#the towers are just so loaded in their imagery to americans...

[hydenine]

I really loved the movie Robot Dreams and I've seen it twice now, but there is something extremely jarring about the number of shots where the twin towers are prominently featured in the background, especially since the film seems to have nothing to do with 9/11 sjdjjdjf

[js116]

Silent Planet’s Everything Was Sound

22 May 2021

A wee bit of background before we get to the main event:

Silent Planet is an American post-rock metalcore band from California headed by retired psychologist/therapist Garrett Russell, and Everything Was Sound is their second studio album. Released in 2016, this concept album did nothing short of blow my mind; the total runtime is 41 minutes, but it took me a couple hours to write out everything I picked up from each song. 

Everything Was Sound has thirteen tracks, standard, so that is the album I listened to for this review! For the purpose of sticking with the album’s story concept, I’ll be adding my standout lyric quotes with the description of the song, rather than sticking them at the end. 

- I want to post a warning before I get into this album: this one covers topics some may view as disturbing. There are mentions of death, suicide, war, several mental disorders including depression and eating disorders), politics, and generally dark themes. This is where you should stop reading if any of these will bother you. -

The concept for this album revolves around the idea of the “panopticon,” which describes a circular prison surrounding a central guard tower. There are bright lights shining down from the tower so that the prisoners cannot see into the tower, where they are told there are guards watching them constantly. The prisoners are isolated from the guards and each other, being unable to see into the tower or other cells due to the walls and the lights. This setup removes the autonomy of the prisoners, and the paranoia that the guards are constantly watching (whether there are truly guards in the tower or not) removes the will to try to escape or act out. 

This concept is introduced in the first track of the album, Inherit the Earth. This first song begins by referencing the events of the previous album’s last track (Depths II from album The Night God Slept, in which the viewer has a vivid vision in the forest before falling asleep) as having happened only a few hours before, and now the viewer is waking up in the woods to find it is starting to rain. The viewer (us) stumbles through the rain and the forest under they find a structure: the panopticon. They enter the prison to escape the weather, and so we are pulled into the story of the album -- a metaphor for the human condition. 

“We inherit the earth, we inherit the war / I inhabit the wound, I dwell in the harm / Oh how far we fall: We’re casualties of time / Oh how far we fall: Forgive existence.”

The second track, Psychescape, (and each subsequent song, except the last one) introduces us to the contents of one of the cells: Schizophrenia. The theme of this song is paranoia and delusion, and the tower’s lights and watching guards are revealed to us; there are two distinct, conflicting voices. 

“I waited on the tracks of reason / But my train of thought never came / It never came.”

“Scrawled across the walls the suffering saint cries out: / ‘Is it madness to retreat from the myopic gaze that holds us captive?’”

Dying In Circles, the third track and second cell, holds the prisoner Organized Religion. Heavily rooted in Biblical principles, I was surprised to find this track used those principles to highlight and call out the hypocrisy of the modern church; the gatekeeping, neglect of those in need, the isolation of outsiders. Silent Planet calls on systematic religion (particularly modern Christianity) to return to its original purpose: to care for others, rather than turn them away or determine their worth as an organization. They are charged with trading their religious superiority for the awe and compassion for humanity they once had; to return to being a religion about the life of God, rather than being solely about his death. I really do love the idea of the “Image of God” being represented by a homeless person sleeping on church steps. 

“Beside the shadow of a frozen chapel / Under the marriage of cross and crown / Outside the privilege of the ‘chosen ones’ / The Image of God is sleeping on the ground.”

“We are the eulogy at the funeral of God.”

“Trade your certainty for awe.”

The fourth track took me for a spin, personally, as I’ve encountered the prisoner described here myself. Understanding Love as Loss opens with a few brief lyrics outlining the suicides of writers Sylvia Plath (“Searching for solace in a toxic temple--” death by toxic inhalation), Earnest Hemingway (“Fragments of lead climbing through your head--” death by shotgun to the skull), Virginia Woolf (“Stones load your coat as you wade through the winter current / Dancing with the dead on the riverbed--” death by drowning), and David Foster Wallace (“Wanton hanging of the wise pale king.” death by hanging). 

The line immediately following the deaths of these writers stuck out to me, as a fellow writer who has struggled with depression: “And I see myself.”

The title of the song explains that love is sacrifice; you lose a piece of yourself when you love someone else. Lose that piece, Silent Planet urges in this song; lose that piece to another person instead of losing yourself to your suffering. 

Lead vocalist Garrett Russell: “[Sometimes with depression,] the world feels like there’s no color. Even if you can’t see the color, be bold enough to ask someone to describe the colors of the world to you.”

This song was my favorite this far into the album, for its bare, unflinching honesty on the subject. The footnotes for this song in the album booklet include the number for the National Suicide Hotline. I respect that. 

The fifth track, Tout Comprendre, draws its title from the first half of a French quote, and translates loosely to “To Understand All.” This song is an interlude, meaning it does not contain any lyrics, and it is the first of two interludes on the set. 

Immediately following Tout Comprendre comes Panic Room, a track that tells the story of a veteran who has come home, but is mentally haunted by the war. The lyrics take us to bloody battlefields in desert sands, and lay out the plague of terror-memories. Panic Room’s prisoner is PTSD, and it delves into the American treatment of returned veterans and their struggles with armed-conflict trauma. 

“Praise me for my valor, lay me in a crimson tower / Justify my endless terror as my ‘finest hour’ / Treat me as a token to deceive the child / Whom we fatten for this scapegoat slaughter / I learned to fight, I learned to kill, I learned to steal / I learned that none of this is real, none of this is real / None of this is real, NONE OF THIS IS REAL”

Just after this verse, there is a brief, almost total silence, before the song resumes. There are several breaks like this in the music; periods of calm between the intense music. 

We move on to the fifth cell and seventh track, REDIVIDER. This song threw me off at first; I thought the words were being reused and rearranged before I realized the song is a palindrome. About halfway through, the lyrics flip to mirror the first half of the song. 

“Death ran away then life flooded in world / This I am: Imbalance, beautifully so / Hands connected, perhaps… / Then dead reflections saw you / I did, didn’t I? / I didn’t, did I? / You saw reflections dead then / Perhaps, connected hands… / So beautifully imbalance: Am I this world? / In flooded life then away ran Death.” 

The fifth prisoner is Bipolar Disorder. 

Nervosa is the name of the eighth track; this one disturbed me the most out of all of them. My first impression of this song was, if you’ll excuse my Irish here, “Holy sh*t.” None of the imagery prior to this song was nearly as vivid and disturbing as it was here. The clean vocals (singing instead of metal-screaming) are very well done, capturing the desperation of the situation in a very raw way, which is fitting for the theme of the song -- this cell’s prisoner is the deadliest of psychiatric disorders, bulimia nervosa. The entirety of the lyrics are well-written (although, again, vividly disturbing), so I chose the most poignant of them.

“I am not my own reflection / I am not myself, I am not myself / I am haunted by a non-existent lover / The spectre, the ghost, the self-starving host / I am haunted by a non-existent lover / I was gifted with the vision but cursed to be the witness.”

This song, too, contains links to help services for eating disorders in the footnotes of the album booklet. 

We come now to the second interlude, C’est Tout Pardonner, titled after the second half of the French quote, the entirety of which translates to “To understand all is to forgive all.” The prisoner held in the two of these is ignorance. 

Just as C’est is the second, contrasting half of Tout, which was followed by war-themed Panic Room, so Orphan, the second, contrasting half of Panic Room, follows C’est. 

Orphan relays the perspective of orphans of war, the prisoners of this track. Particularly focusing on crimes against peaceful civilians (especially in the Middle East), Orphan also describes the reunion of two brothers on opposite sides of war. 

“I’m finding the violence -- it looks like me.”

“Terrified little son, encumbered by your sword / You can hide your fear, but won’t shed the weight of your humanity -- Humanity / You can face me toward the mountains / Where I meet our mother’s gaze / Too blinded by this hatred / To recognize your brother’s face.”

The eleventh track, No Place to Breathe, was both ahead of its time and should not have had to be written in the first place. The prisoner in this eighth cell is fascism, specifically within enforcers of the law. It dives into how easy it is to turn a blind eye to issues like systematic racism, police brutality, and inherent injustice, if these things do not affect us personally. There are three murder victims, (Eric Garner [2014], Hernan Jaramillo [2013], and Kelly Thomas [2011]) all killed by police, whose last recorded words are attributed in the song: “I can’t breathe.” 

Does that sound familiar from more recent news? This album was released in 2016, to give some perspective on how things have changed. 

“We shout at fascists, hands fixed on asphyxiating those in need / Place your hands to the pulse of this city / Keep your ear to the ground / Hear him gasp, / ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.’”

The ninth and final cell is explored in the twelfth track, First Father (which is the partner of a song called First Mother from their previous album). The final prisoner is the grief over losing a loved one. Switching between a rushing, loud tempo and a low-toned quiet of guitars and vocals, the song captures the process of moving forward through personal loss. 

“‘You pulled me through time,’ through the edgeless night / I’ll learn to love as you learned to die / I’ll begin to feel again and finish the chapter you couldn’t write / Candles in the dark, defiant to the night / Defiant to the shadow / You pull me through time, through the edgeless night / I learned to love as you learned to die.”

With the thirteenth and final song, we’ve literally come full circle and are finally at the prison’s central tower, where we discover we are the guard watching the prisoners. Titled after a line from the first track’s lyrics (”We inherit the earth[...] We inhabit the wound”), Inhabit the Wound tears down the guard tower, freeing the prisoners from the confines of their situation or disorder. Each of the nine prisoners reaches into themselves and retrieves a seed, which is planted in the place of the tower. The album closes with this image:

“The earth, with a final gasp, shook free from our inventions. Grace and nature reconciled as I heard ‘it is finished.’ The final seal was broken, the concussion blew me back -- I teetered on the edge of re-creation and the wrath. The nine lovers stumbled out of their shells of brokenness, they reached inside their wounds to find the seeds borne from their suffering. Coalesce upon me to plant the tree of life inside the heart of the machine. Reach inside -- heal the wound -- make us whole.”

I found this album to be an absolute masterpiece, and metal isn’t usually a preferred genre of mine. I’ve got to give this one five out of five symbolic and vivid frogs. Well done, Silent Planet, both in composition and in raising awareness about different types of struggle.

Next week I’ll be reviewing an album that was recommended to me, and that was released today: Twenty One Pilots’ Scaled and Icy.

Thanks for listening with me!

[moved202347]

Hekate / Hecate

(from my old amino before I got banned 😂, pretty much copy n pasted for reference)

Dogs/puppies [from https://hekatecovenant.com/resources/symbols-of-hekate/dogs/] -The dog was connected to spirits, the home (as a guard), a friend of the family, also symbolising an easy birth and fertility.  Represents the earth element. Also known as the 'black bitch'. Originated in ancient hymns, writings, ancient Greek pottery, stone carvings and statues. Its first symbolism came from the Trojan Queen Hekabe who leapt into the sea after the fall of Troy. Hecate took pity on her and turned her into a black dog which became her familiar. In some Greek towns, black female dogs were sacrificed in Hecate's honour, usually at night. Cerberus, the three-headed hound who guards the entrance of the Underworld is additionally connected to Hecate. In American + European folklore, dogs have always been seen as supernatural in the nature of what humans can't see. Black dogs are thought to roam the locations Hecate holds sacred; desolate roads, moors, cemeteries and the crossroads. Dogs attend her as she roams these desolate spaces. 

Dragons [credit to https://hekatecovenant.com/resources/symbols-of-hekate/dragon/]- There are loads of epithets of Hecate. One of her epithets comes from the name 'propylaya' meaning 'she who stands before the gate'. Her hound is believed to be the three-headed dog Cerberus who guards the gateway into the Underworld and some myths believed that dogs replaced dragons. There is imagery associated with Medea with riding her flying chariot escaping from Korinthos after the murder of the king Kreon. Her dragons were a pair of winged, serpentine dragons. 

Black lamb - A preferred sacrificial offering to Hecate. In modern times, it would be more suitable to have a representative of a black lamb such as a statue or photograph , or somehow getting a living black female sheep into your house without wrecking havoc in front of your altar (I don't recommend having a living animal on your altar!). 

Fire breathing Horse or Bull - Represents the fire element. It was symbolic of Hades fiery soul. Hecate is often seen in images crowned with bull-like crescent horns. Black bulls became heavily associated with Hecate as sacrificial animals in necromancy rituals. It is a constant reminder of her powers as creator and destroyer symbolised by the phases (waxing and waning) of the moon and seen in the crescent horns of a bull.

·🖤·

Hydra headed snake or serpent [https://archetypicalwitchcraft.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/understanding-hekate-part-5-the-meaning-of-her-ancient-symbols/]- A solar and underworld symbol. Represents the water element. It was an ambivalent symbol just like the dog, it was connected to the sun, healing and regeneration. Yet there was also a link to the spiritual side, the underworld too. There was old folklore which believed spirits would appear as a snake to bless the house. Snakes, like domestic animals was said to be able to see and feel the presence of spirits, so they were used in necromancy and magic to figure out if there was spirits around. 

·🖤·

Other associations are: frogs or toads; black bulls (draped in wreaths of yew and was then slaughtered in her honour);belladonna (poisonous herb!), cypress; dittany; mandrake; honey (anything sweet), dark chocolate (modern interpretation!); red wine (of course only if your in the age to use it, though your not going to be drinking it!);  torches;  infernal spirits; dagger; ebony; knives or daggers (obviously be safe and don't do any silly things with it!); twin torches; magickal brewing (so potions); silver; grey; bats; rope; black; mental health; hearth and home; dreams; divination; cauldrons; fate. MORE HERBS:  hazel, black poplar, cedar, willow, garlic, thyme, almonds, myrrh, mugwort, mint, dandelion, cardamom, hellbore, belladonna, hemlock, mandrake, hecateis (aconite, wolfsbane [poisonous]) opium poppy, verbena, sage, purple honeysuckle, camomile. Any hallucination herbs (be careful obviously and know your stuff and even then check it with someone who also knows their stuff). Owls, bears, ravens, cats (possibly) and donkeys. 

She is associated with yew, garlic, all poisonous herbs (use representations, so little tiny mushroom statues), oak, white, red, purple, ferrets (polecats), healing, healing herbs (more of the stronger ones and notorious ones), keys (Knowledge, unlocking wisdom, seeing the truth), mandrake, lamps, saffron, sandals in bronze or gold, whips, iron, the wolf, mullet (the blood-coloured goatfish), the new moon, twilight (best time to do rituals with her).

·🖤·

Also MORE epithets ("An epithet is an honorary and praiseful descriptive title used as part of a name."), all taken and sourced from http://www.patheos.com/blogs/matauryn/2017/07/19/many-epithets-hekate/. 

Adamantaea ‘Unconquerable’, ‘Untamable Goddess’

Admêtos ‘Indomable’, ‘Unconquered’

Aenaos ‘Eternal’

Agallomenen Elaphoisi ‘Rejoicing in Deer’

Agia ‘Sacred’, ‘Holy’

Aglaos ‘Radiant’

Agriope ‘Wild-eyed’, ‘Fierce-faced’, ‘Savage-watcher’, ‘wild-voiced’

Agrotera ‘Huntress’

Aidônaia ‘Goddess of Hades’, ‘Of the Underworld”

Aimopotis ‘Blood-drinker’, ‘Murderer’

Aiônos ‘Eternal’

Aizêiοs ‘Vigorous’

Aktinochiatis ‘Radiant haired’, ‘With Rays for Hair’

Aktiophis [Of Unknown Meaning]

Alexeatis ‘Averter of Evil’

Alkimos ‘Powerful’, ‘Strong’, ‘Stout’, ‘Brave’

Amaimaketos ‘Unconquerable’, ‘Raging’, ‘Invincible’, ‘Unapproachable’, ‘Uncontrollable’

Ambrotos ‘Immortal’

Ameibousa ‘One That Transforms’

Amphiphaes ‘Circumlucent’

Amphiprosopos ‘Double-faced’

Amphistomos ‘Double-mouthed’

Anassa ‘Queen’

Anassa Eneroi ‘Queen of the Dead’

Androphonos ‘Killer of Men’

Angelos ‘Messenger’

Antaian Theou ‘She Who Meets’

Antania ‘Enemy of Mankind’

Aôroboros ‘Devourer of the Prematurely Dead’, ‘Devourer of the Untimely Dead’

Apanchomene ‘The Hanged One’

Apotropaios ‘Averting’, ‘Averter’

Aphrattos ‘Unnamed One’

Arêgos ‘Helper’

Archikos ‘Royal’

Ariste ‘The Best’

Ariste Cthonia ‘Best of the World’, ‘Best in the World’

Arkuia / Arkyia ‘Spinner of webs’, ‘Entrapper’

Arrhetos ‘Ineffable’

Astrodia ‘Star-walker’, ‘Star-Courser’

Atala ‘Tender’, ‘Delicate’

Atasthalos ‘Pretentious’, ‘Reckless’, ‘Presumptious’

Athanatos ‘Immortal’, ‘Of Immortal Fame’

Autophyês / Autopheus ‘Self-generating’. ‘Self-begotten’

Azonos ‘Without Borders’

Azostos ‘Ungirt’, ‘Without a Belt’

Baridouchos ‘Barque-holder’, ‘Skiff-holder’

Basileia ‘Queen’, ‘Princess’

Bolos ‘Far-Thrower’,

Boôpis ‘Cow-eyed’

Booporos ‘Ox-Herder’

Borborophorba ‘Eater of Filth’

Boukolos ‘Ox-Herder’

Brimô ‘Angry-One’, ‘Terrifying’

Buthios ‘Abysmal’, ‘Of the Depths’

Charopos ‘Ferocious-aspected’, ‘Fierce’, ‘Grim’, ‘Flashing’, ‘Bright, ‘Having blue-grey eyes’, ‘of the Sea’

Chthonia ‘Chthonic’, ‘Of the Earth”

Chrysôpis ‘Golden-faced’

Chrysosandalos ‘of Golden Sandals’

Chrysosandalaimopotichthonia ‘Goddess of the Lower World Wearing Golden Sandals and Drinking Blood’

Chrysostephanos ‘Golden-Crowned’, ‘Crowned with Splendor’

Chrysostephês ‘Golden-crowned’

Dadophoros ‘Torchbearer’

Dadouchos ‘Torch-bearer’

Daeira ‘The Knowing One’

Daidalos ‘Cunning’

Damasandra ‘Dominator of Men’, ‘Subduer of Men’

Damnamene ‘Means of Constraint’

Damnodamia ‘Subduer of Subduers’

Damnomeneia ‘Dominating Force’

Dasplêtis ‘Horror’, ‘Frightful-one’

Deichteira ‘Teacher’, ‘Revealer’

Deinos ‘Terrible’

Despoina ‘Lady’, ‘Mistress’

Dione ‘Goddess’

Doloessa / Doloeis ‘Astute-one’, ‘Subtle’, ‘Wily’, ‘Cunning’

Drakaina ‘Serpent’, ‘Dragon’

Eidôlios ‘Phantasmal’, ‘Ghostly’

Eileithyia ‘Nurse of Childbirth’, ‘Goddess of Midwives’

Einalian ‘Of the Sea’

Einodia Thygater Demetros ‘Daughter of Demeter, who is of the Road’

Ekklesia ‘Of the Assembly’

Ekdotis ‘Bestower’

Elaphêbolos ‘Deer-huntress’, ‘Shooter of Deer’

Elateira ‘Driver’, ‘Charioteer’

Ellophonos ‘Fawn-slayer’

Epaine ‘Awe-Inspiring’, ‘Glorious’, ‘Sublime’

Empousa / Empusa [Of unknown meaning, related to the monster Empusa and the idea of phantoms and specters]

Empylios ‘At the Gate’

Empyrios ‘Empyrean’

Enodia ‘Of the crossroads’, ‘Of the Roads’, ‘Of the Path’

Ephodia ‘Traveling Expenses’, ‘Provisions for the Road’, ‘Traveling Supplies’, ‘Resources’

Ephoros ‘Guardian’ ‘Overseer’

Epigeioi ‘of the Earth’

Epiphanestate Thea ‘the Most Manifest Goddess’

Epipurgidia ‘on the Tower’

Episkopos ‘Guardian’, ‘One who Watches Over’, ‘Overseer’

Epiteichea ‘The Stronghold’, ‘Fort’

Epi-tymbidia ‘Sepulchral’

Eranne ‘Lovely’

Erannos ‘Lovely’

Ergatis ‘Energizer’

Êrigeneia ‘Daughter of morning’, ‘Early-born’

Erôtotokeia / Erototokos ‘Bearer of love’, ‘Producing Love’, ‘Who Bore Love’

Eukoline ‘Good Tempered’

Eupatepeia ‘Noble-born’

Eurippa ‘Horse-finder’

Geneteira ‘Mother’

Genetyllis ‘Birth-Helper’, ‘Goddess of Childbirth’, ‘Midwife’

Gigaessa ‘Giant’

Gorgo ‘The Grim’, ‘The Gorgon’

Hecatoncheires ‘Hundred-handed’

Hegemonen ‘Guide’

Hêgemoye ‘Queen’

Helike ‘Revolving’

Hersechthonia ‘Speaking From Below’

Hexacheira ‘Of Six Ways’, ‘Of Six Hands’

Hiera ‘Holy One’

Hieros Pyr ‘Holy Fire’

Hipparete ‘Horse-Speaker’

Hippokyon ‘Mare Bitch’, ‘Horse Dog’

Hippoprosopos ‘Horse-Faced’

Hypolampteira [Of Unknown Meaning – possibly related to light or brightness]

Iocheaira / Iokheaira ‘Arrow-shooter’, ‘One who Shoots Arrows’

Indalimos ‘Beautiful’

Ippokyôn ‘Mare-Dog’, half dog/ half horse

Ippoprosôpos ‘Horse-faced’

Kalkaea ‘Wearer of High Boots’

Kalligeneia ‘Bearing Beautiful Offspring’

Kalliste ‘Fairest’

Kapetoktypos ‘Tomb-disturber’, ‘Causing the Noise of Lamentation’

Kardiodaitos ‘Heart-Eater’, ‘Feasting on Men’s Hearts’

Kareia ‘of Karia’, ‘Kraus’

Karko ‘Lamia’, ‘Child-Eating’, ‘Nocturnal Spirit’

Katachthonia ‘Subterranean’

Katakampsypsaychenos ‘Bender of proud necks’

Kelkaia [Of Unknown Meaning]

Keratôpis ‘Horned-faced’, ‘Horned Looking’

Keroeis ‘Horned’

Kthonia ‘Of the Underworld’, ’Of the Earth’

Kleidouchos / Kleidoukhos ‘Key-holder’, ‘Key-keeper’

Klôthaiê ‘Spinner of fate’

Kore ‘Maiden’

Kourotrophos ‘Child’s Nurse’, ‘Nurse of Youths’

Krataios / Kratais ‘Powerful’, ‘Dominator’, ‘Of the Rocks’

Krokopeplos ‘Saffron-Cloaked’

Kunolygmatos ‘Doglike Howler’, ‘Who howls doglike’

Kydimos ‘Glorious’

Kynegetis ‘Leader of Dogs’

Kynokephalos ‘Dog-Headed’

Kynolygmate ‘Howling Like a Dog’, ‘Who Howls Dog-like’

Kyôn ‘Bitch’, ‘Dog’

Kyôn Melaina ‘Black Bitch’, ‘Black Dog’

Kyria ‘The Powerful’, ‘The Supreme’

Laginitis ‘Of Lagina’

Lampadephoros ‘Lamp-bearer’, ‘Torch-bearer’, ‘Who Warns of Nighttime Attack’

Lampadios ‘Lamp-bearer’, ‘Torch-bearer’

Leaina ‘The Lioness’

Leontoukhos ‘Holding a Lion’

Leukophryne ‘White-Browed’, ‘Of the White-Browed Hill’

Limenitis ‘Harbor Goddess’

Limenitikos ‘Of the Harbor’, ‘Harbor Goddess’

Limenoskopos ‘Of the Threshold’, ‘Watcher of Havens’, ‘On the Harbor’, ‘Watching the Harbor’

Liparokredemnos ‘Of the Bright Headband’, ‘Bright-Coiffed’

Liparoplokamos ‘Brilliant-Braided’

Lochias ‘Protector of birth’, ‘Goddess of Childbearing’

Lykaina ‘She-wolf’

Lyko ‘She-wolf’, ‘Wolf-formed’

Maera ‘Shining’

Mageus ‘One who Kneads’ [Possibly related to Magi]

Makairapos ‘Blessed-one’

Medeousa / Medusa ‘Protector’, ‘Guard’, ‘Gorgon’

Meisopomenos ‘Laborer of the Moon’

Meisoponeros ‘Vice-Hating’

Megiste ‘Greatest’

Melaine ‘Black’

Melaneimôn ‘Black-clad’, ‘Wearing Black’

Melinoe ‘Soothing One’

Mene ‘Moon’

Moira ‘A Share’, ‘Fate’

Monogenes ‘Only Child’

Monoprosopos ‘With One Face’

Mormo ‘She-Monster’

Munychia [Of Unknown Meaning]

Nekuia / Nekyia ‘Goddess of death’, ‘Mistress of corpses’

Nerteria ‘Infernal’, ‘Subterranean’, ‘Nether One’

Nerterios ‘Infernal’, ‘Subterranean’, Nether One’

Nerteron Prytanin ‘Mistress of the Dead’

Noctiluca ‘Light of the Night’, ‘Night Shiner’

Noeros ‘Intellective’

Nomaios ‘Pastoral’

Nychia / Nykhia ‘Nocturnal’ ‘Nocturnal-One’ “Goddess of Night’

Nyktairodyteira ‘Night Riser and Setter’, ‘She that Rises and Sets by Night’

Nykteria ‘Of the Night’

Nykti ‘Of the Night’

Nyktiboos ‘Night-Shouter’, ‘Night-Crier’

Nyktipolos ‘Night-Wandering’

Nyktophaneia ‘Night-shining’

Nymphen ‘Bride’

Nyssa ‘Goader’, “Goal’, ‘Beginning’, ‘Turning Post’, ‘Ambition’

Oistrophaneia ‘Manifester of Madness’

Oistroplaneia ‘Spreader of Madness’, ‘Causing the Wanderings of Madness’

Oksyboê ‘Shrill-screamer’, ‘Shrieker’

Oletis ‘Destroyer’

Opaon ‘Follower’

Opheôplokamos ‘Coiled with Snakes’, ‘With Snaky Curls’

Oriplanos ‘Mountain-roamer’, ‘Mountain-Wandering’

Oroboros ‘Tail-Eating’

Ourania ‘Celestial’, ‘Heavenly’

Ouresiphoites ‘Wanderer in the Mountains’

Oxythymia ‘Gallows’, ‘Quick to Anger’

Paggennêteira ‘Mother of All’

Paiônios ‘Healer’

Pammêtôr ‘Mother of All’

Pandamateira ‘All-tamer’, ‘All-powerful’, “All Subduer’, ‘Master of all’

Pandina [Of Unknown Meaning – Possibly related to ‘whirling’ or ‘rotating’]

Pandôteira ‘All-giver’, ‘One who gives everything’, ‘Bestower of Everything’, Bounteous’

Pangaios ‘World-wide’

Panopaia ‘All-seeing’, ‘One who sees everything’, ‘Panorama’

Panta Ephepousa [Of Unknown Meaning]

Pantos Kosmou Kleidokhos ‘Keeper of the Keys of the Cosmos’

Pantrephô / Pantrophos ‘All-nurturing’, ‘All-sustaining’, ‘who feeds all’

Parthenos ‘Virgin’

Pasikrateia ‘Universal Queen’, ‘All-powerful’, ‘who dominates all’

Pasimedeonsa ‘All-guarding’, ‘All-protecting’

Pasimedousa ‘Ruling Over All’

[evilasiangenius]

Ekstasis end notes, part 2

Part 1 can be found here.  Again, this is a working draft of notes, I’ll probably revise it at a future date.

Progress on the next chapter is a little slow, but one hint for what’s to come: Furiosa is on her way to the Immortan’s Tower.

Chapter 11

The Loading Gate is based on the bus gate in Mad Max 2: Road Warrior.

A comment from reader veeeeight: “On tonight's episode of Cooking With The Ace: Doing More With Less.”

Immortan Joe talks about buying more children in Vulnera, chapter 6.

AAA rating is mostly a reference to credit ratings (e.g. Standard & Poor's), but it's also a reference to the Auto Club.

Slit soldered his arm bracer on in chapter 2 of Ekstasis so as to never be unarmed, but he thought ahead; he can take it apart enough so that he can get into Bartertown without having to saw off the bracer.

The model of slavery in Bartertown is more like slavery in classical antiquity than the model of chattel slavery that most people are more familiar with, i.e. the type of slavery that existed in the transatlantic trade.  More on this later.

In Vulnera, chapter 8, Slit reveals that his parents were slaves.  “Slaves, the kind that get themselves made slaves because they buy their way into Bartertown with what little they got left, get in debt once they get inside, and never figure a way to buy themselves out.”  

This is definitely a reference to Max wrecking the Underworld methane farm in Beyond Thunderdome.

The first reference to the slave pens in the Underworld was in Vulnera, chapter 7 when Capable talks about how she was brought to Bartertown to be sold.

I imagined this dealer like any number of stereotypical American car dealers, except he trades in slaves.

Thanks to shejackalarts for the discussions on dog breeds and dog training.  A lot of it inspired this section of the chapter and many elements of how the Ace selects the new War Pups.

Now we know why Slit specifically was brought along.

For those curious, Gamble is based on a Belgian Malinois owned by shejackalarts.  He is a handsome boy, a bracelet thief, a hoarder of plush toys, and a gentleman.  And of course, a very good boy.  https://shejackalarts.tumblr.com/tagged/gamble

The real life Gamble steals watches, bracelets, and anything else attached to wrists.

The Ace's training toy is mentioned in Vulnera, chapter 8 and in Gloria, chapter 11.

Much of the fictional Gamble's life is based on the dog's life, though I don't think the dog has ever broken his nose (that would be too sad).

Morsov just loves those cannibalism jokes.

This model of slavery means that children born to slaves are not automatically slaves themselves; they are nominally free.  That means that even though Slit's parents were slaves, Slit was technically free-born, which meant that he belonged to his parents and not his parents' owner(s).  This suggests that at least some slaves in Bartertown are more like indentured servants than what we would consider slaves in the transatlantic chattel slavery model more people are familiar with.  In Vulnera, chapter 8, Slit talks about how he worked as a thief to try to help his parents buy their freedom.

This was how Slit was brought out of Bartertown, chained by his wrist to the Ace's belt at the end of the first part of this series, in the story titled Furiosa.

The Ace calls Furiosa by her title in public and during official work.

Slit has no reason to trust Traders, after he was abused (Vulnera, chapter 8).

The description of the shady merchant is based on Josh Helman, just aged up.

Uncharacteristically, Slit slips into the personal “I” which shows just how serious this accusation is; he is taking full responsibility and credit for his statement.

100 kliks (about 62 miles) is probably an exaggeration or a symbolic number, but it signifies that Bartertown is a regional power.

I intentionally genderswapped some of the original characters from Beyond Thunderdome, partially to show that time had passed, but also to show that it would not matter what gender these characters are in their society; it is the function that matters.

Math fun fact time: the wheel is actually continuous probability instead of discrete.

Just like Gulag meant something odd in Beyond Thunderdome that didn't match the usual definition of the term, Life Imprisonment is not exactly what it seems it should be either.

Coil and Tran have bet on various things over the course of the stories.  In Vulnera, chapter 3 they bet on Slit and Morsov's fight for rank, and in Ekstasis, chapter 2, they bet on the reason Morsov went to sit with Slit.  

“Rota Fortunae, Imperatrix Mundi” means “Wheel of Fortune, Empress of the World.”  This is from the medieval imagery of the wheel of fortune, as well as a reference to the Carmina Burana, from which the title of the series comes from.

Of the bets made by the two War Boys, this is the first time that we've seen Tran win.

Chapter 12

Without heels, Aunty Entity is about 11 hands, so just about 6'4”.

Aunty's Perch is the headquarters seen in Beyond Thunderdome.

It makes sense that Bartertown became very powerful not just because it was located on a major trade route, but because it had a reliable source of food and water.  Perhaps it's analogous to those fast food-based economies that get built along major highways, where there's a little town in the middle of nowhere that has fast food, motels, and gasoline, and nearly nothing else.  Strict control of the resources has made Bartertown and Aunty very wealthy.

Aunty's Palace is modeled after caravanserai cave dwellings (now hotels) in Göreme, Cappadocia, Turkey.  The imagery of a caravanserai is to suggest the importance of Bartertown as an important trading town on a major trade route, except unlike an actual caravanserai, there are rarely visitors and the only full-time resident is Aunty.  

Given the frequent storms and the relative sterility of Aunty's Perch, it seemed reasonable to give Aunty Entity a better place to live.

The wire-wrapped glass vessel with water is the same one as the one that Aunty Entity offered to Max in Beyond Thunderdome.

Aunty Entity has sole ownership of the very lucrative production of food and water, and therefore is by far the richest person in the wasteland, probably richer than Immortan Joe.  With this resource control, she can afford all the finest things from Before, including wooden furniture, most of which has been burnt, crumbled, or decayed over the many years.

Like many other people in the Wasteland world, Aunty Entity is more of a title than a person.

Fruit porn.

Aunty is talking about fruits like oranges, watermelon, grapes, bananas, etc.

There's some bit of Fury Road lore that suggests that Furiosa has a peach pit.  It's unlikely that she could have kept it safe from a before her kidnapping and captivity, so here it is introduced as a gift from Aunty Entity.

Aunty Entity is not just a title but comes with a style, both of wardrobe and of speech, imitating the first, the one known as the Great.

Greater wealth and an increased settlement means Thunderdome fights are now all fought by proxy, suggesting that the times depicted in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome are considered more primitive and crude.  This is analogous to civilizations eschewing human sacrifice for proxy sacrifice with animals or representative tokens (like ancient Egyptian ushabti, for example).  This prosperity and changing culture is a result of the gradual changing climate that is warmer and wetter than the very long drought that grips the region during the height of global nuclear winter.

Aunty Entity brings up Acosta as a challenge; the charisma hides a cunning mind for strategy.

The bed in the guest room is a charpoy bed made with hemp rope.  This is a method of bed-making that comes from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.  Here is a cool video of a man making a charpoy bed.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ4pGPFpwnA  Beyond practicality, this was meant to invoke the sense of an important stop along a wasteland Silk Road.

I originally wanted to write this olive oil soap as savon d'Aleppo (olive oil and laurel oil soap) but it seemed unlikely they could get enough Mediterranean laurel where they are.  Besides the lovely smell, I wanted to at least obliquely reference the Syrian conflict, which has in part deprived the world of this ancient olive soapmaking tradition.

A little reference here to that “We can do it!” Furiosa t-shirt.  Tfuriosa actually sent me one from Japan. <3

Since new cotton cloth is so valuable (a water-thirsty crop), Aunty Entity/Alex is wearing a fortune in clothing.  There is some serious ostentatious to the drabness.  Compare that with the highly decorated world outside of Aunty's Palace,

The weight of the dress was based on the weight of Aunty Entity's original dress in Beyond Thunderdome, which was a whopping 55 kilos.  Alex's dress is 65 kilos, to be precise, calculated using proportionate heights of characters and weight of the original dress.

“A somebody who has become a nobody” is the converse of the line spoken by Tina Turner in Beyond Thunderdome.

Furiosa is referring to eating pigeons and rabbits.

However the birthrate is skewed through environmental factors, social factors, and infanticide, the main idea that there are more males turns on the notion that in the more uncertain parts of the waste, people have fewer children, hide their births, and children of both genders are often raised male for their own safety.  After all, healthy young females are a very desirable commodity in the wasteland, so much so that they are trafficked great distances to warlords like Immortan Joe.  There are many people in the waste who might have in the past identified/lived openly as women who instead live, work, and appear on the surface to be male.  Thus it looks like there are more men than women.

The title of Aunty Entity is not strictly hereditary; Aunty Entity can also adopt an heir, which has happened more than once in the past.

The tea they drink is made from chrysanthemum and rosebuds, and is based on a Chinese tea blend, continuing the Silk Road references.  Furiosa is treating it almost more like soup than tea.  

This style of heavy cast iron teapot is common to East Asia.

In the past, outdoor furniture like this would have been made of wood, but wood is so rare and valuable now that no wooden object would be allowed to be outside where it could crack or break due to the dry air.  Of course, Immortan Joe is so rich and ostentatious that he does whatever he likes (and in fact has some wood mountings on the Gigahorse's weapons).

I had originally written a bit where Slit moves up a rank every day for 10 days because of his fighting in the line for Vulnera, but it didn't fit so I left it out.  Finally was able to use the idea here.

Slit fought Elvis (now the Secundus) in chapter 4 of Euphoria.

Bucket (with his filed teeth) looks a lot scarier than he actually is.

Chapter 13

One detail that I noticed was that many vehicles including the War Rig and the Interceptor have interior curtains that are rolled up along the frames of the doors.  The later Nux car in the movies doesn't, but bear with me, I have reason for the apparent inconsistency, just as the interiors are different in this first car compared to the later Nux car.

Socially awkward Morsov.

This description of Stonker was sort of a parody of more standard canonical literature.

In the Iliad, Achilles is forced to choose between glory and living a long life.  Like Achilles, the War Boys choose glory.

This image of the War Boys' horseplay comes from behind the scenes videos.

Apparently flipping water bottles is still a thing.

The setting for Aunty's Perch is the same as in Beyond Thunderdome.

Te Ao is a Maori name.

The whistle is what helped Max gain an advantage in the Thunderdome fight in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.  

Of course, the feral on trial is Max.

There is injustice to justice when a person can buy their way to favorable results.

I've always wanted to write a story about Imperator Acosta's background.  

Chapter 14

Modern western culture has a strong emphasis on the individual, but War Boy society has a stronger emphasis on the collective, the community.

This scene of War Boys banging together tools and metal objects is inspired by a similar scene in the deleted scenes where the War Boys are banging on their cars and other metal items in unison.

The famous quote “Fear is the mind-killer” comes from Dune by Frank Herbert.

Doctor Dealgood is totally flirting with Slit.  Too bad Slit doesn't notice.

Many bits of dialogue from these Bartertown moments come from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Writing this fight, it seemed that a possible interpretation of Slit's weird lumpy right ear is that it was caused at least in part due to cauliflowering from taking a heavy blow.  

A nice double meaning for the Thunderdome Live! sign.

Slit counts the seconds as though he were on the car gauging distances.

Nux is the one who shouts, “Slit, no!”

At the very end of the story Furiosa, Slit is sold to the War Boys by his own father.

Chapter 15

Early on writing segments like Furiosa, I didn't know what the interior of the tanker looked like, but by this time I had seen some behind the scenes pictures, so it now aligns more closely to those images.

Often these symptoms can manifest in children who have survived great trauma such as during war.  I learned about this from reading about the survivors of the Syrian conflict.

Using the third person neuter pronoun “it” for children is an old-fashioned way (that still persists in German).  It is both to signify the lack of importance of gender as well as the status of War Pups as goods.

Dart's father was definitely an Imperator.

Smaller fighting War Boys end up being sent to Gas Town as their smaller size means they need less food and water.  The larger ones stay in the Citadel.

I spent an hour or two watching Russian dashcam crash videos before deciding on a proper exclamation for Morsov.  

For more backstory about Coil, Win, and Stonker, check out Vincula.

Bucket is named after a friend's dog.  Bristow is Bucket's best mate and is named after the same friend's cat who has since passed on (Witnessed).

Morsov's reciting War Boy principles that he learned from the Ace in Refuge.

Bucket is referencing the Alien movie series.

Zombie stories keep going on.  No specific movie, just zombies in general.  I'm always slightly amused by how many people have zombie apocalypse survival plans.

Zombie's baby teeth haven't fallen out yet; it's just that he's been hit/knocked over a few times and had some teeth knocked out.  So he's a lot younger than he looks and big for his age.

Stonker is alluding to Win, who was killed on the daily patrol and probably un-Witnessed.  Win was Stonker's parent.  More details can be found in Vincula.

Bucket is asking for Stonker to retell Frozen but then settles on Moana.

Coil inherited this small mirror from Win after Win was killed.  It's mentioned in chapter 17 of Vincula.

The Ace knows what he's doing.

Since Win grew up a Trader, he had a sharp eye for expression and only really focused on the parts that would have conceivably been exposed and not always masked.

As an Imperator, Furiosa is allowed to wear a petroleum black that's been chromed with aluminum dust.

Coil is wrong about Furiosa's hesitation here, and he was wrong about Win's too.

Chapter 16

Chapter 16 begins a new section of the story, which as far as my current plans are, is the middle section (volume 2?).  

This is also how sailors return from the sea (manning the rail).

Many ideas about jobs such as the HazMat (Hazardous Materials) Imperator came from conversations with veeeeight who inspired many of these ideas.  More on this later.

The Citadel has its own cache of clothing that it hoards in storage.

By custom, the Imperator is rarely alone and always has someone close by.  The Ace is going against habit, but he knows she'll be with Coil so he's willing to let her go on her own for a little bit.

Even though the War Rig is cleaned by random Revheads, no War Boy is foolish enough to steal from the Imperator.  War Boy society is fairly honest.

Furiosa's experience with the Prime Imperator can be found in the first story of the series, Furiosa.

I imagine most of the warren hallways look like the ones that Max ran through in the beginning of Fury Road.

I think the fact that the Imperator is rarely alone may imply that Acosta had enemies, despite his prominent standing.

The War Boys' soap is made from petroleum byproducts.

Memories of the past Green Place and the green place within Bartertown running together.

Clear grease is refined petroleum jelly, which is naturally black otherwise.

The items in the shrine were previously mentioned at the beginning of chapter 1.  Not all of the things belonged to Acosta, but many did.  The toy car appears in chapter 7 of Vincula, when a young Acosta and Ace made toy cars for the younger children to play with.

The particular tree oil is olive oil.  Acetone comes from Gastown.  Flower oil is lavender oil.  Capsaisin, menthol, and lavender oil come from Bartertown.  

The Ace is talking about finding a cache of essential oils.

Morsov is talking about opium poppies.

The Brand Imperator has many brandings all over his body from this sort of thing.

Baxter is the name of a friend's cat who unfortunately died as a kitten.

veeeeight helped me with the water plant details.

Chapter 17

Definitely a commentary on health care.

The elegant War Boy doesn't have a name yet, but chapter 20 we find that he's called Ducky (after sigmastolen's cat).

A high-ranked Organic like Ducky has nearly as much run of the Citadel as an Imperator, though mainly of the farms.

The windmills are dismantled and stored ahead of major storms.

The last War was when Furiosa lost her hand.  Though there were many gains (cars, captives, etc.), there were probably too many important losses, such as Imperator Acosta and his remaining crew, for there to be a seemly celebration.  

Modern high rise buildings have issues with pressure differences between the outside atmosphere and inside the building.  Here, I assume the Citadel has similar issues.

These are wool military surplus blankets.  The gray with blue stripes and red edging is the Australian World War II era Army issue blanket, and the sand colored one with green stripes and edging is the Australian Vietnam War era Army issue blanket.  

Translated lyrics for the Russian lullaby Bayu Bayushki Bayu can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/381210/discussions/0/1471966894869331810/ Youtube has a few recordings for those curious.

In the movie, from inside the War Tower (when Slit flies in on a chain) the floor looks closed, and from outside it looks open, so I split the difference so that it's partially open toward the waste side, but closed all the way back.

Most major engineering works of the past (and even present) involve some deaths, but in this case this also alludes to ancient practices of human sacrifice while building structures.

The image of the Immortan's family and their seating arrangement at the McFeast comes from a scene of the actors workshopping in a behind the scenes video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTH2fDyAHcY&t=1m30s

The Haynes, Clymer, and Chilton are all auto repair manual books  Haynes is British and Clymer and Chilton are American.

Chapter 18

Chapter 17-19 were were really troublesome writing and it took completing all three before I could see where the logical chapter breaks were.

In the movie, the Prime Imperator is wearing what I am calling the full emblem, and the Secondus Imperator is not, only a leather badge.  In the movie, Furiosa wears the full emblem too.  

McFeasting: http://evilasiangenius.tumblr.com/post/142858754454/mcfeasting-in-valhalla

In many parts of the world, ink is used to mark voter's thumbs so they can't vote again.

This is of course, Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen.

The Immortan's musicians consists of the Doof Warrior and the drummers.

This conversation about dumping Bucket is very similar to a conversation I overheard once in a Target, except without as much cannibalism.

Bucket is merely an outsider, Morsov is from the much detested Buzzard tribe, which shows some differences in their social standing.

As sigmastolen pointed out, brake drums are sometimes used in orchestral percussion.  Bone flutes and rattles constitute some of the first instruments that humans made.  There is definitely a harp in there somewhere.  The only major families of instruments not obviously depicted are reed instruments and electrophones, reeds being hard to obtain at the Citadel.  Many broad elements of the McFeast music scenes come from discussions with sigmastolen.

Booster is doing a very awkward cover of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

The second War Boy sings Beds are Burning by Midnight Oil, a song that originally was meant to support the rights of the indigenous people of Australia, but has been twisted through the lens of War Boy society to imply it's about Immortan Joe's land rights.  I can't remember who recommended this song to me, but I am pretty sure it was shejackalarts.

This old Organic doesn't have a name yet, but in chapter 20 we find out he's called Scythe.

The War Boys bring their own meaning to the music and lyrics that get distorted over time and distance.  This is Bulls on Parade by Rage Against the Machine, suggested by veeeeight.

I was once given dried jujubes stuffed with walnuts once as a snack while traveling in Asia.

Nux doesn't know that the games were canceled.

Chapter 19

Elvis was Morsov's first partner and Driver but was abusive to him.  In the last chapter of Euphoria, Morsov left Elvis after encouragement from Nux.  After fighting Slit, who was protecting Morsov, at a War Games, Elvis was raised as an Imperator and went on to become the new Secundus.  

Originally, I had wanted to write this scene with Furiosa and Coil as a more typical love scene, but it didn't feel right coming on the heels of Morsov's story.  So it's still a love scene, but here we can see that love comes in many forms and is expressed in many ways, not just sexual.

Coil is teaching her the electric slide.  Many years ago in conversation with sigmastolen, we decided that War Boys would definitely line dance, and there would definitely be 100 War Boys doing the electric slide.

This sketch of Coil was drawn by Win, in chapter 17 of Vincula.

In Vulnera chapter 4, a lifetime ago, Coil and Furiosa also sat on a mechanic's creeper together in the War Rig shop under very different circumstances and with a very different relationship.

This unfinished project is referenced by Coil at the end of Lamia and says something about how little Coil really understood Win.

Those high status vehicles get protective coats, whereas when War Boys grind down their vehicles, it'll end up going to rust at some point because there is no way for them to do the same thing.  

Much like Viking flyting, War Boys can settle disputes with rap battles.

The old Organic's song references his past, and is a contrafactum (filk!) of Whatever it Takes by Imagine Dragons.

Chapter 20

Kyber is veeeeight's dog.  Much of the details of industrial work in this chapter is thanks to inspiration and help from veeeeight, such as the idea of Safety workers who function as Kill Switches, as well as the HazMat, water storage divers, and

Pappy is the name of a dog that belongs to someone we know who works in HazMat.

One thought I had was that later, Max would have been put into quarantine for three or four days, with reduced food and water to try to make him easier to handle.  That obviously didn't work very well.

Duke, Kit, and Tempo are all named after dogs, mostly belonging to veeeeight or friends in the past or present.  Kit is short for Kit-Kat.

The climate is changing in the wasteland, getting warmer and wetter after a long nuclear winter, so that new thriving agricultural societies such as the Citadel are gaining in power and population.  Or perhaps power through population.  

Stonker tells the Ace who did it without actually saying their names.  One and Two, the Prime and Secundus Imperators.

Both Vulnera and Euphoria mention this concept of War Pups acting like a messaging system in the Citadel.  

Furiosa is definitely being misgendered here, because socially, all War Boys are considered male, even if they're not.  I've tried to make the distinction that people who don't really know her misgender her, and sometimes even people who are close to her refer to her as male in public.

I wouldn't be surprised if this act of kindness toward the Bridge Imperators would be something that would inadvertently lead to helping Furiosa smuggle the Wives over in the future, if the Imperators can't see as clearly who is making the crossings...

The grindstones and flour mixing imagery refers back to ancient Egyptians.

Fermented foods are a crucial way for War Boys to get enough vitamin B-12 in their diets.  

Ducky is the black cat...sigmastolen's black cat, to be specific.

The Ace subsisted on the broth when he broke his jaw  in Vulnera.

Ducky's question to the pup is very mathematical, asking about a maximum number using “at most” (compare this with “at least”).

I worked out an entire page of notes in my writing notebook on food bar accounting.  The Citadel definitely stores a lot more bars than are being used.

It always seemed to me that Mad Max: Fury Road was both very serious and kind of absurd at the same time, which is a very unusual mix.

The old Organic Scythe greets Furiosa in Latin.

I always thought that one of the Wretched whom we see at the very end of the movie, legless and crawling out of a hole, was formerly a War Boy but one who had been sent down because he lost his legs.

Furiosa's first run to Bartertown is mentioned in the story by the same name.

Pomegranates are associated with death in ancient Greek culture, notably the myth of Persephone.

[back-and-totheleft]

After the Fall

In Oliver Stone’s new film, World Trade Center, a rescue worker stands atop a pile of steaming rubble, planning his descent into the inferno below. “I need a medic up here,” he yells. “Anybody a medic?”

“I used to be a medic,” comes a voice from the darkness.

A tiny figure scrambles up the base of the hill like a large bug. As he passes into the light, we see that it’s Frank Whaley, an actor who got his start with appearances in Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors and JFK.

“My license lapsed,” the figure says. “I had a few bad years. But I’m good.”

Such is the legacy of Stone — a towering figure in modern film who always seems to be wrangling his own personal demons — that it is almost impossible not to read a scene like that autobiographically. A three-time Oscar winner as both writer (Midnight Express) and director (Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July), Stone has spent much of the past dozen years surrounded by controversy or chaos: His satirical tabloid blitzkrieg Natural Born Killers caused novelist John Grisham to accuse him of engendering real-life murders. Nixon, his oddly sympathetic portrait of the ex-president, eluded liberals and conservatives alike. The jumpy, kinetic editing style he employed in the day-for-noir U Turn and the pro-football pageant Any Given Sunday inspired longtime Stone critic Elvis Mitchell to label the latter “the world’s first ADD epic.”

Then the first of two HBO documentaries (Comandante) on Fidel Castro was shelved for being too sympathetic, while a subsequent portrait of Yasser Arafat (Persona Non Grata) saw Stone’s crew fleeing Ramallah four hours before the Israeli army attacked the Palestinian leader’s compound. (A third film, expected to profile either Kim Jong-Il or Saddam Hussein, was canceled.) He has been arrested twice — in 1999 and 2005 — for DUI and possession of marijuana, respectively. During an appearance at HBO’s “Making Movies That Matter” panel at Lincoln Center in October 2001, he allegedly made inflammatory remarks regarding the September 11 attacks, earning him scorn and ridicule in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Most painfully, when Stone, in 2004, finally realized his 20-year obsession to make Alexander, a sweeping history of Alexander the Great filmed on three continents, the film failed to find a domestic audience.

Now comes World Trade Center, a delicate, contained and extremely powerful evocation of our 2001 national trauma, starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña as John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, New York City Port Authority cops who were miraculously excavated from beneath the glowing rubble of Building No. 7. In an odd way, it brings Stone’s career full circle: His first student film, Last Year in Viet Nam, made at NYU in 1970 (for film professor Martin Scorsese), opens with a panorama of southern Manhattan and what would have been the Twin Towers, except that they weren’t completed until January 1972. But in another respect, World Trade Center may be Stone’s most subversive film yet — a rousing, populist, patriotic adventure story that kicks the legs out from under the right-wing criticism marshaled against him. It could prove the ultimate irony that the bête noire of American conservatives — the man who profiled right-wing death squads in Salvador, My Lai–like atrocities in Platoon, hostile takeovers in Wall Street, the anti-war movement in Born on the Fourth of July and, most notably, the fecund proliferation of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theories in JFK — may find his most enthusiastic audience among the very partisans who have heretofore decried his lifetime of work. As no less a cultural observer than Mel Gibson said of Stone in the 1997 thriller Conspiracy Theory, “He’s a disinformation junkie for them. The fact that he’s still alive says it all. He probably should be dead, but he’s not.”

In person, Stone has an infectious laugh, seems genuinely engaged and takes the full measure of my questions before answering, at which point his ideas often come so fast they seem to be skipping across the surface of the conversation. He’s also the most fun kind of intellectual, in that he perpetually appears to be trying to figure himself out. Briefly a classmate of George W. Bush’s at Yale, he seems — at least on the evidence of our wide-ranging, three-hour discussion — to have absorbed a good deal more of its freshman syllabus. We spoke at his West L.A. editing suite, where he is currently preparing a three-hour, 45-minute DVD-only “road show” version of Alexander, complete with intermission.

L.A. WEEKLY: Where were you on the morning of September 11, 2001?

OLIVER STONE: L.A. Asleep. My wife put the TV on.

And what did you think was happening?

It was sensational. It was exciting. It was horrifying. It reminded me in its barbarity and ferocity of the French Revolution — the tumbrels, heads falling. And I had feelings of anger in me, and vengeance. I had a fight with my son, actually, because he was much more objective about it: “How do you know? Don’t assume anything. You’re acting like the mob.” But there were other feelings as well. You know, I realize I’m an older person; I’ve seen Vietnam and a lot of death and shit. Oklahoma City was horrible. JFK’s assassination. Watergate. The 2000 election. We’ve been through our times of shit in this country, so this was another version.

World Trade Centeris very powerful — emotionally powerful. I had a very visceral reaction to it.I think it’s obviously the film, but it’s also more than the film — it’s the fact that the subject matter is so loaded. If you make a film about fire jumpers, and a fire jumper comes to see it, he’ll say, “Well, you got this part right, you got this part wrong.’?” With this film, we’re all fire jumpers. It’s also very different from a lot of your other films — it’s gentle and contained and quiet. I’m wondering if you had to devise a different approach because the subject matter was so delicate.

I just want to say first that the way I look at myself — it’s not necessarily in the result — but with every film, I really have made an effort to make each one an island unto itself in this little sea that we go around in our ships. And every island has been a destination, a stop for a period of time. I’ve tried to take a different style for every film, because it’s the story that comes first, and the subject dictates the style. Even with something like Natural Born Killers, which seems very stylistic and eccentric, it’s still the content that I think is valid and important. With this film, certain things presented themselves: Obviously, the sensitivities of everyone involved, but ultimately that’s the sky around the project. With JFK, for instance, there were his children to think of, Jackie was still alive, Teddy Kennedy. Blowing his head off in Dealey Plaza didn’t go down well with them either. But there was a bigger story to tell.

Here we were limited by movement, so we worked out a style by which, methodically, the film would go in and out of light: Light would fight with the dark, or rather, light would try to make it up to the dark. Claustrophobia is an issue with a film like this. I did Talk Radio, so I know that feeling of being on one set the whole time. Also, Born on the Fourth of July: That was a very contained movie, in a way, because we had a young man in a wheelchair in the second half, where there’s very little movement. When I read this script, I said, “How do we make this movie watchable? How do we make the tension manageable for a mainstream audience?”

It may surprise a lot of people that you’re not using a lot of shock cuts, moving around inside the frame — what you’ve termed your “cubist” style.

Well, where can you move in a hole? A hole is limited. Finding the right point of view in the hole is crucial.

You once said about Platoon?, “I felt like if I didn’t do it now, I’m going to forget.” We’re five years out from 9/11 now, and there is much public hand-wringing about whether it’s too soon yet to deal with this subject matter.

I think it’s a bogus question. The consequences of that day are far worse today. More people have died since then because of the war on terror. There’s more war, there’s more fear, and there is constitutional breakdown left and right. Have the good sense to go to the psychiatrist quickly. If you’ve been raped, talk to somebody about what that day itself was like before you build up all this armor.

You pursued this film, correct?

Yes. Petitioned. My agent, Bryan Lourd, a man of taste, said to me, “Look, I read this script two weeks ago — it stays with me, it’s emotional. I don’t know if it will make a dime, I don’t know if I can get it financed, but just read it.” So I read it, and I said, “My God, I never thought of this — to do 2001 this way.” I knew [World Trade Center producers] Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher. But no one would make it; Universal dropped it at the [proposed] budget. I was doing other things, I wasn’t stopping my life. But then it came back around. Paramount was just coming into being [under new management]. We were very lucky, because that new studio energy was coming in, and they wanted to make it so badly that it happened right away.

And did you talk with the producers about politics — if there would be a political viewpoint that informed the story?

There was no room for it, because John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno were not interested in politics, per se. They don’t talk about politics like you and I do. Their lives are not determined by it; they live according to what is given them. So it never entered into the equation. I loved the script [by Andrea Berloff] as it was. I loved the inspiration of the story. So I vowed to stay inside those parameters.

New York is probably the most liberal city in America, and yet the 9/11 attack has been so politicized, its imagery considered so proprietary, that right-wing skepticism has been mounting steadily against you since this project was announced. A story in The New York Times said the film is being strategically marketed to right-wing opinion leaders using the PR firm that advised the Swift Boat Veterans group. It even quoted the conservative National Review Web site as saying, “God Bless Oliver Stone.”

I knew [the studio] was doing grassroots marketing to everybody — Hispanics, cops, firemen, teachers, church groups. I didn’t know that they had hired a specific firm; I found out that day. I’m pleased they like it, because it goes beyond politics.

Could you foresee a left-wing backlash against the film?

If people on the right are responding with their hearts, I’m all for it. But if they’re making it into a political statement, it’s wrong. Those on the left might say, “Oh, this is a simplified context, and these are simplistic working-class values. You’re not showing a wider political context.” Or secondly, that we’re sentimentalizing the event — which would be unfair, because I think there’s a lot of grit there. But this is a populist film. We’ve said that from the beginning. In our hearts, it was a Frank Capra type of movie. And he didn’t necessarily get great notices.

In an odd way, I was reminded of Preston Sturges Hail the Conquering Hero — a wartime comedy that pokes fun at the notion of patriotism and, by extension, patriotic movies but which, by the end, almost subversively, fills you with this patriotic fervor. I’m wondering if you see this as your “Nixon in China” moment: Only the director of Nixon and JFK could get away with a film where the most heroic character is an ex-Marine who consults with his pastor before putting himself in harm’s way.

That character, Dave Karnes, is an unlikely hero. He goes to church — that’s a documented thing; he checks with his pastor in a born-again church before he goes down to Manhattan. He evaded the authorities. Get it done; that’s a Marine thing. I think you can argue that the Marine is an ambivalent character, because at the end of the movie, this sense of vengeance is what fuels the wrong war in Iraq.

But for him it’s the right war.

For him it’s the right war. That’s correct. I think if you really look at JFK or at Nixon, which are the two political films I did uncensored in my career — which is amazing unto itself — JFK is neither right nor left, and was attacked equally by the left, who did not like the Kennedy figure of 1963. It was done in the centrist tradition of American dissent: It questioned government and the authority of government. So I was taken aback that the right made such a big issue out of it. I suppose, because they were in office [when the film came out]. But they had never done that historically. They would have been on the side of the investigation; [Barry] Goldwater may well have been. JFK was not a bunch of fantasies strung together. It involved an enormous amount of research — as much as World Trade Center, if not more.

You could make the same argument about Nixon. You took the dominant political figure in our lifetime and gave him the Shakespearean treatment his life cried out for.

It was a psychological point of view. The right wing thought it was going to be a hatchet job; instead, it made him a human being. Unfortunately, in my career, I have spoken out between films, and that’s what’s gotten confused with the films themselves. I think the focus has been lost. Somewhere along the line, I guess, I said, “Look: I’m a filmmaker, but I’m also John Q. Citizen, and things piss me off. I have a right to say, if people ask me and they’re interested, what I fucking think.” And that’s the line I’ve always gotten in trouble with. It’s always between the films, if you look at the statements I’ve made. There’s nothing in the films themselves, as far as I know, that’s really offensive politically.

How much of the criticism against you do you think is organized for partisan political gain?

I’ve always wondered that — especially in the ’90s, after the JFK situation. You have to wonder: Will it come out one day in a government file? You hear about those programs from the ’50s and the ’60s. I was so grateful that Michael Moore came along. He helped me.

He seems to enjoy it. Maybe it’s the counterpart to how the left treats Charlton Heston.

Charlton Heston once said in an interview, “People like Oliver Stone would never hire me in the new Hollywood.” And I went out of my way on Any Given Sunday to hire him. I loved him. I said, “Forget politics, I love your character.” Political reputation pigeonholes you, and in a society that’s very busy, it’s an easy way to get rid of having to think too much about people and what they’re saying. I’m a dramatist; I’m a humanist. I protest.

There’s one line in World Trade Center — I think we hear it on a TV monitor in an office at the Port Authority — where the announcer says, “. . . the shock of the explosion that was coincidental with the two towers coming down,” and then you move on to something else. Was the suggestion that an unexplained explosion might have accompanied the towers’ demise the one seed of doubt you intentionally planted in an otherwise apolitical movie?

Well, I think that all reality is questionable, as you know. Frankly, I’m not an expert on that at all. And I haven’t pursued it, because I think the consequences of where we are now are far worse. But even if there was a conspiracy, it wouldn’t change where we are now. We’re into another place, where there’s more war, more terror, more bankruptcy, more debt, above all more constitutional breakdown and more fear than ever before. That’s very serious. And we’re on the edge of possibly something bigger and very dangerous. Richard Clarke’s book [Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror], at least, is about a true conspiracy that we know existed, of a small group who took over the government and did it their way — manipulated, created the war. It’s 30 or 40 people, right?

Sy Hersh says it’s 11 guys.

It was a conspiracy, and it was basically at the top. It’s Cheney and Rumsfeld influencing Bush. Cheney and Rumsfeld go back to the Ford administration, and when they got their way, they kicked butt. That’s a great story. But that’s not even all of it. When you’ve got a guy like Representative Pete Hoekstra from Michigan, who was a friend of the Bush administration — who had approved of the Patriot Act, the eavesdropping, the taxes, the bank records, all of it — saying in the press that there’s something worse that he’s pissed off about, because they hadn’t consulted him. Something worse? I mean, all the cards are not on the table, right? This is a big story. And we’re living it. How can you write about it? We’re fucking rocking in the boat. It’s like trying to write a great war novel when you might be going into World War II.

Were you at Yale the same time Bush was?

I was in the same class, yeah. I don’t remember him. I was never in a fraternity. I went twice — I dropped out one year and then went back for half of a second year and dropped out.

But at one point Bush requested to meet you, didn’t he?

Yeah, I met him. It was a political breakfast speech here in California at a club, the Republican right wing. They invited me — they’ve always had fun with me, I don’t know why — and it was a big hotel room and a speech about tough love and justice in Texas. He was governor then, around ’98 or so. I swear, I knew in that room on that day that he was going to be president. There was just no question. He had that confidence, and they adored him. There was an organized love for him. He asked for me to come up to the podium and we had a one-on-one. I was in the Bush spotlight — that thing where he stares at you and he gets to know you a little bit.

Assigns you a nickname.

There was one funny line. He knew I’d been in Vietnam. Actually, I didn’t know he’d been at Yale. He told me he’d been in my class; it was a surprise to me. But then he said he’d had a buddy who had been to Vietnam who’d been killed. “Buddy,” he said. It was funny — it was on his mind, he raised it. And it was the way he looked at me: I just felt like, boy, I bet you he’d rather his buddy had come home than me. But he was very friendly, very charming — a very sociable man.

Have you ever thought about going into politics — running for office? Would you consider doing that in a later part of your life?

Not seriously, no.

Orson Welles wrote a weekly political newspaper column during WWII — he was friends with FDR through Sumner Welles, a distant relative of his and a presidential adviser, and at one point he considered running for the Senate from California or his native Wisconsin.

Politics is about raising money and being popular and shaking a lot of hands and spending a lot of time with people. Those are not my strengths. It would be exhausting and would completely destroy my ability to do what I do.

You were pro-Vietnam before you enlisted in the infantry, right? You were fairly conservative?

Yes.

So we could say that you spent the entire 1960s across the political divide from most of what you’ve now come to stand for?

My story is complicated. I did write a novel about being 19 called A Child’s Night Dream. My parents divorced when I was 14, and being the only child, there was no family to go back to. Basically, going to Vietnam was really throwing myself to the wolves. It was a form of rebellion and suicide.

I’ve read a quote to the effect of “I felt like I had to atone for the act of imagination.” Was it actually the failure of the novel that sent you over the edge?

After I left Yale the second time and finished the novel — I was writing the novel instead of going to class, and that’s why I flunked out — my father was supporting me, and that’s an impossible situation: 19 years old, your father is furious at you for the tuition that he’s lost, and you’re living in his apartment trying to finish a novel. It’s like Jack Kerouac moving back home with his mother. But I really believed in it: I was insane with passion. It was the only thing I had. I had no woman friends in my life. I had nothing to support me beyond that. And when that failed, I went into the Army with the idea of “Let God sort it out, whoever I am.” It’s egregious to think that you can be on the level of Mailer or any of your heroes — Hemingway, or Joyce; I was into Joyce heavily at the time.

Part of the fun of watching someone like you working without a net, from a distance, is charting the rises and falls of your career. And sometimes there are films that don’t hit right, that suffer because of the moment or the context — the sky around it, as you put it. I’m thinking specifically of Nixon, which was a commercial failure, but seems to get more sophisticated every time I see it. Or, more recently, Alexander.

I’ve had three big setbacks, in terms of being completely dismissed: Heaven and Earth, Nixon — by many people, at least — and Alexander. On Alexander, it was just devastating, because in America and England, the numbers were so tough. It wasn’t just that people didn’t like it. It was ridiculed. It was destructive criticism. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world we were connecting, we were among the top 20 films of that year in the foreign market. We did better than four of the five Oscar nominees abroad. It was well respected.

Why didn’t Alexander connect? Do we agree that it didn’t connect with English-speaking audiences?

I like the director’s cut better than the first version, because I had more time to prepare it. And the structure is different. It wasn’t because of the homosexuality — that’s a red herring. The mother’s back story and father’s back story, which are really essential, don’t come in until later. We’re doing a third, expanded version now — we’re going all out. This is not for theatrical; it’s for the people who love the film who want to see more of it. It’s the Cecil B. De Mille treatment — three hours and 45 minutes. What I’m doing is going back and showing the whole thing in its sumptuousness, really going with the concept that it had to be an old-fashioned movie, with an intermission, like a road show. Be a showman, instead of trying to be a responsible filmmaker. Go all out on this one. This is my Apocalypse Now, my De Mille epic. [The first time] I was trying to step up to the plate, so to speak. I should have pulled it back, taken an extra year like Marty did with Gangs of New York. But it would have cost a lot of money.

In Oliver Stone’s America, the documentary included with the DVD box set of your films, you say, “I’ve always admired Alexander because of the momentum and the speed with which he traveled and conquered. In my small metaphoric way, I would say the countries were films, and I moved through them like him . . . he’s striking everywhere. I think it was great. We had a great run. But it’s definitely a new phase.” Is Alexander the figure you most closely identify with?

I am a Method director to a certain degree. I do become part of what I shoot. And I think with Alexander, the perception is of hubris, certainly — “Alexander the Great? Who the fuck is he? He thinks he’s Alexander.” I could see that coming. But I always knew who Oliver Stone was. I never lost track of that. And I made the film humbly, in 94 fucking days on three continents. I ran the crew like I always run the crew. Nothing changed in my habits. I walked in the deserts, we shot in a sandstorm once, and it was the same old Oliver who did Salvador. Hubris is taking 110 days on some stupid comedy. That’s an insult to filmmaking the way I was raised. I’m sticking to NYU principles, and I still do to this day. Movies are a tradition; we didn’t invent it — we take it from somebody else and pass it on.

But with Alexander, you faced a challenge like you’ve never faced before, because no matter how bruising the attacks on JFK and Nixon, your core audience was always still with you. For whatever reason, Alexander failed to connect with an audience.

Yeah. In America.

In America. I don't wish to judge it; this is an empirical observation.

No, it didn't connect. Alexander is the high point of my life, and it always will be. I’m not asking for universal love on that; it’s just impossible. It’s not paced to the American style, nor is he a conventional hero. He’s filled with doubts. But Alexander is a beautiful story, and I think I did him well. I mean, I wouldn’t have released it [otherwise]. But I can’t give up; I would never give up. I would be all wrong in my assessments of myself as I work. You have to hear your own self, follow your own drama, or whatever Thoreau said long ago at Walden Pond. [“Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”] Alexander was a huge setback for me, and it certainly hurt me in this business. But you have to understand that people have been saying bad things about me for years. I don’t listen; I have to try to keep going.

I don’t want to make specious connections, but you’ve had several high-profile drug arrests in the last few years. Before that, you were making supernihilist films in an edgy, frenetic style. I'm wondering if these are all moving parts of the same phenomenon.

I’ve smoked dope and drunk alcohol most of my life, okay? Getting pulled over and arrested is a fault, it’s a mistake — a wake-up call. I did get busted a couple of times. One was at a roadblock, so it’s not like I was endangering anybody’s life. The other time, I got pulled over by a civilian cop; I was actually busted for driving too slow. And when the tests came back, I was below the intoxication level. Nobody knows that, because it never got published that way. I should get a chauffeur is what I fucking should do. [Laughs.]

But nobody cares if you smoke pot. They care if it affects the work, if it’s part of a larger problem.

Okay, but I don’t feel bad. I got heavier, physically, at certain points, and I think that gives the appearance of degradation, like Jim Morrison. But I did have a pre-diabetic condition through my mother, and I was on too much sugar. Any Given Sunday, I love that movie, but it was more effort than you think — it was like a three-ring circus, to make five football games in five stadiums work. It took so much energy. There were some problems with the crew on that film. So by the end of that movie, my doctor said I was too stressed, and at my age it was dangerous. There were some issues of medications and stuff, no question about it. But sports people love that movie. With Alexander, there’s a fan site where there are people who have seen it 50 times. They go to the sites in Macedon. They love the romanticism of it. So it’s confusing to me. I’ve tried every fucking time to get it right, even if I haven’t been in my best physical shape. I will get it right. Not everyone is going to agree with me, but I’m going to get it right.

With World Trade Center, it's your first time to deal with studio financing in a decade; you look better, healthier. Has your life changed? Is this a new start?

Your story is a journalistic narrative, and it’s a good one, about Oliver coming back after Alexander, and how there’s a change in his life. And I’ve somewhat agreed with it, but I’ve also pointed out that my methods have stayed the same. But it is about your storyline, in a way — about life. If you go to film school, and you think about your career traditionally, you arc up, in the sense that your budgets get bigger, the stars, whatever. There’s a nice arc to a man’s life. You make your better films later — it’s horrible if you’re Orson Welles, if you make your best film first. And Alexander was a chance to do something on another level entirely. So I reached a peak of ambition. And the ambition was perhaps not matched by my execution, although there are points in the execution that do match the ambition, I think. So then it died a metaphoric death. Point of view died with it, as it died when Heaven and Earth came out. That [movie] was a very sensitive side of myself that I loved — it was tender, and the woman was tender. And it was ridiculed and killed, and part of me, you know . . . those feelings were hurt and eradicated for a while. Same thing with Nixon. You want to get rid of the person after you finish. You want to go back to being who you are, but you’re no longer the same person, because your journey has changed.

And part of me did die [with Alexander] — that part that was enamored of “my very important storyline,” end of quote. Me being the storyline. I played it out. I did all my biographical figures. I have no need to be John or Will. I had a need to be Ron Kovic. I had a need to be Alexander. I had a need to be Nixon and Morrison and Garrison. That’s the change. So now I can be myself, maybe. I can be more authentic to myself. I think there was an attraction to go from the past into the contemporary world in its most hellish moment. It’s like I dropped out and I couldn’t get back in, until by going back to 2001, I could come back into this era. I feel liberated, in the sense that, not that it would be next, but I feel I could do a movie about those next five years. Not that I think it’s complete yet — I think there’s a lot going on that we don’t know about in the government. But I think there’s something in the air. I smell it, and I feel fresh again, having done something — my new, 24-hour, humble microcosm of that day. Wherever I go with World Trade Center, it’s going to spin off to wherever I go next.

-Paul Cullum, “After the Fall,” LA Weekly, Aug 9 2006 [x]

[newstechreviews]

August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble.

All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right on the Carnival route, and see some manifestation of Trinidad going by, or a reggae crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward, one of six siblings, would stay out late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’s cultural and racial multiplicity.

It was this world that nurtured his creativity and helped shape the vision he has brought to the pages of British Vogue since being appointed editor in chief in 2017. “I was always othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic walk through the streets of Ladbroke Grove, a much gentrified, still bohemian part of London, where he moved with his family from Ghana at the age of 13, “you know, gay, working-class, Black. So for me it was very important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal.”

Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting at the intersection of fashion and media, two fields that are undergoing long-overdue change and scrambling to make up for years of negligence and malpractice. Since becoming the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately held company is navigating, on top of an advertising market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public controversies around representation both in its offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.

Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a critical moment for the international publisher. “I wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place. I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When others took steps, Edward took massive strides, showing the importance of our visibility and stories,” she says. Covers since have featured the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s oldest cover star), Madonna and soccer player Marcus Rashford, photographed for this year’s September issue by Misan Harriman, the first Black male photographer to shoot a British Vogue cover in its 104-year history. While other publications, including American Vogue, have reduced frequency during the pandemic, British Vogue has remained financially stable and is still producing 12 thick issues in 2020.

Under Enninful, British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform, shaking up the imagery, tracking the contemporary pain. Its shelf presence is different—more substance, more political—and perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole looks different. No more do Black women search mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of themselves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it took was to give a Black man some power, to give someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the margin a seat at the table.

“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the passing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security guard who told him to enter via the loading bay instead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are returning to normal, we cannot let the world return to how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are seeing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutinizing who is doing what and who is not doing enough to bring about real change in equality and representation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listening now, and we need to take advantage of that. This is not the time for tiptoeing.”

We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-summer noon. When anticipating an interview with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible, it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassuming, arriving in a loose navy suit, pale blue shirt and shades, the only giveaway to his sartorial imperium the no socks with his brogues. He is warm and relaxed, bearing the close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most days to meditate before work.

I-D: Nick Towers; Vogue Italia: Steven Meisel From left: a Fashion Week report by Enninful in I-D’s January 1995 issue; Naomi Campbell on Vogue Italia in July 2008.

These days he resides toward Lancaster Gate, on the posher side of Ladbroke Grove, with his long-term partner the filmmaker Alec Maxwell and their Boston terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his own Instagram account and whose daily walking was a saving grace during lockdown. But the London Underground is where Enninful’s journey into fashion began, one day on the train in a pair of ripped blue jeans, when he was spotted by stylist Simon Foxton as a potential model for i-D, the avant-garde British fashion magazine. Being only 16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian army barracks and who was less than four years in the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of Porto-bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something special was going to come out of it.”

He never had the knack for modeling, he says with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved the process and the craft of creating an image.” He soon moved to the other side of the lens, assisting on shoots and assembling image concepts and narratives, a particular approach to styling that impressed i-D enough to hire him as their youngest ever fashion director at only 18, a post he held for the next 20 years. Without the courtesy designer clothes later at his fingertips, he would customize, shred, dye and bargain for the right look, using the skills he’d developed at home in the sewing room. “I realized that I could say a lot with fashion,” he says, “that it wasn’t just about clothes, but could tell a story of the times we’re in, about people’s experiences in life. And that freedom to portray the world as you saw it.”

What was innate to Enninful—this blend of skilled creativity with the perception of difference as normal, as both subject and audience—was relatively unique in an industry dominated by white, colonial notions of beauty and mainstream. Legendary Somali supermodel Iman remembers a 2014 W magazine shoot in which she, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna were cast by Enninful, the publication’s then style director, wearing Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing. “Until Edward appeared, no one at the mainstream fashion magazines would have cared to commission a portrait exclusively featuring three women of color, and furthermore who were all wearing clothes designed by a person of color,” she says. “He’s an editor in vocation and a reformer at heart, compelled to spur woefully needed social change.”

Courtesy Jamie Hawkesworth and Condé Nast Britain Train driver Narguis Horsford, on British Vogue’s July 2020 issue.

He shows me his various old haunts and abodes, the top-floor bedsit where he used to haul bags of styling gear up the stairs, the Lisboa and O’Porto cafés of Golborne Road—or “Little Morocco”—where he’d sit for hours chewing the fat with people like makeup artist Pat McGrath, Kate Moss, Nick Kamen and photographer David Sims. Name-drops fall from his lips like insignificant diamonds—stylists, photographers, celebrities—but he navigates his domain in a manner apparently uncommon among fashion’s gatekeepers. Winfrey says of him, “I have never experienced in all my dealings with people in that world anyone who was more kind and generous of spirit. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

Her shoot for the August 2018 cover of British Vogue left Winfrey feeling “empress-like,” and she ascribes his understanding of Black female beauty to his being raised by a Black mother. “Edward understands that images are political, that they say who and what matters,” she adds. Enninful’s father Crosby, a major in the Ghanaian army who was part of U.N. operations in Egypt and Lebanon, had thought that his bright, studious son would eventually grow out of his fascination with clothes and become a lawyer. But three months into an English literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying Hardy, Austen and the usual classics, thinking maybe he’d be a writer, or indeed a lawyer, Enninful quit to take up the position at i-D. His father did not speak to him for around 15 years, into the next century, until Grace suffered a stroke and entered a long illness. “Now that I’m older, I realize he just wanted to protect us. He’s come to understand that I had to follow my heart and forge my own path.”

He credits his parents for his strong work ethic—“drummed into you from a very early age by Black parents, that you have to work twice as hard”—and his Ghanaian heritage for his eye for color. His approach to fashion as narrative comes from the “childish games I would play with my mother,” creating characters around the clothes, sketching them out. “I can’t just shoot clothes off the runway,” he says. “There always has to be a character, and that character has to have an inner life.” Since Grace’s death three years ago, his father has lived alone by the Grand Union Canal and is very proud of his son, particularly of the Order of the British Empire awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 for his services to diversity in fashion. The Queen, incidentally, is high on Enninful’s list of Vogue cover dreams.

The British Vogue Enninful inherited from former editor in chief Alexandra Shulman three years ago was starkly different from today’s rendition. During her 25 years in charge, only 12 covers out of 306 featured Black women, and she left behind an almost entirely white workforce. Now the editorial team is 25% people of color—“I needed certain lieutenants in place,” he says—and similar shufflings are being called for over at Condé Nast in New York. Enninful is reluctant to tarnish names any further, maintaining that Shulman “represented her time, I represent mine,” and declining to comment on the U.S. headquarters.

Courtesy Edward Enninful A Polaroid of Enninful in the 1990s from his personal collection.

Enninful’s rise is particularly meaningful to people like André Leon Talley, former editor at large of American Vogue, where Enninful also worked as a contributing editor. Talley describes the new British Vogue as “extraordinary,” and was joyous at Enninful’s appointment. “He speaks for the unsung heroes, particularly those outside the privileged white world that Vogue originally stood for. He has changed what a fashion magazine should be.”

“I’m a custodian,” Enninful says of his role, sitting in a sumptuous alcove of the club bar at Electric House. “Vogue existed before I came, and it will still exist when I leave, but I knew that I had to go in there and do what I really believed in. It’s our responsibility as storytellers or image makers to try to disrupt the status quo.” Ironically, though, he does not see himself as an activist, rather as someone who is unafraid to tackle political issues and educate others, while remaining firmly within the Vogue lens. “They said Black girls on the cover don’t sell,” he says. “People thought diversity equals down-market, but we’ve shown that it’s just good for business.” British Vogue’s digital traffic is up 51% since Enninful took over. He previously edited the 2008 Black issue of Vogue Italia, which featured only Black models and Black women and sold out in the U.S. and the U.K. in just 72 hours.

Since the incident with the security guard in July—which Enninful reveals was not isolated and had happened before (the culprit, a third-party employee, was dismissed from headquarters)—building staff have been added to the company’s diversity-and-inclusion trainings. Enninful would also like to see financial aid put in place for middle management, “because we forget sometimes that the culture of a place does not allow you to go from being a student to the top.” In 2013, he tweeted about another incident, where he was seated in the second row at a Paris couture show while his white counterparts were placed in front. “I get racially profiled all the time,” he says, going right back to his first experience of being stopped and searched as a teenager, which “petrified” him. “When I was younger, I would’ve been hurt and withdrawn, but now I will let you know that this is not O.K. People tend to think that if you’re successful it eliminates you, but it can happen any day. The difference now is that I have the platform to speak about it and point it out. The only way we can smash systemic racism is by doing it together.”

Campbell Addy for TIMEBritish Vogue editor in chief Enninful in Ladbroke Grove, London, on Aug. 31.

Activism, then, is intrinsic. Fashion is altruism, as much as story and craft, as much as the will to capture beauty. For Enninful, there is no limitation to the radicalism possible through his line of work. Rather than the seemingly unattainable elements of style (the £350 zirconia ring, the £2,275 coat) obscuring the moral fiber of the message, the invitation to think and see more openly, the style instead leads you to it, perhaps even inviting you to assemble something similar within the boundaries of your real, more brutal, less elevated existence. “Relatable luxury,” he calls it, and though it’s difficult to imagine exactly how one might evoke a £2,275 coat without his customizing skills and magical thinking, I am inclined to accept the notion, partly because I saw soul singer Celeste in a £1,450 dress in the September issue and think I might give it a try. Anything is possible. “I still feel like I’m at the beginning,” he says with palpable optimism. “I feel the fire of something new.”

—With reporting by Cady Lang/New York and Madeline Roache/London

Evans is the author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a

Cover photo: Styling: Susan Bender; Suit, sweater, shoes: Burberry

[dweemeister]

War of the Worlds (2005)

Shortly after California told its residents to stay at home a few weeks ago because of the COVID-19 outbreak, the first films I watched as my home state grinded to a halt were Ousmane Sembène’s Emitaï (1971, Senegal) and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Emitaï, in its patient beauty, lambasts colonialism in its depiction of a tribe resisting French forces from imposing a rice tax. War of the Worlds, the subject of this review, is one of the first post-9/11 disaster films that have a noticeable difference in tone and approach to those released before the attacks. I definitely know how to calm myself down with a nice relaxing movie (so thank goodness I watched and reviewed 2011′s Contagion years ago). The lightheartedness and star-spangled romps that are Independence Day (1996) and Armageddon (1998) this is not. War of the Worlds, loosely based on H.G. Wells’ classic science-fiction novel of the same name, is closer in spirit to 2006’s United 93 and World Trade Center than those late ‘90s films.

Spielberg’s film is a tale of two halves. A stellar opening hour capturing the initial desperation and unknown threat of the alien attack gives way to incomplete character arcs, inexplicable decisions, and an incoherent resolution that fails to achieve the catharsis it wants. The filmmakers may not be entirely intentional in their portrayal of a (mostly) faceless threat wreaking destruction. Along with The Day After Tomorrow (2004), War of the Worlds set the mood for disaster films long after becoming faded memories in retail bargain baskets, cluttered DVD shelves, and the non-curated hellscape of premium cable and streaming services. The bleakness of these post-9/11 films hew closer to Wells’ motivations when his book was first published in 1898 rather than the jolly arrogance of the 1990s disaster films. As such, War of the Worlds – an afterthought in Spielberg’s filmography and something I paid little attention to upon its release – may just yet outlast the entertaining, unquestioning disaster films it is so often compared to.

Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is a divorced longshoreman who commutes from Bayonne, New Jersey to the docks in Brooklyn. His house sits near a looming overpass; American flags are being flown on the front porches of the entire street. This would be a Norman Rockwell illustration if the neighborhood was less blue-collar. It is his weekend to look after teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and younger daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning). Robbie and Rachel favor Ray’s ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) and her current boyfriend Tim (David Alan Basche). Mary Ann and Tim drive to Boston to visit her parents, and Ray – again – fails to form a connection with Robbie, who insists on calling his biological father by his first name. Rachel, timid and claustrophobic, is not nearly as rebellious, but it is clear she would rather be elsewhere. Soon after, an anomalous electrical storm spawns activates “tripods” buried beneath the Earth’s surface. These alien tripods disintegrate items and people instantly with a blinding white energy beam, which Ray witnesses with a crowd after running off and telling his children to shelter in place. Returning home, Ray barks orders, without explanation, to his two frightened children to pack their belongings and food for a sudden trip to their mother’s place.

Others of note appearing in this adaptation of War of the Worlds are the traumatized Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins); Ray’s friends Vincent and Julio (Rick Gonzalez and Yul Vázquez); and the children’s grandparents (Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, who played the leads in the original 1953 film adaptation). Morgan Freeman narrates the opening and closing seconds of the film.

Spielberg and screenwriters Josh Friedman (1996’s Chain Reaction, 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate) and David Koepp (the first two Jurassic Park films, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) are conflicted about whether their adaptation of War of the Worlds is about a father’s redemption or, like Wells’ novel and the 1953 film adaptation, a broad metaphor of nationalistic hubris. There is nothing preventing them from attempting both, but the film, not without considerable effort, falls short at both. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a character-driven piece where Wells’ novel (only one human protagonist is named, and he relates what he has witnessed to an unnamed narrator) are the 1953 film (two lead characters thinly developed beyond their professional duties) are not. Wells’ work and disaster film/invasion literature does not completely resist personalized narratives, but the grand scope of their stories makes personalization tougher because of the thematic juggling they require.

For those keeping score of father figures in Spielberg films, War of the Worlds positions Ray in a story that progresses towards paternal redemption. Ray is a terrible communicator to his children; he never comes to terms or improves on those skills. He is an inadequate provider for his children and has little knowledge of their inner lives, dismissing those failures and oversights as legacies from his divorce and his fatiguing job. The disrespect between Ray and Robbie across War of the Worlds generates turmoil throughout, but a decision that Ray must make about his oldest child – who is spiteful, reckless, and more childish than he would like to think – neuters the screenplay’s advances towards Ray’s paternal redemption. With Robbie’s aborted character development and decisions coming out of left field, this is where the film derails, never again reaching the heights of the technical and aesthetic mastery of its opening hour. Most of the Jurassic Park-esque final third with Tim Robbins’ Ogilvy forgets Ray’s character development, preferring to emphasize Ogilvy’s disturbed mentality. The handful of exchanges between Ray and Rachel as they stay with Ogilvy have the best examples of acting in the film. Though Ray’s efforts to tend to Rachel are flawed as he contends with Ogilvy’s deteriorating mindset, he succeeds. Rachel, in the grimy darkness of these scenes, now looks and trusts Ray to protect her. As vindicating as this is, the preposterous closing scene that discloses Robbie’s fate of War of the Worlds undermines the writers’ intentions.*

War of the Worlds is Spielberg’s attempt at allegorizing the terrorist attacks of four years prior and the United States’ response to them. Certain images of this film are references to the sights that announced that America was indeed pregnable. Ray’s detritus-covered silence after returning from the first attack in Bayonne harken to the scenes of survivors and first responders finding their way in the dust clouds after the Twin Towers’ collapse. A downed Boeing 747’s fuselage is ripped open, with belongings strewn to the side, evoking United Airlines Flight 93. A lengthy board of the pictures of missing loved ones – with messages of love and sorrow written on these notices – might be familiar to those in the greater New York City area. For Americans of a certain age – namely, those old enough to remember the attacks and their aftermath – these scenes are loaded, a reminder of a dreadful day.

Spielberg, Friedman, and Koepp’s appropriation of these images for War of the Worlds never teeters on the exploitative, but their evocations feel empty. The rubble covering the bodies of Ground Zero survivors and responders became symbolic of their mental trauma and the physical health effects that have delayed their deaths at the hands of terrorists. When we see Ray sitting in his kitchen, barely able to muster a word to his children about what he has witnessed, his reaction seems realistic but the imagery is off-putting. The wreck of a 747 is a hollow reference to United 93 and the desperate passenger rebellion that ensued onboard; the wreck’s presence in War of the Worlds, given that we hear but never see the crash, feels like a contrivance by Friedman and Koepp to bolster the drama – Ray and the kids were THAT close to being rammed by a commercial plane. Given the speed and lethality of the tripod invasion, who has time to assemble a wall of missing persons in short order?

This version of War of the Worlds, like any artwork, is a snapshot of a culture or cinematic trends at a point in time. By 2005, the United States’ War on Terror included wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These conflicts, presented as actions of moral clarity and relative ease for the American military, proved anything but. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds superficially touches upon themes H.G. Wells might find familiar: the overwhelming military force of the world’s superpower brought to a foreign nation, with little consultation from that nation’s residents to understand their interests. Here, the United States’ military might is associated with the alien tripods. But the opposite can also be true. At times, this War of the Worlds associates the United States’ enemies as the invaders, with the American military as the defending force (as they are literally portrayed). In this interpretation, gone is the allegory berating imperialism; in its place, a rather hollow inquisition about how the Pax Americana has failed to live up to its ideals. In two separate instances, Robbie and Rachel ask if the destructive force that their father is trying to save them from are, “terrorists.” Whether or not a viewer sees one of these interpretations as more valid than the other, Spielberg presents a United States with a scrambled understanding of its place in the world. Whether or not a viewer sees one of these interpretations as more valid than the other, Spielberg presents a United States with a scrambled understanding of its place in the world, the morality that it attempts – or, for the most cynical among us, claims – to uphold.

Compared to previous Spielberg movies with aliens at their center, War of the Worlds is devoid of the optimism in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). There are no friendly aliens to be found. The aliens’ motivational ambiguity has thematic parallels to the uncertainty found in most of Close Encounters. It should be no surprise, then, that John Williams’ score to War of the Worlds adopts much of the disorienting atonalism that defines Close Encounters’ first half. One always anticipates a recognizable, hummable motif with Williams, but it never appears. Often, like in “The Ferry Scene”, Williams provides an uncharacteristic atonalism – delivered by ascending rhythmic lines that refuse to resolve to the tonic, blaring brass, and distorted synthetic elements (a musician would probably say that it would be more personally rewarding to play Close Encounters than this). War of the Worlds is a film premised in confusion and wrath. Williams has composed a complex, harsh score appropriate for that premise, even if this means the cues for this film are difficult to listen to outside the film’s context.

As much as I find the paternal redemption unsatisfying, Spielberg based Ray’s character arc on his own reconciliation with his father. Spielberg had incorrectly blamed his father for divorcing his mother, continuing to do so even after he learned the truth. After years of portraying absentee or workaholic fathers (Close Encounters, E.T., 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1991’s Hook, etc.), War of the Worlds marks an increasing forgiveness in how Spielberg handles fathers – culminating with Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln (2012), which portrays the sixteenth President of the United States as a master politician (not exactly Honest Abe, as it includes a bold lie to Congress in order to keep peace negotiations secret) who tries to make time for his two surviving sons. This is a fascinating development in Spielberg’s maturation as a person and storyteller, however blemished this is.

The 2010s saw many action/superhero films defined by their nihilistic violence and gloom. War of the Worlds – with its propulsive action and intriguing style – is not uniquely responsible for those attitudes, but it began, in earnest, a procession of films examining the role and responsibilities of post-9/11 America through parable. Few of those films have been eloquent in their commentaries; War of the Worlds certainly attempts to do so, but it is inconsistent. Released near the beginning of that national reckoning, the film is all the more interesting because of that precocious timing, its status in Spielberg’s filmography still undetermined.

My rating: 6.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

*This should not be construed to be a criticism of how the alien invasion of Earth concludes. Spielberg, like Byron Haskin when he directed the 1953 version, keeps Wells’ original ending – often pilloried, but one that I find naturally poetic.

[youspoketome]

SQUAD FIVE-O - BOMBS OVER BROADWAY (2000)

I don't remember when I first heard Squad Five-O, or I would definitely have written about them sooner. It was probably around when my older brother got a job at Northwestern bookstore that he started buying a bunch of CDs, which I would then dub into cassettes. Some were by Tooth and Nail bands like the OC Supertones and Value Pac that I had heard on comps anyway, but also some bands from other labels like Kosmos Express, Five Iron Frenzy, and most importantly to me, Squad Five-O.

Somewhere in between MxPx changing my life and discovering The Ataris, I discovered Squad's WHAT I BELIEVE and when it was released, FIGHT THE SYSTEM and I was obsessed in a whole new way to me. I started modeling my entire life after that band. I started bleaching my hair because Jeff Squad bleached his hair, I started only wearing my hoodies zipped up about 2/3 of the way because Johnny Five wore his hoodie like that on a tour poster I had, I set my default font on AOL Instant Messenger to neon green with black background to match their logo on FIGHT THE SYSTEM (which they stole from Poison), I got in trouble in algebra class for writing the lyrics to "Fight The System" on my shared graphing calculator at the end of class and leaving it there for the next person. If you read the installment about Me First and The Gimme Gimmes you might remember my camo shorts with knee high argyle socks. I was wearing that because of Squad Five-O. To this day I have one single tattoo, and it's a tattoo I first saw on Jeff Squad and decided I wanted when I was about 15.

I'm pretty sure my first real rock and roll show (meaning not DC Talk at the Target Center or a Billy Graham crusade) was Squad Five-O. They were the perfect band for a Christian music venue like the New Union. Christan venues were notorious for not letting you have fun in the crowd. You can jump up and down, you can move around, but you can't jump into another person or touch someone else while you are moving around. So moshing and crowd surfing were right out. The beauty of Squad though, was since all their songs constantly switched back and forth between ska parts and punk parts, no one got in trouble. The heavier punk parts would play and the crowd would freak out, but before anyone could get pulled from the crowd, the ska part would kick in and everyone would stop moshing and start skanking. Those shows were some of the most fun I ever had in a pit (and I use that term very, very loosely).

So anyway, fast forward to 2000. I've discovered The Ataris and secular music, but I'm still a Tooth and Nail kid at heart. I've started taking classes at community college through PSEO, and so I'm using their computer lab. (I still distinctly remember this.) I go to toothandnail dot com and before the normal home screen loads, there's a page with a giant picture of Squad Five-O announcing their new addition to the Tooth and Nail family. I didn't even hit the continue to home page link, I opened a new window to get to my email and I literally emailed everyone in my address book (95% of whom had never heard of Squad Five-O or couldn't have cared less about them if they had) to let them know that SFO had signed to Tooth and Nail Records. I think I got two responses to that email, one telling me I was a huge nerd and one telling me this was old news and he already knew about it.

Over the ensuing months demos from the new album would show up in a couple different T&N compilation CDs. They were definitely different, but not bad, and I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I continued to excitedly wait for the new album.

Squad Five-O had always had a thing for 80's metal. As I mentioned earlier, they completely stole the Poison logo for their own logo on FIGHT THE SYSTEM. The first time I saw them, every single shirt they had at their merch table was a spoof of Guns N' Roses, Judas Priest, Stryper or some other metal band. But on BOMBS OVER BROADWAY they just went for it. The producer they worked with on this album had previously worked on albums by Cinderella, LA Guns and Ozzy. Gone was the punk/ska hybrid I loved. Gone was the raw energy I soaked up. Gone were the bratty kids shouting anthems. They were replaced by big hair, aviator sunglasses, sleeveless t-shirts and rambling guitar solos.

I still bought it. I still bought a poster and multiple t-shirts (I want to say I had three shirts from this era). I still went to see them (with The Juliana Theory, who I hadn't even discovered yet). But that was the end for me. I didn't buy their next, self-titled album, and to this day I've not listened to their major label album after that. The magic was gone.

I recently listened to a podcast about this album and period for the band, and it sounds like Brandon from T&N heard the demos, knew it wasn't right, and begged them to stick with their previous sound. Even Jeff expressed regret that the producer had made them slow all the songs down and sapped the energy that was there in their live shows and even on the demos.

The thing with BOMBS OVER BROADWAY was until that album I don't think I had figured out yet that bands could change for the worse. Everything I had listened to to that point had just been on an upward trajectory. I had stopped listening to DC Talk and Audio Adrenaline by this time, not because they changed, but because I had. Ghoti Hook's TWO YEARS TO NEVER came out around the same time, and I actually heard the first demo from that album on the same comp as one of the Squad demos, but that one doesn't stand out to me as much. Conrad had quit Ghoti Hook and I think I just assumed they wouldn't be as good anymore without him. Squad Five-O had added members and signed to my favorite record label, who could have imagined they'd get worse? It was kind of an eye opening album for me.

Coda (or: I'm not sure when else I'll get to tell this story, so I'm going to tack it on the end here):

BOMBS OVER BROADWAY obviously had a lot of imagery of planes and destruction and New York City (the lyrics to the titular song literally go "Midnight, New York City/Broadway, going up in flames/Ground zero, big city/Big Apple swallowed by the flames."). At the time it was about vanity and American consumerism, but after 9-11 it became much more real and tasteless. On September 12 or 13, 2001, I got up and got dressed went about my day. While waiting in line for lunch my friend Kara (one of the two respondees of my excited email) kind of looked at my t-shirt and gave me a weird look. I glanced down and said "Squad Five-O. They're a band," and didn't think any more of it. After school I went to work (I was working at Hot Topic by this point, we'll get there pretty soon) where I wore a hoodie most of the night, but after the mall closed and we were cleaning up, they'd turn off the air and it would get really hot and stuffy. So after I got too warm I took off my hoodie and for the first time in the day really took notice of the shirt I'd been wearing all day: a Squad Five-O t-shirt that above the logo featured the Twin Towers falling over with a mushroom cloud coming up between them. I suddenly realized why Kara had been looking at my shirt so strangely, and never wore it again.

[funkocide]

Changes In Machine Vision Enrich Edge Monitoring

Strategic system just like fencing, routes, and lighting is essential to safe guarding a nation's boundary. Nonetheless it alone is absolutely not adequate to protect yourself from the unlawful activity of folks and contraband straight into a nation.

"Know-how will be the essential driver of land, maritime, and air flow website recognition - this will end up only extra noticeable as [U.S. Customs and Boundary Coverage (CBP)] faces future hazards," based on testimony from CBP officers at the Senate listening to on homeland security in 2015.

And unit vision's fingerprints are all in excess of that technology. "The material from permanently fixed and portable surveillance devices, surface sensors, imaging solutions, and other highly developed technological know-how improves situational awareness and better allows CBP to detect, discover, keep tabs on, and appropriately reply to risks with the nation's border places," the testimony says.

At the U.S.-Mexico boundary in the condition of State of arizona, by way of example, Built-in Resolved Tower (IFT) solutions persistently recognize and monitor so-described as "items of attention." Built to put up with its harsh wasteland surroundings, IFT comes with radar, commercial away-the-rack daylight video cameras and energy imaging detectors, and micro-wave transmitters that send out info to border real estate agents with the Nogales station for assessment and decision-producing.

On all 3 fronts of property, maritime, and aerial monitoring, product vision providers are giving you imaging programs - and, more often, analysis of the produced details - that meet up with governing administration agencies' goals of overall flexibility, cost efficiency, uncomplicated deployment in border protection purposes.

Coping with Assorted Disorders

The traditional trouble with perception devices utilised in edge surveillance software is managing the assortment of your outdoor conditions having its varying lighting fixtures and atmospheric conditions, along with wide-ranging terrain. Despite the difficulties, "there are actually locations which you could use controls to further improve when the intellect of your method," declares Dr. Rex Lee, president and Chief executive officer of Pyramid Imaging (Tampa, Fl). He factors to people who keep track of trains down the the southern area of border in the U.S. for illegal travellers.

"Individuals trains have to go using a trellis, which can be provided with the proper detectors and lights to aid investigate the trains," Doctor. Lee declares. Government departments tasked with edge security and safety use infrared video cameras to detect is targeted on during the night time along with other small-lumination disorders, but energy imaging has its confines, very. "Infrared surveillance cameras function really well when you can use them in great-comparison issues," Doctor. Lee states that. "However if you're wanting to buy a our at 98.6°F on a wilderness surface that may be 100°F, the wasteland is giving out rays at virtually the exact same area of the scope. So people depend upon other places on the spectrum for instance shortwave infrared (SWIR) to attempt to find a big difference."

Infra-red imaging works very well in keeping track of power-driven watercraft considering that the boat's engine provides a thermal trademark. "What's good about standard water is the fact it's comparatively uniform and it's very easy to 'wash out' that background and see anomalies," Dr. Lee declares.

But however , the oceans show a vast measure of area to pay. Claims Doctor. Lee, "To observe all of it is a give up amongst having a whole bunch of products overseeing the liquid or products which can be full of the heavens, in which case there is a trouble of viewing one thing really miniature in a very huge in general access."

CMOS Surpasses CCD

Just one important alternation in imaging programs employed in border surveillance applications is the transition from CCD to CMOS devices since the latter is surpassing the quality and performance from the previous. To support this transformation, two years ago Adimec Innovative Graphic Systems bv (Eindhoven, holland) integrated the most recent development of CMOS photo devices - that provide sizeable innovations in photo good quality and tenderness - into its TMX series of rugged commercially made out-the-rack camcorders for high-ending basic safety programs. TMX cams conserve a utmost shape pace of 60 fps or 30 fps for RGB coloration imagery at entire HD quality.

Also, CMOS photo detectors are promising as a substitute for electron-multiplying CCDs (EMCCDs), says Leon van Rooijen, Business Series Director Worldwide Security at Adimec. On account of their exceptional performance over CCDs in low-light-weight ailments, EMCCDs typically are used in software like harbour or coast security.

But EMCCDs have unique negative aspects. For instance, an EMCCD really should be cooled so as to provide you with the ideal performance. "That is certainly very some concern on the a feeling of integrating electrical power use as well as the fact that you should provide substantial voltage into the sensors," van Rooijen declares. "And if you need to have devices working for a duration with out upkeep, an EMCCD is simply not the best option."

To fix these troubles, Adimec is concentrating on graphic digesting "to have the best from the most up-to-date creation CMOS to arrive even closer to the performance world-wide safety and security prospects are widely-used to with EMCCD while not most of the negative aspects with the price, integration, and durability," van Rooijen states that.

Adimec also is treating the challenge of mitigating the turbulence that comes about with boundary surveillance programs in excess of for an extended time varieties, primarily as techniques which are applying analogue movie now are taking techniques when it comes to larger picture resolution imaging to cover up the larger regions.

"When imaging at long array, you could have atmospheric turbulence by high temperature increasing out of the floor, as well as on water point, escalating or evaporated standard water creates issues in terms of the haze," van Rooijen states. "We are going to present turbulence mitigation during the minimal-latency devices baked into our platform and often will deal with process integrators to optimize it for country and ocean applications because they possess the greatest problems with turbulence."

A Lot More Than Pics

Like device sight solutions used in professional programs, boundary security systems bring in lots of files that requires study. "The surveillance field generally is a minimal more slowly to incorporate analytics," claims Dr. Lee of Pyramid Imaging. "We notice sizeable prospect there and still have been using the services of a lot of our buyers to ensure statistics are certainly more automatic regarding what the heck is getting detected as well as to investigate that intrusion, and then be capable to take a good effect."

Some suppliers have created software package that identifies anomalies in prolonged watching. Such as, if your traveler for the air port all of a sudden abandons a suitcase, the software will discover that the target is unattended as the rest all around it consistently relocate.

Despite having sturdy vision-based security potential by any means elements of entrance, U.S. border patrol and homeland stability really need to deal with a much even larger risk. "The United States does a pretty good job taking a look at folks arriving in, but we do an exceedingly inadequate career recognizing as long as they possibly leave," Doctor. Lee states that. "We discover how to get rid of that problem applying systems, but that creates its unique issues.

"A great choice to achieve this is the x-ray products within the TSA set, exactly where you can have a method to document every person," Doctor. Lee goes on. "But that will be overpriced since you ought to do this at each air port within the United States. Monitoring and taking slows down points downwards, and TSA is less than loads of strain to pace factors up." An additional security choice that government departments have reviewed is to take noncontact fingerprints at TSA everytime somebody flies. "The majority of the American community won't tolerate that," Dr. Lee states that. "They will debate that fingerprinting is simply too significantly authorities oversight, and that will final result in many tension and pushback."

Nonetheless, in polls considered over the past ten years, Us residents acknowledge the need to obtain ports of entry. Device sight will continue to provide, and boost when, that program, as a consequence of CMOS performance, new processes to minimize varied enviromentally friendly ailments, along with the extended automation of statistics.

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[nicol-elizabeth-blog1]

Do you remember when this was a shocking image?

A2 Communication and Culture Topic: Watching Theme: Visibility

“Do you remember when this was a shocking image?” - An exploration into the twenty-first century reproduction and reuse of culturally significant images, and the role of social media in the distribution of them. 

In the contemporary culture of modern society, one may argue that it has become extremely easy to get lost in the continuous swarming sea of mass-media domination. With twenty-four-seven news stories and social networking sites updating, refreshing and streaming every second, perpetual images of ourselves and images of others have become a constant and dominant feature of our reality - influencing and shaping our behaviours and values.In this digitalized world that we as a human race have become so accustomed to, it seems so easy to forget about the past and what has happened before us. Both of my case studies that i am going to look at are key examples of how twenty-first century image production and distribution has bought a new meaning to culturally strong and narrative heavy images of significant times in history. Is the world as we know it full of nothing but narcissism and parody? Worldwide, we are arguably more connected now than any other generation before us – the world is now faster and stronger because of the development of new technologies that have changed the way we interact. But, has this ‘cyberblitz’ turned us all into self obsessed, nihilistic creatures? The digital age is reaching a point where society has become so fixated on digital screens, that people rarely take the time to look away from them, to look at and consume the world around them. Instead they become mesmerised and hypnotised by a digital world, removing and desensitising themselves from the real one.    In early 2017, a story arose of a German-based satirist and his online project, designed to draw attention to what some may consider ‘young people’s inappropriate behaviour’ when visiting Berlin’s holocaust memorial. Entitled “Yolocaust” – play on words of both the Nazi Holocaust and the millennial catchphrase You Only Live Once, or “YOLO” –  Shahak Shapira, an Israeli satirist and author, non-consensually gathered self-portrait images (selfies) from social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and superimposed them with archived images of Nazi extermination camp victims.

The “selfie” images show people in various poses while visiting the memorial, located in central Berlin. Shapira then edited these onto the archived images as an attempt to link the Berlin memorial with the hallowed ground of former Nazi concentration camps. The project juxtaposes some people’s arguably controversial and flippant behaviour at the memorial with the solemn significance of the monument, that represents for many visitors, gravestones for the millions of bodies buried in mass graves. Although there are only a small number of images in this project, everyday hundreds of selfies are taken and uploaded from the memorial - a key example of the post-modern ‘participatory culture’ that is described by american media and cultural studies philosopher, Henry jenkins.The narrative behind the Berlin memorial is so strong and ideologically loaded that in retrospect, it is hard to comprehend the reasons why anyone visiting would even feel comfortable with taking selfies there. Participants of this modern selfie craze are almost deconstructing (Jacques Derrida) the real meanings behind the memorial by conforming to the twenty-first century obsession with social media. Almost immediately after any contemporary disaster, within minutes, images of what has happened are available to anyone with a television or an internet connection -  it is this that reveals the sophistication, speed, and power of the digital world. However, the average person sees thousands of images throughout the day and internet search engines can instantly deliver images for almost any word that one types into it. A key example of which would be flickr.com, a photo-sharing website - type in “terror” and amongst the almost endless amounts of results, one will come across a photograph of the monumental World Trade Center towers burning, with the caption “Remember when this was a shocking image?”.     It is this question that points to the issues surrounding the images circulating in today's society. Because of the constant reproduction and reuse of these images, have they become less shocking or is it that us as a generation, who have seen them so frequently, have become desensitized by the horrors of what has happened? (Drabman and Thomas’ Desensitisation Culmination Theory.)It has almost become a social norm to deconstruct and reconstruct true meanings behind historical events through photographic distribution. This idea can be supported by canadian psychologist, Albert Bandura’s ‘Social Learning theory’ in which he states that individuals behaviour and understanding of norms is shaped by what one sees in the mass media. However, it is not just through social media selfie culture whereculturally significant images and the attitudes towards them can influence one's behaviours and values. In June 2016, in the midst of the ‘Brexit’ debate - Britain's departure from the European Union - one campaign poster almost immediately caused an online debate of its own.  Nigel Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party caused outrage when his campaigning poster gained an online presence for being “eerily similar” to nazi propaganda. The poster depicts a large group of refugees crossing  the Slovakian/Croatian border in 2015, with the caption “We must break free from the EU and take back control of our borders”. When the UKIP leader unveiled the controversial poster, which was also portrayed in national press, he was of the belief that it was a “fundamental error” to allow refugees into Europe and that it would threaten the country's security. However, it was many people's opinion that not only did the image promote fascism, it also bore a resemblance to a Nazi propaganda film news-reeled in 1941 which described Jewish refugees as “parasites.”The poster that was used throughout the duration of the campaign was reported as inciting racial hatred, it played on the idea of a binary opposites - us and them. Contradictory to British Values and British Race Laws, the poster was used as a vulgar and extreme tool as an attempt to scaremonger the British public into voting to leave the European Union. Through stereotypical assumptions, this generated cultural myths and moral panic (theory of sociologist Stanley Cohen), and also promoted racism that should have no place in society, especially when being backed by such an influential ideological state apparatus - such as the government -  or when it is curated by a member of parliament that holds such symbolic and cultural capital. (Pierre Bourdieu capital theory.)On one hand, in a liberal democracy such as ours in the United Kingdom, despite the laws of allowing free speech, those advocating hate speech and inciting hatred through expressions and means of communication are considered anti-democratic in terms of capitalism, market liberalism and liberal democracy. However, on the other hand, this case study and Farage himself can also be viewed in a Marxist light, and play on the bourgeoisie idea that his power can be used to ensure that his interpretation of the world, or in this case, the refugee crisis, is the hegemonic ideology. In this act of using pictures which exploit the misery of refugees fleeing crisis to promote his own ideological views was deemed dishonest and immoral by not only the general public, but by other culturally important figures also.Caroline Lucas member of parliament for the green party at the time stated, “Using the innocent victims of a human tragedy for political propaganda is utterly disgusting. Farage is engaging in the politics of the gutter.” The Archbishop of Canterbury (Justin Welby) stated that he “utterly condemned” the imagery used by Farage, and that he was guilty of “inexcusable pandering to people’s worries and prejudices, that is, giving legitimisation to racism...accentuating [people’s] fear for political gain, and that is absolutely unacceptable.” Form looking at both of these case studies, as society becomes increasingly captivated by digital means of communication, the reproduction, construction and reuse of images and the messages and narratives underlying them hold great power and can influence our values, behaviours and views of the world. Demonstrating the truth that an image is worth a thousand words, within the first case study, it was evident that we as a generation can easily become oblivious and ignorant to the real world. Whereas, the imagery used in the second of the case studies can make us question, analyse and reflect upon the morality and integrity of people with such hierarchical status. The power of the visual and the distribution of it in our culture has become a tool used to elicit specific and planned emotional reactions in the individuals who see them. The exploration into the two case studies has demonstrated how contemporary culture and modern society has become so dominated by mass media, with images of ourselves and images of others having become a constant feature of our reality -Human conception of the past has been evidenced to have been so easily forgotten and imagery has in fact influenced and shaped our behaviours and values and will continue to do so.

[moved202347]

Hekate / Hecate

(from my old amino before I got banned 😂, pretty much copy n pasted for reference)

Dogs/puppies [from https://hekatecovenant.com/resources/symbols-of-hekate/dogs/] -The dog was connected to spirits, the home (as a guard), a friend of the family, also symbolising an easy birth and fertility.  Represents the earth element. Also known as the 'black bitch'. Originated in ancient hymns, writings, ancient Greek pottery, stone carvings and statues. Its first symbolism came from the Trojan Queen Hekabe who leapt into the sea after the fall of Troy. Hecate took pity on her and turned her into a black dog which became her familiar. In some Greek towns, black female dogs were sacrificed in Hecate's honour, usually at night. Cerberus, the three-headed hound who guards the entrance of the Underworld is additionally connected to Hecate. In American + European folklore, dogs have always been seen as supernatural in the nature of what humans can't see. Black dogs are thought to roam the locations Hecate holds sacred; desolate roads, moors, cemeteries and the crossroads. Dogs attend her as she roams these desolate spaces. 

Dragons [credit to https://hekatecovenant.com/resources/symbols-of-hekate/dragon/]- There are loads of epithets of Hecate. One of her epithets comes from the name 'propylaya' meaning 'she who stands before the gate'. Her hound is believed to be the three-headed dog Cerberus who guards the gateway into the Underworld and some myths believed that dogs replaced dragons. There is imagery associated with Medea with riding her flying chariot escaping from Korinthos after the murder of the king Kreon. Her dragons were a pair of winged, serpentine dragons. 

Black lamb - A preferred sacrificial offering to Hecate. In modern times, it would be more suitable to have a representative of a black lamb such as a statue or photograph , or somehow getting a living black female sheep into your house without wrecking havoc in front of your altar (I don't recommend having a living animal on your altar!). 

Fire breathing Horse or Bull - Represents the fire element. It was symbolic of Hades fiery soul. Hecate is often seen in images crowned with bull-like crescent horns. Black bulls became heavily associated with Hecate as sacrificial animals in necromancy rituals. It is a constant reminder of her powers as creator and destroyer symbolised by the phases (waxing and waning) of the moon and seen in the crescent horns of a bull.

·🖤·

Hydra headed snake or serpent [https://archetypicalwitchcraft.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/understanding-hekate-part-5-the-meaning-of-her-ancient-symbols/]- A solar and underworld symbol. Represents the water element. It was an ambivalent symbol just like the dog, it was connected to the sun, healing and regeneration. Yet there was also a link to the spiritual side, the underworld too. There was old folklore which believed spirits would appear as a snake to bless the house. Snakes, like domestic animals was said to be able to see and feel the presence of spirits, so they were used in necromancy and magic to figure out if there was spirits around. 

·🖤·

Other associations are: frogs or toads; black bulls (draped in wreaths of yew and was then slaughtered in her honour);belladonna (poisonous herb!), cypress; dittany; mandrake; honey (anything sweet), dark chocolate (modern interpretation!); red wine (of course only if your in the age to use it, though your not going to be drinking it!);  torches;  infernal spirits; dagger; ebony; knives or daggers (obviously be safe and don't do any silly things with it!); twin torches; magickal brewing (so potions); silver; grey; bats; rope; black; mental health; hearth and home; dreams; divination; cauldrons; fate. MORE HERBS:  hazel, black poplar, cedar, willow, garlic, thyme, almonds, myrrh, mugwort, mint, dandelion, cardamom, hellbore, belladonna, hemlock, mandrake, hecateis (aconite, wolfsbane [poisonous]) opium poppy, verbena, sage, purple honeysuckle, camomile. Any hallucination herbs (be careful obviously and know your stuff and even then check it with someone who also knows their stuff). Owls, bears, ravens, cats (possibly) and donkeys. 

She is associated with yew, garlic, all poisonous herbs (use representations, so little tiny mushroom statues), oak, white, red, purple, ferrets (polecats), healing, healing herbs (more of the stronger ones and notorious ones), keys (Knowledge, unlocking wisdom, seeing the truth), mandrake, lamps, saffron, sandals in bronze or gold, whips, iron, the wolf, mullet (the blood-coloured goatfish), the new moon, twilight (best time to do rituals with her).

·🖤·

Also MORE epithets ("An epithet is an honorary and praiseful descriptive title used as part of a name."), all taken and sourced from http://www.patheos.com/blogs/matauryn/2017/07/19/many-epithets-hekate/. 

Adamantaea ‘Unconquerable’, ‘Untamable Goddess’

Admêtos ‘Indomable’, ‘Unconquered’

Aenaos ‘Eternal’

Agallomenen Elaphoisi ‘Rejoicing in Deer’

Agia ‘Sacred’, ‘Holy’

Aglaos ‘Radiant’

Agriope ‘Wild-eyed’, ‘Fierce-faced’, ‘Savage-watcher’, ‘wild-voiced’

Agrotera ‘Huntress’

Aidônaia ‘Goddess of Hades’, ‘Of the Underworld”

Aimopotis ‘Blood-drinker’, ‘Murderer’

Aiônos ‘Eternal’

Aizêiοs ‘Vigorous’

Aktinochiatis ‘Radiant haired’, ‘With Rays for Hair’

Aktiophis [Of Unknown Meaning]

Alexeatis ‘Averter of Evil’

Alkimos ‘Powerful’, ‘Strong’, ‘Stout’, ‘Brave’

Amaimaketos ‘Unconquerable’, ‘Raging’, ‘Invincible’, ‘Unapproachable’, ‘Uncontrollable’

Ambrotos ‘Immortal’

Ameibousa ‘One That Transforms’

Amphiphaes ‘Circumlucent’

Amphiprosopos ‘Double-faced’

Amphistomos ‘Double-mouthed’

Anassa ‘Queen’

Anassa Eneroi ‘Queen of the Dead’

Androphonos ‘Killer of Men’

Angelos ‘Messenger’

Antaian Theou ‘She Who Meets’

Antania ‘Enemy of Mankind’

Aôroboros ‘Devourer of the Prematurely Dead’, ‘Devourer of the Untimely Dead’

Apanchomene ‘The Hanged One’

Apotropaios ‘Averting’, ‘Averter’

Aphrattos ‘Unnamed One’

Arêgos ‘Helper’

Archikos ‘Royal’

Ariste ‘The Best’

Ariste Cthonia ‘Best of the World’, ‘Best in the World’

Arkuia / Arkyia ‘Spinner of webs’, ‘Entrapper’

Arrhetos ‘Ineffable’

Astrodia ‘Star-walker’, ‘Star-Courser’

Atala ‘Tender’, ‘Delicate’

Atasthalos ‘Pretentious’, ‘Reckless’, ‘Presumptious’

Athanatos ‘Immortal’, ‘Of Immortal Fame’

Autophyês / Autopheus ‘Self-generating’. ‘Self-begotten’

Azonos ‘Without Borders’

Azostos ‘Ungirt’, ‘Without a Belt’

Baridouchos ‘Barque-holder’, ‘Skiff-holder’

Basileia ‘Queen’, ‘Princess’

Bolos ‘Far-Thrower’,

Boôpis ‘Cow-eyed’

Booporos ‘Ox-Herder’

Borborophorba ‘Eater of Filth’

Boukolos ‘Ox-Herder’

Brimô ‘Angry-One’, ‘Terrifying’

Buthios ‘Abysmal’, ‘Of the Depths’

Charopos ‘Ferocious-aspected’, ‘Fierce’, ‘Grim’, ‘Flashing’, ‘Bright, ‘Having blue-grey eyes’, ‘of the Sea’

Chthonia ‘Chthonic’, ‘Of the Earth”

Chrysôpis ‘Golden-faced’

Chrysosandalos ‘of Golden Sandals’

Chrysosandalaimopotichthonia ‘Goddess of the Lower World Wearing Golden Sandals and Drinking Blood’

Chrysostephanos ‘Golden-Crowned’, ‘Crowned with Splendor’

Chrysostephês ‘Golden-crowned’

Dadophoros ‘Torchbearer’

Dadouchos ‘Torch-bearer’

Daeira ‘The Knowing One’

Daidalos ‘Cunning’

Damasandra ‘Dominator of Men’, ‘Subduer of Men’

Damnamene ‘Means of Constraint’

Damnodamia ‘Subduer of Subduers’

Damnomeneia ‘Dominating Force’

Dasplêtis ‘Horror’, ‘Frightful-one’

Deichteira ‘Teacher’, ‘Revealer’

Deinos ‘Terrible’

Despoina ‘Lady’, ‘Mistress’

Dione ‘Goddess’

Doloessa / Doloeis ‘Astute-one’, ‘Subtle’, ‘Wily’, ‘Cunning’

Drakaina ‘Serpent’, ‘Dragon’

Eidôlios ‘Phantasmal’, ‘Ghostly’

Eileithyia ‘Nurse of Childbirth’, ‘Goddess of Midwives’

Einalian ‘Of the Sea’

Einodia Thygater Demetros ‘Daughter of Demeter, who is of the Road’

Ekklesia ‘Of the Assembly’

Ekdotis ‘Bestower’

Elaphêbolos ‘Deer-huntress’, ‘Shooter of Deer’

Elateira ‘Driver’, ‘Charioteer’

Ellophonos ‘Fawn-slayer’

Epaine ‘Awe-Inspiring’, ‘Glorious’, ‘Sublime’

Empousa / Empusa [Of unknown meaning, related to the monster Empusa and the idea of phantoms and specters]

Empylios ‘At the Gate’

Empyrios ‘Empyrean’

Enodia ‘Of the crossroads’, ‘Of the Roads’, ‘Of the Path’

Ephodia ‘Traveling Expenses’, ‘Provisions for the Road’, ‘Traveling Supplies’, ‘Resources’

Ephoros ‘Guardian’ ‘Overseer’

Epigeioi ‘of the Earth’

Epiphanestate Thea ‘the Most Manifest Goddess’

Epipurgidia ‘on the Tower’

Episkopos ‘Guardian’, ‘One who Watches Over’, ‘Overseer’

Epiteichea ‘The Stronghold’, ‘Fort’

Epi-tymbidia ‘Sepulchral’

Eranne ‘Lovely’

Erannos ‘Lovely’

Ergatis ‘Energizer’

Êrigeneia ‘Daughter of morning’, ‘Early-born’

Erôtotokeia / Erototokos ‘Bearer of love’, ‘Producing Love’, ‘Who Bore Love’

Eukoline ‘Good Tempered’

Eupatepeia ‘Noble-born’

Eurippa ‘Horse-finder’

Geneteira ‘Mother’

Genetyllis ‘Birth-Helper’, ‘Goddess of Childbirth’, ‘Midwife’

Gigaessa ‘Giant’

Gorgo ‘The Grim’, ‘The Gorgon’

Hecatoncheires ‘Hundred-handed’

Hegemonen ‘Guide’

Hêgemoye ‘Queen’

Helike ‘Revolving’

Hersechthonia ‘Speaking From Below’

Hexacheira ‘Of Six Ways’, ‘Of Six Hands’

Hiera ‘Holy One’

Hieros Pyr ‘Holy Fire’

Hipparete ‘Horse-Speaker’

Hippokyon ‘Mare Bitch’, ‘Horse Dog’

Hippoprosopos ‘Horse-Faced’

Hypolampteira [Of Unknown Meaning – possibly related to light or brightness]

Iocheaira / Iokheaira ‘Arrow-shooter’, ‘One who Shoots Arrows’

Indalimos ‘Beautiful’

Ippokyôn ‘Mare-Dog’, half dog/ half horse

Ippoprosôpos ‘Horse-faced’

Kalkaea ‘Wearer of High Boots’

Kalligeneia ‘Bearing Beautiful Offspring’

Kalliste ‘Fairest’

Kapetoktypos ‘Tomb-disturber’, ‘Causing the Noise of Lamentation’

Kardiodaitos ‘Heart-Eater’, ‘Feasting on Men’s Hearts’

Kareia ‘of Karia’, ‘Kraus’

Karko ‘Lamia’, ‘Child-Eating’, ‘Nocturnal Spirit’

Katachthonia ‘Subterranean’

Katakampsypsaychenos ‘Bender of proud necks’

Kelkaia [Of Unknown Meaning]

Keratôpis ‘Horned-faced’, ‘Horned Looking’

Keroeis ‘Horned’

Kthonia ‘Of the Underworld’, ’Of the Earth’

Kleidouchos / Kleidoukhos ‘Key-holder’, ‘Key-keeper’

Klôthaiê ‘Spinner of fate’

Kore ‘Maiden’

Kourotrophos ‘Child’s Nurse’, ‘Nurse of Youths’

Krataios / Kratais ‘Powerful’, ‘Dominator’, ‘Of the Rocks’

Krokopeplos ‘Saffron-Cloaked’

Kunolygmatos ‘Doglike Howler’, ‘Who howls doglike’

Kydimos ‘Glorious’

Kynegetis ‘Leader of Dogs’

Kynokephalos ‘Dog-Headed’

Kynolygmate ‘Howling Like a Dog’, ‘Who Howls Dog-like’

Kyôn ‘Bitch’, ‘Dog’

Kyôn Melaina ‘Black Bitch’, ‘Black Dog’

Kyria ‘The Powerful’, ‘The Supreme’

Laginitis ‘Of Lagina’

Lampadephoros ‘Lamp-bearer’, ‘Torch-bearer’, ‘Who Warns of Nighttime Attack’

Lampadios ‘Lamp-bearer’, ‘Torch-bearer’

Leaina ‘The Lioness’

Leontoukhos ‘Holding a Lion’

Leukophryne ‘White-Browed’, ‘Of the White-Browed Hill’

Limenitis ‘Harbor Goddess’

Limenitikos ‘Of the Harbor’, ‘Harbor Goddess’

Limenoskopos ‘Of the Threshold’, ‘Watcher of Havens’, ‘On the Harbor’, ‘Watching the Harbor’

Liparokredemnos ‘Of the Bright Headband’, ‘Bright-Coiffed’

Liparoplokamos ‘Brilliant-Braided’

Lochias ‘Protector of birth’, ‘Goddess of Childbearing’

Lykaina ‘She-wolf’

Lyko ‘She-wolf’, ‘Wolf-formed’

Maera ‘Shining’

Mageus ‘One who Kneads’ [Possibly related to Magi]

Makairapos ‘Blessed-one’

Medeousa / Medusa ‘Protector’, ‘Guard’, ‘Gorgon’

Meisopomenos ‘Laborer of the Moon’

Meisoponeros ‘Vice-Hating’

Megiste ‘Greatest’

Melaine ‘Black’

Melaneimôn ‘Black-clad’, ‘Wearing Black’

Melinoe ‘Soothing One’

Mene ‘Moon’

Moira ‘A Share’, ‘Fate’

Monogenes ‘Only Child’

Monoprosopos ‘With One Face’

Mormo ‘She-Monster’

Munychia [Of Unknown Meaning]

Nekuia / Nekyia ‘Goddess of death’, ‘Mistress of corpses’

Nerteria ‘Infernal’, ‘Subterranean’, ‘Nether One’

Nerterios ‘Infernal’, ‘Subterranean’, Nether One’

Nerteron Prytanin ‘Mistress of the Dead’

Noctiluca ‘Light of the Night’, ‘Night Shiner’

Noeros ‘Intellective’

Nomaios ‘Pastoral’

Nychia / Nykhia ‘Nocturnal’ ‘Nocturnal-One’ “Goddess of Night’

Nyktairodyteira ‘Night Riser and Setter’, ‘She that Rises and Sets by Night’

Nykteria ‘Of the Night’

Nykti ‘Of the Night’

Nyktiboos ‘Night-Shouter’, ‘Night-Crier’

Nyktipolos ‘Night-Wandering’

Nyktophaneia ‘Night-shining’

Nymphen ‘Bride’

Nyssa ‘Goader’, “Goal’, ‘Beginning’, ‘Turning Post’, ‘Ambition’

Oistrophaneia ‘Manifester of Madness’

Oistroplaneia ‘Spreader of Madness’, ‘Causing the Wanderings of Madness’

Oksyboê ‘Shrill-screamer’, ‘Shrieker’

Oletis ‘Destroyer’

Opaon ‘Follower’

Opheôplokamos ‘Coiled with Snakes’, ‘With Snaky Curls’

Oriplanos ‘Mountain-roamer’, ‘Mountain-Wandering’

Oroboros ‘Tail-Eating’

Ourania ‘Celestial’, ‘Heavenly’

Ouresiphoites ‘Wanderer in the Mountains’

Oxythymia ‘Gallows’, ‘Quick to Anger’

Paggennêteira ‘Mother of All’

Paiônios ‘Healer’

Pammêtôr ‘Mother of All’

Pandamateira ‘All-tamer’, ‘All-powerful’, “All Subduer’, ‘Master of all’

Pandina [Of Unknown Meaning – Possibly related to ‘whirling’ or ‘rotating’]

Pandôteira ‘All-giver’, ‘One who gives everything’, ‘Bestower of Everything’, Bounteous’

Pangaios ‘World-wide’

Panopaia ‘All-seeing’, ‘One who sees everything’, ‘Panorama’

Panta Ephepousa [Of Unknown Meaning]

Pantos Kosmou Kleidokhos ‘Keeper of the Keys of the Cosmos’

Pantrephô / Pantrophos ‘All-nurturing’, ‘All-sustaining’, ‘who feeds all’

Parthenos ‘Virgin’

Pasikrateia ‘Universal Queen’, ‘All-powerful’, ‘who dominates all’

Pasimedeonsa ‘All-guarding’, ‘All-protecting’

Pasimedousa ‘Ruling Over All’

[newstechreviews]

August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble.

All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right on the Carnival route, and see some manifestation of Trinidad going by, or a reggae crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward, one of six siblings, would stay out late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’s cultural and racial multiplicity.

It was this world that nurtured his creativity and helped shape the vision he has brought to the pages of British Vogue since being appointed editor in chief in 2017. “I was always othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic walk through the streets of Ladbroke Grove, a much gentrified, still bohemian part of London, where he moved with his family from Ghana at the age of 13, “you know, gay, working-class, Black. So for me it was very important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal.”

Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting at the intersection of fashion and media, two fields that are undergoing long-overdue change and scrambling to make up for years of negligence and malpractice. Since becoming the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately held company is navigating, on top of an advertising market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public controversies around representation both in its offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.

Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a critical moment for the international publisher. “I wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place. I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When others took steps, Edward took massive strides, showing the importance of our visibility and stories,” she says. Covers since have featured the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s oldest cover star), Madonna and soccer player Marcus Rashford, photographed for this year’s September issue by Misan Harriman, the first Black male photographer to shoot a British Vogue cover in its 104-year history. While other publications, including American Vogue, have reduced frequency during the pandemic, British Vogue has remained financially stable and is still producing 12 thick issues in 2020.

Under Enninful, British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform, shaking up the imagery, tracking the contemporary pain. Its shelf presence is different—more substance, more political—and perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole looks different. No more do Black women search mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of themselves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it took was to give a Black man some power, to give someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the margin a seat at the table.

“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the passing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security guard who told him to enter via the loading bay instead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are returning to normal, we cannot let the world return to how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are seeing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutinizing who is doing what and who is not doing enough to bring about real change in equality and representation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listening now, and we need to take advantage of that. This is not the time for tiptoeing.”

We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-summer noon. When anticipating an interview with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible, it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassuming, arriving in a loose navy suit, pale blue shirt and shades, the only giveaway to his sartorial imperium the no socks with his brogues. He is warm and relaxed, bearing the close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most days to meditate before work.

I-D: Nick Towers; Vogue Italia: Steven Meisel From left: a Fashion Week report by Enninful in I-D’s January 1995 issue; Naomi Campbell on Vogue Italia in July 2008.

These days he resides toward Lancaster Gate, on the posher side of Ladbroke Grove, with his long-term partner the filmmaker Alec Maxwell and their Boston terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his own Instagram account and whose daily walking was a saving grace during lockdown. But the London Underground is where Enninful’s journey into fashion began, one day on the train in a pair of ripped blue jeans, when he was spotted by stylist Simon Foxton as a potential model for i-D, the avant-garde British fashion magazine. Being only 16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian army barracks and who was less than four years in the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of Porto-bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something special was going to come out of it.”

He never had the knack for modeling, he says with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved the process and the craft of creating an image.” He soon moved to the other side of the lens, assisting on shoots and assembling image concepts and narratives, a particular approach to styling that impressed i-D enough to hire him as their youngest ever fashion director at only 18, a post he held for the next 20 years. Without the courtesy designer clothes later at his fingertips, he would customize, shred, dye and bargain for the right look, using the skills he’d developed at home in the sewing room. “I realized that I could say a lot with fashion,” he says, “that it wasn’t just about clothes, but could tell a story of the times we’re in, about people’s experiences in life. And that freedom to portray the world as you saw it.”

What was innate to Enninful—this blend of skilled creativity with the perception of difference as normal, as both subject and audience—was relatively unique in an industry dominated by white, colonial notions of beauty and mainstream. Legendary Somali supermodel Iman remembers a 2014 W magazine shoot in which she, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna were cast by Enninful, the publication’s then style director, wearing Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing. “Until Edward appeared, no one at the mainstream fashion magazines would have cared to commission a portrait exclusively featuring three women of color, and furthermore who were all wearing clothes designed by a person of color,” she says. “He’s an editor in vocation and a reformer at heart, compelled to spur woefully needed social change.”

Courtesy Jamie Hawkesworth and Condé Nast Britain Train driver Narguis Horsford, on British Vogue’s July 2020 issue.

He shows me his various old haunts and abodes, the top-floor bedsit where he used to haul bags of styling gear up the stairs, the Lisboa and O’Porto cafés of Golborne Road—or “Little Morocco”—where he’d sit for hours chewing the fat with people like makeup artist Pat McGrath, Kate Moss, Nick Kamen and photographer David Sims. Name-drops fall from his lips like insignificant diamonds—stylists, photographers, celebrities—but he navigates his domain in a manner apparently uncommon among fashion’s gatekeepers. Winfrey says of him, “I have never experienced in all my dealings with people in that world anyone who was more kind and generous of spirit. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

Her shoot for the August 2018 cover of British Vogue left Winfrey feeling “empress-like,” and she ascribes his understanding of Black female beauty to his being raised by a Black mother. “Edward understands that images are political, that they say who and what matters,” she adds. Enninful’s father Crosby, a major in the Ghanaian army who was part of U.N. operations in Egypt and Lebanon, had thought that his bright, studious son would eventually grow out of his fascination with clothes and become a lawyer. But three months into an English literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying Hardy, Austen and the usual classics, thinking maybe he’d be a writer, or indeed a lawyer, Enninful quit to take up the position at i-D. His father did not speak to him for around 15 years, into the next century, until Grace suffered a stroke and entered a long illness. “Now that I’m older, I realize he just wanted to protect us. He’s come to understand that I had to follow my heart and forge my own path.”

He credits his parents for his strong work ethic—“drummed into you from a very early age by Black parents, that you have to work twice as hard”—and his Ghanaian heritage for his eye for color. His approach to fashion as narrative comes from the “childish games I would play with my mother,” creating characters around the clothes, sketching them out. “I can’t just shoot clothes off the runway,” he says. “There always has to be a character, and that character has to have an inner life.” Since Grace’s death three years ago, his father has lived alone by the Grand Union Canal and is very proud of his son, particularly of the Order of the British Empire awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 for his services to diversity in fashion. The Queen, incidentally, is high on Enninful’s list of Vogue cover dreams.

The British Vogue Enninful inherited from former editor in chief Alexandra Shulman three years ago was starkly different from today’s rendition. During her 25 years in charge, only 12 covers out of 306 featured Black women, and she left behind an almost entirely white workforce. Now the editorial team is 25% people of color—“I needed certain lieutenants in place,” he says—and similar shufflings are being called for over at Condé Nast in New York. Enninful is reluctant to tarnish names any further, maintaining that Shulman “represented her time, I represent mine,” and declining to comment on the U.S. headquarters.

Courtesy Edward Enninful A Polaroid of Enninful in the 1990s from his personal collection.

Enninful’s rise is particularly meaningful to people like André Leon Talley, former editor at large of American Vogue, where Enninful also worked as a contributing editor. Talley describes the new British Vogue as “extraordinary,” and was joyous at Enninful’s appointment. “He speaks for the unsung heroes, particularly those outside the privileged white world that Vogue originally stood for. He has changed what a fashion magazine should be.”

“I’m a custodian,” Enninful says of his role, sitting in a sumptuous alcove of the club bar at Electric House. “Vogue existed before I came, and it will still exist when I leave, but I knew that I had to go in there and do what I really believed in. It’s our responsibility as storytellers or image makers to try to disrupt the status quo.” Ironically, though, he does not see himself as an activist, rather as someone who is unafraid to tackle political issues and educate others, while remaining firmly within the Vogue lens. “They said Black girls on the cover don’t sell,” he says. “People thought diversity equals down-market, but we’ve shown that it’s just good for business.” British Vogue’s digital traffic is up 51% since Enninful took over. He previously edited the 2008 Black issue of Vogue Italia, which featured only Black models and Black women and sold out in the U.S. and the U.K. in just 72 hours.

Since the incident with the security guard in July—which Enninful reveals was not isolated and had happened before (the culprit, a third-party employee, was dismissed from headquarters)—building staff have been added to the company’s diversity-and-inclusion trainings. Enninful would also like to see financial aid put in place for middle management, “because we forget sometimes that the culture of a place does not allow you to go from being a student to the top.” In 2013, he tweeted about another incident, where he was seated in the second row at a Paris couture show while his white counterparts were placed in front. “I get racially profiled all the time,” he says, going right back to his first experience of being stopped and searched as a teenager, which “petrified” him. “When I was younger, I would’ve been hurt and withdrawn, but now I will let you know that this is not O.K. People tend to think that if you’re successful it eliminates you, but it can happen any day. The difference now is that I have the platform to speak about it and point it out. The only way we can smash systemic racism is by doing it together.”

Campbell Addy for TIMEBritish Vogue editor in chief Enninful in Ladbroke Grove, London, on Aug. 31.

Activism, then, is intrinsic. Fashion is altruism, as much as story and craft, as much as the will to capture beauty. For Enninful, there is no limitation to the radicalism possible through his line of work. Rather than the seemingly unattainable elements of style (the £350 zirconia ring, the £2,275 coat) obscuring the moral fiber of the message, the invitation to think and see more openly, the style instead leads you to it, perhaps even inviting you to assemble something similar within the boundaries of your real, more brutal, less elevated existence. “Relatable luxury,” he calls it, and though it’s difficult to imagine exactly how one might evoke a £2,275 coat without his customizing skills and magical thinking, I am inclined to accept the notion, partly because I saw soul singer Celeste in a £1,450 dress in the September issue and think I might give it a try. Anything is possible. “I still feel like I’m at the beginning,” he says with palpable optimism. “I feel the fire of something new.”

—With reporting by Cady Lang/New York and Madeline Roache/London

Evans is the author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a

Cover photo: Styling: Susan Bender; Suit, sweater, shoes: Burberry