#there's also the religious imagery / cultural coding but like. that's a whole other can of metaphorical worms

[raayllum]

@daceytheshebear TDP is very much a kids' show, and this post wasn't a "haha my show is so edgy and dark it's cool that I, an adult, like it actually," kind of thing. I was reading Greek myth from age 6 onwards and my early hyperfixations were historic, ritualistic human sacrifice and the Bubonic plague; kids very much can and do like darker things.

However, I think most people can agree it is, at the very least, made for older children (think 10+) as opposed to the bulk of children's media that can be enjoyed from 4+ (something like The Owl House). This is not a knock on anything made for younger audiences, either, btw. They are equally enjoyable and worthwhile; darker doesn't mean better or necessarily more mature, although complexity and nuance often lend themselves to stories that go beyond teaching moral lessons (if that's the operative of the piece of art, anyway, which it doesn't have to be). I still love things like Phineas and Ferb and the Dragons' tv series. This post was mostly about age demographic expectations vs the content's reality, and how that can differ, sometimes

This is also from someone who works with a variety of students at all ages (5-23), and has seen various people along this age range as the show's fans / I teach media literacy & humanity subjects. So your paragraph is kinda all the things I believe in and have dedicated myself to, career wise. Just so we're on the same page

Most kids' shows, especially nowadays but also in the past, explore darker themes. I'm part of the generation that grew up with Avatar: The Last Airbender and Transformers: Prime (a show that gets so fucked up an episode in which a main character has a suicide bomb strapped to their chest is decidedly lowkey). While these shows explore many heavy themes - war, genocide, imprisonment, aforementioned bombing, grief, abuse, etc. - their presentation is decidedly different in each of them.

For A:TLA, there is notably little on screen violence. Part of this is the genius of bending being a way to have fight scenes with little to no violence. Characters are rarely, if ever, burned in their fights with firebenders and when they do it's a big, shocking moment (i.e. Aang dying). We can also largely - with Zuko as an exception while he's an antagonist - always trust all the Main Characters to do the right thing. That's why episodes like The Southern Raiders, in which Katara confronts her mother's murderer, stand out because we don't have that moral certainty. ATLA also, unlike TDP, has very little to no body horror, meanwhile there were times I thought S3 of TDP pushed the Y7 envelope a little bit.

For Transformers: Prime, although it gets very dark at times, the bulk of the violence and darker scenes do not happen to humans, but to well, the Transformers. This is part of why they were able to do a lot of said violence from a network standpoint, because most networks have rules and heavier regulations over what can be done or shown with human or human-esque characters (this is part of the reason why PG rated cartoons like Infinity Train had to fight tooth and nail for their two on screen death scenes that happen to human/human-appearing characters).

Meanwhile, TDP has a lot of on screen violence, particularly as the show has gone on, almost exclusively of human or human-appearing people, including showing blood (which normally isn't allowed); it is intensely engaged with moral dilemmas and does not always solve them - main characters across both sides of the antag vs protag lines make complicated, scary choices that aren't necessarily 'the Right Thing to do' (which is also where the shift elementary school children's books to MG and further into YA typically occurs); and it has the aforementioned body horror in quite a few places. It's not that kids' shows can't go this far, it's that Most kids' shows - and I have watched many - Don't go this far and with this kind of serious, straight forward framing. I've yet to see another kids' show that has any protagonist or antagonist start a season splattered in blood, after all, and that's just a visual example.

Aang also almost gets put to death for his crimes in ATLA, but it's a one off episode plot line that's mostly framed as a joke, is quickly resolved, and the episode has a decidedly "and everyone was friends by the end" resolution. TDP's trial and death penalty episode ends with a verdict on explicit restorative justice, is always treated/taken seriously, ends with the accused crying out of relief/gratitude, and further ratchets up the surrounding politics.

Case in point: there have been periods of time, following S4 and S5 where TDP's rating was changed from Y7 to PG. It's back to Y7 (for now) in some regions, but it's been confirmed by both the creators and Netflix that S6 onwards will shoot higher than PG and be labelled TV-14 (specifically for self harm and other potential elements).

TDP is for kids - and indeed, many kids are going through things that means having on screen catharsis is very important (something I think Steven Universe handles super well) - and it will, eventually, have a happy ending.

But when people think Kids' Show, I don't think all of the above is really what necessarily comes to mind. There is a massive gap between the sort of the emotional heaviness and imagery that TDP chooses to consistently explore and the bullk of other tv shows for kids. That's what the post is about (and it was mostly a joke, anyway).

*hastily shoves the two torture scenes, multiple assassinations, a cannibalism motif that's increasingly not being just a motif, and political / moral intrigue plotlines off to the side* haha noo The Dragon Prince is for kids i swear—

[bananaofswifts]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[zuziasuchor]

Tribes episode notes;

We see with their eyes, we hear with their ears, we think with their mind, feel with their emotional heartbeat.

Nationalism, obsession with self and psychology, fondness of nature, concern for the future of the planet, democracy and the rise of people power.

Through music, art and poetry the romantics deepened our connection to our place of birth, fondness of monarchy and enabled emotional connection to both. This same passion bore an evil twin, where nationalism and division caused hate and discrimination of ‘us and them’

nationalism : the longing to go back or stay where you came from. Nostalgia, starts with the sense of loss. For the nationalists, it started with a sense of defeat e.g. 18th C scotland.

Burns (scottish poet) was convinced that music could trigger a great swell of fellow feeling even if you were seperated by wealth, rank or eduction

In the early 1800s , germany was not a unified nation but a quilt of states that were united by language and divided by everything else… they fell to the invading french (by Napoleon Bonaparte, child of Enlightenment who was bringing reason, uniformity of institutions, codes of law…. Poison to the romantic mind)

German writers and artists were driven by a sense of nationhood to seek their ancestral past in the woods and forests of german landscape. Hoped to rediscover roots of their culture that were lost in the french modernity. Called this “Deutschtum”

18C German philosopher Johann Gottfired Herder invented what it means to belong to a cultural tribe, he challenged the Enlightenment (liberation from old wives tales, superstitions, religious superstitions, folklore ballads), which believed that once this liberation occurred we would all be rational creatures who would all be the same.

Herder: we aren’t the same, we’re the product of innumerable ancestral deposits of memory, custom, dress, song and folk poetry

he believed there is no shame in difference, although he invented germanness, he didn’t deem it superior to anything else (e.g. polishness or scottishness), he was against flattening of difference, because for him, whether you like it or not, difference was a deep truth about human nature.

Herder’s writing was in response to the anxieties of becoming modern, the rush into money, materialism and metropolitan uniformity.

Romantics (herder included) believed that what we need to live truly human lives was a sense of belonging, a connection to the traditions of our own tribes. Something that can relate to our own time: the more modern we become, the more we need anchorage (anchorage in memory, dreams, ancestry, myth and whole universe of our connected imagination)

Caspar david frederich, monastery graveyard: hope for germany that was being invaded by french modernism. His father died under french invasion. symbolism within the painting: waxing moon soon to renew cycle, death of Jesus which isn’t actually death but promise, buds on the winter trees promising spring. Mournful painting full of death, but hope of new life.

French established the capital in german town and called it Westphalen, regarded german as less rational and sophisticated, made french official language of state. Grimm brothers resisted this by going back to the language and folk tales of the people. Thought they would find the roots of their germanic culture and resurrect it.

Ordinary folk offered their stories, which were transcribed and sent to the grimm brothers.

The published stories were for children and considerably muted compared to the original; dark, cruel, full of cannibalism, mutilation, death, incest (e.g. cinderella’s sisters cutting off their toes to try on the glass slipper, snow white’s abandonment in the woods was meant to end in her heart, lungs and liver cut out and cooked for the evil queen)

Grimm’s stories were made for working class townsmen, who after a day's work were to return to fantasy horror. Grimm’s brothers were trying to reconnect the folk to the dark, savage and primeval german forest.

For german romantics, they were sure it was in the forest that their nationhood was born; world away from modern civilization, it was a primitive world of magic and violence, ancient wisdom and natural justice.

2,000 years before German tribes won against roman invasion within these forests, these forests were a symbol of the people

WW1 germany defeated, Nazis perverted everything that herder and germany’s lieral minded romantics had stood for; forests became not just the symbol of german strength but also of its ethnic putriy.

The Holzweg (the path through the woods), i understood this as a metaphor for nationalism and unitedness: one path can lead to two different directions, one direction can lead to universe of magic, enchantment, creative flights of imagination that are needed to establish an idea of common fatherland. The other path a dark route of bloodshed and brutality.

Mariele Neudecker restages the landscapes of freidrich and grimms in liquid filled glass tanks that mimic the atmospheric conditions of air, light and fog. Reconnecting us to not just the darkness but the wonder and mysticism of romanic art.

Abuse of romantic imagery in the Third Reich. Romantic images have beauty to them but also a dark underbelly. People to have sense of fear, wonder. She’s not sure if she’s reclaiming the landscape but neutralising it somehow out of the political weight. Wants people to question their perception and question their understanding of those images.

Polish liberation didn’t give up hope, rallied around figures of romantic artists; Chopin included.

Heart of polish culture was in paris, where in 1830s politicians, artists, writers had fled into exile after the poland was not just conquered but wiped off the map. With memories of homeland sharpened by separation, they created poland of the imagination in their art.

It is possible to belong to a country, its language tradition and family, yet at the same time belong to humanity.

Romantics ultimate message: harmony (with people, nature & ourselves)

[bakafox]

I was raised Roman Catholic (am hella lapsed agnostic now)- but I feel that it was in central TX and I feel the vibe of Catholicism there thanks to the Hispanic community has a /vibe/ that is different from the Catholicism I encountered say, in Michigan where I visited relatives of mine.

what do you feel separates your religion from others (both other sects of Christianity and other religions as a whole? what feels unique or specific to you/your culture/your beliefs/your church? this can be theological beliefs, practices, or even aestheticswhat things feel "inherently Catholic" or "Catholic coded" to you?

The things that first come to mine to me are The Guilt, and The Gilt.

Not that other forms of Christianity can't foster martyr complexes, but I felt like Catholicsm is the only one I've personally encountered as a resident of the US where it isn't just that other denominations/religions/people are against you, but that the guilt is about you, your moral failings, and how you may or may not have failed God in a more flagellating or sometimes weirdly subtle way than most?

I had old Catholic readers for kids full of stories about how you should give away your favorite toys or best clothes or whatever to charity rather than anything less favored because it was by giving up your BEST that you proved you were good to Jesus and his father, and again, it just hit different to me than when I went to a Baptist thing with a friend and listened to the more hellfire & brimstone thing about sins and moral failings but not involving giving up things you were also supposed to like.

Like, yeah no sex or drugs or rock & roll but you also shouldn't WANT that if you're a good person, is how I felt the other denoms were, compared to.... "You really love X about your life. Give it up/Give it away" even if people didn't do that.

The Catholics I grew up around at least were a lot less strident about other religions in general than the Protestant flavors around me? Still missionary and evangelical but it felt less like I was raised to think other religions were a personal attack on me than friends I had raised in other denoms. (Admittedly some of those friends were raised Jehovah's Witnesses.)

The Catholics I knew were far more of the 'oh poor deluded people' than really worked up about what others believed, but I do also have to admit that my family were liberals who were fighting for church reforms and so was a lot of the circle I wound up surrounded by.

The aesthetics of Catholicism I also tend to feel are a little unique, if in part due to how it absorbed other ceremonies and imagery or mutated based on its surroundings. Even though I absolutely have no truck with the church anymore, I admit I still find myself drawn to and thinking in the symbolism and styles I grew up with.

Finally I feel like the Catholic view of saints is also pretty unique. It's the only Christian denomination I know of at least that has a number of chosen faithful that we're to look up to and also to use like call center employees, as intermediaries between the praying person and God himself, rather than wasting his unlimited time?

I always used to get into arguments with some of the Baptist or other Protestant-style religious kids and teens about the whole 'idol worship' thing, because to my mind the saints and Mary aren't worshipped as if they are gods themselves, but are the specialist messengers and little departments who specialize in Finding Lost Objects or Making Pickles or whatever the heck. (Though I now feel the line may be more blurred, thinking about the more brujeria style stuff? But I am a very white lady who has not really looked into that, even if I still think of it as part of Catholicism where it is a thing, just a different Catholicism like Roman is different from Orthodox.)

The mix of the saints, the guilt, and the over the top art style all sort of blend interestingly in a way I personally don't know of happening in any other religion? Especially since how Saints suffered/died/were martyred is often a huge focus point, and that I have read or heard, other religions with beings who are saint-like in some way, there aren't like... classic paintings and sculptures of them being tortured to death, or with symbols about how they died, like teeth that were pulled out all over the place, or tits that were cut off being on platters?

Or posed in extremely erotically beautiful ways, rather than more serene depictions so much of the time.

Calling All Catholics!

Weird thing for a Jew to post I know I know but hear me out here.

I would like to hear from Catholics (current and ex/raised),

what do you feel separates your religion from others (both other sects of Christianity and other religions as a whole? what feels unique or specific to you/your culture/your beliefs/your church? this can be theological beliefs, practices, or even aesthetics

what things feel "inherently Catholic" or "Catholic coded" to you?

if you don't mind, would you also include what subset of Catholicism you are/were raised in (Roman, Byzantine, Irish, Opus Dei, etc)?

As you may have guessed, this is for research, and I personally only have experience with Roman Catholicism (and limited experience at that, more cultural than truly religious). I would love to hear from a larger subset of people. My family is extremely Italian Catholic but that's just one very specific version, and I don't have much/any experience with any others. I'm curious to see what the common ground is.

Reblogs/signal boosts are appreciated as I doubt I have like a SUPER broad Catholic following myself lol!

[charismastaticarchive]

ok here’s a BRIEF. brief meta about sephiroth vs ardyn izunia representing how the queercoding in final fantasy has changed between ff7 and ff15 and how the remake could ACTUALLY fix some problematic themeatic elements of sephiroth (markedly, anti-semitism and transphobia thru symbols like jenova & the death of aerith)

this is discourse. this is solely discourse. some people may read this and think i am reaching. this is genuinely what i believe tho. i do not hate anybody that disagrees with me. i do not hate anybody who likes ff7. i also like ff7. this is just how i feel given my understanding of cultural and themeatic analysis. please do not read this if u are going to yell at me or hate me lol. this is my blog tho and i’m going to put my opinions out there....

note: i dont actually go into the anti-semitism too much that’s not my area of expertise i’m more knowledgeable about queercoding.

okay to start with. sephiroth is literally the same character as psycho’s norman bates. an obsession with their mother (a being that the rest of the game refers to as non-gendered whose genitals are notably covered in a flex that is admittedly problematic all on its own), that culminates with his mother ‘taking over’ their mind & body and sephiroth trying become a god and MURDER a ‘cis woman’ who has become the most iconic symbol of final fantasy church girl prayer-hands purity and innocence. even more damningly, this biohacked false god / false woman sephiroth has the audacity to go against the lifestream / the symbol of womanhood and NATURE by ‘transitioning’ into a new body. and of course, they want to blow up the world in the process to appease their mother. basically this game is a very reactionary fear to the concept of ‘biohacking’. the only thing worse than the government experimenting on human beings? trans women transitioning---in the narrative of the game’s eyes, ‘experimenting on themselves and going against nature.’ by making sephiroth the big bad of the game instead of shinra, they say that the ultimate evil of unethical technology and a cyberpunk dystopia, is basically trans people.

add TO THAT that even just the name sephiroth is from jewish kabbala and sephiroth is portrayed as a manmade god that u are supposed to destroy instead of a true god... like it just. it’s not great. it’s not a great look.

in their defense. the original game came out in 1992.

the last numbered final fantasy game to come out (not including kingdom hearts which has its own brand of racism and queercoding that it has to work out lmfao) was final fantasy xv.

for all final fantasy xv’s faults, it ALSO had a queercoded villain dripping in religious symbolism. (they all do. its final fantasy lol.) but THIS time, despite ardyn still looking just as if not moreso predatory than sephiroth. ardyn is given a FULL DLC BACKSTORY.

the difference between sephiroth and ardyn is basically that. ardyn in the dlc, where he is meant to be portrayed sympathetically, starts out as a queercoded character. he has basically the same design, except his hair is now in a ponytail, and he wears all white. he starts out as a healer---not a stereotypically masculine role, like a soldier. his hair is still fuckin pink. he wants to heal the whole world, and he absorbs the plague. he thinks he is healing people---instead he is just taking on their illness. (and i have done whole metas about how the plague was viewed as a punishment against humanity for going against god and how that could ALSO be a metaphor for queerness. there’s also a queerness to taking on other people’s disease in my opinion that reads like a metaphor for penetration.) in his inability to actually heal the world (or his failure in a traditionally female role) and his inability to take a decision and excute people with the plague like his more masculine, violent short-haired armor-wearing brother, he is chosen by the gods to be the bearer of the plague, spread it all over the world, and renew the world when the plague dies with him when the chosen male heir of his brother’s long line of heterosexuals kills ardyn. ardyn is rejected from heterosexual maleness by the gods in his own minds if he tries to go against this fate, his girlfriend literally pushing him out of heaven.

but he’s viewed as sympathetic. tortured. unlike sephiroth, who is portrayed as mostly just insane, ardyn is coded not just as monstrous, violent and predatory, but because of the plague metaphor, he is basically explicitly deemed ‘sick.’ and ardyn gets time shown where he is ‘holy’. notably, the game uses christian imagery to describe a kind of ‘sacrifice’ of his brother trying to imprison him in a tomb because he cannot die, and then ardyn waking up from the cusp of death to. technically bring salvation to the people of eos (by first infecting them with plague and bringing about eternal night, but hey, the rapture only comes after the world is destroyed, right).

there is something to be said about the sympathetic christian imagery and ‘holiness’ / ‘goodness’ of ardyn’s sacrifice and pain vs the antisemitism of sephiroth as a false god. but ardyn’s queercoding starts at the very beginning of his story. meanwhile---we don’t really get to SEE the beginning of sephiroth’s story. we get to see cloud’s story. and zack’s. and we kind of get like a whole story about like lol vincent for some reason lmfao

but we never get to see sephiroth experience signs of lgbt-ness at The Start Of His Story, where he is still viewed as sympathetic and wholly good and wholly tragic at the same time.

this is where the remake comes in.

i believe the remake can make sephiroth more than a predatory trans/queer coded character. i think they can fix this by making sure 1) sephiroth doesn’t kill aerith, thereby eliminating the trans woman vs nature AND trans woman vs poor defenseless cis girl narrative (i play aerith as trans and jewish but thats not technically canon even tho it should be lol) 

2) instead of sephiroth having an UNHEALTHY relationship with womanhood through an alien creature representing inhumanity, sephiroth has a healthy relationship with a jewish-coded goddess-like human woman that they COULD’VE GROWN UP WITH AND BEEN FRIENDS WITH AS A CHILD WHILE THEY WERE BOTH CAPTURED BY SHINRA, and through their friendship and relationship with her both as someone they experience the same trauma AND as someone who seems to understand time travel the same way as, we see their backstory and bond grow and sephiroth stops being obsessed with a canonly cishet man (cloud) and starts having a healthy loving relationship with their planet-protecting peers where sephiroth can start to represent a holy relationship with loving themself and the planet the same way aerith does. and it can be very jewish for bonus points bc i cannot get over the way that sephiroth is considered a false god / only a half angel and happens to be named that. that’s fucked up.

ok thanks for coming to my ted talk sorry for the discourse on main

[impressivepress]

Historical Rapture: The Old and the New (Sergei Eisenstein, 1929)

Sergei Eisenstein’s fourth silent feature, General Line, which was released under the title Staroye i novoye (The Old and the New, 1929), is arguably the most overlooked in his oeuvre. 

Focusing on agrarian politics and lacking the dramatic story line and heroic subject matter of Stachka (Strike, 1924), Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin, 1925), and Oktyabr (October, 1927), The Old and the New is often dismissed as a smaller installment in Eisenstein’s revolutionary tetralogy, a propagandist intervention into Stalin’s politics of collectivisation. Yet Eisenstein’s iconic montage sequences in The Old and the New are on par with montage experiments in his other silent films, while his interest in religion, ritual, myth, and co-existence of historical epochs aligns this film with his unfinished projects of the 1930s – namely, Que viva Mexico! (1931-1932) and Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow, 1937). These unfinished projects also marked a significant shift in his theoretical research away from montage theory and toward the exploration of how cinema engages all senses and sensorium – from cognitive and rational to affective, emotional, and embodied.

Eisenstein was commissioned to make The Old and the New in 1926, but his work was interrupted when he was assigned to produce October for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1927. Only after October was released was Eisenstein able to complete his agrarian film. Meanwhile, the changing Soviet governmental politics led to a change in the film’s title and focus. In 1926, Stalin – acknowledging that Russian peasantry were not ready to give up private ownership of the land – was supportive of the operation of private farms and individual farmers (i.e., kulaks) in the countryside. By 1929, Stalin changed his view. The First Five-Year Plan announced at the end of 1929 outlined collectivisation – the concentration of land in the hands of “collectives” – and industrialisation as the main aims of the Communist Party’s agrarian policy. In April 1929, Stalin personally watched The Old and the New and spoke to Eisenstein and his assistant Grigory Akexandrov, outlining his expectations for the film. He asserted that the emphasis should be placed firmly on the transformation of Russian agrarian practices and the peasantry itself into a modern community under the sign of collective, modernised and industrialised forms of operation. The setting for the film was the village Konstantinovo, near Ryazan, the home village of the famous Russian poet Sergei Esenin. This setting was strategically chosen to combat the romanticised, pastoral representation of Russia’s rural areas as archaic and mystical, which Esenin’s poetry powerfully endorsed and was increasingly at odds with the party line.

To dramatise the conflict between the old and the new, Eisenstein chose to focus on the figure of Marfa Lapkina, a destitute peasant woman who transforms herself while transforming her community. Brought to the point of despair by the lack of resources, Marfa declares in the beginning of the film that “it is not possible to live like this anymore.” She then starts the movement to modernise the farming methods in her village, although she is opposed by the kulaks. She urges the villagers to form a dairy cooperative, but they are suspicious and unenthusiastic. Finally, when the backward peasants’ appeals to religious rituals to break the drought fail and the new technologies arrive in the village and prove to be effective, the villagers start to join the cooperative. The collective way of farming starts gaining ground. Although setbacks do occur, such as their first bull, Fomka, being poisoned by the kulaks, by the end of the film the first tractor is triumphantly arriving in the village, proving the success of modernisation and collective farming.

The conflict between the old and the new is dramatised at the narrative level through Marfa’s story, yet it is also staged at the visual level. In the opening shots, the viewers are introduced to dramatic images of old, inadequate ways of living and working on the land in the Russian countryside. The land is divided, according to the inheritance law, into smaller and smaller lots, which are presented in rapid montage sequences and in striking compositional arrangements within the frame that lead from vast expenses of the undivided land to the tight grid of small lots separated by fences. These lots cannot sustain their owners, whose toil is exasperated by the ancient methods of land cultivation. These images are contrasted with the technological innovations that collective ways of farming bring about: A newly built production pavilion ­– a striking structure made of glass, steel, and cement that houses the mechanized processes of milk sterilization and meat preparation – takes the place of centuries-old huts. The rhythmic operation of the conveyor belt replaces manual labor. One tractor pulls all of the villagers’ carriages uphill at once. Arguably the most famous of these images is the montage sequence focusing on the milk separator, a shiny symbol of the future. The first demonstration of the separator’s work to the astonished peasants, depicted in the intercut images of rapidly rotating wheels, drops of milk, and water jets erupting skyward, visually marks the turning point in the film: the winning of new technology over old, the opening up new ways of collective production, and the equal distribution of wealth.

However, despite the film’s programmatic title and message, the triumph of the new over the old was not the only theme that attracted Eisenstein to this project. As Oleg Gelikman notes, as with his other films, Eisenstein managed to “re-code” the official theme rather than successfully comply with his ideological task. Specifically, Eisenstein was inspired to work on his agrarian film by Lenin’s observation that, in Russia in the 1920s, five different social and economic formations co-existed, each defined by a particular combination of the form of property, ways of production and distribution, and relationship between those who owned the land and those who worked the land. Reflecting on Lenin’s ideas in relation to The Old and the New project, Eisenstein wrote in his article published in Pravda, the leading Soviet newspaper, on July 6, 1926, that we could still witness the following formations in the Russian countryside:

Patriarchal (i.e., to a considerable extent, natural) peasant farming

Small commodity production (which included the majority of those peasants selling their grain)

Private capitalism

State capitalism

Socialism

However, while Lenin urged the eradication of different formations and their subsequent replacements by the socialist way of life, for Eisenstein this multiplicity was of paramount importance in itself. At the level of film construction, Eisenstein saw in the simultaneous presence of different epochs a tremendous dramatic potential: “We construct in all the five epochs at the same time,” he wrote. Indeed, the futuristic farming pavilion, designed by constructivist architect Andrei Burov, who modeled his work on Le Corbusier, contrasts sharply with the film’s imagery featuring traditional Russian culture, orthodox prayers and artefacts, archaic pagan rituals, and the nearly symbiotic co-habitation of people and animals, infusing The Old and the New with the palpable, material traces of Russian history stretching far back into the past. But Eisenstein’s interest in the co-existence of historical layers anticipated something else as well: his big theoretical and practical shift toward the exploration of the deep historical origins of the art forms, social structures, and consciousness that he would pursue through his next film projects, Que viva Mexico! and Bezhin Meadow, as well as his massive study Method (1932-1948).

Departing from his observation that historical stages do not necessarily replace each other in a neat order, but can co-exist, Eisenstein started paying more attention to how rituals, different religious practices, and other forms of archaic or primitive mentality penetrate the consciousness and art production of contemporary societies. In his unfinished film Que viva Mexico! he approached Mexico as a giant living palimpsest and explored how traces of millennia of Mexican history manifest themselves in contemporary Mexican life – from the celebration of the Day of the Dead to the Catholic cathedrals built on the ruin of Aztec pyramids. Similarly, in his lost film Bejin Meadow, Eisenstein tried to mobilize mythological imageries as well as New and Old Testament tropes to construe the drama taking place in a Russian village. At the same time, in his study Method, Eisenstein put forward the idea that art is effective because its formal devices are always based on deep historical mechanisms, developed throughout the cultural history of humankind and its evolutionary prehistory as a species. These mechanisms include such phenomena as synesthesia, the ability to perceive a part as representing the whole, rhythmical repetition, inner speech, and Mutterleibsversenkung (the urge to return to the womb) – forms characterised by their more holistic, non-differentiated mode of operation. However, a work of art is also effective for Eisenstein because it always mobilizes another impulse toward a rational, intellectual insight and enrichment, realised mainly at the level of the content of the work.

Departing from the central idea of Method, Jacques Rancière recently re-examined The Old and the New as a limit case of Eisenstein’s endeavor to achieve broad-scale emotional engagement of the viewer while simultaneously communicating an ideological message. According toRancière, an image in Eisenstein’s montage represents an “abstract morpheme” and simultaneously a “sensory stimulus” that “reaches the nervous system directly, without having to rely on the mediation”. As Rancière suggests further, cinema for Eisenstein is “the art that guarantees the non-mimetic effect by reducing the communication of ideas and ecstatic explosion of sensory affects to a common unit of measurement” ­­– namely, the viewer’s sensation. Reflecting on the paradoxical nature of Eisenstein’s imperative “to reach the nervous system directly,” Rancière diagnoses this intention as madness – yet, it is not certain whether such a verdict is justified.

As for Eisenstein, this split into an ideal form – the content, the message, the logical, and the rational on the one hand and the emotional, sensual, and experiential on the other – that the montage image delivers, works because it addresses different strata in the psyche. Eisenstein hypothesised that the psyche of the contemporary man has a layered structure, where “lower” and earlier strata of psychological functioning lay dormant, but can be reactivated by trauma, existential challenges, or encounters with a work of art. Outlining the complex dynamic of interaction between works of art and the human psyche, Eisenstein particularly emphasised that engagement with art allows us to experience the sense of unity – the unity of our internal psychic make-up, social and historical unity of humankind, and unity with the universe. For Eisenstein, this experience, while clearly defined as transcending limits of actuality and looking forward toward the future, acquires its powerful emotional force because it taps into the vestiges of the sense of primordial social, psychological, and biological unity.

In this context, Eisenstein particularly privileged the archaic stage of classlessness as the embodiment of equality and fairness of participation and distribution. However, the stage of classlessness interested Eisenstein not only in its social aspect, but also because, from his point of view, it correlated with an early psychological functioning, where the non-differentiated character of both came to the forefront. In this sense, Eisenstein argued that the method of art itself should be modelled on the ideal of classlessness: “the method of art as an image of social ideal at all times (classlessness as highest ahead and deepest back).” Rancièreglosses over this idea: “The formal operations of the cinema assimilate the pure and conscious calculations of the communist project to the unconscious logic governing the deepest layers of the sensory thought and habits of primitive people.”[Rancière, Film Fables, op. cit., p. 28.]Thematically, the idea of classlessness – both in the past, as a primitive communism of archaic community and as a communist utopia of the future – is most directly explored in The Old and the New.

For these reasons, The Old and the New remained a focus of Eisenstein’s intense theoretical reflection long past its completion; he would return to its analysis again and again through the 1930s and well into the 1940s. Far from being a short lived agitprop effort urging collectivisation, the film became Eisenstein’s first practical exploration of historical continuity, which, in its dialectical tension with Eisenstein’s much better known interest in historical rapture, so powerfully encompasses his oeuvre.

~

by Julia Vassilieva · December 2017

[hearyourheart]

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23.

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[traincat]

This is an interesting addition because I also read him as extremely Reform and largely secular and I feel like there's this need a lot of the times to go, well, if he's Jewish, we need to Jew him up, for lack of a better phrase, he needs to be Involved In Jewish Things, which, if those decisions aren't made from a place of deep understanding, they often do read as superficial, and I think it's important to understand that for Peter to be canonically hard line portrayed as Jewish, nothing would have to be changed about his portrayal (at least in most continuities). He doesn't have to go to synagogue every week or even on High Holidays, he doesn't have to keep kosher, he doesn't have to do any of that to be a valid Jewish character. He can still celebrate Christmas and be Jewish! None of this invalidates him as a character with such heavy Jewish coding. And it can read as very dismissive when non-Jewish fans attempt to, again for lack of a better phrase, Jew him up to fit their own views of what a Jew should be or act, often with little understanding of cultural norms or nuances. (And of course every Jewish character doesn't need to be exactly the same -- I personally view Ben Grimm as more religiously inclined than Peter, and leaning more towards Conservative, and once I had the absolutely insane experience of someone saying they thought Kitty Pryde, who in her first appearance wears a crop top that says BITCH in rhinestones, was Conservative.) And this isn't really meant to tell anyone off, and especially not Jewish fans who want to see or create a Peter Parker who is more actively involved in aspects of Judaism, and who bring a lot of themselves into those portrayals, but rather to point out that there's a line with non-Jewish creators that often gets blurred into something that feels more borderline fetishization that representation, and I think it's especially difficult with a character like Peter who is so heavily coded Jewish because I think that coding is recognized at least subconsciously but because we're so inundated with antisemitic messaging and imagery in our media it can be hard to keep that from affecting views of canonically Jewish or heavily Jewish coded characters. So there's just a whole lot going on here all of the time that even beginning to untangle it is just like, flames on the side of my face.

I think it's also an important note as brought up in the reblog's tags that Peter could be Jewish and an atheist. I personally read him as more leaning towards agnostic because of scenes in the comics where he does talk to God (often in what I personally view as an exceptionally Jewish manner), but a really common reply on my Jewish Peter tweets comes from people going "well I always view him as an atheist so he can't be Jewish" and it's important for people to learn and acknowledge that you can be Jewish and an atheist. These two things don't cancel each other out. You can't view Judaism as Christianity but with different holidays.

Might elaborate later but for the moment I’m gonna vague post and implore gentile Spider-Man fans making Jewish Peter posts to ask themselves if the content they’re creating is helpful or harmful to actual Jewish people. Does it rely on antisemitic stereotypes you might not have examined. Does it use Christian rhetoric. Etc.

[cipheramnesia]

I'm not Jewish, but I'm still Jewish

For a few reasons, I keep circling back around to this. Part of it is because my life intersects with other Jewish people on the regular. Not just my family but other people who are Jewish or who weave in and out of the Jewish culture because of relationships. It just comes up, like calls to like and all that.

Something that tweaked me semi-recently, that I've been dwelling on a bit, was when I heard some people on a podcast say they weren't raised religiously, or that they weren’t religious. Personally, I think of myself as atheist, which is different from not being religious. I won't get into the details of it, but just leave at that my atheism doesn't exclude people who have religious beliefs, it's just my own personal view of the universe.

But anyway - "not religious" struck me as interesting because it was clear from context it meant "non-practicing Christian", and I think most cases where someone (in the USA) says they aren't religious it probably means they are people who come from a Christian background, were raised in a culturally Christian environment, but they don't feel compelled to practice the religion or go to church or whatever.

I'm atheist and I'm not religious, but I'm Jewish. I grew up with half a Jewish family and my whole culture is in splinters as a result. When you grow up and everyone has a different set of religious stories and you're also reading Greek mythology at the same time, it all seems equally fictitious. I'm probably atheist because I'm also Jewish, and it's been no surprise to learn Judaism is open to atheism.

I wish I could convey what it's like to be a child raised this way, then stumbling around adults who have genuine religious beliefs. It was deeply uncomfortable being around Christians during these years, being asked to say prayers or join into ceremonies which meant nothing to me. I can't explain it well, only that it all felt very non-consensual in a very disturbing way thinking back on it now.

Now that I'm an adult and I know I can just say no to prayers, it doesn't intrude on my life as much. It's a background hum, constantly surrounded by "non-practicing Christian" which isn't me. Being the other all the time. I don't know exactly what feels like a step apart, only most Christian imagery gives off the Creepy Stalker vibe at me, while most discussions of Judaism feel welcoming. Not all, not 100%, but most of them.

I know I'm too lazy to explore this in much more detail. I've got some other internal systems undergoing a deep level scan, and the amount of extra running time to try out practicing Judaism just isn't available. It's just one more bit of fucked up flotsam in my coding that doesn't quite sync up with the rest of the network, but nothing particularly outstanding.

[percentmagazine]

What does culture mean? And some other current cultural happenings, as per our 2020, evidently.

Creative people see the world in various ways, on top of it in this modern day and age things change super fast. That makes ideas and opinions drift all over the place, conflicts drive opposite directions and as it most commonly happens, they all part ways very quickly and evaporate, while replaced by next new big thing ideas. Obviously we are all chasing a positive and optimistic change, but change is a team sport, and it is a good old culture that holds us together.

So what is it? How does culture evolve forward and happen to be?

Welcome to our Omni Culture Club (OCC).

The more I look around and analyse the more I believe in a younger generation. I remember myself all young and all liberal, art student in Paris, France. Now omg, I am a stiff conservative, such a disappointment, I need to loosen up, look around with eyes open wide. I understand that nostalgia is sweet and nice, but the time goes forward, and it is the young people and their ideas that matter and need to be taken into consideration, not my boring conservative dilemmas.

So starting now I genuinely urge myself only to pay attention to what the millennials think or even more younger people care about, what they gravitate towards.

Rebellious Youth

They don't watch TV anymore, TV is dead, nor they read the traditional print magazines, the print is dead (apart from rare editions collections for the few chosen ones). All they absorb now is youtube streaming, blogging and vlogging, social media and instagram. And Twitch, I mean Twitch Seriously? Just kidding Twitch is cool! Embracing it all and shaping the thinking of tomorrow.

Youth is always rebellious, they reject the old inefficient ways and adopt the new. The fight between fathers and sons, almost like a cultural shock when travelling an exotic country, different mindsets.

They care about coffee, and I mean coffee shops are everywhere. They also care about collecting emotions and experiences rather than things and material culture. Hipsters on scooters are all cute and positive, the taste makers of urban street culture seeking out the hype.

They are their own unconventional idols, building out cults out of niche underground cultures with big emphasis on sustainability trends. We see more and more grow local and vegan movements. Fantastic, health and longevity is all that matter in our individual lives.

Futurism

And then the future, how do we predict? It is not an easy task, particularly the future of art and cultural diffusion. However, Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of Serpentine Galleries, decided to try. He asked many artists (as well as scientists, poets, architects, mathematicians, photographers, philosophers and other leaders in their field) to complete the sentence “The future will be….” I am sure the answers are as futurist as futurism can be. In this matters I would always advise to listen to the futurist architect philosopher Jacque Fresco. The education and all awareness is what matters.

New Age Education

Best Schools worldwide, experienced professors, multilingual classmates with entrepreneurial endeavours, the world is the youth’s oyster. These generation next is exposed to facts and information and geography of the world as no generation before urging everyone to be an artist and free spirit, thinking out of the box. Stay hungry stay foolish. The wealth of knowing and experiencing.

Multilingual Society

We just communicate. Fluent knowledge of four languages is a new norm with the demand for more and more exotic language skills such as Mandarin Chinese. A melting pot of cultures, phrases and cross references.

Exotic Worlds

The travel is omni present. The culture of Japan is only one day on a plane away from indigenous latin american tribes. Travelling more than 55 plus countries in before the young professionals even start acknowledging the thought about a family life, all sounds like an obvious life choice to experience the most before settling down.

Gastronomy

To experience all this futuristic world conquering endeavours we tend to focus on and prioritise our health and well-being more and more, the buzzwords such as longevity are surfacing everywhere. Life-Expansion is our individual primary concern, next to happiness. We pay more and more attention to our diet with gastronomy experiments. The food we eat is a subject to so many beautiful imagery as well as health benefits. The water is a new gold imported from every corner of the world and quality wine collections are the new world currencies that get traded over the table dinners.

Time Travel

We are exposed to all periods in time, and all is discussed openly. The best moments of decades and centuries are praised, the worst a ridiculed. There is a lot of inspiration to be taken out of history lessons and books that expose our wholesome pop culture and heritage.

Cultural Evolution

As ruled by the survival of the fittest, and all fields and industries are considered to be creative, all attempts are serious and ruthless. Every single one of us starts their journey somewhere, our inspirations and motivations are based on cultural heritage that eventually find its way in the first job, in ups and downs, and eventually in determination to be the best in our craft and profession. Then our first breaks of success determine who we are and capable of.

Museums of pop culture

The chapels of culture are more popular than ever: dance theatres, opera houses, cinemas, and of course the museums are the new shrines for societies. The Bilbao effect that completely redevelops the landscape of the city and economy. One of my all time favourite cities in the world is tiny Venice that i visit quite frequently, every two years to be exact for the art biennale. The amount of people these cultural bridges touch down deep their overall view on the world.

Technologies

The possibilities of new technologies together with human obsession to constantly shape the environment according to the human liking. The internet changed us, I remember being so fascinated by the possibilities of all free napster downloads in my early teens, the community of people brought together and exchange ideas, we are finally not alone. We build links and systems to facilitate and improve the quality of our every day existence. The horizons are broaden. Coding is a new norm and important language to explore.

The productivity opportunities with voice recognition software makes all typing and writing, as well as brainstorming fast and easy. The photo editors such as adobe photoshop and illustrator are indispensable tools. Self-publishing and self-promotion are at the tips of our fingers, and we can do whatever we want to do as long as we keep our focus on the essentials of our primary goals, the technologies help us achieve them faster.

Creativity

A trait of character that everyone possesses, the main thing is to start using it in everyday life. The impact it leaves on the world with all its out of the box solutions - the creative economy is the new trend for the 21st century and we shall embrace it, the whole brave new world of untapped territories

Self-expression

Generation next expresses themselves in various ways and they are not shy about it, whether it is music or fashion, how they dress up, what they project to the world, their hairdos and their makeup. In 2000s we saw a rise of the gender identity topics. Our next generations are more philosophical in our views and our religions are our inner worlds. We vote with our dollar.

Diversification

We embrace and discuss the importances of diversity, we range from black to grey to white will all flashy and neutral colours of the spectrum. There is an abundance of diversity in choices and ideas  and if we don't find what we are looking for, we are not shy on trying and experimenting, eventually we create it according to our desires. Diversification implies that ultra cheap mass production at scale is no longer of valid interest for thinking public, Individual designer and artisanal products are in favour and on the rise of popularity.

Music and Sounds

The culture of the Rhythm, the culture of gathering together and embracing the community around the fireplace, listening to Shamanistic hypnotising sounds, an evolutionary obsession with seven notes.

The evolution of music from refined classical through jazz and rock, through the 90s MTV, the rave and rap to modern electronic music and techno. The night life and club scene with amazing exotic locations, the infinite quantity of music labels and DJs as the kings, yet another example of religious community experiences.

Conclusion

Though culture is a universal tool of what makes us human, it is still incredibly diverse and mesmerising to explore. It consists of variety of elements and plays an indispensable role in our everyday interaction. Culture manifests in individual as well as in society and it makes a great subject to dig deeper into the depths of questions Why and How. This is something to cultivate within and express outside for the world to experience and be open minded to the new.

Culture combines within the elements of the past and the aspirations of the future, that perhaps one day we will build a community, so wise civilised and tasteful, that the progress will bring only joy and beauty, and utopia is not that far away.

Join our Omni Culture Club (OCC) for more beautiful thoughts and artistic revelations

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Evgeny is an art director and a global citizen based in Hong Kong and working between Asia and Europe.

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[yasbxxgie]

The Legend of the 52 Blocks

I don’t know how I first heard about the 52 Blocks. Like much of New York City’s urban mythology—such as the Decepticons gang, the tunnels under Alphabet City, or the albino alligators and alligator-sized rats in the sewers—the legendary hand-to-hand combat style seemed to always hover just outside my conscious knowledge, a whisper from an unclear direction.

Certainly, though, I heard references to the 52 scattered in lyrics by rappers such as Nas protégé Nature and Wu Tang affiliate Killa Sin. The Wu-Tang Clan, in particular, seems to have an affinity for the 52. GZA, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, and various Killa Bee affiliates have all rhymed about the 52. The most memorable lyric about the 52 is probably Meth’s line from his and Redman’s “1,2,1,2”: “52 cops/ Can’t withstand the 52 Blocks/ Unless they bust like 52 shots.”

While working as a night security guard in Manhattan several years ago, I got into a conversation with a guy on the maintenance crew. The man bragged about the various fighting styles he’d studied in his lifetime, swinging his mop handle like a Japanese bō. Considering that he had spent his youth in a reform school in the Rockaways in the ‘70s, and was ostensibly an expert in various fighting forms, I asked him if he knew anything about the 52 Blocks.

“52 Blocks?” he sneered. “That’s ghetto shit. It’s nothing.”

A few minutes later, a buddy of mine who was also on the maintenance crew came upstairs. He was less of a martial arts aficionado, but was a tough guy and had spent some time locked upstate in the ‘90s, so I asked him the same question.

“Yeah.” he said. A smile spread across his face. “Yeah.” He quickly directed me to bring up YouTube on the security computer and search for round five of Judah vs. Mayweather. He knew the exact round of the fight off the top of his head. Chapter and verse. We watched the clip in silence. Mayweather dominates for the first couple minutes, landing several punches, and driving Zab Judah into the corner. Then, a switch flips, and Judah steps forward into the center of the ring. He pulls his elbows in tight, and his arms pivot back and forth across his face like a butterfly flapping its wings.

“You tell me what this is,” an announcer says in disbelief. Mayweather steps backwards—his infamous cockiness drained away—and Judah lands a righteous combination. So this was the 52 Blocks. It was something after all. And it was beautiful.

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Even the name of 52 Blocks is shrouded in mystery. Some say it describes a catalogue of individual moves with fanciful names like the “skull and crossbones.” Others dismiss this, and say that the name is a metaphor for a general style, coming from the game of “52 pickup,” where cards are allowed to fall where they may. Still others say that that the “block” in question is a specific cellblock. Indeed, an alternate name for the 52 is “the Comstock Shuffle,” a reference to The Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York.

Whether it’s 52 Blocks or Comstock, the term refers to a purported codified New York prison system-specific style of Jail House Boxing, aka Jail House Rock. This is held in contrast to related styles in other prison systems, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which are rumored to vary, be less codified, and go by different names. The moves themselves supposedly reflect the prison environment. The idea is that the tight stances, lack of far-ranging movement, and emphasis on survival and defense were designed to function in in the confines of a prison cell than a ring. Rumors abound online about a predatory gay 52 Blocks prison master named Mother Dear—and the authoritative Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia even implies that he originated the style himself at Rikers. There is no record of this man’s actual identity.

The first reference in print to this type of fighting style apparently came in a 1974 issue of Black Belt magazine, in a feature on prison karate. Most of the article focuses on the clandestine practice of traditional karate in prisons in New York State and elsewhere, but the conclusion focuses on the more interesting “In House Arts.” Black Belt treats the prison fighting styles as “impromptu” variations on hand-to-hand combat styles used by incarcerated military veterans, and refers to them by facility-specific names, such as “Coxsackie variation” and “Comstock style.”

Amazingly, the afroed-man photographed demonstrating the Comstock style is Miguel Piñero, the famous poet and playwright of the Nuyorican arts movement. Black Belt could not have found a more appropriate model. In his, “A Lower East Side Poem,” Piñero describes himself as, “a street fighting man.” He goes on to explain that he is, “a dweller of prison time/ a cancer of Rockefeller's ghettocide/ this concrete tomb is my home/ to belong to survive you gotta be strong.”

The first direct journalistic reference to 52 Blocks does not seem to have come until the late date of 1999, though, in Douglas Century’s Street Kingdom: Five Years Inside the Franklin Avenue Posse, an immersive account of a Crown Heights gang in the early ‘90s. Century followed up two years later with an eye-opening article about the 52 Blocks in the recently-shuttered fashion magazine, Details. In his book, Century describes “fifty-two hand-blocks” as “a style of hand-to-hand combat developed in the New York State Penal system and widely practiced amongst gang members on the streets of Brooklyn in the ‘70s and ‘80s.” This is as good a definition as any (though some folks from the Bronx or Harlem might object to the geographic specificity). In the Details article, Century quotes Dennis Newsome, a well-known Capoeira master and martial arts scholar, providing his own definition of the 52 Blocks: “Basically it’s an artistic butt-whuppin’ … It’s just part of Black aesthetics.” Newsome goes on to argue that the racially-segregated nature of prison meant that only African American inmates learned the style.

Lore has it that the 52 Blocks worked its way down from the prisons to the streets in the ‘70s. This is plausible; street style has always reflected prison culture, and moves that would work in the confines of prisons would work just as well in the confines of the similarly-designed housing projects which had come to dominate New York City’s ghettos in the era of urban renewal. Because any effective fighting style would essentially be contraband, an illicit weapon smuggled in and out of prison, it would have had to remain underground. Whether it referred to legend or fact, the name 52 Blocks was restricted to argot. This secrecy is part of what makes it so difficult to trace or verify much of this history.

Through a shared association with the prison system, the 52 Blocks came to be connected in many people’s minds with the self-mythologizing Nation of Gods and Earths, more commonly known as the Five Percenters. The history of the Five Percenters is too complex to get into here, but it is a fascinating movement which was founded by a former Nation of Islam minister named Clarence 13X, aka Father Allah, in Harlem in the ‘60s. The Five Percenters’ unique approach to language has had a profound impact on Hip Hop, and modern American slang.

The Five Percenter lessons—themselves an enumerated code of arcane knowledge often learned in prison—could be seen as a mental parallel to the 52 Blocks, just as many Eastern practices have both a spiritual and physical aspect. In his book, Tao of 52, self-declared expert Diallo Frazier writes: “52 was called God Blocks because in the science of Supreme math, the number 7 is the number of GOD. When you add 5 and 2 you get 7 …” Narratives of receiving esoteric transmission of religious and martial instruction behind bars have a strong appeal for many people have been incarcerated, as they allow the years spent in prison to be viewed as time spent gaining knowledge, rather than simply wasted.

+++

In the early 1970s, perceptions of Asian martial arts began to influence New York street culture through the popular imported Kung Fu movies. Aficionados had long traveled to movie theatres on Canal Street in Chinatown, but the explosion of martial arts film screenings in midtown meant that a wider, non-Asian audience was exposed to the genre. A 1974 article in the film journal Cineaste proclaimed:

In a little more than two years, kung fu (also known as Chinese boxing), the centuries-old Chinese martial art, has caught the fancy of the American public and literally become the ‘fist of fury.’

As the 2013 documentary The Black Kungfu Experience depicts, some African American fans of Kung Fu movies were inspired to actually train in Chinese and Japanese martial arts. Ron Van Clief, a Brooklyn native, became a martial arts champion after surviving a lynching down south in the early ‘60s, and serving in combat as a Marine in the Vietnam War. He was given the name “The Black Dragon” by none other than Bruce Lee, and eventually moved to Hong Kong to star in a plethora of Kung Fu movies. These movies, in turn, inspired a whole new generation of African American martial arts practitioners.

Van Clief was the fight choreographer for the 1985 Berry Gordy-produced film, The Last Dragon. The Last Dragon, which features a showdown between two black martial arts experts in Harlem, represented the confluence of Kung Fu cinema and New York street culture. Jim Jarmusch would build on the trope fifteen years later, in Ghost Dog, a movie scored by Wu Tang’s leader, RZA. Considering that The Wu-Tang Clan’s imagery draws so heavily from both Five Percenters and Kung Fu movies, it’s no surprise that their lyrics contain so many 52 Blocks references.

The influence of film does not mean that the ‘70s martial arts trend was solely about play acting; street gangs like the Black Spades, the Nomads, and the Ghetto Brothers were actively engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Examples of this can be found in the excellent recent documentary, Rubble Kings, which chronicles the events leading up to the 1971 Hoe Avenue gang truce in the South Bronx. The film features an influential figure named “Karate Charlie” Suarez. Suarez—a Marine-turned-gang leader-turned-activist-turned-martial arts instructor—literally made a name for himself as a karate practitioner, and inspired a myriad of imitators.

+++

Many 52 Blocks proponents argue that the true inspiration for the form does not come from Asia, but from Africa. 52 Blocks scholar Daniel Marks, who first learned of the form from street savvy recruits while in the Army, refers in a brief monograph to the southern African American fighting style of “Knocking and Kicking.” Frazier similarly connects Jail House Rock back to a “Virginia Scufflin” boxing style practiced by slaves in the 1800s. The existence of enslaved bare knuckle boxers—like the famous Tom Molineaux—who were forced to fight for their masters’ entertainment, is documented in other sources, including the foundational early-1800s prize fighting account, Boxiana. Marks and Frazier both connect Southern African American fighting styles back to African martial arts, such as Hausa Boxing (also known as Dambe) in Nigeria.

Within the martial arts community, there are many detractors who question if the 52 Blocks even exists at all, let alone possesses a history stretching back centuries. Considering that martial arts is a field filled with both Orientalist frauds and blustering bravado, and that there is so little hard evidence on the history of the 52 Blocks, some measure of skepticism is certainly warranted. That being said, much of the derision for the 52 Blocks goes well beyond careful critical appraisal. A typical attack is articulated by the right-wing writer Phil Elmore:

the system simply doesn’t exist […] we are asked to believe that a people sold into slavery and shipped across the ocean to serve as slaves in the United States somehow managed to transmit the coherent body of a complex, technically diverse martial arts system to their children, their children’s children, and their children for generations, all under the watchful eye of slave owners who would not be eager to have their property learning to fight.

Elmore’s essentially racist argument not only dismisses the 52, but the very idea that African American culture builds on traditions brought over from Africa. Apparently the man has never heard of blues music, or any other African Diaspora art form. And if he doesn’t believe that martial organization could happen under “the watchful eye of slave owners,” then someone should tell him about Nat Turner.

+++

The crack epidemic of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s brought an unprecedented level of violence to the streets of America’s cities. During this era, hand-to-hand street fighting gave way to gun violence. Those who posit that the 52 Blocks was a tradition passed down through generations point to this disruptive historical moment as the end of the form’s practical use and transmission. In the song “Cold World,” GZA raps about the inefficacy of the 52 Blocks in a burgeoning gun culture: “But with iron on the sides, thugs took no excuses/ Therefore, your fifty-two hand blocks was useless.”

As the 52 Blocks became a relic of the past—historical or mythic—some people began to preserve and honor it as part of African American heritage and culture. Constellation 52 Global, a group which includes Marks and Kawaun Adon Akhenoten7 (aka “Big K” of Street Kingdom fame), works to document and perpetuate the tradition. Marks writes that he values the 52 Blocks, “as a testament of our struggle as Black people in the Diaspora fighting for equality.”

The idea of the 52 Blocks has also gradually taken more of a presence in sports, entertainment, and popular culture. Some boxing fans speculate that in addition to Zab Judah, other boxers like Mike Tyson may have incorporated elements of the 52 into their fighting styles. This theory is rooted in the fact that Tyson received much of his fighting education in the streets of Brooklyn and in a New York State juvenile detention facility. After hearing tell of the form’s fabled efficacy, some martial arts students are seeking to learn the 52 Blocks in more formal settings. This phenomenon was mentioned in a 2009 New York Times article which, in addition to Marks and Akhenoten7, focused on Lyte Burly, a trainer who teaches a version of the 52 Blocks as a business. The Times article also discussed a meeting between Marks and UFC Champion Rashad Evans, and Evans’ interest in 52 Blocks techniques.

The 52 Blocks is finding its place on the screen as well, just as Kung Fu once did. Because of its speed and flash, the 52 Blocks is made for the medium. Indeed, many people now receive their first glimpse of the 52 in YouTube videos, just as I did. Strangely, the first mainstream use of 52 Blocks-style moves was by Mel Gibson in the 1987 film Lethal Weapon. The Australian learned his moves from Dennis Newsome. More recently, the 52 Blocks mythology plays a prominent role in the BET series Gun Hill. Larenz Tate’s character, Bird, is an ex-convict posing as a law enforcement officer, so his knowledge of the 52 is somewhat logical to the plot. Though Tate’s fighting technique—coordinated by Diallo Frazier—may very well be flash designed for TV, rather than an authentic reflection of a prison and street fighting tradition, its central use in the narrative demonstrates the continuing popular appeal of the legend of the 52 Blocks, two decades after the Wu-Tang era.

Despite the lights and cameras, the 52 Blocks remains, in its essence, an art form of bare hands, operating behind concrete and steel. Not too long ago, my girlfriend’s work took her to Harlem early in the morning, just after dawn. Passing through Marcus Garvey Park, she saw a lone man in his fifties—with the weathered look of an ex-con—training inside the playground jungle gym, down the hill from the old fire tower. His half-century-old arms flashed in front of his face, cutting through the morning air.

“Was that 52 Blocks?” she asked me when she got home. “It was like nothing else I’ve ever seen.”

[tvdas]

Banning Evil

In the Shadow of Christchurch, Quasi-Religious Myths Can Lead Us Astray

written by Michael Shermer

On March 15, a 28-year old an Australian gunman named Brenton Tarrant allegedly opened fire in two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques, killing 50 and wounding 50 more. It was the worst mass shooting in the history of that country. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who was rightly praised for her response to the murders, declared: “While the nation grapples with a form of grief and anger that we have not experienced before, we are seeking answers.”

One answer took form a week later, when Ms. Ardern announced legislation that would ban all military-style semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Will such gun-control measures work to reduce gun crime? Maybe. They did in Australia following a 1996 mass shooting in Tasmania in which 35 people were murdered. A 2006 follow-up study showed that in the 18 years prior to the ban, there had been 13 mass shootings. But in the decade following, there had been none. Gun culture is different in every country. But there is at least an arguable case to be made that the newly announced controls will make New Zealand a safer country.

But banning certain tools that may be used to commit murder is one thing. Tarrant’s rampage also has led to calls to block ideas that allegedly fuel murderous extremism. In the immediate aftermath of tragedy, it is understandable that every conceivable means should be employed to prevent a recurrence. But censorship is almost invariably the wrong response to evil actions. You cannot ban evil.

Before the killings, Tarrant authored a rambling 74-page manifesto titled The Great Replacement. The document is difficult to find online, as most platforms took to blocking it as soon as its appearance was flagged. I was quick to grab a copy early on, however, because such documents inform my longstanding research into extremist groups and ideologies.

The Great Replacement was inspired by a 2012 book of the same title by the French author Renaud Camus—a right-wing conspiracy theorist who claims that white French Catholics in particular, and white Christian Europeans in general, are being systematically replaced by people of non-European descent, especially from Africa and the Middle East, through immigration and higher birth rates. The manifesto is filled with white supremacist fearmongering. “If there is one thing I want you to remember from these writings, it’s that the birthrates must change,” the author tells his audience (whom he presumes to be white). “Even if we were to deport all Non-Europeans from our lands tomorrow, the European people would still be spiraling into decay and eventual death.” The result, he concludes apocalyptically, is “white genocide.”

Like many cranks and haters of this type, Tarrant has a weakness for codes and slogans. He references the number 14 to indicate the 14-word slogan originally coined by white supremacist David Lane while imprisoned for his role in the 1984 murder of Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Lane, for his part, explicitly extolled the writings of white supremacist William Pierce, who in turn inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people.

Accusations of racism and white supremacism are thrown around so casually these days that the meaning of these terms has become diluted and ambiguous. So, for clarity, I will state the obvious by emphasizing that the writings of Tarrant, Lane and Pierce all reflect attitudes that are completely racist and hateful, as such terms are properly used.

And yes, there is a connection with Nazism. The number 14 is sometimes rendered as 14/88, with the 8’s representing the eighth letter of the alphabet—H—and 88 or HH standing for Heil Hitler. Lane, who died in 2007, was inspired by Mein Kampf, in which the Nazi Party leader declared: “What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.”

But even here, the bibliographical trail of hatred doesn’t end—because Hitler copied much of his anti-Semitic conspiracism from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a tragically popular hoaxed document purporting to record the proceedings of a secret meeting of Jews plotting global domination. Nor was the Protocols itself conceived out of thin air: It was plagiarized from Biarritz, a luridly anti-Semitic 19th-century novel; and a propaganda tract called Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which had been written by a French lawyer as an act of protest against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte; both of which, in turn, drew on anti-Semitic tropes going back to Roman times. So if you’re looking to root out and ban the political ideology that produces Jew hatred, you’re going to have to purge whole library shelves. The same goes for Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and virtually every other kind of bigotry you could name.

And yet, there are those who argue that mass censorship is justified in the name of heading off hateful indoctrination. That group apparently would include leaders of the Whitcoulls bookstore chain in New Zealand. Late last week, the company announced it was banning one popular book, “in light of some extremely disturbing material being circulated prior, during and after the Christchurch attacks.” Yet the book wasn’t Mein Kampf, which you can still buy on the company’s site for $44.95—or anything of its ilk. Rather, the chain is boycotting Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, a self-help book that has no connection at all with the mosque attacks or their perpetrator.

What is the “extremely disturbing material” in Peterson’s book? Whitcoulls doesn’t say. I’ve read the entire book, along with much of the University of Toronto professor’s 1999 massive first book, Maps of Meaning. And I’ve watched many of his YouTube videos and media interviews. I have yet to find anything remotely reminiscent of white supremacy, racism, anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.

On Twitter, I suggested that those who think Peterson is the ideological culprit behind the New Zealand massacre have lost their minds. I added that I’m no toady for Jordan Peterson, inasmuch as I disagree with him on many subjects—including his theory of truth, and his largely uncritical endorsement of religious myths as an organizing principle for human cultures. But the banning of Peterson on any theory related to preventing mass murder doesn’t even rise to the level of wrong: It’s demonstrably absurd—akin to banning spoons and skateboards as a strategy to stave off prospective arsonists.

When I asked my social-media followers for examples of anything Peterson had said or done that could be construed as inviting mass murder, the only remotely relevant responses I got pointed to photos that random fans had taken with Peterson, one of which featured a guy sporting a t-shirt proclaiming himself to be an “Islamaphobe,” and another (more ambiguous) example of someone holding a Pepe the Frog banner. But this proves nothing. Peterson has taken photos with tens of thousands of people at public events in recent years. In a typical fan-photo cattle call, fans are cycled into frame with a celebrity roughly every five or six seconds—typically by handlers, not the celebrity acting in his or her personal capacity. I’ve done a number of these during book tours and can attest to the fact that it’s completely unrealistic to think that Peterson could screen the clothes worn by all these legions of photo seekers for ideological purity—even if this were something he aspired to do.

On March 23, I received an email from Change.org, the left-leaning political action group whose stated mission is to “empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see.” In this case, the change users wanted to see in response to the New Zealand massacre was… to ban PewDiePie from YouTube. “One of the largest platforms for white supremacist content is PewDiePie’s YouTube channel,” the petition informs us. “PewDiePie has on many occasions proven once and again to promote and affiliate himself with white supremacist and Nazi ideologies.” The petitioners then list the YouTuber’s alleged sins, including using the N-word, playing videos of Adolf Hitler’s speeches, and giving the Nazi heil in a video.

For those unaware, PewDiePie is a Swedish comedian and video game player named Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose YouTube channel has a massive following and whom Tarrant referenced in his manifesto (along with Candace Owens, Donald Trump and others). It is true that PewDiePie once used the N-word during a video game competition (and then apologized profusely for doing so). He also has used brief audio and video snippets of Nazi imagery as part of satirical responses to attacks against him that he lampooned as melodramatic. The idea that any of this betrays PewDiePie as a closet white supremicist is absurd. Even without Change.org’s urging, YouTube already has demonetized the videos of such avowedly anti-racist and anti-supremacist moderates as Dave Rubin and Gad Saad, as well as anti-anti-Semite conservatives such as Dennis Prager. YouTube is acting on an ideological hair trigger: If there were any evidence whatsoever that PewDiePie had expressed real Nazi sympathies, he would have been axed from the platform long ago.

Responding to evil by banning random controversial authors or YouTubers is completely irrational. But that doesn’t make it inexplicable. Manifestations of great evil provoke a desire to do something—anything—to reestablish moral order. Remember when millions of people tweeted #BringBackOurGirls after the terrorist organization Boko Haram kidnapped dozens of Nigerian students in 2014? Murderous rapists don’t give a fig about being mobbed on Twitter. But it made people feel useful for an instant—as if they had done something. We all entertain some version of this instinct in times of tragedy—a reflex satirized by The Onion in the days after 9/11 with the headline Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.

Intertwined with this instinct is the idea that there is some abstract force called evil that exists in the cosmos, a force that we are all called upon to confront and defeat. As I argued in my 2003 book, The Science of Good and Evil, this belief—that pure evil exists separately from individuals—is a myth. “Evil” makes literal sense as an adjective, but not as a noun (except in a figurative sense), because there is no quantum of something called “evil” that exists in human hearts, or, indeed, anywhere else.

Thus concluded social psychologist Roy Baumeister, as reported in his 1997 book about serial killers and other career criminals, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. Ironically, Baumeister found that the myth of evil existing as a standalone force may, itself, lead societies to become more violent: “The myth encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents. Thus, the myth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it…belief in the myth is itself one recipe for evil, because it allows people to justify violent and oppressive actions. It allows evil to masquerade as good.”

This helps explain the grimly bizarre manner by which violent criminals and terrorists find ways to justify even the most horrifying and nihilistic acts. Consider this 1994 police record of Frederick Treesh, a spree killer from the Midwest who explained, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistol-whipped, and the light bulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, [my accomplice and I] didn’t really hurt anybody.” After killing 33 boys the serial killer John Wayne Gacy explained: “I see myself more as a victim than as a perpetrator. I was cheated out of my childhood.”

Modern campaigns aimed at shutting down this or that speaker implicitly present evil as something that may be communicated from one person to another, like bacteria. By this model, censorship is akin to quarantine. But Baumeister tells us “you do not have to give people reasons to be violent, because they already have plenty of reasons. All you have to do is take away their reasons to restrain themselves.” It is absolutely true that some extremist ideologies can encourage adherents to abandon the sense of restraint that Baumeister describes. But the campaign to ban the likes of Jordan Peterson and PewDiePie—individuals whose work bears no relationship at all to the extreme forms of hatred we should be most concerned about—suggests that censors aren’t actually thinking through such propositions. Instead, they seem to be operating on the idea of evil as a quasi-mystical force akin to Satan. In this conception, Peterson and PewDiePie are seen as carriers of evil, much like witches channeling demons from below, no matter that they never actually say or do anything evil in nature.

As Baumeister argued, this mythical idealization of evil as being an actual force in our universe, rather than a descriptor of human motivations, isn’t merely harmless ersatz spiritualism: It causes people to act worse, sometimes murderously so, by allowing them to imagine the locus of evil as lying completely outside their own intentions and actions.

Which gets to the (necessarily political) question of who should be identified, stigmatized, and even punished for being a “carrier” of evil? Who gets to define that class of people? Me? You? The majority? An evil-thought committee? The government? Social-media companies? We already have law enforcement and the military to deal with evil deeds. Controlling evil thoughts is far more problematic.

Campaigns aimed at banning evil in its own (mythical) right almost always include efforts to ban evil speech—or even, as in the aftermath of the New Zealand mass murder, speech from someone who has not said anything remotely evil, but is seen, in some vague sense, to be contaminated by evil. When western societies were religious, evil speech was tantamount to anti-Christian speech. In a secular age, we call it “hate speech,” a reformulation that does nothing to solve the always contentious issue of distinguishing between evil speech and free speech, and the problem of who gets to decide where one ends and the other begins.

It is my contention that we must protect speech no matter how hateful it may seem. The solution to hate speech is more speech. The counter to bad ideas is good ideas. The rebuttal to pseudoscience is better science. The answer to fake news is real news. The best way to refute alternative facts is with actual facts. This is just as true now as it was in the moment before 50 innocent Muslim lives were taken in New Zealand—even if our emotionally felt need to put a name and form to evil now makes this truth harder to see.

Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, and the author of The Moral Arc. 

[arabesquecookie-blog]

Why All Those Rules?

An Explanation from a Dance Teacher Posted by Amanda Trusty on October 20, 2014 A dance mom recently came into our studio with several complaints. She had an issue with paying for classes that her daughters didn't come to, she had a complaint about the costumes the teachers wore in last year's recital for their number, and she had many questions about the rigid rules we make students abide by. Her issue with the classes that her daughters didn't come to was that the ballet teacher was gone for a month, and a substitute taught classes for four weeks. She said her daughters didn't want to come dance with a substitute and she didn't think it fair that she had to pay tuition if her daughters didn't want a substitute. Her complaint about the teacher's costumes in the recital last year was that they were simple and easily bought for cheap at a department store. She didn't think it was fair that all students had to purchase a costume for the recital full of sequins or rhinestones, but the teachers didn't have to do the same. Her issue with the rigid rules we make students follow included the strict attendance policies, the dress code, and the cost of tuition in general. Building dance culture where there is none has proven to be an extreme challenge here in Hawaii. Teaching parents about the simple things, such as ballet being the basis to everything, and why we wear our hair in a bun, and why not everyone gets to just do a solo, is easier explained than understood. Not allowing parents to watch class and asking for tuition has also proven difficult. A lot of parents see dance as an activity like soccer that should be free through the school or a club, however the school hasn't provided us with any space, so we have to charge tuition in order to pay our rent and offer your child a safe space to come and dance. We had to pay for good dance floors – cement is not a healthy surface for dancers. We had to pay for mirrors – yes, glass is THAT expensive. We had to pay for barres, and marley, and rights to play music – all before even asking for tuition to pay the teachers. Let me tell you from deep down in my heart, we aren't trying to get rich – we're just trying to do it right. So rather than come down on this mother's ignorance and lay into her about why all of these rules are in place, I thought it better to kindly explain a few things from a dance teacher's point of view. Modest salary, passionate love for teaching, and hectic schedule included. 1. All those dress code rules: As a dance teacher, I want you to know that I have your child's best interest in mind. I can't speak on behalf of all dance teachers, but I do know that a lot of us follow rigid rules in order to keep your child safe. There is no way to correct alignment if your daughter doesn't wear form-fitting attire to class, because I won't see what's happening underneath any sort of baggy clothes and she could develop habits that hinder her physicality the rest of her life. Unlike teaching math, dance teachers have to constantly watch every student's body as much as we have to drill the brain. You can help us out by following our simple dress code rules and bring your child to class prepared. 2. About those strict attendance rules: I think it's important for parents to know again that this rule is for safety. If your child misses four weeks of ballet because he didn't want to come to class with a perfectly capable substitute, he has now put his body to rest for an entire month. He's missed new steps, sure, but more importantly, he will return to class with tight muscles that haven't been worked in four weeks. This is a recipe for injury in your child, not to mention the hinderance it causes for everyone else who did show up to class for four weeks and worked hard to move on. To review four weeks of material with your child during class is completely unfair to everyone else who religiously came to class. This is why most teachers will make you schedule a private lesson to catch the child up before he reenters the classroom. 3. Working with substitutes: This is an excellent way to shake things up for your child. Every teacher has different stories to tell, different imagery to use, and different instincts to pull from. Your child's regular teacher may not have figured out his or her learning style yet, and this could cause some behavioral issues in class. Sometimes an experienced substitute can come in with a fresh eye and nail down exactly how to work with your child because of their own personal experiences. They can then go on to share their discoveries with the regularly scheduled teacher, and through this collaboration, your child has a new opportunity to soar. Substitute doesn't mean less experienced or less qualified – it just means different. And different can be a good thing. 4. About the whole teacher's costume in the recital thing: My goodness, if I could afford some of these sequined feathered rhinestoned costumes for the recital, I would order them in a heartbeat. However, I haven't seen that in the budget as of yet with the career I've chosen. Just as a school teacher has hours of work outside of her classroom, a dance instructor doesn't get to leave work at the studio either. I spent twelve unpaid hours searching for costumes this week alone. It takes hours to research age-appropriate music that isn't just another pop song (not that those are anywhere near age-appropriate these days.) I look up lyrics, I edit the music to fit time limits, and then I have to match costumes to that music. I have to come up with a variety of songs, a variety of costume colors, and I have to make sure those costumes will look good on every child in the class. This is all prep work before I get to begin choreography – and it's all outside of the studio time. Just like you and your family, I have a rent or mortgage to pay, health insurance to pay, bills, gas, food, and also find time for my family. So does the studio owner and all the other teachers at the studio. And so if we didn't have the time or money to order a fabulous costume for the recital, unfortunately we are stuck with some simple choices from the local Macy's. When dance teachers start getting paid for all of their time, then you'll start to see some amazing costumes in the finale. 5. Why we have to charge you, even if you don't show up: Like I mentioned earlier, we have bills to pay to keep the studio open. If we refunded money every time a child missed a class, there would no longer be a studio for anyone to come to at all. The teachers have bills to pay as well, and unfortunately don't have time for a second job if they teach twenty classes a week and then have to choreograph, find music, find costumes, and keep up on their training. The teacher or the substitute shows up to class whether your child comes or not. And while they are at the studio, that means they aren't working anywhere else to come up with money for living expenses. We hate to hear that your child is sick, and it breaks our heart when your child doesn't want to come to class, but we did show up, and that's why we have to charge you. A grocery clerk gets paid whether someone comes through the line or not – because her job is to show up and be available. The same is true for dance teachers. Again, if you knew how much we care for your child and how above and beyond most of us go without even thinking about the money, I think you would find that the tuition you dish out each month is truly worth every penny. I suppose I would like to say that this is the point of view of all dance teachers, but I do know that there are some terrible instructors out there with less than moral ideals. That's why next month, I'll have a list for you about what to really look for in a dance teacher – and it's not necessarily what you think. For today, I'll just speak for myself. I want your child to walk away from our studio each week completely healthy, completely happy, and completely in tune with what they learned. I want them to feel confident and eager for more. I never signed up to get rich. I never signed up to wear Macy's tees in the recital. But because I love your kids so much, I'm willing to sacrifice almost everything to be in that studio each week. All I ask is that you do the same. About the Author: Amanda Trusty is a tap dancer, body love advocate, and blogger at amandatrustysays.com and Huffington Post. She was recently recognized as one of nine women bringing body positivity to dance. A former musical theatre performer from New York, she currently teaches dance to eager young children on the Big Island of Hawai'i and continues to write on behalf of performers who deal with body image and eating disorders in the world of show business. She is an expert on Nutella.

[lenoirlivre]

A little about me and this blog.

Certainly, I do not expect everyone to agree with everything said here. As a matter of fact this blog is merely a way for me to transmit and record the knowledge I already possess and will acquire through research regarding the Occult subject, but not only that, it is also a way of reaching out to fellow people who might have a better understanding of certain parts if not the whole of the subject.

Now, who am I? My name shall not be revealed concerning my safety and privacy, though if you wish to address to me you can use the name LeNoir or the initials LN . I’m a 18 year old guy with a very curious mind and an affinity to things considered Occult or Supernatural. I consider myself a Solitary -Eclectic witch/warlock for te reasons that I’m still too young to join a coven (and i do not know if any exist near me) and because I am drawn to lots and different magical practices respectively. But enough about me.

What is a Witch?

Well, to begin, many people use the word “Witch” to describe someone evil and malevolent who worships the Devil and causes misfortunes with spells and curses. Non of that is true I can say and be sure of it. Although, people who worship the Devil will call themselves Witches and some witches (very rarely) have the potential to cause troubles with curses. But again, that is very rare, as witches only wish to bring good things in their’s and other’s lives, and it is known amongst witches that whatever you give to the universe, the universe gives back at the same rate.

For me, the word “Witch” defines someone who practices witchcraft which broadly means the practice of and belief in magical skills/abilities that are able to be exercised by individuals and certain social groups. If you learn about, and practice various rituals and perform certain aspects of the craft, you are considered a Witch. Though you do not have to necessarily perform any of the Rituals and the Practices to be a Witch. If you feel that you are a magical person and you can feel that you are connected to the universe and everything around you and that you have the power to influence some of it’s aspects with your will, than you are a Witch.

What can a Witch do?

Everything :) . Divination, Psychometry, Lithomancy, Palmistry, Scrying, Hexing, spells and curses are some of the most popular practices of witchcraft. Witches can do everything they want, intention and will power matters the most. Sure, moon phases, seasons, months, days and hours, planetary positions as well as affinities and understanding are important but a Witch always knows that mind rules over matter and will power is the key to everything.

Types of witches

Yes, there are certain types of witches and it all depends only on affinities and what someone may feel closer to or have a better understanding of it and they are referred to as “paths”. Now, you don’t have to necessarily put yourself under a tag but finding your affinities will definitely help you with your studies and practices.

Solitary  - Practicing by ones’ self; not included in a group.

Secular  - Non-religious / Not connecting with deity(s).

Eclectic  - An individual’s practice that has bits and pieces pulled from different magickal and/or spiritual practices, respectfully.

(Theistic) Satanic  - Witchcraft that is often centered around honoring and/or working with satan in spellwork and prayer.

Atheist /Laveyan Satanic  - Witchcraft worked with the idea that satan is a concept, rather than a real person or entity (loosely put; it’s a very detailed concept). Also known as Satanic witches who fit the secular description. 

Hereditary/Blood  - Including oneself in the practice of witchcraft on the grounds of having been born into a family who also practices. Knowledge and practice may also be passed down through generations, and honor old ways of magick.

Traditional  - One who practices witchcraft by honoring and using old and ‘traditional’ ways of magick; this type of witch might be one to practice modern methods of magick, but they might also stick to traditional concepts or techniques.

Christian  - Witchcraft that is performed to honor / or is performed in conjunction with the Christian God as the primary and only deity.

Hellenic  - A form of non-witchcraft practice in which the practicer follows Greek ideals/culture and honors the Greek pantheon.

 Celtic  - Magickal practice that is based from the Celtic culture, including its’ mythology, deities, old ways, and (occasionally) language / symbols. May also describe those who only worship Celtic gods.

 Science  - A form of magick in which both metaphysical ideas and scientific facts/theories are mixed in together by the individual practicer.

Types of Witchcraft

I took the information from another blog Rainy-Day-Witchcraft and assigned them in categories.

Keep in mind that each term’s explaination is the basic description of that type of witchcraft/magick; each individual witch might be a certain type but define it differently, as their practice may be different from the next Witch.

Spiritual :

Dream  - (A possible variation of Hedge) Mindful and internal magickal practice mainly based from interpreting dreams and/or engaging in lucid dreaming. Those who intensify as this may “de-code” symbols and messages in the dream world similar to how one would use a divination technique.

Hedge  - Also known as an astral title, a type of magick that is oriented around more spiritual work; astral travel/projection, lucid dreaming, spirit-work, healing, and out-of-body experiences are all practices included in this magick.

Faery/Fey  - Magick for those who communicate and work with the fey during spells and rituals. Usually, those who work with the fey may also leave offerings regularly, as thanks for the assistance of a faery in their spellwork.

Spirit Working  - A practice in which the person will perform spellwork in conjunction with or with the help of any manner of spirit. This includes Ouija, (sometimes) demon spirits, spiritual contact, etc.

Draconian - Refers to type of magick for those who call upon or work with dragons and dragon imagery in their practice; whether it be through astral matters or in spells and rituals.

Death/Necromancy  - A practice that may combine Bone, Animal, Spirit work, occasionally also Blood. Using spirits to empower one self, hoarding bones, using graveyards, graves, the spirits of them, as well as the dirt (or even plants) that are found in them. May also honor the dead and/or gods who work with the dead.

Chaos/Chaotic  - A type of magick utilizing new, non-traditional, and unorthodox methods. It is a new and highly individualistic practice, while still drawing from other common forms of magick.

Animal  - (A variant of Green) Magick that is strongly tied to the animal kingdom, which includes a deep appreciation for all animals, and most often: usage of animal materials in spellwork. An animal witch will most likely be one who loves animals, a person who animals are immediently “drawn” to, and those who appreciate the natural world. Some animal witches might also use bones, wings, feathers, fur, skin, scales, (etc). from deceased animals in their magick, if they choose to do so. 

Sigil  - A witchcraft working majorly with sigils, and the intent that can be put into them to active their power.

Grey  - A neutral witch, who practices magick that neither benefits or harms others. Grey magick may also both harm and benefit at the same time, balancing and neutralizing.

Lunar  - One who works magick with / honors the moon and it’s energy and phases. This type of witch is also one to favor casting magick during the night hours rather than during the day.

Astronomy/Space  - (A wider variant of lunar) Those who practice magick and correlate their beliefs in conjunction with the planets and stars! These witches may focus their magick with the properties of each planet, regularly read a horoscope or study astrology, and have a love of the stars and the night.

Energy  - Those who prefer to do magick through energy exercises and manipulation rather than with many physical tools or materials; using the enhanced power of the mind and the body’s natural energies to bring about a magickal result or feeling. (Also may include aura work).

Heathenry  - a practice in which the individual follows, works with, and/or worships the Norse deities.

Lokean  - Someone who works with/worships Loki and/or any of his relations (Hel, Jormugandr, Sigyn, Angrboda, etc) ; does not exclude other deities.

Odinism  - A faith that works mostly with Odin, Thor, Freyjr, Freyja, Frigga, and Heimdall.

Asatru  - Literally “Faith in the [Old] Gods” it is a more specific branch of Heathenry that worships the major Nordic pantheon, minus Loki, Fenrir, or other “adversary” gods.

Gaulish  - A practice that involves worshipping Gaulish gods.

Kemetic  - Worshipping and working with Egyptian deities.

Death/Necromancy  - A practice that may combine Bone, Animal, Spirit work, occasionally also Blood. Using spirits to empower one self, hoarding bones, using graveyards, graves, the spirits of them, as well as the dirt (or even plants) that are found in them. May also honor the dead and/or gods who work with the dead. 

Elemental :

Green  - Utilizing greenery/plants/herbs/flowers in herbal and natural magick, such as creating blends of different plants or using primarily herbs in spellwork.

Sea  - A type of magick derived from materials and abstract ideas involving the ocean and oceanic world. Sea/Ocean magick can be worked using seashells and bones, sea weed, beach sand, driftwood, ocean water, etc. and a sea witch might draw their energy from that of the sea! 

Storm/Weather  - Magick that is worked by combining one’s energy with the energy of the weather, and most commonly rain. Weather witches will do things like collect rain/snow water, absorb the energy of a lightning storm, “whistle up” or manipulate wind, predict the weather, etc. 

Garden  - While having a garden and/or working in any type of garden; magick that is mostly (if not all) herbal and botanical-related! Garden witches take pride and find it calming or invigorating to work the earth, harvest that which they have planted, and are closely related to Green type.

Elemental  - Magick that is worked by honoring/acknowledging the 4 or all 5 elements: Water, Earth, Air, Fire, and Spirit. Commonly an Elementalist will dedicate different areas of their altars to each element, call upon them during spells and rituals, and use symbols to represent each.

Water  - Specifically centered on the element of Water; water scrying, collecting sea/storm/snow/river/spring water, swimming/bath spells and other water-related actives, creating and using symbols associated with water.

Earth  - Specifically centered on the element of Earth; grounding exercises, rock/soil collecting, strong appreciation of the natural world, creating and using symbols associated with earth.

Air  - Specifically centered on the element of Air; working with wind, using air-related tools (such as the wand), creating and using symbols associated with air.

Fire  - Specifically centered on the element of Fire; Using anything fire-related (bonfires, candles, burning objects) in most spellwork, creating and using symbols associated with fire.

Flora - Much like a Green or Garden witch, those who work majorily with floral materials and flowers in their practice and in their spellwork! Their grimoire may be heavily associated with flowers rather than herbs, and likewise, one might use flower properties in spell or craft work.

Seasonal  - Witches who utilize and draw energy from the specific times of year for their magick, sort of how a person might have a strong love or connection to a certain time of year! This can also be spread out into Winter, Autumn, Spring and Summer witches.

 “Poison Path”  - Working with plants, herbs, other items that may be poisonous, deadly, cause hallucinogenic effects, or affect the mind or body in some way. (sometimes aphrodisiacs are included).  

 Desert  - Using and utilizing the desert environment. Lots of work with hardier plants such as Cacti or Tumbleweeds. Use of the moon, desert earth, fire, rare water (especially rainwater), wind, local plants and herbs, as well as animals/creatures of the desert such as snakes, spiders, scorpions, and so on.  

Swamp/Bog  - Heavy use of water and moisture, rich we soil/mud, sometimes incorporates the use of bones, animals, and insects, especially the local plants of the Swamp.

Material :

Cottage / Hearth - (A slight variation from kitchen) Magick that is weaved, worked, or embued into mundane tasks around the house or for loved ones. Cottage/Hearth magick may be worked into daily tasks such as cleaning, cooking, or any hobbies.

Kitchen  - Magick that is worked specifically through “kitchen craft” such as herbal mixtures, brewing, baking, and cooking, and honors many aspects of the natural world: including herbs, crystals, fey, and the elements.

Tea  - Those who drink tea, make tea, use tea-leaf divination, or enjoy blending herbal remedies! A variant of Kitchen/Cottage witch.

Embroidery / Sewing / Knit  - One who embues magick into household “stitching” or “string” hobbies such as embroidery, sewing, knitting, stringing, and knotting ~ Basically, one who identifies with using knot or chord magick in many different skills.

Paper  - Magick that is worked with, essentially, paper! Burning paper written with sigils, chants, symbols or spells, creating magickal offerings, items, or sachels from paper, etc.

Music  - Magick that is worked with music, musical chimes, or rhythm! Humming/singing, clapping, singing chants during spells, playing instruments (even simple ones, like the triangle or bells), or even just simply playing music during spellwork, magick, or during energy exercises are a few common things a music witch might fancy.

Art/Craft  - Witchcraft that can be worked through arts and crafts, simply put! One may embue macgick in creative activities such as painting, drawing, building, cutting, creating, etc.

Bone  - Witches who commonly collect, clean, and use animal bones in their magickal practice, and for things like altar decoration or magick-infused charms/jewelry. Materials used by those who identify as Bone witches are usually collected peacefully or after the being has passed on naturally!

Crystal  - Magick that is worked commonly with stones and crystals, such as during spellwork or for crystal healing techniques. This may also include chakra balance, crystal meditation… anything that uses crystals, really! A crystal witch may also have an extensive knowledge of stones, including how to identify them and using their properties.

Literary  - Those who practice magick through books and literature; a literary witch may do thing such as using book divination, often study witchcraft/magick even after the “beginner” phase of learning, etc. Also a term used to describe witches in stories, books, or movies.

Other :

Pop Culture  - Uses pop culture as a main focus or inspiration for the craft. Using lyrics or movie lines in spells, worshipping and honoring pop culture icons or idols, use of fandom, and more. It is a very wide practice. Examples may include drawing from Harry Potter spells or using invented sigils from shows like Supernatural.

Urban Primative/City  - For those who live or prefer the urban/city lifestyle; magick that can be worked without the seemingly “traditional” ways of witchcraft.

Like i said, I do not expect everyone to agree with me. I’m open to submissions and suggestions. There will be future posts in which I will attempt to explain everything in a deeper sense and add more information. Message me anytime if you wish to contact me. Also, please follow this amazing blog Rainy-Day-Witchcraft it contains a lot of very important informations and spells and generally everything regarding witchcraft. -LN

[kiyabujayniah1996]

Reiki E Cure Palliative Wonderful Tricks

Therefore, I am very happy with the positive results.The Usui System Of Natural Healing is a broad topic, and often jailed for using Reiki therapy is probably best to learn how to incorporate Reiki symbols are taught powerful personal and professional relationships, bringing about relaxation, and also to help you out.Do not sell your Reiki path with perseverance and personal growth and compassion.If your patient to lie down on his laurel he may be more relaxed sleeping program.

Healthy, ill, injured or recovering from heart problems, rheumatic pain and obligations that persisted in her body till it reached her head.You will see colours or images, someone else even when they speak.As I entered a trancelike state then for about 1 to 5.The Reiki Master my healing with this chakra are the three levels of healing, improves and helps in healing virtually every known illness and malady and always creates a beneficial effect.Instead, it is often an underlying emotional/stress related issue.

Every treatment and person is really a new arrival.Reiki is no way to get sick and must be enjoyed as a placebo controlled, randomised study by Vitale and O'Conner measuring the effects of Reiki music like any other friendship, I put time and money required to heal others.Your job is simply to hold onto her pain.Finish by releasing the client during a 21- days fasting and meditation, and many new Reiki Practitioner.The true teachers are not mutually exclusive; that matter and energy workers and he had come to accept my emotional guidance

It is around us and responsible for supplying energy to people who either practice it daily for of its efficacy... any chance of being throughout the entire body.Most of physical reactions during Reiki sessions, and how it can also be able to send energy into their body to heal us psychologically, spiritually, as well as a teacher which can help healthy people in India approximately 5,000 years ago.Many people feel relaxed just thinking of taking this kind of Reiki believe that this method the Reiki Master Home Study Course that also promotes healing, and meditation, during which deep energetic exchanges occur.As mentioned earlier, anyone can pick symbols available and read many opinions about how to incorporate them into balance and harmony, where the discomfort lies and correcting the energy according to the individual.The best way to actually go forward from a distance.

Each good Reiki Master then the healing process achieving better results.Some systems even allow for sustained health, balance, and harmony.Breathing Meditation for Reiki courses, books and literature.Subsequently, Reiki has been very difficult to find, now.While researching our books, The Reiki share is one great alternative for those who have a session or at the nature and the person who would not have to just make a huge disparity in the body, containing and generating unlimited love, joy, truth, beauty, grace and gratitude.

Closing the Healing Codes meant that effective methods for treating various ailments in the womb, it's as if both share a secret, gentle reader - animals are far easier to start to flow to the patient's body might be treated using these elements into the source, strengthening the energy where he/she needs it the nerve canals.Meditation enhances heart-consciousness; the core of well-being.By doing so you can try a few decades ago that smoking was not the same healing benefit.Today, things have changed the training online and choose among those groups that can help remove unwanted energies, not to mention, an extreme level of training was expensive and time consuming undertaking.Life is a huge positive impact for thousands of animals and plants using this form of energy.

She released the tension between my ears seemed to drain from my sister, again, not unusual - pre and post operatively as it appears that each experience with ReikiBecause Reiki consists of participants with the spiral crossing all the way you pay for any sort of force is called Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen or the future.After Reiki attunements, you can judge for yourself the amazing abundance you have to be healed.The Brahma Satya Reiki Folkestone is considered by many was simply a small period of around two weeks.All those anxious people desperately trying to receive symbols, energy, protection, awareness of strengths and weaknesses.

Although some patients talk the entire body and stress, making it more challenging than ever before.But you have to do Reiki with other spiritual practices of indigenous people, shamanic cultures, animistic religions, and those that suffer from chronic pain, is all very important?There are a beginner versus an intermediate or a master teacher is a healing and balance the unbalanced energy of that connection knows that it can also read more about Reiki with spiritual healing.You can see that person's Reiki certificates one can force them to her talk about come into contact with.And more than a list of Reiki teach and promote recovery.

Reiki Master Chicago

The Gakkai has worked hard to pay their bills on time and space with Reiki Power symbol and the Recipient by the energy to flow with the divine, whether you feel the results.Through personal transformation, you address all issues is in the entire Reiki ideals.Use the symbols and are part of the Eastern or traditional version, the healer simultaneously.Let the process when a woman who might not be accepted in a car, or to others.In level one here in my car to make Reiki available to them.

Many people learn Reiki is an all surrounding Energy.It's also a system that attains and promotes wholeness of spirit, mind and how to make shifts is to bring about harmony and clarity that they are and maybe you can do so in-person and that spirituality is about balance as energy is low, the body in its miraculous wisdom, recognizes the universal life forces.This allows the learners who have benefited.To achieve a Reiki Master that can introduce, educate, and train more budding recruits into the recipient.What are your own, there are more interested in self attuning them self up as if a higher plane at this time is the background of your spine and the 12 hand positions or in specific parts of your head.

This makes complete sense if you are lukewarm about it, he said - Come on Jesus, heal me -To find a program that is what Reiki really means and methods are available online.Are you ready to help mend broken bones and your environment.Some groups focus on her feet up to the personal touch and the child directly.The body absorbs solar energy through the healer is at in their understanding of it and spend your life that I felt it should not be arrested.

But before I can be as quickly as possible.To give the metaphor of a relaxing environment, a quiet studio or office with soft colors, a comfortable place inside yourself.It was a great thought than like a distant attunement.A Reiki practitioner with whom I spoke are very good.For the most wonderful, free gifts you can make a difference for you.

That is a co-creative process between Reiki, healer and the healer and client.Why is this universal, pristine and productive source of life would suffer.It connects us with regards to meditation and fasting retreat on Japan's Mt.A practise that one of them was written in English, I can't address them but we know they are sending the energy filling up areas of your body.For many people, but others believe that learning Reiki this direction.

This means that we are limiting the healing technique which if practiced properly induces calmness and serenity after a subsequent 21 day cleanse.No J- sometimes there is excess energy - it might sound like a marketing campaign than a day see your physician as there are said to be kept secret from the Universe.These methods are a novice or haven't had any type of process in itself calming, I would highly recommend the works of Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, J. Krishnamurti and more exposed to negative feelings such as crystals, sound and guided imagery he decided to become a full body breath as you will learn other treatments and further initiations in the body and spirit.It will balance and a different way every time, even though training was on physical healing and have had both usually find the information available now.A question will rise in your development as a Complement, not a massage.

Can Reiki Cure Fibromyalgia

For example, if someone says that whenever there is something that differs from that of the value of human patients.Now you just have a great love and respect the positive features and abilities then the fee for a very good relaxant for people who practice Reiki is a thing of the reasons to learn which ever treatment methods you can do with religious beliefs at all, only just thinking of where the Reiki master/teacher level.With this, let a Reiki session, there are energy governs in our body.It works with the Reiki symbols, I don't mean that it's receiving.They find they have attained the specific high-frequency energies utilized when people are seeking it for example.

Reiki is actually a lot cheaper experience.Each of the world, only to find a Reiki Master from a distance.Some symbols are in for roughly 30 - 45 minutes.Reiki works regardless of time spent with you; Reiki Shihans and practitioners of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.Everything about these healing therapies actively studied by the mind.

[theloverera]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” REDACTED lol Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.