#st ann

[sonicandvisualsurprises]

1965

Larry Marshall, known for his contributions to the foundation of reggae, delivers a passionate vocal performance, effortlessly riding the song's bouncy rhythm.

Artist biography on Discogs.

[rinielsaerwen]

St. Ann Catholic Church - Mackinac Island

[truedevotiondesign]

APRIL Birthstone Rosary // St. Ann

[filmgad]

[reasoningdaily]

“The Ordinance of Baptism at Brownstown Jamaica"

George Baxter, after Joseph Bartholomew Kidd. “The Ordinance of Baptism as administered by the missionaries connected with the Baptist Missionary Society to 135 persons near Brown’s Town, in Jamaica, in 1843,” colored wood engraving. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The Jesuit priest Abraham J. Emerick, who served as a missionary in Jamaica (1895–1905), indicated that “Mialists” wore white robes during their ceremonies, and he linked this feature to the white robes donned by Revivalists and Bedwardites during the early twentieth century. White was and remains the most prominent color symbolizing the world of invisible powers (deities,spirits, ancestors, etc.) in West and Central Africa.

Witnessing or undergoing the baptism ritual likely would have reinforced the numinosity of the color white and the involvement of invisible entities beyond the Christian Trinity in a transformative initiatory experience for African converts, whether of Igbo, Asante, or Kongo heritage. These three groups and their neighbors composed the largest percentage of Africans to enter Jamaica during the entire transatlantic slave trade. In particular, the Kongo kingdom, which had come under Catholic influence beginning in the late fifteenth century, gave Jamaica’s Myal tradition its name and purpose.

BaKongo groups interpreted bodies of water as a boundary between the visible and invisible worlds. Moreover, the Simbi, a class of guardian spirits associated with waterfalls, springs, rock formations, and other phenomena in nature, might have edged their way into the theological imagination of some candidates as they waded and were washed in the water.

In Kongo, those initiated into the societies of ritual and healing experts were capable of contacting invisible forces that could remedy social and personal afflictions. Myal societies in effect were reconstituted ritual societies of Kongo persuasion mirroring the healing activities of Lemba, Nkimba, Kimpasi, and Ndembo custodians in Central Africa.

The baptismal death and resurrection purification rite performed through candidates’ immersion into and rising from the water had a counterpart in Jamaica’s African spiritual traditions. The Myal death and resurrection rituals in which novitiates would appear lifeless until ceremonial experts resurrected them into a new life of knowledge and ritual leadership within the society are perhaps the most tangible examples we have on record today. If Myal members wore flowing white robes before the Baptist tradition came to Jamaica, extant pre emancipation descriptions of the society do not make any mention of it.

The Christian rite of baptism, in which candidates — adorned in ankle-length white robes — encountered the numinous in the natural environment, would have cemented the connections that Africans seeking to belong to two over-lapping worlds (the Baptist and the Myal) were bound to draw between them.

In the Victorian universe of Christian denominations, the Baptist tradition bended most pliably toward African modes of religious apprehension. Initiation into this legitimate society offered converts access to knowledge, power, enhanced training, and status — all social goods that allowed them the best chances to prosper in post emancipation Jamaica. For Baptist converts with comparable commitments to Myal denominations, the same social goods obtained within the private cosmos they constructed among themselves, a world they understood as theologically and spiritually conversant with some of the central symbols and rituals of the Baptist faith.

From the Book - Victorian Jamaica:

[badlikebena]

Bad Bena Fame FM Bad Like Bena

[nakeddeparture]

Troy Ellis, 27, was formally charged for the rape and murder of Talia Thompson, 8.

https://youtu.be/LGyDvMVw-wc

Then acted shy and innocent — even pulled his lips in. Naked!!

Like. Share. Subscribe.

[annie-in-the-real-world]

Y’all would NOT BELIEVE what I found in a random store today

Best $10 I ever spent

[kitsunetsuki]

Henry Clarke - Anne St. Marie, Vogue Paris, 1958, from L'elegance des Années 50 by Henry Clarke (1986)

[mxttiasdotsys]

This wood pigeon kept getting so close I couldn't keep them in frame

I did turn my camera to show a photo I'd just taken of them. I do not speak pigeon so I didn't know how to interpret their reaction.

[acquired-stardust]

Pokemon Yellow GameBoy Color 1998

[anghraine]

[Note: this post is grumpy and eventually also about Star Trek, it just takes longer than usual to get there and is generally rambling.]

There's something tickling my brain about how my main fandom—to a large degree, sole fandom—for years was Pride and Prejudice, and one of my most intense and long-lasting, yet niche grievances with Austen fandom fanon was over Lady Anne Darcy. It was specifically around the fandom image of her as this absolutely idealized mother, a sort of Madonna figurine brought to life.

I've talked about this many times, but: we know little about Darcy's mother in the book, and that little doesn't really suggest this ideal modest, easy-going, selfless, soft maternal figure. Multiple people in the novel allude to her teaming up with her sister, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, in arranging the betrothal of Lady Catherine's daughter to Lady Anne's son to consolidate the status and property of the sisters' husbands, as well as their own aristocratic ancestry. Lady Catherine is really the only one who goes out of her way to mention Lady Anne. Late in the novel, Darcy very carefully talks his way around filial respect towards his dead parents while also trying to explain how they affected him, insisting they were good people while adding that they not only allowed, but encouraged ("almost taught" him) his arrogance and narrow preoccupation with his family circle. He also specifically says that his widely beloved father was the more generous and pleasant of the two.

It's a small thing in some ways: Lady Anne is an incredibly minor character who is dead before the novel starts and whom we only hear a little about that's easy to overlook. At first (long ago), I didn't care about individual fics or headcanons or whatnot working to distance her from Lady Catherine (and even Darcy himself), and instead envisioning her as a sort of generic maternal ideal. But it was impossible to avoid noticing what seemed an oddly pervasive fannish investment in this quasi-Madonna image of her, even though a) we hear so little about her and b) it doesn't fit very well with what we do hear.

And honestly, Lady Anne being the more abrasive and haughty parent, whom Darcy resembles more closely, makes perfect sense with her background and with the structural mirroring of Elizabeth-Mr Bennet and Darcy-Lady Catherine (each parental figure embodying extreme versions of each lead character's flaws and in some ways, warped versions of their virtues).

But it's not just that there's no reason to assume she was so utterly dissimilar from and superior to Lady Catherine, and that both Lady Catherine and Wickham are independently manufacturing the Pemberley family's cooperation with the planned marriage between Darcy and Anne, or to think that Darcy's implication that Lady Anne was the more difficult personality is mistaken. The thing that always puzzled me is why so many P&P fans want to idealize her this way in the first place, when she's barely referenced in the novel. Why would so many fans care so much about this dead offstage aristocrat being defined entirely in terms of Being a Good Mother (maybe even a perfect mother) despite the obvious unnecessary complications this creates around the characterizations of her sister and son?

It was never a universal fanon, to be clear, but common enough that I couldn't help noticing it and finding it strange. Like, did this whole weird fanon arise solely because Lady Anne is Darcy's mother, and marginal and ambiguous enough to allow fans to default to the most comfortably gendered image of female parenthood? Is it related to the hyper-gendered interpretations of Elizabeth and Darcy themselves, even though both are most strongly associated with cross-gender parental figures in Mr Bennet and Lady Catherine?

(A tangent, but for the record: I'd also argue, and have before, that Elizabeth is most temperamentally similar to Darcy's male friends, while Darcy himself is far more like Jane and Charlotte than like Bingley or Fitzwilliam. And just about every time that either Elizabeth or Darcy makes an assumption about the other based on generalizations about men/women rather than particulars of each other's personalities, they get proven very wrong. So understanding either of them wholly in terms of masculinity/femininity seems dubious in the first place.)

There are probably other possibilities for why there's this investment in idealizing Lady Anne, but in any case, the reason I'm rambling about this is because a lot of the sense of Amanda Grayson's character post-"Journey to Babel" that I've seen reminds me a lot of Austen fandom's representation of Lady Anne.

It's not as baseless with Amanda, for sure. She is initially somewhat set up that way only for that image to get painfully undercut later, when she tells Spock she'll hate him forever if he doesn't step down from his responsibilities to risk his life for Sarek's (she also hits Spock in this scene, though "I'll hate you forever" feels worse to me! ymmv!). And later official ST productions have moved more and more aggressively towards this "Madonna" image of Amanda (while Spock himself has also been increasingly stripped of the messy, complicated ways that TOS Spock himself interacts with gender, in-story and out of it).

But even versions of Amanda that appear almost exclusively based on TOS Amanda seem to lean heavily into an image of her that reminds me much more strongly of fanon Lady Anne Darcy than the Amanda of "Journey to Babel." And I guess it's one of those things that I not only disagree with but don't really get the appeal of. I like both Lady Anne and Amanda quite a lot, despite all of the above—or rather, because of it. They seem to be difficult, imperfect figures within messy family dynamics—great! Messy family dynamics are a lot of fun, and being good mothers is not the only metric by which to engage with female characters who have children.

I don't think either Lady Anne or Amanda are good parents, but they're no worse at it than their husbands, and I find both of them more interesting to think about than their husbands. One of my first fanfics ever was a trollish little fic about Mr Darcy cheating on his wife, who has returned to her father's house with a premature baby nobody expects to live, only to increasingly hint and then reveal that the betrayed wife is Lady Anne and the supposedly doomed premie baby is Darcy himself. There's a TOS-only concept that regularly plays in my head about the cut "City on the Edge of Forever" scene where Spock invites Kirk to Vulcan to rest and heal for some indefinite length of time, only it happens at the end of the five-year mission when Kirk is even more ground-down than he transparently is becoming in S3, but this becomes interwoven with Amanda as this personable but ambiguous figure, and with the complications around how she relates to Spock, Sarek, and even Kirk.

Anyway. I don't know if there are other fandoms where people have noticed that drive to idealize rather than villainize flawed mothers, but I was very struck by how much the cleaned-up Amanda reminded me of cleaned-up Lady Anne.

[marvelsgirl616]

☘️☘️☘️

[schemmentits]

Hear me out: Lisa Ann Walter as older Celia St. James