#while keeping his name clear off of the epstein list

[ghostsghoul]

You love me? I’m flattered, I will forgive you if you hand a cheeseboard at the crack of dawn on a pice of cardboard, it has to be at dawn becauseI’m chill like that, and it has to be on cardboard because unlike my appearance, I am actually an old maiden trapped inside the body of a rat and I can only turn back into a maiden if I have true loves and kisses.

or i can offer a blowjob

[duncanwrites]

All the books I read in 2020, reviewed in two sentences or less

My 2020 in reading was, naturally, a little strange. I had lots of long pauses, did a bad job of keeping track of everything I read, used an e-reader for the first time, and read more for work than I usually do.

So these may not be in strict chronological order as they usually are, and there may be a few missing, but here’s the list, as per tradition:

Rising Tide - John M. Barry: This history of the Mississippi floods of 1927 and the resulting changes in how the US deals with natural disasters is one of those stories about how politics and personality can become a part of the concrete world, and essential for understanding the racial dynamics of disaster response. Well-told, and worth reading. 

The Consultant's Calling - Geoffrey M. Bellman: A very useful recommendation from a trusted friend that now has a long-term spot in my office shelf. This book isn't only about consulting, it also offers great thoughts about finding your place and impact in organizations in general.

Range - John Epstein: I think Range is the nonfiction book that had the second- greatest impact on my thinking about myself this year (stay tuned for number 1!): I've always approached my professional and political work as a generalist, and for a long time I felt like that approach was leading me to a dead end. Reading this convinced me that I could be effective and even more useful with my fingers in a lot of different pies, and nudged me to keep searching for my most effective place in the movement.

The Accusation - Bandi: A harrowing work of realist fiction from North Korea that shows the toll authoritarian hero-worship takes on the soul.

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead: I found that the quality of The Underground Railroad did not quite match its notoriety. It felt like two books awkwardly joined, where the more grounded approach to the emotional and interpersonal stakes of slavery and freedom was attached to a poorly-explored fantasy device.

Maus - Art Spiegelman: So much more than a book about the Holocaust, Maus is about parents and how pain is handed down between generations.

I Love Dick - Chris Kraus: After a long enough time, it becomes hard to evaluate books that are meant as a provocation as well as storytelling, but even 20 years on, it's not hard to see why I Love Dick brought us so much of the style and voice of feminist writing on the internet. A unique, itchy, sticky piece of work.

Bloodchild - Octavia Butler: Whenever I see an Octavia Butler book in a used book store, I buy it. This collection of short stories is a fantastic example for what transgressive, visionary speculative fiction should aspire to.

King Leopold's Ghost - Adam Hochschild: What I love about this book and the other I've read by Hochschild (Bury the Chains_ is that he very carefully merges deep explorations of systems of violence with the way that they can be undone by the people who participate in them. King Leopold's Ghost is as much about Belgium's murderous plunder of the Congo as it is about the successful global movement against it.

Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon: Priory of the Orange Tree is built on a strong foundation, melding Eastern and Western dragon stories into one universe, but couldn't seem to tie all of its threads together in a compelling way by the end.

Desiring the Kingdom - James K. A. Smith: Smith's point about meaning and desire being embedded in every day practices is a valuable one, but I think I may be just too far outside of his target audience of religious teachers and thinkers to get the most out of his explorations here.

City of Brass, Kingdom of Copper, Empire of Gold (The Daevabad Trilogy) - S. A. Chakraborty: This series is exceptional, and some of my favorite books of any kind that I read this year; I certainly think I recommended them more often than anything else I read in 2020. A high fantasy built on Islamic and Arab cultural iconography, the characters are insightfully developed, the world building grows with precise pacing, and the themes of intergenerational trauma, and sectarianism are handled with expert delicacy.

Leadership and the New Science - Meg Wheatley: While I appreciate the effort to apply metaphors developed from scientific paradigm shifts to provoke paradigm shifts of thinking in other areas of work, I think this book strains its chosen metaphors a bit too far to be useful.

The American Civil War: A Military History - John Keegan: I appreciate that there's a value to these kinds of military analyses of conflicts, but I found this book's neutral tone - and sometimes admiring takes - towards the Confederacy off-putting. Two things I did take from it: the outcome of the war was not certain at the beginning, and speed is truly a critical part of winning conflicts.

To Purge This Land with Blood - Stephen Oates: This was the first substantial reading I had ever done about John Brown, and Oates' book made it very clear why he is still one of the American historical figures most worth talking about today. The contradictions, complexities, and unimpeachable truths caught up in his raids are almost too many to name, but I think he is one of the people most worth thinking about when considering what actually changes the world.

Normal People - Sally Rooney: Anyone who denies that this book is anything less than a truly great novel is not telling the truth, or does not actually care about the feelings people feel. It is a work of keen emotional observation, and perfect, tender language, as well as a pleasingly dirty book -- and there is nothing I would change about it.

Conversations With Friends - Sally Rooney: Still a banger, I think Conversations with Friends struggles somewhat to get to its point, and has less of the pleasing depth and ambiguity of Normal People. Still worth your time and attention, I think.

The Glass Hotel - Emily St. John Mandel: I loved Station Eleven, and I can't imagine having to follow it up, and I unfortunately think The Glass Hotel doesn't quite accomplish all it set out to do. It wandered, hung up on a few strong images, but never progressed towards a point that needed to be made, and I finished it feeling underwhelmed.

The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates: Coates is an essential nonfiction writer who can turn a phrase to make devastating, memorable points - but I thought his novel failed to do very many of the things that make his nonfiction great.

A Visit From The Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan: Someone once recommended this book to me as a way to study voice in character development - it is certainly that, as well as a brutally efficient window into hope, fame, and aging.

Trick Mirror - Jia Tolentino: The best parts of Trick Mirror show why Jia Tolentino is one of the writers most worth reading today: she knows how to find the experiences and people that wormhole you into dimensions of American culture that you might not otherwise think carefully about. While I think some of the essays in the book are weaker than her usual work, overall it is still terrific, and her essay on Houston rap, evangelical culture, and drugs is one of the best anythings I read all year.

My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russell: I feel like I'm on very shaky ground making any definitive takes about a book like this that is so fundamentally about gendered violence and what it means to be a victim of that violence. But I will say that I think it's important to recognize how power and charisma can be used to make you want something that actually hollows out your soul.

Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel: Without a doubt, this is the nonfiction book that had the greatest personal impact on my life in 2020, and I have much longer things I've written about it that I will probably never share. While I've not ever been to the extremes she describes here, Wurtzel describes so many things that I clearly remember feeling that the shock of recognition still hasn't worn off.

The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander: In truth, we should all be shaking with rage at the American justice system every single day. This is certainly not the only book to explain why, but it does a particularly good job of explaining both the deep roots, and rapid expansion of the system we need to dismantle.

The Martians - Kim Stanley Robinson: Getting another little taste of the world Robinson built in the Mars Trilogy only made me want to drop everything and read them again. Well-made, but not stand-alone short stories that are worth reading if you've finished the novels and aren't ready to leave the formally-Red yet.

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters - Ursula K. Le Guin: One of the things that makes Le Guin so special is the sparseness of her prose and world building, and her genius is very much evident in her short stories.

Matter - Iain M. Banks: This is the second Culture series book I've read by Banks, and once again I thought it was inventive, satisfyingly plotted, but not so heady to be imposing. A very solid read.

Ogilvy On Advertising - David Ogilvy and Ogilvy On Advertising in the Digital Age - Miles Young: The original Ogilvy on Advertising is  frustratingly smug but at least delivers plain and persuasive versions of advertising first principles. Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age is also frustratingly smug, but is mainly useful as an example of the hubris and narcissism of contemporary advertising executives.

Goodbye to the Low Profile - Herb Schmertz: Schmertz was the longtime public affairs director for Mobil Oil, and in this book he talks about how they worked to manage public debate about the oil industry, without realizing that he's writing a confession. Reading this it is abundantly clear how the oil industry's commitment to making deception respectable led to the collapse of the American public sphere.

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries: I was surprised by how much I liked this book, and wish more people who wanted to start political projects would read it. The Lean method is a way of building organizations that are ruthlessly focused on serving their base of supporters, and evaluate their work against real results - and I think we all could use more of those.

Zero To One - Peter Thiel: Another book that reads like a confession when perhaps not intended to, Zero To One's main point is that the point of building businesses should be to build monopolies, and that competition is actually bad. A great starting point for understanding what's gone wrong in America's tech economy.

The Mother of All Questions - Rebecca Solnit: Of the many things to cherish about Solnit as a writer, the one I needed most when I re-read this book is her ability to gently but doggedly show other ways of imagining the world, and ourselves in it.

Native Speaker - Chang-Rae Lee: I think this is the third time I've read this novel, and the time I've enjoyed it the least: somehow on re-re-reading, the core metaphors became overbearing and over-used, and the plot and characters thinner.

Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller: There are several excellent entries in the sub-genre of classic tales re-told from the perspective of silent women characters, but this is the first I've read re-told from a man's perspective - in this case, the likely-lover of Achilles in the Iliad, Patroclus. While not necessarily a groundbreaking work of literature, it is a very well-executed one that tells a compelling story about how violence can destroy men who carry it out.

Uprooted - Naomi Novik: What makes Uprooted so engrossing is that its magical world feels grounded, and political: magic has consequences for the individuals who use it, and further consequences based on their place in the world. What makes it frustrating is the overwhelming number of things the author has happening in the story, and the difficulty they have bringing them to a conclusion.

[waveridden]

FIC: the neon limelight

The story behind Neoscum is like something out of a movie. (Or, a day in the life of a rock band. 3.5k, gen)

AUcember || read on Ao3

#

In the front of Xanadu, the infamous semi-truck-turned-tour-bus, there is a letterboard hanging precariously from the top of the cabin. It’s a smaller version of the kind that you’ll see outside movie theaters and churches, the kind that would light up if it were plugged in. This board isn’t plugged in, and it’s held in place with a combination of nails and duct tape. The message is changed once a week, by a different member every time. This week, the letterboard reads in mismatched letters, “BALLS 2 THA WALL TILL U FALL.”

The letterboard is one of the many personal touches in Neoscum’s infamous tour truck. There’s a futon bolted to the wall, a bunk bed, a crow’s nest-style hammock, and entirely white leather seats. There are also Polaroids taped to the wall, which bassist Pox tells me are mostly her work. There are five or six for every stop on their tour so far, and every stop on all of their tours. All in all, the four walls of Xanadu are cluttered.

This kind of clutter wouldn’t be a surprise to any Neoscum fans - at least, not any fans who have seen the band’s social media. “They know we’re dirty,” says Pox, with an exaggerated wink. “If they follow us on Instagram, they know we’re dirty.”

“They know we don’t always do laundry,” adds Zenith, the band’s drummer. “They know a lot about us. We don’t have a great concept of TMI.”

“Or just a low threshold,” Pox says. “We’re comfortable with people seeing our true selves. If that means posting pictures of Zenith’s dirty laundry on Snapchat, then that’s what that means today.”

The band’s social media presence is a lot like the interior of Xanadu: a little cryptic, a little eclectic, incomprehensible until you look closely enough to see the pattern. Six days before the release of their fourth album Neon Americana, a fan discovered that the fourth word in each installment of the band’s Snapchat story from the last month spelled out the tracklist. It’s not clear which of the band’s members masterminded this long con, and none of them own up when asked. It’s this kind of mystery that defines Neoscum: flawless execution, but for no clearly comprehensible reason.

“Of course there’s a reason,” Pox says, when I ask her about the Snapchat story. “It’s not about who did it, it’s not about the tracklist. It’s about having fun and making people pay attention. Haven’t you ever wanted someone to pay attention to you?”

#

 The story behind Neoscum is like something out of a movie. Lead singer Dak Rambo was making a name for himself with country music, but he was small-time at best. Squirt Purpler, more commonly known by his stage name of Tech Wizard, was playing the keyboards in a live band on a Chicago stand-up comedy showcase. The two of them met and started recording independent experimental music. Before long, they reunited with Rambo’s old friend Zenith, a drummer from the Seattle punk scene, and met Pox, a bassist and songwriter who was shadow-writing pop hits. With the addition of Max Epstein, a folk guitarist making waves online, Neoscum was complete.

The musical tastes of Neoscum, much like the rest of the band, work despite having every reason not to. “You can go to twelve different record stores, and they’ll all have us sorted differently,” says Purpler. “I think it’s great. We’ve got a little bit of everything, we’re all over the place. Who needs to only be one thing?”

Neoscum’s first album, Death Race, charted as a metal album, a rock album, and an indie album. Their second album, ratcandy, landed firmly on the pop charts, and their third album Time To Kill A Dragon was a country album. With the release of Neon Americana, Neoscum have cemented themselves as both everything and nothing: the album was a blend of techno, R&B, and every other genre that the band had ever worked with. The album is more than two hours long, and tells the story of a road trip from coast to coast. Tracks blend seamlessly from one genre to the next, creating the image of a chaotic, cohesive nation. It received universal acclaim after its release.

“The album was Pox’s idea,” Zenith says. Pox is the one foreign member of the band, a transplant from across the pond. She’s infamously secretive with her personal life; the closest anyone has found to a hint about who she used to be is an online demo of a song dedicated to someone named Pandora. “The first tour we did, the one after Dragon came out, was the first time she’d ever seen most of the country. It was completely new to her, and I think she was enchanted by it.”

Pox is not the group’s only songwriter, but she is the mastermind behind album concepts. The whole group credits her with the idea for Neon Americana. There are rumors that she had a meticulous journal, keeping notes about every city she stopped in; there are rumors that she wrote the entire album on the tour. Pox doesn’t confirm or deny any of them, either publicly or when asked. Instead, she insists that the album is a collaboration, a meeting of the minds.

The one thing she does take credit for is the idea behind the tour. “I saw all the big cities last time,” she explains, twirling a lollipop between her fingers. Xanadu is in the middle of Kansas, between tour stops, and Pox is dipping into her secret sugar stash. I have to close my eyes whenever she wants candy, because I’m not allowed to see where she keeps it. “We went to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, all the places that everyone stops. And I wrote songs about them, we all wrote songs about them. But there’s only so much of a picture that the big cities paint. So when we started planning our second tour, I said that I wanted to see smaller towns. I want to go the places that nobody else goes.”

The tour, formally titled “The Small Town Neon Americana Neoscum Second Tour Extravaganza Party” and colloquially called “the second tour”, is entirely focused on small cities and small towns. There are no stops in New York, or in Los Angeles, or in Chicago. The biggest city that Neoscum is visiting will be Rochester, Minnesota. The venues are small, and the crowds are all enthusiastic. I’m joining them for two shows in Kansas, in towns that have never had big names perform before.

The band is all enthusiastic about the concept behind the tour, all for different reasons. “I never got to go to big concerts when I was a kid,” Purpler explains. “I lived just far enough outside of all the major cities that it was too far to drive for anything less than an emergency or a once-in-a-lifetime thing, so I never saw any bands growing up. It means a lot to me that we get to give some small town kids that performance.”

For other members, it’s less personal: Rambo says, “I like driving. Anything that gets us driving is good. Those real small town ones, the ones where the pavement hasn’t been touched since 1984 and the grass looks like it’s going to crack if you touch it? That’s the good shit, baby. We’re seeing a lot of those lately, and I am loving it. Everything’s tiny, it’s the way this country is supposed to be, you know? It’s just us and those kids who get to see a cool band.”

And for Epstein, the quietest of the band? “There’s less stage fright in a bar than in a stadium.”

#

 The band’s first stop is in Josephine, Kansas, and they immediately start in on a whirlwind series of pre-show rituals. Rambo drives Xanadu to the outskirts of the town, to a sign that says the town’s population, and they all pile out of the truck to take a five-man selfie next to the sign. Once they’re inside city limits, Zenith starts playing ABBA - not on the truck’s high quality sound system, but on his phone’s speaker. He doesn’t stop until they pull up outside their venue: an outdoor amphitheater for an afternoon show. Epstein recites a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pox opens the door with her left hand and her eyes closed, and the band all take the amphitheater by storm.

They’re ruthlessly fast in their setup: Purpler talks to the venue coordinator while the rest of the crew makes sure everything is to their standards. Zenith and Epstein manage the band’s tech setup as Rambo and Pox manage the equipment. From start to finish, it takes them under thirty minutes to have everything in perfect shape.

“We don’t fuck around with these things,” Zenith says. He’s nearly as cryptic about where he came from as Pox is, but he at least has a traceable career. He has no last name to speak of, and he has never explained why he’s missing an eye. But he’s competent, both as a drummer and as the band’s self-proclaimed tech guy, and he has a reputation for being mysterious. “We’re here to do a show, we’re going to make sure it’s perfect. It’s not like it’s hard to be prepared, to get things done the way they’re supposed to be done.”

The amphitheater in Josephine is packed, not just with locals but from people in surrounding towns. There are teenagers and middle-aged men and elderly women, all sporting Neoscum merch. All of them are buzzing, talking about songs that they hope to hear and things that they hope to see. Neoscum is notoriously flashy with their concerts. It’s not unusual to see pyrotechnics, or costume changes, or people swapping instruments. One tour video, which went viral, showed Pox attempting to play Zenith’s drums with her feet in the middle of a show.

“We don’t plan anything for our actual shows,” Epstein tells me, five minutes before the curtains go up. “We have a set list, and we normally play all the same songs off of it, but if something seems unplanned, that’s because it probably is. None of us like playing by the rules, or doing things the same way every time. Not even me.”

Epstein is known for being the most relaxed of the band’s members. He’s the least likely to try and haggle with grocery store clerks (as Pox has done), share obscure knowledge of advanced physics (Zenith), get stuck on top of a telephone pole after a dare (Purpler), or win a blackjack jackpot (Rambo, Epstein’s maternal uncle). He’s the least spotlight-happy of all of them.

He’s also the most forthcoming about his personal life. Epstein graduated in the top quarter of his high school last and joined Neoscum not long afterwards. He has a sister, seven years younger, who recently received a kidney transplant. He says that his biggest inspirations are Bob Dylan and Yo-Yo Ma, and his uncle Dak. He’s the most likely of the band to be singing, humming, or playing his instrument in his spare time. He’s the mediator of debates and the filmer of shenanigans. He has a prosthetic left arm and right leg, and he refuses to let anyone call him “the disabled one” in the band.

Epstein says that his reputation as “the boring one” doesn’t bother him; if anything, it’s a relief. “Those guys are my family,” he says, echoing a sentiment that the whole band has shared at one point or another. “But they’re all kind of fucking crazy. I don’t want to be in the news for even the less weird things that they do. Except for that time Z got to be in the news for knowing thermonuclear physics, that was pretty cool.”

Sixty seconds before the curtains go up, Rambo goes around the band. He gives Pox a warm hug, Epstein a kiss on the left cheek, Zenith a kiss on the forehead, and Purpler a kiss on the right cheek. He looks at me and winks, and says something I can’t quite make out over the cheering crowd outside. I’ve only known Rambo for two hours, but I already understand the charismatic rock star allure that everyone claims he has. He seems more at ease on stage than he does off, and when the curtains rise, he shouts, “What the fuck is up, Kansas?”

Kansas lets him know what the fuck is up. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a man not even remotely cowed by thousands of people screaming at him.

#

 There is a list of rules in Xanadu, taped up next to the letterboard. “It’s for you,” Purpler explained, not long after I boarded the truck. “And for everyone who visits us, but it’s mostly for you right now.”

The rules are simple. Feet on seats are fine, but shoes on seats are not. Dropping food is okay as long as you clean it up. You never challenge someone to a fight if you wouldn’t actually fight them. You don’t talk about Lil Marco - the band’s nickname for the producer Big Marco who attempted to sue them after the release of Deathrace. You don’t say the word “Grammy,” because it’s a jinx, and nobody needs a Grammy anyways.

The list contains nearly forty rules, and I’m sworn to privacy about most of them. “Nobody needs to know the way we do things,” Rambo says. “Not really, you know? Fans get weird. Gotta keep some things a mystery.”

The last rule on the list is don’t say shit about other people’s shit in interviews. It’s obvious where the rule came from. On the drive from Josephine to Troy, I ask Rambo about the rule, and his lips thin. Rambo is a friendly, jovial man: before he was a rock star, he was a trucker, a country singer, and an unabashed sex worker. But there’s no humor on his face as he thinks through his response. “It was fucked that TMZ did what they did,” he says. “People are entitled to have secret personal histories if they want them. I don’t care that Morrows was up for reelection in Colorado, and I don’t care that they thought it would be okay. Digging up people’s stuff is - it makes it easy to forget that we’re people too. But we’re people too.”

Rambo is, of course, referring to a now-infamous exposé that TMZ published, revealing a link between Purpler and incumbent Colorado governor Fayglin Morrows. The connections aren’t especially clear, but it’s obvious that Morrows was a family friend to Purpler’s parents, who were killed in a hate crime when Purpler was four. The entire band followed their newest rule to a T, and none of them publicly discussed the article or the incident, including Purpler. Morrows went on to win reelection in Colorado, although the race was subject to a recount.

“It was hard for all of us,” says Zenith, “and by that I mean it was mostly hard for Tech, so we were all pissed. We were trying to keep him out of the limelight, trying to let him keep his past to himself.”

“I don’t think it matters where any of us are from,” says Purpler, in his only interjection into the conversation. “I know what I need to know about everything, and nobody else needs to know anything. We all know where the band’s politics stand, and we share the personal stuff that we want to.”

Neoscum is full of outspoken socialists: Epstein in particular has been vocally critical of healthcare reform policies, and the band has made a name for themselves by participating in protest marches. And nobody has to look any further than the band’s social media to see their openness about their personal life. But the band is firm when they put down boundaries. TMZ never issued an apology to Purpler, despite the influx of fan petitions and demands for one; the fans still stood by Purpler in his wish for privacy. He later thanked them for their support in a public statement, marking the first and only real time he addressed the TMZ article directly.

It’s clear from early on that the band’s “don’t say shit” rule applies while talking to me. Zenith and Pox almost form a protective barrier around Purpler with their bodies, and even Epstein comes down from his perch in the crow’s nest to watch me. They’re defensive of one another, and as soon as the conversation moves on, everyone relaxes. It’s hard to say if they do it intentionally or subconsciously, but the meaning is clear either way: they have each other’s backs, at all times.

#

 The pre-show rituals in Troy go the same as the rituals in Josephine. This performance is the same evening, at a bar called the Electric Cowboy Lasso-Swingin’ Doogie-Wrasslin’ Party Zone Gambling Hall and Microbrewery. Rambo seems to know everyone there, from the bartender to the regulars. “That’s just Dak,” Purpler says. “He’s always like this. He has friends everywhere.”

At the Josephine concert, Purpler and Zenith switched instruments for two songs. At the Troy concert, everyone stays where they’re supposed to until the second-to-last song, when Pox takes Max’s acoustic guitar and sits in the center of the stage to sing an acoustic ballad. It’s not a good fit for the trucker bar, but they’re all rapt and silent as she sings, and a fan’s video of the performance went viral the following day. (Eagle-eyed fans noticed that this was the song that she dedicated to the mysterious Pandora, but Pox hasn’t commented, and neither has the rest of the band.)

The most interesting part of the show comes afterwards. Strike happens in a neat fifteen-minute timeframe, and then the band is in the bar, drinking and laughing with the rest of the patrons. They’re patient and friendly with autographs and selfies, but before long, the fans clear out of the bar and leave only regular patrons. Rambo is introducing people by name to the band members, and before long they’re all piled into a corner booth, talking over each other. They eat food off of each other’s plates and poke each other and finish each other’s sentences. It lasts for several rounds and a couple of hours. “Family dinner,” Zenith calls it at one point, and it’s exactly that.

 #

 Rambo insists on dropping me back off at my office in Lawrence, even though I’ll get there in the wee hours of the night. He doesn’t seem at all bothered by staying up all night driving. The band goes to sleep in what seem to be normal places for them: Epstein in his crow’s nest, Pox in the passenger’s seat, Tech on the bottom bunk, Zenith on the futon. Only Rambo stays awake, and he answers my questions quietly, like his voice will wake them over the noise of the truck on the road.

“It’s impossible to describe what these people mean to me,” he says, in a candid moment. “You know, this job, it’s changed all of our lives. I’m never going to have to worry about where I’m going to stay the night again. Max, he got his sister’s operation paid for. Pox and Z and Tech, they all have opportunities to figure things out that they couldn’t have had two or three years ago. And we’re paying that forward. We’re doing these shows in little towns, it’s fucking great. Have you ever been to a small town? Some of them are awful, but some of them are just full of people who wanna be happy. And we make them happy.”

We reach Wichita at four in the morning. Rambo lets me out the back gate of the truck and tells me I’m always welcome back, as long as I’m not a dick to his people. For the next three days, I receive random texts from him: pictures of the band, videos from venues, and misspelled rough drafts of tweets that he wants me to correct. They taper off, and I’m left following along with the band through the news and through Twitter, just like the rest of the world.

My single day with Xanadu feels like a dream, an illusion of Polaroids and jokes that I only half-remember. I can’t help but wonder if that was intentional. I caught a glimpse of Neoscum as people, a fleeting glimpse that falls second to the truth that they project to the rest of the world. And then I, like the rest of the world, am paying attention to them. Just like they want me to.

Argus Armstrongman is an independent contributor to Lone Star Publications. You can follow him on Twitter @argus_asm or read more of his contributions here.

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Let's just take a minute to digest all the bizarre events of the past day

Sometimes the world throws a thing at its inhabitants that requires everyone to blink a few times to reset their brains around their new collective reality.

Approaching 6 p.m. on Tuesday, we got one of those moments.

SEE ALSO: Stephen Colbert has a brilliant explanation of why Donald Trump fired James Comey

President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey around that time, amid an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign's potential connections to the Russian government. It's a moment in which the United States's separation of powers and the integrity of its institutions will be tested, and enough weird shit happened in the next hours that you'd be forgiven for believing we lived in a simulation that was struggling to work out a glitch. We listed some of those odd things, below. 

The FBI director thought his firing was a joke

If you found out the president fired Comey by watching TV, you and Comey have that in common. 

The FBI Director was speaking to the agency's Los Angeles office when news of his firing reportedly broke on a TV in the back of the room. He laughed, because what else do you do in that situation, and admired what he figured was a prank. Then some staffers pulled him into an office and informed him that this is real life.

The press secretary hid in the bushes

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer didn't seem to have a lot of time to prepare for the Comey firing, and Spicer isn't a dude known for meticulous preparation as it is. The man knows that, every day, he will have to stand before the White House Press Corps and talk about whatever the hell is happening that day, and he still finds himself — for example — favorably comparing Adolph Hitler to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. 

But the Comey firing appears to have caught him so off guard that — rather than talk to reporters waiting around the White House — he hid from them in the bushes. 

@anamariecox #adorables looking in the bushes for Sean Spicer like pic.twitter.com/FQQYtuEuQX

— not very kfar (@nkneer) May 10, 2017

Found a picture of Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes: pic.twitter.com/mZXC3Mwn5U

— Krishna Vasikar (@zero_silence) May 10, 2017

<Sean Spicer emerging from the bushes> pic.twitter.com/o8rYYab52v

— Danny (@recordsANDradio) May 10, 2017

When it became clear that this strategy was untenable, he said he was cool with some questions as long as there there were no lights and he wouldn't appear on camera. 

Rudy Giuliani happens to be in town

Hours after Tuesday's sun had set on Washington, D.C., two reporters happened upon former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani by the bar of the Trump International Hotel there. Giuliani was the Trump campaign's designated ranting and red-faced uncle, but his job after the election has been a cyber position in which the Trump team doesn't seem terribly invested. 

Giuliani has a long (and fraught) history in law enforcement, and though he told The Atlantic and New York Magazine that he wasn't going to be Trump's nominee for FBI director, he did say he was stopping by the White House. 

Also, another White House source told New York Magazine that Giuliani is, in fact, in consideration.

Trump live-tweeting CNN

Speaking of TV, you may know that the president of the United States seems to watch a lot of it. On Wednesday, his drug of choice was CNN, a favorite hate-watch of his. We know this because of this one micro-blogging website that also serves as a portal into the president's brain.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal went on CNN Wednesday morning to criticize the president's decision to fire Comey. Cue tweetstorm:

Watching Senator Richard Blumenthal speak of Comey is a joke. "Richie" devised one of the greatest military frauds in U.S. history. For....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2017

years, as a pol in Connecticut, Blumenthal would talk of his great bravery and conquests in Vietnam - except he was never there. When....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2017

caught, he cried like a baby and begged for forgiveness...and now he is judge & jury. He should be the one who is investigated for his acts.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2017

(As an aside, if you want to know what Trump's tweets are in reference to...)

And then the president called out the network by name. 

The Roger Stone report on @CNN is false - Fake News. Have not spoken to Roger in a long time - had nothing to do with my decision.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2017

Trump met with Russian government officials the day after

Trump said he fired Comey for mishandling the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. That's the official explanation.

Trump once praised Comey for the director's handling of an investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while Trump was campaigning against her, so, yeah. 

Rather than take up the official line, many believe Trump fired Comey because Comey was at the head of the FBI, which is investigating Trump team ties with the Russian government. 

So it was either incompetence or trolling that led Trump to meet with Russian officials the day after he fired Comey. Or maybe it was trolling on the part of the Russian government and incompetence on part of the president. Who am I to say. 

Here's the president with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov:

"Epic photo," says Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman. pic.twitter.com/GSIEp4Rn3Z

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) May 10, 2017

Photos of Trump's meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak just hit the Getty wire and they're all credited to Russian news agency TASS pic.twitter.com/qE9lWB6KuS

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) May 10, 2017

Russian Embassy trolling all of us https://t.co/b2S2KQ6lKi

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 10, 2017

And here's Lavrov, earlier, alongside Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, mocking a reporter for asking about how the Comey firing colored today's meetings. 

Speaking of strange optics...

The last time a president fired the person leading an investigation focused around him, the U.S. was led by President Richard Nixon, who resigned amid the Watergate scandal. Comparisons to that time flooded media outlets and Twitter in the hours after the Comey firing, so it was a little strange when Henry Kissinger — who served as secretary of state under Nixon — showed up next to Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday. 

Pool brought into the Oval. It's Trump and ... Kissinger. pic.twitter.com/1F1CPO4kQw

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) May 10, 2017

Strange how? I don't know. But, strange. 

The timing of this firing just keeps getting worse

I mentioned earlier that many believe Trump fired Comey because he didn't like where the investigation of Trump-Russia ties was headed. Though we can't say for sure that's what happened, that line of thought has only gained traction since Tuesday evening. 

Breaking News: Days before his firing, Comey asked the Justice Dept. for more money for the FBI inquiry into Russia https://t.co/K33pJO300n

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 10, 2017

CONFIRMED: Last week Comey asked Rod Rosenstein for more resources for investigation into Trump/Russia collusion.

— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) May 10, 2017

Rosenstein is the Deputy AG who wrote the memo justifying Comey's firing https://t.co/BdqHc3zr73

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) May 10, 2017

Maybe this firing was hugely coincidental, or maybe Trump is developing a soft spot for Clinton that was absent during the campaign. Or maybe we should trust the reporting of people such as The New York Times's Maggie Haberman, who has a knowledge of this White House like perhaps no other reporter, and who says it's been planned for some time. Our call. 

Oh, one last thing

.@CBSNews briefly interviewed Putin in full hockey gear shortly before he took the ice. Reacted to Comey. Story/clip TK pic.twitter.com/FwpmsQuq6F

— Stefan Becket (@becket) May 10, 2017

Here's the interview:

Putin called the reporter's question "funny," said the Russian government has "nothing to do" with the Comey firing, and then said, according to the translator, "you see, I'm going to play hockey with the hockey fans."

WATCH: Trump's outrageous insults throughout his campaign

[ladystylestores]

China Chalet, Fashion’s Studio 54 of the Instagram Era, Closes – WWD

https://pmcwwd.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/china-chalet-008.jpg?w=640&h=415&crop=1

For the last decade on cold, winter Friday nights in New York City’s Financial District — long after the neighborhood’s army of suits and City Hall workers had packed up their briefcases for the weekend — a second wind would hit Lower Broadway.

In front of the second-story Chinese restaurant China Chalet, a line of partygoers snaked north for blocks — their glitter eye shadow flaking off in sub-zero temperatures; eBayed vintage Dior bags, midriff tops and chain belts cocooned deep within sleeping bag coats.

While unknown to many, China Chalet was legend to an influential few — a carpeted Chinese restaurant by day and underground nightlife space by weekend night that was frequented by the kinds of New York counterculture communities whose style of dress is observed, exploited and commercialized by the larger fashion industry. What had been founded as a Cantonese establishment and banquet hall in 1975 organically became a haven for all walks of youth culture — with its owner Keith Ng renting the space for a considerably affordable fee, welcoming party organizers from a broad spectrum of sexual identities, ethnicities and economic means.

The scene at China Chalet.  Amy Lombard/WWD

In a time pre-pandemic when people were still allowed to congregate en-masse, China Chalet was the central gathering place for New York designers, stylists, gallerists, artists and personalities. So it was a shock this past weekend when news broke that the 45-year-old institution was closing — another casualty of the coronavirus’ economic wreckage. China Chalet became a trending topic on Twitter and will, by many accounts, be remembered as the Studio 54 of the “BC” — or before coronavirus — era.

It took Ng, a Cantonese immigrant, to set the stage for a safe space party culture. “I don’t think you will find that many people out there gutsy and ballsy enough to allow their space to become what China Chalet was,” Opening Ceremony cofounder Humberto Leon said of Ng.

Boldface names were often in attendance, including Cardi B, Timothée Chalamet, Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, Kiko Mizuhara and even disgraced heiress and accused Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Famous or not, it was the parties’ mix of crowds and sense of sanctuary — particularly for those who felt disoriented in the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s election — that will remain in memory.

“Even though a good party at China Chalet was thrown by organizations geared toward a specific group of people, it was a mix there. It’s one of those cross-generational places that will go down in New York history as a place where everyone gathered,” said Arthur Soleimanpour, founder of community-driven media platform Parks Department.

Come nighttime, the restaurant’s cocktail lounge and pink, fluorescent-lit dining room would fill with all walks of city life and a thick cloud of cigarette smoke — sending revelers home with an ashtray stench that could only be removed by the most abrasive of shampoos. Without ventilation, the restaurant’s parquet-floor banquet hall, its makeshift dance floor, clocked August subway station temperatures and humidity in the dead of winter.

The scene at China Chalet.  Amy Lombard/WWD

“These kids put on the grandest of looks to stand in a stuffy, smoke-infested room. Not even your dry cleaner could probably take that out,” Raul Lopez, founder of Luar, said of the scene there. By 11 the next morning, the space had cleared out and China Chalet’s food was again available for order delivery platforms like Seamless, their sesame chicken reaching customers likely clueless of what had occurred there just hours before.

Ng declined multiple requests for an interview but humbly relayed through frequent party organizer Alexander Kellogg: “China Chalet is one of the many businesses affected by the national lockdown. I think we will let it go….We were just one of the many impacted.” In addition to the Financial District outpost, Ng also ran restaurants on the Upper East Side, Staten Island and was planning a jazz bar concept in Midtown — all of which have ceased operation.

Leon had held Opening Ceremony’s annual holiday parties at China Chalet since 2003 and would frequent events there as well. “I think it will go down as a space that will personify a period. It’s pretty sad because as I think about what place I would want to go right after coronavirus, China Chalet was on that list of places to have fun and see something familiar,” he said.

“The amount of people talking about it now and making memes about this Chinese restaurant in the Financial District is proof [of its longevity],” said Kellogg, who brokered party contracts on Ng’s behalf, including events for Vogue and Red Bull. “I don’t think people in the Seventies expected Studio 54 to be remembered as it was and I think China Chalet will be the same.” 

While pop-up events occurred at China Chalet throughout the year — increasingly by big-ticket hosts like Converse and Highsnobiety as the space’s reputation grew — it was Dese Escobar’s reoccurring “Glam” party, sometimes held in collaboration with Vaquera and Telfar, as well as Ty Sunderland’s monthly “Heaven on Earth” event for the LGBTQ community, that cemented China Chalet status as a counterculture Shangri-La.

The scene at China Chalet.  Amy Lombard/WWD

While acceptance was key to China Chalet’s status as a hot spot for the anti-establishment, so were the clothes worn there. Lopez labeled weekend partygoers there as “beautiful swans.”

“There was a mirrored hallway that was like a runway, people would sit down and look at each another. You had the opportunity to be seen so people saw it as an opportunity to get dressed up and keep fashion relevant,” Escobar recalled. “It’s where a lot of designers came to be inspired and cast models or take some notes. It was a place where people knew they could find young, fresh talent and inspiration.”

Communities have been pushed to mostly online-only contact during the COVID-19 crisis. But during its run, China Chalet was a sort of intermediary between social media and the real world — a common ground where virtual friends and foes could see each other in person, often meeting for the first time.

“For me, it represented a lot of Internet culture,” Sunderland said of his parties. “The parties became a meeting place for people to meet others with similar ideals and aesthetics — I heard so many cases like, ‘Oh we have followed each other on Twitter for five years and met at your party.’”

“It was very much about being seen and being seen in real life probably for the first time by a lot of people who only know you from Instagram. What you were wearing was always important,” Vaquera’s designers Patric DiCaprio, Claire Sullivan and Bryn Taubensee recalled of their time there over e-mail.

“It felt like a free space where rules didn’t apply. You could smoke inside, approach your crush, wear what you want. So in a way it was testing ground for new ideas: everyone was wasted and eager to see each other and to try something new. It was like this safe space to just go for it,” they added.

Leon summarized: “It always felt underground and somewhat gritty. Anything that comes after this would be a wannabe version.”

Source link

قالب وردپرس

from World Wide News https://ift.tt/2Ob6Zpl

[pippiessweathogs]

Welcome Back Kotter fanfiction: From Juan to Susie: A Mixtape

Title: From Juan to Susie: The Mixtape

Summary: When Cutie Pie is upset, Epstein decides to cheer her up with something special. He gives her a mixtape composed of all the songs that have somehow touched their relationship.

Note: My Cutie Pie universe follows a singular storyline. Each of the previous stories I’ve written featuring this character have been written in order according to the progression of Epstein and Cutie Pie’s (Susie) relationship. Before reading this story it is best that you have read the previous ones. Those stories include in order: Cutie Pie, The Courtship of Juan, Shall We Dance? Emotional, and Tupelo Honey. While you would be able to follow this story without reading those, it would make certain parts easier to understand if you knew the background behind what was happening in this story.

Prologue:

                 Epstein waited anxiously outside the science lab, for the arrival of his new fiancé. Lots of rumors had been going around the school the last few weeks, pertaining to their engagement. Some students were working hard to convince others that their high school engagement meant that a little Epstein was on the way. These rumors had a viciousness surrounding them. This caused quite the bit of ill treatment of Cutie Pie. It was to the point where she would cry on his shoulder everyday about how she was going to drop out of school so she wouldn’t have to deal with everything anymore.

               He tried his hardest to convince her she should stay in school and forget the rumors. Even though they knew the truth behind their high school engagement, and had the support of their friends, the rumors still got to her. Epstein finally convinced her that by dropping out of school. It was allowing the others to win. Everyone would have even more reason to beehive the rumors were true. She needed to stay to help keep her good name.

               But, still, the rumors upset her. He hated seeing her so upset, so he thought he should do something to help cheer her up.  But he wasn’t sure what would cheer her up. And buying her a present was out of the question since he didn’t have the money. He knew that whatever he did for her, had to come from the heart. It only took him hearing one of their special songs on the radio when he realized the perfect gift for her. He had worked hard to pull this off and he never been prouder of his efforts.

               “Hey Susie.” He said, lightly grabbing her by the hand as she left the lab. “I’ve been waitin’ for you to come out.” He kissed her.

               “Hey Juan.” She smiled, until she saw the nearest clock. “How long have you been waiting for me?”

He shrugged “Only about fifteen minutes.”

               “What?”’ She asked surprised. “Didn’t you have a class?”

               “I did. But I skipped out early. Was falling asleep in there anyway. Not like I’m passin’ that class.”

               She frowned at him. “Juan. You promised you would pass your classes.”

               “Yeah yeah. I’ll get there. Don’t worry.”

               “Just make sure of it. I want to graduate with you.”

               “Hey are you my mother? Don’t worry.”

               “Ok Juan.”

               She took his hand and then they started walking down the hall. He would sometimes give other students threatening looks or gestures if they ever looked like they were thinking about the rumors. Attitudes changed quickly as the other students got the message loud and clear. They hurried past the couple, trying their best to avoid Epstein.

               Cutie Pie sighed, which drew his attention onto her. He looked at her, a bit concerned.

               “Hey, honey, what’s the matter?”

               “I just… it’s tough, Juan. I try not to let the other students bother me. But there’s only so much I can do to get through the day.”

               “I know, honey. I really wish you wouldn’t worry so much about everybody else. We know the truth.” He kissed her cheek. “Listen, I don’t like seein’ you so down all the time. So I thought I’d do something special to cheer you up.”

               “Oh yeah?” She blushed a little. “What’s this something special you have planned?”

               “I can’t tell ya here. Ah, come to my house with me after school.”

               She grinned intrigued. “Alright. What for?”

               “So I can properly give you the surprise. I worked hard on it and I want to present it just the right way.”

               “Ok.” Her grin grew some. “I’ll go with you. Though it’s going to make me wonder all the rest of the day what this surprise is.”

               “Good.” He smiled and then kissed her. They reached the doorway to her next class. “Ok honey, here’s your stop. I’ll see you later.” He kissed her again. “Bye honey.”

               “Bye, Juan.”

               They parted ways, him leaving her incredibly curious. His surprise was all either of them could think about during their final classes of the day.

 …

                 Cutie Pie sat on Epstein’s bed. She watched in all curiosity as he searched for something in the room. When he found what he was looking for, he brought it over to her on the bed.

               “Susie,” he sat next to her. “I worked real hard on this. And I wanted to present it to you right. And, just so you know, I have a story for everything.”

               “Juan I know you’re not proposing because you already did that.”

               He grinned “I know. But this is a special gift. And one hundred percent from the heart.” He stood up. “Hold on. I can’t give this to you yet.” He slipped the present into his pocket. “I have to get something. Hold tight.” He turned and then quickly left the room.

               “Juan wait!” She called after him.

               She sat back, confused, wondering what this surprise could have been. As she waited for Epstein to return, she heard him arguing with his sister over something in the next room. Though not mad, he shouted a bit at her, trying to speak over her incessantly rising voice. He kept assuring his sister, saying repeatedly, “I’ll give it back.” Finally, he returned to the room seeming as though he had just came back from the battle field. In his hands, he held a cassette player. He looked at Cutie Pie and simply shook his head.

               “Sisters are crazy. Try an’ borrow one thing and she jumps all over ya.”

               “Why was she so upset?”

               “Ah, who knows? Something about something I took from her once and returned completely destroyed.” He rolled his eyes. “I ain’t the one who threw it off the overpass. That was Pedro.” He started to set up the cassette player. “You sure you wanna be part of this family?

               She laughed “Juan I knew what I’d be getting into when I accepted your proposal.”

               He smiled and finished setting up. Then he moved closer to her and sat down. “Susie, like I said, everything here has a story behind it.” He pulled the present out of his pocket and handed it to her.

               “You got me a cassette tape?” She asked, confused.

               “No. It’s a mixtape. I put it together myself. See?” He showed her the handwritten label which read “From Juan to Susie.” A list of songs was included on either side of the tape.

               “You made me a mixtape?” She asked, grinning a little. “That’s so sweet!”

               “Thought you’d like it. I put a lot of thought into it. Picked each of these songs special, because, they have followed our relationship for one reason or another. Check it out.” He pointed at some of the songs.

               “Wow. This is incredible. I love it.”

               “You ain’t even listened to it yet.”

               He took the cassette from her and placed it into the player. He took it out just to be sure it was on the right side before putting it back in.

               “Before I play it, I just want to explain each song… well they all have their stories like I said. And I want to share them with you as each song plays.”

               He pressed “play” on the tape player. The music started playing and Cutie Pie listened in confusion.

               “Is this… Spill the Wine?”

               “Yes.” He said with a small laugh.

               “What’s this have to do with our relationship?”

               “It does in a way. See, well it’s more about me than us. This is a song that had followed me for a while. And well let’s listen to it.”

               “Ok.” She grinned.

               They listened to the song, letting the music surround them. As they did, he started telling her more in detail about why he chose the song.

[cryptobully-blog]

One year after ICO mania, these big-money projects are delivering

http://cryptobully.com/one-year-after-ico-mania-these-big-money-projects-are-delivering/

One year after ICO mania, these big-money projects are delivering

The ICO mania we saw last year escalated rapidly. The ICO that signaled to me that things were about to get out of control was the Gnosis raise in April.

The company’s concept of a decentralized prediction marketplace made a lot of sense to me. What made less sense to me was that it was able to raise $12.5 million in 15 minutes. And what made no sense to me at all was when Gnosis’ valuation hit $300 million. If I recall correctly, it even hit $1 billion at some point.

Then Brave’s Basic Attention Token raised $35 million in 30 seconds at the end of May.

Then, in June, Bancor said, “I see you and raise you,” bringing in a then-record $153 million in three hours.

At that point, all bets were off, and the ICO floodgates were officially open, leading to Filecoin and Tezos’ $200+ million raises.

It was easy to be skeptical about the idea that these projects warranted such large valuations and capital at a pre-product stage. Heck, it’s easy to be skeptical even now, and plenty of people are — like Ryan Selkis and John Pfeffer.

And there’s been a lot of concern that, after their huge ICO fundraises and with no contractual obligation to deliver a product, founders would have little incentive to stick around and do the hard work. But we’re now one year in, and it’s heartening to see that real, meaningful products are shipping.

Brave

I love the concept of Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT). If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a token that lets users pay micro-fees, in BAT, to their most-used or most-liked content sites. The idea of paying sites directly for the level of interest you have in their content seems like a great counterbalance to the last 150+ years of letting them sell your attention to advertisers, which Tim Wu documents beautifully in his book, The Attention Merchants.

My challenge with the BAT is that it requires all of us to use Brave‘s ad-free browser, which most of us do not use. I have it installed on my machine, and I use it for specific occasions where I feel I really want privacy (I’m not even sure I totally trust Chrome Incognito mode). Beyond privacy, Brave’s other selling point is that, without any ads to serve up, it promises faster browsing speeds.

Brave’s CEO is Brendan Eich, by the way, who invented Java Script and cofounded Mozilla.

Now, Brave had a head-start over most of 2017’s ICO companies. It debuted the first iteration of its browser back in 2016, well before its ICO. Still, one year post-ICO, the company continues to deliver.

As an example of what it can do, the other day, I saw a (very depressing) article in my Facebook feed, so I clicked through to the Forbes page. I was greeted by this:

I whitelisted and went on to get this:

Then, I decided to copy the URL and use Brave, which got me this without any warnings:

As you can see, Brave removed the 35 pieces of data/ads that Forbes was pushing on me. The result is a faster browser experience.

Brave’s initial effort is to drive browser adoption through great experience. Then it plans to move on to a model where you are paid to watch ads based on the criteria you set. It will of course continue to let users send micro-payments to the sites they use most. You may not want to pay $19.95 per month for access to Forbes or the Economist, but you might be willing to pay $.01 for an article with no ads.

There’s a long way to go from here to there, but it’s great to see Brave making positive strides with a live product that works really well.

Bancor

Bancor is a case study in not rushing to judgment in the crypto space.

[Disclosure: I own less than $1,000 in Bancor tokens in order to use its platform.]

The project’s beginning was a bit rough. There were some issues with the ICO, primarily due to the Ethereum network getting bogged down from the amount of traffic. Also, because the approach was so novel, many people had difficulty understanding the proposed solution in the whitepaper. After the ICO, the project was challenged by a leading researcher in the crypto space, but Bancor’s world class response was the stuff of PR legends. In my mind, it was a crisis management case study. Still, early on, many in the crypto space hadn’t reached a conclusion about the project either way.

But the tide is really starting to turn in Bancor’s favor.

The team has demonstrated the ability to deliver both at the protocol and at the app layer. What’s more, the concept behind the innovative token is starting to gain acceptance and adoption. Bancor is currently the #1 decentralized solution for token conversions by volume, surpassing IDEX and EtherDelta.

I had the opportunity to chat with Eyal Hertzog, one of the cofounders, for about two hours. I couldn’t help but be impressed with the depth of his thinking and the way he was attacking the problem.

The challenge the company faced was solving the problem of centralized exchanges on the one hand and smart contract-based decentralized exchanges on the other.

Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are inherently risky, as we have learned time and time and time and time again. With a centralized exchange, the private keys that make everything possible in a blockchain-based world are held not by the individual customer but by the exchange itself. It’s like Equifax but using real money instead of “just” your information.

Slightly more secure are decentralized exchanges such as EtherDelta and Oasis Dex, but they have all kinds of issues as outlined in  “Front-running, Griefing and the Perils of Virtual Settlement (Part 2),” written by a cofounder of 0x protocol. The basic issue is that (as we saw with the BAT token sale) someone can pay more in gas to make their transaction and thus get their transaction submitted ahead of everyone else’s (which is especially problematic in ICOs, where limited tokens are available, and in trading).

0x championed a solution to this problem by building an entire protocol around relays instead of contracts. You can read more about that here. Given the issues centralized exchanges are having, it is not surprising to see Ox’s network traffic pick up and projects such as Radar Relay building on top of the platform.

But even those decentralized approaches have a core challenge; namely, “the coincidence of wants.” Simply put, if you want to sell a share of Apple or IBM, there needs to be another person who wants to buy it at that time. If there isn’t, the market doesn’t have liquidity and you are stuck.

Bancor’s innovation is a smart token that aims to solve all of this. The basic idea is that, instead of trading with another person, you trade against a basket of tokens that algorithmically changes the price based on supply and demand.

Bancor is processing over $10 million worth of transactions daily and is supporting an ever-growing list of tokens. Keeping with its proven ability to ship, it recently released an improved and upgraded user interface.

Stefano Bernardi, who writes what I consider to be the best newsletter in crypto, Token Economy, had this to say: “I must admit that I gave Bancor a lot of shit, mostly because of their (at the time) insane ICO  —  but I’ve been impressed with the execution. What they’ve built is a super interesting alternative to decentralized exchanges.”

With the listing fees for centralized exchanges going into the seven figures, in some cases with long delays, it is not surprising to see many project founders turning to Bancor. They can provide liquidity to their existing token holders and, as they build out their projects, give others an opportunity to participate quickly and easily.

Gnosis

Not quite fully live yet and still in beta is the decentralized prediction market leveraging Gnosis, called Olympia.

Over the course of December, the company ran a two-week test across 22 predictions ranging from

Will NYC have a white Christmas? (no)

Will ETH hit $1000 in 2017? (no)

How many users will engage with the Olympia network by Jan 1? (584)

The good news here as well is that it works.

The idea that we will soon have a fully functioning decentralized prediction market that can’t be manipulated by a central authority is pretty appealing.

The 2017 ICOs are growing up

While the SEC and others have been clearing out the scam projects and regulators are cooling the market a bit (which is ultimately good), we are seeing more and more of the first wave of ICOs start to deliver. Golem, for example, another of the early ones to market, just launched its beta on the Ethereum MainNet. It took the company 1.5 years. Another early ICO, Storj, has 40 petabytes of data on its decentralized network with over 150,000 nodes around the world.

Back in January, I suggested 2018 would be the year that “sh*t gets real.” It’s exciting to see the real work getting done now, particularly while so many people are afraid of the crypto market.

That’s not to say the crazy valuations or investment amounts we saw last year justified, just that I’m happy to see real products shipping.

We’re currently in a relatively quiet time. This is the lull following the funding frenzy of November/December of 2017 when the infrastructure and apps are getting built. In a year or so when these projects are truly ready for prime time, people not following this space will be asking themselves, “hey what happened?”

The answer will be, “Some of those ICO guys were scammers. But some were not — they took the money and did what they actually said they were going to do. Now it’s here.”

Special thanks to Omri Cohen and Brian Brown for reviewing this article.

Jeremy Epstein is CEO of Never Stop Marketing and author of The CMO Primer for the Blockchain World. He currently works with startups in the blockchain and decentralization space, including OpenBazaar, Zcash, ARK, Gladius, Peer Mountain and DAOstack.

ICO News

[fraggie-doodles19]

WASHINGTON — In the weeks before Donald J. Trump took office, lawyers joining his administration gathered at a law firm near the Capitol, where Donald F. McGahn II, the soon-to-be White House counsel, filled a white board with a secret battle plan to fill the federal appeals courts with young and deeply conservative judges.

Mr. McGahn, instructed by Mr. Trump to maximize the opportunity to reshape the judiciary, mapped out potential nominees and a strategy, according to two people familiar with the effort: Start by filling vacancies on appeals courts with multiple openings and where Democratic senators up for re-election next year in states won by Mr. Trump — like Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — could be pressured not to block his nominees. And to speed them through confirmation, avoid clogging the Senate with too many nominees for the district courts, where legal philosophy is less crucial.

Nearly a year later, that plan is coming to fruition. Mr. Trump has already appointed eight appellate judges, the most this early in a presidency since Richard M. Nixon, and on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send a ninth appellate nominee — Mr. Trump’s deputy White House counsel, Gregory Katsas — to the floor.

Republicans are systematically filling appellate seats they held open during President Barack Obama’s final two years in office with a particularly conservative group of judges with life tenure. Democrats — who in late 2013 abolished the ability of 41 lawmakers to block such nominees with a filibuster, then quickly lost control of the Senate — have scant power to stop them.

Most have strong academic credentials and clerked for well-known conservative judges, like Justice Antonin Scalia. Confirmation votes for five of the eight new judges fell short of the former 60-vote threshold to clear filibusters, including John K. Bush, a chapter president of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal network, who wrote politically charged blog posts, such as comparing abortion to slavery; and Stephanos Bibas, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who once proposed using electric shocks to punish people convicted of certain crimes, although he later disavowed the idea. Of Mr. Trump’s 18 appellate nominees so far, 14 are men and 16 are white.

While the two parties have been engaged in a tit-for-tat escalation of hardball politics over judicial nominations since the Reagan years, the Trump administration is completing a fundamental transformation of the enterprise. And the consequences may go beyond his chance to leave an outsize stamp on the judiciary. When Democrats regain power, if they follow the same playbook and systematically appoint outspoken liberal judges, the appeals courts will end up as ideologically split as Congress is today.

“It’s such a depressing idea, that we don’t get appointments unless we have unified government, and that the appointments we ultimately get are as polarized as the rest of the country,” said Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. “What does that mean for the legitimacy of the courts in the United States? It’s not a pretty world.”

For now, conservatives are reveling in their success. During the campaign, Mr. Trump shored up the support of skeptical right-wing voters by promising to select Supreme Court justices from a list Mr. McGahn put together with help from the Federalist Society and the conservative Heritage Foundation. Exit polls showed that court-focused voters helped deliver the president’s narrow victory. Now, he is rewarding them.

“We will set records in terms of the number of judges,” Mr. Trump said at the White House recently, adding that many more nominees were in the pipeline. Standing beside the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, he continued, “There has never been anything like what we’ve been able to do together with judges.”

Appellate judges draw less attention than Supreme Court justices like Neil M. Gorsuch, whom Mr. Trump installed in the seat that Justice Scalia’s death left vacant and that Republicans, led by Mr. McConnell, refused to let Mr. Obama fill. But the 12 regional appeals courts wield profound influence over Americans’ lives, getting the final word on about 60,000 cases a year that are not among the roughly 80 the Supreme Court hears.

Nan Aron, of the liberal Alliance for Justice, said that her group considered many of Mr. Trump’s nominees to be “extremists” — hostile to the rights of women, minority groups and workers, and unduly favorable to the wealthy. But conservatives, who have rallied around Mr. Trump’s nominees as a rare bright spot of unity for the fractious Republican Party, see them as legal rock stars who will interpret the Constitution according to its text and original meaning.

And they see tremendous opportunity in the fact that Mr. Trump is the first Republican president whose nominees can be confirmed by simple-majority votes, especially since he is likely to fill an unusually large number of vacancies. Mr. Trump started with 21 open appellate seats because after Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015, they essentially shut down the confirmation process. Six additional appellate judgeships have opened since his inauguration, and nearly half of the 150 active appeals court judges are eligible to take senior status — semi-retirement that permits a successor’s appointment — or will soon reach that age, according to Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution scholar.

As a result, Mr. Trump is poised to bring the conservative legal movement, which took shape in the 1980s in reaction to decades of liberal rulings on issues like the rights of criminal suspects and of women who want abortions, to a new peak of influence over American law and society.

“What makes this a unique opportunity in modern history is the sheer number of vacancies, the number of potential vacancies because of the aging bench, and the existence of a president who really cares about this issue in his gut,” said Leonard A. Leo, an informal adviser to Mr. Trump on courts who is the executive vice president of the Federalist Society.

Liberals have accused Mr. Trump of outsourcing his nominations process to the Federalist Society. But two administration officials argued that this claim misunderstands how the conservative legal movement has matured as the generation of Republican lawyers shaped by reading the originalist dissents of Justice Scalia and by the bitter 1987 fight over Judge Robert H. Bork’s failed Supreme Court nomination has come of age. Mr. McGahn and nearly all the lawyers working for him at the White House are longtime society participants, so relationships built on the network of like-minded conservatives saturate discussions of potential nominees from the inside, they said.

Mr. Trump has also had help from the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, in lowering impediments and keeping the confirmation assembly line moving.

For example, confirmation hearings have usually featured just one appellate hopeful at a time (along with several district judge nominees). But Mr. Grassley has scheduled three hearings this year with two appellate nominees — as many as took place during all eight years of the Obama administration, according to congressional aides.

The independent guardrail role of the American Bar Association, which has vetted potential judges since the Eisenhower administration — conducting confidential interviews with people who worked with them and rating their experience, integrity and temperament — is also weakening. Picks by presidents of both parties have sometimes run into trouble, but Republicans have accused the group of bias against conservatives.

Traditionally, the group’s volunteers vet potential judges before the White House decides whether to send their names to the Senate, but Mr. Trump — like President George W. Bush — exiled it from that role, leaving it scrambling to evaluate nominees afterward. Already this year, Mr. Grassley has held hearings for four district judge nominees before the group finished its work — which happened with only seven during the eight Bush years.

The bar group later deemed two of them unqualified to be trial judges, saying they lacked sufficient trial experience. On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee nevertheless advanced both to the Senate floor. One, Holly Teeter, a 38-year-old federal prosecutor who fell just shy of the bar group’s minimum standard of 12 years of experience, gained bipartisan approval. But the other, Brett Talley, a 36-year-old with virtually no trial experience and who wrote politically charged blog posts on topics like gun rights, had a party-line vote.

Republicans may go further in ousting the group from its semiofficial gatekeeping role after it rated L. Steven Grasz, Mr. Trump’s nominee for the appeals court in St. Louis, as “not qualified” to be a judge, portraying him as “gratuitously rude” and unlikely “to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge” on matters like abortion. The White House is weighing telling future nominees not to sign confidentiality waivers that give A.B.A. evaluators access to disciplinary action records and not to interview with the bar group, an official said.

Conservatives are also pressuring Mr. Grassley to reduce one of the few remaining constraints on letting a president with an allied Senate majority appoint whomever he wants to a life-tenured judgeship: the Judiciary Committee’s “blue slip” practice, named for the color of the paper that senators use to sign off on nominees for judgeships in their states.

While it has been handled differently in different eras, throughout the Obama years, Mr. Grassley and his Democratic predecessor, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, refused to let the confirmation process proceed for nominees without two positive blue slips. That approach forces presidents to consult with senators and, when they are from opposite parties, incentivizes the compromise selection of relative moderates.

Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, has announced he will not return a blue slip for David R. Stras, an appeals court nominee who is a Minnesota Supreme Court justice and is on Mr. Trump’s short list for the United States Supreme Court, saying he was not meaningfully consulted and objected to him. (An administration official said the White House had primarily negotiated with Minnesota’s senior senator, Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who did turn in a blue slip.) Conservatives want Mr. Grassley to hold a hearing anyway.

Democratic senators in Oregon and Wisconsin have also not turned in blue slips for pending appellate nominees, but the question of how much control senators will retain over judicial appointments in their states is not limited to partisan politics.

Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, has not returned a blue slip for Kyle Duncan, an appeals court nominee who represented conservative clients in several culture-war cases, including whether corporations may refuse to provide contraception coverage to employees based on owners’ religious beliefs, and whether transgender students may be barred from using the school bathrooms of their gender identities.

The Judicial Crisis Network, an opaquely funded group that runs ads pressuring Democratic senators not to block Trump nominees, has begun airing ads in Louisiana supporting Mr. Duncan. Mr. Franken warned that if the blue-slip constraint eroded, Republican senators would lose, too — and not just when Democrats regained power.

But many conservatives want to take full advantage of their window of opportunity. Mr. Leo, of the Federalist Society, said Mr. Trump had instructed his transition team to prioritize appointing conservative judges who would be “strong” and could resist “tremendous political and social pressure.”

Mr. Trump “understood that the American people cared about judges, and he for his own purposes cared very deeply about it and recognized that he could be a president who could help restore the judiciary to its proper role,” he said.