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coraniaid · 1 year ago

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I Only Have Eyes For You isn’t a perfect episode – for one thing, there are a couple of incidental lines of dialogue which I really don’t think should have made it past the first draft – but it is certainly a very very good one.

It’s also, I think, the first episode of the show that’s made me care about Buffy and Angel as an actual couple. Before this point it’s been … well, I’d certainly argue that Buffy’s relationship with Angel is pretty fundamental to understanding who Buffy is as a person after this season and why she acts the way she does (when it comes to Faith and Parker and Riley and Spike, yes, but also more generally her reluctance to open herself up emotionally to her mother and her sister and her friends all goes back to that whispered and rejected ‘I love you’ in Angel’s bedroom in Innocence).

But I’d not been invested in it at all before now. The relationship is important, yes, but I don’t think it’s particularly interesting in its own right before this episode. (Obviously there are people who find the idea of a vampire slayer in love with a vampire inherently interesting – “rather poetic, in a maudlin sort of way” – but I am not one of them.) I’m never convinced by how the relationship itself develops, and this rewatch was no different. It’s established as early as Angel that Buffy might be in love with him, but I’ve never really understood why, based on the little screen time they have together. They’re not even properly dating until the end of Reptile Boy and then they only have a handful of episodes of actually being a couple before the events of Surprise. It does not feel that the relationship develops so much as it is suddenly something that has always existed.

And I know a lot of people don’t like this ship because of the age and power imbalance and how unthinkingly condescending and paternalistic Angel can often be, but I think that misses the point a bit. Episodes like this one demonstrate that the writers are very aware of how messed up this relationship is, in ways that will be discussed again next season in The Prom (also written by Marti Noxon). The Becoming flashbacks coming up will also (I think intentionally) do a good job of deconstructing the love-at-first-sight thing that the show’s been relying on up to now. (I’m not convinced, honestly, that Season 3 consistently deals with things with quite the same level of awareness, but I guess that’s something to discuss when I get there in this rewatch.)

I don’t know that I’d have necessarily given David Boreanaz his own five season long spin-off show on the back of it, but the final scene between Buffy-as-James and Angel-as-Grace is really strong. That repeated last confrontation between James and Grace almost feels like it’s being overdone, right up until the pay-off of James/Buffy shouting “don’t walk away from me, bitch” to a departing Grace/Angel. For all that the show’s attempt at feminism is often laughably shallow (even for network television in the 1990s), I think the gender reversal here is a surprisingly clever touch.

Other thoughts:

The anachronism around the song the episode is named after (the version by The Flamingos that plays in the flashbacks was released in 1959, four years after the flashbacks are supposed to be happening) is a little weird, largely because I’m not sure why the original murder-suicide had to take place in 1955 at all. (I could understand if it was 1958, say, making the episode’s original air date the forty year anniversary of the deaths, but what is important about 1955 specifically?) Did the writers just pick a year at random and not check when the song was from until it was too late to change it?

(It’s a nice version of the song though.)

I’m also not sure what I feel about Giles's whole “to forgive is an act of compassion. It’s not done because people deserve it” speech. People online seem to really like it, but I’m not sure whether it really means anything, or – if it is meaningful – whether it’s actually something I agree with.

On the one hand, the episode is not actually subtle about the fact that in this episode James is Buffy: so Buffy is really being asked to forgive herself – in fact she’s being told that she needs to forgive herself – for her role in Angel’s death (having been the trigger for him losing his soul in Surprise and now, after Passion, having announced her intention to kill Angelus too). It’s hard to argue against that, given that Buffy (despite her protests) obviously didn’t do anything wrong. But then, the fact that she didn’t do anything wrong means that Buffy obviously does “deserve” to be forgiven, so what’s the relevance of Giles's quote here? Who is it that’s being forgiven who doesn’t deserve forgiveness? (OK, James, literally, but we don’t actually care about James: he’s just a plot device.)

“People who have done bad things need to be forgiven whether they deserve it or not” does not seem like a particularly good take. Presumably this is not what Giles is actually saying. But how else are we to interpret these lines? What does this quote actually mean?

#btvs #buffy rewatch 2023

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justforbooks · 1 year ago

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The battle to remove censorship from the British stage was fought primarily at the Royal Court theatre in London during the mid-1960s. The plays of Edward Bond, one of the most important British dramatists of the 20th century, who has died aged 89, were an essential part of that story and that struggle.

Bond had submitted plays to George Devine’s recently established English Stage Company at the Royal Court in 1958 and, as a result, was invited to join the theatre’s Writers’ Group. His first performed play, The Pope’s Wedding, was given in a production without decor on 9 December 1962, and Devine then commissioned a new play, which Bond submitted in September 1964.

That play, Saved, was presented privately for members of the English Stage Society in November 1965 after the lord chamberlain – the official censor to whose offices all new theatre plays had to be submitted – demanded cuts in the text. The play was the most controversial of its day, not just because of the explicitness of the sexual swaggering and dialogue, but because of a scene in which a baby is stoned to death in its pram.

The stays of middle-class propriety in the contemporary theatre had already been given a good vicious tug in the work of David Rudkin and Joe Orton, but this was something else. There was uproar in the theatre, and in the reviews, and a visit by the police. The theatre was hauled into court after an alleged minor breach of the club licensing laws, and many notable witnesses, including Laurence Olivier, spoke in the play’s favour. Penelope Gilliatt wrote in the Observer that the play was about brutishness, not brutish in itself: “The thing that makes Saved most painful to watch is the fact that the characters who won’t listen to other people’s desperate voices are in despair for lack of a listener themselves.”

Bond’s next play, Early Morning, was banned outright. It was a surreal fantasy, featuring Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale as lesbian lovers, two conjoined twin princes, and cannibalism in heaven. Again, the vice squad paid a call, performances were cancelled and a private dress rehearsal arranged for the critics in April 1968.

By now the theatres bill was on its way in the House of Commons, becoming law in September. Plays were finally removed from the control of the lord chamberlain, who had held censorious sway over the nation’s entertainment since 1737. Violence, sex, political satire and nudity were bona fide subjects at last for the modern theatre.

William Gaskill, the artistic director of the Court in succession to Devine, mounted a Bond season in 1969 that established his reputation both in Britain and abroad, during a tour to Belgrade and eastern Europe. Saved was given 14 productions in West Germany and opened to acclaim in the Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Czechoslovakia and the US.

This period was one of defiance at the Royal Court, and the experience marked everyone who worked there for life, none more so than Bond and Gaskill. Bond was acknowledged as the inheritor of Brecht’s legacy in the flintiness of his writing and the uncompromising artistic vision of his scenes and stage pictures.

He wrote many fine plays in the subsequent decade: his Lear (1971) was a majestic, pitiless rewriting of Shakespeare, with Harry Andrews unforgettably scaling a huge, stage-filling wall at the end; Bingo (1973) and The Fool (1975) drew chilling portraits of English writers – Shakespeare (played by John Gielgud at the Court – and by Patrick Stewart in a 2010 revival at Chichester) and the rural poet John Clare (Tom Courtenay) – at odds with their societies, driven respectively to suicide and madness; and The Woman (1978), the first new play to be produced on the National’s new Olivier stage, was an astounding, panoramic survey of Greek myths and misogyny.

Bond was born in Holloway, north London, one of four children. His parents were farm labourers in East Anglia and had come to London looking for work. Bond was evacuated during the second world war, first to Cornwall and later to live with his grandparents near Ely, Cambridgeshire. He attended Crouch End secondary modern school in London in 1946 and left when he was 15. “That was the making of me, of course,” he said, “you see, after that nobody takes you seriously. The conditioning process stops. Once you let them send you to grammar school and university, you’re ruined.”

He enjoyed the music hall and was impressed by Donald Wolfit as Macbeth at the Bedford theatre in Camden Town in 1948: “I knew all these people, they were there in the newspapers – this was my world.”

After school he worked as a paint-mixer, insurance clerk and checker in an aircraft factory before beginning his national service in 1953. He was stationed in Vienna and started to write short stories.

Once Saved had been performed and he knew he would always work in the theatre, he bought a house on the edge of a small village, Wilbraham, near Cambridge, and lived there contentedly with his wife, the German-speaking Elisabeth Pablé, a writer, whom he married in 1971 and with whom he collaborated on a new version of Wedekind’s Lulu based on some newly discovered jottings and manuscripts in the early 90s.

His early plays were often based in situations and societies he was familiar with, whatever their period setting, but Bond’s later work took on a more resonant, prophetic, some felt pompous, tone. Put simply, according to Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright in Changing Stages, their 2000 account of the British theatre, Bond used to ask questions; now he gave answers.

He acquired a reputation as a rather remote guru, and his later, proscriptive epics about the failure of capitalism and the violence of the state were more often performed by amateurs than by the leading companies in Britain.

The Worlds (1979), for instance, was first given by amateurs in Newcastle, but its scope was immense, charting the collapse of a successful business operation riddled with strike action, terrorism, kidnappings and long speeches. In one of these, a terrorist defines the two worlds as one of appearance and one of reality. In the first, she says, there is right and wrong, the law and good manners. In the second, which controls the first, machines and power.

Before going into what he called voluntary exile from the British theatre establishment, Bond wrote the “pastoral” Restoration (1981) for the Court, an often witty inversion of a Restoration comedy, with Simon Callow in full flow as Lord Are, and Summer (1982) for the National, a comic, modern rendering of The Tempest set in the sunny Mediterranean.

Bond was a dapper, withdrawn man who could be intimidating, but disarmingly gnomic and self-deprecating when he was in the mood. Sympathetic interviewers could be treated to bilious attacks on directors such as Sam Mendes – whose 1991 revival of his 1973 comedy The Sea, a beautiful play of madness and dehumanisation in an Edwardian seaside town, he loathed – and Trevor Nunn (who, he said, turned the National Theatre into “a technicolour sewer”), though he never raised his voice and often dissolved into mischievous chuckling.

Even the collapse of eastern European socialism could not stem the flow of Bond’s writing. “Before, as a socialist writer,” he once told me, “you knew there was a framework, a system to which the play might eventually refer. But now, the problem of the last act has returned! And I was always a critic of the system to start with. That’s why I wrote my version of King Lear.”

More recently, you had to hunt pretty hard to find his new work. There was an intriguing season of six plays at the Cock Tavern in the Kilburn High Road, north London, in 2008, and several more performed by Big Brum, a theatre-in-education company in the Midlands, between 2012 and 2014.

Jonathan Kent directed a revival of The Sea at the Haymarket, starring David Haig and Eileen Atkins in 2008, while Sean Holmes provided the first London production of Saved in 27 years – still harrowing, more pertinent than ever – at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 2011.

Following the example of Brecht, Bond was prolific in supplying his work with the extra apparatus of poems, prefaces and notebooks, though, unlike Brecht, a giant of an intellectual all-rounder in comparison, and a far superior poet, he was always better when restricting himself to stage dialogue.

He also wrote for films, including the screenplay for Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), set in the Australian outback and starring Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil, and the Nabokov adaptation Laughter in the Dark (1969), as well as contributing dialogue for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971).

At his best, he was a genuine poet of the stage, and exerted an enormous influence on at least two generations of theatre workers after him. It is possible that some of the unknown plays of his later, post-nuclear apocalyptic period will be ripe for assessment. The place of at least 10 of his earlier plays is secure in the national literature and they are certain to be revived. He remains much admired and often performed in France and Germany.

Elisabeth died in 2017.

🔔 Thomas Edward Bond, playwright and director, born 18 July 1934; died 3 March 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Edward Bond #in memoriam

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chiefhalliday · 1 year ago

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❝ the new york city police department strives to foster a safe and fair city … and solve the problems that create crime and disorder through an interdependent relationship between the people and its police … ❞

[ sky - 23 - she/her - gmt - no triggers ]

tw: death, cancer, injury ↴

✧･ﾟ— B A S I C S

— NAME: Rowan Jameson Halliday

— NICKNAME/S: Ro (by those closest to him)

— D.O.B.: 6th January 1950 (age 74)

— GENDER, PRONOUNS, SEXUALITY: Cis male, he/him, demisexual

— HOMETOWN: New York City, NY, USA

— CURRENT RESIDENCE: Brooklyn

— AFFILIATION: Law Enforcement

— JOB POSITION: Chief of the New York Police Department

— EDUCATION: High School ; NYPD Academy

✧･ﾟ— P E R S O N A L I T Y

— MBTI: ENFJ – the protagonist

— POSITIVE TRAITS: Considerate, charming, selfless, patient, observant, loyal

— NEGATIVE TRAITS: Meticulous, stubborn, reserved, modest

— LIKES: reading, hot drinks, homemade food, history, baseball, old films, flowers, classic cars

— DISLIKES: tardiness, prejudice, injustice, insects, bitter food, hot weather, pranks, heavy metal music

✧･ﾟ— R E L A T I O N S H I P S

— MOTHER: Lenora Florence Halliday (née Jameson)

— FATHER: Winston Robert Halliday (deceased)

— SISTER: (SEE WANTED CONNECTION)

— ‘THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY’: Loren ‘Evie’ Yvaine Hawkins

✧･ﾟ— A P P E A R A N C E

— FACECLAIM: Tom Selleck

— EYE COLOUR: Blue-green

— HAIR COLOUR: Black with flecks of grey

— BUILD: Tall

— HEIGHT: 6’ 4”

— SCARS/BIRTHMARKS: A small scar from a stab wound on his right thigh

— BODY MODIFICATIONS: N/A

— CLOTHING:

✧･ﾟ— F A V O U R I T E S

— FOOD: Cream cheese bagels

— DRINK: Root beer and whisky sours

— BOOK: The Call of the Wild by Jack London

— FILM: Bullitt (1968)

— TV SHOW: The MLB and any kind of nature documentary

— SEASON: Winter

— COLOUR: Blue

✧･ﾟ— B I O G R A P H Y

— Rowan was born at 2:36am on 6th January 1958 in New York City, NY, to Winston and Lenora Halliday. He also has a sister four years his junior.

— From a young age, Rowan had a great admiration for both of his parents. Being a police officer himself, Winston taught his son the values of trust, comradeship, respect, and a sense of purpose. They would play baseball together for hours on the weekends, go to the cinema, and even go on fishing trips out of state. Lenora taught her son patience, kindness, dedication, and optimism. Before retirement, she was an actress (mainly working in theatre and television) and then later a tutor at the prestigious Juilliard School, but she would always let Rowan offer his own creative insight in her work.

— Rowan was bullied at school until his father taught him to fight back. He’d do his best of ignore the boys that picked on him, but when they started to push him and hit him then Rowan knew he had to do something about it. So when the boys got a taste of their own medicine and were finally put in their place, Rowan got into trouble with the principal, but wasn’t punished by his parents- in fact, they were proud of him- and the boys never bothered him again.

— Rowan always worked hard at school. He got top grades in his English and gym classes and average grades in the rest, but he already had his heart set on following in his father’s footsteps to become a police officer. After graduating high school, he enrolled in the academy where he greatly excelled and gained a name for himself as a sharpshooter in target practice. However the process wasn’t as straightforward as Rowan thought. Whilst he was outstanding at his job, he had a tendency to doubt himself and thought that he could never live up to his father’s expectations and reputation. His mother was always trying to reassure him that he didn’t have to be a replica of his father and that he should just be himself: the considerate, brave, loyal, and benevolent man that he grew to be.

— Upon graduating from the police academy, Rowan was assigned to the 13th precinct in Manhattan South, staying for 6 years, before being transferred several times as his career progressed. He passed the sergeant’s exam first time around and a year later, when Rowan was 27, his father was shot in the line of duty during a drive-by and spent a week in the hospital. The injury effected his mobility and was forced to take early retirement. Rowan hated seeing his father so depressed and once Winston was able to travel the two went upstate to fish together for a weekend.

— Rowan had just received his promotion to Captain when his father got sick and not long later died of pancreatic cancer. It was a time when Rowan was considering changing careers, but after finding a letter written to him by Winston before he died, Rowan was spurred on to continue in the NYPD and he always keeps that letter close to him as a reminder.

— Fortunately, Rowan himself was never shot, but came close on a number of occasions. The worst injuries he suffered were a broken arm and a stab wound to the thigh- both of which left him doing administrative duties for several weeks. During this time though he gained an appreciation and respect for members of the NYPD who weren’t officers or detectives, understanding the importance of the so-called minor roles that were actually just as important. If he ever saw an officer or detective treating a sketch artist or a secretary badly he would waste no time in standing up for them.

— Despite being qualified for the job, and with several commendations to prove it, Rowan never wanted to be the police chief. When he was the top choice for the job, he initially turned it down, citing that he was too old and due for retirement, not a promotion. But his modesty was dismissed and after a little more persuasion (particularly from his mother and sister) he took the job. He knew that being Aaron Keaton’s successor would come with its trials and tribulations, but Rowan is prepared to give it everything and to make a difference to people’s lives.

✧･ﾟ— W A N T E D C O N N E C T I O N S

— FAMILY FIRST: Family has always been important to Rowan, especially after the death of his father. This wanted connection would, most importantly, be for his sister (any FC who could pass would do!), but maybe also for his niece/nephew. You would have free reign with their career, personal life, etc., but would have a tight knit relationship with Rowan. Bonus points if the niece/nephew followed Uncle Rowan into law enforcement!

— THE RIGHT HAND: This connection, of course, would be for the deputy chief of police and Rowan’s most trusted confidant. Their opinions and views matter most to Rowan and not only would they be close friends, but they would work side by side in ensuring the people of New York City are safe and that crime rates come down.

— REMEMBER WHEN: I would absolutely love for Rowan to have a former partner or good friend who he worked with back on the beat. They could meet up often, reminisce about the good old days, and attend each other’s family gatherings amongst other things.

— BROKEN TRUST: On the other hand, your muse could be a former partner who turned bad (or perhaps they were corrupt all along) and a once great duo formed on trust and friendship was ruined by the poison of crime and corruption. Part of Rowan hopes he never sees his old friend again so he doesn’t have to punish them, but that would be an occupational hazard of being the police chief.

#wb.intro #rowan ✧･ﾟ— bio

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amazing-spiderling · 2 years ago

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Music ask game: 2 5 14 18 19 30 35 47 64 blue

2. Do you still buy CDs (or other physical media)?

I do! I actually still buy *blank* CDs and burn stuff to play in the car (although we finally figured out how to make the USB port play nice so that's less of a priority). I think I'm most likely to buy CDs from small indie bands at small events or live shows? Or like when I went to Meow Wolf I *HAD* to have the CDs of the music they played throughout the venue and the arcade. Also a few years ago I decided to start collecting LPs in earnest. Not like, as a BIG THING, but I bought a record player that wasn't from the thrift store and now I have a few dozen records, largely anime and video game soundtracks, but also Vaporwave and Chillwave stuff and a few "normal" bands as well.

5. Is there a song you don’t like but like its music video?

Uhhh.... I honestly couldn't think of one. OTL I dunno, I feel like these days you have to actively seek out music videos, and a lot of them are just kind of whatever. So I probably wouldn't go looking for the video of a song I didn't care for. Maybe there was a time when someone sent me a memey music video for a terrible song but I can't really think of any. :/

14. A song or album from the 50s or earlier:

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Okay, this cover is from much later, but the original is from 1958. I have this whole silly headcanon from an old Spideypool Back to the Future AU that I never did anything with that involved this song, so it sticks out in my memory.

18. A song or album from the 90s:

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Even though Sailor Stars hadn't been released in the US at the time I was in high school, my friends and I were the kind of nerds to get our hands on fansubs and third hand information about the final season and became low key obsessed with the Sailor Starlights. It became very important that I learn all the words to Sailor Star Fighter's image song.

19. A song or album from the 2000s:

youtube

From 2004. I saw a silly "what your favorite anime says about you" meme that said if your favorite was Samurai Champloo you think you're a little bit cooler than everyone else, and you're low key kind of right. XD I don't know if it's my favorite of all time, but I'm willing to accept that assessment anyway. This was a track I had on repeat through a lot of the 2000's

30. Songs you love to sing along to:

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I don't even particularly like Metal Gear Solid 3 but I'd be lying if I said Snake Eater isn't an absolute bop.

35. A song you like in a language you don’t speak:

youtube

What else could it be? :)

47. Is there an artist you used to dislike but learned to like because of a friend’s influence?

...Huh. I think maybe not? I feel like I'm pretty instinctive about stuff like music. At most I might go from "I was unaware of this until now" to being really into it, but if I don't like something at first listen, I'm probably not going to grow an appreciation for it, since my reasons for disliking music usually has to do with how it makes me feel physically. (Stuff that's really intense like death metal and dubstep sort of makes my chest and head hurt- that's not going to change any time soon.)

64. [Send me a color and I’ll post an album cover art of that color.]

Daredevil '03 kids will understand XD

#thanks for the ask #i spent a large part of my life being anime trash and it shows

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brookstonalmanac · 21 days ago

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Events 1.28 (after 1920)

1920 – Foundation of the Spanish Legion. 1922 – Knickerbocker Storm: Washington, D.C.'s biggest snowfall, causes a disaster when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theatre collapses, killing over 100 people. 1932 – Japanese forces attack Shanghai. 1933 – The name Pakistan is coined by Choudhry Rahmat Ali Khan and is accepted by Indian Muslims who then thereby adopted it further for the Pakistan Movement seeking independence. 1935 – Iceland becomes the first Western country to legalize therapeutic abortion. 1938 – The World Land Speed Record on a public road is broken by Rudolf Caracciola in the Mercedes-Benz W125 Rekordwagen at a speed of 432.7 kilometres per hour (268.9 mph). 1941 – Franco-Thai War: Final air battle of the conflict. A Japanese-mediated armistice goes into effect later in the day. 1945 – World War II: Supplies begin to reach the Republic of China over the newly reopened Burma Road. 1956 – Elvis Presley makes his first national television appearance. 1958 – The Lego company patents the design of its Lego bricks, still compatible with bricks produced today. 1960 – The National Football League announces expansion teams for Dallas to start in the 1960 NFL season and Minneapolis-St. Paul for the 1961 NFL season. 1964 – An unarmed United States Air Force T-39 Sabreliner on a training mission is shot down over Erfurt, East Germany, by a Soviet MiG-19. 1965 – The current design of the Flag of Canada is chosen by an act of Parliament. 1977 – The first day of the Great Lakes Blizzard of 1977, which dumps 3 metres (10 ft) of snow in one day in Upstate New York. Buffalo, Syracuse, Watertown, and surrounding areas are most affected. 1980 – USCGC Blackthorn collides with the tanker Capricorn while leaving Tampa, Florida and capsizes, killing 23 Coast Guard crewmembers. 1981 – Ronald Reagan lifts remaining domestic petroleum price and allocation controls in the United States, helping to end the 1979 energy crisis and begin the 1980s oil glut. 1982 – US Army General James L. Dozier is rescued by Italian anti-terrorism forces from captivity by the Red Brigades. 1984 – Tropical Storm Domoina makes landfall in southern Mozambique, eventually causing 214 deaths and some of the most severe flooding so far recorded in the region. 1985 – Supergroup USA for Africa (United Support of Artists for Africa) records the hit single We Are the World, to help raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. 1986 – Space Shuttle program: STS-51-L mission: Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts on board. 1988 – In R v Morgentaler the Supreme Court of Canada strikes down all anti-abortion laws. 2002 – TAME Flight 120, a Boeing 727-100, crashes in the Andes mountains in southern Colombia, killing 94. 2006 – The roof of one of the buildings at the Katowice International Fair in Poland collapses due to the weight of snow, killing 65 and injuring more than 170 others. 2021 – A nitrogen leak at a poultry food processing facility in Gainesville, Georgia kills six and injures at least ten. 2023 – Protests begin after police beat and kill Tyre Nichols.

#Events

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monikeroboogie · 2 months ago

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Once I had a dream I met Allen Ginsberg, he was sitting in front of a yellow wall, I asked him 'do you still hang out with bob Dylan anymore?' and he said 'no, I'm dead' and I woke up and was reading Ginsberg poetry and I read a poem that was like 'last night I dreamt of you Walt Whitman, and the last line was like 'Last night, I dreamt of you, Allen Ginsberg'

I had a dream when hunter Thompson died, he was on a football field and barking like a dog in an orange puffy coat. A couple days later his suicide note came out and it was titled 'football season is over'.

Once i was walking home from the store and I was thinking about God, does God exist, why do we suffer, is God benevolent and I found ten bucks on the ground, as if God himself was like 'great, here's ten bucks'

I had been saying for years I had wanted to see a psychic to see what it's like, looking for one pro-bono and there was a free reading when I was in NYC in Manhattan and I went in and before I walked in the door, I thought to myself 'I am going to go in there and explain I'm homeless and starving and she is going to give me 20$. And that's exactly what happened. I thought it, I did not speak it allowed, I have always wondered how she did that, maybe I am just a smooth talker.

Now I believe in mental telepathy and initiatic dreaming and spirit possession, I have done a lot of gross and weird things at really unfortunate times that were as if moved by a will not my own, generally par for the course for a schizophrenic, I believe schizophrenia is demonic possession, not to mention all the coincidencse that the world revolves around me that seem to be artificial that are so amazing I think it must be that magic is real. Makes me wonder about Jesus.

Once after starving homeless in rags and delirium from mental illness, dangerously underweight I came home from NYC only to be met with the same indifference and neglect from my family I have always believed is politically motived, my colonizer family are xenophobic to radical ideals I cherish, they neglect me in their capitalist sense when I have no job, so i went back to NYC and the first night i was back at the flop house, a young woman overdosed and died, i assume overdose, I was sleeping on the floor wearing my clothes with no pillow or blanket or even backpack full of things at that point and i woke up to the words 'OMG, she's dead' and it was as if even before I heard those words I woke up elated, happy finally, after a lifetime of childhood depression, bitterly agonizing depression, every little thing a trigger so that every smile of the face of all talking heads was delight for my suffering, every syllable, every slight a heckle from a brutal Satan, and with that death my depression had ended and I am down in the dumps now to be isolated and bullied with no cuddle buddy in poverty, as women are wicked when you are unwanted, but the excruciating nature of that depression no longer plagues me, but then my grandma died, I believe she committed suicide because I had married a junkie whore and said so, and I think my family lurks on my social media, so I went into st pats in Manhattan and took communion and prayed to God to stop killing people, and shortly after that there was a day no one was murdered in NYC, it was in the news.

Once I thought to myself 'If you are the one true God, show yourself to me, give me a sign' and as an afterthought I thought 'a solar flare or something' and the next day there was a solar flare, not such a common occurrence.

Twitter has for years been able to read my thoughts. So, I believe magic is real, what to do about this, go to church regularly apparently. Wiccans might disagree, I lost my virginity to a wiccan after all, I was an atheist at the time, I did not believe in Jesus, what is the harm in screwing a wiccan. So, I am shopping for a religion. I formally became a Zen Buddhist about 18 years ago now, I still study Buddhism, I'm a lousy Buddhist. Other buddhists are saying Phillip Kapleau and Dharma heir are not really Roshis, thanks for invalidating my spiritual journey. What appealed to me the most about the madison zen center was that Kapleau was the stenographer at nuremberg and it was a departure from being bullied by someone who told nazi jokes, also another reason it is unfair to smear me as being a nazi sympathizer when I have been studying anti-fascism for 20 years.

Edit: Calling me a liar is gas lighting and makes me want to sick torture you. I would voluntarily take a lie detector test to prove I am telling the truth. Edit: Here is that poem

Feb. 29, 1958 by Allen Ginsberg

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spoilertv · 2 years ago

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#SpoilerTV

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blackswaneuroparedux · 2 years ago

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From my point of view, what's beautiful in the sport is that you don't need to know too much about tactics or anything to see. If you find something beautiful, you don't need to be an expert to know it. It's like ballet… The reason it was nicknamed 'ginga' was that normally, when we'd play against a European team…back then, the European teams were very tough and physical. They were big, and defensively solid... There were some in Brazil who thought we should make that our football culture. We would say, 'We want to dance. We want to ginga. Football is not about fighting to the death. You have to play beautifully.' And so we did, and that's the reason that Brazil created more of a show, more of a ballet… The ambition should always be to play an elegant game.

- Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento)

Pelé was born on Oct. 23, 1940, his father was a professional soccer player in their native Brazil. Pelé — who was given his nickname by childhood friends because of the way he mispronounced his favourite soccer player goalkeeper Bilé - honed his craft playing futsal (or indoor soccer) in Bauru, the region within São Paulo, where Pelé grew up.

In 1956, at only the age of 15, Pelé tried out for the Santos FC professional club near São Paulo. He soon signed a contract with the team and made his professional debut on Sept. 7, 1956. In the Brazilian press, Pelé was instantly hailed as a star, with the forward leading the league in scoring as a 16-year-old in 1957. The following year, Pelé joined the Brazilian national team for the 1958 World Cup, delivering a performance that would make him a global star and earn him the nickname “O Rei,” or “The King.”

Pelé’s dominance continued through the Sixties as his Santos team won six championships in the Brazilian league over the course of that decade, while Brazil also won the World Cup in 1962 and 1970, with Pelé winning the Golden Ball for best player at the latter tournament. In his 19 seasons at Santos, spanning from 1956 to 1974 and roughly 660 games, Pelé scored a record-shattering 643 goals.

In 1975, Pelé helped ignite interest in “the Beautiful Game” - a phrase he in part popularised for the sport, inspired by his own majestic style of play — in the U.S., a country seemingly culturally impervious to soccer’s charms: The American team failed to even qualify for the World Cup between 1954 to 1986. Following nearly two decades at Santos and a brief retirement, Pelé signed with the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League.

Pelé’s mere presence helped the Cosmos reach record attendances, and the sport itself gained public awareness otherwise unheard of stateside. He spent three years with the Cosmos, culminating in a Soccer Bowl championship with the Cosmos in 1977. That same year, Pelé played his final game as a pro as the Cosmos hosted his former longtime team, Santos, for an exhibition match at a sold-out Giants Stadium, with Pelé playing for both teams during the game. In the near half-century following his retirement, Pelé became one of soccer’s greatest ambassadors, continuing his push to keep the “Beautiful Game” on the forefront of the world stage. He starred in soccer-related movies — 1981’s Escape to Victory and 1986’s Hotshot — and teamed with Brazilian musician Sergio Mendes on the soundtrack to a 1977 documentary about his life. He received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth as well as every other possible soccer-related accolade, from the FIFA Order of Merit to the FIFA Player of the Century to a spot on TIme’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century list.

The debate over his status as the all-time No.1 is almost unresolvable, with Lionel Messi the only player to match him in Ballon d'Or awards, and the Argentine and Cristiano Ronaldo also leading him in the all-time goal race. But you can judge Pelé’s greatness by what his footballing peers - legendary players in their own time. “The best player ever? Pelé. (Lionel) Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are both great players with specific qualities, but Pelé was better.” said Alfredo Di Stefano, the late and great Argentine star for Real Madrid. Ferenc Puskas, the legendary Hungarian footballer disagreed, “The greatest player in history was Di Stefano. I refuse to classify Pelé as a player. He was above that.” For Franz Beckenbauer, he said of Pelé “He is the most complete player I ever saw.”Rarely do the Germans see eye to eye with the Dutch such is their footballing rivalry, but for the late great Johann Cruyff, “Pelé was the only footballer who surpassed the boundaries of logic.”.

Even Ronaldo, the only player on the same level as Lionel Messi in the modern game, put the debate to rest when he declared, “Pelé is the greatest player in football history, and there will only be one Pelé in the world.”

RIP King Pelé (1940-2022)

#pelé #footballer #football #brazil #soccer #athlete #icon

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namesisfortombstones · 2 years ago

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Halloween-a-thon 2022

From late September 30th to early hours of November 1st. *Demarcates previously-unseen title 1. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (theatrical version) 2. The Mummy (1932; theatrically) 3. Bride of Frankenstein (theatrically) 4. Lady Frankenstein 5. Trilogy of Terror* 6. The Haunting (1963) 7. Orphan 8. Prophecy (1979) 9. Phantasm: RaVager (The For Rory Edition) 10. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (theatrical version) 11. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) 12. It! The Terror from Beyond Space 13. Pit and the Pendulum (1961) 14. Halloween (2018) 15. Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell 16. The Fog (1980) 17. The Howling 18. Death Ship 19. Halloween Kills (Extended) 20. The Face of Fu Manchu 21. Halloween Ends* (theatrically) 22. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers 23. Phantasm: OblIVion 24. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (R.I.P. Ted White) 25. Fright Night (1985) 26. Christine 27. Hellraiser (1987) 28. Silver Bullet 29. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II 30. Howling IV: The Original Nightmare 31. The Gorgon 32. The Masque of the Red Death (1964) 33. House of Usher 34. Orphan: First Kill 35. Witchfinder General 36. The Terror (1963) 37. Horror of Dracula 38. Lust for a Vampire 39. Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (producer's cut) 40. Mr. Sardonicus 41. The Devil's Wedding Night 42. Dracula, Prince of Darkness 43. Elvira's Haunted Hills* 44. Popcorn* 45. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers 46. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave 47. Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood 48. Taste the Blood of Dracula 49. Halloween III: Season of the Witch 50. Scars of Dracula 51. Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch 52. Prince of Darkness 53. Communion 54. Let's Scare Jessica to Death 55. Rasputin, the Mad Monk 56. Dracula A.D. 1972 57. The Satanic Rites of Dracula 58. Amityville 3-D 59. Dracula's Daughter 60. The Frenchman's Garden* 61. The Wolf Man (1941) 62. Son of Dracula 63. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man 64. Nightworld* 65. The Marsupials: The Howling III 66. Poltergeist (1982) 67. Alligator* 68. Alligator II: The Mutation* 69. The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman 70. House of Frankenstein 71. The City of the Dead 72. Assignment Terror 73. Black Sunday 74. The Devil Rides Out 75. Phantasm 76. A Nightmare on Elm Street 77. Halloween (Extended) 78. Halloween II (theatrical version) 79. Curse of the Demon (U.S. version) 80. Equinox (1970) 81. The Curse of Frankenstein 82. House on Haunted Hill (1958) 83. Son of Frankenstein 84. The Plague of the Zombies 85. Halloween II (TV Version)

#Halloween #Samhain #October #horror movies #scary movies

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whileiamdying · 2 years ago

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Pelé, the Global Face of Soccer, Dies at 82

Pelé, who was declared a national treasure in his native Brazil, achieved worldwide celebrity and helped popularize the sport in the United States.

Born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pelé was a formative 20th-century sports figure who was revered as a national treasure in his native Brazil. He was known for popularizing soccer in the United States, and citing it as a tool for connecting people worldwide.CreditCredit...Associated Press

By Lawrie Mifflin Dec. 29, 2022

Pelé, one of soccer’s greatest players and a transformative figure in 20th-century sports who achieved a level of global celebrity few athletes have known, died on Thursday in São Paulo. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by his manager, Joe Fraga. The Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in São Paulo said the cause was multiple organ failure, the result of the progression of colon cancer.

Pelé had been receiving treatment for cancer in recent years, and he entered the hospital several weeks ago for treatment of a variety of health issues, including a respiratory infection.

A national hero in his native Brazil, Pelé was beloved around the world — by the very poor, among whom he was raised; the very rich, in whose circles he traveled; and just about everyone who ever saw him play.

“Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory,” Andy Warhol once said. “Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.”

Celebrated for his peerless talent and originality on the field, Pelé (pronounced peh-LAY) also endeared himself to fans with his sunny personality and his belief in the power of soccer — football to most of the world — to connect people across dividing lines of race, class and nationality.

He won three World Cup tournaments with Brazil and 10 league titles with Santos, his club team, as well as the 1977 North American Soccer League championship with the New York Cosmos. Having come out of retirement at 34, he spent three seasons with the Cosmos on a crusade to popularize soccer in the United States.

Before his final game, in October 1977 at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Pelé took the microphone on a podium at the center of the field, his father and Muhammad Ali beside him, and exhorted a crowd of more than 75,000.

“Say with me three times now,” he declared, “for the kids: Love! Love! Love!”

Pelé kicks a ball over his head in 1968 in an acrobatic move. Off-balance or not, he could lash the ball accurately with either foot.Credit...Associated Press

In his 21-year career, Pelé — born Edson Arantes do Nascimento — scored 1,283 goals in 1,367 professional matches, including 77 goals for the Brazilian national team.

Many of those goals became legendary, but Pelé’s influence on the sport went well beyond scoring. He helped create and promote what he later called “o jogo bonito” — the beautiful game — a style that valued clever ball control, inventive pinpoint passing and a voracious appetite for attacking. Pelé not only played it better than anyone; he also championed it around the world.

Among his athletic assets was a remarkable center of gravity; as he ran, swerved, sprinted or backpedaled, his midriff seemed never to move, while his hips and his upper body swiveled around it.

He could accelerate, decelerate or pivot in a flash. Off-balance or not, he could lash the ball accurately with either foot. Relatively small, at 5 feet 8 inches, he could nevertheless leap exceptionally high, often seeming to hang in the air to put power behind a header.

Like other sports, soccer has evolved. Today, many of its stars can execute acrobatic shots or rapid-fire passing sequences. But in his day, Pelé’s playmaking and scoring skills were stunning.

Early Success

Pelé sprang into the international limelight at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, a slight 17-year-old who as a boy had played soccer barefoot on the streets of his impoverished village using rolled-up rags for a ball. A star for Brazil, he scored six goals in the tournament, including three in a semifinal against France and two in the final, a 5-2 victory over Sweden. It was Brazil’s first of a record five World Cup trophies.

Pelé also played on the Brazilian teams that won in 1962 and 1970. In the 1966 tournament, in England, he was brutally kicked in the early games and was finally sidelined by a Portuguese player’s tackle that would have earned an expulsion nowadays but drew nothing then.

With Pelé essentially absent, Brazil was eliminated in the opening round. He was so disheartened that he announced he would retire from national team play.

But he reconsidered and played on Brazil’s World Cup team in Mexico in 1970. That team is widely hailed as the best ever; its captain, Carlos Alberto, later joined Pelé on the Cosmos.

“I wish he had gone on playing forever,” Clive Toye, a former president and general manager of the Cosmos, wrote in a 2006 memoir. “But then, so does everyone else who saw him play, and those football people who never saw him play are the unluckiest people in the world.”

Pelé, right, hugging a teammate in 1958 after Brazil defeated Sweden 5-2 to win the World Cup. Credit... Associated Press/Reportagebild

Edson Arantes do Nascimento was born on Oct. 23, 1940, in Três Corações, a tiny rural town in the state of Minas Gerais. His parents named him Edson in tribute to Thomas Edison. (Electricity had come to the town shortly before Pelé was born.) When he was about 7, he began shining shoes at the local railway station to supplement the family’s income.

His father, a professional player whose career was cut short by injury, was nicknamed Dondinho.

Brazilian soccer players often use a single name professionally, but even Pelé himself was unsure how he got his. He offered several possible derivations in “Pelé: The Autobiography” (2006, with Orlando Duarte and Alex Bellos).

Most probably, he wrote, the nickname was a reference to a player on his father’s team whom he had admired and wanted to emulate as a boy. The player was known as Bilé (bee-LAY). Other boys teased Edson, calling him Bilé until it stuck.

One of Pelé’s earliest memories was of seeing his father, while listening to the radio, cry when Brazil lost to Uruguay, 2-1, in the deciding match of the 1950 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro. The game is still remembered as a national calamity. Pelé recalled telling his father that he would one day grow up to win the World Cup for Brazil.

He signed his first contract, with a junior team, when he was 14 and transferred to Santos at 15. He scored four goals in his first professional game, which Santos won, 7-1. He was only 16 when he made his debut for the national team in July 1957.

A New Way to Play

When Brazil’s team went to the World Cup in Sweden the next summer, Pelé later said, he was so skinny that “quite a few people thought I was the mascot.”

Once they saw him play, it was a different story. Reports of this precocious Brazilian teenager’s prowess raced around the world. One account told of how, against Wales in the quarterfinals, with his back to the goal, he received the ball on his chest, let it drop to an ankle and instantly scooped it around behind him. As it bounced, he turned — so quickly that the ball was barely a foot off the ground — and struck it into the net. It was his first World Cup goal and the game’s only one, and it put Brazil into the semifinals.

“It boosted my confidence completely,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The world now knew about Pelé.”

Pelé in his debut game in 1975 with the New York Cosmos at Randalls Island Stadium. Credit... Barton Silverman/The New York Times

The world now knew about Brazilian soccer, too. Pelé undoubtedly benefited from playing alongside other remarkably gifted ball-control artists — Garrincha, Didi and Vavá among them — as well as from Europe’s lack of familiarity with the Brazilian style.

Most European teams used static alignments; players seldom strayed from their designated areas.

Brazil, though, encouraged two of the four midfielders to behave like wingers when attacking. This forced opponents to cope quickly with four forwards, rather than two. Making things more difficult, the forwards often switched sides, right and left, and the outside fullbacks sometimes joined the attack. The effect dazzled onlookers, not to mention opponents.

After the semifinal against France, in which Pelé scored a hat trick in a 5-2 Brazil win, the French goalkeeper reportedly said, “I would rather play against 10 Germans than one Brazilian.”

The team went home to national acclaim, and Pelé resumed playing for Santos as well as for two Army teams as part of his mandatory military service. In 1959 alone, he endured a relentless schedule of 103 competitive matches; nine times, he played two games within 24 hours.

Santos began to capitalize on his fame with lucrative postseason tours. In 1960, en route to Egypt, the team’s plane stopped in Beirut, where a crowd gathered threatening to kidnap Pelé unless Santos agreed to play a Lebanese team.

“Fortunately, the police dealt with it firmly, and we flew on to Egypt,” Pelé wrote in his autobiography.

He had become such a hero that, in 1961, to ward off European teams eager to buy his contract rights, the Brazilian government passed a resolution declaring him a nonexportable national treasure.

Soccer Diplomacy

When Pelé was about to retire from Santos in the early 1970s, Henry A. Kissinger, the United States secretary of state at the time, wrote to the Brazilian government asking it to release Pelé to play in the United States as a way to help promote soccer, and Brazil, in America.

By then, two more World Cups, numerous international club competitions and tireless touring by Santos had made Pelé a global celebrity. So it was beyond quixotic when Toye, the Cosmos’ general manager, decided to try to persuade the player universally acclaimed as the world’s best, and highest paid, to join his team.

The Cosmos had been born only a month earlier, in one afternoon, when all the players had gathered in a hotel at Kennedy International Airport to sign an agreement to play for $75 a game in a country where soccer was a minor sport at best.

Toye first met with Pelé and Julio Mazzei, Pelé’s longtime friend and mentor, in February 1971 during a Santos tour in Jamaica. It took dozens more conversations over the next four years, as well as millions of dollars from Warner Communications, the team’s owner, for Pelé to join the Cosmos.

During that period, he became the top scorer in Brazil for the 11th time, Santos won the 10th league championship of his tenure, and Pelé took heavy criticism for retiring from the national team and refusing to play in the 1974 World Cup, in West Germany.

Toye made his last pitch in March 1975 in Brussels. Pelé had retired from Santos the previous October, and two major clubs, Real Madrid of Spain and Juventus of Italy, were each offering a deal worth $15 million, Pelé later recalled.

“Sign for them, and all you can win is a championship,” Toye said he told Pelé. “Sign for me, and you can win a country.”

To further entice him, Warner added a music deal, a marketing deal guaranteeing him 50 percent of any licensing revenue involving his name, and a guarantee to hire his friend Mazzei as an assistant coach. Pelé signed a three-year contract worth, according to various estimates, $2.8 million to $7 million (the latter equivalent to about $40 million today).

Clive Toye, the general manager of the Cosmos, with Pelé after the soccer star signed with the team in 1975. Credit... Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

He was presented to the news media on June 11, 1975, at the “21” Club in New York. Pandemonium ensued: Fistfights broke out among photographers, and tables collapsed when people stood on them.

The hubbub continued when Pelé played his first North American Soccer League game, on June 15 at Downing Stadium on Randalls Island in the East River. It was a decrepit home; workers hastily painted its dirt patches green because CBS had come to televise the big debut. More than 18,000 fans, triple the previous largest crowd, shouldered their way in to watch.

At every road game during Pelé’s three North American seasons, the Cosmos attracted enormous crowds and a press contingent larger than that of any other New York team, with many journalists representing foreign networks, newspapers and news agencies. Movie and music stars — including Mick Jagger, Robert Redford and Rod Stewart — showed up for home games, lured by Warner executives’ enthusiasm for their hot new talent.

The Cosmos moved to Giants Stadium in Pelé’s final season, 1977, and there, in the Meadowlands, reached the pinnacle of their — and the league’s — popularity. For a home playoff game on Aug. 14, a crowd of 77,691 exceeded not only expectations but also capacity, squeezing into a stadium of 76,000 seats.

That season, the Cosmos had added two more global superstars, Franz Beckenbauer of West Germany and Carlos Alberto of Brazil. (Later, in 1979, the Los Angeles Aztecs lured a third, Johan Cruyff of the Netherlands, to the league.) Soccer seemed poised to enter the American mainstream.

But as it turned out, professional soccer was not yet ready to blossom in America, not even after the Cosmos won the 1977 league championship, in Seattle, or after Pelé’s festive farewell game in October, when he led the “Love!” chant and played one half for the Cosmos and the other half for the visiting team, his beloved Santos.

The league had expanded to 24 teams, from 18, and lacked the financial underpinnings to sustain that many games and that much travel. Nor could other teams match the Cosmos’ spending on top-quality players. The league went out of business after the 1984 season.

But at the grass-roots level, and in schools and colleges, soccer did take off. In 1991, the United States women’s national team won the first women’s World Cup. (The United States has won it three times since.) In 2002, the men’s national team made it to the quarterfinals of the World Cup. And Major League Soccer has established itself as a sturdy successor to the N.A.S.L. (In 2011, the inaugural season of a new minor league with the N.A.S.L. name included a New York Cosmos team, of which Pelé was named honorary president.)

In June 2014, the city of Santos opened a Pelé Museum just before the start of the World Cup, the first held in Brazil since 1950. In a video recorded for the occasion, Pelé said, “It’s a great joy to pass through this world and be able to leave, for future generations, some memories, and to leave a legacy for my country.”

Advocate for Education

Pelé met Rosemeri Cholbi when she was 14 and wooed her for almost eight years before they married early in 1966. They had three children — Kelly Cristina, Edson Cholbi and Jennifer — before divorcing in 1982.

After his divorce, Pelé often appeared in the gossip pages, partying with film stars, musicians and models. He acted in several movies, including John Huston’s “Victory” (1981), with Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone.

It also emerged that he had fathered two daughters out of wedlock. One, Sandra, whom he had refused to acknowledge, later sued for the right to use his surname. She wrote a book, “The Daughter the King Didn’t Want,” which he said greatly embarrassed him. She died of cancer in 2006.

His son, nicknamed Edinho, was a professional goalkeeper for five years before an injury ended his career. He later went to prison on a drug-trafficking conviction.

In 1994, Pelé married Assiria Seixas Lemos, a psychologist and Brazilian gospel singer; their twins, Joshua and Celeste, were born in 1996. They divorced in 2008. In his later years he dated a Brazilian businesswoman, Marcia Aoki, and he married her in 2016.

Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

His brother Jair Arantes do Nascimento, who was known as Zoca and also played for Santos, died in 2020.

Children always responded warmly to Pelé, and he to them. Neither big nor intimidating, he had a wide, easy smile and a deep, reassuring voice.

“I have never seen another human being who was so willing to take the extra second to embrace or encourage a child,” said Jim Trecker, a longtime soccer executive who was the Cosmos’ public relations director in the Pelé years.

Pelé greeting children during the inauguration of a soccer pitch in Rio de Janeiro in 2014. Credit... Silvia Izquierdo/AP

Pelé was sensitive about having dropped out of school (he later earned a high school diploma and a college degree while playing for Santos) and often lamented that so many young Brazilians remained poor and illiterate even as the country had begun to prosper.

Indeed, the day he scored his 1,000th goal, in November 1969 at Maracanã stadium in Rio before more than 200,000 fans, Pelé was mobbed by reporters on the field and used their microphones to dedicate the goal to “the children.” Crying, he made an impromptu speech about the difficulties of Brazil’s children and the need to give them better educational opportunities.

Many journalists interpreted the gesture as grandstanding, but for decades, as if to correct the record, he cited that speech and repeated the sentiment. In July 2007, at a promotional event in New York for a family literacy campaign, he said, “Today, the violence we see in Brazil, the corruption in Brazil, is causing big, big problems. Because, you see, for two generations, the children did not get enough education.”

(On the subject of correcting the record, research for his 2006 biography turned up additional games played, and the authors concluded that the famous 1,000th goal was actually his 1,002nd.)

In London during the 2012 Olympics, Pelé joined a so-called hunger summit meeting convened by the British prime minister at the time, David Cameron, whose stated goal was to reduce by 25 million the number of children stunted by malnutrition before the Rio Olympics in 2016.

Business and Music

Pelé’s own venture into government began in 1995, when he was appointed Brazil’s minister for sport by then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Pelé began a crusade to bring accountability to the business operations of Brazil’s professional teams, which were still run largely as gentlemen’s clubs, and to reform rules governing players’ contracts.

In 1998, Pelé’s Law, as it was known, passed. It required clubs to incorporate as taxable for-profit corporations and to publish balance sheets. It required that players be 20 before signing a professional contract and gave them the right of free agency after two years (instead of after age 32).

Many of the provisions were later weakened, and corruption continued, but Pelé said he took pride that the free agency clause had survived.

Business deals gone awry plagued him throughout his life.

He himself said he was often gullible, trusting friends who were less competent than they appeared. In 2001, a company he had helped found a decade earlier, Pelé Sports and Marketing, was accused of taking enormous loans to stage a charity game for Unicef and then not repaying the money when the game failed to happen. Pelé shut down the company; Unicef said there had been no wrongdoing on his part.

While continuing to promote educational programs throughout his life, Pelé also pursued his musical avocation. He was never far from a guitar, and he carried a miniature tape recorder to capture tunes or lyrics as the mood struck him.

He composed dozens of songs that were recorded by Brazilian pop stars, usually without his taking credit.

Pelé relaxing during the World Cup in Mexico in 1970. Pursuing a musical avocation, he was never far from a guitar. Credit... Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos, via Getty Images

“I didn’t want the public to make the comparison between Pelé the composer and Pelé the football player,” he told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2006. “That would have been a huge injustice. In football, my talent was a gift from God. Music was just for fun.”

As he grew older, he often spoke of the difficulty of distinguishing between two personas: his real self, and the soccer superstar Pelé. He often referred to Pelé in the third person.

“One of the ways I try to keep perspective on things,” he wrote in his autobiography, “is to remind myself that what people are responding to isn’t me, necessarily; it’s this mythical figure that Pelé has become.”

His face remained familiar around the world long after his retirement from soccer. In 1994, when the World Cup was about to be played in the United States, Pelé sat in Central Park in New York waiting to be interviewed for ABC News. A teenager passed, did a double-take and then ran off; within minutes, people were streaming across the park to see him.

“There were hundreds of them,” Toye wrote in his own memoir. “Seventeen years after he last kicked a ball, this dark-skinned man is sitting in deep, dark shade under the trees — but he is still recognized, and once recognized, never alone in any country on earth.”

#Pelé #Edson Arantes do Nascimento #The New York Times #Obituary #Cancer #Santos #Brasil #Cosmos #NYC

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kwebtv · 7 months ago

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Character Actor

Gerald Mohr (June 11, 1914 – November 9, 1968) Radio, film, and television character actor and frequent leading man, who appeared in more than 500 radio plays, 73 films, and over 100 television shows.

From the 1950s on, he appeared as a guest star in more than 100 television series, including the Westerns The Californians, Maverick, Johnny Ringo, The Alaskans, Lawman, Cheyenne (as Pat Keogh in episode "Rendezvous at Red Rock"/as Elmer Bostrum in episode "Incident at Dawson Flats"), Bronco, Overland Trail (as James Addison Reavis, "the Baron of Arizona", in the episode "The Baron Comes Back"), Sugarfoot, Bonanza (as Phil Reed in the episode "The Abduction", as Collins in the episode "Found Child", as Cato Troxell in the episode "A Girl Named George"), The Rifleman, Wanted: Dead or Alive (episode "Till Death do us Part"), Death Valley Days (as Andrés Pico in "The Firebrand"), and Rawhide. In 1949, he was co-announcer, along with Fred Foy, and narrator of 16 of the shows of the first season of The Lone Ranger, speaking the well-known introduction as well as story details. The narration was dropped after sixteen episodes.

Mohr guest-starred seven times in the 1957–62 television series Maverick, twice playing Western gambler Doc Holliday in "The Quick and the Dead" and briefly in the conclusion of "Seed of Deception", a role he reprised again in "Doc Holliday in Durango", a 1958 episode of Tombstone Territory. In one of the other Maverick episodes, he portrayed Steve Corbett, a character based on Bogart's in Casablanca. That episode, "Escape to Tampico," used the set from the original film, this time as a Mexican saloon where Bret Maverick (James Garner) arrives to hunt down Mohr's character for an earlier murder.

Mohr also guest-starred on Crossroads, The DuPont Show with June Allyson, Harrigan and Son, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, It's Always Jan, Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Lost in Space, Ripcord and many other television series of the era, especially those being produced by Warner Bros. Studios and Dick Powell's Four Star Productions. He sang in the 1956 Cheyenne episode "Rendezvous at Red Rock". He also essayed Captain Vadim, an Iron Curtain submarine commander, in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode "The Lost Bomb". In the series' fourth and final season (1968-69), Mohr guest-starred in the episode "Flight From San Miguel" on The Big Valley. This episode was broadcast posthumously in April 1969.

Mohr made guest appearances on such network television comedy shows as The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1951), How to Marry a Millionaire (1958), The Jack Benny Program (1961 & 1962), The Smothers Brothers Show (1965) and The Lucy Show (1968). He had the recurring role of newsman Brad Jackson in My Friend Irma (1952). He played "Ricky's friend", psychiatrist "Dr. Henry Molin" (real life name of the assistant film editor on the show), in the February 2, 1953 episode of I Love Lucy, "The Inferiority Complex". His repeated line was, "Treatment, Ricky. Treatment".

In 1954–1955, he starred as Christopher Storm in 41 episodes of the third season of Foreign Intrigue, produced in Stockholm for American distribution. During several episodes of Foreign Intrigue, but most noticeably in "The Confidence Game" and "The Playful Prince", he can be heard playing on the piano his own musical composition, "The Frontier Theme", so called because Christopher Storm was the owner of the Hotel Frontier in Vienna. Foreign Intrigue was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1954 under the category "Best Mystery, Action or Adventure Program" and again in 1955 under the category "Best Mystery or Intrigue Series".

Mohr made four guest appearances on Perry Mason (1961–66). In his first appearance, he played Joe Medici in "The Case of the Unwelcome Bride". In 1963, he played murder victim Austin Lloyd in "The Case of the Elusive Element". In 1964, he played the murderer, Alan Durfee, in "The Case of a Place Called Midnight". In 1966, he played agent Andy Rubin in the series' final episode, "The Case of the Final Fadeout".

He continued to market his powerful voice, playing Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic) in the Fantastic Four cartoon series during 1967 and Green Lantern in the 1968 animated series Aquaman. (Wikipedia)

#Character Actor #TV #Gerald Mohr

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