. She’s not my only classmate that changed her views but she’s the only one who did it so drastically. The other person is someone on tumblr who was islamphobic but didn’t think he was. Our discussion lasted for weeks, he said so much bullshit about refugees, Alevis and Islam but at the end he apologised. 5/6

You’re completely right in that free speech differs from justice system to justice system! Unfortunately, some radical groups on the left and right wing want to take judgment of free speech into their own hands, instead of seeking the legislative or judicial backing that Germany utilizes. In a very similar way, a lot of local leaders in American cities are calling for the removal of Confederate statues without public discussion. While I agree with the decision to remove the statues, the fact that they’re doing so without some prior forum for discussion and consensus is somewhat disturbing. My dad likened it to the mandatory defacement and destroyal of (far less offensive) historic statues in China during the Cultural Revolution; it bears uncomfortable similarities to authoritarian governments.

You brought up two cases of people with whom you had meaningful conversations before they changed their views. I think it’s safe to assume you didn’t attack their personal characters or tell them to just shut up because their worldviews were dehumanizing (which is what a lot of liberals are doing to alt-right figures right now). Perhaps individual debates and discussions are the path to change, but that necessitates people being willing to respect, listen to, and spend time peacefully expressing their opinions to people who hold opposite and potentially offensive stances.

If we’re denying Neo-Nazis the right to assemble and tearing down Confederate statues without attempting to discuss and educate first, we’re asking for further polarization. It will incite more of the bitter, irrational hatred that we’ve been condemning, simply because we have not made an effort to reach out to the opposite side, consider their beliefs, and explain our decisions to them. I understand that some people believe that it is not our responsibility to inform oppressive/privileged people, but there are also people like you who are willing. Anon, you’ve personally engaged with people with hateful, racist worldviews that hurt you and successfully switched their perspectives. That is incredible, and I hope that inspires more people to do the same.

Edit: Also, apology accepted. :) And no worries, I know my original post was pretty charged, and I wasn’t too happy with my dad at the time either.

[mediaeval-muse]

Video Game Review: Vampyr (Dontnod Entertainment, 2018)

Genres: action RPG, horror

Premise: Players assume the role of Jonathan Reid, a newly-turned vampire who struggles to balance his thirst for blood with his Hippocratic Oath during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.

Platform Played On: PC (Windows)

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

***Full review under the cut.***

I am evaluating this game based on four key aspects: story, characters, gameplay, and visuals.

In-Game Triggers: violence; blood; body horror; mentions of: xenophobia, sexism, self-harm, suicide

Story: I’m honestly not sure how to talk about the main plot of this story because on the one hand, the post-World War I/Spanish Influenza historical setting made the vampire narrative feel fresh. I feel that too often vampire stories are set in the Victorian era, which is understandable, but the choice of setting for this plot made vampire lore interesting to me again. On the other hand, the overarching narrative that deals with the source of the pandemic and the quest for Jonathan Reid’s maker is BANANAS. Without giving anything away, it was a strange mix of very down-to-earth conflicts (pandemics, social class, etc.) with mythology and folklore - and not just the vampirism bits! I honestly can’t say the main was laid out well, or that it was engaging. I much preferred running around talking to NPCs and learning about their lives. But I did enjoy some elements of the bigger plot, such as the struggle against the vampire hunter group known as the Guard of Priwen, and the ultimate reveal of how the epidemic started. Those were well done, I think, because they kept the focus on London, and I enjoyed seeing how vampires would fare in such a setting. When we ultimately branched out to figure out who Reid’s maker was, I was less enthused because it felt too mystical and too disconnected from the Spanish Flu/post-War Britain.

Characters: Because this game is an RPG, characters are perhaps the most important aspect of the narrative, and in my opinion, Vampyr did very well on that front. Jonathan Reid himself is an interesting figure in that he’s not only a doctor, but a war veteran who has some radical ideas regarding where to take medicine. Depending on how he’s played, he can be a compassionate healer or an arrogant bastard, so that’s pretty neat.

This game also features an array of named NPCs called “citizens,” who Reid can talk to as players explore the semi-open world layout. Talking to citizens gives players “hints,” or interesting tidbits about their past or secret activities they participate in (for example, one citizen is involved in an underground medical dispensary). The more hints you unlock, the more dialogue options you have, and sometimes, you have to go back and talk to citizens you’ve conversed with before to unlock more dialogue and more side quests. I really liked this aspect of the game. It didn’t feel tedious to me. Rather, it felt like I was learning all the juicy gossip around London. For the most part, these citizen backstories were compelling and varied, and I was genuinely impressed that they dealt with issues of social class, race, gender, sexuality, and PTSD.

I do wish, however, that some of the more major NPCs were given stronger motivations, especially the women. Although I liked Reid’s sister, Mary, and his love interest, a fellow vampire named Elizabeth, I wish they had more to do and were integrated more with the main plot. I also wish that Reid was given an option of romances rather than just one, or the option not to pursue a romantic relationship at all, mainly because that would enhance the RPG elements a little more.

Gameplay: Because Vampyr is an RPG, some gameplay elements will be familiar, such as skill trees, multiple dialogue options, experience points, etc. All of those worked fine for me and helped orient me in gameplay. There were also mechanics regarding crafting and research that were pretty straight-forward, so if you’ve played action RPGs before, these aspects shouldn’t feel too different.

Combat was admittedly a little clunky and felt repetitive after a while. I really think this game could have benefited with more stealth mechanics, similar to how you can choose between being a lethal tank or stealth assassin in something like the Deus Ex reboot. You are, after all, playing as a vampire. I did think it was clever, however, how your supernatural abilities are fueled by “blood” instead of “mana,” which you acquire by biting people in combat or by eating rats (you can also craft syringes which give a temporary boost to your blood bar).

But where I thought Vampyr really shined was in the way it asked players to balance the chaos level of each of the 4 districts that made up the semi-open world layout. Players can explore these districts and talk to “citizens,” unlocking backstories and performing medical examinations to see who needs treatment. Players can then decide to craft medicines and administer treatment, which will boost citizens’ XP and render the area more “stable” (so that it is clear of monsters and offers more side quests). As I discussed above, talking to citizens gives players “hints,” or interesting tidbits about each citizen’s past or secret activities they participate in. The more hints you unlock, the more dialogue options you have, but also, more hints and a healthy medical slate gives the citizen a higher “blood purity” level, which will grant Reid more XP if the player decides to kill them. It’s an interesting approach to RPGing, as the mechanics literalize Reid’s personal struggle between healing and bloodlust.

Traveling between districts was admittedly a little annoying. This game could have benefited from fast travel between “hideouts” (the safe houses where you can level up and craft). I also wish the game didn’t use an auto-save system, just in case the player wanted to go back to a previous checkpoint. It was personally anxiety-inducing to know that once I made a choice, whether on purpose or because I accidentally hit a button, that I had to live with it. The auto save might heighten the suspense for some and make the stakes feel higher, but I personally wasn’t a fan.

Visuals: I’m a sucker for a character with a well-tailored suit, so I’m perhaps a little biased when I say I love the look of Reid’s design. Suit aside, I really liked the spooky animations when Reid used his vampire powers, and I especially loved that they were rendered in a deep red (to mimic blood of course) that contrasted nicely with the gloomy color palate of disease-ravaged London.

Speaking of which, even though the 4 districts were largely grim and grey, and NPCs were dressed to match, I did like the early 20th-century, post-World War I setting. The textures were all really nicely realized and the details were splendid.

I did notice, however, a drop in frame rate from time to time, which would have been fine if it didn’t interfere with combat or mess up my navigation when trying to figure out where I was. My screen would almost stutter in the middle of a fight, causing me to lose some life because I couldn’t see where the hits were coming from. I also wished the camera had moved around a bit during dialogue, so it wasn’t fixed on one face the whole time.

Recommendations: I would recommend this game if you’re interested in the early 20th-century, post-World War I history and psychological consequences, turn-of-the-century medical science, plagues and pandemics, vampires and vampire lore, and RPGs.

Final Verdict: Despite some technical missteps and randomness of the overall plot, I was addicted enough to the RPG elements, visual design, and hint/heal system regarding citizens that I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT YOU TALK

I'm designing a new dialect of Lisp. It has a long way. This isn't true in all fields.1 The number of people you interact with is about right.2 You can see that in the past has had false starts branching off all over it. 06 and 1/1-n to see if it makes the company prey to a lawsuit. C, Java, Perl, Python, you notice an interesting pattern. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. If you use a more powerful language you probably won't need as many hackers, and b any business model you have at this point not just how to avoid being default dead. If startups are the first to go. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way.

Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but because software is so easy to do: find a way to make people happy. Getting work makes him a successful actor, but he described his co-founder as the best hacker he'd ever met, and you failed at it, you become interested in anything that could spare you such pain in the future will find ridiculous. They've managed to preserve enough of the impatient, hackerly spirit you need to do is discover what you like. Skyline Drive runs along the foothills to the west. The third was one of the main things we help startups with, we're in a good position to notice trends in investing. Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't get enough of it.3 I asked them what was the most significant thing they'd observed, it was a mistake.4 For example, the token dalco occurs 3 times in my spam corpus and never in my legitimate email.

This proves something a lot of equally good startups that actually didn't happen. But think about what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something that sounds like spontaneous, informal speech, and deliver it that way, who can argue with you? What you should not do is rebel.5 When did Microsoft die, and of what? Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?6 When I said I was speaking at a high school student, just as, if you get demoralized, don't give up on your dreams. The problem with American cars is bad design.7 A company that grows at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is the reason. Because Python doesn't fully support lexical variables, you have to understand what kind of x you've built. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing.8 Programmers learn by doing, and b reach and serve all those people.

The important thing for our purposes is that, at this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be built out, and that's what it's going to be about. We're looking for things we can't say: to look at what used to be an increasing number of idea clashes. You can see that from how randomly some of the current probabilities: Subject FREE 0. Cluttered sites don't do well in demos, especially when they're projected onto a screen. The best plan, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.9 So don't assume a subject is really about. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of theorems that can be proven. It wouldn't be the first time, with misgivings.

If Galileo had said that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall, he would be right on target. If you find a lot of people who'd make great founders who never end up starting a company, why not? That's not a radical idea, by the standards of the desktop world. The second dimension is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Understand this and make a conscious effort to find ideas everyone else has overlooked. And if you want to make large numbers of users love you than a large number of companies, and that assumption turns out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand over investors. The twentieth century. It would be a bummer to have another grim monoculture like we had in the 1990s. Patterns to be embroidered on tapestries were drawn on paper with ink wash. If you're really getting a constant number of new startups?10 Facebook got funded in the Valley.11 And since fundraising is one of the best in the business.

American cars continue to lose market share. Customers are used to being maltreated. Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one. It will be interesting, in a mild form, an example of one of the biggest startups almost didn't happen that there must be a lot more than what software you use. That doesn't mean 16. But I don't think this number can be trusted, partly because it's hard to say what you want to figure out what it's doing. For founders that's more than a theoretical question, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe, and they'll say the same thing.12

Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most news about things going wrong. Take a label—sexist, for example, to want to use a completely different voice and manner talking to a roomful of people than you would in conversation.13 Better to harass them with arrows from a distance. Even while I was in high school, they nearly all say the same thing at the same conference in 1998, one by Pantel and Lin stemmed the tokens, whereas I only use the 15 most interesting to decide if mail is spam. Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. Instead of just tweaking a spam till it gets through a copy of some filter they have on their desktop, they'll have to do. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you want to know how to improve them. Go out of your way to make people happy. A surprising amount of the work of PR firms really does get deliberately misleading is in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to design for the user, but you have to give up on your dreams to what someone else can do, you make them by default.

The outsourcing type are going to be about the 7 secrets of success?14 But the way the print media are competing against. There is already a company called Assurance Systems that will run your mail through Spamassassin and tell you whether it will get filtered out. Systematic is the last word on work, however. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, this is actually good news for investors, because it implies you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence. So just keep playing. And you might have trouble hiring programmers.15 Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a new version almost every day that I release to beta users. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.16 Two of the false positives were newsletters from companies I've bought things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure.

Notes

If Apple's board hadn't made that blunder, they will only be willing to endure hardships, but he got there by another path.

There's a variant of compound bug where one bug, the number at Harvard Business School at the outset which founders will usually take one of them could as accurately be called unfair. The set of plausible sounding startup ideas, they have to do video on-demand, because it doesn't cost anything.

My feeling with the guy who came to mind was one cause of accidents. Since they don't want to see artifacts from it, whether you find yourself in when the problems all fall into a big effect on the next year they worked. Microsoft, not just the raw gaps and anomalies.

To a kid most apples were a couple days, but except for money. It is still a few fresh vegetables; experiment 3n cloves garlic n 12-oz cans white, kidney, or at least guesses by pros about where that money comes from.

Did you know about it. But wide-area bandwidth increased more than linearly with its size.

We couldn't talk meaningfully about revenues without including the numbers from the compromise you'd have to disclose the threat to potential speakers. I didn't.

Some introductions to philosophy now take the form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly neutral that they're really works of art are unfinished.

And that is largely determined by successful businessmen and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. So how do they learn that nobody wants what they made much of a startup. If you want to either.

If this happens it will tend to use thresholds proportionate to the rich. Steven Hauser.

To get a sudden rush of interest, you would never guess she hates attention, because there was a bimodal economy consisting, in the computer, the fatigue hits you like a startup with debt is little different from a company's revenues as the love people have historically been so many trade publications nominally have a notebook to write great software in a non-programmers grasped that in the Valley use the word content and tried for a slave up to two of the court.

Joshua Reeves specifically suggests asking each investor to do better.

If he's bad at it, and VCs will offer you an asking price. Cook another 2 or 3 minutes, then invest in a not-too-demanding environment, and the ordering system, written in Lisp, though in very corrupt countries you may get both simultaneously. Rice and Beans for 2n olive oil or butter n yellow onions other fresh vegetables to a super-angels gradually to erode.

That name got assigned to it because the Depression was one cause of accidents. Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written it? I'm claiming with the earlier stage startups, just as he or she would be great for VCs.

The Price of Inequality. It's a case of the other seed firms. Apparently the mall was not something big companies, summer 2010. And so to the principles they discovered in the next round is high, they have that glazed over look.

Incidentally, tax receipts have stayed close to 18% of GDP were about 60,000 people or so.

Wufoo was based in Tampa and they would probably a bad idea. I suspect five hundred would be lost in friction. In this essay. Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost that none who read it ever wished it longer.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Max Roser, Paul Buchheit, Dan Giffin paper, several anonymous CS professors, and Emmett Shear for their feedback on these thoughts.

[shirlleycoyle]

Racial Bias in AI Isn’t Getting Better and Neither Are Researchers’ Excuses

An AI-powered portrait generator went viral last week thanks to its ability to turn selfies into realistic Impressionist portraits. For people of color, however, the results leave much to be desired.

The flaw in AI Portrait Ars, an app built by researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, was first pointed out by Morgan Sung, a reporter at Mashable. She found that the app “whitened my skin to an unearthly pale tone, turned my flat nose into one with a prominent bridge and pointed end, and replaced my very hooded eyes with heavily lidded ones.” This result is both terribly disappointing and utterly predictable.

“I wasn’t surprised at the whitewashing at all, since I’m used to things like Snapchat filters lightening my skin, making my eyes bigger, narrowing my nose. But I was taken aback by how extreme it was,” Sung told Motherboard. “The painting that AI portrait built was a completely different face.”

In 2019, AI developers should know that algorithmic bias not only exists but is a serious problem we must fight against. So why does it continue to persist? And can we actually stop it? These are open questions that boil down to where you think the blame lies. Is it the case that these algorithms are exaggerating parts of human nature? Are algorithmic biases a reflection of our society’s systemic problems? In the case of the AI Portrait Ars, it may help to trace why it couldn’t draw the faces of people of color in order to figure out why this continues to happen.

Part of the problem lies with how AI Portrait Ars fundamentally works. The program relies on a generative adversarial network (GAN), meaning there are two types of algorithms pitted against each other as adversaries to create its portraits. The first type are generative algorithms, responsible for generating new data. The second type are discriminator algorithms, responsible for deciding whether new data belongs to the training dataset.

With AI Portrait Ars, the generator learns how to create realistic portraits of people and the discriminator learns how to discern which aren’t convincing enough based on the dataset. Datasets, then, are of the utmost importance in determining whether or not the GAN will read certain data (facial features) as authentic or not. The training dataset has over 15,000 images, but it’s important to remember where these images were likely pulled from.

“This was an experiment by one of our researchers. The images from the app’s users were deleted immediately from our servers after the Renaissance portrait was generated. The experiment has run its course,” IBM Research said in a statement to Motherboard.

“Also, the tool reflects the data it was trained on: a collection of 15,000 portraits, predominantly from the Western European Renaissance period,” the company continued. “In some cases, it produced a strong alteration of colors and shapes. That’s a reality of the style, not the algorithm.”

This experiment, however, mirrors dozens of other AI and facial recognition experiments that have had far more accurate results for white people than people of color. If the experiment proved anything, it’s that AI researchers continue to be drawn to experiments and research that perpetuate the biases we already know exist in AI research.

It’s also not actually a “reality of the style” of Renaissance art that people of color weren’t in paintings of the era. There are many examples of people of color in European art history, though they are largely assumed by the masses to be non-existent in art from the Renaissance.

“The material available for illuminating the lives of individual Africans in Renaissance Europe through the visual arts is considerable, though little known to the wider public,” a lengthy 2013 report from Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum called “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe” notes.

It is important to “understand the period in terms of individuals of African ancestry, whom we encounter in arresting portrayals from life, testifying to the Renaissance adage that portraiture magically makes the absent present. We begin with slaves, moving up the social ladder to farmers, artisans, aristocrats, scholars, diplomats, and rulers from different parts of the African continent,” it continues.

The problem with AI Portrait Ars reflects how, historically, technology often functions as an extension of the status quo as opposed to a great equalizer. Color film, for example, was initially calibrated to look best with white skin tones since they were the preferred consumer market. In the 1970s, what prompted the industry to even consider better rendering of darker colors was economic pressure from Kodak’s professional accounts. Furniture manufacturers were angry that their advertisements using Kodak color film didn’t capture the difference between dark-grained wood and light-grained wood, while chocolate confectioners were angry that the film couldn’t capture all the different shades of chocolate.

At this point, AI researchers—especially ones utilizing IBM’s Watson, should know better. In 2018, Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithm Justice League, published her MIT thesis analyzing facial recognition technology from IBM Watson, Microsoft, and Face++ (a Chinese artificial intelligence company). Buolamwini found that all of the programs had the highest error rates for dark-skinned women and the most accurate results with light-skinned men, but that IBM Watson had the highest disparity in the error rates between dark-skinned women and light-skinned men (the error rate was 34.4 percent higher for dark-skinned women). Buolamwini also found that as skin tones got darker, IBM Watson failed to correctly recognize a subject’s gender nearly 50 percent of the time.

To IBM’s credit, Buolamwini’s research pushed the company to radically improve its facial recognition technology. This, however, hasn’t stopped the problem of racial bias from reappearing in other IBM products like their AI Portrait Ars, or the industry at large. Until we can root out the biases baked into our society that keep reemerging in each new generation of technology, what is to be done?

Caroline Sinders, a machine learning designer who previously worked with IBM Watson, told Motherboard that part of the problem lies with a “lack of awareness that we need to test multiple genders or multiple races.” At the same time, Sinders asked whether the solution is as simple as more diversity in data. “When these failures pop up, it really does highlight a lack of diversity in the sets. But also having a more diverse dataset for things that use facial images poses a problem where better facial apps lead to … better facial recognition. Do we necessarily want that?”

That’s a valid question when applied to the many in-the-field uses of AI and facial recognition technology, many of which are deployed disproportionately by police against people of color. As Sinders mentioned, better facial apps leads to better facial recognition—but do we need yet another AI face app at all?

Today, the problem of getting datasets that represent populations accurately and the legacy of technology being used to preserve power systems are very much interlinked. In a New York Times op-ed, Buolamwini talks about the “coded gaze,” a phenomenon where “A.I. systems are shaped by the priorities and prejudices — conscious and unconscious — of the people who design them.” The extremely high rates of misidentification that plague facial recognition software when used on people of color have led to calls for its complete and total ban. These embedded biases can affect hiring prospects, misidentify innocent people, and give unaccountable actors in the private sector or law enforcement apparatus greater information about our personal lives, without our consent. Already some cities have already banned the technology, and Congress is expected to vote on legislation that would forbid face recognition in government-owned public housing.

All of this, however, makes clear that it’s not exactly clear what the best way to stop this is. Do we use more data to empower problematic technology? Do we use algorithms to de-bias other algorithms? Do we risk continuing to disrupt people’s lives while we figure this thing out? Maybe all this means that the answer is that we can’t, at least not without first questioning whether such fundamentally problematic technology should exist at all.

Racial Bias in AI Isn’t Getting Better and Neither Are Researchers’ Excuses syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[volunteerismandanarchy]

Why We Miss the WASPs

Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

New York Times, Dec 5, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps.html

The nostalgia flowing since the passing of George H.W. Bush has many wellsprings: admiration for the World War II generation and its dying breed of warrior-politicians, the usual belated media affection for moderate Republicans, the contrast between the elder Bush’s foreign policy successes and the failures of his son, and the contrast between any honorable politician and the current occupant of the Oval Office.

But two of the more critical takes on Bush nostalgia got closer to the heart of what was being mourned, in distant hindsight, with his death. Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart described the elder Bush as the last president deemed “legitimate” by both of our country’s warring tribes — before the age of presidential sex scandals, plurality-winning and popular-vote-losing chief executives, and white resentment of the first black president. Also in The Atlantic, Franklin Foer described “the subtext” of Bush nostalgia as a “fondness for a bygone institution known as the Establishment, hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools, acculturated by the late-night rituals of Skull and Bones, sent off to the world with a sense of noblesse oblige. For more than a century, this Establishment resided at the top of the American caste system. Now it is gone, and apparently people wish it weren’t.”

I think you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.

Put simply, Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

Foer suggests this nostalgia is mostly bunk, since the WASPs were so often bigots (he quotes Henry Adams’s fears of a “furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto”), since their cultivation of noblesse oblige was really all about “preserving [a] place at the high table of American life,” and since so many of their virtues were superficial, a matter of dressing nicely while practicing imperialism, or writing lovely thank-you notes while they outsourced the dirty work of politics to race-baiting operatives.

“Those who are mourning the passing of the old Establishment should mourn its many failures, too,” he writes. Which is fair enough: The old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, it had failures aplenty, and as a Catholic I hold no brief for its theology (and don’t get me started on its Masonry).

However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms. You can get rid of the social registers and let women into your secret societies and privilege SATs over recommendations from the rector of Justin and the headmaster of Saint Grottlesex ... and you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite, filling your schools and running your public institutions. 

Not only that, but you even end up with an elite that literally uses the same strategy of exclusion that WASPs once used against Jews to preserve its particular definition of diversity from high-achieving Asians — with the only difference being that our elite is more determined to deceive itself about how and why it’s discriminating.

So if some of the elder Bush’s mourners wish we still had a WASP establishment, their desire probably reflects a belated realization that certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion — and that the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive.

Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country.

The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it, because for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.

And somehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship — one that from the late-19th century through the middle of the 1960s was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended, and that certainly hasn’t been matched by our feckless leaders in the years since George H.W. Bush went down to political defeat.

So as an American in the old dispensation, you didn’t have to like the establishment — and certainly its members were often eminently hateable — to prefer their leadership to many of the possible alternatives. And as an American today, you don’t have to miss everything about the WASPs, or particularly like their remaining heirs, to feel nostalgic for their competence.

The interesting question is whether they had to die off as they did. The decline of the old establishment is often portrayed as a simple inevitability — with all those baby boomers storming the universities, all that demographic change sweeping away white Protestant America, how could the WASPs hope to preserve their rule?

Certainly something had to change. But along with the establishment failure in Vietnam, which hastened the collapse of the old elite’s authority, there was also a loss of religious faith and cultural confidence, and a belief among the last generation of true WASPs that the emerging secular meritocracy would be morally and intellectually superior to their own style of elite. Thus under '60s mandarins like the Yale president Kingman Brewster the WASP ascendancy did not simply fall; it pre-emptively dissolved itself.

I’m not sure that self-abnegation has aged well. In any scenario the WASP elite would have had to diversify and adapt. But its virtues were to some extent transferable to a more diverse society: The establishment had always been somewhat permeable to arrivistes, Jews and Catholics imitated WASP habits in the 1940s and 1950s, and in our era their admirable influence is still felt in figures as different as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

So it’s possible to imagine adaptation rather than surrender as a different WASP strategy across the 1960s and 1970s. In such a world the establishment would have still admitted more blacks, Jews, Catholics and Hispanics (and more women) to its ranks … but it would have done so as a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy, rather than under the pseudo-democratic auspices of the SAT and the high school resume and the dubious ideal of “merit.” At the same time it would have retained both its historic religious faith (instead of exchanging Protestant rigor for a post-Christian Social Gospel and a soft pantheism) and its more self-denying culture (instead of letting all that wash away in the flood of boomer-era emotivism). The goal would have been to keep piety and discipline embedded in the culture of a place like Harvard, rather than the mix of performative self-righteousness and raw ambition that replaced them.

Such an effort might also have had spillover effects on politics. It’s de rigueur for liberals to lament the decline of the Rockefeller Republicans, or the compromises that a moderate northeastern WASP like George H.W. Bush made with Sunbelt populism. But a WASP establishment that couldn’t muster the self-confidence to hold on to Yale and Harvard was never likely to maintain its hold on a mass political organization like the G.O.P. Whereas an establishment that still believed in its mission within its own ivied bastions might have been seen as more politically imposing in the wider world — instead of seeing its last paladin, a war hero and statesman in a grand American tradition, dismissed in the boomer era as a “wimp.”

The point of this counterfactual is not to just join the nostalgic chorus around Bush’s departure for the Great Kennebunkport in the Skies. Rather it’s to look forward, and to suggest that our current elite might someday be reformed — or simply replaced — through the imitation of the old establishment's more pious and aristocratic spirit.

Right now, almost all the discussion of our meritocracy’s vices assumes the system’s basic post-WASP premises, and hopes that either more inclusion (the pro-diversity left’s fixation) or a greater emphasis on academic merit (the anti-affirmative right’s hobbyhorse) will cure our establishment’s all-too-apparent ills.

But nostalgia for what was best about the old establishment might point to a more radical theory of the case, one proposed by Helen Andrews in a 2016 Hedgehog Review essay on meritocracy and its discontents:

The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy — so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label. By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not. If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system. If geographic diversity strikes them as important, they should ensure that it exists, ideally while keeping an eye on the danger of hoovering up all of the native talent from regional America. But they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

This idea is heresy to our current ruling class; it would have been simple wisdom to the WASPs. If we would learn from their lost successes in our own era of misrule, reconsidering this idea — that a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly — might be a fruitful place to start.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram, join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.”

You can follow him on Twitter:  @DouthatNYT

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | AP FACT CHECK: Trump is having it both ways on border policy

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/idxqhT

WASHINGTON | AP FACT CHECK: Trump is having it both ways on border policy

WASHINGTON | April 7, 2018 (AP)(STL.News) President Donald Trump was having it both ways over the past week, portraying a “crisis” at the Mexico border that demands the use of National Guard troops while boasting of a huge drop in illegal border crossings there. A border crisis is in the eye of the beholder, but his claims about illegal entry into the U.S. were off.

Also in recent days, the president misrepresented his tax package’s place in history and the size of the U.S. trade deficit with China, a number at the heart of an intensifying trade clash between the economic superpowers. “The U.S. is losing $500 Billion a year,” he tweeted Saturday, inaccurately.

A look at some recent statements and the facts behind them:

TRUMP: “For 40 years, they couldn’t pass anything and they didn’t know why. I said, ‘How is it hard to pass tax cuts?'” — remarks Thursday in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

THE FACTS: It’s not even close to true that Trump is the first president in 40 years to achieve tax cuts. Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the 2000s each achieved several rounds of historically significant tax cuts, some bigger than Trump’s. ___

TRUMP: “Because of the Trump Administrations actions, Border crossings are at a still UNACCEPTABLE 46 year low. Stop drugs!” – tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: Trump’s numbers are dated. He’s taking credit for a reduction in apprehensions at the Southwest border that began before he took office. The numbers have since risen to typical arrest rates seen during the Obama administration.

Arrests tend to follow a pattern. The numbers begin to rise late in winter, peak in the spring and dip as the Southwest heat becomes insufferable.

That pattern broke after Trump’s election. Arrests dipped after the election and plunged after Trump took office. April 2017 logged the fewest arrests in a single month since the Homeland Security Department was created in 2003. Indeed, thanks to that drop, the 2017 budget year logged the fewest Border Patrol arrests in 45 years.

But after April 2017, the numbers ticked up. In the autumn they returned to rates seen during Obama’s second term. New federal statistics show 50,308 arrests in March — a 203 percent increase from March 2017, when there were only 16,588 arrests, and 37 percent more than the previous month.

Trump called the numbers a “point of crisis” in his proclamation seeking National Guard deployment to the Southern border.

Apprehensions at the border are a useful gauge of illegal crossings but an imperfect one because nobody knows exactly how many people cross without being detected. ___

TRUMP: “The United States hasn’t had a Trade Surplus with China in 40 years. They must end unfair trade, take down barriers and charge only Reciprocal Tariffs. The U.S. is losing $500 Billion a year, and has been losing Billions of Dollars for decades. Cannot continue!” — tweet Saturday.

TRUMP: “We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!” And: “When you’re already $500 Billion DOWN, you can’t lose!” — tweets Wednesday.

THE FACTS: He overstates the trade deficit with China by $163 billion.

He does this by counting Americans’ purchases of goods from China as a loss for the U.S., while ignoring what China buys from the U.S. He also ignores another big part of the equation — trade in services.

Last year, Americans bought about $505.6 billion in goods from China while China bought about $130.4 billion in goods from the U.S. So the actual trade deficit in goods was just over $375 billion.

Factor in trade in services and the actual U.S trade deficit with China was $337 billion.

As for intellectual property theft, it’s not clear where Trump gets his figure of $300 billion and it’s not possible to be precise about illicit activity such as counterfeit goods, pirated software, theft of trade secrets and so on. But various analyses suggest his estimate is plausible.

An independent bipartisan U.S. commission estimated in 2017 that U.S. interests lost $225 billion to $600 billion from worldwide intellectual property theft, with “thousands of Chinese actors” the main culprits. ___

WHITE HOUSE: “President Trump’s tax cuts are the biggest gross tax cuts in American history, with $5.5 trillion in gross tax cuts over ten years and $4.5 trillion in reforms.” — news release Thursday.

THE FACTS: What’s notable about this statement is that the White House is edging away from Trump’s frequent and false boast that the tax cuts are the largest ever, period. The new statement asserts that the “gross” tax cuts are the largest in history. But that’s still shoddy accounting.

The gross value of tax cuts is only one side of the ledger. The other side consists of “offsets” — various increases in certain taxes and fees, taxes created and reductions or eliminations of current tax breaks — that are used to pay for the cuts.

Economists, historians and lawmakers judge the significance of a tax package by its net effect. They measure or estimate the cost of net tax cuts to the treasury and compare that with the size of the overall economy — the gross domestic product.

By that measure, Trump’s package — “reforms” and all — considerably trails Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, Obama’s 2013 extension of Bush’s tax cuts, and more.

The estimated cost of Trump’s package is $1.5 trillion over 10 years. In October, before the details were complete, the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget assumed a higher value to the package — $2.2 trillion. Even that more significant plan ranked as only the eighth largest in history as a percentage of GDP and fourth largest by another measure — inflation-adjusted dollars. ___

TRUMP: “In many places like California the same person votes many times. … They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people. And it’s very hard because the state guards their records. They don’t want to see it.”— remarks Thursday in West Virginia.

THE FACTS: Trump is repeating a claim, without evidence, that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election, delivering the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump won the Electoral College.

Studies have found only isolated cases of voter fraud in recent U.S. elections and no evidence that election results were affected. Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt found 31 cases of impersonation fraud, for example, in about 1 billion votes cast in elections from 2000 to 2014.

Trump hoped to come up with evidence of widespread fraud when he appointed a commission to study the issue. But he abandoned the effort because of infighting by the panel and lawsuits as states refused to cooperate. More than a dozen states balked at the commission’s demand for reams of personal voter data, including names, partial Social Security numbers, voting histories and party affiliations. ___

TRUMP: “This will be the last time — in April … that you’re going to go with that old fashioned, big, lots of pages, complicated tax form. Because next April, you’re going to in many cases, one page, one card.

It’s going to be very, very different. …You will have a nice simple form. This will be the last year, so take pictures of it and enjoy it. This is the last time you’ll have to file a very complex and big tax form. It’ll be much easier starting next April.” — remarks Thursday in West Virginia.

THE FACTS: There’s no sign that the IRS is planning new filing forms, card-sized or otherwise, for the 2018 tax year. As for the new one-page form that Trump said is coming, there already is one: the 1040EZ has been around for years. It can be used by people with less than $100,000 in taxable income and no dependents, and who meet other criteria.

The tax postcard has been a political gimmick for years.

“The idea of radically simplifying taxes has always been more of a political talking point or sales pitch, more than it’s been part of any reality,” says Joseph Rosenberg, senior research associate at the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Although many taxpayers will have an easier time filing because of the doubling of the standard deduction, they’ll still have to do legwork to figure out their taxable income and whether they qualify for the deduction or would be better off itemizing. They will also need to figure in the hit they could take from the capping of deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes.

So if a shorter form is in their future, so are pages of data and tables to consult.

At any rate, the overwhelming majority of Americans now file their tax returns electronically, which is how they simplify. The idea of dropping a postcard-type paper with personal financial data into the mail seems old-school.

___

TRUMP, on deploying troops to the Mexico border: “We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.” — remarks Tuesday at the White House.

THE FACTS: The last two presidents did it. So did Rick Perry, Trump’s energy secretary, when he was Texas governor.

Trump plans to send 2,000 to 4,000 National Guard members to the border to help federal officials fight illegal immigration and drug trafficking, a smaller force than George W. Bush deployed in 2006, when he sent more than 6,000. Altogether 29,000 National Guard members participated in that mission as forces rotated in and out over two years.

Obama sent about 1,200 National Guard troops in 2010 to beef up efforts against drug smuggling and illegal immigration. Perry dispatched 1,000 from the Texas National Guards in 2014. The Border Patrol has more than 20,000 agents along the border.

By DAVID BAUDER by  Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (U.S)

[bartroberts]

New Post has been published on Black Barth News

New Post has been published on http://blackbarth.com/inevitable-impeachment-donald-trump-will-come-president-mike-pence-wont-bad/

After the inevitable impeachment of Donald Trump will come President Mike Pence – and it won't be so bad

Pence, by contrast to Trump, is cautious, conservative and conventional – and plainly ‘one of us’ to the Republican elite

“I, Michael Richard Pence, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States…” It’s not so outlandish a vista, is it? Especially now.

Every Vice President, no matter how modest or unlikely a figure, knows that he is “only a heartbeat away” from the highest office, as the phrase goes, should some tragedy overtake the chief executive. In the case of Mike Pence, he might feel that he is only a tweet away from assuming the presidency, such have been the mishaps, missteps and much worse of what we should probably call the Trump Maladministration.

The last time it happened, in 1974, President Richard Nixon was in so much trouble over Watergate that he had to go – because, as he carefully put it in his resignation speech on 8 August 1974: “I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the nation would require.” In other words, there was no “admission” of any guilt, but an open admission that he couldn’t beat an impeachment and forced removal, and would rather spare the country (and himself and his family) further pointless anguish by chucking it in before America was further torn apart by the affair. He was right.

That could quite conceivably befall President Trump, and even more so because of the already visible signs of unrest among those in his own party about what has been happening in his brief presidential reign; but also because Trump hasn’t much of a political base in Congress, being more of an insurgent than a Republican. On the other hand, he sure has a base in the country. Maybe subliminally (or maybe not), this is why Trump likes to get away from DC and go and speak and be adored at some great Trump rally every so often – to remind the professional politicians in their bubble that he is a power in the land.

The Trumpites, many so personally devoted, will make their views known if and when the time comes for a Götterdämmerung struggle, but still the senators and congress members may well calculate that they have more to lose by sticking with Trump than by replacing him with a clean skin. Pence, by contrast to Trump, is cautious, conservative and conventional, and plainly “one of us” to the Republican elite.

Though still loved by his supporters, like Nixon before him, Trump may decide not to risk certain impeachment and punishment by resigning before what Nixon called a “deliberately difficult process” becomes inevitable. Admittedly Bill Clinton toughed it out for rather longer during the Lewinsky business in the mid-1990s, but that was, in truth, basically a trivial offence by comparison with the stuff Nixon or Trump face: obstruction of justice and all the rest.

The very threat of impeachment could be sufficient to deliver us President Pence. In which case, like Gerald Ford, the VP who succeeded Nixon, the question arises as to whether President Pence should grant an unconditional presidential pardon to his predecessor for any crimes and misdemeanours that might have been committed in office (or before…). Again you’d think that likely, on political rather than judicial grounds.

The title of Ford’s memoirs, A Time to Heal, summed up his and the national mood, and Ford went on TV to explain his decision.

The following is a version of such a national address if delivered by President Pence sometime in 2018 (after the mid-term elections might have further removed Trump’s support in Congress) or in 2019. Ford’s was quite a majestic and historic text, formally a Presidential Proclamation, so I hope you’ll excuse the length of this “modernised” version:

“As a result of certain acts or omissions occurring before his resignation from the Office of President, Donald Trump has become liable to possible indictment and trial for offences against the United States. Whether or not he shall be so prosecuted depends on findings of the appropriate grand jury and on the discretion of the authorised prosecutor. Should an indictment ensue, the accused shall then be entitled to a fair trial by an impartial jury, as guaranteed to every individual by the Constitution.

“It is believed that a trial of Donald Trump, if it became necessary, could not fairly begin until a year or more has elapsed. In the meantime, the tranquillity to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States. The prospects of such a trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.

“Now, therefore, I, Michael R Pence, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free and absolute pardon unto Donald Trump for all offences against the United States which he, Donald Trump, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from 1 January 2016 through 9 August 2019.”

Would it be bad for America, all of this? No, at least not necessarily.

Watergate and Nixon left scars. The ramifications are still felt today, not least in Mr Trump’s strange allusion to tape recordings and the frequent comparisons with the Watergate era’s sacking of the Special Prosecutor and White House interference in the work of the CIA and FBI, and of course the arguments about impeachment. Yet America did recover from Watergate, and Ford himself, though neglected, proved perfectly effective as well as a healing figure.

Gerald Ford so recovered his party’s position that he went on to almost win the 1976 presidential election against Democrat Jimmy Carter (Ford also saw off a radical right winger named Governor Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination). With Henry Kissinger as continuing Secretary of State, Nelson Rockefeller as Vice President and, lest we forget, Donald Rumsfeld as Defence Secretary, he picked up the pieces of the Vietnam defeat and pursued detente with Russia and China, including finishing the important Helsinki Accords, which sowed the seeds of human rights in the Communist Bloc that eventually helped bring down the Soviet Union.

So, not a bad president. And some of the others who came to power “accidentally” were also truly great political figures: Teddy Roosevelt, Harry S Truman and Lyndon Johnson, for example.

President Pence would no doubt carry on with much of Trump’s agenda, but you get the feeling he might quietly shelve the Mexican wall and some of the more eccentric stuff, and he would certainly not send out ill-tempered tweets before he’s settled in for his morning coffee. He and prospective First Lady Karen Pence would make a more homely couple than the glamorous Donald and Ivanka show, but no matter. The Republicans might well prefer that, and maybe it would be in America’s interests to have a man as president who very deliberately told his party when accepting their nomination, “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.”

The 46th president, and “the Man who Pardoned Trump”, perhaps too, before that much longer.

Source

[riting]

Hi, Solo / Gala, Honey (Pieter Fundraiser)

Carmela Hermann Dietrich on Hi, Solo

Hi, Solo, a series inspired by Mark Haim, is curated by Alexx Shilling and Devika Wickremesinghe. This particular evening was a fundraiser for Pieter Performance Space. Inspired by Hi, Solo I set a timer for three minutes two times; during each writing session, I wrote whatever came to mind, first about Hi Solo, and then Pieter and the fundraiser.  And….go!

1.

I love Hi, Solo. I love the idea of it. That within three minutes you can make something that is a complete idea. That is the assignment. To create a 3-minute solo specifically for Hi, Solo. Someone I admire once told me, “when you’ve got something important to communicate, say it in three sentences”. I’ve used this when I want to run on at the mouth in an email, a text, in conversation. How often as choreographers do we run on at the body-mouth? Simone Forti, one of my primary artistic mentors, once told me that in the 60’s Robert Dunn gave his (now historic) composition class the assignment, “make something that’s three minutes long and don’t work on it for longer than three minutes”.

What was most interesting to me, was watching how the artists took on this challenge. I saw choreographed ideas that had a set beginning, middle and end; I saw works that weren’t set, but followed a strategic trajectory; some artists improvised, allowing their endings to be arbitrarily decided by the timer.  I saw some that drew me in, and some that didn’t. There were some that made my nine-year-old son laugh. And one that made him sad. I can’t get into specifics about all ten piece because … I only have three minutes to write.

2.

This particular Hi, Solo was a fundraiser to raise money for Pieter. Pieter needs a new floor. I love Pieter’s floor. I can see any inch of it on instagram and remember, “oh, yeah, that’s that spot where my hair always gets caught in the tape”. It’s a well loved floor. But as Jmy James Kidd, Pieter Protector, said, it’s also a bit dangerous. She revealed during the fundraiser pitch at Intermission, that she has a splinter “permanently lodged in her ass.” That’s not good. Pieter has been a radical dance space for creativity, safe expression, innovation, and exploration for seven years. I am there regularly. What’s so amazing about Pieter is not just the mix of people drawn to it’s community, but the welcoming attitude of the entire space. This is the vision of Pieter; a place where artists and people who want to be themselves and feel accepted are welcome. Yes, Pieter has some badass choreographers, but at Pieter the newbie who has never danced or performed is just as welcomed and accepted. Pieter supports Los Angeles’ people like no other. 

Carmela Hermann Dietrich is an L.A. based choreographer and improviser whose work has been performed nationally and internationally since 1995. Her last dance theater work, "In Plain Sight", featuring four real-life people grappling with compulsive behaviors, premiered at the Bootleg Theater. Carmela is also an Upledger Certified CranioSacral Therapist.

Maya Gingery on Hi, Solo

PIETER IS A PLACE

Names either stick or they don’t, and this one did.  It’s called Pieter and only Jmy knows why.

Pieter is a place that was created for community and a community has formed around this dance studio in Lincoln Heights.  After 7 years of pounding feet and rolling bodies, the past-its-prime flooring needs replacing, and so on April 15th Pieter held an evening of performance as a fundraiser for a brand new floor.

Hi, Solo was an evening of 3-minute works by a roster of local artists, some dancers, some performance artists, and a few that fall between the cracks. It’s an eclectic mix, a diversity of styles and forms that serve well LA’s appetite for inclusivity. And so it was, for this benefit show that also included a sweet testimonial from the hosts and board of directors about how Pieter has become the heart center for so many in the local dance and performance scene.

Here’s a short synopsis of what I experienced:

The show began with a work titled Emergency Landing choreographed by Dorothy Dubrule, and danced by P. Jason Black, a non-dancer as he explained it to me.  It could have been called an Ode to Aluminum Foil, as the rotund Jason was indelibly and fashionably wrapped in it, toga-style. To the tinklings of a piano sonata (Schumann perhaps?), Jason expressed as willingly as Isadora Duncan his interpretation of the classical poses of the gods, and just as willingly descended and rolled like a boulder on the ground, the kinetic antithesis to the greek statue. The contrasts worked.

LA-based Carol McDowell, dressed in summery turquoise, danced her own solo titled, Noetic Gestures No. 3.  There was a Latin aesthetic in her choice of music, and a lot of shifting directions and gestural use of space. Later I learned the dance was based on Hermeneutics, or the philosophy of interpretation. Since dance is a non-verbal form of communication, this seemed apropos. One could interpret it however one wished.

Wilfred Souly danced his solo Trapped to a live talking drum played by Magatte Sow. His movements suggested possession by something outside himself, as seen in African spiritualism. There were contrasts of up and down, side to side, in and out. It was a powerful male performance and it’s political intent was the driving force.

Performance/visual artist Luis Lera Malvacias presented a work that was both literally and figuratively dark and subversively visual. Covered in black clothing that completely obfuscated his body, his spine however was visually articulated with a row of white lightbulbs. On the stage lay a mysterious angular black object, also illuminated, a parallel to the objectification of his own body. The artist, bent over like the hunchback of literary fame, moaned and cried as he mysteriously hovered near the box, only his voice penetrating the sphere of this dark perverse world. It was weird and striking.

Maybe it was the psychological resonance from the previous piece, but I can’t remember a thing about dancer Maria Maea’s I choose here.  If that sounds harsh, one can be forgiven for not remembering everything in such a long and diverse program.  I do remember some video, some sound, some dance. However, it’s title couldn’t have been more perfect. Possibly the dance was perfect too. I hope Maria performs it again, when I will be ready to remember it well.

In the second half of the show Doran George presented Aid and Abet, a sexually-loaded interpretation of scholarship. Seemingly naked underneath a trenchcoat casually draped over them, they lay on piles of books and played dead, as Gillian Cameron recited gay poetry. Give me Love, she read in a monotone, as we waited for her to revive him with bon mots.  In the end Doran was resurrected, and rose to reveal themselves wearing a loincloth and a plaster-of-paris penis, fully-erect natch.  Some good ideas there.

Valerie McCann is not a dancer. She’s an actor, she explained to me, but she wanted to make a dance.  So she did.  It was called Helplessness Makes Patients Hard to Please, with the subtitle Love Hurts.  Based on the title I’m going to assume she has some experience with this.  She wore a terrific white robe that was a costume from a play she had been in.  She took that costume with her (who was wearing whom?) and made a dance play about gestures and trajectory that ended at the wall. She used the space well, and I never would have guessed it was her first choreography.  Loads of stage presence.

Dancer/Choreographer Kevin Williamson did an exquisite arm dance.  Feet planted firmly like the roots of a tree, he chose to be in profile as he manipulated his two upper limbs in every possible configuration that profile will allow.  It was a search for reason in an unstable world. To me it’s always within limitations that imagination has room to grow and I was in continual wonder as he took me on his bodily journeying.  He also chose to accentuate the oddness of the Pieter stage, a rectangle interrupted in the center by a square of four large pillars, by standing off-center and far upstage, inviting us to think about the scale and boundaries of human existence. Beautiful.

Dancer Alexsa Durrans wore red and black.  On first impression I perceived her flowing movement as a watery flamenco, though “weighted like water, this will happen again” turned out to be more motivated by fluidity than Spanish passions.  Not sure what would “happen again”, but when water is concerned it’s certain something will.  That’s the beauty of dance, it’s poetry in motion, it ebbs and flows like water, and what’s not seen is often just as important as what is.

Finally dancer Alexa Weir honored us with a wistful, idyllic ode to new motherhood. She filled her stage with potted plants and moved with delicate grace among them. Glass chimes tinkled in the background.  She called it Day Moon.  She choreographed it in a closet.  It was a lovely and calming conclusion to a Nabokovian program.

One problem I’ve encountered as both artist and audience is that no one is writing about independent experimental dance in LA. So naturally no one expects to be reviewed. I had a hard time finding and talking to the artists amid the din of chips, dips and beer-fueled conversations, but I persevered. (Sorry Maria, I couldn't find you!).  Let's be grateful for the creation of Riting.LA, an online place to bring focus to LA independent performing arts and the thousands of artists who make this city such a vibrantly growing creative space.

In conclusion, Pieter raised some money. We got to watch some dance and support the artists.  As always, the after-party was fun and the community communed.  LA is great.

Maya Gingery is a maker-dancer-choreographer-musician-educator-writer, lifelong creative and fellow human. She makes dances and other performative events, collects musical instruments, grows vegetables and sings a song every day. Her best friend Mimi is a deer. She was last seen on stage as Demeter, in the Four Larks development project of  ὕμνος/hymns at the Getty Villa.

Hi, Solo / Gala, Honey (Pieter needs a new floor!) happened on Saturday, April 15th, 2017. The night was curated by Alexx Shilling and Devika Wickremesinghe.

Pieter has since reached their goal to raise $10,000 for a new floor and cosmetic repairs. Pieter’s YouCaring campaign will be live through May 31st. Metabolic Studio will match all funds raised up to $15,000. Please consider donating to such a special space.  

photos by Amanda Bjorn