#the care for telling immigrant stories and calling out gentrification !!!

[samaspic31]

OH BTW BLUE BEETLE WAS AMAZING

uncle Rudy is now my role model for life

[mnthpprt]

Chapter 46: Thorns

[Sorry for the lack of updates, life has gotten busy lately. But I’m back and I bring some big bad interactions!]

“Of course, Anaïs,” the pureblood agrees. “Walk with me.” Though he politely offers his arm, it is more of an order, one I do not dare to disobey. I look at William for reassurance. There is no playful smile on his face, no witty comment. Oh, no. Instead, all he gives me is a slow, serious nod. All the words in the five languages I speak are not enough to express how wrong this feels.

“Alright,” I finally sigh, taking a hold of Vlad’s arm. It feels surprisingly robust under the sleeve of his coat, dark and billowy, which only ads to his already mysterious air. Usually, that is a quality I would appreciate in a man. Right now, however, it just makes me want to run for my life.

“Come,” he says, “I want to show you my garden.”

To my surprise, neither William nor Charles follow us out of the room. They know not to question the pureblood’s authority. I make a mental note to do the same. Vlad guides me down a hallway, and then another. The deeper we go into the building, the warmer and better lit it becomes, it seems. I was wrong about this church. It is far from abandoned, let alone decrepit, and it is certainly a lot bigger than I previously estimated. I think he lives here. As much as I dislike the idea of a murderous vampire in such close proximity to the city and all the people I have come to care about, I can at least appreciate that he is taking good care of the place. Even if the hairs standing on the back of my neck prevent me from enjoying it.

We come out through the other side of the building, where I am met by the sight of the beautiful city below us. The neighbourhood of Belleville, perched atop a hill on the North East edge of the city, is - and remains, even in my time - mostly inhabited by immigrants and the working class. In my present, most of the buildings, including Vlad’s church, don’t exist anymore, having been demolished and replaced by housing projects.

While the temple itself is nothing special, safe for it’s larger than usual size, I can’t help but mourn the inevitable disappearance of something so beautifully old, of all the history that will be wiped out from this place in favor of modern gentrification. I can see why Vlad chose to make his home here. Ironically, I doubt he knows what will happen to it.

“Ah, I see you enjoy the view from here as much as I do,” he chuckles, breaking my distraction. I nod, suppressing the chill his calm voice sends up my spine. “This way, Anaïs.”

Despite the majorly bad vibes I get from him, I let him guide me around the back of the building. We come to a stop on its side, where the sparse rose bushes along the wall become dense and frequent, melting into a lush garden that even the one in the mansion couldn’t compete against.

“It’s breathtaking,” I mutter, looking down at the vast expanse of white roses before me, flanked by a myriad of flowers of every shape and color. I glance at Vlad. He smiles, satisfied. “May I...?” I hesitate to let go of his arm and step onto the narrow path that cuts through the vegetation.

“Go ahead,” he nods. I do not like the smug smile on his face, but even I have to admit he has a right to wear it. This garden is... Wow. Just wow.

I walk ahead of him, marvelling at the pristine state of every single petal that has yet to wilt under the impending summer heat, but slow to a stop when I spot a plot of unfamiliar buds near a corner. They look like a bizarre cross between dandelions and arnica, only bigger, unlike anything I have ever seen. It is not until I approach them that I notice the thin mesh cage that has been built over them. Despite their odd shade, white with a slight blue tinge, they seem too unassuming for such measures to be taken. Most of the species they resemble tend to be considered weeds, not treasured and protected like these are.

“What are they?” I manage to ask quietly. Though I do not take my eyes off their striking petals through the mesh cage, I hear Vlad’s footsteps settle beside me.

“I presume you already know what blanc is, correct?”

My eyes widen in surprise, and I crouch to get a better look. I knew they were rare, but I was not expecting these little things to be the only source of nourishment to vampires. They look so... plain. Ordinary, even, were it not for my knowledge in the topic. There is nothing magical about their appearance at all.

“I have never even drank blanc before,” I say from the ground. “I have tasted it, though, and it is disgusting.” I scrunch up my nose, making Vlad laugh.

“I have to agree, Anaïs. But that is not why I keep them. I prefer my food fresh,” he concludes, leaning over me. His voice is somehow menacing and detached at the same time. I purse my lips, unnerved, but give him a questioning look. “They are extremely prized, which I enjoy. Besides, they have a certain beauty to them, don’t you think?”

“I guess they do,” I shrug before standing up again. I have been distracted for long enough. He’s good. “So now I know why you keep those flowers, but what about your friends back there? Why did you bring back Salieri?”

His eyes become a darker shade of red, almost like blood, though his expression remains unreadable.

“Be careful how you address me, fetiță.” His tone is cold, a mortal warning. I am quick to throw my open hands in the air between us in an attempt to appease him.

“I mean no disrespect, but you do kinda owe me an explanation.” He narrows his eyes. Shit, I should not have said that. I take a deep breath to calm myself before I go on. “Look, I might be new to all of this, but I am not stupid,” I say slowly, taking a step back. He responds by taking a step forward. “I know that you could tear me apart without breaking a sweat. All I want is to understand you, so I can avoid doing something that will get me killed a second time, okay? Please, at least give me that.”

My plea seems to make him relax, and I smile, relieved.

“I suppose you have a point,” he concedes. “I will do my best to answer your questions.”

My smile grows wider as I hold onto his arm once again. He wanted to walk, so let’s walk.

“Let’s start with something easy,” I muse, breaking the ice. “That word you called me just now... What language is it?”

“Romanian,” he answers as we begin to stroll through the garden. “It means ‘little girl’.”

“Of course it does,” I chuckle under my breath. Our height difference is more evident now that he is standing by my side, towering over me. Then again, most people do. “Wait. Romanian? Did you fight against the Ottoman Empire, by any chance?”

“So you’ve heard the stories too,” he sighs. I hear a tinge of amusement mixed in with the resignation of being found out. “I have not used this name in a long time. I suppose history never forgets...”

That confirms my suspicion, and I must admit, I really hoped to be wrong about this one. But no, I happen to be casually hanging out with the man whose notorious cruelty inspired Dracula. Funnily enough, at least Bram Stoker got the vampire thing right. I wonder how the author would react to finding out they are real. He’d probably lose his mind, and I would not blame him. I almost did too.

“Okay, next question,” I move on, eager to change the topic. I must get to the juicy stuff before I get distracted again. “Why are you going after Saint Germain’s people? I mean it’s obvious that it is him you are trying to get to, but I would like to know the reason for that. Weren’t you friends or something?”

“Something.” From his deadpan tone, I can tell Vlad does not want to talk about their relationship. However, he did promise me answers, and I intend to get them or die trying. Again. “That door of his, the one he brought you through? He is selfish with it. Collecting some of the greatest men in history for... what, exactly? It is such a waste...”

“What would you do with it, then?”

“Put that talent and influence to good use, of course,” he laughs, as if it were obvious. “As you must have figured out by now, I have a door of my own at my disposal. However, it is... tainted. Unstable. I have tried to convince your sire to let me use his on multiple occasions, to no avail. Alas, even our centuries long friendship is not enough to sway him. I believe we could see eye to eye if I could show him the truth. Maybe then he would not look down on my ways as he does now.”

“And by ‘your ways’, I guess you mean sending your henchmen to kidnap me so you can use me as bait?” I can’t help but retort. “You say you want to put these men to good use, but what does that even mean? For what?”

“You shall find out soon.”

I open my mouth, but my stomach grumbles loudly before I manage to voice my protest. Worst timing ever.

“Would you like some rouge? I am feeling rather peckish myself,” he cheerily offers. There goes the conversation, along with my chance to discover what he’s up to. I am forced to nod, however, as I have not eaten since early this morning. As much as I hate to cut the interrogation short, I am starving.

I follow Vlad back into the church, resigned, and we make our way to a hallway on the second floor. I smell the scent of human blood before I notice that the voices I can hear behind a closed door are new. There is a man, whom at first I mistook for Faust, but he sounds too cheery. And too French. I hear a woman too, giddy and nervous due to Shakespeare’s charming approaches.

I want to ask what is going on, but I am not sure I want to know the answer. I have a bad feeling about this. Vlad opens the door, revealing the sitting room on the other side. Along with William, the other two vampires I met are there. Faust stands to the side, merely observing, as Charles chats with the young couple, seated around a coffee table. They are unmistakably human. I can only think of one reason for them to be here, and I do not like it in the slightest.

As the now familiar feeling of bloodlust shoots through my veins, I clench my hands behind my back and smile politely. Vlad ushers me into the room, closer to the group, and soon lets go of me to offer his hand to the woman, motioning for her to stand up.

“This one will do,” he murmurs, stroking her cheek. She looks surprised for a brief moment, but any expression immediately disappears from her face when she locks eyes with the pureblood. “Listen to my voice. Relax.” The woman’s arm goes limp and falls to her side. “Good, good. Take of your necklace.”

She obeys. Is she... hypnotized? Can he do that? When the lady’s choker falls on the floor, the reality of what is about to happen sets in. The man I assume to be her husband does not react. He is looking at the woman, but his eyes are out of focus and his face blank, nothing but an empty shell.

The king of the castle eats first, of course. Vlad pulls the woman close and leans down slowly, almost tenderly, as if he is going to kiss her neck. He stops short of touching her skin before violently sinking his fangs into her. The horrible, wet sound her flesh makes causes me to bite my own lip in an attempt to hold back. I shuffle closer to William and lean over the back of his chair.

“I can’t do this.”

“It would be improper to deny your host’s food, my nightshade,” he says nonchalantly.

“You know that’s not what I mean,” I hiss through clenched teeth. “I won’t be able to stop, Will. I can’t-”

“You can’t what?” Vlad calls out. “It is your turn, come. Don’t be shy.”

Fuck. I am not in a position to reject that offer for two reasons: the first one being my hunger, and the second being that he might kill me if I offend him. I cough and begin to turn away, but feel William’s reassuring hand over mine. I hope I can trust him to stop me in time. If I end up killing this poor girl, he’s going next.

I exhale a shaky sigh as I hesitantly make my way to the center of the room, where the woman stands frozen, a lifeless doll. She is slightly taller than me, so I hold her body close and stand on my toes.

“Lo siento muchísimo (I am so very sorry),” I whisper in her ear. I don’t know if she can even hear me, but if she could, I doubt she’d understand my foreign words. I feel everyone’s eyes on me, expectant. Vlad clears his throat behind me. He is starting to lose his patience.

But so am I. Just like that, any control I had over my body fades when my eyes catch a glimpse of the two fresh puncture wounds on the woman’s neck, of the twin drops of blood oozing down from them. I make sure to bite over the same spot.

The familiar wave of relief that comes from feeding washes over me, but this time it is much more intense, much sweeter. Everything disappears around me. There is just me and my prey, her blood pulsing into my mouth as I barely have to exert any effort to drink it. But it is not enough. I bite harder. It is dripping down my chin now, and I hold onto the yellow satin blouse, now tinged with red, like my life depends on it. I cease to exist in this moment. There is only blood and my pure, unadulterated thirst for it.

“...Anaïs.” I vaguely recognize my own name being spoken. “That’s enough.”

“Come on, let her have her fun,” another voice says. I can barely tell who’s who.

“Anaïs, stop,” I hear again, this time more sternly. Strong arms pry me off and pull me into a tight hug, restraining me until I come to my senses. “That’s it, my nightshade. Well done.”

“Will?” I manage to pant, leaning back into his chest. “Shit, is she okay? I didn’t drain her, did I?” My voice wavers with dread.

“No, my dearest,” he softly says. “Thou stopped in time.”

“Thank you,” I sigh in relief. Still holding onto William’s arms around me, I glance at Vlad. He does not look pleased.

[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

Lin-Manuel Miranda on ‘Mary Poppins Returns,’ Taking ‘Hamilton’ to Puerto Rico, and the ‘In the Heights’ Movie

While many actors on the press circuit use platitudes like “unforgettable” to describe their experiences working on a movie, Miranda literally means it; After watching a rough cut of Poppins in February, his wife went into labor. “My wife was nine months pregnant. We watched the movie, had lunch and she went into labor with our second child. So I will always associate this movie with that very special day. It was incredible moment in our lives.”

The red carpet, star-studded event, drew stars Emily Blunt (Mary Poppins) and Miranda (Jack), as well as Rob Marshall (director/producer), David Magee (screenwriter), Marc Platt (producer), Marc Shaiman (composer/songwriter/co-lyricist), and Scott Wittman (co-lyricist). There were also plenty of celebrities in attendance to preview the beloved sequel – from John Leguizamo to Martha Stewart. “It’s so exciting to see anything that he does,” said Leguizamo, who attended the event with his daughter Allegra. “The man is brilliant. He brings a new voice and a new sound.”

...

It’s a gift that Miranda made sure to bring to his favorite New York neighborhood of Washington Heights, holding a screening at the historic uptown theater United Palace. “It was the best part of the process,” he added. “To bring it to United Palace [theater] on 175th Street and to bring back movie-going there. I helped contribute to the screen and the HD projector that they have. It felt like the closing of a circle. To premiere a film that I made there was like a dream come true.”

In Mary Poppins Returns, Miranda plays Jack, a character akin to Dick Van Dyke’s Bert from the original 1964 classic Mary Poppins. Jack, like Bert, is Poppins’ wingman and goes on adventures with the Banks children. As Lin-Manuel puts it,“Mary Poppins is authentically back to take care of the Banks children, but she is also really there to take care of Michael and Jane Banks.” Unlike Bert, a composite of several characters from PL Travers’ stories, Jack is a character specifically invented for Miranda by director/producer Marshall and screenwriters. “They thought of a Jack of all trades. So, [they decided] let’s call him Jack,” said Miranda, whose character is roughly the same age as the adult Michael J. Banks.

As Lin-Manuel tells it, the character of Jack is similar to Usnavi, the protagonist of his break-out Broadway show In the Heights – which is where Marshall first saw him acting at the Richard Rogers Theater.“Usnavi is a lot like Jack,” Miranda points out. “He’s a streetlight [literally and figuratively] as someone who illuminates his neighborhood. And then there’s Jack, who’s literally a lamplighter. He’s the guy who brings light to London in the darkness. It’s a metaphor for what he does in the film and it’s his job description.”

Movie fans will be excited to hear that Jack has his own line of toys. “What was weird and cool was that there is a Barbie doll of me and the next day there was a Funko doll, so not one, but two toys. I remember the surreal experience when the Moana dolls first came out – and those were characters that we helped create but this is on a whole other level.”

With the film’s anticipated success, we can predict a sequel to follow. “If Rob is in, I’m in,” Miranda says hypothetically, quipping “I can play a 90-year-old Jack [as Van Dyke did as Mr. Dawes Jr].”

...

Simultaneously, Miranda is working on the film version of his hit In the Heights, which is currently in casting mode and will be shot in its entirety in Washington Heights. Mirada hopes to cast Latino legends and Latino talent no one has heard of. “Everything that currently happens in the streets of Washington Heights, will happen on the streets of In the Heights,” he confirmed. That means the movie will be “smartly updated for 2018-2019,” tackling hot topics like gentrification and immigration head-on.

So far, the role of Abuelita has not been secured (award-winning Boricua actress Rita Morena had previously been reported to be taking the role). “What a beautiful rumor,” said Miranda who affectionately calls her Titi Rita. “She’s an in-demand actress. I don’t know if it will happen.”

[Image source: LinMiranda.com]

[mastcomm]

‘Gentefied’ Asks, Can a Show About Gentrification Be Funny?

LOS ANGELES — On a crisp afternoon in Boyle Heights, just weeks before the Feb. 21 debut of the new bilingual Netflix series “Gentefied,” the main cast gathered at Santa Cecilia in Mariachi Plaza, a restaurant named for the patron saint of musicos. The Mexican actor Joaquín Cosío, best known in these parts for playing a wisecracking narco in the cult hit “El Infierno,” sat dressed in a gray sport coat over a plain black shirt as the plates were passed around. He smiled wide.

The younger cast members of “Gentefied,” who play his four grandchildren, call him by his character’s name, Pops, even in real life. This day was no exception.

“This is the strength of ‘Gentefied,’” he said in Spanish. “Each character is so well-defined that it feels like we are actually a family sometimes.”

Carlos Santos, who plays Chris, one of the grandchildren, agreed. “It’s that feeling of that you want to belong,” he said. “You want to be a part of something.”

That spirit of belonging was one the creators, Marvin Lemus and Linda Yvette Chávez, had worked hard to cultivate for “Gentefied,” a comedy that makes gentrification a central theme. But making sure the community felt like part of the project, too, had been challenging. At its core, gentrification is about what it means to belong. And few places in Los Angeles are more hotly contested in those terms than Boyle Heights, the mostly Hispanic neighborhood where the series is set and was filmed.

Reminders were everywhere. Lemus and Chávez got one last month while walking down a nearby block of First Street, drinking cafe de olla from polystyrene cups. It was a chilly morning for Los Angeles, and they were geeking out because their official trailer had just dropped. Soon they were standing a few steps from the coffee shop where they had written the original pilot.

Except that the coffee shop had been squeezed out; in its place, a large pink building was fenced up for construction. A homeless man slept out front.

“At least I heard this is going to be a new Mexican spot,” Chávez said.

Had they written this moment into the pilot, it might have felt contrived. Instead it underscored the challenges of creating a series that will bring underrepresented voices to the screen but also more attention to a community already besieged by rising rents: Can a show about gentrification be funny? And who gets to tell the story of Boyle Heights?

“Everybody’s trying to figure it out — all we know is that we love our people and we don’t want them to be hurt,” Chávez said.

The challenge, she added, was to determine how to “create something that shows their humanity” but also pushes viewers to ask, “‘How the hell am I impacting things with gentrification?’”

Few shows depict the Hispanic experience in the United States from a Hispanic perspective, which seems to place an extra burden of responsibility on those that do. Reboots of the family drama “Party of Five” and the sitcom “One Day at a Time,” both of which swapped out the white families of the original versions for Hispanic ones, have centered on heavy issues like racism and immigration. The Starz series “Vida” tackled gentrification in its first season — and was boycotted by the activist group Defend Boyle Heights for making one of its lead characters a member.

In “Gentefied,” a family owned taco shop faces a rent hike that may shutter the business and break apart the family. Meanwhile, the family itself is being pulled in different directions by its members’ needs and ambitions.

It’s a tension common to immigrant clans, including those of the creators, both children of Latin American immigrants. (Lemus is originally from Bakersfield, Calif.; Chávez is from southeast Los Angeles County.) It also complicates the picture of gentrification, which is often oversimplified: The show’s title — a play on the English word “gentrified” and the Spanish word “gente,” for people — refers to when educated and affluent Hispanics return to their old neighborhoods and wind up negatively affecting existing residents.

“That was what we try to explore with every single character in the show,” Lemus explained. Chris is an aspiring chef with bourgeois tastes who gets grief for being “too white” or not “a real Mexican.” The other grandson, Erik (J.J. Soria), wants to get his life together and build a family in a changing Boyle Heights.

“Some characters really are ride-or-die for the community,” Lemus added. “Some are a little more about self.”

The granddaughter, Ana (Karrie Martin), embodies both impulses. A queer artist with an insatiable appetite (literally and figuratively), she wants to become famous and travel the world. And she wants to help her grandfather. And she wants to please her girlfriend, a community organizer who equates art galleries with gentrification.

Martin, whose Honduran family settled in New Orleans “because it was the port that felt most Caribbean,” said that she and Ana were very different (except for the big appetite). The differences, however, had pushed her to explore her own identity more deeply.

“There’s pieces of me that I found when playing her,” she said as her castmates ordered another plate of carnitas. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can live in this power, in this strength.’”

The show itself has had a complex life, too. Pitched in 2015 as a series of web shorts, it drew attention early from the Emmy-winning actress America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty,” “Superstore”), who read and loved the original pilot.

“When I dig deeper into the gentrification as a metaphor, it feels so personal to my experience growing up,” she said in a phone interview. “That kind of push and pull between being rooted in history and ancestry and that mission to progress: It’s a very complicated conversation.”

Ferrera signed on as an executive producer and appeared in a cameo, and by May 2016 the web series had wrapped production and released a trailer. (“No cartels, no guns, no drugs,” an interstitial text reads. “Maybe a little weed.”) It was clear there was an audience right away.

“The trailer dropped and that went viral,” Chávez said. “People were loving it.”

The shorts debuted at Sundance the next year, around which time, Lemus said, they received six offers to produce a network version. But the team went with Netflix because they believed it would have the widest distribution. (The original web series never appeared online.)

“I want my little cousins who live in, like, the hood of Bakersfield with their stolen passwords to be able to watch it,” he said. “We wanted everyone to watch it.”

Ferrera, who directed two episodes and was born in Los Angeles to Honduran immigrants, said she was “more than certain there are millions of people like me who would love to see the world that Marvin and Linda created.”

True as that may be, feelings were complicated in Boyle Heights, where some activists have accused the producers of trying to profit from their plight.

“As we started to learn more about the bigger struggles in Boyle Heights and the community members who fight so passionately for it,” Chávez said, “we started to realize: ‘OK, how are we contributing or complicating this issue?’”

In response, Lemus and Chávez made efforts to involve people from the neighborhood, eventually winning some of them over. They met with community leaders and recruited locals to act in the original trailer from 2016. Even an activist from the group Defend Boyle Heights praised “Gentefied” during a public event at the time, though the group has been more critical of the show since.

Lemus admits he has at times felt guilty about not being from Boyle Heights. But ultimately, he and Chávez decided it was good for Hispanic creators to tell Hispanic stories.

“Every show or every film that’s been done about us for the longest time were only told through this poverty-porn mentality,” Lemus said. “It’s always like, we’re riding down a dusty road in the back of a truck. And I’m like, we’re American. We wanted to make something American.”

Chávez added: “I grew up here. I can see the beauty in every person walking down the street and see my cousins and the people I love in them, and I’m going to write from that place.

“A lot of times people aren’t that, and they’re writing about our community. So what they see is what they’re scared of.”

Back at Santa Cecilia, Soria, who plays Erik, laughed and ate tacos de carnitas with his castmates. He knows about the fear Chávez described — how it precludes opportunity, influences behavior. He’s from a neighborhood much like Boyle Heights, El Sereno, just a few miles away — a Los Angeles hood kid who once got blocked from joining the police department because he was still on probation for trying to stab a person.

“I realized I was trying to prove I was tough to people who didn’t even care about me,” he said.

He has played a lot of gangsters in his career, but his real life today looks nothing like that. One might think that as a local Mexican-American who carries much of the show, he would feel most acutely the various pressures surrounding it. But he didn’t seem worried, or preoccupied with the task of representing an entire community.

“Nah, I don’t have that,” Soria said calmly between bites. “This is my experience of it, you know?”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/entertainment/gentefied-asks-can-a-show-about-gentrification-be-funny/

[howyoutalktostrangers]

“The misery and the hope we shared”

A review of The Plague by Kevin Chong, Arsenal Pulp Press

By Will Johnson

When Kevin Chong first sat down to write The Plague, it was absolutely unnecessary for him to invent a new epidemic for Vancouver, as the opioid crisis currently ravaging the west coast is already sending a staggering number of residents hurtling to an early grave. By the end of 2017 the city had brought the average death rate down from around 150 per month to under 100, but the epidemic has soldiered on despite aggressive interventions by the B.C. government.

And while the average headline-reader still associates these deaths with the hardcore drug addicts of the Downtown Eastside, picturing homeless derelicts slipping from this mortal coil in shadowy alleys, a closer look reveals that those passing away include teenage athletes who have been prescribed painkillers, upper middle class couples with young children and a disproportionate number of people living in First Nations communities.

In other words: this is hitting just about everyone, from all walks of life — leaving us with even less of an excuse to look the other way.

*

Chong may or may not have had the opioid crisis on his mind while penning his latest novel, but his depiction of our society’s inability to grapple with the threat of imminent death feels both prescient and immediate, a clarion call for those who have become too accustomed to other people’s suffering. Lost in narcissism and materialism, Chong’s average Vancouverite has allowed their selective empathy to negate their ability to engage with others’ personal emergencies. Their solipsism has rendered them incapable of creating the sense of common purpose required to tackle a large-scale catastrophe.

“The city was made up, as it had always been, of people who worked too much for too little … this bustle precluded self-examination,” Chong writes in the introduction. “Yes, there were activists in the city, but those people seemed unhappy and disagreeable.”

The Vancouver he conjures has never seen a war, has yet to experience the great earthquake looming in our future, and contains citizens that “came together to for summer fireworks that celebrated … fireworks”. Because of this, “it was an anatomized city, a place in which the joys and fears were contained within the spheres of self and family” and “collective traumas were experienced but barely heard by the rest of the city.”

These days Vancouverites are being bombarded with social media campaigns that not only plead with your average person to care about the drug users dying all around them, but also to consider the humanity of those being taken from us prematurely. “People who use drugs are real people” is the repeated tagline, juxtaposed beside faces identified thusly: “Cousin, Student, Drug User, Friend”.

Not addressed is why we typically fail to see this truth, why we’ve become so skilled at ignoring the marginalized in the first place.

In The Plague, the city’s residents initially greet the health emergency with faux concern, failing to understand the gravity of their situation. “On their profile photos they posted pictures of themselves wearing surgical masks. Others, hoping to look medieval, wore black cowls, but resembled nerdy sorcerers.” They flee reality by taking in apocalyptic films, “which ranged from Vincent Price’s Last Man on Earth to Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, from camp to comedy.”

It isn’t until a full-out quarantine is called that people begin to take things seriously. “Our devotion to routine was how we sought comfort in the moments after the hot flare of annoyance tapered into disquiet — when we noticed, say, a co-worker absent from a meeting. Or when we saw entire aisles in markets picked clean.”

*

Chong’s sixth book could easily be placed within the genre of disaster fiction, which makes it perfectly suited for exploring the nuances and political realities of the opioid crisis.  

While his earlier novels include a coming-of-age story and an immigrant narrative, this is his first attempt at a larger scale epic. It has parallels with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which plays coy about the apocalyptic destruction that occurred before the opening, instead dwelling on the existential questions raised as his characters struggle for survival in its wake.

In much the same way, readers of The Plague finish the book with very little information about the disease that drives the action, the way it’s contracted or how it’s ultimately cured — meanwhile they know all about the characters’ interior lives. Both of these books have a parabolic, vaguely Christian texture, like you’re reading a carefully crafted sermon by someone who doesn’t believe in God.

And if you’re expecting something akin to a Stephen King door-stopper, you’re going to be mightily disappointed by The Plague. In Chong’s still-operating city we don’t have Walking Dead-style system breakdown, the characters brood and chat more than they do anything else, and there’s no Dustin Hoffman telling his superior “With all due respect, fuck you, sir” like in Outbreak. There are scenes that are funny, but more in the way that makes you cringe afterwards.

Chong’s book is inspired by the work of none other than Albert Camus, whose 1947 novel La Peste documented an outbreak in Oran, Algeria decades earlier. Ten years after its publication, during his speech accepting the Nobel Prize, Camus said of his writing “it was a commitment to bear, together with all those who were living through the same history, the misery and the hope we shared”.

Put another way, by critic John Cruikshank, he was depicting “man’s metaphysical dereliction in the world.”

For Camus, writing about a killer disease was his opportunity to tackle the Third Reich. For Chong, it gives him an opportunity to explore topics wholly unrelated to the action, everything from riots and sex scandals to gentrification and the changing role of contemporary journalism. And anyone who has spent any time in the Rainy City will find plenty that’s familiar, including the nihilistic materialism of its residents — though he doesn’t mention yoga pants even once.

And in both books there’s no Higher Power coming to save us. As McCarthy says, “There is no God, and we are his prophets.”

*

Into this setting Chong plunks three main characters: Dr. Bernard Rieux (who shares a name with Camus’ protagonist), an American writer named Megan Tso, and a city hall reporter named Raymond Siddhu. These three each engage with the health crisis in different ways, illustrating both how futile and how meaningful their actions are, at first ignoring all the dead rats with blood coming out their eyes until they’re forced to watch people they love suffer slow, hideous deaths.

When all is said and done, the crisis will last four months and cost 1400 lives, but somehow this feels beside the point.

“Everyone wants to make this health issue political,” Siddhu complains to Rieux, shortly after the first cases are reported. “Infectious disease doesn’t check your party affiliation. Suffering is universal.”

Though it may be new to them, the threat of disease existed long before these characters ever stepped foot on the page. In a televised speech, Mayor Romeo Parsons calls the epidemic “our founding condition” — reminding them that the city is named after an English officer of the Royal Navy who was faced with disease upon arrival. He describes the scene of first contact in the 1890s, noting that the First Nations populace had been decimated by smallpox before the settlers even landed.

“Captain George Vancouver did not see wealth and abundance but devastation. He found abandoned villages and beaches lined with decaying bodies. He saw canoes placed in trees, which upon closer inspection, held skeletons inside them.”

And just like any catastrophe, its the weak who end up suffering most.  “You don’t need to wear a tinfoil hat to see how disease disproportionately affects our most marginalized people, the poorest, the least privileged,” he says.

Chong has put a post-modern spin on the old Stalin quote “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” by showing the meaningless ways public opinion can be manipulated when it comes to matters of life and death. For instance, the mayor’s rise to popularity is triggered by a YouTube video of him making a jump shot that was “widely shared and re-posted”, making people feel “pre-acquainted with him”.  

Meanwhile Tso is the author of a book called The Meaning of Death. She reflects there was “a look that people who organized death-related events cultivated. It wasn’t so plainly ‘alt’ as a high-school goth aesthetic.” She later notes that her marketing manager told her “to tell funny stories about the mummies of the Atacama Desert to make you feel comfortable about turning cemeteries into picnic spaces and taxidermying your pets.”

People will try anything to convince themselves they don’t have to feel other people’s pain.

*

Parsons is easily Chong’s most compelling character, but it isn’t long before he’s dragged off his high horse. Siddhu ends up breaking news of a sex scandal — the mayor mistakenly fucked his own long-lost daughter — and the beleaguered politician goes into hiding.

It’s hard not to see the parallels here with Chong’s former colleague Steven Galloway, whose own scandal has become a multi-year fiasco pitting different factions of the literary community against each other. However, it’s from this unlikely avenue that he comes up with the narrative’s most hopeful storyline, as Parsons discovers a new humility and joins forces with the front-line workers.

“This infection exposed everything that we had wanted to sweep aside. It’s allowed us to see others — not just the ones who looked like us — it allowed us to see them as equals. The disease levelled us,” he says.

Putting aside his political pomposity, Parsons ends up volunteering for The Sanitation League — a service started by Rieux that helps afflicted people outside the hospital system. In the most moving scene of the novel he sits by the bedside of a young girl about to die, witnessing her final moments alongside her parents. It’s cathartic for him, as well as the reader, because it puts a human face on what is primarily an abstract menace.

“Rieux did not need to tell him that this child was not responsible for her own death,” Chong writes.

Here’s where some would draw a distinction between those suffering from Chong’s plague and the people overdosing on fentanyl — they feel one is responsible for their fate, while the other isn’t. But this moralistic worldview allows onlookers to dodge feelings of complicity while ignoring a simple fact: it’s the world itself, and the treatment people receive from their societies, that maneuver them into places of vulnerability. This idea is explored in the book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by journalist Johann Hari, who has worked to humanize drug addicts and call for the legalization of all drugs.

“Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It’s actually going to deepen it,” he writes.

“So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.”

*

The most promising solution to the opioid crisis was pioneered in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver with the creation of the country’s first safe injection site — a move vehemently opposed by Stephen Harper at the time. Recently, Ontario premier Doug Ford made headlines for saying he was “dead against” them, despite the fact that they’ve been proven to be enormously effective at saving lives and helping addicts into treatment.

“Public opinion has slowly begun to turn against prohibition, and policy-makers are finally beginning to look at addiction as a health issue as opposed to one for the criminal justice system,” journalist Travis Lupick writes in his new book Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City's Struggle with Addiction.

For anyone who has loved someone with an addiction — as I have — safe injection sites provide an opportunity for caregivers to demonstrate to the vulnerable that they’re loved, that there are people out there willing to help. Out of crisis comes compassion. And as with The Plague’s Sanitation League, it takes people putting aside their personal comfort (and sometimes safety) to reach out to those on the brink. It’s Mayor Parsons’ willingness to personally participate that wins him Rieux’s approval.

“This is not about your personal business,” he says, shaking his hand. “It’s because I think your idea of suffering is grounded in reality.”

As the book draws to a close, Siddhu is amazed by how the Vancouver community has pulled together, telling Tso “I felt like I was in a community for the first time.”

She agrees.

“I’ve seen people risk their lives for strangers, people who would otherwise be unheroic."

*

Despite everything, inequality and injustice persist right to the end of Chong’s novel — just like in the real world. As the death toll rises, some residents barricade themselves in their homes to focus on renovations while others start new professions: “People were working as amateur massage therapists and running restaurants from their dining rooms.” Others come up with radically immoral ways of coping: “They raised online donation campaigns for friends immobilized by grief and then pocketed the proceeds.”

“I go out in the evenings more than I have in the past ten years,” Siddhu’s colleague tells him. “The city has never been livelier since the funerals started.”

Chong’s novel is bleak, it’s true, and the language purposefully keeps readers at arms’ length — at one point, there’s even a trigger warning. (“We are aware that the suffering of children can be acutely difficult and may prompt, among readers of this history, their own troubling memories.”) But in each of his main characters he’s found something of the human spirit to celebrate. At one point Siddhu is faced with his own powerlessness when a former journalism subject confronts him about how little has changed since he reported on the conditions she’s living in.

“You told me my words would make a difference, and I said you were full of shit,” she says. “It doesn’t matter anymore, I guess.”

The narrative isn’t without hope, though, and Rieux in particular stands out as an example of selfless giving. While speaking with Tso about his views on medicine, he gives a short speech on how he keeps going.

It’s the sort of thing that would work well as a personal mantra.

“I don’t have a view of life in an abstract sense,” he says. “I don’t care when it begins or how precious it is compared to a gorilla’s. I just want to help people.”

[musingsofmaniacs]

T2: Nostalgia, Gentrification, and Heroin

The thing that you notice in T2:Trainspotting, released about a year ago, is that it’s not as snappy, as fast, and as exciting as the original. Sure, the soundtrack is intriguing, as is the case with every single Danny Boyle flick, but the sheer energy that bustles through the first film is just not there.

What is there though, is nostalgia of the time when Rent Boy, Sick Boy (now called Simon), Spud and Frank were young and carefree. And the lament of the time that has flown and a life that has been thrown away.

If Trainspotting touched upon the topic of nostalgia, T2 is steeped in it. In the first, Diane tells Mark to grow up and look around because the music has changed and so has the clothes and the world. This Mark also encounters at the nightclub where he finds that despite being a young man 26 years of age, he cannot fit in. He listened to Iggy Pop, a star in the 80s faded out by the end of the decade and talks about Archie Gemmill’s score against Netherlands in 1978 that nobody else really cares about.

T2 shoves the bewildering change that the world has gone through in their faces: A gentrified Edinburgh with influx of immigrants that has moved on, like Mark. Sick Boy and Spud have been shown to have fallen on hard times, with latter struggling with skag and family abandonment and former indulging in extortion and pimping; the people that the rapidly growing world has left behind.

The story in itself is lackluster, and is not the point anyway. One can’t help but feel that the sequel does not match up to the explosive craziness of the former. That somehow, the sequel is slower, sadder, a shadow even of its former self. Which is, in fact, the crux of the movie. The way you feel watching this film reminiscing about how fun the former was (and how much time has passed between the two) is the same way our beloved skagboys feel about the age the former is set in, making this paradoxically the perfect sequel. Through repeated inter-textual montages of the previous movie, Boyle is conveying this longing for the old times these individuals have, when they felt they mattered and belonged, and the sadness in living off the past glory. Don’t get me wrong, the past was pretty shitty for them, but the searing pain of nostalgia is somehow shittier.

Mark thought he had moved forward, but it turned out that he could not really leave Edinburgh after all. Begbie has literally been a in prison for 20 years, and still cannot pass up an opportunity to rough up somebody. Diane, on the other hand, is shown to have moved on with her successful career, away from Mark and the losers, true to her character. Even Mikey Forrester (played by Irvine Welsh himself), the wimp who was too scared in the first film to keep the stolen Heroin for himself, has done well for himself, running a successful vice racket.

Heroin is the one thing that had not changed, and the familiar feeling of ‘thousand -times-better-than-the-best-orgasm’ hits Mark and Simon again when they take the skag after staying clean for 20 years. But what if it is the other way round? Is it that the skag-boys actually return to heroin because they feel left in the wind by the speeding train of life that chugs ahead at full steam? Is it because heroin slows down time and life for a while? Is it that the heroin is an escape because choosing life, big-fucking-television, can opener, selfish brats, stalking lovers on social media, posting about last wank to last breath - the stuff that other people do, is distressing and eventually pointless?

The movie is relevant in the light of the middle-age the post post-modern, hyper-conneted world is going through. Techno-Optimism is at the ebb now, at crossroads, with pushback from those left behind. Those who feel they have been left behind by globalisation, liberalisation, politics, technology, social media, economy, LGBT movement, free trade; steeped in the deep nostalgia and yearning for the return to good old life. Coal jobs, anti-immigration, no political correctness and no tech giants replacing workers.

You see them everywhere, be it at an office with a significant generation gap between management and employees or at a voting booth voting for the most nativist sumbitch on the ticket. Basking in the glory of the older days when they were relevant and threatened by the new tide that might wipe it all out.

And they keep returning to their heroins, voting for the bloated bully who promises them a hit.

Both the movies do end with the message of hope, and beg you to consider, after all, the sanest option:

[nadinabbott]

Why Do We Have The Media System We Have

*On hometown streets, the local anchor is a movie star. Crowds move out of the way for the cameras. And profits don’t get eaten by the airfare. Moreover, ‘bodybag journalism,’ as veteran New York television newsman Gabe Pressman calls it, apparently pays the bills. Plenty of people watch, and audience ratings are high*

Eleanor Randolph, Washington Post Writers Group. in the Chicago Tribune, 1989

Many people complain all the time. We have corporate media, that only tells us what corporate interest wants us to read. This media is biased. Chiefly, this media does not cover the issues that matter (to me). Some examples of these matters are labor issues, poverty, gentrification, homelessness, the cost of housing and the end of the middle class.

However, it is time for some introspection. Media consumers have a lot to do with this state of affairs. I will explain this in my first blog post, as well as the intersection of economic behavior with a lack of a variety of voices in the media.

This lack of voices is not necessarily a lack of minority voices. These days many of the top reporters do come from communities of color. Many are women as well. Perhaps not enough. But the fact is that major media outlets are no longer just white old men with access to the microphone. This lack of voices is far more pervasive as a class matter, which is another issue not well covered. The United States has clear social stratification, even if the national myth tells us that we are not a class-based society.

This is especially obvious in the top tier of American media, where compensation is very high. We are talking seven-figure salaries. The attitudes and views of the world trickle down to whatever remains of local newsrooms that in some cases, work for the same national outfits. Many of those top-tier reporters and anchors come from the same exact social class as the leaders of both national parties, and some of the owners of the outlets. A few of the owners, such as Jeff Bezos, come from the stratosphere of American wealth. He is literally among the three wealthiest men in the nation. Yes, they are men. The other two are Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. (Between the three of them they have more wealth than the bottom half of the nation.)

This must be said though. Neither of these three men started life in the stratosphere of American wealth. However, they had a few advantages others lack. For starters, they had access to education, which is going to go away for many middle-class families, especially at the graduate level these days under the new tax bill. They are also white and male. These three things are ones rarely discussed in our current media system. And when they are, it tends to be from the point of view of a dominant class in what is referred to as elite publications.

The elite has their papers. From the beginning of the country, certain publications have reflected the views of those who have political power. Even some of the pre-revolutionary broadsheets did. The Federalist Papers were a series of discussions between the men who led the revolution as to the political makeup of the country.

The newspapers of the 1800s were also used to discuss the issues of the day. Most people, early in the history of the country, were not literate either. So reading was truly an elite pursuit, so was writing. The common folk did not vote either. At least not until Andrew Jackson, if you were white and male.

Immigration and New Media

Papers have been a tool of the very wealthy. Famously   William Randolph Hearst pushed for the war with Spain in 1898. Manifest destiny was the rage, and many of the wealthiest men in this country expected to enrich themselves. “Remember the Maine” became the reason for the war. The American people were subjected to some serious propaganda. If this sounds like the second Iraq war, it is because it was exactly like the ghostly weapons of mass destruction that were not found in the desert. Yes, some people have become immensely wealthy from the profits of war. We know now that what happened to the USS Maine was a tragic accident, but that did not stop the war in 1898, or in 2003.

However, something else was happening in the United States. This is something that should have been replicated in modern times with the internet. There was an amazing growth in immigrant and labor based papers. These were printed in a slew of languages, from Yiddish, to German or Italian. Some were printed in English. It was somewhat of a golden age for the press, while also being full of contradictions. Yellow journalism, and extremely slanted stories were the order of the day. It was also the era that saw the beginnings of what would become investigative journalism.

Chiefly though, people paid for to their newspapers.Whether it was because they were interested in community news, or they read a paper that supported their view of the world. It was a time when newspapers thrived. There was precious little free news. People knew that those who covered city hall had to be paid, even if not much. It was also a time when papers at times were very narrow in who read them, and the slant they took. None pretended to be balanced.

Newspaper reporters did not do this to get rich. Moreover, most came from the same social strata as the papers they wrote for. Some were of some means, but most reporters were working class people, maybe lower middle class, which gave them a different view of the world than the wealthy they sometimes went after. Covering issues affecting labor and the plight of unions was not alien to these men, and it was mostly white men.  

This new media was part of a social condition that also led to the organizing of the people against the robber barons. Like today, wealth concentration was very high. People were not happy, and political parties, both Democrats, and Republicans, worked for the interests of the top tier of society. There was a strong third party, the Grangers, who put real pressure on the system. The wildcat strikes were an almost daily affair. In time this led to reforms and the progressive era. That panoply of publications in multiple languages continued for two more generations.

Those papers were in many cases responsible for bringing down city hall in more than a few cities. They were also responsible for raising a conscience about the working conditions in many an industry and bringing afoot the first age of regulations.

The pen was mightier than the sword.

The Modern Age

Granted, I am skipping a lot of American history part of the reason is that our modern day has a lot in common with the Gilded Age. We have the highest income inequality since 1929. Likely it is also equal or higher than the Gilded Age. We can estimate, but the government did not keep statistics in the 1880s.

We have a real need for independent voices, and independent publications from those run by the very wealthy. The reasons for that are similar to the Gilded Age. People know this. We heard this many times during Occupy marches and conversations. People know that what they call the mainstream media will either ignore them, or cover their story with what the people on the street perceive as corporate bias.

Remember, who pays for the media determines a lot of its values. There is a reason why top-tier anchors, at national desks, are paid seven-figure salaries. However, many of the people who complain to no end about this, have not made the next connection. We could build a media system serving the middle and working classes.  But just saying “we are the media” is not enough.

You need a platform to publish. You need to do due diligence and get actual press credentials, and pay to host a news site. In other words, there are real costs to this. Sure, you can stream on YouTube, or Facebook, or a series of other streaming services. That could end tomorrow since you do not own that. You need to be careful about what you do in the field. Hearsay is not good journalism. Nor is just retelling stories you heard without any follow up. You need to chase leads. You need to confirm a story. And in some cases, you must be ready to defend yourself in a court of law.

You can run a media outlet on a shoestring budget. We did. But you still need to find people to subscribe and help you defray these costs. This last critical step is one that most activists are missing. If you are not willing to pay for the media you both rely on and consume, don’t expect that media to be around for long.

The people who bought those papers in a panoply of languages in the Gilded Age understood this. These papers may have cost a penny, but you could buy bread with a penny as well back then. I admit this is partly generational. We know because the people who supported us were older. Younger people and the breakdown seems to happen around 45 years of age, believe that if it is on the web, it is free.

We started seeing this trend a couple decades ago, when we were part of an entirely different industry. But when the web started to take shape, people started to distribute copies of both music and fiction. The younger generation was the one most involved in this.

We might be on the cusp of a new economic system. Or just a bizarre moment in time when younger people have developed a lack of awareness of costs. If it is the former, we might be moving to a post-money world. If it is the latter, this attitude will help those in power to consolidate even more power. After all, they do not have to lift a finger to remove competition. Basic modern economics will do that for them.

If it Bleeds..it Leads...

There are other reasons why we have the media system we have. We saw it ourselves. If you ask, many people will not admit that they like to watch vehicle pursuits, or read about fires and accidents. The police blotter, as it once was called, used to be in the back pages of a paper. It used not to lead the local news either. Rarely it made it to the top of the news, and anybody looking at sales noticed the same thing we did. Blood and gore sell.

Then came the 1980s and body bag journalism. It is not as if reporters were airheads. As the Chicago Tribune published in that period:

What is surprising about all this is that very intelligent people work on these programs. I know several of them, and they are not airheads held together with hair spritz. On journalism panels and in private conversation, these attractive reporters display a command of complicated subjects and world affairs.

Such intelligence is sometimes allowed on local news shows. But when I asked a friend in local news why there seemed to be less of it, she said, ``It is not smart to seem too smart`` on Action-Live-at-Five-Eyewitness News. Somehow, the television image-makers have decided that if you sound a little too well-informed on television, people resent it. They think you`re uppity.

Some local newscasters have tried to break away from the blood-and-guts model that they say is predominant in places where the crime rate is overwhelming-the big cities such as New York, Washington, Chicago and Miami.

While some stations have heroically tried to break away from the model, the police chase was now the future. It is what kept eyes on the screen.

Media outlets rarely speak of your city budget. Corruption stories that used to bring down administrations are mostly a thing of the past.

This is driven by the choices made by viewers and readers. We saw it when we tried to run a local paper, that dealt with real issues. And that idea about being uppity if you know the issues, ii have experienced that in the flesh. More than once I have been called uppity, or other names, for actually knowing the issues. Normal societies expect reporters to know the issues, but a reporter that knows the issues is somehow threatening to both readers and policymakers.

In short, we have the media we are willing to pay for, it is the police blotter we watch. As for me. I like those uppity subjects. We are in the place we are because Americans love to watch OJ getting pursued by the police, and not CSPAN, or your local city council. OJ’s arrest and the trial was a dramatic moment that cemented that news pattern. Now go ask who knows about the repeal of Glass Steagall, or how many troops are currently in Syria?

I will post policy, and reactions to items that indicate cultural changes. My days of running a daily are in my past. I was part of that media that many are so critical of. I did try to give a voice to communities that have no voice. However, we saw no commercial success or support from the same people who complain the media does not care about real issues. It is not that they don’t care. Quite honestly, it does not pay the bills.

Those are critical issues, ranging from why political parties behave the way they do. This includes economics, automatization and climate change, and the intersection with the political system and neoliberalism. And from time to time, a dive into American history. I believe it matters. All these issues are related. However, this will hardly be a daily affair. I have things to do, and projects I have put on the back burner because of running a daily. Now that is done for, and the next stage in my life is afoot.